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She breathed an obvious sigh of relief and nodded. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
He turned back towards the way they’d entered and gave a little start. Darkness. Nothing in front of him. No obvious way out. Sealed in a million tonnes of rock along with some deadly bats.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a second. He was Donovan Reid. He couldn’t do this. In any other lifetime this would be described as a wobble. He couldn’t let that happen.
Then he felt Grace lay her hand on his arm. She held out the torch in front of her. He could see she was taking some long, slow breaths. She glanced sideways at him, aware that the ranger was watching them both. ‘Let’s go.’
She walked first, letting the thin torch beam ahead of her be the beacon lighting the way out. She moved briskly, without talking, until they reached the bend in the cave that revealed the entrance ahead.
He felt all the pent-up air rush out of his lungs. He hadn’t even realised he had been holding it. As they neared the entrance his phone beeped loudly. It was inside his suit, it would have to wait.
It took a few minutes to reach the outside of the caves. The decontamination unit was set up outside and they all stripped off their gear and headed for the showers. This time there was no sharing of cubicles. No untoward views of a naked Grace. It was almost disappointing.
He towelled off his hair and picked up the phone. The screen was steamed up and he wiped it clean and stepped outside.
No.
‘What is it?’ Grace appeared beside him, towel-drying her hair too.
He held up the phone. ‘Just what we don’t want to hear. Two adult fatalities in the last hour. One at our hospital, another, a late diagnosis, at a hospital in Mexico. He visited the caves last Thursday. John found him during the visitor follow-ups. We need to step up a gear.’
‘But what else can we do?’
His eyes skimmed over her body. She was wearing simple clothes. A T-shirt and a pair of fitted trousers. All he could think about was what lay beneath.
It couldn’t happen. He couldn’t do this.
This was exactly what he’d feared. People depended on him to stop this outbreak. He couldn’t do that while his head was full of Grace.
She was watching him with her green eyes. Trusting him because of what they’d just shared.
He kept his tone sharp as he walked away from her. ‘Get those samples to David at the labs. I’m going to speak to whoever is in charge of the park. I’m going to get the whole area cordoned off.’
He couldn’t turn round. He wouldn’t turn round.
Because he didn’t want to see the expression on her face.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHAT WAS WRONG with him?
He’d barely spoken to her in the last few days. She was getting more conversation out of Mara from the kitchen than she was from Donovan.
Oh, he mentioned patients and gave instructions. The caves had been confirmed as the site of the virus. The Jamaican fruit bats had been rounded up and taken away while some scientist worked out how the virus had travelled between African and Jamaican bats.
She’d waited the last two nights to see if he would knock on her door. She’d even hesitated outside his door the other night, not even knowing if he had actually been there or not. Then she’d sat in her room, pulled the doors back and stared out at the beach to see if she could spot him running.
It was ridiculous.
Callum Ferguson, in the meantime, was charm himself. He spoke to her for an hour at every handover, praising her work, answering any questions and giving her a few hints about things she was unsure of. She was finally starting to shake off the bad feelings that Frank Parker had initiated. Was finally starting to feel like a valuable member of the team.
But Donovan was doing nothing to help that.
He was sitting at one of the nurses’ stations, working on a computer. She wasn’t going to avoid him. She hadn’t done anything wrong. So she flopped into the seat next to him and picked up the phone.
‘Hi, it’s Dr Grace Barclay from the DPA team in Florida. I’m just phoning to check on the condition of the kids we sent to you a few days ago.’
She listened carefully, taking a few notes. They had five kids now in other ICUs. Two still very serious and three who seemed to making small improvements.
She replaced the receiver with a sigh. She didn’t even care what kind of mood Donovan was in right now. ‘Tyler Bates, the five-year-old we resuscitated? He’s still not doing great. They’ve transfused him three times and are giving him extra clotting factors. He’s still haemorrhaging.’
Donovan turned his head slightly. ‘And the other kids?’
‘Obi, Sarah and Mario have made slight improvements. Jenny is still serious.’
He nodded and turned back to his screen.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything else?’ The stats for the Marburg virus were circulating around her head. Anything between a twenty-three and a ninety per cent death rate. They had treated more than thirty kids so far. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to deal with a child death. She’d never had to do that before. She was getting angry with Donovan’s deafening silence. She stood up, sending the wheeled chair skidding behind her. Her voice rose. ‘Do you know that his mom’s pregnant? They’ve forbidden her to enter the isolation room. The risk to the baby is too great. She can’t even hold her little boy’s hand.’
‘Sit down, Grace.’ His words were quiet and they just infuriated her all the more.
‘No, I won’t sit down. I don’t want to sit down. I want you to talk to me.’
He raised his eyebrow. ‘I am talking to you.’
‘No, you’re not. Not really.’
One of the nurses hurried past, her eyes flicking from one to the other. She picked up a prescription chart and disappeared into another room.
Donovan took his hands from the keyboard and leaned back in his chair. ‘Grace, it’s late. We have to hand over to Callum in an hour. I’ve got another three suspected cases in sites around the world. I’m trying to organise a way to get their samples checked in labs that have no idea what Marburg virus looks like. What do you want me to do? Ignore the work I’m supposed to be doing, to deal with your temper tantrum?’
; She stopped dead. ‘My what?’
‘Your temper tantrum.’ He waved his arm at her in exasperation. ‘That’s clearly what’s going on here.’
She was holding back sobs. She walked to the other side of the desk. It was safer. She couldn’t punch him from there.
She leaned over towards him, ‘What I’m doing, Donovan, is offloading to my team leader. I’m juggling more than twenty paediatric patients right now—an area I don’t specialise in. We only have one paediatrician and he’s on the other team. I’ve got another two kids that should ideally be transferred to another ICU, but there are no available beds at Panama Health Care, and if I send them to another facility I’ll have to authorise another DPA team to attend.’ She drummed her fingers on the desk.
‘My brain won’t stop reminding me of the death rate for Marburg.’ She waved her arm down the corridor. ‘We’ve lost five adult patients now. How long will it be before we lose a child? And will I be left to deal with that too? Because, quite frankly, Donovan, I don’t know if I can.’ She ground her heels into the floor. ‘So, no, Dr Reid, this isn’t a temper tantrum. This is a frustrated colleague wondering if she’s cut out to be on a fieldwork team. Believe me, if I was having a temper tantrum, you would know it.’
There was a fire in her eyes he’d only glimpsed on occasion before. A fire that made her seem more beautiful than ever. Even after five days here, staying in a backwater motel, her dark hair was glossy and her skin glowing. Grace looked as if she should be on the cover of a magazine.
All of a sudden he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand it a second longer. His brain seemed to have lost its don’t-say-that clause. The kind that made you adjust what you really wanted to say to the words that formed on your lips. ‘Grace, what’s going on here?’
She pulled back. She seemed surprised by his forthright question.
Her brow wrinkled. ‘What do you mean?’
He waved his hand. ‘This. Us. What is this?’ He was confused. It was strange for him, because clarity of thought was one of his great strengths. He just couldn’t make sense of this any more.
