Alessandro and the Cheery Nanny

Alessandro took in the woman who had been the cause of another sleepless night. A new cause, granted, but still a complication he didn’t need. She was different today, out of her shorts and T-shirt. Very professional looking in the modest white uniform with the zip up the front. Her hair was a little neater in her ponytail and in this environment he felt on a more even keel around her.

Still, his gaze dropped to the zip briefly and before he could stop it, an image of him yanking the slider down flitted across his mind’s eye.

He looked at Delia briefly. ‘Yes. We’ve met.’

Then he turned back to the patient and Nat felt thoroughly dismissed. If only he knew what he’d done to her in her dreams last night…

Had she had time she might have been miffed but her patient caught her attention. ‘Super-Nurse, hey?’ he croaked behind his oxygen mask.

Nat dragged her gaze away from the back of Alessandro’s head to look at the patient. He was sweaty and grey with massive ST changes on his monitor. Multiple ectopic beats were worrying and as she watched, a short run of ventricular tachycardia interrupted his rhythm.

His heart muscle was dying.

He was also in pain despite the morphine that she noted had already been administered, but there was still a twinkle visible in his bright eyes. He was obviously one of those stoic old men who didn’t believe in complaining too much.

‘Yes, sir.’ She reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘That’s me. To the rescue.’

The patient gave a weak chuckle. ‘Ernie,’ he puffed out. ‘Looks like I’m in safe hands, then.’

Nat glanced at Alessandro. She hoped so. She hoped he was better at doctoring than he was at communicating. At fathering. ‘The very best.’

‘What’s the ETA on the CCU docs?’ Alessandro asked no one in particular.

Seeing Nat Davies from the crèche was a bit of a surprise but he didn’t have time to ponder that, or her damn zip, now. He had to focus on his patient, who needed that consult and admission to the coronary care unit pronto.

Ernie’s ECG was showing a massive inferior myocardial infarction. They were administering the right drugs to halt the progress of the heart attack but these patients were notoriously unstable and with age against him, Alessandro worried that Ernie would arrest before the drugs could work. Or that his heart was already too damaged.

‘Couple of minutes,’ someone behind him said.

As it turned out, Ernie didn’t have a couple of minutes and Alessandro’s worst fears were realised when the monitor alarmed and Ernie lost consciousness.

‘VF,’ Nat announced as the green line on the screen developed into a series of frenetic squiggles. Her own heart rate spiked as a charge of adrenaline shot through her system like vodka on an empty stomach.

Alessandro pointed at Nat. ‘Commence CPR. I’ll intubate. Adrenaline,’ he ordered. ‘Charge the defib.’

Nat hiked the skirt of her uniform up her thighs a little as she climbed up onto the narrow gurney. She planted her knees wide and balanced on the edge of the mattress, a feat she’d performed a little too often, as she started compressions.

Any ill will she may have been harbouring towards Dr Lombardi fizzled in an instant at the totally professional way he ran the code. It was textbook. But that wasn’t doing him justice. It was more than textbook. He didn’t see a seventy-two-year-old man and give up after a few minutes. He gave Ernie every chance. It wasn’t until the down time reached thirty minutes that he finally called it.

He placed his hands on Nat’s, stilling their downward trajectory. ‘Thank you,’ he said. Then he looked at the clock. ‘Time of death fifteen twenty-two hours.’

Nat looked down at his hands. She could just see her own through the gloved fingers of his. She noticed for the first time his sleeves were rolled back to reveal the dark hair of his bronzed forearms and she absently thought how strong they looked. How manly.

She glanced at him and their eyes locked, a strange solidarity uniting them. She could see the impact of this loss in his bleak stare. As she watched, his gaze drifted briefly south, lapping her cleavage, and she felt her nipples bead as if he’d actually caressed them. When he looked back at her, all she could see was heat.

Two beats passed and then as quickly as the heat had come it disappeared and he was removing his hands, extending one to help her off the gurney. Dragging her gaze from him, she accepted, easing back to the floor.

Her knees nearly buckled and Nat snatched her hand away, grabbing for the edge of the trolley to steady herself.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked as he watched her wobble slightly.

