Nursing The Doctor (15 page)

Krupps’s eyes narrowed behind her glasses. She opened her mouth to respond and then closed it again with an audible snap. With a raised eyebrow and a knowing glance in Lily’s direction, she turned on her heel and marched out, picking up the medication tray and making a production out of closing the door firmly behind her.

“Damn it all, they’ve started recruiting nurses with military training to deal with me,” Greg fumed. “Did you see how she looked at us? She figures we were in the midst of kinky sex when she interrupted. Considering how obsessed everybody is with bodily functions around here, she’ll probably mark it on my chart. ‘Dr. Brulotte, one forty-five, penis visibly erect.’”

There was a second of shocked silence, and then Lily couldn’t help herself. A giggle escaped, and then another. In a moment she was laughing so hard she couldn’t have answered him if she tried.

Greg grinned at her, and then the ridiculousness of the situation hit him as well, and he, too, began to laugh. It was painful, though. It hurt his ribs, and he curled forward and grabbed at his chest with his one good hand.

Lily picked up a pillow and thrust it at him, and he held it against his body as the laughter slowly subsided.

“You do it on purpose,” Lily accused him when she could speak again. “You’d stop if they didn’t take it all so seriously, wouldn’t you? You just amuse yourself by getting under their skin. You enjoy driving the entire staff nuts.”

He was slumped in the chair, still cradling his ribs. “Not until this minute, Scout’s honor, Lil. This is the first time I’ve seen anything remotely funny about any of this. God, it feels like I broke my ribs all over again.”

“Maybe you ought to try being a little nicer as long as that particular nurse is on shift,” Lily advised. “I sure would. She terrifies me.”

“You know, you have a point. Okay, I’ll try to be good.”

Lily glanced at her watch and leaped to her feet. “Migosh, I’m gonna be late for my shift! I can’t believe the time.”

“Take the stairs, I always found them faster than the elevator. See you soon?” He held out his hand, and after a slight hesitation, she took it. “Lil, you’ve done me more good than any drugs could. You will come again soon?”

“I promise, I will.”

“Tomorrow?”

“If you like. I’m on afternoons again, so I’ll come during my dinner break. In fact, I’ll bring dinner.”

“It’s a date.”

They grinned at each other, then he released her hand and she hurried out.

Lily ignored his advice about the stairs, and all the way down in the elevator she tried to make sense of what had just happened.

Instead of giving her a tongue-lashing about the needle stick as she deserved, he’d comforted her:

Instead of saying he never wanted to see her again, instead of raging at her for exposing him to Hep C, he’d kissed her and asked her to come to see him tomorrow.

Oh, how he’d kissed her. Greg Brulotte was better at kissing than anyone she’d ever encountered. Just thinking about it sent a thrill shooting through her.

If that’s how it feels to be kissed by him, just imagine how it would feel to...

She stopped her rebellious fantasies when the elevator deposited her on the main floor, but she was intrigued by the vividness of the erotic scenes her mind had effortlessly conjured up.

She hurried along the corridor to the doors that led to the ER, feeling as if an enormous weight had lifted from her shoulders.

Nothing had really changed, she knew that. She’d notified her supervisor in the ER about the Hep C, and because the disease was not easily spread, there was no problem with her working. She’d also told her doctor and been assured that, when the time came, she’d do the necessary tests.

So nothing had changed, Lily reminded herself again.

She and Greg were both still at risk as far as Hepatitis C was concerned, but sharing the danger was so different than shouldering it alone.

He wasn’t the man she’d thought him to be at all. He was far kinder and more sensitive than she’d imagined. He was more sensual, too. It took real effort to put the kiss out of her mind and apply herself to her work.

Greg watched her as she left his room, admiring as he always had the graceful swing of her walk, the slenderness of her back, the sensual roundness of her hips. He’d always found her desirable, but now there was also a desire to protect her, to keep her from agonizing over this thing that had happened to them.

He sat lost in thought as the minutes ticked away, not even thinking of the medications that just hours ago he would have swallowed greedily.

Hepatitis C. He knew from a clinical point of view exactly what the disease did to the human body. He’d seen people dying of cirrhosis of the liver or chronic hepatitis as a result of infection with Hep C. Despite his reassurances to Lily, her disclosure had come as a tremendous shock.

And he also knew that the highest incidence of infection resulted from blood-related procedures, with IV drug usage and transfusion at the top of the list. Direct contact through the blood was an amazingly efficient method of contracting most diseases. Lily wasn’t being alarmist in thinking there was a very real danger that one or both of them would develop Hep C.

He gazed out the window, lost in thought. He knew it didn’t work that way, but if it were a trade-off between him and Lily, he prayed it would be him that contracted the disease. He was the most likely, after all, he told the invisible jury he was addressing. He was missing his spleen and his body was already in a weakened condition.

Weakened, but still functioning, he thought with a sudden flash of triumph. He’d always taken his sexuality for granted, so getting a hard on had never been an event before, but it sure as hell was today. He hadn’t realized how deep seated the fear was that he’d come out of this damaged, unable to make love the way he had before. Until now, he’d never doubted that his body would comply instantly with whatever his senses dictated.

The barrage of specialists who’d seen him still hadn’t been able to guarantee that he’d recover fully. He’d asked point-blank about sexuality, and they’d given him probables and likelies, which he knew he’d have done, too, in his role as physician, but which frustrated and frightened him as a patient. True to form, he’d lost his temper with them.

He thought about that loss of control for a moment.

