‘WHAT’S THE TIME?’
‘Five past eight.’
‘We’re early.’ Matteo Martini sighed. Waiting had never been his forte.
It was an exercise in self-control. A tightrope to balance on between the need to follow rules and gather information and the desire to act. To help someone in trouble. To save a life perhaps...
This wasn’t a real life situation, however, which made it impossible to gather any clues about what was to come from a radio conversation or updated pager messages. All they had was a minimal briefing sheet that had given them the GPS coordinates for the scene and that they would be assessing a thirty-five-year-old woman with abdominal pain.
Their tasks were listed as well and they had to assess the scene, examine and treat the patient, define a working diagnosis and means of transport if necessary, within a time limit of eleven minutes.
This was all about following rules. Waiting in their vehicle until it was their turn to enter what looked like a very ordinary village house to face their first scenario of this emergency response competition.
‘Doesn’t look like much.’ Luke sounded disappointed. ‘You sure we’re in the right place?’
‘Sì. Assolutamente.’ Matteo pointed through the windscreen. ‘That car parked over there is a competitor. It’s got the numbers. And a light on the roof, like ours. And the flags are...’
‘Scottish,’ Luke murmured.
The tension of having to wait had just got a whole lot easier as Matteo felt himself being pulled back into the unexpected delight of meeting Georgia Bennett last night. What a stroke of luck it had been that her partner for this competition was an old friend of Luke’s. He didn’t even have to make an effort to get an introduction to a woman who would have caught his eye no matter how big a crowd she was in.
There was a glow of energy about Georgia that made him think of adventure. Fun. In combination with that tumble of dark blonde curly hair and those hazel-brown eyes that had rather fascinating flecks of gold, she was irresistible. Given their passion for a shared career, that easy conversation over a drink or two had been a bonus. And by the end of the evening, when they’d split up to study the lists of scenarios that had been handed out to the waiting teams, Matteo had been left with the conviction that the attraction he’d discovered was mutual.
Whether they would have the chance to explore that attraction any further was an enticing possibility but Matteo wasn’t going to allow it to distract him for any longer than a delicious minute or two. He had, in fact, dismissed it from his mind completely well before their start time of eight-fifteen a.m.
Until he saw the two women emerge from the house, that was. Until Georgia spotted them waiting in their vehicle and raised her hand to wave at him.
Until she smiled...
‘Be nice to have an idea of what we’re heading into,’ Luke said. ‘They weren’t giving away any clues, were they?’
‘And neither should they,’ Matteo said sternly. ‘That would be dishonest.’
‘Not exactly.’ Luke’s tone was thoughtful. ‘Dishonesty is when you fail to tell the truth. Breaking the rules of the competition to give someone else an advantage would be dishonourable rather than dishonest.’
‘Hmm...’ Matteo absorbed the correction. ‘They are both unacceptable.’
Dishonesty was at the top of his list of despicable human traits. Right up there with cruelty and violence, particularly when children were involved.
‘Too right they are,’ Luke agreed.
Thrusting his arms through the straps of his pack of gear, Matteo had another moment of distraction.
Had he been a little too honest with Georgia during that conversation last night? He’d probably talked about his family with rather too much enthusiasm, hadn’t he? If he had wanted to encourage any attraction on her part, he should have stuck to talking about the more exciting exploits of his career as a helicopter paramedic instead of how close he was to his mother and his sisters. Good grief, he’d had to blink tears from his eyes when he’d told her about how much of a thrill it had been to welcome his latest nephew into the world recently.
Weirdly, that slightly cringe-making moment of distraction became an advantage a very short time later, when the two men found themselves in a confusing scenario of a party going on in the house. If the memory of holding that newborn baby hadn’t been still there in the back of his mind, would he have been so quick to run up the stairs when they’d heard there was a pregnant girl having stomach pains? And maybe he wouldn’t have put quite the same amount of passion into resuscitating a baby who wasn’t breathing if he hadn’t been imagining that it could have been his sister as the terrified young mother.
