The Italian Effect

When the curtain was whisked aside behind her she whirled to face the intruder. She would have loved to demand answers to each one of those questions but doubted whether her grasp of Italian was up to it. Neither was it the time or place for such recriminations. It was Taddeo who mattered.

A distant part of her brain registered the fact that the man who had just joined them was the epitome of every cliché about handsome Italian males—all lean good looks and flashing dark eyes. The more rational side registered the fact that his clothing might be in immaculate good taste but it was decidedly rumpled and he looked as exhausted as if he hadn’t slept for a week.

That didn’t mean that those dark eyes were lazy about skimming over her from head to toe, lingering pointedly in several places.

Lissa glared at him when his gaze finally rose high enough to reach her face, angry that her body was stirring in response to the admiration she could read there.

The sudden shiver of awareness drew her attention to the fact that she was wearing little more than a gauzy shirt over a swimsuit that covered her as faithfully as a second skin. It was a measure of how single-minded her concentration had been over the last half-hour that she’d completely forgotten her skimpy attire, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

‘You are a doctor?’ she demanded with a lift of her chin that denied the previous few seconds of byplay, and received a cool nod in reply. ‘Well, there’s been an accident,’ she announced, the words beginning to sound more fluent the more often she used them. ‘The child fell and hit his head. He’s still unconscious.’ She gestured towards her charge, affording him his first view of their patient.

He gasped and she found herself unceremoniously nudged aside as he strode to the side of the bed.

‘Mio figlio!’ he exclaimed in a voice full of horror as he began to examine the child, and they were almost the only words she understood in the following flood of words. All she could tell was that they were questions and that he was very angry.

‘I’m sorry, but when you speak so fast I can’t understand,’ she announced, reverting to English and stopping him in his tracks. ‘Did you say he’s your son?’

‘Si…Yes,’ he corrected himself impatiently, his dark brows pulled together in a deep V as he checked the unconscious child’s pupillary reaction. ‘Taddeo Aldarini. He’s almost five years old…But what happened to him? Where is Maddelena, and what are you doing with my son?’

He’d straightened up by then and his final question was almost an accusation, not softened at all by the sexy accent shaping his words.

Lissa chose to answer the more important one first.

‘He fell at the beach and landed on his back on the rocks.’ She held up her hand when he went to interrupt. ‘He’s been unconscious since he fell but his vital signs are all within normal bounds. I didn’t let anyone move him until I could stabilise his spine on an improvised backboard. As far as I can see, his only external injury is a bump on the back of his head where the skin has been broken.’

‘You are a nurse?’ he questioned as he swiftly jotted down what she’d told him on the case notes.

‘A doctor,’ she corrected as an amplified voice cut through the hubbub outside the curtain. The electronic distortion meant that she understood little more than the fact that the man was being paged in a hurry.

‘What sort of a doctor?’ he demanded with a suspicious look.

‘Accident and emergency for the last year but I’ve been thinking about going into general practice.’ At least, she had been before her private life had collapsed in ruins around her.

‘You can prove this?’ he challenged with a harried look over his shoulder as the disembodied voice called his name again.

‘Now? No,’ she said, startled by the demand. Was he going to sue her for practising medicine without permission in a foreign country? But Italy was part of the European Union. Didn’t that mean that people were free to work in any of the member states?

The thoughts scrambling around in her head screeched to a halt with the memory of her little bag of belongings.

‘Just a minute.’ She crouched down to tip everything out onto the floor and grabbed the flat leather wallet hidden right at the bottom. ‘Is this what you want to see?’

She held out both her passport and her hospital identity card. She had no idea how she’d come to pack it when she’d had no intention of doing anything other than vegetate for the next four weeks, but when she’d been preparing for her day on the beach had found it with the rest of her documents.

He examined both of them in silence then gave a decisive nod.

‘I would like to ask a favour of you,’ he said, his choice of words strangely formal. ‘Would you accompany Taddeo to the…radiografia? As you see, I already have so many people waiting and now there are the victims of…scontrarsi.’ He mimed a collision and gestured towards the throng all too audible on the other side of the curtain, but his glance towards his son was very telling. He was obviously torn between his duty to his patients and his personal wish to be beside his son.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t her problem but, having become involved in the situation, how could she not see it through?

‘I’ll stay with him on one condition—that you find me something a little more…’ She gestured towards her skimpy attire with a grimace. It had seemed fairly modest on the beach, but next to his fully clothed body, there was something almost…intimate about the contrast.

‘It would be a shame to hide such beauty,’ he said in a low voice and she glimpsed a sudden unnerving flash of heat in his dark eyes. ‘But perhaps it would be safer.’

