Mended Read online

  Mended

  Heal Me Series, Book 3

  Stacy Eaton

  Nitewolf Novels

  Contents

  1. Chapter 1

  2. Chapter 2

  3. Chapter 3

  4. Chapter 4

  5. Chapter 5

  6. Chapter 6

  7. Chapter 7

  8. Chapter 8

  9. Chapter 9

  10. Chapter 10

  11. Chapter 11

  12. Chapter 12

  13. Chapter 13

  14. Chapter 14

  15. Chapter 15

  16. Chapter 16

  17. Chapter 17

  18. Chapter 18

  19. Chapter 19

  20. Chapter 20

  21. Chapter 21

  22. Chapter 22

  23. Chapter 23

  24. Chapter 24

  25. Chapter 25

  26. Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Heal Me Series

  About the Author

  Also by Stacy Eaton

  Dedication

  This story is dedicated to all of those who love to read and continue to come back for more of my books! Thank you!

  Chapter 1

  Josey

  “What do we have scheduled for the operating room tonight?” I asked as I approached Ruth Anne at the scheduling desk.

  “The ER has a broken leg that is coming up in a little while. Cardiac Care might be sending someone down in a few minutes for a procedure after they finish some tests. Otherwise, there is nothing else pending right this moment.”

  “So—it’s going to be one of those quiet nights, huh?”

  Ruth Anne winced, “Josey, you know better than to say that. Anyone that ever says that curses us with major traumas.”

  I ducked my head to avoid her glare. She was right. I did know better, but I was antsy and hoped that we might be busy tonight to help work off the anxiety that was rushing through my system for some unknown reason. The sensation felt like a tangible presence in the air; maybe it was a full moon or something—who knows.

  I was the head surgical operating room nurse on the night rotation where we dealt with mostly emergency surgeries. Of course, I didn’t wish harm to come to people, but in a city as large as New York, people were always getting injured.

  At night, we had about a quarter of the regular employees in the surgical wing. I used to work during the day, but I actually preferred to work nights. It gave me an excuse to not have a social life.

  I wasn’t into the bar scene anymore, and the thought of finding a man to share my life had exploded like the fireworks on New Year’s when I had discovered the man I loved in the arms of another woman.

  I didn’t fault Walker. I’d never told him how I felt about him until after I found him kissing a stranger in Colt’s guest room. When Walker had told me that he cared about me, but only like a sister, it had burst every bubble I had carefully cherished over the years I’d known him. No one wanted to be loved like a sister, not when what you felt was so much more.

  It took a little while, but I forgave Walker. How could I not? Walker, Colt, Whitney, and I had been close-knit friends since college—although Whitney wasn’t around these days because of her jealousy. After she had tried to ruin the relationship between Colt and Ember last year, Colt fired her from his private practice, and she had kind of slipped away from all of us. The last thing I wanted to do was be like Whit.

  At least when I found out that sexy pediatrician Walker Hunt was in love with another woman, I didn’t try to destroy the relationship. It took me some time, but I was happy for him and Jasmine. I thought the two of them were great together, and Walker was crazy about Jasmine’s son, Tony—so much so that he had adopted him as his own. It didn’t hurt that Jasmine and I had become fast friends, and I couldn’t imagine life without her.

  I was ecstatic for them, and quite honestly, jealous as hell—not because Walker was with someone, but because he had someone period. I’d hoped that by now, at the age of thirty, I would have found someone to love and settle down with. It hadn’t happened and, quite honestly, I was tired of trying to find a man out in the bar scene. The hospital was off limits when it came to finding love. I learned a long time ago not to mix business with pleasure. So, if those two places were out, how was I ever going to meet someone?

  Like I did every shift, I checked out the OR suite that I normally used. We had people who were assigned to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be, but it never hurt to double-check. The last thing I wanted was to be in the middle of a life or death situation in the OR and not have the necessary equipment on hand.

  I was just finishing my swing through the suite when I heard chaos in the hallway and headed toward the main desk.

  “What’s going on, Ruth Anne?”

  She picked up the phone while she answered me, “Police officer struck by a car and then shot, he will be up in a few minutes. He’s still in transport. They are going to triage and then bring him straight up.”

  “Okay.” I spun and hurried down the hall to the lounge where the rest of our team would be preparing for our night.

  With a quick shove, I opened the door and found almost everyone sipping coffee and laughing inside. “We have a trauma coming in. Police officer hit by a car with a GSW.”

  I was already turning to leave the room, as everyone clambered about to follow me. I had worked with this team for about six months now, and I loved every one of them.

  Bob was our emergency surgical assistant who was employed by the hospital to help with surgeries at night. His job was to assist the two surgeons who would be present. Josh was our nurse anesthesiologist who helped either Matt or Pam, our staff anesthesiologists. We also had Jennifer for our scrub nurse who assisted with sterile procedures, and Aimee as our circulating nurse who dealt with non-sterile tasks. Temperance was assigned as our holding room nurse, and I saw her down the hall already preparing information about the patient. The last of the team was the recovery nurse, and I wasn’t sure who was assigned to that tonight because Emilee, who was our regular, was off.

