© 2012 By Radclyffe. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-807-0

This Electronic Book is published by

Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 249

Valley Falls, New York 12185

First Edition: November 2012

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Credits

Editors: Ruth Sternglantz and Stacia Seaman

Production Design: Stacia Seaman

Cover Design By Sheri (GraphicArtist2020@hotmail.com)

By Radclyffe

Romances

Innocent Hearts

Promising Hearts

Love’s Melody Lost

Love’s Tender Warriors

Tomorrow’s Promise

Love’s Masquerade

shadowland

Passion’s Bright Fury

Fated Love

Turn Back Time

When Dreams Tremble

The Lonely Hearts Club

Night Call

Secrets in the Stone

Desire by Starlight

Crossroads

Honor Series

Above All, Honor

Honor Bound

Love & Honor

Honor Guards

Honor Reclaimed

Honor Under Siege

Word of Honor

Justice Series

A Matter of Trust (prequel)

Shield of Justice

In Pursuit of Justice

Justice in the Shadows

Justice Served

Justice For All

The Provincetown Tales

Safe Harbor

Beyond the Breakwater

Distant Shores, Silent Thunder

Storms of Change

Winds of Fortune

Returning Tides

Sheltering Dunes

First Responders Novels

Trauma Alert

Firestorm

Oath of Honor

Short Fiction

Collected Stories by Radclyffe

Erotic Interludes: Change of Pace

Radical Encounters

Edited by Radclyffe

Best Lesbian Romance 2009-2011

Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe, eds.

Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments

Erotic Interludes 3: Lessons in Love

Erotic Interludes 4: Extreme Passions

Erotic Interludes 5: Road Games

Romantic Interludes 1: Discovery

Romantic Interludes 2: Secrets

Breathless: Tales of Celebration

Women of the Dark Streets

By L.L. Raand

Midnight Hunters

The Midnight Hunt

Blood Hunt

Night Hunt

Acknowledgments

Medical romances are a niche within a niche, but for me each is a little piece of my history, and as I have written them, a part of a community of books featuring continuing and overlapping characters. I have written two lines of medical romances, one set in the fictional Philadelphia Medical College (Fated Love and Night Call) and the other in the University Hospital system (Turn Back Time, The Lonely Hearts Club, and the First Responders book Trauma Alert). My first medical romance, Passion’s Bright Fury, is the prequel to Fated Love and takes place in NYC. Each novel explores a new set of characters, but like the hospital where I spent twelve years training, the community at the center of each feels like home. Everyone knows everyone else, often better than friends and family. Any of the books can be read in any order, and familiar faces will show up as they often do in real life, around the next corner. I hope you find coming home as enjoyable as I.

Thanks go to Sandy Lowe for perseverance, patience, and unflagging support; to author Nell Stark for taking the time from her ever-busier schedule to comment and encourage; to Ruth Sternglantz for expert editing; to Stacia Seaman, for never missing a step; and to my first readers Connie, Eva, Jenny, and Paula for never growing tired of me.

Special thanks to Sheri for a great cover that captures the essence of the story.

And to Lee, for the fun of it all—Amo te.

Radclyffe, 2012





For Lee, for sharing the road

Chapter One

The on-call phone rang, waking Hollis from an uneasy sleep. She rolled over on the narrow bed, groped in the darkness for the cell, and swiped accept without looking. “Monroe.”

“It’s Honor Blake in the ER, Dr. Monroe. We need you down here STAT.”

“What is it?” Hollis sat up, the last vestiges of sleep driven from her mind by the familiar tightening in her belly and surge in her blood. Adrenaline rush—as potent as sex and twice as satisfying. She glanced at the battered plastic digital clock on the equally battered metal bedside stand. 3:32 a.m. Why did the complications always come in the middle of the night? For that matter, why did most babies choose to show up after midnight? Questions obstetricians had been asking without answer for centuries, probably.

“A twenty-four-year-old in the range of thirty-five weeks, and she’s hemorrhaging.”

“On my way. Can you call Labor and Delivery and tell them we’re coming?”

“Already done,” the ER chief answered.

“And page the on-call neonatal—”

“Already done.”

“Yeah, sorry. Guess this isn’t your first rodeo.”

“Not by a long shot. Are you awake?”

“And moving. Be right there.” Hollis disconnected, stuck the phone in the back pocket of her scrubs, and grabbed her lab coat off the back of the door on her way out. She’d only been at Philadelphia Medical Center a week after finishing her fellowship at a friendly rival hospital across town, but she knew all the shortcuts to the ER already. She took the stairs three at a time down two levels and pushed through the fire door to the ground floor. The wide, tan-tiled halls were nearly empty in the middle of the night. Empty stretchers covered with plain white sheets were lined up head to toe along one wall like sentries, awaiting six a.m. when the transport teams would begin ferrying patients from the ER and hospital rooms to X-ray, the OR, and all the many other destinations in the hospital. By the time the walk-in clinics opened at nine, the halls would be congested with foot traffic. Now the only people around were men and women from housekeeping—pushing floor polishers, rolling supersized trash bins, and steering canvas carts piled high with soiled linens.