The fact was, he’d lost his temper with almost everyone he’d encountered since his accident with the exception of Lily. Well, maybe he’d become mildly annoyed with her the other day, he amended, but he’d certainly never felt the outright rage that had driven him to alienate most of the doctors and all of the nursing staff treating him.

Several of those volatile encounters played across his mind like scenes in a bad movie, and all at once he realized he’d been acting like a spoiled brat, selfish, unreasonable, totally self-centered.

He cringed as he compared his behavior with Lily’s. She, too, was facing a major crisis in her life, but her reaction was the direct opposite of his. She’d thought of him instead of herself.

Lily. Sweet Lily, unselfish, beautiful Lily.

Frightened Lily.

Frustration rose in him, this time not at his injuries, but at his inability to reassure her, to do something to protect her from the Hep C danger, even though he knew he couldn’t. He would listen if she wanted to talk, he certainly planned to kiss her if she ventured close enough and didn’t move too quickly. But that was about the extent of his abilities as a lover at the moment.

As far as his behavior was concerned, from this moment on, he could and would make an effort to be more civil with the staff. He decided to call the nurse and take his pills.

He punched the call button and waited.

Valerie Krupps finally stomped through the door seventeen minutes later.

“Well, Doctor, what is it now? I assume you’ve decided to take your medication?”

Greg had planned to be polite, but her demeanor made him instantly defensive. “Whaddya mean, now? I haven’t asked for a damned thing for at least two hours.”

“That has to be a first from what I’ve heard,” she snapped.

Greg glared at her. “Nurse, if this was my ER, I wouldn’t tolerate your attitude for two seconds,” he snarled. “You’d be out on your ear until your disposition improved.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to be your ER, does it? Now, if you’re ready to swallow these, get on with it, because I’m trying to care for a patient.”

What exactly did she think he was? Greg opened his mouth to blast her and then closed it again. What about his good intentions?

Lil, I’m doing my damnedest here to be a good-guy. He held out his hand for the paper cup with his pills in it and when she handed them over he sorted through them, trying to identify just exactly what meds they had him on now.

He recognized one as a form of Tylenol, but three others eluded him. He hadn’t taken them before, and he wanted to know what they were.

“I would like to know exactly what these medications are if you don’t mind,” he managed to say in a polite, reasonable tone. “I want to be sure what I’m swallowing here.”

“Doctor.” Her voice dripped with forbearance. “Those are the medications that have been prescribed for you by your physician. And they were supposed to have been taken over an hour ago.” She poured water from his jug into a glass and held it out. “I suggest you get on with it.”

He ignored the glass. “And I suggest you go and check on these pills for me.” He pitched his voice dangerously low and gave her the look he’d used to terrorize anyone who needed it down in the ER. “And while you’re at it, Krupps, contact your supervisor and tell her I want to lodge a formal complaint about you. Your attitude stinks.”

“Yours isn’t any better, so that makes two of us.” She snatched the paper cup and turned on her heel. If it had been possible to slam the door, she would have.

Forty-five minutes went by. Through sheer force of will, Greg managed to transfer himself from the wheelchair to the bed. He’d die before he asked Krupps for assistance, and several times during the tricky maneuver, he figured he was about to. The effort took every ounce of stamina he possessed. Still, it was a first, and part of him felt elated to have done even that much without assistance.

He was still panting and sweating and trembling with the effort it had required when the door opened again.

Krupps strode to the side of his bed, coming to a full stop and folding her arms across her ample bosom.

“Dr. Brulotte, I owe you an apology,” she said in what for her was a subdued tone. “That was not your medication. It belonged to Mr. Hubbelman in 419. We have a nurse just out of training on the floor, and she made a mistake. I should have double-checked, but I was busy just then.”

Greg could have said something sarcastic. Instead, mindful of his change in attitude, he said, “I guess we’ve all made mistakes at some time or other.”

“I know I certainly have,” she said, holding out the paper cup with his proper medication.

He checked the pills, identifying each of them before he swallowed them. “Yes, well, I did feel your attitude toward me could use improvement, Nurse Krupps.” He felt more than a little smug at the change in her demeanor.

“When I said I’ve made mistakes, Doctor, I wasn’t referring to my attitude toward you.” The look she gave him could have frozen boiling tar. “It was a mistake not to check your meds. It’s not a mistake to give you some of your own medicine as far as bad attitude goes. You’ve terrorized enough nurses around here. It’s time someone stood up to you. And before you remind me, I left a note for my supervisor to call on you. She’s at a meeting at the moment, but she should be back at four. I should tell you, however, that I’m highly respected on this service, so having you complain doesn’t bother me one whit.”

She was efficiently tugging at his bedding as she spoke, punching pillows into submission behind his head, straightening wrinkled sheets and arranging him with an expertise and impersonal efficiency that spoke of years of experience.

“And I think you should know, Doctor, that my twin sister Vivian works in rehab. I told her I’d get a reading on you and let her know what to expect when you get down there.”

She heaved him up as if he weighed a hundred pounds less than he did and, without hurting his ribs one bit, she shoved a final pillow behind his neck, just in the particular area that was aching.

“Half the nurses on this floor are off on stress leave from having to deal with your nonsense,” she huffed. “Somehow I don’t think my supervisor is going to be too upset with me for standing up to you. Of course, I’ll tell her myself about the mixed medications.” She gave the bed one final survey, tugged the blankets out at the foot so that his feet were comfortable, and then turned and marched away, swinging her arms as if she were going into battle.