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  “In Bombacopsis, no. I could keep him in my cottage, if that would help you for a little while, but I think you’re going to have to go to Child Services in Cima de la Montaña to see what they suggest.”

  She already knew what they’d suggest. Damien had pointed that out so clearly. “Or we can keep him here at the hospital for a few days and hope that someone from outside Bombacopsis comes in and recognizes him.” How Damien would feel about this, she didn’t know. But she suspected he’d be agreeable, in spite of the protest he might put up. “Leave him here for now, and I’ll talk to Damien once he’s out of surgery. If he doesn’t want to keep Miguel here, one of us will bring him to you later on tonight.”

  “Do you understand any of this?” Padre Benicio asked Miguel.

  The boy looked up at him but didn’t answer, and Juliette sighed a weary sigh. “He hasn’t said a word since we found him.”

  “I’m sure he’ll speak when he’s ready, won’t you, Miguel?” Padre Benicio said, as he let go of Miguel’s hand and backed toward the hospital door. “In the meantime, I’ll be at the festival if you need me.”

  If she needed him. Truthfully, she didn’t know what she needed. Miguel’s parents, a nap, a few extra hours in the day to accomplish everything she needed to...

  “No luck,” she said to Damien, once she noticed that he’d emerged from the exam room. “Looks like Miguel’s ours to take care of for the time being.”

  “What it looks like to me is that you need to take a break. You look exhausted.” He held out his hand to Miguel, who scampered across the corridor to take hold of it.

  “It’s nothing that a good cup of coffee won’t fix.”

  “Well, if I thought that was true, I’d send you down to the festival to get one. They serve extraordinary blends at several of the roadside vendor stalls. But I think your tiredness goes beyond that.”

  “Are you diagnosing me?” she asked him, touched that he was noticing her so closely.

  “Just worrying about you. You’re running yourself into the ground, and I think you need to go over to my hut, where it’s quiet, and take a nap.”

  “You know what they say...”

  “That you’ll sleep when you’re dead?”

  She nodded. “I’ll be fine, Damien. But I appreciate your concern.” This was a nice moment between them and she didn’t want it to end, but Miguel needed to get settled down for the night, and she wanted to get onto the rest of her patients. So, reluctantly, she turned her back on Damien and returned to the ward, to the patient who was suffering complications from an infected puncture he’d got when, trying to grab its fruit, he fell out of a milk tree.

  As Juliette lifted the bandage on her patient’s right leg, she caught a glimpse of Damien standing in the doorway to the ward. He was staring at her. Holding on to Miguel and staring. It made her nervous, caused her to become self-conscious. So she tried her best to turn her back to him, but she knew he was still staring. She could feel it igniting a flame up and down her spine.

  So what was this all about? She’d encountered all kinds of people before, in all kinds of places, but none of them had ever affected her like Damien. None of them had ever made her go weak in the knees or caused her pulse to quicken. None of them had ever distracted her so much. And she was distracted, make no mistake about that. In fact, she was so distracted she almost put the soiled bandage back on her patient’s leg. Almost—but she caught herself before she did. Chastised herself for the absent-mindedness. Berated herself for the straying thoughts that were trying to grab hold of her.

  The thing was, she wasn’t even sure she liked Damien. That caused her the most concern. The man was affecting her in odd ways, ways she couldn’t anticipate, and there were moments she couldn’t even stand being in the same room with him. Of course, there were also moments when she wanted to be in the same room with him, in the same space, breathing the same breath. And those moments were seriously overtaking the other moments.

  So maybe she did need that nap. Maybe it could cure her of whatever was ailing her. Only problem was, she wasn’t sure there was a cure for that—if that was, indeed what was happening. Or if she even wanted to be cured if it was.

  * * *

  Pabla was sound asleep when Damien went to check on her. Doing nicely after her tonsillectomy. Juliette was in the bed next to the girl, sound asleep, as well. As much as he needed her help with the influx of partygoers from the festival trooping into the waiting room, he truly didn’t want to disturb her. But George had gone home after the tonsillectomy, Alegria was off for the night and, with the exception of Miguel, who was bedded down in one of the ward beds, the patients already admitted and Diego, who was busy taking the names of potential new patients coming into the hospital, he was all by himself. And, from the looks of things, this was going to turn into one hell of a busy night.

  “Juliette,” he said quietly, still on the verge of not disturbing her.

  “Do you need me?” she asked, looking up at him groggily for a moment, then bolting straight up in the bed. “I didn’t, did I?” she asked, rubbing her eyes, then her forehead.

  “What? Take a nap?” The expression on her face was frantic, almost like a deer caught in the headlights. For a moment, all he wanted to do was reach out, take her hand, pull her close and hold her. Reassure her. But, of course, he didn’t. Urges like that had no place here. No place in his life, either. If he did allow them to take hold of him, though, it would have been with Juliette. Right here. Right now. In his arms. Loving the feel of it. Savoring the emotional foreplay. Nice thoughts, but too distracting...