An hour later, Lissa’s pulse still tended to miss a beat when she thought about the startling potency of that glance. The only way she’d been able keep it under some sort of control was to concentrate on her little charge.

It had been a major undertaking to dredge up enough Italian to make herself understood, especially as those long conversations with her grandmother had never covered such topics as ‘make sure you leave the towels in position around his head until you’ve taken the X-ray of his neck’.

Along the way, she found several members of staff who spoke good English—better than her Italian, at any rate—and was able to ask some tactful questions. By the time she’d collected the evidence that Taddeo had suffered no broken or cracked bones, she’d also started to build up a picture of why the accident and emergency department was in such chaos.

‘Dr Aldarini, would you like to set your mind at rest?’ she invited when she finally managed to track him down with the developed X-ray plates.

He pounced on them so eagerly that Lissa was glad that she’d thought to bring them down to him. It was obvious that he’d been worrying about his son in spite of the fact that he was still rushed off his feet.

While he scrutinised each plate minutely, she did the same to him, wondering just what it was about this man, rumpled and exhausted as he was, that set up this strange electric tingle inside her. She couldn’t remember having had anything quite like it happen to her before and it was totally inappropriate. Not only was she in Italy for rest and recuperation in the wake of the disaster of the last few months, but this man was obviously a pillar of the local community. He was probably a very loving husband to the pretty young wife she’d had to leave behind at the beach and he was definitely a concerned parent.

She made herself drag her eyes away from him to gauge how many patients there were still waiting for attention.

None seemed to be victims of the outbreak of food-poisoning she’d heard about. Apparently, there had been some sort of welcoming buffet at one of the larger hotels a little way along the coast, resulting in nearly fifty people suffering the effects of the flouting of hygiene regulations in the kitchen.

‘Where is Taddeo now?’ Dr Aldarini demanded when he finished scrutinising the plates, and she turned to face him again. ‘Is he on his way back down here?’

‘I hope you don’t think I was throwing my weight around, but…he came round while the X-rays were being taken and the radiographer and I decided he would probably be better off under supervision in the children’s ward. Apparently the paediatrician already knows him there?’

His mouth twisted into a wry grin. ‘Unfortunately, too well,’ he agreed. ‘The last time he was here was several months ago when he came off his bicicletta and broke his arm.’ He shook his head. ‘He has no fear, that one. He will give me white hair.’

Her eyes travelled over the thick dark strands but couldn’t see any evidence that it was happening yet. All she noticed was the fact that his hair was just long enough to reveal the same existence of a tendency to unruly curls as his son had inherited.

‘The paediatrician said that as he’d been unconscious for so long, he’ll keep Taddeo here overnight under observation. He’ll speak to you when you have time to call, but he was cautiously optimistic…the way doctors always are. Oh, and I have no idea how you’ll get in contact with your wife to let her know what’s happening. She was very upset, but I had to leave her behind at the beach. You’ll need to put her mind at rest about Taddeo.’

She couldn’t help thinking that the young woman she’d left at the beach seemed absurdly young to be married to such a man as this—still dynamic in spite of his exhaustion. And it wasn’t just because he’d made her pulse leap when she’d been determined not to have anything to do with men for the foreseeable future.

‘Taddeo has no mother,’ he announced bluntly, his voice as hard as stone for all his attractive accent. ‘Maddelena is the daughter of a colleague.’

Now, why on earth should his brusque words send a shaft of pleasure through her? she thought crossly. Why should it matter that the man wasn’t married? For all she knew, he might be involved in a relationship with Maddelena, although his tone of voice didn’t make it sound likely.

Anyway, it was none of her business. Her fleeting connection with the man would be over as soon as she found some way of returning to her hotel.

‘Do you have a car, or may I give you a lift somewhere?’ he asked suddenly, almost as if he’d been reading her mind. ‘I will be free as soon as I’ve visited my son.’

She hesitated, torn between the strange feeling that she should get as far away from this man as possible and the equally strong desire to spend just a little longer in his company. In the end, practicality tipped the balance.

‘I would be grateful for a lift,’ she replied, equally politely. ‘I travelled here with Taddeo, so my car is miles away.’

‘After your actions today, it is the least I can do,’ he said sincerely and gestured towards the bank of lifts. She found herself automatically falling into step beside him as he made his way towards the paediatric department.

Taddeo was almost asleep by the time they reached his bedside, and apparently completely unconcerned by the fact that he was in hospital. He seemed far more interested in quizzing his father about a promised outing.

‘Dormire,’ murmured his father patiently as he smoothed a soothing hand over tousled dark hair.