From Hawaii to Forever Page 7

  And finally—finally—after all this time, she found herself the recipient of his smile. The full force of it was just as dazzling as she had known it would be. Her knees felt a little weak, but she managed to casually grip the bar on one side of the elevator, as though she were just shifting her stance.

  “A truce sounds good,” he said. “I have a feeling that if we’re not bickering we might actually find out we like working together.”

  Kat wasn’t sure what to say.

  Certainly not, I’d like that, but I’m very attracted to you, and that’s really interfering with my ability to recover from a fiancé who practically left me at the altar just a few weeks ago.

  No, that response was probably off the table.

  She settled for giving him a small smile instead.

  He released the emergency stop button and the elevator began moving upward again. This would be good, thought Kat. They would get to know each other a little better, and soon enough she’d get used to him. He’d never need to know how badly she wanted to run her fingers through his dark hair.

  When the elevator doors opened on the trauma unit all was in chaos. Even Selena was sweeping around the ER floor, conducting triage.

  She nodded at Jack and Kat as they stepped out of the elevator. “Major car crash on the expressway,” she said, by way of explanation. “We’ve got multiple trauma cases coming in at once. Grab one and get to work.”

  Jack and Kat nodded at one another. At the end of the hallway a team of EMTs were wheeling a gurney with an incoming patient on it toward the ER; Kat rushed toward them, with Jack close behind her.

  “What’ve we got?” Kat asked Marco, the head EMT on duty.

  “Man who looks to be in his late fifties with multiple fractures. His breathing was shallow when we first picked him up, but now he’s not breathing at all. He got smashed up pretty bad in the expressway crash. We had to use the jaws of life to get him out from under his car.”

  “How long has he been unresponsive?”

  “Less than a few seconds.”

  “His pulse is thready,” said Jack. “Could be something obstructing the airway.”

  Kat placed her stethoscope on the man’s chest. She could hear a heartbeat, but there were no sounds of respiration. “We’ll need to intubate,” she said. “Let’s get him to an operating room.”

  She was about to ask Jack if he’d be able to come with her, but he’d already moved to the other side of the gurney and was helping her push it down the hallway.

  “Thanks,” she said breathlessly as she tried to keep pace with him. “I know they need you out there.”

  “You need me in here,” he responded as they pushed the patient’s gurney into the OR.

  He immediately began attending to the pulse oximeter, and Kat was relieved to see there was no need to talk him through the procedure; he’d clearly done this before.

  Before she could ask, he handed her a laryngoscope. Kat tilted the patient’s head back and inserted the scope into his mouth, taking care to avoid the man’s teeth. As she pushed the endotracheal tube into the patient’s airway Jack began to inflate the balloon that would deliver air into his lungs. He continued inflations as Kat positioned her stethoscope first above one lung and then the other, to listen for sounds of respiration.

  There.

  Kat relaxed her shoulders as she identified the ragged but unmistakable sound of breathing in both lungs. They’d need an X-ray to ensure correct placement of the tube, but hearing respiration from both lungs meant that the patient should stabilize quickly.

  She straightened up from where she was bent over the patient and looked at Jack in astonishment. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a line into a patient so fast,” she said.

  He flashed a smile at her and Kat felt another pang. Just a few minutes ago she’d been hoping that spending more time with Jack would help desensitize her to his charm. But now, finding that they were able to work together so seamlessly... Kat thought she might actually want to work with Jack more often if it meant that her medical procedures would go this smoothly.

  If she could just get her heart to stop going into overdrive every time he smiled they’d be a great team.

  “One of the easiest intubations I’ve ever done,” he agreed, looking at the patient’s pulse-ox levels on the monitor. “I’d say we should take him down to X-Ray to ensure correct placement of the line, but...”

  “What is it?” said Kat.

  “Come look.”

  Kat came around to Jack’s side of the gurney and was suddenly filled with dread.

  The distinctive rash of the super-flu was spread over the man’s legs and abdomen: small red bumps. And she and Jack had been working on him without haz-mat suits, and with only standard levels of protection between the two of them.

  Kat realized that her plan to take the edge off her attraction to Jack by getting to know him better was about to blow up in her face.

  She was going to get to know Jack better, all right. Kat remembered what Selena had told her about the hospital’s policy regarding virus exposure.

  Kat looked at Jack’s face, and knew what he was thinking, too.

  They might be about to spend a long time together.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KAT AND JACK had only been in the secure holding room for a few hours before Kat was certain of one thing: no matter how much time they spent together, she was never going to become desensitized to Jack Harper.

  She’d wondered if being quarantined with Jack would let the two of them get to know each other better. But she quickly realized he was as guarded as ever when she mentioned that the research team working on the virus had been using studies conducted by his parents for reference. She’d only meant to reassure him that she thought the team was close to developing a vaccine, but his reaction surprised her.

