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He should go after her. But then he might say something inappropriate like he loved her. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t risk her position on the team. And right now he just didn’t think he could get his body to move. His legs felt like lead and he rubbed his eyes as the words on the computer screen seemed to dance around him.
‘Donovan? Donovan?’ The voice grew sharper.
He felt fuzzy. He definitely needed to sleep. Or maybe he needed to eat? When was the last time he’d eaten? But his stomach was churning. He couldn’t face the thought of food right now.
‘Donovan.’
The voice was right in front of him. David thumped into the chair next to him and shook him by the shoulders. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
David leaned forward, then immediately pulled back again. ‘Are you sick?’
‘Just tired. I need to sleep.’
‘No. It’s more than that. What are your symptoms?’ The voice was direct and intense. David might work in the lab but he was a fieldwork member could fill any role on the team. He wouldn’t hesitate to take any actions he needed to.
Donovan stretched out his back, trying to loosen his sore muscles, and went for his natural automatic response. ‘I don’t have symptoms. I’m fine.’
Or maybe he did? His brain started to straighten out. What were his symptoms?
It was as if a thousand little caterpillars started marching over his skin with ice-cold feet.
He couldn’t have contracted the virus—could he?
No. He’d been wearing protective gear since he’d got here. Any patient contact he’d had he’d been fully covered. As for the caves, he’d worn the full hazmat suit. Nothing got through that.
The chills continued. The resus case. He hadn’t been wearing full protective clothing for that. He’d pulled on a pair of gloves but that had been it. A child hadn’t been breathing, and he’d prioritised.
He’d had to maintain Tyler’s airway and the little boy had already been haemorrhaging. Truth was he’d probably been exposed to all kind of body fluids.
‘I want to draw your blood.’ David’s voice had never sounded so firm.
Grace. He needed to talk to Grace. He needed to apologise and give her more support. He didn’t have time for this.
David was walking around now, in and out of treatment rooms, collecting supplies. Before Donovan could argue, a tourniquet had been tightened around his upper arm and David was tapping the skin in his inner elbow.
‘Stop it. What you are doing?’
David ignored him. ‘Do you feel sick, nauseous? Have you had any diarrhoea? Sore head, scratchy throat? Any chills or a rash?’
He slid the needle under Donovan’s skin with the ease of long experience then started slotting on the collection bottles for the various samples of blood.
Donovan didn’t know whether to be mad or grateful. And that told him everything he needed to know.
‘When do you think you could have been exposed? We’ve been here just over five days. You must have been exposed at the beginning.’
His head was pounding. He had to stop thinking like a doctor. For once in his life he had to play the part of a patient. ‘No sickness, no diarrhoea. Yes, I have a headache, a sore throat and some chills. But that could be a hundred other things.’
He opened his eyes to face David’s grey ones and the mask covering his face. It gave him a jolt. His colleague was taking no chances.
‘The resus,’ he finally said. ‘I could have been exposed at the kid’s resus. It was five days ago. Maybe a little bit more.’
David finished collecting the samples and pressed a cotton-wool ball into the crook of Donovan’s elbow. ‘Hold this.’ He glanced up and down the corridor. There were approaching footsteps.
‘Callum, I’ve just taken a sample from Donovan. He’s having some symptoms. Can you arrange for him to be put in an isolation room until I get some results?’
The air turned blue with Callum’s Scottish expletives. He didn’t hesitate and moved straight over to Donovan. David thrust a gown and gloves towards him and was met with another outburst of words.
Donovan was fine. He was absolutely fine. But any second now he was going to be sick all over his shoes. And this fuzzy headache made him feel as if he was surrounded by a huge cloud of cotton wool. Words and pictures were disorientating him. Like any person, he’d had sickness bugs before in the past, but this didn’t feel like a normal bug.
Callum’s loud voice carried up the corridor as he sorted out a bed. Among all the voices and confusion there was only one clear thought in Donovan’s head. Only one thing he could focus on. Grace.
He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to touch her skin and run his fingers through her hair. He wanted to sit down face to face with her. He wanted to tell her that everything about her confused him. He’d never been so distracted by a woman in his life.
He’d never had that gut-clenching feeling about a woman before. She could make him smile just by walking into the room. She played in his thoughts every day and every night. And no matter how much his gut told him that dating someone in the team was a bad idea, every other part of his body disagreed.
He squeezed his eyes shut and he could see her walking out of the sea in her orange bikini with the water streaming from her body; he could see her striding across the concourse at the airport with her wraparound dress and newly found confidence.
He could see the hurt and fire flash in her eyes when she’d been mad at him earlier. Why hadn’t he spoken to her? Why hadn’t he gone after her?
‘This way, Dr Reid. We have a room ready for you.’ One of the nurses was at his elbow. Totally gowned, gloved and masked. Infection-control procedures were in place.
Oh, no.
He’d kissed Grace. He’d definitely swapped body fluids with her while he’d been incubating the disease. He’d put Grace at risk. He felt a sharp pain in his chest as if someone had just grabbed hold of his heart and squeezed tightly.
No. Not Grace. Anyone but Grace.
‘Callum!’ He had no idea where
Callum was but he had to tell him. The nurse at his elbow jumped as she tried to lead him down the corridor. Panic seized him. This was what he’d dreaded. This was what he’d always feared. And he’d been right.
He was finding it difficult to focus, difficult to concentrate. Grace was the one solid picture in his mind. His head was thumping, it felt as though the pulsing blood supply was echoing around his brain. This wasn’t normal. It wasn’t right.
Thumping footsteps and a heavy hand on his arm. ‘Donovan, what is it?’
‘I kissed Grace. I kissed her.’ He couldn’t hide the desperate tone in his voice. Neither could he make out Callum’s reply. The world around him was swimming, hazy lights merging and blackening, the strangest feeling flooding through his body as all energy seemed to leave him, turning his legs to jelly.
Then everything went dark.
* * *
She was eating the greasiest, unhealthiest pizza in the world. She’d been so mad she’d left the hospital without eating and had found out to her peril that Saucer Boys Pizzas was the only option near the motel. The bad punctuation should have told her everything she needed to know.
The grease wasn’t helping the horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach.
The horrible feeling that she’d made a terrible mistake.
She pulled open the doors to the beach, drinking in the ocean view and releasing some of the odour of toxic pizza.
The plastic white chair on the tiny balcony was designed to be uncomfortable. What she’d really like to be doing right now was sitting with a glass of wine in hand, watching the sunset on the horizon. But she wasn’t in that Zen-like kind of place.
She was too worried about the kids. She was too worried about doing her absolute best on her twelve-hour shift tomorrow. She was too worried she might miss something important.
She was too worried about Donovan and her actions around him.
There. She’d let that thought into her crowded brain. It almost felt like some of the other thoughts were there deliberately, trying to push him into the background and pretend he wasn’t important, when the truth was he was centre stage in her brain all the time.
