Chapter 3
Life in an emergency room nursing clinical at the county hospital wasn’t quite what Mabel had imagined as a little girl when she used to play with her mom’s stethoscope and otoscope. But there were elements of it that were close.
Things had been quiet all day, so she’d only administered a couple of IVs and a few doses of medication.
Not that she was complaining. A slow day in the emergency room was a good thing. It’s not like she wanted to have someone come in with a meat cleaver stuck in their body. But she did want to feel like she was earning her keep, that she was learning enough.
At age thirty, she wasn’t the youngest in her nursing class, but she wasn’t the oldest either. It had taken her a while to get to this place—longer than she’d wanted it to. There had been some meandering.
Becoming a nurse like her mom had been her goal growing up.
Until tragedy struck, and then it wasn’t. When she became disillusioned with the career shift she’d made along the way, she finally decided to wise up to her original calling.
She knew it was the right decision because she didn’t miss her job as a lobbyist in Boise. The politics, the jostling for control, the rigamarole between warring ethics, and the very gray area she found herself swimming in—she’d had enough of it all.
Getting sick and leaving it all behind was what it took to wake her up. She’d spent that summer two years ago on her dad’s couch, barely able to move. By the end of it? She’d made up her mind.
Nursing was direct and clear. It was science mixed with care and compassion. She just had a couple more clinicals and then needed to pass the NCLEX before she could start her career for real.
As she focused on the words of Raylene, the RN her clinical instructor had assigned her to, she fiddled with the tiny glass bottle of sand on a chain around her neck. It hung inside her shirt to her mid-torso. Wearing it was an old habit.
“You’ll enter it like this,” Raylene said as she showed Mabel how to fill in the patient’s chart.
The sand was from the bank of a ditch in Silver Plum.
One day, early in the school year when the KNO kids were fourteen and in denial that their carefree summer was over, a bunch of them went rafting down the ditch just as evening had descended.
As they floated, Zane had dug into the earth with his fingertips and thrown the wet, sandy dirt at her.
She’d thrown some back, and a fight ensued.
She’d been covered in it, and so had Zane, mud and sand in their scalp and ears, hooding their eyes, their teeth glowing white when they smiled through the caked mud.
When she went to shower it off at home, her head swimming with thoughts of Zane, she’d shaken some of it into an envelope.
A few short months later, her entire world would change.
She found the envelope later and pored a bit of it into the tiniest of glass bottles hanging from a long chain. It was a talisman now. And a reminder of the hope that had once been inside her.
No one knew about this little ritual, of keeping something from Zane near her. But still, she wasn’t fooling herself. Over time, it had become this weighty stack of something far more meaningful.
More itchy. More complicated.
Zane had rejected her way back when, and that event was forever known in her head as The Incident. When he hauled her out of one of their best friend’s weddings? She called that The Incident Part Deux.
The Incident Part Deux was marked as a sort of new beginning. It represented the need for her to move on with her life. She really, really had to move on. Because in the confusing aftermath and swirl of emotions during that weekend in Jamaica, he’d avoided her as if she had leprosy.
She’d respected that, since it was Anjali and Parker’s wedding and all.
But in the weeks after? He didn’t reach out to her to explain himself, to ask for her forgiveness, to say what had been on the tip of his tongue before.
What was he about to say? Something about things between them getting worse and that he felt…
something. He acted like she would know what he was talking about.
What was that supposed to mean?
As the weeks went on, and as he missed KNO both times since then, Mabel slowly began to understand that this was something he just wasn’t going to talk about.
Then she told herself she’d been imagining its significance all along.
It had been a blip. Nothing. If he’d had a rush of emotion, it had certainly died down since they’d come back home.
In reality, this was nothing new. She’d been fighting against herself since she was fourteen years old. They’d been doing this dance between them ever since.
Well, no more. She was done dancing with Mr. Zane Taylor. He’d rejected her after they’d kissed as kids, and nothing had been quite right with them since. His rejection after the wedding was the last straw.
