The Patient Nurse

Dear Reader,

I really can’t express how flattered I am and also how grateful I am to Harlequin Books for releasing this collection of my published works. It came as a great surprise. I never think of myself as writing books that are collectible. In fact, there are days when I forget that writing is work at all. What I do for a living is so much fun that it never seems like a job. And since I reside in a small community, and my daily life is confined to such mundane things as feeding the wild birds and looking after my herb patch in the backyard, I feel rather unconnected from what many would think of as a glamorous profession.

But when I read my email, or when I get letters from readers, or when I go on signing trips to bookstores to meet all of you, I feel truly blessed. Over the past thirty years, I have made lasting friendships with many of you. And quite frankly, most of you are like part of my family. You can’t imagine how much you enrich my life. Thank you so much.

I also need to extend thanks to my family (my husband, James, son, Blayne, daughter-in-law, Christina, and granddaughter, Selena Marie), to my best friend, Ann, to my readers, booksellers and the wonderful people at Harlequin Books—from my editor of many years, Tara, to all the other fine and talented people who make up our publishing house. Thanks to all of you for making this job and my private life so worth living.

Thank you for this tribute, Harlequin, and for putting up with me for thirty long years! Love to all of you.

Diana Palmer

DIANA PALMER

The prolific author of more than one hundred books, Diana Palmer got her start as a newspaper reporter. A multi–New York Times bestselling author and one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humor. Diana lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia.

Visit her website at www.DianaPalmer.com.

The Patient Nurse
Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To doctors and nurses and hospitals everywhere.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter One

He heard the whispered, amused comments as he walked down the hall toward the cardiac care unit of St. Mary’s Hospital, and it was hard work not to grin. He’d just been interviewed on local television that morning about his habits in the operating room. The interviewer had elicited the information that Dr. Ramon Cortero liked to listen to the rock group Desperado while he performed the open-heart surgery that he was world-famous for. The nurses and technicians in the cardiac ward where he worked had teased him about it affectionately all day. They were a team, he and these hardworking people, so he didn’t take offense at the teasing. In fact, some of them were fans of the Wyoming-based group Desperado, as well.

His black eyes danced in a lean and darkly handsome face as he strode along in his surgical greens, scouting for the wife of a patient in whom he’d just replaced a malfunctioning heart valve.

The woman wasn’t where she was supposed to be—in the surgical waiting room on the second floor. The CCU nurse had inadvertently sent her down to the main lobby waiting room, and when he’d phoned down there, she was missing. She was a middle-aged woman whose husband had survived against the odds, having been brought in with a leaky prosthetic valve complicated by pneumonia. It had taken all Ramon’s skill, and a few prayers, to bring the man through it. Now he had good news for this woman, if he could find her.

The elevator doors opened nearby, and when he turned, there she was, surrounded by her teenage son, in a long black coat, several members of her husband’s family, and one of the female chaplains who’d rarely left her side since the ordeal began forty-eight hours earlier. She looked her age. Her eyes were red and puffy from much crying, and there was a desperate plea in them.

Ramon smiled, answering the question she seemed afraid to ask. “He came through just fine,” he said without preamble. “He has a strong heart.”

“Oh, thank God,” she whispered, and hugged her son. “Thank God! And thank you, Doctor.” She extended a hand and shook his hand.

“De nada,” Ramon said with a gentle smile. “I’m glad we could help him.”

The cardiologist, a debonair African-American, grinned from his stance near the heart surgeon. It was he who had met the woman and her son at the door as they arrived in the critical care unit and explained the heart catherization procedure as well as the valve replacement surgery to them. It was he who’d offered comfort and a glimmer of hope. The woman shook hands with him and smiled broadly, adding her thanks to him, as well.

Dr. Ben Copeland only shrugged. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said, and smiled back. “Your husband is in the intensive care unit just down this hall. There’s a room next to it where you can wait until he’s hooked up to the monitors, and then you can see him.”