Hollis cut around all of them as if she were still running track and dodging runners ahead of her. She held her stethoscope to her chest with one hand to keep it from banging her in the face and mentally ran the list of what she’d need to check on a third-trimester patient bleeding out. She hit the button for the automatic doors to the ER on the run and barely slowed as they lumbered open, squeezing through the narrow gap without breaking stride. A blonde in her mid-thirties wearing a Scooby-Doo smock looked up from the centrally located nurses’ station with a startled expression. Hollis called, “OB emergency?”

“End of the hall—cubicle ten,” the blonde said, pointing to the left-hand corridor in the T-shaped ER.

“Thanks…Linda.” Hollis hoped she’d gotten the name right and swerved around a couple of wheelchairs angled together, as if their invisible occupants were having a late-night conversation, and sprinted the short distance to room ten. A crash cart surrounded by resuscitation litter stood in front of the brightly lit space. Plastic IV bag wrappers, multicolored intravenous catheter caps, the tail end of a spool of EKG paper, and a deflated BP cuff marked the site of the action. A cacophony of voices reached her as she drew near.

Hang another unit…

Fetal heart tones are dropping…

BP’s crashing…

Where is OB?

“Right here.” Hollis skidded to a halt at the foot of the stretcher. She’d known what to expect—she was a brand-new attending, but this wasn’t her first rodeo either. Still, the chaos rocked her for a millisecond. The adrenaline surge made her vision swim, and then her focus kicked in. The analytical part of her brain took the wheel and she settled into the zone. One quick scan told her all she needed to know. The blue plastic-backed chucks under the woman’s hips, designed to keep her and the mattress dry, had long since reached their capacity. The white sheets under her parted legs were crimson. Blood dripped in fat red splatters onto the floor, making delicate snowflake patterns as it congealed.

Honor Blake said, “The ultrasound shows—”

“It’s an abruption,” Hollis said, pressing through the nurses and techs congregated around the stretcher to get up to the patient. Couldn’t be anything else, not with that much blood, but she grabbed the ultrasound printout just to confirm. Yeah, there it was—the placenta had torn away from the uterine wall, leaving a latticework of enlarged vessels wide open to pour out blood. “How much blood has she had?”

Honor wasn’t fazed by the obstetrician’s overbearing manner. Her spouse was a surgeon, and trauma or ortho or obstetrics, it didn’t matter—surgeons were all gunslingers with a touch of God complex. Maybe you had to be to cut into a living being with absolute confidence. This one was new, but by all reports, Monroe had a quick mind and quicker hands. Not much on sociability. Typical surgeon. “We’re on our third unit. The blood bank is sending another four upstairs to L and D.”

“Good.” Hollis assessed the mound of pale belly ribboned with delicate blue veins exposed where the white cotton sheet had been pulled aside. Above, the full breasts were capped with swollen chocolate nipples. She ran her hand over the distended abdomen. The uterus was a rock. A rock filled with blood and a baby who was going to be in trouble soon. “What do we know?”

“She’s in and out. History is scant. Twenty-four years old, prime ip, not much else.”

First pregnancy—always a bit unpredictable. Thirty-four weeks looked about right for her size—not dangerously premature if she delivered the baby now, but still, the baby would be at risk for pulmonary insufficiency and neuro complications. Couldn’t be helped, though—the mother was gushing blood faster than the nurses could pump it into her. “Any prenatal issues?”

“We don’t have records,” Honor said.

“Coags?” Women with abruptio placenta often developed bleeding disorders, and that spelled major trouble in the OR.

“Not back yet. But she’s clotting.”

“For now.” Hollis moved to the head of the stretcher. The dazed young woman looked younger than twenty-four, and pale to the point of translucency, her golden brown hair framing a finely etched face with luminous green eyes and lips that were still full and sensuous despite being nearly drained of color. “I’m Dr. Monroe. What’s your name?”

“Annie.” Lids tinged with gray shuttered closed. “Colfax.”

“Annie,” Hollis said gently, “when did you start bleeding?”

“An…hour…not sure. Can I have some water?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“What about my baby?”

“You’re having quite a bit of bleeding and we’re going to need to operate. The baby needs to come out and we need to get the bleeding stopped.”

Eyes the color of spring grass—now surprisingly clear, considering her blood pressure was only sixty and she had to be scared out of her mind—opened wide and fixed on her face. “It’s too soon for the baby. I want to wait.”

Hollis bit off a retort. She didn’t have time to argue, but the young woman’s voice was strong. She was competent to decide. “I don’t think you can wait. You’re losing blood and the baby will suffer for it.”

“Just a little more time.”

“Look, is there someone with you or someone I can call? Spouse? A boyfriend?”

“No.”

“How about a family member we can—”

“No,” Annie said quite distinctly. “There is no one.”

No one. No friend? No lover? No family at all? The patient didn’t look like a street person or some paranoid dropout likely to be living off the grid, but Hollis didn’t have time to speculate on why Annie Colfax was alone during one of the critical moments of her life. “Okay, Annie—we don’t have time for much discussion. The baby’s at risk. So are you. You need a C-sectio—”

“No. No surgery.”

Hollis clamped down on a flare of temper. “We don’t have any choice, you—”

“No. Don’t believe…” Annie’s voice faded and her chin sagged.

“Pressure’s fifty palp,” a nurse announced. “Fetal heart tones are slowing.”