Falling for Her Army Doc Read online

  “It’s easier to stay safe that way. I learned that when I was young, trying to make it through school with good grades rather than a bad reputation. Then again in medical school, where brown skin wasn’t exactly the norm.”

  “Did that bother you much?” she asked.

  “When I was young, yes. But most kids suffer at the hands of other kids one way or another. When I started discovering who I was...” He chuckled. “Well, let’s just say that I know who I am, but in totally different terms now.”

  “It’s almost funny how a man with amnesia may know more about himself than I know about myself.”

  She should leave now. Get away from him while she could. Because as intimacy wove around them she was becoming fully aware that Mateo was the man who might make a difference in her life—if she allowed it. But her legs were too weak to support her body and too shaky to move her away from there. And the humid night, even with the cool spritz coming from the air-conditioning in the ohana, surrounded her, held her in place...which allowed his kiss in.

  Just like the way Lizzie felt, Mateo’s kiss was unsteady at first. Tentative, with a masterful edge just waiting to break through. But he held back. Allowed time to pull her into his arms, tight enough so he could smell the faint scent of gardenias in her hair but loose enough to let her respond to his touch. Her arm, caressed by his, burned, and yet she shivered.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, his breath warm on her neck.

  Lizzie instinctively tilted her head to look up at him. He was tall, much taller than her, and his shoulders were broad...something she’d tried hard not to observe at the hospital in anything other than a professional way. But now her profession didn’t stand between them, and she admired what she saw the way any woman would admire a beautiful man.

  “Just...unaccustomed...” she replied, her voice barely above a whisper.

  She thought briefly about the colors of the evening sky—the golds and oranges, all the colors that took on a different meaning tonight, other than simply being the colors of another night alone on the beach. Stars by the thousands were twinkling. And she was gazing out on the empty sea, her empty life, her empty world.

  All full now—if only for a moment.

  Mateo shifted just enough to catch her off-balance and push her against the door frame. In a heartbeat he grabbed her and held her tighter, his dark eyes staring intently into hers. Just a breath between them with no place to hide.

  “To what?” he asked. “What are you unaccustomed to?”

  “You...me...us. All of this. I’ve held myself back from it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was nothing I wanted to become accustomed to. Nothing...no one who mattered. And being like that has become a habit. I’m always too tied up with...other things.”

  “Maybe this will break your habit,” he said.

  His voice was deep and intense. So much so, his meaning was clear. And when their lips met his hold on her tightened even more. He was pulling her into him, pressing himself into her.

  It wasn’t like she wanted to be somewhere else. She didn’t. This moment—right here, right now—that was all there was. Her moment. And as her eager mouth fused to his she forgot who they were, where they were, or why they were. None of that mattered now. Nothing mattered but the tip of his tongue brushing her lips and the way she welcomed the urgent thrusting that sent even more shivers racing through her body.

  * * *

  Mateo had expected some heat just from being so close to her. Something mildly pleasant from almost touching. Then actually touching. But the sizzle, the pure magnetic draw of her—that was what caught him off guard. And not just the way she responded to him, but the way he responded to her. Like he’d never kissed a woman before.

  The moment his lips touched hers, ever so briefly, and he cupped her neck with his hand, she arched backward, allowing him more of her. And as his thumb caressed the silken flesh of her throat, and she quivered hard against him, he pulled her even tighter to him, to close the gap, to feel the contours of her.

  Damn, but her lips were soft. Too soft. And he fought to call back every bit of reason that was escaping him.

  But before reason took over, he pressed his lips hard to hers, and felt the twining of her leg with his calf. A tiny, pleading sound was liberated from her throat—and that was when he lost his control. His cool. His will to keep this impersonal. That was when Mateo bent his head and seized that sound, drawing it between his lips and holding it there, for fear that once he backed away it would be gone, and they would return to normal.

  His emotions were too close to the surface now. Too naked. Too close to revealing parts of him he didn’t even know in himself. Which scared him.

  So rather than thinking about it, rather than letting his pure, raw emotions take over, he kissed her with everything inside him—fear for the future, desire for someone he didn’t know, desperation for what would become of him once Lizzie was out of his life.

  Because she would be out of his life. There may have been mere millimeters between them now, but those millimeters would soon turn into worlds. And those different worlds would separate them.

  The thought of that pulled him back.

  “Well, that’s one thing you certainly haven’t forgotten,” Lizzie said, brushing her fingers across her red swollen lips.

  “It’s a natural response to you, Lizzie. Surely you’ve seen it building?”

  “Sometimes I miss the obvious. Partly because I want to and partly because I don’t put myself out there.”

  “How is it with me?”

  She raised her fingertips to her lips. “Nice. Very, very nice.”

  He’d almost hoped she would say something like they couldn’t do it again, or it had been terrible. But the smile on her face told him otherwise. Which wasn’t good because already he wanted more, when there was no more to give. Or to have.

  * * *

  He was sitting on the lanai, sipping a fruit juice, watching the darkness surround him. It was a good place for him to be, because she was too confused to make much sense of their situation. In fact, broiling a mahi-mahi, a simple task, was proving to be almost more than she could handle right now.