In any case, there had been nods of satisfaction from the judges and both he and Luke felt far more confident when they arrived at their second scenario, which clearly had nothing to do with childbirth. Their patient was a middle-aged man who was curled up on a bed and groaning loudly as they entered the room. He was also holding a plastic bucket.
‘He’s been sick.’ The woman who’d met them at the door had explained that she was his wife. ‘He got this terrible back pain all of a sudden and then he started vomiting.’
‘Could you get some baselines, please, Matt?’ Luke was taking the lead on this scenario. ‘I’ll see what I can find out with the history.’ He crouched down beside the bed.
‘Show me where this pain is.’
The man put his hand on his side, under his ribs but then moved it towards his abdomen and into his groin.
‘Is it the first time you’ve experienced it?’
‘Yes.’
‘How bad is it? On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst you can imagine?’
‘Ten...’ He groaned again. ‘And I feel sick...’
‘We’ll give you something to help with that in just a minute.’
Matteo held a tympanic thermometer close to their patient’s ear.
‘Temperature’s normal,’ the nearest judge informed him as he continued taking baseline recordings. ‘He’s tachycardic at one-twenty, respirations are twenty-four and his blood pressure is one-thirty over ninety.’
Matteo caught Luke’s glance. With a normal temperature, infection was less likely to be a cause of this pain so a diagnosis like appendicitis or diverticulitis could be ruled out for the moment. What was needed now was pain relief. He collected everything he needed to insert an IV line and put a tourniquet on the man’s arm.
‘The IV line is in.’ The judge nodded.
‘Have you had any trouble urinating?’ Luke asked now. ‘Is it painful or have you noticed anything different?’
‘It hurts,’ the man replied. ‘And it’s very dark.’
Luke glanced at Matteo, who nodded. The diagnosis and their management now appeared simple.
‘We think you might have a kidney stone,’ Luke said. ‘And it’s blocking your ureter and causing this pain. We’ll give you something for the pain and then we’ll take you to hospital. Are you allergic to anything that you know of?’
‘No.’
Matteo was already going through the motions of drawing up the morphine.
‘What dosage are you administering?’ one of the judges asked.
‘We’ll start with five milligrams,’ Luke replied. ‘We can top that up if the pain scale isn’t reduced to less than five.’
The judge nodded. ‘The drug has been administered.’
Matteo began tidying up and Luke was checking their briefing sheet that gave a list of available hospitals and means of transport. They needed to choose the most appropriate option, which ranged from leaving the patient where he was, transport by helicopter or ambulance to the nearest general hospital, a higher-level hospital or a specialised centre.
Matteo dropped the packages of IV gear back into his pack and turned to pick up the blood-pressure cuff.
To his horror, he could see that their patient now seemed to be having trouble breathing and he was clutching at his chest.
‘Luke...’ The word was a warning. He reached out to take the man’s pulse. ‘Do you have chest pain, sir?’
Their patient didn’t respond. His head fell back against the pillow and he was gasping for breath.
Luke was still processing this unexpected twist in their scenario.
‘Do we see any skin changes?’
‘You see redness appearing,’ a judge said. ‘And hives.’
Nothing more than a glance between Luke and Matteo was needed.
‘Anaphylaxis to morphine,’ Matteo agreed quietly. ‘I’ll get a bag of fluids up. And we need some adrenaline, stat.’
They both worked swiftly to counter a potentially fatal situation, administering drugs, getting their patient on oxygen and a cardiac monitor. Within a couple of minutes the judges were nodding with satisfaction and declared the scenario complete. They just wanted to ask some questions.
‘What is your hospital of choice for this patient?’
‘Hospital A,’ Luke told them. ‘They have an internal medicine department and an intensive care unit and they are the closest.’
‘And what is the most important information to pass on about your patient?’
‘That he has a previously undiscovered allergy to morphine. We will write it on his notes and make sure the information is received by everyone we speak to. We will also advise the patient that it would be a good idea to wear a Medic-Alert bracelet from now on.’