  “Look,” he said, “I deal with this every time we get a new doctor at the hospital, so I’m just going to tell you this now: I haven’t spoken with any of my family members for more than four years. So if you’re trying to wangle an introduction to any of the great Dr. Harpers, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “What?” said Kat, surprised. “Jack, you’ve totally got the wrong idea. I just meant that your parents’ research has been extremely useful.”

  When he still looked skeptical, Kat went on.

  “Selena mentioned your family during my first few days here. What I don’t understand is why it should be any sort of secret. If I came from a family like yours I’d be telling everyone. With those kinds of connections in the medical field—”

  “Connections with the Harpers are only useful if you’re doing what they want you to do,” he said. “If you’re trying to forge your own path, then being a member of the Harper family is more of a liability than an advantage.”

  Kat nodded slowly. “I’m guessing they didn’t love it that you dropped out of medical school.”

  “That about sums it up,” he said.

  She wanted to ask him more, but she could see that the subject was closed.

  Why did he have to smell so good? Her plan—the plan that had sounded so good in her mind earlier that morning—was not going to work.

  She’d had high hopes that if she could simply spend more time with Jack she might start to think of him as a normal person, instead of someone she felt unaccountably attracted to. But the more time she spent with Jack, the more tantalizing he became. The question of whether his eyes were blue, or more of a deep sea-green, was becoming a matter of some urgency to her, as she found her mind wandering back to his eyes anytime she tried to concentrate.

  She and Jack had been housed together in a small room at the far end of the hospital’s rarely used west wing. Selena had apologized for the small size of the designated isolation area and had made a halfhearted offer to try to find a way to provide separ
ate rooms for them, but Kat could tell her friend was concerned about the hospital’s limited capacity due to the influx of patients from the highway crash. Kat and Jack had both reassured Selena that they would be fine sharing a single room with privacy curtains, although secretly Kat wasn’t thrilled at the idea, and from the expression on his face, she could tell that Jack felt the same way. But if sharing a room with Jack would help to make room for more patients, then Kat would cope with the situation the best she could.

  Selena had arranged for the infectious disease team to run blood tests on the affected patient. It would take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to be sure. If the team confirmed that the patient did have the super-flu, then Kat and Jack would be spending at least the next ten days together, to ensure that neither of them showed any sign of having contracted the virus.

  Kat hoped with all her heart that the patient didn’t have the virus—both for the patient’s sake and because she wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to sleep knowing Jack was a mere two feet away from her.

  The room was sparse: it contained two gurneys with privacy curtains, a shared bathroom, and an old television set that could access about three network channels. With their limited entertainment options Kat could tell that it was going to be a long ten days, if it came to that.

  It didn’t help that their close quarters only served to highlight how different they were from one another. She could tell by the way that Jack had haphazardly thrown his belongings about the room that he was the kind of person who didn’t seem to mind clutter. She, on the other hand, preferred things to be neat and orderly—even if they would only be staying there for a few days.

  “We should decide which parts of the room are yours and which are mine,” she said. Maybe keeping their things to separate areas would help her to ignore the mess.

  He blinked, looking around the tiny, five-hundred-square-foot room. “Isn’t that kind of irrelevant in a room this small?” he said. “I don’t think there’s much we can do to avoid each other’s space.”

  Kat gritted her teeth. She had a feeling that she wanted to tolerate his clutter about as much as he wanted to talk about his family.

  “Some people might say that in a tiny space it’s even more important to be clear about what goes where,” she said.

  “Fine,” he replied. “How about I stay on my gurney and you stay on yours, and the rest can work itself out?”

  She took a deep breath.

  You’re learning how to relax, she reminded herself. You’re learning how to let go and live in the moment. Maybe this is your chance to practice that.

  The Old Kat would have insisted on trying to win the argument. The New Kat was going to disengage.

  She unpacked a small mountain of meditation workbooks and arranged them at the foot of her gurney in a neat stack, making sure they were organized by subject and author’s last name. If she had to be in quarantine she might as well use her time productively.

  When Selena had heard about Kat’s mission to spend the year learning how to relax she’d provided Kat with an extensive collection of self-help workbooks, meditation recordings, and podcasts on mindfulness. Selena had termed the project “Operation Rebound,” while Kat preferred to think of it as “Operation Inner Peace.” She’d gotten through about a third of the workbooks, but inner peace was still proving elusive.

  Learning to relax was a much more daunting task than she’d originally thought.

  The key to achieving a relaxed state, according to all of her meditation recordings and workbooks, was to practice putting aside distracting thoughts in order to turn her mind to the present moment. So she sat on her gurney with her legs crossed and her eyes closed as a soothing voice through her headphones instructed her. And she tried to follow the instructions—she really did.

  First she turned aside all thoughts about Jack’s eyes.

  Then she turned aside all thoughts about his hair, and what it might feel like to run her fingers through it.