There were more thanks, more tears. A nurse came along and was dispatched to show the relieved family where they could wait until they were allowed to see the patient.

Ben joined Ramon. “Sometimes,” he said, “we have miracles. I wouldn’t have bet a cup of coffee on that man’s chances when he was brought in.”

“Neither would I,” Ramon agreed grimly. “But sometimes we get very lucky indeed.” He sighed and stretched. “I could sleep for a week, but I’m still on call. I guess you get to go home.”

Ben grinned.

“Lucky devil.” He shook his head and left the other man with a wave of his hand as he went to check on the other two surgical patients he’d managed, with God’s help, to pull back from the abyss. There had been three emergency surgeries on this otherwise quiet Sunday when he was on call. He was stiff and sore and very tired. But it was a good sort of tired. He paused at a window to gaze with quiet satisfaction at the huge lighted cross on the main hospital wall. Prayers were often answered. His had been tonight.

He checked his patients, wrote out the orders, dressed and went over to O’Keefe City Hospital across the street to visit three other new patients on whom he’d performed surgery. He also had to go to Emory University Hospital in Decatur on the way home to check a patient there who was ready to be dismissed. All his rounds made, he went home.

Alone.

His apartment was spacious, but not outwardly the home of a wealthy man. He preferred simplicity, a holdover from his childhood in Havana, in the barrio. He picked up a copy of Pio Baroja’s Cuentos and smiled sadly. There was an inscription just inside the cover that he knew by heart. “To Ramon from Isadora, with all my love.” His wife, who had died of pneumonia, of all things, only two years before. She had died while he was abroad performing complicated bypass surgery on a very important diplomat. She had died because of neglect, because her cousin had left her alone all night and the fluid in her lungs, combined with a desperately high fever, had killed her.

It was ironic, he thought, that he hadn’t been home the one time he was truly needed. He’d left Isadora with her young cousin, Noreen, a registered nurse. He’d thought he could trust Noreen to take care of her. But she’d left Isadora, and when Ramon came home from overseas, it was to find her already gone, already beyond the reach of his arms. He’d blamed, still blamed, Noreen for her neglect. She’d tried desperately to explain, but he’d refused to listen. Wasn’t her sin apparent to everyone, even to her aunt and uncle, who had blamed her as vehemently as he had?

He put the book down, running his fingers lovingly over the cover. Baroja, a famous Spanish novelist of the early twentieth century, had been a physician as well as an author. He was Ramon’s favorite. The stories in this collection were full of Baroja’s life in the barrio of Madrid before antibiotics were discovered. They were stories of pain and tragedy and loneliness, and through it all, hope. Hope was his stock-in-trade. When all else failed, there was still faith in a higher power, hope that a miracle could occur. One had occurred tonight, for that lady whose husband was in ICU. He was glad, because it was a good marriage and those people were in love, as he and Isadora had been. At the beginning, at least…

He sighed and turned toward the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator.

“Ay, ay, ay,” he murmured softly to himself as he surveyed the contents. “You’re a world-famous cardiac surgeon, Señor Cortero, and tonight for your supper you will feast on a frozen dinner of rubber chicken and undercooked broccoli. How the mighty have fallen!”

The sudden ringing of the telephone brought his head, and his eyebrows, up. He was still technically on call until midnight, and he might be needed.

He lifted the receiver. “Cortero,” he said at once.

There was a pause. “Ramon?”

His face hardened. He knew the voice so well that only two syllables gave away its identity over the telephone.

“Yes, Noreen,” he said coldly. “What do you want?”

There was a hesitation, also familiar. “My aunt wants to know if you’re coming to my uncle’s birthday party.” How stilted those words. She and her aunt and uncle weren’t close. They never had been, but the distance was especially noticeable since Isadora’s death.

“When is it?”

“You know when.”

He sighed angrily. “If I’m not on call next Sunday, I’ll come.” He toyed with a slip of paper on the spotless glass-topped telephone table. “Are you going to be there?” he added darkly.