‘That was good.’ Matteo slapped Luke on the back as they left the house. ‘I might not have thought of recommending the bracelet.’
‘I was too slow to spot the change in our patient’s condition. Well done, you.’
Matteo grinned at his friend. ‘We make a good team.’
‘We’ve got a break now, haven’t we? About an hour?’
‘We should use it to do the driving test.’
‘Okay.’ Matteo was looking forward to this test. He might work on helicopters now but his early years as a paramedic had been on the road and he loved the challenge of driving fast and doing it well.
A gravelled area beside the river that ran through this village had been cordoned off for this part of the competition and a line of orange road cones marked the course. They could see an ambulance completing the test as they arrived, clouds of dust billowing as it snaked around the cones at high speed and then came to a sudden halt between the cones marking the end of the course.
Another car was waiting for its turn.
The car with the Scottish flags.
And there it was again...
Distraction. A delicious buzz of anticipation at the knowledge he would be seeing Georgia again.
It had always been a given that he would thoroughly enjoy coming to this competition again.
A smile took over his face as he spotted Georgia sitting in the driver’s seat of the girls’ vehicle. He just hadn’t realised how much better it would be this time.
‘Cute,’ he murmured.
The swift glance from Luke held a note of surprise. Or maybe concern. Did he think that Matteo was here to chase women rather than focus on their performance? He thought fast, putting a casual smile on his face as he shifted his gaze from the woman in the driver’s seat. ‘I didn’t notice that before.’
The look of surprise increased as Luke raised his eyebrows. ‘You mean Georgia? Or Kate?’
Okay. Maybe his interpretation of that glance had been accurate.
He hoped his laugh was as casual as his smile.
‘Oh, the girls are both cute but that wasn’t what I was looking at. Have you seen what is tied to the front of their car?’
It was a stuffed toy bear that was wearing a kilt and holding a set of bagpipes.
Matteo rolled down his window and pointed to the toy, raising his voice so that Georgia could hear him. ‘He is going to get dirty, I think.’
‘All part of the fun.’ Georgia was grinning at him as she called back. Holding his gaze.
Mio Dio... That smile. The sparkle in those eyes. It was enough to make Matteo’s breath catch. For an odd warmth to ignite in his gut and then spread all the way through his body.
What was it about this woman that was so different?
So compelling?
Could Georgia feel this same unusual level of attraction? Possibly not, by how focussed she clearly was on what she was about to do.
‘Which one of you is going to do the driving? You’re only allowed one person in the vehicle.’
There was a hint of something in her eyes. A challenge perhaps? Or did she want to watch him showing what he was capable of?
His lips twitched in a suppressed smile. He would be more than happy to demonstrate any skill she might be interested in—and he was apparently good at many things that women liked...
But did Luke want to do the driving?
No. His companion was already unclipping his safety belt.
‘You do it,’ he said to Matteo. ‘You’ve got far more experience with emergency driving skills than I have. I’ll wait with Kate.’
‘Cool.’ Matteo nodded as Luke got out of the car. He could focus now.
He needed to know exactly what was required to make sure he aced this particular test.
He needed to make sure he impressed Georgia...
* * *
‘You’re a bit quiet, Georgie. Not worried about the next task, are you?’
‘Not at all. I was just thinking about that driving test. I could have done better.’
Georgia wished she’d done better. She might not have been able to see his face but she’d known that Matteo was watching her and the effect had been to make her very uncharacteristically self-conscious. Clumsy even. She had felt his gaze on her like a physical touch of his hand on her skin and the hyperawareness it had created had messed with her concentration. How embarrassing had it been to send those road cones flying on her first attempt at the serpentine? It wasn’t until she had been able to shut him out of her thoughts that she’d been able to demonstrate what she was capable of.
‘You did great.’ Kate’s tone was reassuring.
‘Not as great as Matteo,’ Georgia muttered.
Kate grinned. ‘He was something else, wasn’t he? I’ve never seen anyone drive like that. So fast. And he didn’t touch a single cone.’
