Buch lesen: «The Sergeant's Secret Son»

Chapter One

Impatient because the situation was urgent, Dr. Macy Jackson made her way slowly and laboriously though the dark and ravaged streets of Lyndonville, South Carolina. She was horrified at the damage the tornado had done, and as she approached the epicenter of the devastation, she steeled herself for what else she might discover.

The streets were strewn with fallen trees and branches and other debris she could only guess about. Many of the roads were impassable, and she’d had difficulty making her way through. Every time she’d found one clear street, it would lead to another dead end. The destruction she encountered in the beams of her headlights was chilling.

And she hadn’t yet reached the site of the real disaster.

Finally, she reached Faron’s Trailer Park, which had sustained a direct hit from the tornado, and her heart broke at the sight she found. In the flickering lightning from the departing storm, she could see that trailers were overturned, twisted and flattened like tin cans for the recycling bin. Fires raged from broken gas tanks, and firefighters were doing what they could to put them out. How could anyone have survived this?

A siren blipped as Macy climbed out of her car and as the damp air hit her face, she felt the cold and the rain, and she smelled the acrid odor of fire and fear. She looked to where a sheriff’s department cruiser flashed its blue lights. In the meager illumination of the headlights, Macy could see several victims huddling or stretched out on the littered ground.

She felt a flicker of unease as she approached the cruiser, then stood bathed in the flashing blue light, but she shook it away. Maybe it was a throwback to her childhood when a black child was always under suspicion, even one as light-skinned as she. Then her attention was drawn back to the devastation.

Spotlighted by the occasional flicker of lightning and flames, a huge man, the color of polished mahogany, bare-chested, magnificently muscled, and wet in the sporadic rain, ripped at the torn and shredded metal of what was once a mobile home. The only part of him that didn’t seem to be shining in the flickering light was his short hair. In the red-and-blue glow of the fires and police lights, he looked almost diabolic, but Macy sensed that he was one of the good guys. As Macy watched, the man pulled a small bundle from the shredded mess.

Something, she didn’t know what, had drawn her attention to the powerful man working so hard in the rubble. “Who is that?” Macy asked the sheriff’s deputy, as the huge man waded purposefully through the debris carrying what looked like a pile of rags.

“Don’t know,” the deputy said. “Claimed he’d had rescue and first-aid training, and at the time, he was all we had.”

“Thank goodness he was here to help,” Macy said as she leaned over the first of her patients. It looked as though she would have a long night’s work ahead of her.

“I think this is the last victim from the trailers,” a deep voice grunted as he lowered a trembling and rain-soaked little girl to the ground beside Macy.

Macy cast a startled sideways glance at the speaker and discovered the man she’d been admiring was none other than Alex Blocker. The man she had hoped she’d never see again, though she’d longed for him in her dreams, loomed, broad-shouldered and capable, above her. Now she knew why she’d been so attracted to him. This was the man with whom she’d made both the worst and the best mistake of her life.

“I’ve had enough first-aid training that I can help out with triage,” he said tersely as he tried to make the child comfortable on the wet, cold ground. “Her name is Leticia. She’s probably all right. She’s wet and cold and scared, but I didn’t find any obvious trauma.”

He didn’t act as though he recognized her, but then, maybe he was feeling just as awkward about this meeting as she was. Deciding to plunge right in, Macy took the first step. “Thank you, Alex,” she said, looking into his deep, dark brown eyes.

Suddenly recognition dawned in his eyes, and his face lit up for a brief instant. Then the cool, calm, rescuer facade returned. “Hello, Macy,” he said slowly. “I see you finally made it through medical school.”

“Yes.” Macy nodded. “I’d love to catch up, but we’ve got a long night ahead of us, and Leticia needs attention now. She might have internal injuries,” she said, under her breath so that only Alex could hear. “We’ll have to watch her.” She looked around. “Where are her parents?”

Alex jerked his head in the direction of a distraught woman huddled over a mound covered by a tattered sheet. “That’s her folks. I think you can tell what the sheet is covering without me having to spell it out in front of the k-i-d. She’s traumatized enough as it is.”

Macy swallowed a lump in her throat when she saw the debris and the devastation. She’d known there would be casualties, but she’d hoped that there would be no deaths. Now that her worst fears had been realized, she could do nothing but help the living.