She could find joy in nursing and in her special assignment from Mack.
Mayor Mack Duncan had asked her to head the water authority months before, and though she was way out of her element, she could see how that could be fulfilling.
She could work as a nurse during the day, perform her water authority duties a couple of nights a week, and spend the rest of the time successfully managing not to think of Zane.
She was hanging up her Zane hat. With that thought came a zing through her body. She didn’t want to do this, to be done loving Zane. But she had to.
If Jamaica had taught her anything, it was that it was past time to let go.
Maybe there were other men she could love. There was one who might prove to be a good distraction.
Raylene closed out the patient’s file—they’d sent him home after treating his sprained ankle—and Mabel started thinking about how she’d fill out her care plan for this case as homework that night.
An alarm buzzed loudly, and the scanner crackled with an incoming ambulance’s information.
Raylene got right to work.
“Do you like the ER scene?” she asked Raylene as they prepped.
“The question isn’t if I like it. It’s if my adrenal glands can handle the stress.” Raylene waved a hand around the small department. “It’s hard.” She had dark circles under her eyes, and she wrung her hands. “But in my opinion, it beats the Mother/Baby unit and the surgical floor.”
Before she could respond, Mabel felt the whoosh of the double doors leading into the ER from the outside and a blast of warm autumn air coming in. She heard a shout.
“Mr. Ryland,” the man’s voice let a slight soft baritone laugh escape.” You’re going to end up with two lacerations if you aren’t careful with that hand.” A pause, and then, “Oops. Watch the metal frame,” the man’s voice said.
Mabel placed both hands on the small computer cart in front of her, grateful that Raylene had already rushed to their side. That gave her half a second to breathe before she needed to jump in to help.
Because hearing Zane Taylor’s voice again just as she had decided to forget all about him, made her blood run cold.
If she could, she would have turned away from the scene immediately and gone and worked in another area of the hospital. She would have gladly cleared away bed pans or administered catheters. Anything but trying not to fail her clinical with Zane nearby.
One more steadying breath later—and a fly-by-night wish that she were Catholic so she could cross herself—she turned to help, to do her job. At first, Zane didn’t see her, and she got the advantage of watching him work.
He wore his paramedic uniform—a short-sleeved white button-down shirt with the medic patch on the breast pocket and black polyester pants.
How he managed to make the boxy uniform attractive, she’d never know.
She did know how to explain his attractiveness in his firefighter turnout gear, though.
She’d sung operatic praises to herself when she saw him wearing it at a city safety event the year before.
His face wore a scowl. It was probably her favorite of all of his scowls—the hard-at-work frown. He focused on restraining the patient, the skin and muscles of his biceps pressing hard against the fabric of his sleeves.
“Easy does it, dude. You weren’t agitated on the ride over. Slow down,” he chastised. But with it came an undercurrent of concern. “Take a deep breath. We’re going to help you feel better, okay?” His voice was so kind, it almost made Mabel herself feel better.
Almost. Because it also happened to be the voice of the guy who had, through his indifference, ripped her heart to shreds on multiple occasions.
The patient thrashed wildly, and Zane’s shirt was bloody. The man was in his thirties or forties, slight of build, and smelled strongly of alcohol. That smell, mixed with the pungent metallic scent of blood, flipped Mabel’s stomach upside down.
Blood was pouring from the man’s hand, which wasn’t helped by the thrashing. Oh, and the cursing. There was a lot of cursing.
Raylene motioned to her. “Mabel, hold him steady on this side. We’re going to have to inject a sedative.”
Zane’s head whipped up. In the chaos, Zane saw her, and his eyes blazed through her.
The corners of his mouth turned up, and even though a soft oof left his lungs as the patient pummeled Zane’s arm with his non-injured fist, he held her gaze, his mouth still curled in a small smile of wonder.