“No,” she said without any trace of feeling in her voice. “I took his present over today. They’ll be out of town until the weekend, so they asked me to call you.”

“All right.”

There was another pause. “I’ll tell my aunt that you’re coming.” She hung up.

He put the receiver down and pressed it there. It felt cold under his fingers, cold like the inside of his heart where Isadora was. He could never separate the memory of her death from Noreen, who could have saved her if she’d been at home. It was unreasonable, this anger. He realized that, on some level. But he’d harbored his grudge, fed it on hate, fanned the flames to thwart the pain of losing Isadora in such a way. He made himself forget that Noreen had loved Isadora, that her grief had been every bit as genuine as his own. He hated her and couldn’t hide it. Hating Noreen was his solace, his comfort, his security.

To give her credit, she never accused him of being unjust or unreasonable. She simply kept out of his way. She worked in O’Keefe City Hospital across the street from St. Mary’s, where he performed most of his surgeries. She was one of two registered nurses who alternated night duty on a critical care ward. Sometimes he had patients in her unit, whom he had to visit on rounds. But he treated her even there as a nuisance. She had a university degree in nursing science. She had the talent and intelligence to become a doctor, but for some reason, she’d never pursued such a career. She’d never married, either. She was twenty-five now, mature and levelheaded, but there were no men in Noreen’s life. Just as there were no women in Ramon’s.

He went back into the kitchen and made himself a pot of coffee. He required very little sleep, and his work was his life. He wondered what he would have done without it since losing Isadora.

He smiled, remembering with sad poignancy her elegant blond beauty, those vivid blue eyes that could smile so warmly. Noreen was a poor carbon copy of her, with dishwater blond hair and gray eyes and no real looks to speak of. Isadora had been beautiful, a debutante with exquisite poise and manners. The family was very wealthy. Noreen shouldn’t have to work at all, because she was the only surviving heir to the Kensington fortune. But she had apparently little use for money, because even when she was off duty, she seemed to dress down. She had an apartment and never asked her aunt and uncle for a penny to help support her. He wondered what their response would have been if she had asked, and was amazed that he concerned himself with her at all.

Noreen had been a puzzle since he’d met Isadora, six years before. Isadora was outgoing and gregarious, always flirting and fun to be with. Noreen had been very quiet, rarely exerting herself. She’d had no social life to speak of. She was studious and reserved back then, a nurse in training, and her profession seemed to be paramount in her life.

Ramon frowned. Odd, he thought, how a woman so wrapped up in nursing could have been so negligent with her own cousin. Noreen was so conscientious on the ward that she was often reprimanded for questioning medicine orders that seemed unacceptable to her.

Perhaps she’d been jealous of Isadora. Still, why would she have gone so far as to leave a critically ill woman alone in an apartment for almost two nights?

One of his colleagues had mentioned Noreen to him shortly after the funeral, and remarked how tragic the whole business was, especially Noreen’s condition. He’d snapped that Noreen was no concern of his and walked off. Now he wondered what the man had meant. It was a long time ago, of course. The colleague had long since moved to New York City.

He dismissed the thought from his mind. God knew, he had more important things to think about than Noreen.

That Sunday afternoon, since he wasn’t on call, he did go to see Hal Kensington, Isadora’s father, bearing a birthday present—a gold watch. Mary Kensington met him at the door, soignée in a leopard-striped silk caftan with her platinum blond hair, so much like Isadora’s, in a neat bun atop her head.

“Ramon, how sweet of you to come,” she said enthusiastically, taking his arm. She made a face. “I’m sorry I had to ask Noreen to phone you about today. I knew I’d never have time to run you down, with all my charity work, you know.”

“It’s all right,” he said automatically.

She sighed. “Noreen is a cross that we must all bear, I’m afraid. Fortunately we don’t see her except at Christmas and Easter, and only then at church.”

