Healing The Md's Heart: Healing the MD's Heart

“More than anything. I’ve been trying to track down as many blood relatives as I can. I’m running out of time.” He steeled himself to say what he hadn’t dared acknowledge in his head, yet battled daily in his nightmares. “My son is dying.”

Chapter Two

He’d succeeded in shaking Cort’s composure and it brought a surge of what almost felt like triumph because he knew, without having any basis for his certainty except gut instinct, that this time, he wouldn’t be turned away.

“I’m sorry,” Cort said, a husky note in his voice replacing his earlier coolness. “I’ve got four kids and I can’t imagine…” He scrubbed a hand over his face and when he looked back this time the sympathy in his eyes was clear. “There has to be something we can do to help or you wouldn’t be here.”

“There is. Noah needs a bone marrow transplant, but they haven’t been able to find a match.”

“Noah has a rare immune-system illness,” Lia explained for him. “There’s been a lot of success in treating it with bone marrow transplants. But without it—” She looked at Duran, an apology in her eyes. “Without it, the prognosis isn’t good. Noah probably won’t survive past his late teens. The sooner he gets a transplant, the better his chances, and the odds of finding a match among blood relations are much higher.”

“Which is why I went searching for my birth parents when neither I, my ex-wife nor any of her family turned out to be a match,” Duran added. “I was hoping one of my birth parents would be a match, or if not, that maybe I had other relatives that would be. That’s why I said discovering I had five brothers here is a better outcome than I could have wished for.”

Cort nodded. “Then neither your twin nor your birth mother was a match, either.”

“Ry wasn’t. The only thing the tests proved was that we were brothers. And she refused to be tested.” Anger flared up in him again and he pushed it down. There was nothing he could do to change the past or her mind and it wouldn’t aid his appeal now. “She said she didn’t want her family to know how badly she’d screwed up over thirty years ago. According to her, admitting to having sex once when she was twenty-two with a stranger she’d met in a bar would ruin her life.”

“Jed won’t give a damn. His family already knows the worst of his sins and a one-night stand hardly ranks.” Cort hesitated and Duran readied himself for another disappointment. “He’s sick though, dying. He couldn’t be a donor even if he wanted to be. But I’m sure I can speak for my brothers and say we’d all be willing to be tested as soon as you can arrange it.” He turned to Lia. “Is there anything you can do to expedite things?”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” she assured him. “I can’t get anything done over the weekend, but I’ll see what I can do about setting things up for early next week.”

Duran found himself holding his breath, waiting to be told it was a mistake; that it wasn’t going to happen the way he wanted. When that didn’t come the sense of relief hit him hard, as if all the air had left the room and rushed back, and with it, a little of his faith in the future.

He searched for words to convey his feelings, but the thankfulness he felt was so tangled up with other, less defined and more uneasy emotions connected with finding brothers, a twin, discovering parts of himself he never knew—emotions that he hadn’t given himself time to process—that it left him floundering for what to say to the stranger who could end up saving his son’s life.

But Cort spared him from having to say anything by moving the conversation to practicalities. “I’m guessing you’re staying the night here with Noah. But when he gets out of the hospital, you and he can stay with one of us.” He forestalled any protest Duran would have made by holding up a hand. “A hotel’s no place for a sick kid. The ranch would be best. There’s plenty of room at the big house and Rafe and Josh are only a few minutes away. But that means telling Jed, and soon.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing. “I don’t see any way around it.”

“I get the feeling he’s not going to be happy to find out he has two more sons,” Duran said. If that was the case, he was glad that Jed Garrett had sons who, if not happy to learn of his existence, were at least willing to accept him as a brother and do what they could for Noah.

“No, it’ll probably be just the opposite,” Cort said grimly. Apparently he saw Duran was starting to get frustrated with the veiled hints about Jed’s character and offered a rueful smile. “Sorry, I’m not deliberately trying to keep you in the dark. But it’s going to take some time to explain and I’d rather not do it here.”

“Later then, or not,” he said. “My concern right now is Noah.”

“I understand. Why don’t you give me or Rafe a call tomorrow, when you figure out what’s going on with Noah and one of us can run by and help you two get settled somewhere else?”

“About that—” Duran began. He felt uncomfortable accepting hospitality from strangers, even if he was related to them.

It was Lia who resolved the matter for him. “Say yes. Otherwise I’ll have to call security because Cort never takes no for an answer and that’s the only other way we’ll get rid of him.”

“Thanks for the character reference,” Cort retorted.

“Thanks for the warning,” Duran muttered and both Cort and Lia laughed, drawing a reluctant smile from him. “Fine, leave me a number and I’ll let you know when Noah’s released.”

Cort handed over a cell and home number and as it seemed to finish anything else they could say for now, an awkward silence intruded.

With a shift of his shoulders that telegraphed their shared uncertainty about where they should take this next, Cort finally spoke. “I should be going. You need to get back to your son and I need to get home to my family. I’ll talk to you, both of you—” he glanced at Lia “—soon.”

