SEIZED, A Romantic Suspense Novella (2 page)

“Wyatt’s out for the night, just be sure to check on him. And don’t let the girls eat too much junk or they’ll never go to sleep,” she said as she zipped her coat.

“Don’t worry about the kids. I’ve got this. You just drive slow and safe.”

Then he cupped her face between his big warm hands and stared deeply into her eyes. The warmth and love she saw in the depths of his hazel eyes going a long way to ease the terror and ache in her heart.

“I’m sorry about the call schedule. I’ll check with you before volunteering next time, I promise, babe. I love you.”

He leaned in and kissed her. The slow, open-mouthed, tempting kiss that promised so much for later when she came home. She wanted to sink into it, into him, and stay cocooned in his strong arms forever. Just when she was ready to give into the urge, he eased his lips from hers and stepped back.

“Cell phone?” he asked in that husky, ready-for-sex voice of his.

She held it up, wiggling it back and forth. “Got it.”

He pressed the hands-free earpiece into her hand. “Wear this for the trip. Text or call me when you get there and call when you’re leaving, so I’ll know when to worry.”

She smiled. It was the same thing she always said when he was leaving for work. She gave him back his usual reply. “Gotcha, babe.”

Dave glanced at his cell phone for the twentieth time since he’d tucked the girls in bed. The hospital was only a twenty-minute drive in traffic. Even with the slick roads, she should’ve been there by now.

Why the hell wasn’t she calling? Even if she were still mad, she knew the rules. Hell, she’d made them.
Always call so the other wouldn’t worry
.

“Hey, bro. Quit staring at your phone like a lovesick pup. It’s your deal,” his youngest brother Luke said from beside him. “Your woman will call.”

“Lay off him,” his other brother Matt said. “Just because you don’t have anyone ever waiting on your calls at home, respect the man worrying about the mother of his children on a shitty night like this.”

“Hey, just because I’m smart enough not get shackled doesn’t mean no one ever worries about me.”

“Mom and Sami don’t count,” Dave said, shuffling the cards.

“Hey, leave my wife out of this,” Jake Carlisle, an FBI agent and their brother-in-law said, returning to the table with beers for all. “She was mad enough that I was heading out in bad weather to play poker. The only thing that made her hold her temper was she knew I was hanging out with her miscreant brothers. Figured I’d keep you out of trouble.”

“What about him?” Luke nodded at the older man seated opposite him at the table, U.S. Marshal, Frank Castello, a recently adopted member of the group. “He doesn’t have anyone at home waiting for him. Don’t see you guys giving him any grief.”

Castello simply lifted his beer and took a swig.

“Because we all know if he had a woman, he’d stow her in Witness Protection just to keep her from bothering him about calling,” Matt said.

“Hell, she’d probably request to go there just to get away from him,” Luke said with a grin as he gathered in his cards.

Castello flipped them both the eternal sign of screw you and took another drink of his beer.

The table vibrated next to Dave’s elbow just after he laid out the cards in the center of the table for Texas Hold’em. He snatched up his phone. “Hey, babe.”

“Hey back at you,” she said, sounding a bit out of breath. “Sorry, I didn’t call earlier.”

“Everything okay?” He laid his cards facedown on the table and shoved his chair away from the table then strode to the stairway, away from the noise. “You have any trouble on the roads?”

“Nothing more than we expected. The tail end slid a few times, but I just took it slow. But as soon as we got here, I had to head straight to pre-op to get my patient. Can’t tell you anymore, but it’s a VIP, so everyone was all hurry-and-get-things-moving-up-my-ass.”

He laughed. Judy didn’t cuss often, but when she did it was always creative. “So where are you calling me from? I thought you couldn’t take the phone in the OR.”

“Phone’s in my pocket on vibrate. But you know those cute little paper scrub hats you like to tease me about looking like shower caps?”

“Yeah?” He couldn’t help grinning, knowing what she’d say next.

“Fits right over my wireless earpiece.”

He laughed again, knowing that this late on a bad-weather night she’d get by without much fuss for wearing the earpiece in the OR. “So, not a gang shooting?”