Georgia scowled. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’
Kate laughed. ‘Let it go. I’ll bet there are other things he’s not as good at. He’s a boy. And he’s Italian. Maybe he had a Ferrari when he was a teenager.’
Oh, man, there was an image to play with. A younger version of Matteo Martini. With much longer hair perhaps, behind the wheel of a very fast car. With that easy grin on his face and only one hand on the wheel because his other arm would be over the shoulders of the girl in the passenger seat. Because there would be a girl, no doubt about that. Or maybe his hand would be resting on her leg, his thumb making lazy circles on that sensitive skin on her inner thigh. The girl would be smiling, too, of course. Georgia certainly would be...
It was ridiculous to experience a twinge of something so easily recognisable as envy.
No, it was even worse than envy. This felt like jealousy, thanks to the way Georgia’s eyes were narrowing. She shook her head to stop it happening.
‘What’s the next task about?’
‘It’s called “School Bag”. We’re being called to a teacher who has tripped over a school bag and is lying on the floor, not moving. She’s unconscious but breathing. Head injury, do you think?’
‘I’m sure it won’t be that simple. We’ll have to make sure we rule out other causes of unconsciousness. Was the fall the cause or did she fall because of something else?’
‘Like a cardiac event.’
‘Yes. Or hypoglycaemia, drug overdose, a stroke, seizures, anaphylaxis, alcohol. It’s a long list.’
‘Let’s hope there’s someone around who can tell us exactly what happened. We need to know how she was acting immediately before she fell.’
The only other people in the classroom with the unconscious woman, however, apart from the silent judges, were a group of young children who were taking every advantage of their teacher being unable to control them. Some were having a race around the room, jumping from one desk top to another. One was ripping pages from a textbook. They were all shouting and laughing.
The teacher was lying face down near the blackboard. A school satchel was close to her feet, spilling its contents of an apple, drink bottle and box of pencils. Kate felt for a pulse on their patient’s neck the moment they got close enough.
‘Hello...can you hear me?’
‘You have no response,’ a judge informed her. ‘The heart rate is one hundred and twenty.’
They rolled their patient carefully so that they could protect her airway. The noise in the classroom increased and Kate was hit on the head by a ball of screwed-up paper. Georgia’s head swerved and caught the culprit—the boy who’d been ripping pages from the book. He grinned at Georgia.
An impish grin beneath a wild mop of curly hair. Such a cute kid, she had to stop herself grinning back. Instead, she jumped to her feet and tried to find her sternest expression. If they couldn’t get this scene under control, it was going to make it impossible to do their job well.
‘Enough,’ she shouted. ‘All of you kids come here. At once.’
A chair toppled with a crash in the sudden silence that followed. One by one, the children came closer. They were all acting so well, with their heads down to show that they knew they were in trouble. One little girl, with huge blue eyes and long plaits, was biting her lip and looking so scared that Georgia just wanted to give her a cuddle.
‘It’s okay,’ she told them. ‘But you have to stop being naughty. Your teacher is sick. Did anyone see what happened?’
‘She fell over,’ one of the children said.
‘And before that?’
The children shook their heads. One boy turned away and pushed another one, who pushed back. Georgia caught a third boy who stepped past her, poised to start running again. From the corner of her eye, she could see Kate taking some baseline measurements, including blood glucose. Then she looked at one of the judges.
‘Is there someone available who could look after these children?’
‘There is a school caretaker outside the room.’ A nod from the judge was the signal for the young actors to leave the scene. The boy who’d thrown the paper ball grinned at Georgia again as he left and this time she did return the smile. Along with a quick wink.
‘Blood glucose too low to register,’ Kate said behind her. ‘Skin is cold and clammy and she’s still tachycardic.’
‘Cool. I’ll set up for a glucose infusion.’ Georgia turned back to the task as the door closed behind the last of the children. They could work in peace now but there was a part of her that was missing the energy that had been in the room a moment ago.