Duran waited until he’d gone and then by tacit agreement, he and Lia went back inside the room to check on Noah. He stood to one side while she bent over his sleeping son, not liking her frown when she finished taking his temperature again.

“It hasn’t come down much,” she said in answer to his pointed look. “We’ll monitor it for the next several hours, and if it doesn’t improve, then I’m going to start him on intravenous antibiotics. He may have had those before, if he’s had other infections.”

His eyes on Noah, Duran nodded. More hospital time, more treatments that would only buy a temporary respite, not the permanent answer Noah needed. “I should never have brought him along.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference. The infection’s been going on for a couple of days, at least, probably since before you left L.A., and it would have been worse for him if he’d been sick while you were gone. At least here you and Noah are together and you’ve got—” she looked lost for an appropriate word, settling on “—family you can rely on to help.”

“I’m not quite ready to consider them family and whether or not I can rely on them remains to be seen.”

“You can—rely on them, I mean. I’ve known four of them for years, and they’re all good guys.”

He noticed she deliberately avoided referring to them as his brothers, perhaps because of his comment wary of acknowledging a blood link between him and the others. “You don’t seem surprised to find out Garrett’s got two more sons.”

“Not really,” she said. “Jed’s five sons here were by four different women, and the oldest one he didn’t even acknowledge until a few months ago. I’d have been more surprised if it had turned out the five of them were the only children he fathered.”

Duran shook his head, not yet ready to learn any more about what was obviously a convoluted family tree. “Noah wants to meet them all. When I explained to him why I was coming here, that I had found out I had more family than just his grandparents, that’s all he could talk about.” He lightly stroked his hand over his son’s tousled hair. “He’s lonely, with just him and me, and because he’s been sick for so long. My ex-wife’s family decided that he and I didn’t exist after Amber left me. So the idea of having more family is exciting—to him. But he doesn’t have to think about the consequences.”

“That one of them might not be a match?”

“That they might not care about knowing him, or that it’s all temporary. We stay here for a while and then he never sees them again.”

Suddenly, Duran felt tired, drained by the emotional roller-coaster ride he’d been on for what seemed like years now. He heard himself, a damning echo in his head, admitting Noah was dying and all the fear, grief and worry he’d been shouldering alone for so many months welled up in him, tearing at his control.

Turning away from the sympathy in Lia’s eyes, he leaned his hands on the back of a chair, head bowed, struggling to regain his composure. There was a pause, a whisper of sound and then a gentle hand touched his shoulder.

“You’re doing everything you can,” she said softly.

“It hasn’t been enough so far, what if it isn’t enough now?”

“Then you keep trying. Because even if it isn’t enough, that’s all you can do.”

If it wasn’t enough, it would break him. There would be no compromises with his emotions, no comfort in telling himself he’d done his best. “I can’t let that happen,” he said, but instead of coming out as clear, hard resolve, it sounded desperate, already cracked with sorrow.

“Duran—” Lia reached around and laid her hand against his jaw, turning him to face her. Whatever she saw in his expression prompted her to abandon what she intended to say and before he understood, he was in her arms, she was holding him or he was holding her, and it didn’t matter because it had been so long since he shared the burden, that giving even a little of it up, for however short a time, was like being able to breathe again.

The moment stretched into many, into time he couldn’t measure, before the comfort she offered and he grasped at became too much to accept and he very carefully pulled out of her embrace. Still within touching distance, they stood looking at each other and for the first time, he saw her as a woman and not the doctor who’d stepped in to help a stranger in need. She was barely to his shoulder, on the thin side of slender, and there was a delicacy about her, as if she were finely made and vulnerable to the rigors of life. Her dark red hair was gilded with copper and gold in the dim light, her eyes an unusual shade of light brown. He might have, at first glance, dismissed her as merely decorative, with little substance, except he had felt the strength in her hands, seen the intelligence and empathy in her eyes, been touched by her warmth even when he thought himself immune.

She accepted his study for a minute or two and then dropped her eyes and took an uncertain step back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t be.” Duran resisted the urge to reach out to her, to reassure her that she’d misinterpreted his moving away from her; he’d been alone for so long it had become habit to throw up his defenses when he was most vulnerable. “I appreciate everything you’ve done so far. You’ve gone way out of your way to help us.”

“Yes, well, that is my job,” she said briskly. She avoided eye contact with him and busied herself taking Noah’s temperature again. “I’ll have the nurse check him again in a couple of hours. If there’s no change, then we’ll start the IV. But we’ll keep our fingers crossed he won’t need it this time. I’ll be back first thing in the morning, unless there’s a problem before then.”

For some reason, her determined return to professional detachment irritated him. It felt jarringly out of place, though by all rights, it shouldn’t have. “Does this mean I have to start calling you Dr. Kerrigan again?”

“You haven’t called me anything,” she said. A slight smile touched her mouth, bringing back a whisper of the warmth. “At least out loud.”

“Okay, Lia,” he said deliberately. “Then we’ll see you in the morning.”

This time the smile blossomed. “Count on it.”