Mount Mercy Read online

  MOUNT MERCY

  HELENA NEWBURY

  CONTENTS

  1. Amy

  2. Amy

  3. Dominic

  4. Amy

  5. Dominic

  6. Amy

  7. Amy

  8. Dominic

  9. Amy

  10. Dominic

  11. Amy

  12. Dominic

  13. Amy

  14. Amy

  15. Dominic

  16. Amy

  17. Amy

  18. Dominic

  19. Amy

  20. Dominic

  21. Amy

  22. Colt

  23. Amy

  24. Dominic

  25. Amy

  26. Dominic

  27. Amy

  28. Dominic

  29. Amy

  30. Dominic

  31. Amy

  32. Amy

  33. Dominic

  34. Amy

  35. Amy

  36. Dominic

  37. Amy

  38. Dominic

  39. Amy

  40. Amy

  41. Colt

  42. Dominic

  43. Colt

  44. Amy

  45. Amy

  46. Amy

  47. Dominic

  48. Amy

  49. Dominic

  50. Amy

  51. Amy

  52. Amy

  53. Dominic

  54. Amy

  55. Dominic

  56. Amy

  57. Dominic

  58. Amy

  59. Dominic

  60. Amy

  61. Dominic

  62. Amy

  63. Colt

  64. Amy

  65. Amy

  66. Dominic

  67. Amy

  Epilogue

  Contact Me

  © Copyright Helena Newbury 2018

  The right of Helena Newbury to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. All characters, companies, organizations, products and events in this book, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any real persons, living or dead, events, companies, organizations or products is purely coincidental.

  This book contains adult scenes and is intended for readers 18+.

  Cover by Mayhem Cover Creations

  Main cover model image licensed from (and copyright remains with) Wander Aguiar Photography

  First Edition

  Dedication

  To my high school English teachers, Ms. Collinge and Mr. Roberts. Without you two, this wouldn’t be possible.

  1

  Amy

  SOMETIMES, I wonder: what if I’d never left the operating theater? I could have stayed safe. Stayed warm. But I’d never have met Doctor Dominic Corrigan. I’d never have fallen headfirst into those blue Irish eyes. I’d never have known what it took to love a man like him, or what it was like to be loved by one.

  And we’d be dead. We’d all be dead.

  On the morning I met him, I was in the zone. The hospital, the operating theater... all of it had melted away and I was only aware of the soft violins of Bach’s double concerto, the reassuring weight of the scalpel in my hand and the steady rhythm of the patient’s heart. When I spoke, even my voice was a little slow and dreamy. “You can tell Mrs. Barlow her husband’s going to be okay.” I began to close up the incision. “Good job, everyone.”

  Krista, my head nurse, grabbed the phone and passed on the good news. She’d barely put it down, and I’d only just finished suturing, when it rang again. “They want you downstairs for a consult,” she told me.

  Downstairs. I came out of the zone in a split second. I kept my voice calm, but my stomach was already knotting. “Ask Patel to do it.”

  “He’s in the middle of a heart bypass,” said Krista apologetically.

  I pulled off my surgical mask. “Weisler, then.” Now my voice was pleading.

  “He’s working on a head injury. Some teenager came off her dirt bike.”

  That only left me. I had to go down there. I nodded and walked out into the hallway. When I hit the elevator button for 1, Emergency Room, my chest went tight.

  Surgery, where I manage to hide most of the time, is on the very top floor of the Mount Mercy hospital, furthest from the outside world. It’s a secure little burrow: no one comes up there unless they’re scheduled for a procedure. The ER? That’s the polar opposite. It’s where hundreds of strangers pour in every day. I could hear it before the elevator even reached the first floor. Yells and screams and running footsteps. Shouts and pleas and anger and above all, people.

  I don’t do so well with people.

