Fated Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

Quinn's second week in the ER, and already the other physicians were triaging anything that looked surgical to her. She was rapidly becoming one of the busiest physicians in the emergency room.
    Finley, a thin, sharp-eyed African American, shrugged. "Anything that gets them taken care of and off our board works for me. You know how long it takes for ortho or plastics to get down here for a consult."
    Honor couldn't argue. She'd much prefer that patients be evaluated, treated, and discharged rather than have them waiting for hours for a specialist to evaluate them. The long delays clogged up her emergency room and irritated the patients. Still, at this rate, Quinn was in danger of being seriously overworked. Already, Honor had noticed that the new attending was arriving early and leaving late.
    "Thanks. Room ten, did you say?"
    "Last I saw."
    Honor parted the curtain slowly and peeked inside. Quinn and one of the emergency room residents were seated on either side of a narrow arm board. A young Hispanic male lay on a stretcher with his arm extended on the support, palm up. A laceration extended across the width of his forearm, approximately three inches above the wrist crease. From where she was standing, Honor could see exposed muscle bellies, several pencil-sized white bands of severed tendon ends, and a blood clot in the region of the radial artery just above the thumb. "Can you talk?"
    Quinn glanced up from the wound and smiled in greeting. "Sure. Come on in."
    With an inquiring expression, Honor tilted her chin in the direction of the patient, who appeared to be unresponsive.
    "Anesthesia by ethanol," Quinn explained. The patient was intoxicated and, after the resident had injected the lidocaine to numb the wound, had promptly gone to sleep.
    "Nerve injury?" Honor leaned over the seated resident's shoulder for a better look into the depths of the wound. Quinn held the edges open with two small stainless steel right-angle retractors that looked like miniature rakes so that the resident could work.
    "Got the sensory branch of the radial nerve, but missed the median. Lucky for hi—yo, Zebrowski, don't grab the end of the tendon with your forceps. You'll fray it, and then it won't hold your sutures."
    "Sorry," the resident mumbled, his hands shaking as he struggled to place the fine blue Prolene sutures through the ends of the lacerated tendons.
    "Get it right down the center of the tendon."
    "Okay?" Zebrowski asked tentatively as he edged the needle into the tissue.
    "That's better," Quinn commented as she watched him place his first stitch. "Now tag it with the hemostat and put in another one just like it." She looked up to find Honor watching her with a serious expression in her golden brown eyes. Quinn quirked a brow. "What?"
    "Nothing." What Honor had been thinking was that Quinn was not only a fine surgeon, but also a good teacher. She appeared on the surface to be precisely as she had been advertised—an excellent addition to the ER. Except that Honor couldn't make sense of the picture. Why should someone with Quinn's skills be working there? All that she could imagine was that there had been some breach in ethics that had cost Quinn her surgical career. That thought bothered her more than a little, because it was difficult not to like the dynamic surgeon.
    Quinn divided her attention between watching the resident complete the tendon repair and trying to figure out what she had just seen in Honor's eyes. Curiosity, confusion, and, oddly, compassion. The mix of emotions was powerful and compelling. She caught her breath, feeling her heart trip unexpectedly. In the next instant, it was steady again, and she ignored the slight flutter of uneasiness. "Do you need me?"
    "When you get a chance, I want you to take a look at some films on a twenty-year-old who took a header off his bicycle. I think he's got a fracture of the mandibular body, but I'm not sure. The x-ray isn't diagnostic and his exam is equivocal."
    "Okay. As