  “So, reason it out,” she said aloud as she chopped the mangoes, cilantro, green onions, and bell peppers to top the fish. “He kissed you, or you kissed him. Either way, it was a kiss.”

  Perhaps the only kiss she’d ever had that was worth remembering.

  “He enjoyed it...you enjoyed it.”

  Truer words never spoken. But was there anything beyond what they had already? She didn’t know, and she was pretty sure he didn’t either.

  Lizzie drew in a heavy sigh. Her last relationship, which had been her marriage to Brad, was a disaster of epic proportions, and even though it was so far in the past, she wasn’t sure she was ready for something else. She’d been played—expecting everything, getting nothing. Maybe she’d even let herself be played, believing what she wanted to believe, seeing what she wanted to see.

  Because in the end their collapse had come as no real surprise to her. There’d been hints. His self-imposed curfew. The texts he’d sent when he’d thought she wouldn’t notice. Other women. Another life.

  “Mateo isn’t married,” she argued with herself.

  But even if she were to get involved, the one thing that frightened her was his lack of memory. Would she always have to be on guard for him, like she’d been for her dad? Always nervous when he was late getting home? Or when she couldn’t find him in the house?

  She’d lived that life once and honestly didn’t know if she had it in her to do it again. The circumstances might be different, but she saw so much sameness. Or maybe that was what she wanted to see. Something to keep her at a safe distance, because she honestly didn’t know where she was going.

  What would happen if he found
himself again and he wasn’t the man she thought he was? She’d certainly been in the dark about her husband, and perhaps that was what scared her most. She was falling for this Mateo, but there might be another one waiting to emerge. Having fallen in love with one man who’d turned out to be someone else...she wasn’t going near that again.

  “And the moral of that story,” she said to her salsa, “is don’t get involved.”

  She glanced out the sliding glass door, only to catch herself wondering how much that kiss had changed things. Or if it had changed things between them at all. They were, quite simply, house-owner and houseguest. End of story. At least, she hoped so.

  “Doc Lizzie!” someone yelled into her kitchen window. “Come quick. I think he’s dead.”

  That snapped Lizzie from her doldrums and she grabbed her medical bag, clicked on her outside floodlights, and ran out the lanai door to follow the college-age man down to the beach, where one of his buddies, who’d had a little too much to drink, was lying unconscious in the sand.

  Immediately she dropped to her knees on the left side of him, and saw Mateo drop to his knees on the right and lay his fingers on the man’s neck to check for a pulse. He tried a couple different places as Lizzie inflated the blood pressure cuff, then shook his head grimly.

  “Nothing,” he said, taking hold of the man’s wrist to check for a pulse there.

  When Lizzie looked over at him for an answer, he shook his head again.

  “I can’t get a blood pressure on him, either.” She looked up at the young man’s buddy. “What happened?”

  “We were surfing. Real good tides at night around here. And he fell off his board. Don’t know what happened after that. Maybe it hit him...”

  “Is he drunk?” Mateo asked.

  “We’ve had a few beers. Nothing serious.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Lizzie said to Mateo. “A few beers and a surfboard can get you dead.” She said that for the benefit of the young man’s buddy. “What’s his name?”

  “Teddy. Teddy Chandler.”

  “Teddy, can you hear me?” Mateo yelled, giving the young man a hard thumb in the middle of his chest.

  A sternum-rub, as it was called, was a technique used for assessing the consciousness level of a person who wasn’t responding to normal interactions such as voice commands. In Teddy’s case there was no reaction.

  “Call for an ambulance,” Mateo shouted, while Lizzie put her ear almost all the way down on Teddy’s mouth to see if there was any discernible breathing.

  When she could find nothing, she checked for a pulse again. Like before, it wasn’t there. So she commenced CPR, placing the heel of one hand on the center of Teddy’s chest at the nipple line.

  As she positioned herself to start the compressions, Mateo took an IV set-up from her medical bag and inserted it into Teddy’s vein—right arm, just below the bend. He attached a saline bag to it, but nothing else.

  “Epinephrine could cause severe brain damage,” he said, more to himself than Lizzie.

  “You remembered that?”

  “I remember some of the newer studies stating epi is contraindicated in cardiac arrest.”

  Lizzie stopped her chest compressions long enough to assess Teddy for breath sounds, but still he wasn’t breathing.

  Mateo opened Teddy’s airway by tilting his head back and lifting his chin. Then he pinched the man’s nose closed, took a normal breath, and covered his victim’s mouth with his own, giving him two one-second breaths, hoping to see the natural rise and fall of his chest.

  Still nothing was happening.

  He gave two more breaths, followed by Lizzie, who administered thirty chest compressions. Then they repeated it all.

  The second set of compressions caused Teddy to vomit and spit out seawater, and then he sputtered to life, blinking hard, and reeking of far more than a few beers.

  “Can I go home now?” the young man muttered, trying to sit up even as Mateo forced him back onto the sand.