  When the doors rumbled open, I caught my breath and took an unconscious step back. Gurneys rattling past, nurses running back and forth with supplies, the ear-splitting whistle of defibrillator paddles rising in charge and the dull thud as they fired. A babble of voices: doctors and patients and relatives and cops, all demanding answers, now, this instant. Surgery is about planning and precision, sometimes hurried but never panicked. The ER is one continuous panic. You want to know what it’s like? Get four or five mechanics, huddle them around a freshly-wrecked car and then push the whole thing out of a plane and tell them they have to get it working again before it hits the ground.

  The doctors in the ER cursed and bitched and joked and somehow it worked, they formed a noisy, close-knit team, like a rowdy group of football jocks who win every game. They communicated non-stop. I’m painfully shy. They made split-second decisions. I’m all about thinking things through. They were heroes who lived for the adrenaline rush. Confident, grinning lions, hungry for the next patient.

  I’m more of a dormouse. My dad once told me, people like us do better in a lab. And he was right: I’m a scientist who somehow landed in a hospital. I thrive on order and the ER was chaos. I really, really didn’t want to go out there.

  And then I saw him, across the room: the case I’d been called downstairs for. A biker in a sleeveless leather jacket lay on a gurney, a knife buried in his chest right up to the hilt. Definitely a surgical case. My mind was instantly spinning with a diagram of the man’s anatomy, visualizing all the damage the blade would have done. We had to get him upstairs now.

  Except... an ER doc, a big guy I didn’t recognize, was leaning over the man. He’d just finished re-inflating the man’s lung—so far, so good—but now he was preparing to do the worst thing possible: pull out the knife.

  I felt my eyes bug out. I darted out of the elevator and right into my own personal hell. “Stop!” I yelled. But my voice is moderated for the quiet calm of the OR. I was a mouse squeaking next to a busy freeway.

  And crossing the ER felt like scuttling across that freeway. I’m not that small, about 5’5”, but everything felt huge and fast and loud. Carts and gurneys racing across my path, cops tussling with drunks, nurses running between patients... all the people who belonged down there and then me, trying to thread my way between them.

  I’m used to people not noticing me. It’s deliberate. I tend to... hide. But it means no one moves aside for me. And as I struggled and dodged, I could see the doctor flexing his arms, preparing to pull the knife…. “Stop!” But just as I yelled, paramedics burst through the doors with another patient, drowning me out.

  I ducked under a cop’s upraised arm, turned sideways to slip between two nurses and slammed against the biker’s gurney. My hands wrapped around the doctor’s hands on the handle of the knife and I pushed down just as he pulled up. “STOP!” I yelled.

  And the doctor stopped.

  Everything stopped.

  I st
ood there panting with relief, staring down at the knife. The hands under my fingers were huge and tanned. God, and so warm. The ER is a freezing, drafty barn of a room, but he throbbed with heat.

  My gaze tracked slowly up his arms. They were... wrong. Surgeons, we’re quick and deft with long fingers like pianists. Doctors might carry a little more muscle from all that heaving patients onto gurneys but this guy looked more like a Marine. His forearms were as thick around as my thigh and chiseled with muscle, tanned to a light caramel and dusted with glossy black hair. But what really made me stare were the tattoos. The tail of what looked like a serpent began just above his elbow and went upwards, looping and twisting. The black ink gleamed as the design stretched over the curve of his bicep... and then his blue scrubs cut off my view.

  As I looked up, I had to twist awkwardly to face him. There was a gossamer touch as the little hairs on his arm brushed my elbow and then our forearms were bumping up together, the warm solid bulk of him pressing against my cool skin.

  I swallowed and lifted my chin. He was big: his chest filled my vision, glorious slabs of hard muscle that pushed out the front of his blue scrub top, the scoop neck just low enough to catch a glimpse of tan flesh.

  I lifted my chin even more. He was tall, too. I was eye-level with his pecs. My lips were just the right height to kiss his nipples.

  I flushed and craned my head right back.

  And I was captured.

