Frankie pulled out the scrubs from the suitcase she’d dragged inside the hospital. She wanted to be self-sufficient and independent, to rely upon no one but she couldn’t help but be surprised the doctor with the pretty blue eyes had made no attempt to help her with her things. Of course, she wasn’t in England any more and he only knew her background.
Father: famous heart surgeon.
Mother: gorgeous Brazilian model.
Frankie: fiancée of a football player.
She grimaced. He probably had a point. She didn’t have any business thinking she could make a difference except she had to, and not just because of the media scrum at home, all desperate to get her take on why she’d called off her engagement. She had to do something to prove to herself there was a likeable person inside and not just an empty shell.
Walking toward the door Lucas had indicated, she tried to block out sounds she hadn’t heard outside. Shouting, moans of pain, and a cacophony of voices all mixed together. How did the medical staff manage to concentrate in such an atmosphere?
Her flat, sensible tennis shoes squeaked softly on the linoleum floor, and her heart squeezed painfully. This was more difficult than she’d thought it would be. Not as hard as packing up her entire life and running away from England, but a damn close second.
Pushing open the double doors, Frankie gasped as the reality of an aid mission following a natural disaster hit her. The room was neither a hospital ward, nor an operating theatre. At least, not an operating theatre in the traditional sense.
Spread out in front of her, four operating tables contained patients at various stages of procedures. She walked over to the nearest table. Blue eyes watched her progress, it wasn’t difficult to recognise the disapproving glare above the surgical mask.
“Where do I scrub in?” Her voice was much calmer than she’d hoped for. She sounded as though this was the kind of question she asked every single day of her life, even though the truth was the polar opposite—her usual day-to-day conversations usually revolved around where to eat lunch or which shops she was going to hit.
“We don’t have the time or the facilities to follow usual operating procedures. Go over to the sink and do the best you can. Double glove.”
“Is this the canteen?”
“It was.” Lucas checked the machine bleeping at the side of the patient.
“Okay,” she said, hoping to disguise her trembling fingers and desperately quaking stomach with a no-nonsense tone. “What are we doing here?”
“Amputation.” He looked up briefly. “You scrubbed yet?”
Frankie swallowed. His eyes challenged her, making the decision easier, she wasn’t about to run away from her very first test. This operation would allow her to show her skills and prove her worth to Lucas. She might not really know herself anymore, but she wasn’t the person she’d been living as for the last ten years.
She scrubbed quickly and made her way back to the table just as Lucas lifted a scalpel and began the procedure.
“What do you need me to do, doctor?” Hopefully the deferential tone would go some way to showing him she was ready and able to assist him in any way he needed, for as long as was needed.
As Lucas made the first incision, she focussed on what he was doing and what would come next. She tried to work out what he would need from her before he asked for it—anything to make his job easier because if she could show him she knew what she was doing, there would be no grounds to send her away.
He flicked a glance at her, his cool blue eyes assessing her. She raised an eyebrow and he looked away, back to the patient on the table. Quickly and skilfully, he divided the muscles and clamped the blood vessels, all the while keeping a careful watch on the machines tracking the patient’s stats. A job he was doing as well as his own though in a hospital, under ordinary circumstances, an anaesthetist would be checking how the patient was coping with the procedure.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He got stuck under a wall of his house when it collapsed.”
She hadn’t come here to put her life into perspective, she’d come to make a difference, to do something that made her feel like a human instead of an automaton. But it did give her a different outlook on her own troubles. Sure, finding out Joey was cheating had been awful and, at the time, she thought it life-changing. Now, she realised it was simply life defining.
“Does he have family?” Her own family could be very self-absorbed but they would do everything in their power to help her mentally and physically cope with the trauma of such an injury. Frankie hoped the patient on the table was as lucky.