  Me, I was the surgical technician. I was a nurse with surgical training, and I helped the three doctors with anything that they needed while operating.

  I loved my job. It might sound odd, but I lived for the adrenaline rush that came with an emergency patient wheeled in. I thrived on the urgent need to stop the bleeding, patch up the patients, and send them into recovery. To save a life, no matter who it was, was my goal.

  “Josey,” Ruth Anne called as I bustled down the hallway, “he’s about five minutes out. Do you mind going down and assessing?”

  I changed my trajectory from the desk toward the elevator bank, “Sure, probably a good idea to have one of us down there anyway.”

  With my arms tensely crossed over my chest, I waited for the elevator to arrive. The adrenaline pumped through my system as I stood in the metal box and descended.

  The doors opened to a flurry of activity, and I scanned the room. There were three stretchers coming from the ambulance bay, and on all three of them were police officers. Oh, crap.

  Two of the officers were sitting up, one with her arm in a sling close to her side, another with gauze wrapped around his head, but the third one grabbed my attention like a neon sign. The officer was on his back, his uniform partially removed, and several people were working around him even as they moved him into a treatment area.

  I followed the crowd of people into the room, standing back and listening to what was happening. These people were trained for emergency room trauma. I wasn’t here to complete any medical procedure, just to oversee and have a good idea of what we had when he came upstairs.

  His blood pressure was high, understandably the material of his pants o
n his left leg had been cut, and bone stuck out through the skin, damn. I stepped around the gurney to the other side to see what exactly they were working on and found several people fixated on his abdomen area.

  I clenched my teeth. A gunshot to the abdomen was never good. There were so many organs that could be damaged. All that soft tissue to check would be hell in the OR. If the bullet had fragmented inside his abdomen cavity, it was going to take a while to find it all.

  The ER doctors called out for tests to be done, and I stepped up to Paul. “Hey, Paul, can you order an X-ray of his abdomen while they are doing the leg? I want to know if the bullet fragmented, and if so, how badly.”

  “You got it, Josey,” Paul replied, and I melted into the shadows again. As I leaned against the wall, I looked at the officer’s face for the first time. He was staring at me, and my heart skipped as I recognized him. Oh, shit!

  Normally, I stayed out of the way when it came to the trauma room, but his eyes screamed for help—or maybe he just wanted someone to tell him it was going to be alright. I approached the gurney, resting my hand on his forehead. “Tucker, hold on, okay. We’re going to do everything we can for you.”

  He swallowed and gave the slightest nod before he closed his eyes and winced in pain as someone pushed on his stomach. A moment later, he bucked his body and screamed as his leg was shifted.

  “His pressure is dropping,” someone called out.

  “Tucker, hold on, you got this.” I glanced around the room. “Has he had any morphine?”

  “Yes,” one of the nurses stated, “but he’s not responding to it.”

  “We have a ventricular fibrillation! Get me the paddles!” Paul shouted as an alarm began to sound.

  I stepped out of the way, staring at Tucker as his body went slack.

  I grabbed a nurse as she brushed past me, “I need a favor.” She nodded. “Get in touch with Dr. Walker Hunt and tell him Tucker Wheatcraft is getting ready to go into surgery,” I glanced at Tucker’s pale face, “and tell him it’s not good.”

  Chapter 2

  Tucker

  New York City was always bustling with activity and being a cop in the city had its up and downs. Tonight, was one of the low points.

  Last night, a young man was shot by an officer while he was robbing a local market, and tonight everyone was on the warpath. The country had gone nuts recently, constantly jumping on the vicious bandwagon of hatred for the police. Everyone screamed for justice for the kid who had pulled a gun on the storekeepers and the police officer who had responded. It had been a justified shooting, but the citizens didn’t see it that way. To them, it was just another reason to cause riots and make noise.

  My partner Camille and I were on riot patrol. There were pedestrians everywhere, and we were just trying to keep the peace. We understood that people wanted answers, but why did they feel they had the right to torch cars and loot shops while they waited for them?

  It didn’t make any sense. What happened to the respect police officers had after 9-11? In the last two years, there had been less respect and more vicious threats against us than ever in history.

  It was getting so bad that I had thought more than once about hanging up my duty belt and stepping away from the madness. When I was young, the only thing I had wanted to do was be a police officer, and the only place I had wanted to work was here in the city.

  Many times I had considered moving back to Texas and working with one of the local PDs there, but did I really want to start all over? Did I even want to do the job?

  What the hell would I do if I weren’t an officer? I couldn’t even imagine what I would do if I decided to step away. My father had even brought it up recently, as if he knew that I was considering it. He understood that the world was a different place now, and as scary as it was, now was the time that they needed more good officers, not fewer—so I stayed.