  His eyes were like the sky, but not a sky you’d see over Colorado or Texas or anywhere in America. They were chips of the sky in some other land, an ancient sky that hung low, clinging to dark rocks with its mists, bathing the landscape with its tears. They were breathtakingly beautiful... and sad. Just for a second, they were the saddest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  But just for a second. I’d caught him off guard, but he put that right immediately. His back straightened, his lips pressed together and those eyes turned bright and diamond-hard, like the sky itself had frozen. The feeling was totally different. Before, I’d been captured. Now I was pinned.

  He had high, almost graceful cheekbones that made me think of somewhere cold, but his skin had been warmed to a deep tan. A hard jaw with just a dusting of careless, I don’t give a fuck stubble. That jaw would have made him look too brutal if it hadn’t been set off by a gloriously full, soft lower lip that pouted out, arrogant and knowing. I learned soon that no matter where you tried to look on that face, you’d always be drawn back to those eyes and that lip. He was dangerously good looking and he dripped with confidence. If the doctors in the ER were lions, this guy was the leader of the pride. I didn’t recognize him: was he new?

  His dark brows arced down just a little as he studied me. I could feel his gaze on every freckle, every loose strand of copper hair that had spilled out beneath my surgical cap. I could feel it on the line of my jaw and on my lips. It set off a lashing, twisting streamer of energy inside me that connected straight to my core and made me crush my thighs together.

  The corners of his mouth rose lazily up.

  A cocky smile.

  An oh, it’s on smile.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked. The fuck wasn’t aggressive. It was amused. Intrigued. Which made no sense, I’ve never intrigued anyone.

  I nearly said Amy but I was suddenly aware of the nurses, the other doctors, the whole rest of the ER. How long had we been staring at each other? Two seconds? Seven hours? “Beckett,” I said. “Surgery.”

  “Beckett.” His accent was like brutally hard, rain soaked rock, each surface turning silver as lightning lit it up. Musical and violent. My name was transformed into a two-syllable slap, intimate and playful. I felt my cheeks flare. “I’ve put a tube into his lung to re-inflate it, but the knife has to come out,” he told me.

  For a split-second, I thought: what knife?

  Then I looked down at our hands, my fingers still wrapped over his on the knife’s handle like we were the betrothed at some ancient wedding ceremony. Appropriate: his accent sounded old. Not old man. Old country. And then I got it. Irish. And not the soft lilt of the south. This was darkly sexy, untamed, a rumble that resonated right down my body. Northern Irish.

  “You pull it,” I said, forbidding my voice to shake, “and he’ll bleed out. It hit a main artery. The pressure of the blade’s all that’s keeping him alive.”

  He looked down at our hands. “Blood’s filling up his chest cavity and squeezing his heart. If I don’t pull it out to relieve the pressure, he’s dead.”

  I focused on the pulse monitor. He was right: each beep came with just a little more difficulty. I could hear the man dying. But I could imagine the frantic, terrifying nightmare that would ensue if that blade came out in the ER: instead of a slow leak we’d have a gushing firehose. “I’ll do it upstairs,” I told him.

  “We don’t have time.”

  Another beep from the monitor. This one was agonizing: everyone around the gurney felt it. I could visualize the heart being crushed, fighting against the pressure. I could feel myself wavering... but it was just too risky. “You can’t do this down here!” I snapped.

  “I’m his doctor.” He was as calm as I was panicked. But he was running out of patience.

  “Why even call for a surgical consult if you’re not going to listen to me?” I asked desperately.

  “I didn’t.”

  My heart flip-flopped. What?! Was I in the wrong place?

  “I did,” said a voice from behind us.

  Both of us craned over our shoulders. Dr. Henry Bartell, administrator of the hospital. He still goes by Doctor, even though it’s ten years since he traded the ER for spreadsheets and meetings.

  “My first day and already you’re second-guessing me?” said the Irish doctor.

  “Don’t push it, Corrigan,” Bartell told him. “You’re not in LA now. You set a foot wrong here, I’ll bounce you out the door. Beckett’s our best surgeon. If she says it stays in, it stays in.”

  I felt myself flush down to my roots. Bartell and I get on, mainly because I’m the only person who gets their paperwork in on time. I’m not trying to be the teacher’s pet: following the rules is just the way I’m wired.