Macy had never met Leticia Haley’s father, but she knew both Leticia and her mother from her clinic. Macy swallowed again and averted her eyes. As much as she was saddened by Mr. Haley’s death, she didn’t have time to deal with that now.

She drew in a deep breath and turned to Alex.

He hunkered down beside her. “The worst cases are closest to the cruiser. I figured you’d need more light to attend to them.”

“Good thinking,” Macy said without taking her eyes, filled with unshed tears, off her patient. Although she wanted to stop and look at Alex, his broad chest glistening with rain and perspiration, she knew that Leticia needed her full attention. She gave the child a reassuring smile.

Alex touched Macy’s face and turned her chin up to look at him. He drew her into his arms and folded her into an embrace. How warm and gentle Alex’s touch was, even with hands that were hard and calloused, and how much Macy needed it. A tingle of awareness shuddered through her as Alex inclined his head toward the headlights focused on the victims.

“We’ll get through this,” he said gently, letting her go. Then he stepped away and started clearing more debris to make an open area. He glanced over his shoulder. “So Medevac can land,” he explained, then went back to work.

Macy glanced back at him once more; she longed to watch the play of Alex’s muscles as he worked, but she directed her attention to the most seriously injured. At least, most of her attention. It was hard not to look at Alex when all she wanted was to drink in the sight of him after all those years.

Even if he could mean big trouble, Macy couldn’t help wondering what might have been. No, she had work to do now. Thinking or worrying about Alex would have to wait. Besides, he’d made it perfectly clear five years ago that he was not interested in her.

If he had been, five years would not have passed before she saw him again.

But he had been right on the money with all his triage decisions, Macy realized with appreciation as she looked over her patients. There were only two serious cases: a head trauma and a possible spinal-cord injury. She did what she could to stabilize them until they could be evacuated to hospitals in Florence or Columbia. She just hoped that more help would get there soon.

The remaining victims needed splints and bandaging, and some only needed shelter and something warm to drink. She could probably treat them at the clinic, she thought. Lord, she didn’t know if she still had a clinic in the aftermath of the storm.

“Anybody know if the clinic made it through?” she asked, dreading what she might learn.

No one had an answer.

Another cruiser pulled up. Sheriff MacEachern left the engine running and the lights on, but he stepped out of the car. He scanned the devastation, ducking as a propane tank from a gas grill exploded on the other side of the trailer park, adding more orange light to the hellish scene. Then he moved over to Macy. “A medical evacuation team is on its way. It shouldn’t be long,” he said, squatting to be closer to where Macy knelt over one of her patients.

“How long?” Macy demanded, her heart still pounding like a wild drum solo from the exploding tank. “I have two here that need more specialized treatment than I can give. The rest I can treat at the clinic.” She glanced up at the sheriff. “Assuming I still have a clinic.”

“Clinic’s fine,” the sheriff assured her. “Some minor damage, but the generator is on, and the equipment is functioning. One of your nurses is there. She’s started giving first aid to walk-ins. I reckon we’ll have the roads cleared between here and there by the time the chopper makes it.”

As if to underscore the sheriff’s statement, a helicopter swooped out of the roiling clouds. The reassuring whump of the helicopter’s rotors was music to Macy’s ears. MacEachern grinned. “See? The cavalry to the rescue.”

Macy issued a silent prayer of thanks for the helicopter’s arrival. “Amen to that,” she said over the roar of the approaching helicopter. She turned back to her patient. It was hard to monitor a comatose patient with no equipment, so the helicopter was a chariot of hope sent from heaven.

Macy watched in amazement as Alex waved the chopper in with flashlights. He seemed to actually know what he was doing.

Damp air swirled around them, stirring up the water from puddles and drenching everyone with the chilly spray. Macy shivered.

The sheriff, still in crouch position, moved away toward the helicopter as it settled onto the open space that Alex had cleared.

“As soon as we get these two priorities attended to, I’d like to try to move this operation to the clinic,” Macy said to no one in particular. Then she was too busy to worry about what the sheriff or Alex were doing.

“WELCOME HOME, Block,” Air Force Senior Master Sergeant Alex Blocker muttered to himself as he watched the chopper lift off with the most badly injured of Macy Jackson’s patients.