“Don’t know about the other two cases going on, but this one was just a leg wound. Like I said, a VIP, and I doubt he was mixed up in a gang feud. Tons of press and bigwigs down in the ER though. I bet it’s on the news tonight. Can’t talk, docs are done scrubbing. Love you.”

She disconnected before he could return the sentiment. Frustrated, he swallowed a growl as he pocketed his phone.

Then it hit him.

How many times in the past five years while on the Cincinnati SWAT tactical team had he done the exact same thing to her? Left her home worrying while he was called to a case or a situation, gave her a brief call, then hung up before she could tell him she loved him?

No wonder she’d been too cranky to live with lately. If he had to put up with this kind of worry and being cut off, he’d be cranky, too.

“Everything good?” Matt asked.

“She’s there, safe and sound.” Dave resumed his seat at the table and glanced at his cards. “Everything’s fine except this hand I dealt myself.”

That comment had everyone chuckling and more good-natured ribbing ensued. Dave joined in despite a niggling sense that Judy wasn’t all right still ate at him. Even though he’d never been a worrier, he slipped his phone out of his pocket and set it on the table, anyway.

Castello raised one eyebrow his direction and the others paused to look at him.

Dave shrugged. Call him a worrywart or overprotective, but despite the rough patch they seemed to be going through, Judy was still the center of his world. He wouldn’t rest until she was home tucked in bed beside him. Ignoring the looks of his brothers, he shrugged again. “Just in case.”

“Sneaky,” Karen, the scrub nurse, said as Judy touched the off button on her earpiece.

“I could’ve called him on my way in, but he needs a taste of the worry he puts me through.” Judy winked at her around the six-foot resident’s shoulder while she reached up to fasten the top of his paper surgical gown. “How was I to know it would be everything’s-STAT-Hodges covering for the hospital tonight?”

“Better not let him hear you call him that or see you with that earpiece or he’ll have you written up,” Smith, the third-year resident on duty for the night, said as Karen snapped his gloves over his sterile hands.

“Too late,” Karen whispered, the twinkle gone from her eyes. Judy imagined she could see her friend’s mouth twisted in a frown beneath her surgical mask.

“You know staff isn’t allowed personal electronic devices in the OR, Judy,” a rather nasally voice said behind her.

Judy rolled her eyes heavenward a moment then fixed a semi-contrite look on her face and turned to face the night’s on-call surgeon. “Good evening, Dr. Hodges. I’ll remove it as soon as the case is over. I’d truly forgotten I had it on. My husband insisted I wear it in tonight, given the roads.”

She cringed inwardly. Nothing she hated more than pretending she wanted this man’s good opinion. From the day she started work at the hospital five months ago the pompous jerk had given her nothing but his opinion about everything—from the way she tied his gowns to how she would spend a few extra minutes reassuring patients before the nurse anesthetists put the patient to sleep. Nothing she did impressed him and lately she’d quit trying. As her mama would say, you can’t fix stupid, or in this case…arrogant.

“It is bad out there. But don’t let it happen again.”

Judy couldn’t help blinking in surprise as she fastened his gown. Karen had the same astonished look in her eyes for a minute then they narrowed. Yeah, her friend had the same thought. Hodges might say it was okay, but he’d still be writing her up just as soon as the case was over.

Just what she needed, a disciplinary write-up from him. Luckily, her boss considered Hodges as big an arrogant ass as she did.

That’s one thing about Dave, despite being a cop and on the SWAT team, his ego was secure enough that he didn’t have to bully or intimidate others to make himself feel important. She’d noticed that the first day she saw him in the Emergency Room when she was a senior nursing student.

The sliding doors to the ambulance bay opened and two patrolmen escorted an injured prisoner in to be examined. The young man, with blood caked on the side of his face and soaked through his right arm, had been driving under the influence when he left the road, flipped his car and crashed into the guardrail on the opposite side of the highway.

The older officer jerked the suspect into the room assigned by the charge nurse, making a point of shackling him to the bed. “Don’t even think about giving us any trouble, kid.”

The teenager, barely more than a boy, looked red-rimmed eyes out the door as the paramedics rolled a stretcher toward another room in the ER, a blanket covering the body from head-to-toe. “Aaron? Is…that Aaron?”

