“Please!”
He snapped on fresh gloves and only then noticed that she had one of hers off. “Tell me you haven’t touched him without a glove! If you have, disinfect your hands right now. Don’t bring them anywhere near your face until you do! Hell, disinfect your face.”
“Hey take it easy—”
“Do it, Gulnar! The guy has jaundice and, until we know how he got it, I have to assume he’s infectious!”
My. Just one look and he reached the diagnosis she’d agonized over!
“I didn’t touch him, darling. I was just contrasting the colors of our skin to decide if he does have jaundice.”
“Well, he does. And humor me, OK?” He looked over his shoulder to the other exam station. “Who’s behind that curtain?”
“It’s Helena.” She was their only Badovnan nurse.
“Tell her to do it, too, just in case.”
She signed in resignation, did as she was told. She came back from Helena’s station, sticking her tongue at him. “Over-protective despot!”
“And you love it.” Her heart quivered her consent. She loved everything he did and was. She knew he knew it, saw it, felt it. His eyes told her he did, before he disengaged his teasing, tenderly devouring gaze from hers and smiled down on their patient. “Mr. Khurdi, isn’t it? Nice to meet you. Sorry for the lack of direct communication.” The guy must have understood something for he gave him a nodding grimace. Dante tilted his head at Gulnar. “History?”
She recounted Mr. Khurdi’s complaints and her findings. Dante nodded and started conducting his own examination. “Hmm.” He finally stepped away, took her aside and raised one eyebrow at her. “Your diagnosis?”
“Are you testing me, darling?”
“As if you need a test, amore!”
Her heat shot up with mortification. “I needed one yesterday when I couldn’t diagnose that ectopic pregnancy!”
She shuddered, remembering the emergency surgery that had followed her delay in diagnosis, the hemorrhage, almost losing the woman and having to sacrifice one Fallopian tube when the patient’s other one was obliterated by adhesions.
It had been a bone-melting relief when the woman had burst into tears of thankfulness on being told! She had five children and had been going to pieces with the thought of any more. There hadn’t been consistent birth-control measures since she’d come to the camp and she’d had two unwanted pregnancies during that time. One had resulted in twins.
“It was very misleading,” Dante said dismissively. “With her history of ulcerative colitis, severe abdominal pain usually means a recurrent attack of inflammation. And you did diagnose it in the end, you just took longer to sort out the differential diagnosis.”
Her lips twitched. “You’re too good for my ego.”
He gave her a look of genuine perplexity. “It baffles me that you don’t have a planet-sized ego. You’re phenomenal, amore!”
Pleasure at his praise spread through her as he picked up Mr. Khurdi’s chart and scribbled notes and observations.
He was phenomenal. What they shared was. How was it possible for it to keep getting better, deeper, the fire raging higher?
It had to be the clock ticking. She’d heard that timed liaisons had a way of keeping the passion burning, every sensation exquisite, every feeling soul-shattering. And she only had three weeks left. This time, when he left, it would be really all over. For her.
She tried to stifle the gutting dejection. She’d agreed to his rules. Ha. She’d snatched at any extension with him.
Live now! To the last moment.
She caught his eyes as she took the chart out of his hands and what she saw there…! Could it mean what she so insanely prayed and wept for? That he felt something for her beyond sexual dependency? That he might extend their liaison, at least keep the door open for future possibilities, sporadic reunion s?
She couldn’t hope for that. She’d better not!
She cleared the suffocating longing out of her throat and gestured towards Mr. Khurdi. “If you really want my diagnosis, I think he has a hydatid in his liver! OK, go ahead, laugh!” As he would, no doubt, if she told him how she loved him.
“Why should I when I think you’re 100 per cent correct? When I’m impressed out of my mind that you actually thought of it?”
A hundred giant butterflies tried to burst out of her chest.
Don’t make me love you any more. There is no more. I can’t stand any more.
It was getting harder and harder not to tell him how she felt, not to scream her love in his arms as he transfigured her with ecstasy, or when he helped her and validated her and made her feel like the only woman in the world, the most precious human being in existence.
