CHAPTER ONE
HE STOOD NAKED and felt the water splash over him. Eyes closed, arms raised with his hands splayed above him on the porcelain tile, Brett Ackerman dropped his chin to his chest. Water pressure that was fine for cleansing wasn’t strong enough to wash away the tension knotting the muscles along the back of his neck.
He stood there, anyway. Planned to let the hot water run out and then to remain in the cold for as long as he could take it. His pain was his own fault. He’d been out too late after several grueling days of work, flying back and forth across the country twice.
He’d been celebrating. Ten years since he’d sold the dot-com he’d started his junior year in college. A decade of his life had passed, and here he was. Standing alone in the walk-in shower in his elegant, historical, two-story walk-up across a quiet street from a flowered lot that led to the ocean beyond.
He owned the house. The lovely two acres across the street. And another house down the street, too, that was split up into bed-and-breakfast-type rooms that were all rented on an extended-stay basis.
He owned them both, and lived in this one, alone.
Just as he’d walked home alone from the quaint neighborhood pub on the corner in the wee hours of that Tuesday morning in September. Where he’d celebrated by nursing two cocktails over a period of several hours and playing video trivia games with anonymous opponents.
His life was on track. Exactly as he’d planned.
And that fact was worth celebrating.
His cell phone peeled, an urgent sound partially muted by the shower. It was only seven. He wasn’t due at the Americans Against Prejudice board meeting in LA until nine. His unscheduled tour of the home office facilities would follow immediately after. While the other board members were at lunch.
His phone continued to ring. Brett continued to stand under the shower—remaining strong against the temptation to pick up—stubbornly determined to relax.
As a nonprofit regulator—a self-made position that in ten years had grown into something approximating a national Better Business Seal of Approval designed to assure nonprofit donors that their monies were not being misappropriated—he was currently sitting on more than fifty boards around the country.
The phone fell blessedly silent, and Brett lifted his face to the soothing heat sluicing over him. Enjoying the moment.
Then his phone started to ring again. Shit. He’d made it through the first summons, but there was no way he could ignore a second, right on the heels of the first. At seven in the morning.
So much for a little naked relaxation.
* * *
ELLA WALES ACKERMAN, RN, the brand-new charge nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Santa Raquel Children’s Hospital—a newly completed facility just outside Santa Raquel—was in the unit’s nursing office early on that Tuesday morning, going over charts and checking her email before her shift began. The thousand-bed facility had only been open a few weeks, and already they had thirty patients in their fifty-bed unit.
Thirty babies fighting for their lives.
She read chart notes from the night before. Saw that the little “ostomy” guy had coded again, but was stabilized. His liver was shutting down due to the nutrition they were forced to give him intravenously until they could do the surgery that would put his stomach back together. If they couldn’t keep him stable, get him well enough to tolerate the surgery...
He was stable. They’d do all they could for him.
“Ella?” She glanced up as Brianna Wood, one of her nurses, a twenty-eight-year-old transfer from San Francisco, stopped in the office doorway. “I know you aren’t on the floor yet, but I just wanted to let you know, we got word an hour ago that a new patient’s coming up from Burbank sometime this morning. A two-pound, six-week-old girl. I don’t know the particulars yet, just that she’s in a warming bed and breathing on her own.”
“Let’s put her in D-4,” Ella said. The pod was their least crowded and also one that, so far, had no patients with ventilators. They talked about the attending physician and waiting for orders, and then Ella asked, “So, did you talk to him?”
Brianna had been planning to ask her boyfriend to move in with her. Which meant leaving his job as a nuclear medicine technician in San Francisco to relocate to Santa Raquel. The long-distance relationship wasn’t working out well.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“He said he’d see...”
The woman wasn’t crying, but Ella could almost feel the effort it took Brianna to keep her emotions in check.
“You thinking about going home, then?” She’d hate to lose her. Not only were they still staffing, Brianna was a damn good nurse, too. But if she would be happier...
“Absolutely not. I love this job. And if he’s not sure now, my moving back isn’t going to make him any more so.”
There was a lot Ella could say about the importance of having a life beyond the man you loved, but she was the woman’s boss. And admittedly jaded where men were concerned. “He could change his mind.”
Brianna shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked hopeful for a moment. “Do you think I should? Go back?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Would you?”
She shouldn’t answer that, either. “No.”
Brianna’s nod gave her pause. “But...if you want to go home, I’ll give you a glowing reference,” Ella added with a small smile. She’d never been a boss before. Was used to being just one of the nurses—someone who could offer personal advice and opinions without undue professional consequence.
“You don’t wear a ring...”
The question on Brianna’s pretty face called out to Ella. She was new in town, too. And other than her sister-in-law, Chloe, who was living with her temporarily, had no one to confide in. Or even catch a movie with.
“I’m not married.”
“Have you ever been?”
Closing the charting program on her computer, Ella stood up. “Yes, I have been. Now, let’s go get D-4 ready before shift change. If you want to grab a cup of coffee after you get off, I’ll see what I can arrange...”
So she shouldn’t fraternize. A cup of coffee with a valuable employee who was hurting was just good business.
As it turned out, Ella didn’t make it to D-4 or coffee with Brianna. Before she’d even clocked in, the three-month-old in C-2 coded, and it took a couple hours to get him stabilized. By the time Ella finally made it to the break room for a cup of coffee, Brianna was long gone. And she sat by herself, sipping her dark roast, and thinking about things that weren’t productive.
Like Brett. And the baby they’d spent three years and ungodly amounts of money trying to conceive. The baby he’d never wanted. The baby who’d been born too soon to save, leaving his mama with little hope of ever having another child of her own. And here she was, four years later, saving other people’s preemies.
When she’d graduated from college, Ella hadn’t planned to work with seriously ill babies. She’d focused on pediatric nursing. And a job on a PIC unit at a large hospital in LA had been available. Whenever babies had been in for procedures, she’d been the one doctors had requested to assist them. They said she was good with the babies. That she seemed to have a natural ability to calm sick infants.
Funny, a woman who wasn’t capable of conceiving naturally or of carrying a baby to term, having that ability.
No, she wasn’t going down that depressing road again. Her twenties were casualties buried on the shoulders of that road. And though her journey had been painful, she’d finally turned the corner.
She was thirty-one now and taking charge of her life. This new job as charge nurse seemed almost symbolic.
She’d moved from LA to Santa Raquel. A move that would force her to face her past, to confront her present and to build a future.
Standing, Ella checked the pockets of her scrubs to make certain that she had her pager, her pen, and the ID card she had to swipe to get on and off the unit, and turned toward the door of the deserted break room. Time to get back to work.