“Yeah, kid. That’s your friend. The one you killed,” the older officer said, getting right in the poor boy’s face.

“Hey, lay off, Sean,” the younger, dark-haired officer said, maneuvering between his partner and the crying suspect.

“What, Dave? You want me to coddle this kid? Tell him it wasn’t his fault he got drunk and stole a car? That he wasn’t the one who decided to drive like Mario Andretti on 71?”

“No. But it was his friend who died.”

“Yeah and he killed him. Some friend he turned out to be,” Sean spat out the words just as Judy approached to get admission information, part of her job as the ER secretary.

“Look, he isn’t the boy that caused your son’s accident. Why don’t you go get some coffee while I wait for the doc to see the kid?” Dave gently pushed his partner away from the gurney where their prisoner now huddled on his side.

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll call home, too.”

Judy, clutching her clipboard to her chest, stepped back, barely getting out of the angry officer’s path as he stalked out. She stepped into the cubicle to see the younger man pulling a blanket around the shivering, crying teen’s shoulders.

“Once we get the docs to look at your head and arm, you can call your folks, okay?” He said, squeezing the suspect’s uninjured shoulder.

“Excuse me?” she said then froze on the spot when Officer Dave looked at her with eyes the color of warm honey and a question on his face. Wow. Dark hair, dark eyebrows and a slight shadow along his jawline had her heart throwing off an extra beat or two.

“Yes?” he asked, the curve of his lips turning up in the start of a smile. The kind of smile that made her get all tingly inside and want to see if the rest of him was as sexy as his lips.

“Um,” she blinked to clear the carnal thoughts running through her mind. “I…uh…I need to get information from…” she glanced at the boy huddled under the blanket.

“Jason Watts,” Dave said, the smile deepening.

“I need Jason’s information to get him admitted.”

Dave stepped back, giving her just enough room to pass by, but not so much that she couldn’t feel his body heat and smell the sandalwood soap lingering around him.

For the rest of the evening, until Dave and his partner took Jason to jail, she’d surreptitiously watched how Dave stood guard over his prisoner. He’d gotten him a soda once the docs said he could have one then sat close by, but never getting aggressive towards the boy.

He’d returned at the end of his shift to see if she’d like to go out for a late night meal. Since she had clinical early that morning she’d had to turn him down, but agreed to go out with him that weekend. It was while they shared a pizza and beer that she learned he’d not only been kind to Jason, but given his parents the name of a good defense lawyer they could afford.

When she asked him why, he said, “The kid reminded me of my youngest brother, Luke. He’s taking a long time to grow up. I could see him doing something stupid like this and knew he’d beat himself up with guilt. Just thought I could help.”

And that’s when she fell in love.

“You ready to count?” Karen asked, pulling Judy out of her momentary reverie.

“Sure.” She pulled out her pen and the count sheet to do the preoperative surgical count of instruments, suture needles and cloth sponges known as laps, while the surgeons draped the patient and adjusted the surgical lights with the sterile light handles.

“Let’s move it, people. This man’s lost enough blood. Let’s not let him lose his leg, too,” Dr. Hodges said, holding out his hand for the scalpel from Karen and staring pointedly at Judy as if she were the cause of the man’s injury by following protocol.

Well, he could just get his tighty-whities in a knot all he wanted, she had one more thing to do before Karen would hand him the knife. Judy grabbed the chart and flipped to the surgical consent and looked at the patient’s name band to confirm. “This is Gregory J. Klein—”

“We all know who this is, Nurse Edgars,” Hodges rudely interrupted. “Everyone in the state of Ohio knows Senator Klein’s son. We need to start the case. Knife. Now.”

He held out his hand expectantly, but Karen ignored him.

Judy narrowed her eyes at the surgeon. “Karen will give you the knife after we complete the timeout, Dr. Hodges, per hospital policy. If you didn’t interrupt, she’d have handed it to you already.” She took a deep breath and started again. “Gregory J. Klein, no known allergies, for repair of gunshot wound to right upper thigh, site confirmed and marked. Patient received antibiotics just now and no other medical complications noted. Is this agreed by everyone?”