BWWM Interracial Romance 2: Open Heart Read Free Page A

sure was his wife’s, and not necessarily from rushing to her ER.
    It was just one of those things, Ashley told herself as she threw away the trash from her meal and stowed the leftovers in the cooler bag, shoving it back into her locker. She would have a laugh with Rosalie later about the shutdown she had delivered, and maybe she’d check out what had ended up happening to the patient.
    When she checked the duty board again, Ashley saw that she had ended up in pediatrics after the morning chaos after all. She would talk to Rosalie later, since the ER was farther away than the department that needed her.
    Ashley wondered who had ended up with the uncle from hell and would have asked, but pediatrics was busy. She checked the chart of the kids from the early-morning car accident, as she knew that half the staff was probably doing; they were stable, but their condition wouldn’t necessarily stay that way. The little girl had internal bleeding, the little boy several broken bones, and they had both suffered intense head trauma. The parents were unconscious as well, and the question of how to deal with the family’s accommodation had caused a flutter after they were all stabilized. The parents were not in the Pediatrics ward, but they had been put as close to the Pediatric Emergency unit as possible.
    Ashley reached for the charts that were in her bin, and opened the first one up. It was an emergency admission. A girl, admitted with fever, chills, vomiting, some blood in vomit. Ashley read through the triage notes and then flipped to the paperwork at the back and groaned. She had assumed that some other resident would take the uncle from hell and his niece. If only she had stayed in the ER, she would be able to dodge this particular bullet. At least, she thought, he couldn’t possibly be angry at not being seen yet—the girl, Amanda, was in a holding room. She had been triaged and sent to the pediatric unit, which made sense with the relatively low-grade symptoms that the girl was exhibiting. But it was just her rotten luck that Ashley had told off the guardian; the chart indicated that the girl’s father had faxed in notarized authorization for his brother to stay with his niece. Ashley steeled herself and made her way to the room, taking a deep breath and preparing to be screamed at.
     
    There was a flicker of recognition in the man’s eyes when she came into the room, but instead of shouting at her the way he had Rosalie, he remained seated and said to his niece, “Look, Mandy, the nice doctor’s here to see you.”
    Ashley smiled at the little girl; to some degree she could trace a resemblance—while no one would mistake her for the man’s daughter, they had a similar brow structure, something of kinship in the line of their jaw. Ashley decided that it was best to focus on the patient; if her uncle wanted to start something with her later, that was his business, and she would handle it.
    “Hey, Amanda. I’m Doctor Brown, but you can call me Dr. Ashley if you want,” she said, crossing the room to the bed. There was a vomit tray nearby, and Ashley had read in the admitting notes that the girl was still vomiting—had been vomiting for two days straight. “Nurse Angie told me you were very brave when she had to take your blood for tests.” Ashley gave the girl a smile.
    “She said they were going to put it in a centri-center—” the girl hesitated over the word, her brow furrowing weakly.
    “A centrifuge? Yep. They’re going to look for a lot of different things, to make sure we know what’s going on with you.” Ashley looked at the read out on the monitoring equipment for a moment; the girl’s heart rate was steady, if a little low. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to get another poke, and you’re probably going to have to lie still for a long time,” Ashley told the girl, turning her attention back to her.
    Amanda looked up at Ashley with a flicker of feeble curiosity in her dark eyes.