Healing Her Heart, page 1
Healing Her Heart
Norfolk Medical
Book 1
Eliza Ellis
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. The reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, without the express written consent of the author constitutes a copyright violation.
HEALING HER HEART
NORFOLK MEDICAL 1
2nd Edition Copyright © 2023 Eliza Ellis
Cover Art Designed by Mayhem Originals
Original Copyright “Splint” © 2019 by Eliza Ellis
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Thank you to these patrons for making this book possible.
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Brittany
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
About the Author
Chapter 1
Samantha Clark glanced over to her portfolio and fingered the folder holding her hiring documents for the fourth time that morning. Sam pressed the button to circulate the air in her car as the smog from the surrounding cars drifted in, turning her stomach. The digital clock on her car’s dash flashed a new number, subtracting what time remained until the start of her first shift. She had forgotten about the morning rush.
Sam reached over to her portfolio again when a semi in the southbound lane dragged her attention away. She watched in horror as the beast of a vehicle bounced over the concrete medium and crashed into the minivan, not five cars ahead of her. Air siphoned from her lungs at the impact. The collision and grinding of metal sounded worse than a thousand fingers down a chalkboard. The family vehicle didn’t retard the progress of the death-on-sixteen-wheels, and it continued to bulldoze its way through the lanes, smashing into cars like any good action movie sequence.
Car brakes screeched to avoid a collision with the body of the truck, only to be propelled forward by vehicles behind that didn’t stop in time. Sam used both feet to slam her pedal into the floorboard, missing the bumper of the car in front of her by mere inches.
A sigh was half out of her mouth when her body jerked forward, and then the airbag slammed her back into the seat. So much for avoiding the bumper. Sam groaned, one hand going to her neck while the other sought to be a barrier between her face and the heat of the airbag. She punched down the bag until air filtered between herself and the hot balloon.
Instinctively, she put her car into park and reached for her keys. Then she realized her eyes, were pinned shut, anticipating the pain of whiplash. She swallowed, ignoring the twinge of pain at the base of her skull that would throb later. She pried her lids open, her gaze going to her rearview mirror. The driver behind her seemed dazed, beating at the airbag in front of her.
Idiot. Didn’t you see the truck? Why didn’t you stop? Probably because she was watching the truck. Ugh. Sam undid her seatbelt, grabbed her phone and medical bag from the passenger seat, and opened her car door. Stiffness traveled across her neck; she groaned and began massaging it with one hand. Until paramedics arrived on the scene, people would need her skills as a nurse. She had to focus on them and not her own pain. All ten fingers and ten toes still worked, and she didn’t have any broken limbs, so it was time for her to get to work.
The passenger door to the truck opened, and a man hopped out onto one of the crushed cars. Was that the driver? Where was he going? Sam slid over the hood of her car, unable to walk around it with the bumper being molded into the car in front. She watched the man jog around a few cars.
“Hey!” she called out to him. He stopped short, and turned in her direction, only enough for Sam to see the tattoo of a lion stretching down the entire left side of his neck and across his lower jaw. “Hey!” she cried out again. Could he hear her over the shouts and honking horns?
The truck exploded, a wall of impenetrable heat blasting her back several feet. Sam landed hard on the concrete, the tender flesh of her elbows tearing, the pads of her hands serrated as she braced for the impact. Her arm shielded her face from further heat. At the edges of the explosive sound, Sam could hear screams and wailing. She blinked against the searing smoke. Her lungs burned as she inhaled.
Rolling onto her stomach, she forced her legs to work, and she made it to her feet. No driver. If she was knocked over by the blast, then he must’ve been thrown several feet. She stumbled to the car behind her. Once she had determined the woman driving didn’t have any major injuries, she rushed toward the inferno.
Home sweet home.
Was it a coincidence that the first thing she’d do on her return to the sleepy coastal town of Norfolk, Virginia, was to be involved in a traumatic accident? She’d only been taking classes online for her trauma nurse certification, waiting to receive practical experience. That’s what Norfolk Medical’s trauma center is for: to teach me. Well, nothing like a little field training. What could be more traumatic than being blown up?
All around her, pockets of fire and huge clusters of debris made an obstacle course that would’ve required physical endurance and strength training prior to completion. Sam didn’t have the time to practice. People needed her now—even if she hadn’t trained in trauma either.
The first person she reached had no legs and was unconscious, his pulse slowing. With only one tourniquet in her bag, she looked frantically for something to stem the bleeding from the other leg and found jackets and blankets in a nearby car. Reaching through shattered glass, she snagged the blankets on a ragged shard of glass. She could make strips and—
“Help! Help!” a woman cried from a car to her right. “Please! My baby!”