  Then she turned aside her thoughts about whether that tantalizing scent of his might have a bit of sandalwood in it. Was the smell just him, she wondered, or did he put on some sort of cologne?

  It was strange, she thought, that she didn’t have to try very hard to keep her mind off Christopher. It was Christopher who’d broken her heart, after all. Just three days before their wedding. Her heart still ached to think about it. But, even though she was sad about the wedding, and the end of all the things she’d envisioned for their lives together, she didn’t find Christopher crossing her mind very often.

  Sometimes she found herself feeling sad about the breakup, or angry about the way he had gone about it, but oddly she didn’t find herself thinking about Christopher himself. She certainly didn’t find herself constantly distracted by thoughts of him. Not the way she was by thoughts of Jack.

  * * *

  Jack’s main goal, in most relationships, was always to avoid getting too close. As someone who had been overshadowed by his family and their prestigious medical careers for much of his life, it was important to Jack to be his own person. But avoiding closeness was difficult in the tiny quarantined room. It had only been a few hours, and he already wasn’t sure he would be able to make it for that much longer.

  At first their sharing a room had seemed practical. But now that Jack was faced with the fact that he would be sleeping just a few feet from Kat that very night... He tried to make certain his behavior was as gentlemanlike as possible at all times. If he couldn’t hide his attraction from himself, then he at least wanted to hide it from her.

  Kat sat meditating on her gurney. She seemed so serene. She was ambitious, just as Sophie had been, but then, he could never picture Sophie practicing at a hospital like Oahu General, focusing on patient care rather than prestigious research projects.

  Kat certainly wasn’t like Sophie. Usually when people in the medical world learned who Jack’s family was they couldn’t wait to talk to him about how his father’s books had changed their lives, or how his mother had inspired them to go into medicine. But in six weeks Kat hadn’t said a thing to him, despite knowing.

  Except for just a moment ago, when she’d simply mentioned his parents’ books and he’d assumed the worst. He wondered now if he’d acted prematurely.

  Kat was obviously at the top of her field. She should be at a prestigious hospital on the mainland. Somewhere far away from him. Then he wouldn’t have to think about the red curls cascading down her back. What was she doing here, on his island, at his hospital?

  With all those books she looked as if she should be going on some sort of meditation retreat.

  When he stepped over to the carefully organized set of workbooks that were piled in a neat stack at the edge of Kat’s gurney she yanked her headphones out.

  “Sorry if I interrupted,” he said.

  “I wasn’t having much success anyway,” she said. “It’s kind of hard to focus on the present moment when you’re stuck in a small room with bad lighting, waiting to find out if you’ve contracted a life-threatening illness.”

  He nodded in agreement and picked up one of the books. “‘Zen and the Art of You,’” he read aloud. “‘Finding the Inner Child Within Your Inner Self.’ What is all this stuff?”

  “It’s part of my project to learn how to relax,” said Kat. “I thought I’d use this time to get into my Zen.”

  “Into your... Zen?”

  She tried to explain. “It’s like...trying to live in the moment. To take life one step at a time. Not to plan, but to accept what comes in each moment.”

  “To go with the flow?”

  “Exactly,” said Kat. “Only, it’s harder than it sounds. Especially since I’ve never been a very go-with-the-flow type of person.”

  He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “You’re kidding?”

  She glared at him, and he briefly consider
ed whether he might need to duck and run for cover.

  But then she groaned and said, “Look, this stuff doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve never been very good at letting go of all the things I have to worry about. When I lived in Chicago, sometimes I tried going to the beach on Lake Michigan to de-stress—but you know what happened every time? I couldn’t shut my brain off. I’d think about the patients who needed me, or the things I’d left unfinished, or other doctors and nurses I needed to communicate with. Or the hundred other things I had to do the next day. It was so hard to figure out how to let it all go that eventually I stopped trying.”

  “But you’re trying again now? What changed?”

  Her face grew sad. “The Day of Doom,” she said.

  That sounded pretty intense. Was that the reason Kat had wanted to move to Hawaii? He’d simply assumed that she wanted a break from her regular life, or had romantic illusions about working in a tropical setting. It had never occurred to him that she might be running away from something.

  “I suppose it does sound dramatic,” she continued.

  For a moment he thought she might be blinking back tears, but it must simply be the way the light hit her eyes.

  “It was just a bad breakup, really. That and some other things all happened at once. Just bad timing.”

  Ah. So she wasn’t running from something so much as someone. “Breakups are hard,” he said. “If it makes you feel any better you’re not the only one who’s ever run off to Hawaii after a bad breakup.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “You?”

  “Me. After my own exceptionally hard breakup.”

  She gave a soft chuckle. “So we’re both unlucky in love? And I thought you and I had nothing in common.”

  He snorted. “I’d have to believe in love first, in order for us to have that in common.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t try to beat me at cynicism. My breakup was way worse than yours—I guarantee it. No one believes in love less than I do. Trust me, pal, I have given up on love.”