He’d dreaded coming home to Lyndonville, and so far, his homecoming hadn’t been all that great. That was an understatement! He’d barely gotten settled into the spare room at Gramma’s house when the tornado sirens had gone off. He’d hustled Gramma Willadean into her storm cellar, and they’d waited for the all-clear signal. As soon as he’d heard it, he’d taken off to see where he could help.

He was combining leave with an official trip to interview for a recruiting position in Florence, South Carolina. While he was here, he would attend Willadean Blocker’s seventy-fifth birthday celebration. He had mixed emotions about returning to Lyndonville, the town he’d seen as a dead end and had left as soon as he was old enough. But now it looked as if life were throwing him a curve. If he took that job in Florence, he’d be almost next door to Lyndonville.

Though the docs had patched up the knee he’d torn while saving the life of one of his teammates—Ski Warsinski’s parachute had malfunctioned at three thousand feet over Hurlburt Field, Florida—it was no longer sound enough for him to land on in a parachute jump. Jumping had been a big part of his job as a member of Silver team, one of the elite special operations branches of his combat control squadron. He’d worked hard to be the best of the best, and now that was over. He could take the recruiting position long enough to retire with a pension, or he could leave the air force now and blow everything he’d worked for.

If you asked him, it wasn’t much of a choice.

Still, he had more important things to think about now. There was a helluva mess to clean up here in Lyndonville. He glanced over to where Macy was herding some of her patients to her car. Just looking at her had stirred up old emotions and passions, and he was glad that it was dark and he was alone at the moment.

He pushed a memory of twisted sheets and hot sweaty bodies out of his mind and turned back to the business of cleaning up the storm damage.

Macy turned, the car door open, and directed a tentative wave toward him. Block mustered a tired smile that was probably more of a grimace, and waved back. Then Macy got into the car and drove away.

IT SEEMED as if days had passed, but it had only been hours of grueling labor. Block was glad for the work. With a borrowed chainsaw, he had cleared a forest of fallen tree limbs from roads, and now cars and trucks had begun to pass by slowly.

Block stopped for a break. As warm as he had been while he was working, the chilly autumn breeze from the encroaching cold front cooled his heated bare skin and caused it to break out in gooseflesh. He gulped down a soda and then helped himself to hot coffee that had miraculously appeared as neighbor after neighbor had come out of their homes or shelters and had set about making the world right again.

Or as close as it could get, considering.

He leaned against his rented SUV parked in front of a drugstore in a little strip mall and looked around, wondering where he could help next. There was still too much devastation and it was too long until dawn for him to think about going back to Gramma’s. And there was still lots of work remaining.

Now that he’d slowed down, Block realized that he was dead tired. He’d spent enough sleepless nights as a combat controller to be used to them, but he figured some of the volunteers, people like Macy, weren’t.

He wondered briefly how Macy was doing in her clinic and how many patients she must be seeing, but tried to push her out of his thoughts. For now, there was plenty for him to do—even if his bum leg was starting to hurt like hell.

He guessed he’d have plenty of time to baby his sore knee soon enough: either as an unemployed civilian or as a recruiter. Didn’t much matter which. Wasn’t much occasion for either one of those to be called out in the middle of the night and work for days on end without sleep. Maybe getting medicaled out of combat control wasn’t such a bad deal after all.

No, it was a terrible deal. Everything he’d strived to achieve was tied up in being a combat controller. He’d worked his tail off to be one of the best. Even though he’d managed to earn a degree in aviation management, he was too damned old to have to start back at the bottom at some other job. And there wasn’t an airport here, anyway.

“Hey, is that your SUV?”

He looked up, startled that he’d been so deep in his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the man come up to him. “Yeah. It’s mine.”

“Do you know where Doc Jackson’s clinic is?”

Block shook his head. “But I could find it.”

“Doc Jackson needs some supplies over there, and I don’t have a way to get to her.” The man nodded toward a car half-buried under the branches of a fallen tree and shrugged.

“I can get the stuff to Dr. Jackson,” Block allowed.

The man grinned wider than a jack-o’-lantern. “Oh man, you are a lifesaver. You know where old Doc Cranston’s office was?”

Block nodded. They’d never been able to afford to go to Dr. Cranston, but everybody in Lyndonville knew where his office was.

“Let me get a dry shirt out of my car, and I’ll be glad to ferry your supplies over.”

While Block wiped himself off with the wet shirt, the man scurried inside. Soon he returned with several boxes full of supplies.