He glanced down at her curiously. “You raised her.”

“And I should feel something for her, you think.” Mary laughed without humor. “She was Hal’s only brother’s child, so we were obligated to take her in when her parents died. But it wasn’t from choice. She was always in the way. She’s going to be an old maid, you know. She dresses like someone out of the local shelter and as for parties, my dear, I never invite her for them, she’s so depressing! She was always like that, even as a child. Isadora was so different, so sweet, so loving. She was our whole world from the minute she was born. Of course, Noreen stayed with my mother a great deal of the time, until her death.” She glowered. “Noreen was a burden. She still is.”

How strange that he should feel a twinge of pity for the sad little girl who came to live with people who didn’t want her.

“Don’t you love Noreen?” he asked bluntly.

“My dear, who could love such a pale shadow of a woman?” she asked indifferently. “I suppose I’m fond of her, but I can never forget that she cost us our Isadora. As I’m sure you can’t,” she added, patting his arm comfortingly. “We all miss her so much.”

“Yes,” he said.

Hal was sprawled in his favorite easy chair, his bald head reflecting the light from the crystal chandelier overhead. He looked up from the yachting magazine he was reading as the other two joined him.

“Ramon! So glad you could come!” He put the magazine aside and stood up to shake hands warmly with his son-in-law.

“I brought you a little something,” he said, handing Hal the elegantly wrapped package.

“How kind.” Hal beamed. He opened it and enthused over the watch. “Just what I wanted,” he said. “I have a sport watch, but I can wear this one to the yacht club. Thanks!”

Ramon waved the thanks away. “I’m glad you like it.”

“Noreen gave him a wallet,” Mary said disparagingly.

“Eel skin,” Hal added, shaking his head. “The girl has no imagination.”

Ramon remembered where Noreen lived, the clothes she wore off duty. She apparently had little money, since she asked for nothing from her aunt and uncle, and eel skin wallets were expensive. He wondered what she might have gone without to buy her uncle that present, about which he was so cavalier. Ramon knew what it was to be poor. He was grateful for any gift he received, however meager.

He recalled that Noreen had chosen a small crystal bud vase for Isadora as a wedding gift when they married. Isadora had tossed it aside without a care, much more enthusiastic about the Irish linen tablecloth that a girlfriend had brought her. Noreen hadn’t said a word, but a male nurse who had accompanied her to the engagement shower remarked loudly that Noreen had gone without a badly needed coat to buy that elegant trifle for her unappreciative cousin. Isadora had heard him, red-faced, and immediately picked up the bud vase and made a fuss over it. But it was too late. Noreen had held her head up proudly, never shed a tear. But her eyes had been so sad…

“Are you listening, Ramon?” Hal murmured. “I said, we’ll have to go sailing one weekend.”

“I’d like that, when I have time,” Ramon replied, but without enthusiasm. He was uncomfortable with these people. They picked their friends by their bank balances and social position. Ramon had been acceptable because he was famous and well-to-do. But the Ramon Cortero who had escaped from Cuba with his parents at the age of ten wouldn’t have been welcomed as a prospective in-law. He knew it, now more vividly than ever. Odd, these disjointed thoughts that plagued him lately.

He stayed only long enough for cake and coffee, served on the finest china, and then excused himself. Outside, he looked back at the large brick mansion with no real feeling at all. The house was as bland and indifferent as the people who lived inside it. He wondered what was happening to him to make him feel so uncomfortable with Isadora’s parents, who had been so kind to him after her death.

He drove himself back to his apartment in the silver Mercedes that was his pride and joy. He couldn’t remember feeling so empty since the funeral. Probably he was overtired and needed a vacation. He should take a week off, just for himself, and go away. He could fly down to the Bahamas and laze on the beach for a few days. That might perk him up.