  The doctor moved his hands off the knife, taking mine with them. I sighed in relief. But then Corrigan turned to face me, leaned in and loomed. Face-on, he seemed even bigger: those shoulders seemed to block out the whole ER until it was just him and me. “You think it’s too risky?” He was still calm, still controlled, but I could hear the frustration boiling away under the surface. He was sure he was right, just as I was.

  I nodded. “Mm-hmm.” I crossed my arms, glared, and tried to look assertive. Then uncrossed them. Dammit!

  “Thing is, Beckett, slow and certain might be the way to go when you surgeons are upstairs in Mount fucking Olympus but down here in the trenches we need to take some chances.” His voice was fast and hard, the accent like being caressed by silver-veined granite. “You’re the cautious type? I get that. It’s kind of adorable. And if I ever come upstairs, I’ll sit with you and fill in every form in triplicate before we so much as cut a toenail. But down here, in the ER, with my patient, my word is God and if we need to take chances, we’ll take them. Are you really a good surgeon?”

  “What?” My head was spinning and my face was hot. I was being dressed down, but it didn’t feel cruel. Not when, with every word, those eyes were burning down into mine, melting me just when I needed to be made of iron.

  “Are you really a good surgeon?” he repeated.

  “Yes!” I’d never admit that, normally, but I was flustered.

  “Good.”

  And with one quick move, he pulled out the knife.

  2

  Amy

  FOR A SECOND, I just stood there staring. He didn’t just do that. He did not just do that. Then Corrigan extended his arm with a flourish and let the knife go. It fell and thunked into the floor, the tip buried in the linoleum. Blood gushed in red rivers from the wound. I could feel
panic spread through the people around the gurney as the numbers on the blood pressure monitor went into freefall. A nurse met my eyes across the table: is he crazy?!

  Behind me, Bartell got the words out before I could. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he bellowed.

  But Corrigan was utterly calm. He reached down and grabbed my hands. A jolt went through me, right down to my toes. There was something about his touch, strong and warm….

  He guided my hands into the wound. “Keep pressure there,” he told me. I pressed hard and the bleeding slowed. But we still only had seconds to save this guy.

  Corrigan started probing the wound, searching for the severed artery. He had to move in close and his hip pressed against mine. Two paper-thin layers of scrub material separated naked me from naked him. I was close enough that I could catch the scent of him and it was addictive, sweet vanilla with a heady kick of sandalwood. Part of me was mad at him. Part of me just wanted to bury my nose between his pecs.

  He looked away from the wound as his fingers moved. I do that, too: when you can’t really see what you’re doing, it helps to look at something else and go by feel alone. Except... he looked at me. At the little slice of pale shoulder blade above the neckline of my scrubs. At the copper hair that had slipped free at the side of my cap, a whole lock of it hanging down and grazing my cheek. I felt myself flush.

  “There,” said Corrigan. “Got you, you bugger. Clamp.” A nurse handed him a clamp, and he clamped the artery.

  Everyone held their breath for a few seconds. Then a nurse said, “Blood pressure’s stabilizing. Rhythm’s healthier, too.” There was a kind of awe in her voice.

  “He’s still got a hole in his chest!” My voice was tight with panic.

  “Well, feck,” said Corrigan. Not fuck, like before. Feck. It was lighter, gentler and very, very Irish. “If only we had a top surgeon on hand who could fix it.”

  As he slid his hands out, his fingers brushed mine. That jolt again, like teenagers holding hands. Get it together, Amy! The guy was still going to die if I didn’t work fast.

  I grabbed a suture kit and went to work. But this was nothing like working in the OR. I reached for some gauze but my fingers closed on thin air: I was used to everything being in its place. Then a nurse leaned against the gurney and the patient moved sickeningly under my hands, nearly dislodging a clamp. A supply trolley sped past me, missing me by an inch. An ambulance siren started to wail, just outside, and then there was a blast of freezing wind and loose paperwork blew across the room as the doors opened.