Nat rubbed her at her knees. ‘Fine’

Except, staring down at Ernie, she knew it wasn’t. Ernie was dead. And whatever was going on between her and Alessandro didn’t matter next to that. Neither did it matter that she’d only known Ernie for only a handful of minutes—he was still dead. Gone. The twinkle in his eyes extinguished for ever. In fact, it made it worse that she didn’t know him. It was wrong that a person should die surrounded by strangers.

She felt as she always did, overwhelmingly sad.

Alessandro nodded. ‘We need to talk to his family.’

His cold onyx gaze bored into hers with an air of expectation, no trace of the heat from a moment ago.

Looked like she was going with him.

Confronted with the businesslike professional, she wondered if she’d imagined the fleeting glimpse of sorrow and passion she’d seen. Her tummy growled again and she bargained with it for another half an hour.

Alessandro strode briskly ahead and Nat worried as she followed him. Sure, the view was good. His trousers hugged the tight contours of his butt and each stride emphasised not only the power of his legs but pulled at his shirt, emphasising the broadness of his back.

But none of that meant this man was remotely equipped to talk to grieving relatives. He was still grieving himself. Had Ernie’s death resonated with him? Had this death reminded him of his dead wife, of his own grief?

He was obviously a consultant, she didn’t think for a moment this was his first time. But if he was as emotionally disconnected with this family as he was with his son, it could be disastrous for them. As a nurse she was used to being involved in these conversations but did he only want her there to fill in the emotional gaps for him? Was she going to be left to pick up the pieces like she’d done too many times before in her career because too often doctors were ill equipped for this sort of situation?

She contemplated saying something. But despite the brief flare of desire that had licked her with heat, his terse This is none of your business from yesterday still rang in her ears and she didn’t want to annoy him before this heart-wrenching job. But he seemed as tense as yesterday, as distant, and not even the growling of her stomach could override the foreboding that shadowed her as she tried to keep up with his impossibly long stride.

Telling someone their husband/child/mother/significant other had died was always dreadful. As a health-care worker, Nat would rather clean bedpans all shift than witness the devastating effects of those awful few words. But she knew Ernie’s wife and kids deserved the truth and she knew they’d have questions that only someone who had been there could answer.

And that was her.

She couldn’t back away from that. No matter how much she wanted to.

Much to her surprise, Alessandro again totally confounded her. He spoke softly, his accent more apparent as he gently outlined what had happened and how they’d tried but in the end there had been nothing they could do to bring Ernie back. The family cried and got angry and asked questions and Alessandro was calm and gentle and patient.

He was compassion personified.

And at the end when Ernie’s wife tentatively put out her hand to bridge the short distance between Alessandro and herself and then thought better of it and withdrew it, it was he who reached out and took her hand.

It should have melted her marshmallow heart in an instant. But it didn’t.

It reminded her of yesterday and Julian reaching for his father’s hand and it had the opposite effect. She was furious. It felt like a red-hot poker had been shoved through her heart. She wasn’t sure if it was the lack of food or the lack of sleep but she felt irrationally angry.

Was this man schizophrenic? Was he some sort of Jekyll and Hyde? How could he offer Ernie’s wife, a relative stranger, the comfort he denied his own child?

He’d shown this family, this previously unknown collection of people, more sensitivity, more emotion, than he’d displayed for his four-year-old son. Yesterday she’d thought he was emotionally crippled. Grieving for his wife. Today, as they’d walked to do this, she’d worried about it again. Worried about his ability to empathise when he was buried under the weight of his own grief.

But it wasn’t the case. He was obviously a brilliant emergency physician with a fabulous bedside manner. He just didn’t take it home with him. To the most important person in the world. To his own child. To his son.

They left Ernie’s family after about twenty minutes and Nat had never been more pleased to be shed of a person in her life. She steamed ahead, knowing if she didn’t get away from him she would say something she would regret.

Alessandro frowned as Nat forged ahead. She seemed upset and as much as he didn’t want anything to do with the woman who could almost have been Camilla’s twin, they worked together and he knew that sudden death, such as they’d both just been part of, took its toll.