He glanced around him at the beautiful city skyline, ablaze with colorful lights, and remembered how that elegant glitter used to remind him of beautiful Isadora. She was sweetness itself to him, but he remembered vividly walking in on her once when she was cursing Noreen like a sailor for not putting her sweaters in the right drawer. Noreen hadn’t said a word in her own defense. She’d rearranged the clothes and left the room, not quite meeting Ramon’s eyes.

Isadora had laughed self-consciously and murmured that good help was just so hard to find. He’d thought it a cold remark for a woman to make about her own cousin, and he’d said so. Isadora had laughed it off. But he’d watched, then, more closely. Isadora and her parents treated Noreen much more like a servant than like a member of the family. She was always fetching and carrying for someone, making telephone calls, arranging caterers and bands for parties, writing out invitations. Even when she was studying for exams, the demands from her family went on without pause.

Ramon had remarked once that exams called for a lot of study, and the other three Kensingtons had looked at him with blank faces. None of them had ever gone to college and had no idea what he was talking about. Noreen’s duties continued without mercy. It wasn’t until she left home, just after Isadora’s marriage, that the Kensingtons hired a full-time housekeeper.

He went back to his apartment and made himself a cup of coffee. It disturbed him that he should think of Noreen so much, and especially on her uncle’s birthday. There had been parties for Hal, and Mary Kensington before, but Noreen had rarely been included in the celebrations. It was as if her presence in the family was forgotten until something needed doing that only she could do, such as nursing Isadora through flu and colds and nuisance ailments.

That reminded him of Isadora’s pneumonia and Noreen’s neglect, and he grew angry all over again. Despite his wife’s faults, he’d loved her terribly. Even though Noreen had been badly treated by her aunt and uncle and cousin, it was no excuse to let Isadora die. He might feel pity for her lack of love, but he still felt only contempt when he remembered that Isadora had died because of her.

He spent six days in the Bahamas, alone, enjoying the solitude of the remote island where he had a room in a bed-and-breakfast inn. He’d walked along the beach and remembered painfully the happy days he’d spent here with Isadora on their honeymoon. He still missed her, despite their turbulent relationship.

He noticed gray hairs now and felt his age as never before. He should remarry; he should have a son. Isadora hadn’t wanted children and he hadn’t pressed her about it. There had been plenty of time. Or so he thought.

The sunset was particularly vivid, as if it were a canvas worked by a madman in fiery colors with black highlights, slicing down to the horizon like a bloody knife. He sighed as he stared at it and listened to the sweet watery whisper of the surf near his bare feet. How poignant, to hold such sights in the heart and have no one to share them with. He was alone. How he longed for a loving wife and plenty of children playing around him on the beach. Perhaps it was time he started thinking of the future instead of the past. Two years was surely long enough to mourn.

He went back to work with a vengeance, taking on a bigger workload than ever before as time passed. He was operating on a private patient at O’Keefe City Hospital, across the street from St. Mary’s. It was just after a particularly rough operation that he was called to the cardiac care ward to check a patient the night nurse wasn’t too happy about. He had three patients in this hospital, in addition to patients at St. Mary’s and Emory.

He wasn’t happy when he discovered who the night nurse was. Noreen, in her usual white slacks and colorful long jacket, with a stethoscope around her neck, her hair in a bun, gave him a cool look as he paused at the circular nurses’ station.

“I didn’t think this was the night you worked at O’Keefe,” he said shortly, still in his surgical greens.

“I work whenever I have to, and what are you doing at O’Keefe?” she asked.

“I had a patient who requested that his surgery be performed here. I’m on staff at three hospitals. This is one of them,” he replied, equally coldly.

“I remember,” she said. Her hands went into the pockets of her patterned jacket. “Your Mr. Harris is throwing up. He can’t keep his medicine down.”

“Where’s his chart?”

She went to the doorway of the patient’s room and produced it from the wire basket on the wall, handing it to him.

He scowled. “This nausea started on the last shift. Why wasn’t something done about it then?” he demanded.