  I was a good officer. I cared about people, I took as much time as I could to comfort victims and assist with what needed to be done. I prided myself on my integrity and all that I had accomplished in my job—but tonight was not about helping someone in need; it was about keeping the masses in line and protecting property. Camille shot me a look as a group of rowdies began to taunt us. She was just as uncomfortable as I was, and I knew it. We’d had many talks about everything that had been happening during our long shifts. She’d even spoken about leaving the city and moving to her hometown to work for a small department herself, but like me, she loved the city as if she had been born here and just couldn’t force herself to leave quite yet.

  A few protestors blocked the street, and Camille and I moved toward them to coral them back to the sidewalks so the traffic could keep flowing. New York already had enough traffic issues; it didn’t need the help of boisterous and unruly people to make it worse.

  “Come on, folks, off the street,” I tried to yell above the noise while Camille called on her radio for more cars to head this way. Some of the folks stared at us, some listened and shifted toward the sidewalk, but a few others raised their hands and shouted insults at us.

  It was a sweltering summer’s night, and the humidity made rivers of sweat run down my chest and under my vest. At least I wasn’t wearing full riot gear. If I had been, I would have probably melted in my boots. I swiped at sweat as it beaded on my forehead. It was ten at night, and the darkness brought no relief.

  The heat did not help our case. In fact, it egged everyone on. If it had been winter, no one would be outside, but on a humid summer’s night, they were all on the streets looking for any action after being cooped up all day long.

  “Let’s go, get out of the street. Keep your parties on the sidewalks, please,” I yelled again.

  “Screw you, pig!” one of the young men yelled, but I ignored him. I’d heard it all before.

  “Let’s go,” I was in the middle of the road now, trying to shift the people to the other side when I heard an engine rev behind me. I didn’t dare turn to look at it because the last thing I wanted to do was turn my back to the rioters, especially the one young man who was eyeing me with a sneer on his face.

  “Tuck!” Camille shouted, but I kept my gaze on the guy in front of me. “Tuck!”

  “Fuck you, copper! Your dirty ass should be the one lying six feet under!” another of the men bellowed at me.

  The engine noise behind me grew louder, and a few of the men’s eyes enlarged. That was when I turned to see what caught their attention.

  A vehicle with no headlights on was barreling toward me. I shifted, trying to get a better look at it, and hopefully give the driver time to see me. How could he not? I was standing in a lighted area with about ten other people in the street. He had to be able to see me. I was about to jump out of the way when I realized there wasn’t enough time.

  The SUV struck me so hard that I flew in the air and landed a distance away. At first, I couldn’t breathe from landing so hard on the macadam, but after I finally sucked in a breath, pain engulfed every inch of my body and fractured my senses. I screamed in pain for a moment, and people yelled around me. Someone stepped on my shoulder, and I heard another person laugh cruelly.

  I tried to suck in more oxygen to remain conscious, knowing that I was in a horrible position on the ground with all the protestors around me. When I opened my eyes, the young man who had been sneering at me stood four feet away, a grin so evil it brought a chill to my spine. In his hand, a black handgun glinted in the lamplight, the muzzle pointed straight at my forehead.

  I froze. There was no way I could get to my gun before that boy—and that’s what he was, no older than eighteen or nineteen—put a bullet in me. There was no hesitation in his dark eyes, no wavering of conscience. I knew without a doubt that he would do it.

  His finger began to pull the trigger back, and I braced myself. In that moment, I prayed to Saint Michael, the patron saint of law enforcement, and to God himself. Let it be over with quick—but at the last moment, the kid began to fall for with someone o
n his back, and the gun went off. The bullet struck just under my vest and streaked hot pain through my gut. The kid and Camille fell to the ground beside me, and she was wrestling with him to get the gun away when two other cops showed up and helped her. I heard her calling my name as she took hold of my hand, but then everything else was a blur of pain and noise.

  In the emergency room, I tried to hold on, tried to stay awake, but the pain was so intense that it kept trying to suck me under. I felt like I was caught in heavy quicksand and, as hard as I fought against it, it would fight harder to pull me under—body and soul.

  Someone that I recognized but couldn’t place stood beside me, and her cool hand over my brow was like a touch from heaven. Her light green eyes sparkled at me with so much concern that I wanted to reassure her that I’d be okay. I tried to hold on to the vision of her beautiful face, but as soon as my eyes closed, I began to lose it. I heard myself screaming, and then I felt nothing.

  Sounds grew louder around me, and I had the sense that I was being moved quickly. Bright lights flashed over my eyes one after another like I was in a tunnel driving fast. The words that were spoken were hard to understand over the pounding of the blood in my veins. I tried to blink, but just that simple movement hurt.

  “Tucker, Tucker, can you hear me?” The movement stopped, and I heard a bell ring. I tried to open my eyes again and finally managed to open them into little slits. “Tucker, you’re on the way to surgery. Hold on, okay?”