Taming the Playboy

God knew she’d tried to tell them, but they had laughed and hugged her, and told her not to worry. That she was just held captive by an overactive imagination. And her grandfather’s stories. Amos Schwarzwalden, her mother’s father, was visiting from Austria at the time and they left her with him.

And drove out of her life forever.

The accident happened at six-thirty that evening. It was a huge pileup on I-5 that made all the local papers and the evening news. Seven cars had plowed into one another after a drunk driver had lost control of his car. A semi had swerved to avoid hitting the careening vehicle—and wound up hitting the seven other cars instead.

Miraculously, there’d only been two casualties. Tragically, those two casualties had been her parents.

It was the first time Vienna could remember ever having one of those “feelings.”

After that, there were other times, other occasions where a sense of uneasiness warned her that something bad was going to happen. But the feeling never came at regular intervals or even often. It didn’t occur often enough for her grandfather, who was the only one she shared this feeling with, to think she had some sort of extraordinary power. She didn’t consider herself a seer or someone with “the sight” as those in the old country were wont to say.

But her “intuitions” occurred just often enough for her not to ignore them when they did happen. And even though they had not warned her of the car accident that had nearly stolen her grandfather from her, they now made her feel that if this man who had come to their rescue was not in the O.R. when her grandfather was being operated on, something very serious was going to happen. Something that would not allow her grandfather to be part of her life anymore.

Her eyes met Georges’ and she flashed a rueful smile that instantly took him captive.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound as if I was coming unhinged,” Vienna apologized, but all the same, she continued holding on to his arm. “But I really do feel very strongly about this,” she emphasized. “You have to be in the operating room with my grandfather.”

Georges could all but feel the urgency rippling through her, transmitting itself to him. The woman was dead serious. They were running out of time and as far as he knew, Patterson had still not been located.

“All right,” Georges agreed gently. “I’ll go talk to the surgeon.” Placing his hand over hers, he squeezed it lightly and gave her an encouraging smile. “You sit tight, all right?”

Vienna was barely aware of nodding her head. She forced a smile to her lips.

“All right,” she murmured. “And thank you. Again.”

He merely nodded and then hurried away.

In the locker room, he quickly changed into scrubs. As he closed the locker door, he felt as if he was getting a second wind. Or was that his third one? He wasn’t altogether sure. By all rights, at this point in his day—or night—he should have been dead on his feet, looking forward to nothing more than spending the rest of the night in a reclining position—as he’d planned with Diana.

Instead, as he headed to scrub in, he felt suddenly invigorated. Ready to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The prospect of facing a surgery always did that to him. It put him on his toes and, Georges found, instantly transformed him into the very best version of himself.

He all but burst into the area where the sinks were and after greeting the surgeon, began the laborious process of getting ready to perform the procedure—in double time.

Rob Schulman was carefully scrubbing the area between his fingers with a small scrub brush. Every surgeon had superstitions. Schulman’s was to use a new scrub brush for every surgery. He glanced over toward Georges.

He seemed mildly amused at the energy he witnessed in the other man.

“Someday, Georges, you’re going to have to tell me what kind of vitamins you’re on.” When Georges looked over toward him quizzically, he elaborated. “I saw you eight hours ago and they tell me that except for two hours, you’ve been here all this time. What kind of a deal with the devil did you make?” Schulman asked. He paused to rotate his neck. Several cracks were heard to echo through the small area. The surgical nurses, waiting their turn, exchanged smiles. “Why is it you’re not falling on your face?”

“I scheduled that for after the surgery,” Georges replied with an easy air that hid the electrical current all but racing through him. Done, he gave his hands another once-over, just in case. “I want to thank you for letting me scrub in.”

Schulman laughed softly to himself, the high-pitched sound incongruous with man’s considerable bulk. “You’re welcome, but this time, it’s more of a matter of supply and demand, Georges. Murphy told me that they can’t find another assistant in time.”

They could have opted to wait. Or, in an emergency, Murphy could have scrubbed in. Carefree to a fault, Georges still knew better than to take anything for granted. He inclined his head toward the senior internal surgeon. “I’ll take what I can get.”

Schulman concentrated on his nail beds, scrubbing hard. “They tell me you brought him in.” He raised his brown eyes toward Georges for a second. “Hunting down your own patients these days?”

Georges pretended he hadn’t heard that line twice already this evening and flashed an easy smile at the man.

“I was on Pacific Coast Highway,” he told Schulman “The accident happened right behind me.”

“Lucky for the driver you were there,” Schulman commented. Finished, he leaned his elbow against the metal faucet handles and turned off the water. Bracing himself, he looked toward the swinging double doors that led into the operating room. “All right, let’s see if I can keep that luck going.”

Georges nodded. Finished with his own preparations for the surgery, he followed Schulman into the O.R., his own hands raised and ready to have surgical gloves slipped over them.

An eerie feeling passed over him the moment he’d said the words. Exactly one moment after he had pointed out to Schulman that an artery the latter had cauterized wasn’t, in fact, completely sealed.

With the old man’s organs all vying for space, it had been an easy matter to miss the slow seepage. The surgeon was focused on what he was doing, removing the spleen and resectioning the liver by removing a small, damaged portion no more than the size of a quarter. As all this went on—not to mention the presence of various instruments, suction tubes and clamps within the small area—the tiny bit of oozing had almost been overlooked. Would have been overlooked had something not caught his eye in that region.