The Italian Doctor's Mistress

“Signorina Blake, my apologies for not being here to meet you when you first arrived.”

He had a beautiful voice, deep and hypnotically soothing with its lilting Italian intonation. And beautiful hands. His long fingers closed around hers in a grip at once gentle and sure. Slightly dazed, Danielle allowed him to lead her to one of two club chairs situated at the other end of the room, next to a wall of windows looking out on a reflecting pool surrounded by rhododendrons already in full bloom.

“Thank you for seeing me now,” she said stiffly, horrified that, with her father so dreadfully ill, she could find herself drawn to this magnetic stranger. “I understand you’ve been busy.”

“Always, I’m afraid.” He took a seat in the other chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “No sooner is one emergency taken care of than another arises. But you are not here to listen to me complain.” His eyes, a deep velvety gray trimmed with indecently long lashes, surveyed her soberly. As for his mouth…! In terms of sheer sex appeal, nothing the latest Hollywood idol could offer came even close to it. “You wish to discuss your father’s condition, yes?”

She nodded, the gravity in his voice leaving her almost hyperventilating.

“You are familiar, of course, with what happened to him? How he came to be brought here?”

“No,” she said. “All I was told was that he’d had an accident and was badly hurt.”

“He was in the mountains, snow-boarding in an out-of-bounds area, and fell down a sheer rock face.”

Snow-boarding? She shook her head, stunned. How like her father to take up a sport better suited to someone a third his age, and to break the rules when he did so. But then, Alan Blake had always believed he was a law unto himself. “I had no idea he was in Italy, let alone that he had taken up snow-boarding.”

If Carlo Rossi was surprised that she knew so little of her father’s activities, he didn’t let it show. “I’m afraid he sustained a very serious head injury,” he said.

“How serious?”

“He fractured his skull.”

“Wasn’t he wearing a safety helmet?”

“I suspect not, although given the severity of his fall, I doubt a helmet would have helped very much. All skull fractures are cause for concern, signorina, but an occipital fracture such as your father suffered, is particularly critical.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of its location.” He reached for the pad of paper on the occasional table next to him, took a pen from the breast pocket of his tunic, and drew his chair closer to hers. “The skull is made up of several bones. The largest is the parietal bone here.” He sketched rapidly and with the fluid skill of one very familiar with his subject. “The occipital bone sits immediately below it, at the base of the skull. Fractures in this vulnerable area occur as the result of what we term a ‘high energy blunt trauma,’ and are divided into three types. The first two are classified as stable. A Type 111 fracture, however, is the most severe and potentially very unstable.”

“And that’s the kind my father has?”

“Sadly, yes.”

“Is that why he’s unconscious.”

“Yes. With such an injury, coma is the rule rather than the exception.” He paused and spared her a very direct look. “That’s not to say he won’t eventually come out of it…”

“I hear a ‘but,’ Dr. Rossi,” she said coolly. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He flexed his fingers and expelled a long breath. Regret intensified the fatigue in his eyes, and she knew in that moment that she had yet to hear the worst. “Because of the proximity of cranial nerves,” he said, “there’s a high incidence of associated injuries.”

With every carefully chosen word, he increased her level of fear. But she’d had a lifetime’s practice at keeping her emotions in check, and it stood her in good stead now. Projecting a calm she was far from feeling, she asked, “What kind of injuries?”

“Impaired swallowing, paralysis of the vocal cords with subsequent phonation difficulties. Hemiplegia, or even quadriplegia. In layman’s terms, Signorina Blake, if your father recovers consciousness, he may be paralyzed in much the same way that he would had he suffered a massive stroke. The paralysis could extend down one, or both sides of his body.”

Alan Blake, the man who prided himself on running a marathon at age fifty-five, paralyzed? Unable to dominate the conversation at his frequent, ultrasophisticated dinner parties? Incapable of controlling his bodily functions?

Horrified by the implications, and filled with pity for the father who’d have spared little for her had their situations been reversed, Danielle spoke without thought for how her words might be interpreted. “You should have let him die! He’d be better off!”

“By whose assessment, signorina?” Carlo Rossi asked, his gray eyes suddenly as glacial as his voice. “Yours, or his?”

He thought she was cold and unfeeling, that she spoke out of selfishness. But he didn’t know her father, and trying to explain Alan Blake to a stranger would merely sound as if she was making excuses for herself. “Let me put it this way, Dr. Rossi,” she said. “Would you want to be kept alive under such conditions, trapped in a body that refused to obey you?”

“My personal preferences are irrelevant. I am committed to saving lives, not ending them. In your father’s case, I am painting a very dark picture in order to prepare you for the worst possible outcome. But there remains the slender chance that he will make a full recovery.”

“How long before you’ll know?”

Carlo Rossi raised his beautiful hands, palms up. “That I cannot say.”

“Hazard a guess, Doctor. Another week? A month?”

“I don’t second-guess God. I deal only with what I know. He could open his eyes today, tomorrow, next week or …”

“Or never?”

“Or never.” He watched her in silence a moment, then said with thinly veiled contempt, “I recognize your impatience to be done with this, Signorina Blake. You cannot put your own life on hold indefinitely. You have obligations other than those of a daughter to her father—to a husband and children, perhaps.”

“No. I’m not married.”

He curled his lip in disgust. “A lover, then? A career?”

“A career, certainly. I own a travel agency.”

“Which clearly matters more to you than your father. Why else would you wait so long to come to his bedside?”

She sat up poker-straight in the chair, and returned his glance unflinchingly. “It just so happens, Dr. Rossi, that I was on a cruise to Antarctica when this tragedy struck my father.”

“Cruise ships do not have telephones, these days? No electronic means of keeping in touch with the rest of the world?”

“Of course they do, but in this instance your sarcasm is misplaced, Doctor,” she said sharply. “Had your hospital left a message with my office staff, they would have been in touch immediately, and I’d have been here as soon as it was humanly possible. But the message was left on my home answering machine, and since I live alone…” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

“We had no other recourse,” he replied. “That was the only telephone number listed on your father’s passport, in the event the next of kin needed to be contacted.”

He steepled his fingers and observed her silently for a second or two. Eventually, he said, “Signorina, I regret that we have—”

Before he could continue, the door burst open and a young girl, a beautiful child with long dark braids hanging down her back, came flying into the room. “Papà!” she cried. Then, seeing he was not alone, she skidded to a stop and clapped a hand to her mouth. “Mi scusi! La disturbo, Papà?”

“Yes,” he said severely in English. “And you know better than to come in here without knocking first.”

“Ma Beatrice non e—”

“Remember your manners, Anita. My visitor does not speak Italian.” He spared Danielle a brief glance. “I am right, yes? You do not?”

“A very little only, but don’t worry about that.” Danielle collected her purse and stood up. “We’re pretty much finished anyway, aren’t we?”

“No, signora, we are not quite done,” he said evenly. “Please allow me a moment to attend to the reason for this interruption, then you and I will resume our discussion.”