Block opened the back hatch and pulled out a dry air force sweatshirt and pulled it over his head. Then he turned to the man.

Taking the boxes, Block said, “I’m sure Dr. Jackson will appreciate this stuff.”

And he’d appreciate another chance to see Macy.

RUEING THE FACT that she’d sent her nurse home to be with her own family during a break in the action, Macy leaned back in the swivel chair behind the reception counter. She was so tired she could barely see straight. Every time she thought she had seen the end of the stream of injured coming into the clinic, another surge of patients would find its way to her. For the moment, the waiting room was empty and Macy took advantage of the calm. She closed her eyes, propped her feet up on a stool and tried to will herself another ration of energy.

Apparently, sheer will wasn’t enough.

The door creaked open, but Macy was too fatigued to jump up. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she murmured wearily as she rubbed her tired eyes.

Warm strong hands massaged her shoulders, and as startled as she was to find them there, Macy couldn’t resist the respite from her aches and pains. She arched her back closer to the reviving action of the unknown hands. “I don’t know who you are, but if you’re single, will you marry me?” she murmured as she melted beneath the man’s strong fingers.

“Well, that’s the best offer I’ve had all night.”

Macy jerked away from the wonderful strong hands. “Alex?” she squeaked. “What are you doing here?”

“A guy from the drugstore over near Faron’s Trailer Park sent me with a load of supplies.”

“So you volunteered?” she asked dryly as she tried to compose herself. She poked several strands of runaway hair back behind her ears and smoothed the front of her white lab coat. Alex was here in beautiful, glorious, living color. Too bad he’d covered those magnificent muscles with a sweatshirt. A surge of adrenaline rushed through her—or maybe it was lust—and Macy found herself gaining her second wind.

“No, I was drafted.”

She tried to conceal her confused emotions from Alex as she lowered her feet from the stool and blinked up at him.

Her heart was racing, and Macy heard a roaring in her ears. She hoped it was from exhaustion and not a sexual reaction to Alex Blocker standing there in her clinic. No, that couldn’t be. Macy Jackson didn’t have reactions like that. And had she really asked him to marry her? She almost groaned with embarrassment.

Everybody knew that Macy had more important things to do with her life than fool around with men. There had been that one exception five years ago with Alex. And she didn’t like thinking about it most of the time.

With Alex back in town, she’d have a hard time forgetting.

While she’d been woolgathering, Alex had gone back outside and retrieved the supplies. He reappeared in the doorway. “This stuff is heavy. Where do you want me to put it?”

Macy felt her face grow warm. Here she was having hot flashes about Alex, and he was standing there with his arms full of boxes. “I’m sorry,” she finally managed. “I’m so tired tonight, I can barely think.” It was a better excuse than the real one.

She was going to have to come to terms with their one little lapse from reality five years ago when she’d allowed herself to think they might have started something. No, she had to keep her mind on the task at hand. She’d have plenty of time to revisit her one night with Alex later.

She just wished it hadn’t happened. No, she didn’t. For one very wonderful thing had come out of that. And now that Alex was here, she was going to have to deal with the results of that night. And so was Alex, even if he didn’t know about it. Yet.

She pushed herself up from the chair. “I guess I should see what you’ve got. We’re in a lull right now, but it won’t last long if the last few hours are any indication. I’d better get as much put away as I can before I get another flood of patients.”

“Just show me where.”

Trying to ignore the sparks of attraction practically snapping between them, Macy peered into the top box in Alex’s muscular arms. “Those look like first-aid supplies. I suppose I should leave them out right where I can get to them,” she said, thinking out loud. “Pretty much all my patients tonight have been broken bones and lacerations.” She showed Alex to one of the two examining rooms.

Alex lowered the boxes to the floor near the exam table. “You want me to divvy this stuff up so you’ll have some in each room?”

Why hadn’t she thought of that? Was she really that exhausted, or did Alex’s mere presence keep her from thinking clearly? It had to be a little of both. “That’s a great idea,” she finally said. Alex didn’t comment on her delayed response, but went straight to work.

Grateful that Alex was distracted from her for the moment, Macy turned to one of the other boxes. These, too, could be divided up between the two examining rooms. Trying to ignore Alex’s too-charismatic presence, she concentrated on putting everything away.