The front of the car was crushed by another car, and the woman appeared trapped, but her baby girl in the backseat looked okay, by her wailing.
“Hold on!” Sam cried, and she went back to the man without legs. “Sir?” He opened his eyes, his expression vacant. He had expired. She swiftly undid her tourniquet.
Sam rushed back to the other car, passing by disoriented and injured people. The sounds of sirens in the distance calmed her erratic pulse. She’d never been so happy to hear the lifesaving sounds of arriving emergency personnel. Adrenaline still high, she ran to the side of the car with the child in it, and her heart plummeted. A young woman in the front seat bled profusely from a wound to her side.
“Please.” The woman’s voice sounded faint and croaky. “I’m dying. Please get her out. Aria…”
Aria cried, her hands red, blood smeared across her forehead. Poor child was covered in shards. The explosion must’ve shattered the windows of the car and cut her.
Sam wrenched the door open and quickly unbuckled the child.
“Please don’t let her forget me. My…my phone.”
Before pulling the child out, Sam spotted a cellphone on the floor.
“Aria…password. My husband…”
“I won’t let her forget. I’ll tell him,” Sam said quickly before the woman slumped over.
Sam’s eyes burned with anger and grief. She’d seen death a number of times. But this was different. Trauma death was even more shocking to the senses. An even greater sense of helplessness, even being a nurse.
Sam pulled the sobbing child out, tucked the cell into her back pocket, and ran to the next injured person she saw. A man stood with his left arm hanging by a few shreds.
“I…I…” He held his arm up, shaking.
“Sir, you’re in shock. I’m a nurse. I can help.” She set Aria down between them, and the child clung to her legs as Sam wrapped his arm creating a sling. She guided the man to sit down in the back of his car. “The ambulance is on its way. Hang tight, okay?”
Firefighters watered the flaming truck and cars while paramedics fanned in between the cars to the injured. Sam picked up Aria and turned, signaling one of the paramedics.
“Please don’t leave me,” the man pleaded, grasping at her red and blue plaid shirt and nearly popping the buttons in the front.
“Okay, okay, okay.” Sam backed up. “I won’t leave you.”
The man nodded and loosened his grip. He closed his eyes. His mouth hung open as he panted. “Thank you.”
As a fireman ran over he called out, “You’ve got to get out of here!
Sam was immediately struck by the man’s square jaw and deep voice. “Tony?” The fireman’s helmet was low over his forehead, but the blue eyes were the same slant as her mother’s. Of all places to meet her brother after so many years. He would be responding to a major accident.
“Samantha?” Tony cried, his eyes going wide with recognition. “What the devil?” The brief look of shock and happiness was quickly replaced with stern professionalism. “You’ve got to get out of here.”
“I can’t leave him,” she said, pointing to the man on the ground.
Tony glanced at the man and frowned. “These cars could blow any moment.”
Suddenly focused on the vehicles, Sam saw rising smoke thicken and liquid pouring out onto the ground. Oh, no!
Tony reached down, wrapped an arm around the man’s back and underneath his injured arm, and pulled him from the car. The man hollered in pain. “If we don’t move now, we’re dead.”
Chapter 2
This happens when you don’t have an intern, Dr. Huxley Armstrong mused as he stood in the supply closet with hands on his hips. He had no idea where the gloves were, had used his last spare pair, and the nurses were overloaded with their duties and couldn't keep up with replacing boxes at each bed. Charts waited for him to review but he was in a closet, reduced to getting what he needed, instead of sending a wild-haired, eager intern wound tight on caffeine to do all of his work.
Had he been spoiled now that he was far-removed from his residency days running after attending physicians and getting them coffee? Consider him humbled. Not knowing where things were wasted time and some patients didn't have much time left. Before I leave, I need to replace all the empty boxes.
In six months, the trauma center had gone through several interns, with all of them quitting within a couple of weeks. They couldn’t keep one around and he was getting blamed for the turnover rate. Something about his teaching style—or lack thereof. The ripple effects of their leaving had him standing here ignorant of supply closet organization.
Why couldn’t they hire a certified trauma nurse? There wasn’t a single one in the entire country that wanted to work for Virginia’s elite level one trauma center? He would ask to review the job description posting. Something had to be scaring nurses away from a prime location in the Old Dominion, nestled between the gorgeous Elizabeth River and the Chesapeake Bay. The Atlantic Ocean wasn't a far drive and the beaches clean and inviting.