  “I didn’t mean to, Damien. I’m sorry.” She pushed off the edge of the bed, stood and tugged her scrubs back into proper place. “I sat down, thinking I’d rest here next to Pabla for a minute, just to keep an eye on her, and I must have...” She looked over at the young girl who was sleeping peacefully in the next bed. “How long was I asleep?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “I assumed you needed the sleep. It happens, Juliette. We all get to that point where we just break down. I figured you’d reached that point.” He reached over and squeezed her arm. “And you looked so peaceful I didn’t have the heart to wake you up—until now, when I need your help.”

  She looked up at him. “Damien, I don’t put in nearly as many hours as you do, and most of my work isn’t that physically demanding. I shouldn’t have been so exhausted.”

  He chuckled. “Why not? You’re only human, like the rest of us.”

  “But I didn’t come here to sleep. I’m still up to pulling off a few straight shifts without...” She frowned, and drew in a deep breath. “Maybe I’m getting too old to do this, and I’m just kidding myself thinking I still can.”

  “Juliette, are you feeling all right?” Something about her seemed a little off this evening, and he worried that her hours here at Bombacopsis were proving too much for her to handle. It was a different kind of medicine than she was used to, in a harsher environment than she’d ever dealt with. He’d had to make some physical adjustments when he’d first arrived or he’d have burned out too quickly. Better nutrition. Sleeping whenever he could. Asking for help when he needed it rather than plowing through by himself. Maybe that was all Juliette needed—some adjustments. He hoped so, anyway.

  “I’m fine. Better now that I’ve wasted half the shift sleeping.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. I had a med student once who sat down on the side of the patient’s bed to take an assessment, and fell asleep right there. When the nurse on the floor called me down to have a look at what she’d just found, I walked in on my med student all cozied up with his patient, snoring away like he didn’t have a care in the world.”

  Juliette laughed. “What was the patient doing?”

  “Looking stricken, and fig
hting not to get pushed out onto the floor.”

  “Well, if you ever catch me literally falling asleep on my patient, do me a favor and fire me on the spot so I don’t have to go to the trouble of resigning.”

  Damien stepped closer to her and put his arm around her shoulders as they headed to the desk at the entry to the ward. They stopped for a second, Damien picked up the clipboard listing all the patients waiting to be seen and, with his arm still around her shoulders, they continued on toward the waiting room. “Are you good to take on a few patients? Because the festival is ending for the night and we’ve got them lining up for us now.”

  “What are the chief complaints?” she asked.

  “Nothing serious, as far as I’ve seen. Mostly cuts, scrapes and bruises from too much merrymaking.”

  She stopped, then looked up at him, clear confusion written all over her face. “How?”

  “Too much booze leads to shoving and hitting. Or people falling down or stumbling into things. Like I said, nothing serious. But what you get are a lot of the men who don’t want to go home in their condition, don’t want their wives or families to see what they’ve been up to, so they come here first. It’s sort of a village tradition, I’ve been told.”

  “How long does this festival last?”

  “Two nights.”

  They started to walk again. “Well, sounds like a fun evening.”

  “Diego’s giving them all numbers as they come in. How about you take the evens and I’ll take the odds? And we’ll both keep an eye out for serious problems that need to be seen immediately.”

  “So you’ve got an eleven-year-old boy on triage?”

  “Almost eleven.” Damien chuckled. “And I’m betting this isn’t exactly the way your father would run a hospital, is it?”

  She laughed. “Damien, this isn’t the way anybody would run a hospital.” In spite of that, she was growing to love it here, every underfunded, understaffed minute of it.

  * * *

  “Miguel is not his name,” George Perkins announced, stepping into the exam room. Juliette was busy on one side of it treating a patient for minor abrasions, while Damien was treating a head bump on the other side. “He’s Marco. Marco de los Santos. He’s seven. And he has a little sister, Ivelis, who’s four.”

  Damien snapped his gloves off, tossed them in the trash and escorted his patient to the door; his patient reached into his pocket, grabbed out a few colónes, enough to total about twenty cents in US currency, and handed them to Damien in exchange for his medical care. “Gracias,” the man mumbled, then hurried on his way.

  Damien turned to George. “So you’ve found the family?”

  “Not exactly,” George said. “I found someone at the festival who knew who Miguel—Marco—was. Told us where to find his family. Actually, his grandmother. In the jungle, in a pretty isolated little community. Marco and Ivelis have lived there with her since their mother died a couple years ago, according to the neighbor. Anyway, I took a couple guys from town out there and found...”

  “His grandmother?”

  George nodded, but the expression on his face told Damien there was more to the story. “So what’s the bad news?”

  “I think you found Marco on the road because he’d gone looking for someone to help his grandmother.”

  “She’s sick?”

  “She’s dead, Damien,” George said, practically whispering, so not to be heard. “Little Ivelis was sitting in a chair next to the bed, while her grandmother was laying there...”

  “Dear God!” Juliette gasped. “That must have been horrible for the poor child.”

  “So what did you do with Ivelis?” Damien asked.

