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What was wrong with her? This was her fault. She was sending conflicting signals to Austin, playing in the pool with him one minute, arguing over her house repairs the next. Kissing him as if she were desperate and starved for love and attention. No wonder he'd proposed. Was she more like her mother than she realized?
She shivered at the thought. She needed to move out of Austin's house as soon as possible.
She managed to calm down enough to drive to the closest high interest brokerage house. They were more than happy to lend her money in exchange for an astronomical interest rate. She stared at the numbers of what her monthly payments would be and tried not to show her alarm. One extra shift a pay period couldn't be enough. She'd have to work two extra shifts in order to make ends meet.
Yet, what choice did she have? She didn't want Austin to think she'd marry him to avoid paying her debts. And the project needed to be done. Without giving herself time to talk herself out of it, she signed the papers and walked away with a fat check and the heavy responsibility of high interest loan payments.
At Austin’s house, she set the check in the center of the kitchen table, where he couldn't help but see it when he came home. She told herself it was better this way.
He wasn't her type. She knew full well his reputation wasn't exaggerated. Many nurses in the emergency department had raved over what it had been like to go out with him. His proposal had caught her so off guard, she didn't know what to do or to say.
Avoiding him wouldn’t be easy, not while they were living together in one house. Where could she go if she and Josh did need to move out? She couldn't afford a hotel, not with the new loan payments. She had friends from work, but none of them had much extra room. She sat on the edge of the bed in the guest bedroom and gazed around helplessly.
She was stuck here until she could find another place to stay.
Austin knew how much he'd blown it with Lindsey when she avoided him for the rest of the day. He saw the check on the kitchen table from one of those high interest loan places but refused to take it. Paying inflated interest rates wouldn't help her become independent. She was already independent, doing a fine job of raising her son on her own. Why couldn't she see that?
He paced the length of his home, trying to relax his tense muscles. He shouldn't have shocked her with his proposal. Even though he'd meant every word. The idea of marrying Lindsey didn't scare him as much as it probably should. In truth, he'd never planned on marrying anyone. There wasn’t a woman he’d dated with whom he’d wanted to spend the rest of his life.
And despite his tendency to avoid deep relationships, he didn't take marriage lightly. Thanks to the example set by his parents, he believed in marrying for keeps. That was the main reason he'd been so picky before.
Giving Lindsey the space she needed wasn't easy. He missed her. He missed talking to her even if it was just to hear about her day. Or to tell her about his.
He was almost grateful he was scheduled to work the following day. Living in the same house with her when she was barely speaking to him was difficult. At least Josh was talking to him or things would have gotten extremely uncomfortable.
He left the house the following morning before he even saw Lindsey. He received his first call within the hour, responding to a bad single vehicle crash on the interstate. After hitting a concrete barrier, the vehicle had flipped over and skidded on its hood for nearly fifty feet.
He was glad to be partnered with Big Joe to assist with the extrication. Two teams had been dispatched to the scene of the crash and traffic was backed up for miles. Luckily, both occupants of the car, a husband and his wife, had been wearing their seat belts or the outcome would have been deadly.
“Are you both okay?” He knelt on the ground to peer into the space where the driver side window had once been. The driver looked to be worse off than his female passenger.
“My chest hurts.”
Austin didn't like the way the guy looked—he was pale, sweaty and complaining of chest pain. Had he suffered a heart attack before the crash or as a result of the air bag deployment while flipping over the concrete barrier and sliding on the car's roof?
“Let's get some oxygen on you.” He reached in to wrap the oxygen mask around the guy's head. “On a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain you've ever felt, how much does your chest hurt?”
“Eight. Maybe a nine.” The man's words were muffled by the oxygen mask.
“Let’s try some nitroglycerin.” Big joe pulled out a small vial of the soluble tablets.
He urged the patient to place the medication under his tongue. While they gave the nitro a chance to work, he and Big Joe discussed the best way to get the two victims out of the car.
“Through the window,” Big Joe decided. “It will be tight, though.” He gave a yank on the door, but it wouldn't budge. “Unless we want to wait for the jaws of life to get here?”
“No, let's try the window. I'll cut through his seat belt.” Austin used his knife to free the driver and then slowly eased the man out of the car, doing his best to keep his patients head and neck in alignment.
“How's your pain?” He asked when the driver was free.
“A little better.” The driver lifted bloody hands to his chest, rubbing the center. “Still hurts, though.”
Joe let's start an IV and give him some morphine. Austin didn't like the driver's pale, cold, clammy skin. They needed to get his pain under control, and quickly.
With big Joe's help they managed to get the driver safely strapped onto the longboard and then up and onto the gurney. Using the padded head and shoulder blocks, he kept the guy’s neck stabilized as Joe started the IV.
The driver relaxed once they had the morphine in him. But hooking him up to their portable monitored showed he had some acute myocardial changes in his heart. Austin quickly called the hospital and discussed the case with the emergency doctor as they prepared to transport him for further treatment. The second team that had arrived, took control of their patients’ wife. Thankfully she didn't look as badly hurt.
An emergency department doctor met them at the doorway of the ambulance bay. He shouldn’t have been disappointed not to see Lindsey. He and Joe wheeled the patient inside. The doctor had already contacted the cardiologist on duty and they had discussed the need for the patient to go straight to the cardiac cath lab. He and Joe assisted with transporting the patient to the third-floor cardiac care area.