“I assume your place is okay,” Alex said, trying to ease the heavy blanket of tension that had settled over them, after they’d worked for a while. “I hear the new part of town where all the town houses and apartments are wasn’t in the tornado’s path.” He assumed that Macy had set up house in one of the new, upscale neighborhoods rather than in an old one.

“Everything’s fine. Some limbs and a few trees down, but the tornado missed us.” Macy had been chagrined to realize that, at first, she’d thought the damage in her neighborhood was terrible before she’d seen what was left of the trailer park.

Alex started to say something, but the clinic door swung open.

“Dr. Jackson, I need your help outside,” a middle-aged man shouted frantically. “My son is hurt. Bad.”

Macy hurried outside to find a woman hovering over a boy, his face white with pain, stretched out in the back of a battered pickup truck. A strong gust of wind whistled through the pines overhead, showering everyone with cold drops of water, and Macy shivered with the unexpected drenching. “We have to get him inside.”

She leaned over the side of the truck and spoke to the boy, not one of her regular patients.

Alex stepped up behind her. “Do you have a backboard?” he asked quietly, his warm breath sending shivers of delight skimming down Macy’s spine.

It surprised her that he seemed to know instinctively what she suspected. The boy could have a back injury, and any wrong move could cause the damage to be more severe. She had to think. “Yes, in the storage area.”

Alex turned to go get it, and Macy climbed into the bed of the truck to get a better look at her patient.

A quick examination showed that the backboard was probably not necessary, but it would make the boy more comfortable when they moved him inside.

The technician who usually helped with the portable X-ray machine hadn’t made it in, so she was going to have to do everything herself. At least Alex knew something about first aid. She’d enlist his help, as long as his presence wasn’t too distracting.

“I’m not going to be able to do much for him here,” Macy told the boy’s parents while she waited for Alex to return with the backboard. “But I can make him more comfortable until we can get him to the hospital in Florence.”

The man nodded, apparently relieved that something could be done. “What can I do?”

“When Alex gets back with the backboard you can help carry your son in. In the meantime, I’m going to try to call the hospital in Florence and see if they can send an ambulance out to pick him up. Otherwise, you may have to get him there yourself.”

For now, she would do what she could.

BLOCK WATCHED as the ambulance pulled out of the parking lot of the small clinic, and he glanced at Macy. She had to be dog tired. He could see in the slump of her shoulders that whatever reserve of energy she’d been operating with was long gone. Her face was drawn, and dark smudges rimmed her eyes. Her curly chestnut hair, once pinned into a tidy ball, had long since escaped from its constraints and tumbled loose and wild around her shoulders. She sagged against the doorjamb, and Block wondered if that was the only thing that kept her from collapsing.

“Come inside,” he said, taking her fine-boned hand and trying to forget the sparks he felt every time he touched her. Her fingers were cold, and her grip was weak.

She nodded, but seemed not to have the energy to speak as she followed him into the clinic.

“You’re limping,” she said, seeming to have suddenly come awake.

“No, I’m not.” Damn. He hadn’t wanted her to notice.

“Yes, you are. Come here. Let me see.”

Block blew out a long exasperated breath. The last thing he needed was to have her touching him, feeling him, setting him on fire. “It’s just an old injury that’s been slow to heal. And it always bothers me when it rains.”

“Then more reason that I should take a look at it,” she said, brooking no nonsense. “You could’ve reinjured it.”

“It healed the first time. It’ll heal again.”

“No, it won’t. Take off your pants,” she said in a whiskey-sour voice that would have seemed sultry in different circumstances.

“Excuse me?” Just listening to the innocent command in that come-hither voice had a part of his body that shouldn’t be awake standing at full attention.

“Oh, puh-lease. I can’t examine your leg if you don’t let me look at it. I’m fully familiar with male anatomy,” she said primly. “I won’t swoon.”

Yeah, but maybe he would, Block couldn’t help thinking. Finally realizing that he didn’t want to aggravate his injured knee further, he gave in. “I’ll just go in the examining room and get ready for you. Okay?”

“Fine. I’ll get the portable X-ray machine ready.” She turned and left him to undress.

Block kicked off his boots and pulled out of his wet jeans as quickly as he could. He looked around for one of those sheets they used as drapes in an exam room, found one, and wrapped it around him. He could care less if Macy looked at his leg, but he damned sure didn’t want her to see what happened to another part of his anatomy as soon as her fingers touched him.

And he’d thought the night had been long up until now….