  “Brought her back to Bombacopsis with me. Carmelita is looking after her now, but we really can’t keep her since there’s not enough room in our cottage, not with Carmelita and me, and her three children.”

  “And the grandmother?” Juliette asked.

  “Padre Benicio is going to see to a proper burial. He’s also going to make arrangements for the children.”

  “What kind of arrangements?” Damien asked.

  “They’ve got no one. At least that’s what the neighbor said. So the padre’s going to talk to someone in Child Services in Cima de la Montaña this coming week and—”

  “And they’ll get lost,” Damien snapped. “Separated from each other, and lost!”

  “You can’t be sure of that, can you, Damien?” Juliette asked, helping her patient down from the exam table and showing him to the door.

  “No, I can’t be sure of anything. But what I know is that there are so many abandoned children in Central and South America that all the protective agencies are too overrun to be effective. And what I know is that so many of the children who go into protective care don’t fare well, especially older children like Miguel—Marco.”

  “But what else can you do?” she asked him. “Could Padre Benicio find them an adoptive family? Would Child Services allow that?”

  “They’d love it. But it’s an almost impossible task. Adopting out one older child is difficult, and to ask someone to take in two of them—there are too few resources to conduct that kind of a search for anybody who’d be willing to do that. And it would have to be done from here, because Child Services are so busy just keeping these kids alive from day to day, they don’t have time to do much else.”

  “Which is why so many of these children are put into the fields to work,” Juliette said, discouragement thick in her voice.

  Damn, he hated this. Hated it to hell, as there was no real solution here for Marco and Ivelis. If only he’d just kept on going when Juliette had told him to stop, he wouldn’t have known that these two children existed. Wouldn’t have become involved in their lives. Ignorance would have been bliss for him in this whole situation. But not for Marco and Ivelis. And that’s where his mind stopped and stayed—on the children. Damn! He had to find a way to help them.

  “You’ll figure it out, Damien,” Juliette said, squeezing into the doorway next to him once George had left. “And you’ll do the right thing by those children.” She reached up and brushed his cheek. “I know you will.” Then she scooted on by.

  Damien watched her for a moment, the trace of her fingers still lingering on his cheek. How was it that someone he’d known for so short a time had made such an impression? But Juliette did make an impression, and it left him feeling—nice. Even happy.

  “So tell me, Juliette, what’s the right thing? Because I don’t know,” he said, following her through the ward, both on their way to do general assessments.

  “I wish I could.” She stopped, turned around to face him, then laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “I really wish I could.”

  He looked down at her, smiled wearily. Then kissed her. At first on the forehead. Then on the tip of her nose. Then full on her lips. A gentle kiss. A kiss of warmth and subdued passion. A kiss of need. It was a short kiss, though. Come and gone before he even realized what he’d done. But it left him feeling...stronger. And that was all he needed right now. Strength. Juliette’s strength.

  “I wish you could, too,” he said, pulling her into his arms, and holding her tight to his chest.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE WEEK HAD turned into a busy one for Juliette. She’d taken on twelve new placements, as well as spent time checking into various avenues of funding for Damien. Plus she’d met with a pharmaceutical representative who’d given her enough antibiotic samples to keep Damien’s stock in decent supply for a few weeks. On top of that, she’d worried endlessly about Marco and Ivelis and what was going to happen to them. It was frustrating spending a whole week not knowing.

  Given all the worrying, as well as all the other efforts expended on El Hospital Bombacopsis’s behalf, she was coming to realize that she was getting too involv
ed there. Too invested. But she couldn’t help herself as the more she did, the more she wanted to do. To impress Damien, though? That thought had crossed her mind and she’d swept it aside as quickly as it had entered. Apart from Damien and any feelings she might be having for him, Juliette did like her short stay there every weekend. Liked the people. Especially liked the work.

  Of course, there was that kiss. One simple kiss they hadn’t talked about. One simple kiss that had caused her a week’s worth of distraction. A kiss she could almost still feel on her lips.

  “It’s getting rough out there,” she told Cynthia, as she packed an overnight bag to throw into her car for her weekend trip to Bombacopsis.

  “The work, or your feelings for that gorgeous Dr. Damien?”

  “Neither one. It’s the involvement with the people. It’s like I’m turning into a permanent part of the whole operation.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “I wanted some patient interaction, on a limited basis. I didn’t want to get myself involved in day-to-day lives, and look at me. I’ve packed the whole backseat of the car with supplies I’ve managed to scrounge up for them.” She sighed. “And I want to spend more time there than I have to give them.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know.” Maybe she belonged back in direct patient care on a full-time basis after all. Maybe both her father and Damien had been right about her all along. Two dominant men, both tugging at her life. She was trying to resist, but not sure she really wanted to anymore.

  “Did you know that Damien is in town right now?” Cynthia asked her.

  “He is?” That surprised her. Hurt her a little, too, as he hadn’t thought to confide his plans to her. Not that he should have. But it would have been nice. Might have signaled something more than their brief kiss being only a whim. “Why?”

  “He referred a patient to Carlos, and he came in to have a consult. I’m surprised no one told you about it.”