He did not have the right to smile at her like that. Not when they were working. Not when he’d engaged in The Incident Part Deux and then proceeded to ignore her for two months.
She shook her head roughly and then joined Zane at the gurney, grasping the patient’s arm with one hand and holding his thigh steady with the other.
The man jerked around to look at Mabel, and it took only a moment for him to start to calm as he looked at her, his face covered in sweat and smears of blood.
Except, a sick feeling of caution floated over her. The patient’s stare? Chilling.
“Doc’s on his way from surgical; now let’s get some sedative in him.
” Raylene prepped for the injection, and the patient started to struggle again.
She tilted her head toward Mabel. “It would have been nice for you to practice this,” she shouted over the man’s colorful language and labored moans.
“But seeing as how he’s giving us trouble, I’ll take care of it while you assist, okay? ”
Mabel nodded and then turned her attention to the patient. “That’s good. Way to start to calm. Breathe.” She hazarded a glance at Zane.
The patient gasped for air, and Zane secured an oxygen mask around his head.
She spoke to the patient again, and his movements stilled.
“You’ve got the touch, Mabel.” Zane’s gaze continued to bore into hers.
She started to loosen her grip as the man slumped into the stretcher. Maybe he would finally be calm.
Raylene neared with the IV kit. But just as Mabel let go even more to get out of the way, the patient flung his body to one side, his shoulder wrenching free of Zane’s clutches.
In one swift movement, the patient sat up, propelled himself off the stretcher, and shoved Mabel into a choke hold against the wall.
Instantly, Mabel’s head throbbed, pain searing through her throat at the suffocating grip of the inebriated man. She saw stars and couldn’t breathe.
Without pause, Zane tackled the guy into the legs of the stretcher. On the hard floor of the ER, he pinned him with his knees. The patient brought his hands up to Zane’s eyes, but Zane broke away. He slammed his fist down on the guy’s cheekbone before Raylene seized Zane’s shoulders.
“Okay, okay. You’ve got him.” Raylene kneed Zane in the back. “That’s enough!” Her breath was ragged.
They all breathed heavily while Zane continued to restrain him as she administered the sedative. A few moments later, the man’s lids closed and his breathing slowed to a normal pace. Only then did Zane relax his hold. He shook his head and whispered, “Loser,” under his breath.
He got up off the floor, his shirt rubbed down with blood, and took a couple of stumbling steps away, his back to Mabel.
He peeled off his gloves and spun back around.
“You okay?” he asked Mabel, reaching her and gently tilting her chin up and away so he could see her neck.
He traced a finger along the front of her throat, his touch sending tendrils of electricity throughout her.
The concern in his eyes and the feel of his fingertip was something that would be burned into her brain forever. “He had ahold of you good.”
His voice almost broke. Almost.
She cleared her throat, the pulse in her neck throbbing. “I’m okay.”
The look on his face told her he didn’t believe that one bit.
Zane turned to Raylene. “Ask Dr. Mitchell to take a look at her, would you?” He signed the admitting paperwork Raylene pushed toward him and turned to leave, his breaths not yet at a normal rate.
He looked back at Mabel, and his gaze filled with concern. “I’m sorry he choked you like that.” His hand swiped across his forehead.
Before she could respond, he was gone through the double doors and back out to the ambulance, the swagger in his firefighter strut subdued only by a slight limp.
Mabel was sick. She’d been assaulted. Zane had saved her.
After Raylene got Mabel a water bottle, she guided her to sit in one of the office chairs behind admittance. She sighed and clicked her tongue. “I’ve never had a paramedic respond that way. I’m going to have to write him up.”
At Mabel’s slight gasp, she continued. “Not that the patient didn’t deserve it, and he was defending you, but still. I do have to make a report.”
“Will Zane get in trouble?”
“Possibly.” Raylene scrubbed her face with both hands and sank into a chair across from Mabel. “Probably.”