“I would really love to know how you came by the diagnosis. Give me a detailed performance of your beautiful mind at work, amore.”
She busied herself with placating Mr. Khurdi, answered Dante only when she got her erupting pulse under control. “Before I give you any performances, I want to know what you think we should do about it. My knowledge doesn’t extend to knowing if it’s operable or inoperable.”
“From its location and his general condition, operable. Definitely. Do you have time to help me, tesoro?”
Oh, how she reveled in his precious professional faith. But she remembered something. She felt reluctant to convey it, but couldn’t withhold it with a clear conscience. “Uh, Helena wanted to assist you some time. And I guess I can’t hog you all the time.”
“Amore, you still don’t believe you have carte blanche to do anything you want with me? With my eternal gratitude? But, seriously, I don’t want anyone else to assist me, if it’s at all avoidable. If it’s a must, just this time, let Helena be the second assistant.”
“Uh, so what do I tell Mr. Khurdi? He’s getting agitated.”
“I can see that. OK, tell him he has a parasitic infestation by a tapeworm of the genus Echinococcus granulosus which is causing him a disease called cystic hydatidosis of the liver, the favorite target of the organism. At least one cyst now is over five centimeters in size and that’s why its pressure produced symptoms of obstructive jaundice and abdominal pain. I also suspect he has bile sac rupture, therefore his classical triad of biliary colic, jaundice and urticaria.”
She turned her back to the patient and shook with suppressed laughter. Dante widened his eyes in devilish innocence. “What? He should know all that!”
A splutter escaped. “I’m sure it would also interest him to know that the stuff he passed in vomit and stools was the hydatid membranes when the cyst ruptured!”
“Ah, so that is how you diagnosed it!”
“That, the triad and him living in a country in his childhood where it is endemic. He used to live in Greece.”
“Brilliant, bambola! So, shall you tell him all that?”
She gave him an affectionate nudge. “Just tell me what I can tell him about the surgery.”
“Tell him that’s it’s nothing serious now he’s diagnosed. We’ll take care of him, I’ll just go in, remove the ruptured gall bladder, remove the parasite and sterilize the cyst cavity by injection of a scolicidal agent. Hmm, we do have formalin here, don’t we?”
“Dante! You don’t tell patients you’re going to inject them with formalin!” She knew he was teasing her, knew how considerate he was with his patients.
He pretended bafflement. “It is what I’m going to do!”
“Well, I’ll stick with telling him it’s a solicidal agent—hell, a parasite killer. I’m not about to try to explain to him why we’re going to inject him with something used in preserving corpses!”
In twenty minutes, the surgical team was gathered around the sedated Mr. Khurdi and Dante was taking one more look at the X-ray and ultrasounds.
He snorted in disgust.
Gulnar raised her eyes from her final preparations of the surgical instruments. “We already knew X-rays aren’t well known for their reliability in detecting hydatids.”
He rotated his neck, working a crick out. “I do wonder why we bother with X-rays at all. And ultrasound results remain operator-dependent.”
Her eyes caressed him. “And since our operator is the best there is, we did find confirming signs—daughter cysts, sand…”
“But not an exact position. But, wonder of wonders, there is the barest shadow in the X-ray of a thin rim of calcification delineating the cyst.”
“Enough for you to go in with confidence?”
He gave the X-rays one last assessing look, then handed them to her. “I believe so.”
“OK, Dante, he’s under. You can go ahead.”
Dante looked at his anesthetist. Sam Hiller wasn’t looking at him. Not likely when he could barely take his eyes off Gulnar. Dante sympathized. And because he knew Gulnar was his alone, as long as their…arrangement lasted, he didn’t mind.
He still couldn’t believe what she’d done to him. She’d created new facets in him, new personas. The perpetually lusting male. The powerless, dependent creature. The devil-may-care rogue. The fearless fighter. And then there were the richness and tenderness and joy and freedom and constant surprises…