Read Online Secrets of a Shy Socialite by Wendy S. Marcus - Free Book Online Page B

direction down the hallway.
    “Fine. How’s that little boy?” A three-year-old found unresponsive for an undetermined period of time, and rather than call an ambulance the older brother had scooped him up and run, barefoot, through a major intersection, to the urgent care center.
    Mary shook her head and gave Jena a look that said “not good.” Out loud she said, “We’re doing all we can for him. Paramedics are finally on their way to transport him to the hospital.” Forty-five minutes after they’d placed the call thanks to a train derailment with multiple casualties.
    Jena entered the lobby to find a woman carrying a small child, holding a bloodied cloth over the left side of the toddler’s face, the woman’s blouse and the little girl’s pink overalls stained red. “What happened?” she asked, taking a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and slipping them on.
    “I turned my back for a minute.” The mother started to cry. “I don’t care if that coffee table has been in my mother-in-law’s family for years. When I get home I am tossing it into the street.”
    “Let me take a look, sweetie,” Jena said to the little girl, pushing aside a mass of black curls and lifting the cloth to take a peek at the injury, a rather large laceration to the left eyebrow area. But the cloth had adhered to the wound and Jena would need to moisten the area with saline to get a better look. “It seems to have stopped bleeding. Gayle will take your information and we’ll get you into a room.”
    “My daughter has been waiting for almost an hour,” a big brute of man bellowed from the standing-room-only waiting area. His nine-year-old daughter, who sat quietly, in no apparent distress, watching cartoons on the television, had fallen from her bike, while wearing a helmet, and denied hitting her head. No visible head trauma. Right wrist swelling and pain. Minor scrapes and bruises to the extremities. Stable.
    “I’m sorry for the wait.”
    “That’s what you said half an hour ago.” He stood up and stormed toward her.
    “Is there a problem here?” a deep voice asked from behind her. Justin’s voice. Jena had never been so happy to hear it.
    “Yeah there’s a problem.” The man didn’t back down.
    Justin came to a stop beside her, khaki pants covering his long legs, a navy blue polo shirt with Rangore Security embroidered in red letters on the left breast pocket, clinging to his muscled chest. His bare arms thick and powerful. His light scent enough to attract, to make her crave closeness.
    Justin didn’t suffer the paunch of an overindulgent lifestyle or the pallid, diminished physique of a seventy hour week white-collar workaholic. He was an imposing specimen of man, the personification of macho alpha male, the standard to which she compared all potential marriageable males. The reason she found some otherwise decent men lacking.
    “Well look at you,” Gayle’s voice intruded. “What did we do to deserve the head honcho tonight?”
    Jena didn’t have time to question Justin’s unexpected arrival or wait for an answer to Gayle’s question because she heard a siren. “We have a critically ill patient in the back,” she told Justin. “I think that’s our ambulance.” She looked out the glass front door. Shoot. “Whose red car is that?” Parked perpendicular to the entrance, blocking the ramp.
    “Mine,” the woman carrying the bloodied little girl said.
    Justin held out his hand. “Either you move it or I will.”
    The woman handed Justin her keys. On his way out he did something to the double doors to make both remain open.
    “I’m guessing if it were your child in respiratory distress you’d want the doctor to give her his full attention,” Jena said to the irate father. “Even if that meant people had to wait while he did.”
    The man returned to his seat.
    “We’re doing the best we can,” she told the patients and family members waiting. “I’ve spoken with each of you and as soon