  “The only place you’re going is to the hospital,” Lizzie told him. “In a saltwater near-drowning water is pulled out of the bloodstream, and then it pools in the lungs, where it’s thicker than normal blood, and can cause heart damage since your heart isn’t used to pumping hard enough to circulate the thickened blood.”

  “In other words,” Mateo chimed in, “you may have messed up your heart, so you need to have it checked out.”

  “Will it hurt?” Teddy asked.

  Mateo looked across at Lizzie and smiled. “Probably. But that’s what happens when you drink too much and then think you can conquer the surf. It doesn’t happen that way, Teddy. Worldwide, one person drowns every two minutes, and while half of those are children, the half that aren’t children are largely made up of men who take risks. Drinking and surfing is a risk—you got lucky that your buddy knew where to go to fetch a doctor. Normally it doesn’t turn out that well.”

  Lizzie stood and brushed sand from her knees. Mateo was impressive. Besides that, he was a very good doctor, and for the first time she wondered if there might still be a place in medicine for him. What he’d done and what he’d remembered... Heroic didn’t even begin to describe it.

  Surely there was a place for him?

  Someplace better than where he was now?

  Someplace where she wouldn’t be so tempted by him?

  And, make no mistake. Mateo tempted her in ways no man ever had before.

  * * *

  “It’s you they need out there, Doc. Not some other medic. This is Freddy. You’ve got to go. Got to go... Got to go...”

  The soldier faded from view then reappeared in an ambulance, motioning for Mateo.

  “Hurry up. Hurry up.”

  “But I need to be here,” Mateo protested. “Incoming.”

  “Go,” his nurse was telling him.

  She was pointing at the door where, just outside, the ambulance awaited.

  “Go, Doctor. It’s your duty. This is Freddy.”

  But the faces in the hall were blurring together. And the soldiers with those blurred faces were all pointing at the door.

  “Go!” they were screaming as he dropped to his knees, shut his eyes, and held his hands over his ears. “Go, Mateo!”

  He opened his eyes and he was alone. Just him in the makeshift hospital. And the ambulance. No one to drive him. But the voices—they were still in his head.

  “Go!” Mateo screamed, then bolted up in bed, sweaty and shaken.

  He knew he had to go, but he didn’t know where.

  Dear God, he didn’t know where.

  * * *

  Lizzie could hear him scream through her open window. This was his battle to win, not hers. But she desperately wanted to help him through it. Except she couldn’t. These nightmares he was having were taking him on a journey he had to walk alone. The answers he needed were there. But they were his to find, not hers to reveal.

  She believed that now, as much as she ever had. Still, as she went to her own bed she was shaken. And silent tears slid down her cheeks. She wanted to fight his battles, do away with his demons. But in the end that would only make her feel useful—it would do nothing to help Mateo.

  As she laid her head on her pillow and shut her eyes all she could see was an image of someone drowning. Mateo. He was walking into the water and she was the only one there to pull him out. But she couldn’t.

  That was her nightmare for the rest of the night. He was drowning and she couldn’t get to him, the same way she hadn’t been able to get to her dad when he was dying. She was letting them down, letting them both down. And she didn’t know how to fix it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “YOU OK?” MATEO ASKED.

  He was concerned about Lizzie. She hadn’t said a word in over an hour. Sitting there in the sand, staring at the water, she seemed almost li
ke a statue. A beautiful statue, maybe of a goddess watching over the sea.

  “I cleaned up the mess from last night’s burnt mahi-mahi and salvaged the salsa to put over something else. But I’m not sure what, since you don’t keep a lot of groceries in your pantry.”

  “Because I rarely eat at home. When Dad was in better shape he loved to cook, but then when I took over we ate very simply. If I couldn’t fix it in under thirty minutes, we went out. At least until he couldn’t do that anymore. Then, with everything he needed from me in the evenings, I usually just brought something home.”

  “Did you have someone helping you?”

  “I had a couple different people who were available when I wasn’t here. One was a student nurse, the other a retired physical therapist. They were good with Dad, but he always wanted me, and sometimes he’d get so belligerent I’d have to leave work to come take care of him.” She shook her head. “My father was a lieutenant colonel in the Army, and toward the end he didn’t even know his own name.”

  “I didn’t either,” he said. “Not for several days. I can’t imagine how it would be to lose yourself entirely. Even with just pieces of me gone, I get frustrated. And that’s nothing compared to what your dad went through. I’m sorry for that, Lizzie. I suppose we tend to think we’re invincible, but the scariest thing that happened to me was waking up in Germany when the last thing I remembered was performing a surgery in a desert outpost hospital. Nobody would tell me what was going on, and I certainly didn’t have the capacity at that point to figure it out.”

  He sat down in the sand next to her, handed her a glass of fresh fruit juice, and took her hand.

  “I felt so...alone. I imagine that’s how your dad felt when he knew he was losing his memory. It’s not an easy thing to face.”

  She scooted closer and grasped his hand a little tighter. “He wasn’t cooperative, either.”

  Mateo laughed. “Either? Which implies what?”