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The nurse chuckled. “Of course. Your physician’s assistant did. Either way, we sure are grateful you showed. Now.” She waved to the people waiting with bored expressions. “You can either do the intakes or draw the blood. Which would you prefer?”
“Blood?” she rasped.
She felt woozy. Her pulse was a stampede as she fully took in her surroundings for the first time. Just beyond the cubicle, there were beds. With people. Tiny tubes of blood curled from their arms where it drained into thick plastic bags like liquid jelly.
Marti recoiled, her eyes widening to twice their size. Of all the booths to get trapped in, she got stuck in this one. “They’re donating blood?” she croaked.
The woman scowled, her patience clearly waning. “We don’t have time to joke, Dr. Maddox. They told me at the office you were a bit eccentric, but we’re on a schedule here.” She motioned to a young man sitting close by. “You can do intakes, if you want. He already finished his paperwork. You just have to review it.”
Marti nodded. Relief sank in her veins. She could breathe again. Paperwork she could handle.
“Afterward, check his hemoglobin. Just like this,” the nurse said, quickly swabbing the young man’s finger, then pulling out what appeared to be a little thumbtack. “And prick.” She brought the sharp tip of the tack down on the boy’s finger before Marti could protest. “Easy peasy.”
Marti stood, transfixed by the drop of crimson. The blood formed a perfect bubble on the tip of his finger.
Easy peasy. Easy peasy . . . The nurse’s voice looped in her head as her vision glazed over and the floor whirled around her. A tingling sensation started at her toes and worked its way up her body in quick succession. The nurse’s voice faded, and Marti’s stomach squeezed. The room tipped on its axis, so she focused on her breathing, desperate to slow her racing heart.
But it was too late.
She felt her knees buckle before her body turned to rubber. The room swam, and just as her eyes rolled back in her head, she saw a flash of piercing green before the world went black.
SHE FLOATED, SURROUNDED by a forest . . . woodlands and the scent of fresh grass. Pine. Cedar. Base notes of leather.
She blinked her eyes open. Her fingers gripped the sides of a cot, soft beneath her back.
Her vision blurred, then slowly cleared as she peered up into familiar eyes. Green—so green. The flash of color before everything went blank.
She tried to sit and groaned when her head throbbed.
“Easy there.” Logan hovered over her and placed a steadying hand on her back.
The events of the last few moments flashed through her mind—the nurse thinking she was Dr. Maddox, the blood, her woozy head . . .
Logan must have seen her faint.
He broke her fall.
Reaching a hand up to her aching head, she tried to quell the pounding as she glanced up at him.
“Welcome back.” He grinned. “You know, if you wanted to get me alone, all you had to do was ask. You didn’t need to fake fainting.”
Marti brought a hand to her head and groaned. “I wasn’t faking.”
“I didn’t know you were a doctor. Funny you never mentioned it. Doctor by day, writer by night? Or do you only practice on Tuesdays?”
“Funny,” Marti rasped, scowling.
In an effort to clear the fog, she shook her head and glanced around her. They were in the back of a tented booth, hidden away from the crowd of Med students strolling by.
“It’s unusual for a doctor to faint at the sight of blood,” he plowed on, clearly more than amused by her presence there, in a white lab coat, sporting a foreign nametag.
“I have epilepsy.” Marti glared at him, but her lips twitched, betraying her.
“Do you now?”
“It’s not exactly the kind of thing you advertise. Is it?”
“So you’re a doctor and you have epilepsy? And here I just thought you might be spying on me.”
