Their Forever Family: Her Family for Keeps / A Father for Poppy / His Little Christmas Miracle. Abigail Gordon

energy dark and serious. His anticipation of what they would find was palpable, and she reacted in much the same way.

      Nothing was ever quiet in an ICU. Bleeps, alarms, and the noise of respirators, although quiet in and of themselves, together made quite a racket.

      A nurse in cartoon scrubs and a bouncy blond ponytail approached. “Can I help you?” She was perky in a way Rebel could never hope to be. Her skin was flawless, and she had applied just the right amount of makeup to enhance her features. She was buxom and curvy, where Rebel barely had breasts. Or at least that’s what she felt like sometimes. This was the kind of woman Duncan probably went for, not someone as uninteresting as her. She didn’t wear much makeup, her hair kept its own schedule of events, and she didn’t have a curves in the places men liked. Even though she had flaming red hair, she thought it was a detractor. Men like Duncan didn’t go for women like her, but then again she didn’t date, so it didn’t matter, and she needed to focus on things other than her dashing coworker.

      The nurse’s bright blue eyes looked between them as she spoke, but lingered on Duncan. Rebel could hardly blame her, he was something the eyes could linger on and not become fatigued.

      “We have some paperwork to fill out for the ER as follow-up to see how Eric’s doing,” Rebel said, focusing once again on the task at hand, the only reason she was here with Duncan.

      “Oh, you must have been the first responders.” A light of sympathy entered her blue eyes. “I heard about your efforts in report this morning.” She pouted out her lower lip and placed a gentle hand on Rebel’s arm.

      “Yes, we were.” She looked at Duncan, who seemed impervious to Becky’s beauty and sympathetic manner. Maybe he already had a squeeze on the side and wasn’t interested in anyone else. She mentally yanked herself back. Maybe it was none of her business.

      “How awful it must have been to find him.”

      “Yes, it certainly was a shock.” Rebel showed Becky the form. “Can you give us an update?”

      “Sure.”

      Duncan observed the interaction between the two nurses who couldn’t possibly be more different in looks. Though Becky was certainly attractive, his gaze kept returning to Rebel. What an unusual woman she was. Of course, he’d run across unusual women before, but there was something about Rebel that kept taking his mind down a path he’d sworn never to go down again. Romance and dating was something he’d thought had died when his fiancée had been killed. His interest in sex had been on hiatus, but now was beginning to return as he watched Rebel beside him.

      “Excuse me. I want to go see him first.” He stepped forward, leaving the two nurses to do the paperwork.

      Rebel watched as he placed a hand on Amanda’s back, startling her from sleep in the chair. He exuded compassion and Rebel swallowed hard, crushing down the memory of being on the receiving end of such a gesture some years ago.

      In a few minutes, Duncan returned, the lines in his face serious. “Can you tell me where your intensivist is? I’d like to speak to him or her.”

      “Her. Dr. Barb Simmons. She’s in the charting room behind the nurses’ station. Drop-dead gorgeous blonde. Can’t miss her.”

      With only a nod and no lingering glances of interest, Duncan left them.

      “Let’s see your paperwork. I can help you fill it out,” Becky said.

      As Rebel stretched out her arm to hand the paperwork to Becky, her arm seemed to go numb, and she lost her grip on the pages. They fluttered to the floor. “Oh, rats!” Hastily, she grabbed them and shuffled them back together. “Sorry about that. Lost my grip for some reason.” She knew the likely reason and it frightened her more than anything in the world. She was starting to show symptoms of the disease.

      “That’s okay,” Becky said, and opened her bedside computer chart, distracting Rebel from her self-focus. Becky’s fingers flew over the keyboard and pulled up the data on Eric’s case.

      “Any sense of how he’s doing overall?” Rebel asked, nurse to nurse. Experienced nurses developed senses that couldn’t be learned in a classroom or in books.

      “Well, he’s deeply sedated right now.” She gave another sympathetic look. “I hate to even give you a guess because patients surprise me all the time. These little ones are so amazing. They spring back when you least expect it.” She sighed. “Then again, they take a downturn just as fast.” She gave that pout again. Once, Rebel got, twice was just unattractive.

      “Thanks.” She looked behind Becky. “Can I go in and see him?”

      “Absolutely. Just let me know if you need anything.”

      Rebel could see Amanda half sitting on a chair, half lying on the bed beside Eric. Across the room a man sat with a computer on his lap, leaning back in his chair, fast asleep. “Amanda?”

      The mother turned to Rebel, her face splotchy and swollen. “Yes?”

      “It’s Rebel, the nurse from the ER.” She knelt beside the bed and placed her hand on Amanda’s back, the same way Duncan had. “I came to see how you and Eric are doing.” The words sounded trite. After all, how could any of them be doing after such a life-altering event?

      “He’s going to die. I know it.” Her voice was just a whisper that spoke to Rebel’s soul, which had seen so much pain in her own family. Somehow, there had to be hope, even if it was just a little.

      Trying to be encouraging without giving false hope was a tricky dance. “I just reviewed his chart with Nurse Becky and things look pretty stable right now.” That was the truth. At least for the moment.

      “Then why hasn’t he opened his eyes? Why doesn’t he respond to me?” Frustration shot out of her like electricity.

      “He’s being heavily sedated. When kids are on the respirator they get wiggly and won’t let the machine do the work.” That was true, too.

      “Why didn’t anyone explain this to me?” She raked a hand through her hair in frustration then clenched her fists in her lap. She looked as if she wanted to hit something.

      Rebel knew this information had likely been explained more than once, but due to stress of the event she hadn’t remembered it.

      “Just keep talking to him. He can hear you.” Hearing was the last sense to leave before death. People who returned from seemingly unrecoverable events often did, and were able to relate stories of hearing everything going on around them but being unable to respond at the time.

      “I didn’t know whether he could hear me or not.”

      “He does. Just give him your love. Just let him hear your voice.” That was the one hope she’d held on to when her brothers had died, that they had heard her voice and had known she loved them. “He may not respond to you right now, but he will hear you. It will be your voice he recognizes and responds to. If anything is going to pull him out of this, it will be you.”

      “Really?” Shocked, Amanda looked at her child, then back at Rebel, trying to determine the truth.

      “I’ve worked with many patients who have awakened from comas, and that’s the thing they all had in common. They heard their families and knew there was someone with them.”

      “Do you think he can…make it?” She pushed her hair out of her face.

      “I don’t know, but for me to go on as a nurse I need to have some hope.” Rebel squeezed Amanda’s hands as she echoed Duncan’s sentiment and choked down her own emotion that wanted to swallow her whole. This moment was not about her own grief and loss but about the recovery of Amanda’s child. “It’s never easy, but don’t give up.”

      “I don’t want to…but I’m not getting much support…” she glanced at her husband “.from anyone.”

      “Men like to fix things and feel powerless when they can’t.” She