“Some of the nurses are working twelve hour shifts,” she reminded him. “And there were four new cases added to the ward this afternoon, all critical.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“Yes, sir,” she said automatically, handing him a pen. “Could you do something about it now?”

He scribbled new orders, and then went in to check the man, who was pale from his ordeal.

He came out scowling. “The catheter was taken out last night and put back in this morning. Why?”

“He didn’t void for eight hours. It’s standard procedure…”

He stared her down. “He’s been throwing up and not drinking very many fluids. The longer that catheter stays in, the more risk there is of infection. I want it taken out and left out until and if he complains of discomfort. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Who had the catheter taken out?” he asked abruptly.

She only smiled at him.

“Never mind,” he said heavily, knowing that torture wouldn’t drag a name out of her. His eyes went over her oval face. Her cheeks were red but the rest of her face was pale and rather puffy. He scowled. He’d never noticed that before. It was the sort of look he often found in heart patients.

She put the chart back up. “The technicians are run off their feet on this shift. I wish we had someone staying with him who could give him cracked ice. That would stay down.”

“Hasn’t he any family?” he asked, touched by her concern.

“A son, in Utah,” she replied. “He’s on his way here, but he won’t arrive until tomorrow.”

“Tough.”

“Very.”

He glanced toward one of the patient’s wives who was trotting down the hall with a foam cup and a plastic pitcher. “Where’s she going?” he asked.

Noreen actually smiled, her eyes lighting up. “The Jamaican technician, Mrs. Hawk, told her where the ice machine and the coffee machine were. She’s been saving everyone steps ever since. She even gets towels and washcloths and blankets when she needs them, instead of asking anyone.”

“This is unusual?”

“Well, there are three other women who come to the door and ask us to give their husbands water when they’re thirsty—about every five minutes, after they’re brought in here after surgery.”

“Nurses used to do those things,” he reminded her.

“Nurses used to have more time, fewer patients, less paperwork and not as many lawsuits to worry about,” she returned, and sighed.

He searched her face and the frown came back. “Do you feel all right?” he asked with evident reluctance.

Her face closed up. “I’m a little tired, like everyone else on this shift. Thank you for seeing about Mr. Harris, sir.”

He shrugged. “Let me know if he has any further bouts of nausea.”

“Yes, sir.” She was polite, but cool, remote.

His dark eyes narrowed as they met her gray ones. “You don’t like me at all, do you?” he asked bluntly, as if he’d only just realized it.

She laughed without humor. “Isn’t that my line?”

She turned without meeting his gaze and went back to work, apparently dismissing him from her mind.

He left the ward, but something was nagging at the back of his mind, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was uneasy, and he didn’t know why. Vacations, he thought, were supposed to relax people. His seemed to have had an opposite effect.

Behind him, Noreen was trying to calm her renegade heartbeat, forcing herself not to look after the tall, dark man to whom she’d secretly given her heart so long ago. He’d never known, and he never would. Isadora had brought the tall man home and Noreen’s heart had broken in two. Not for her, the dark warm eyes, the sensuous smiles. Isadora, the pretty one, the flirting one, married the man Noreen would have died just to kiss. She’d kept her painful secret for six long years, through the four years of Ramon’s marriage, through the past two searing years of accusation and persecution. Her heart should have worn out by now, but it kept beating, despite its imperfection that grew worse daily.

The time would come when she might not have time to get to a doctor. Not that it mattered. Her life was one of sacrifice and duty. There had been no love in it since the death of her parents. She’d felt lost going to the big, lonely house that accepted her only reluctantly. She’d been Isadora’s private servant, her aunt’s social secretary, her uncle’s gofer. She’d been alone and lonely most of her adult life, hopelessly in love with her cousin’s husband and too proud to ever let it show.

He hated her now, blamed her for something that wasn’t really her fault. Even in death, he still belonged to beautiful Isadora. Noreen turned her mind back to her chores, shutting him out, shutting out the past and the pain. She accepted her lot, as she always had, and went about her work.