Chapter One
D
r. Alexandra Larson had a fantasy. It was decidedly tame, as fantasies went, butshe'd never regarded herself as terribly creative or adventurous. She didn't even havewhat she considered any real sense of style. She just played it safe. She wore her dark hair short, her make-up soft and her clothes either simply tailored or loose, dependingon her mood or what was handy. And she always shied away from the extravagant, theoutrageous or the truly indulgent.She considered her little daydream the ultimate indulgence.In it, she was alone. In a hot bath. The kind of bath a woman had to carefully easeinto while aromatic steam fogged the room, beaded on her chest and filled her lungs.The kind where skin pinked and knotted muscles relaxed in the liquid heat, and themind emptied of everything but the knowledge that all she had to do was … soak.She savored that image, lingered over the details, letting her mind drift to it as sheran between surgery, hospital rounds, clinic appointments, day care and, occasionally,the vet.She'd been caught indulging in it when her pager had gone off as she'd pulled intoher driveway forty minutes ago. It was her thirty-second birthday. She should have been able to toy with the thoughts a little longer. Instead, she was scrubbing in for surgery with barrel-chested Ian Whitfield, one of the trauma doctors from emergency,and the fantasy of aromatic steam had given way to the reality of antibacterial scrub."What can you tell me?" she asked, working lather from her fingertips to beyondher elbows. "I was only told that we have a thirty-four-year-old male with a compoundfemur. Are we dealing with anything else?""CT shows no concussion or other internal injuries. The compound break in the leftleg is the worst of it. That's why I asked for the orthopedic surgeon on call."Between the green cap covering the man's receding hairline and the band of whitemask obliterating the bottom half of his ruddy face, only his bespectacled eyes werevisible. They narrowed, light bouncing off his lenses, as he shook his head. "That'sone lucky man in there. According to the paramedics, a truck blew a light and nailedhim full on the driver's door.""He was driving?""Apparently."That meant the victim had borne the brunt of the impact. Alex stored that detail asshe reached for a brush to work under her short, unpolished nails. The force of thatimpact also explained how such a strong bone had penetrated the lower thigh.She'd already seen her patient's X-rays. The femur, the long bone of his upper leg,had fractured in two places. The distal break, the one closest to the knee, had alsosplintered into a jagged spike.The good news was that she'd seen far worse. The bad news was that this sort of break often led to nasty complications.
Leave a Comment