An energy that only children could provide. That wholehearted enthusiasm for being alive that adults learned to control too well sometimes. Taking advantage of an opportunity for adventure was a hallmark of a happy child and it always seemed to involve either laughter or tears—a pendulum that could swing unpredictably.
Georgia loved the unexpected.
And she loved kids. Even more than babies. She’d had always had dreams of having a whole bunch of them. A messy house and lots of noise with hopefully more laughter than tears. A frantic routine of cooking, cleaning, cuddles and school runs to deliver her little tribe to classrooms just like this one.
She had a job to do now that had nothing to do with small people and the fragment of that dream that the extras in this scenario had prompted was easy enough to push aside.
But it was a reminder that it was still there. Getting stronger with every passing week. If she was going to achieve even a part of that dream she was going to have to do it soon.
And having a kid you could take to school had to start in a very different place.
With having a baby.
And that brought her straight back to the plan she had just abandoned on moral grounds—of using this competition as an opportunity to start that journey to parenthood.
Georgia dismissed that line of thought easily as well as she taped the cannula to their patient’s arm as evidence that an IV line had been established.
As they monitored the effects of their treatment, she tried to think of anything they might be missing that could be another twist in this scenario.
‘She’s not wearing a Medic-Alert bracelet, is she?’
‘No.’ Kate moved the collar of the shirt their patient was wearing. ‘Or a necklace.’
‘Can you check her bag? Or the drawer in her desk? It would be useful to know what medication she’s on. Is she using insulin or medication to lower her blood sugar? She might have overdosed.’
Kate did find a packet of tablets in the teacher’s bag but they weren’t what they might have expected.
‘These are antidepressants, aren’t they?’
‘Yes.’
The woman lying on the floor began to move and she groaned softly.
‘Your patient’s blood glucose level is returning to normal,’ one of the judges said. ‘What is your plan for transport?’
Georgia thought fast. ‘We will transport her to hospital. She has no one here to watch her and we don’t know what her normal regime is for her diabetes control.’
‘Which hospital do you choose?’
‘Hospital B.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s a higher-level hospital and there are psychiatric services available. The fact that she’s taking antidepressants suggests that there are additional issues for this patient that might be affecting her control of her disease.’
The judges nod was pleased. So was Kate’s.
‘Good job,’ she whispered, as they left the scene. ‘I probably would have picked Hospital A because it was the closest. And I might not have thought to check her bag either.’
‘You get patients delivered to you with a handover of any available information. I guess I’m just used to searching for clues.’ Georgia shoved the bulky pack of gear into the back of the car. ‘It’s one of the things I love about my job—getting to play detective on scene along with being the medic.’
Matteo shared her passion for this job. He was probably as good at playing detective on scene as he was at emergency driving. They’d never run out of fascinating things to talk about, would they?
Oh, boy...this was getting worse. She was actually thinking in terms of for ever? Of growing old together and still not running out of conversation?
‘You have to deal with all the distractions, too,’ Kate added. ‘Those kids were doing my head in to start with.’
The bunch of children was being ushered back into the building now, probably to prepare for the next scenario. As Kate and Georgia drove away, they spotted a car they recognised heading towards the school.
‘I think those boys are stalking us.’
Kate’s lips twitched as if she was trying not to smile. ‘Just coincidence.’ But she turned her head to watch the car disappear. ‘I wonder how they’ll cope with finding a riot going on.’
Georgia lapsed into silence. Matteo would cope very well. He probably wouldn’t even need to shout at the children to get their attention and gain control of the scene. He’d only need to smile at them and they would be eating out of his hand because they’d know how much he loved kids.
And he did love kids. A large part of the conversation they’d had over drinks last night, when Kate and Luke had been talking quietly, had been about his family. About how much he adored his sister’s children and what a thrill the recent birth of a new nephew had been. It sounded as if the entire Martini clan had been at the hospital to welcome that new arrival and Georgia hadn’t missed the way Matteo had spoken about his other sisters and his mother. She could have sworn he’d actually had tears in his eyes at one point. Family was clearly of the utmost importance in his life.
