Mac's Bedside Manner. Marie Ferrarella

worth any humiliation Jolene had had to endure. Like finding her husband breaking in his new couch after office hours with his squeaky voiced, mammary gland endowed receptionist.

      Straw that broke the camel’s back, Jolene thought ruefully. At least her experience with Matt had taught her well. And if it hadn’t, her three years at San Francisco General would have. Doctors thought themselves a breed apart from the rest of humanity. The rules of society didn’t apply to them except when they wanted them to. They certainly believed themselves to be two cuts above the nurses they dealt with. And she was first and foremost a nurse, the way her mother had been before her and her grandmother before that.

      It was what she was, Jolene thought as she watched the doors and waited for them to spring open, and what she would always be.

      If she didn’t have Amanda to provide and care for, Jolene would have opted to go work in a third world country where her dedication and knowledge would have been truly appreciated and there wouldn’t have been a host of overbearing doctors to deal with. Just perhaps one within a thousand-mile radius.

      Her grandmother had been such a dedicated woman in her youth, selflessly giving herself up to the hard life found in underdeveloped regions in Africa. She’d been a Red Cross nurse when her grandfather had met her.

      Jolene smiled to herself. Her grandfather had been the one doctor that was the exception to her rule.

      Just then, the rear doors burst open.

      The next moment, the rear section of the emergency room was filled with the sight, sounds and smell of what had been a near fatal disaster.

      “Kind of like when the Native Americans attacked the covered wagons in the old Westerns, isn’t it?”

      The comment came from directly behind her. A shiver danced down her neck and shoulder blades in response to the whiff of warm breath that accompanied his words.

      What was he, standing right on top of her?

      Turning almost all the way around, Jolene saw that Rebecca’s knight in tarnished armor had somehow gotten directly behind her without her noticing. Served her right for letting her thoughts wander.

      Jolene turned back toward the incoming gurneys a split second after giving the man a disparaging look.

      “Except that we’re supposed to help them, not shoot at them,” she retorted icily.

      Nurses and doctors were pairing themselves off, bracketing gurneys and the attendants that came in with them. Mac paused just long enough to look quizzically at the nurse with the killer body. “Have I offended you somehow?”

      “I don’t think now’s the time to hit on me, Doctor,” she told him crisply. She was already hurrying away from him. “We have work to do.”

      For a moment Mac was speechless. He’d been put in his place royally. Put in his place within a tiny, obscure box and had the lid slammed down on him. Tight.

      His interest was seriously piqued.

      But interest was going to have to wait. Though gifted at multitasking from an early age, Mac gave the emergency situation his entire focus. He fell into place beside the fourth gurney as it came through the doors and began shooting questions at the young female paramedic closest to him.

      For the next hour, it felt as if someone had unleashed a dam. An endless stream of injured party-goers kept coming and coming. Each time it seemed as if that had been the last of them, another ambulance arrived, bearing another casualty.

      “What are we, the only hospital in the area?” one of the doctors who had been called down groused.

      Overhearing as she hurried to another bed, Wanda answered, “We’re the only ones whose trauma area is equipped to handle this kind of volume. Dr. Mac, they need you in Trauma Room Three,” she called out.

      Mac looked at the nurse practitioner working with him on a twenty-year-old woman who seemed to have every part of her body pierced with something. The piercing in her thigh hadn’t been of her choice. He and Martha had worked for over ten minutes, making sure the wound the vocal party-goer had sustained wouldn’t begin to gush again. It appeared to be stable.

      “Go ahead,” Martha urged. “I can handle this. It’s all over but the shouting.”

      Considering that the young woman they were working on was hurling four-letter words at them regarding the man who’d thrown the party, Mac thought it rather an apt description of the situation.

      “I’m all yours,” he told Wanda, hurrying behind her.

      “Be still my heart,” the woman quipped, covering her ample chest with a rubber gloved hand. She brought Mac to a man, who looked as if he’d been on the bottom of the pile in the pyramid after the balcony’s collapse.

      This, Mac quickly assessed, was going to take more than simple suturing and cleaning.

      Someone brushed against his elbow in the tight space around the gurney and as he automatically looked, his eyes met the new nurse’s.

      “How are you holding up?” he asked.

      She seemed to take the question as an affront to her abilities. “Fine.”

      Mac felt as if he’d just been fired on at point-blank range.

      He looked at Wanda, who shrugged in response to his silent question. She didn’t seem to know what was wrong with the new nurse, either.

      For the following three and a half hours, Mac found himself hip deep in sutures, X rays, blood and chaos. There was no time to think, only to react and pray that responses—correct responses—were ingrained. Several times during the frenetic dance from patient to patient, Mac had looked up to see the new nurse close by, ministering to the wounded.

      Twice they found themselves working over the same injured victim.

      She worked well, he noted. And quickly, as if she’d been in these situations countless times before. He’d known new nurses to buckle under pressure. But then, he remembered, Jorge had said she was a transfer from San Francisco General. That made her somewhat seasoned.

      He couldn’t help wondering why she’d transferred. She was obviously good at her job, The brittle voice she’d directed at him was nowhere in evidence when she spoke to a terrified woman, who was afraid she was going to lose her leg. Jolene stood, holding the woman’s hand as he worked feverishly to stabilize the woman in order to rush her into surgery.

      “Okay,” Mac announced the moment Wanda told him there was an O.R. free, “she’s ready to go up.”

      Frightened brown eyes shifted toward him. “Am I going to lose it?” the woman cried, hysteria barely contained in her voice.

      “Not a chance,” he told her, smiling. “You’ll be dancing in three months.”

      His words earned him another cool look from Jolene as she helped push the gurney out into the hall and toward the elevator. Now what had he said?

      He had no time to ponder on it. Someone else was calling for him. Stripping off the yellow paper gown, he slipped into the one that Martha Hayes was holding out for him.

      “Let’s roll,” he said to the young nurse.

      Eventually, just as Mac’s back was beginning to ache in fierce protest—reminding him of the strain he’d received over a dozen years ago on the football field—the chaos receded as abruptly as it had begun.

      He glanced over toward the rear doors, holding his breath, unwilling to release his hold on the adrenaline that was keeping him going.

      The doors remained closed.

      “That’s the last of them, Dr. Mac,” Wanda told him wearily.

      Mac rotated his neck, trying to reduce the tension that had knotted itself there. “Gee, just when we were beginning to have fun,” he muttered.

      With relief, he shed the last