The Doctor's Guardian. Marie Ferrarella

cocked her head, still looking at her closely, her expression saying that she was confident she could detect a lie if she heard one. “So there’s no one important in your life right now?”

      “You, Mrs. Baker,” Nika told her warmly as she prepared to take the woman’s blood pressure. “You’re important in my life.”

      Ericka frowned. “Is that your hokey way of telling me that you’re dedicated?”

      “You might say that,” Nika allowed with a laugh. “It’s also a ‘hokey’ way of saying that I care about my patients. Every one of them. And since you’re one of my patients…”

      Ericka nodded her head, holding up her hand to keep her doctor from continuing. “I get it. You care about me. Well, if you do, it’s nice to know. Now,” the old woman instructed as she braced herself and raised her chin, “do your worst.”

      “What I plan to do, Mrs. Baker,” Nika told her gently, “is my very best.”

      Ericka’s head bobbed curtly. “I’ll let you know if you succeed.”

      Nika pressed her lips together. She’d come to learn that patients didn’t like it when you laughed at what they said, unless they were intentionally trying to be funny. “I’m counting on it,” she told the woman.

      Chapter 4

      Nika frowned as she appraised the upper and lower numbers on the blood pressure gauge in her hand. They weren’t what she wanted them to be, especially since the woman in the bed was on blood pressure medication.

      “It’s a little high,” she told Ericka as she deflated the cuff. Pausing to make a quick notation of the reading on the woman’s chart, Nika swiftly unwrapped the cuff from the thin arm.

      Ericka waved away the note of concern. “Of course it’s high. My new doctor kept me waiting. I got aggravated.”

      Nika looked at her. She knew the woman knew better than that. “That wouldn’t have caused your blood pressure to elevate like that unless you were waiting for me in a yard full of pit bulls.” She tucked the cuff away. “I’d like to see that come down a little bit before we finally whisk you off for surgery.”

      Ericka made a noise that sounded very much like a snort. “You forfeited the ‘whisking’ part by making me take all these tests you’re talking about first.”

      Nika placed a placating hand on top of one of the woman’s blue-veined hands and said gently, “Mrs. Baker, the object here is to make you well, not to see how fast we can get you in and out of the hospital. We don’t take chances with our patients’ lives here.”

      Ericka looked at her for a long moment, as if assessing the genuineness of the statement. And then her sharper features melted into a softer expression as she smiled.

      “Call me G,” she urged.

      Nika cocked her head. She’d heard the detective refer to the woman that way. Was it her middle initial, or the first letter of some kind of nickname?

      “G?” Nika repeated, an unspoken question in her voice.

      The platinum-blond head nodded. “That’s what I told Coleman to call me when he first came to live with me. I hated the way Grandmother sounded. Still do. Makes me think of some old, bent-over woman, shuffling around in sensible shoes, her white hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck.” Finished with her description, Ericka shivered.

      “No worries,” Nika told her with a laugh. “That certainly doesn’t begin to describe you. I thought the computer made a mistake when I looked down at your chart earlier. If ever a woman didn’t look anywhere close to eighty-four, it’s you.”

      Ericka positively beamed. “You know, you just might have become my new best friend after all,” the older woman told her.

      “I’ll settle for being the doctor who makes you feel well enough to go home, Mrs.— G.” About to use the woman’s last name, Nika corrected herself at the last moment.

      “Fair enough,” Ericka declared. “Continue,” she urged, indicating that she was ready to endure the rest of the physical.

      Nika suppressed her smile and did as she was “bidden.”

      She had just finished the feisty woman’s exam and was carefully entering the last of her notes on the chart when the sound jolted her. Piercing the late morning air, the alarm sounded a great deal like an air raid siren used in one of those old movies depicting Europe during World War II.

      Except that this wasn’t an air raid. And rather than warning of a possible multitude of deaths, this had to do with only one possible demise. But even one was one too many.

      She didn’t want to have another on the books if she could help it.

      Nika instantly abandoned the chart, setting it down on a side counter.

      “What is that awful noise?” Ericka asked as she put her hands over her ears and tried to press out the sound.

      “I’ll put down you have good hearing when I get back,” Nika promised, trying to divert the woman’s curiosity from the reason that the alarm was going off. She didn’t want the woman frightened—and she definitely didn’t want her to start wondering if perhaps that alarm would ever go off for her.

      “What’s going on?” Ericka demanded, shouting in order to be heard.

      “It’s a code blue,” was all Nika said before she ran out into the hall—making sure she closed the door to Ericka’s room behind her.

      The sound that signaled the very real possibility of someone’s life ebbing away filled the hallway, making it momentarily impossible for her to ascertain from which direction the alarm was coming. The next moment, Nika had her answer. Alerted by the monitor at the nurses’ station, the two responding nurses and an orderly were all running toward one room.

      A quick scrutiny told Nika that so far, no doctor was coming to the patient’s aid. They were still incredibly shorthanded.

      “Crash cart,” she yelled out to the other three. “We’re going to need a crash cart.”

      The orderly, Gerald Mayfield, a powerful-looking man who was almost as wide as he was tall and had helped get her out of the elevator earlier, fell back to fetch the lifesaving device.

      She knew who the room belonged to a second before she entered. John Kelly. She’d paused to talk to the man this morning just before she’d gone down to the cafeteria. And subsequently gotten stuck in the elevator on her way back, she thought ruefully. Maybe if she’d taken the stairs, she would have gotten back sooner and somehow could have prevented this.

      God knew how, she thought now, looking at the painfully thin man whose heart had abruptly stopped beating.

      The monitor attached to him, tracking his vital signs, had nothing to show for its efforts but very thin, straight lines. They were accompanied by an eerie, flat note that mournfully announced the end of a life.

      “There’s no pulse, Doctor,” Katie O’Connor, one of the two nurses who’d made it to the patient’s room first, told her. The nurse’s long fingers were still pressed against the elderly man’s throat, as if that would somehow make his vital signs magically reappear once again.

      But they didn’t. The straight lines on the monitor continued going nowhere.

      It couldn’t end this quickly, Nika silently argued in her head.

      “He was just talking to me,” she said out loud, addressing her words to Katie. “Telling me how much he was looking forward to going back to the nursing home because he’d figured out a chess move that would confound his roommate. He was positively gleeful about it. He didn’t sound or behave like a man who was about to die,” she added, saying the words more to herself than to the other two women.

      Katie, who’d been a nurse more years than she’d