And wouldn’t he make the best father? He would be totally devoted to his children and there would be a huge, extended family in the wings to make every milestone a glorious celebration.
If that was what Georgia was looking for, Matteo would be perfect.
A few years ago even, when she’d still had the dream that she could find her perfect partner and be totally confident that her own children would never face the kind of fear that had poisoned her own childhood, Matteo would have stood out as being exactly what she was searching for. Gorgeous and confident and super-smart. She’d been more than impressed to learn about his postgraduate qualifications in resuscitation and aeromedical transportation.
But the last remnants of that dream had come crashing down in the wake of the brutal ending of her last relationship. Her heart had been broken for the last time and she knew not to trust that tiny flutter of hope that had come from nowhere when she’d seen this gorgeous Italian for the first time.
His passion for his family was actually a massive negative in the grand scheme of things because if the worst happened, she would be facing an army of opponents if she wanted to protect her children. And she knew that fighting even one could be too many.
It was an automatic gesture to turn her arm a little whenever this memory surfaced. To see the jagged scar that remained from the arm that had been so badly broken when she was only five years old. To feel a shiver of that terror when her birth father had arrived to claim her and the struggle to drag her from her mother’s arms had turned vicious.
Not that it had surfaced much in the last few years, because Georgia had believed she would choose a good man and could rewrite history, but her choices had proved untrustworthy. And, okay, maybe Rick had only been verbally vicious when he’d ended their relationship but that had been more than enough to stir the memories. Her ‘father’ had been just as quick to cause pain with words as anything physical.
And Italians had a reputation for having quick tempers, didn’t they? Imagine having to face an entire family of angry Italians?
Kate’s voice broke into her thoughts. ‘Penny for them?’
‘Huh?’
‘You’re miles away. What’s up?’
‘I’m just hungry,’ Georgia said. ‘It must be time for lunch, isn’t it?’
Kate checked their schedule.
‘Yep. We’ve got a break for over an hour.’
Finding a parking space near the main buildings of the ski resort, the two women handed over their vouchers to receive another meal featuring dumplings.
Georgia felt suddenly weary.
‘I feel like I’ve been on a full shift already,’ she told Kate. ‘And we’re only a third of our way through the competition. At least we get a break after this. I’m going to try and catch a nap.’
After they’d eaten, they went outside into the sunshine and found a grassy patch to lie on that was shaded by a huge tree. Georgia closed her eyes and hoped that Kate would think she had fallen asleep.
She just needed a little quiet time and maybe she could stop the unsettling thoughts that were only a distraction to why she was really here and then she could focus completely on winning this competition.
Childhood memories of the trauma of being forcibly taken from her mother, the intervention of child protection services and then being moved from one town to another until her father’s death had finally freed them from the threat that had never gone away but were of no help to her concentration.
Stupid dreams of finding ‘the one’, like Kate still had, were just as useless.
The plan of launching her new future as a single parent by choosing her baby daddy at this competition were well and truly being laid to rest.
Because, if she had the choice, she wouldn’t be able to choose anyone other than Matteo?
And he would end up finding out, wouldn’t he? He was best friends with her best friend’s friend and secrets had a nasty tendency to get revealed eventually.
Besides...she liked him.
She really liked him. Too much to consider the kind of deception that would end up haunting her for ever.
Her breath escaped in a small sigh as she turned her mind back to the tasks they had already completed today. The baby resuscitation. All those little scamps creating havoc in the schoolroom.
And thinking about those children produced an idea that Georgia hadn’t ever considered before.
Perhaps she didn’t actually need to have a baby herself. There were always children who needed adoption or fostering. Children who were having to live with the kind of trauma she knew about all too well.
She’d be good at that.
With another long, outward breath, Georgia relaxed into the companionable silence she was sharing with Kate.
Yes. That was an idea that merited a lot more thought in the near future. When this competition was over.