Free Luca's Bad Girl by Amy Andrews

to thehospital gurney on the count of three. Whether she liked it or not, she and Stanley were connected.
    And she really didn’t want to have to deal with that.
    Stan pulled his mask off and grabbed her hand. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I told you she was cheating on me.’
    Mia looked into his anguished face, trying not to see her father, trying only to see the man who had menaced her with a knife. But he looked … broken.
    Just like her father.
    ‘It’s going to be okay, Stan,’ she murmured, replacing his mask as people bustled around her. ‘We’re going to get you patched up.’
    He pulled it off again. ‘No. Just leave me. Just leave me to die.’
    Mia and Luca’s gazes met for a moment. She felt rage build inside as she looked back down at Stan. He’d taken the coward’s way out, just like her father. Her father had walked, Stan had jumped—both ways showed very little regard for the people left behind.
    For a tiny baby. For a bewildered ten-year-old girl.
    ‘Please, just let me die,’ Stan begged.
    Mia bit down on the urge to tell Stan that if he’d really wanted to die he should have jumped from a higher building. The fact that he hadn’t spoke volumes about the incident. She doubted it was a true attempt—more like a cry for help.
    And she was damned if she was going to let him die on her watch.
    She put the mask back. ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid, Stan.’
    ‘We need X-Ray,’ Luca said. ‘And get Psych down here. I want to consult with John Allen.’
    Luca and Mia, their personal situation forgotten,worked methodically over the next hour to stabilise Stan for Theatre. They intubated, placed lines and another chest tube, gave blood and plasma expanders, consulted with Ortho, General Surgery and Radiology.
    And all the time Luca was chanting, Come on, Stan, come on Stan, come on Stan. Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. If it took everything he had, Luca was not going to let this man die.
    Not that he’d ever been particularly emotional about life-and-death situations. Being a trauma specialist, he saw the struggle between the two on a regular basis. Like two powerfully competing forces pulling in opposite directions. He worked hard to save every patient but not even he was arrogant enough to assume that hard work was always enough.
    Sometimes, no matter what he threw at a patient, they died.
    He got that. People died.
    Children, teenagers, athletes, mothers, forty-year-olds with everything to live for.
    People died.
    Hell … they were all dying.
    But the truth was, Stan had struck a chord. And probably for the first time ever he actually felt personally invested in a patient. And not because Stan had threatened him with a knife but because Luca knew all about the demons that had driven him.
    He knew how it felt to be betrayed by the person you loved. How it felt to have your whole world yanked out from under you. And how life-changing that could be.
    He knew how it felt to be a father one moment and then suddenly not.
    To feel powerless.
    To feel alone.
    It may have been a whole bunch of years ago but some things never left you.
    He glanced at Mia as she took a phone call from the lab. Mia, who was working just as hard to pull Stan through. The man who had threatened to stab her, who had slashed her arm with a knife.
    What was driving her?
    The same things that had driven her to cry out in her sleep that night? That had spurred her to seek amnesia in his arms?
    What were the things that haunted her? That made her tough and feisty and not the cuddling type?
    Had Stan stirred them up for her as he had stirred things up from his past? Daddy, come back . That’s what she’d cried out that night. Did Stan remind her of her father as he had reminded him of his sixteen-year-old self?
    ‘Haemoglobin’s eight,’ Mia announced. She ordered another bag of blood to be hung and administered stat. ‘Let’s get him to Theatre for that laparotomy,’ she said. ‘He’s bleeding from