He’d made a mistake with the last intern he trained. For years, he’d been immune to falling for his coworkers. Extrication was too messy. Working with one another awkward.
Then he’d met Diana.
All of his walls, rules, and protestations were useless against her large blue eyes and infectious laugh. The toss of her dark hair and command use of feminine charms. His ego was on such a high from her he had done the stupidest thing known to man: propose.
“Are you just going to stand there and stare all day? Don’t you know what you want?”
Speaking of stupid mistakes. Without turning around, he recognized the voice of the one-night stand that wouldn’t slink away in the morning. Maybe because it was more than once. Shame on him. “I know what I want, Jo,” he said tightly. And it’s not you.
Dr. Joanna Brook chuckled behind him. Then he heard the undeniable click of the door shutting. Huck suppressed a groan.
This is how it started the last time. Caught in a supply closet. Her perfume enveloping him in a witchcraft-like haze. Him wishing he had a counterspell.
He had been exhausted after a twenty-four-hour shift that ended with a ten-hour surgery. If he’d gotten that nap in before the operation, as he had planned, then his judgment wouldn’t have been impaired.
Instead, she had smiled, giggled about something, and feigned a trip that had crushed her ample chest onto his, and his hands were lifting her legs, carrying her to an obliging wall.
“I think this has been reorganized,” Huck said in defense. Just pick something and get out!
Jo snorted. “No, it hasn’t.”
“Found it!” Huck snatched the nearest thing—a package of gauze—and stuffed it into the pocket of his white doctor coat before she could see and challenge him. He passed Jo without giving her a look and rushed out of the room. As soon as he exited that impending torture chamber, the disapproving glare of Nurse Pritchard confronted him. Huck’s lips sagged as he met her at the nurses station. “Don't start.”
“What are you doing?” she hissed. “Can’t you leave that poor woman alone?”
“Poor woman?” Huck scoffed.
“You know she's in love with you.”
“Nurse Pritchard, I don't think she understands the meaning of the word." He did. If she were in love, she had a strange way of showing it, trapping him in closets. "You’re well aware of Jo’s reputation. She makes her own choices.”
Nurse Pritchard harrumphed, crossing her arms. “She doesn’t need your help.”
Huck held a hand up in defense. “Never again, believe me.” It’s not like Jo wasn’t a nice girl; she was. She just wasn’t Diana.
Diana’s rejection was his lowest point since leaving Afghanistan. The best solution he’d found to melancholy was a jolt of serotonin, courtesy of a beautiful woman. And Jo was beautiful and built. But she was also clingy, insecure, and a hopeless romantic who continued to misinterpret a one-night stand. It would not lead to a proposal. Rejection had soured his view on marriage and erected a fortress around his heart.
He would never fall in love again.
Nurse Pritchard let a sigh drop from her thin lips. She relaxed her boxy shoulders and uncrossed her arms. “Okay, Huck. But I don’t want to catch you two in that closet alone again, do you hear me? You’re already on thin ice with the chief.”
That was true. If he wanted to be promoted to head trauma surgeon, he’d have to keep his nose clean—and he had, for a little while. Now if the outgoing surgeon would just leave and recommend him. The more days passed without an announcement, the antsier Huck got. But he wasn’t about to let anyone know that. Huck grinned and winked. “What are you? My mother?”
“Your mother should’ve boxed your ears more. To keep that ego of yours in check.”
Huck laughed. “Believe me, she did that plenty. Didn't help much.” He rubbed at his ears. “See? They’re pretty flat against my head.”
Nurse Pritchard’s lips twisted into a wry grin. “I’m sure there’s something else that can get boxed.”
Huck blinked with feigned innocence. “Nurse Pritchard, are you coming on to me?”
She snatched a folder from her desk and whacked him over the head. Huck roared with laughter.
“I would never!”
“How disappointing for the both of us.”
“Hey! Have you two seen the news?” Nurse Melanie raced up to the desk and grabbed the remote. Pointing it at the television, she raised the volume, and the typical voice of a reporter detailed the harrowing image on the screen.
Jo had exited the supply closet and clustered near the station where everyone watched the devastating scene unfold from the viewpoint of the news chopper. A massive car pileup only several miles from Norfolk Medical meant trauma victims would arrive in minutes.
Huck smiled.
“Stop your grinning. This is a tragedy!” Nurse Pritchard screeched. Even Jo looked at him like he was a lunatic.
Work and play had gotten him through the last six months without Diana. And given the number of cars that were on fire or smashed to pieces, there would be a lot of work for him to do in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, enough to convince the chief to promote him to Head of Trauma. Chief said he’d have to prove he could handle the extra responsibility.
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