Airborne Emergency. Olivia GatesЧитать онлайн книгу.
folks. Stage fright never killed anyone. Start thinking of the most recent and effective procedures that benefit you in your specialty and write something comprehensive. Anyone needing any reference resources, we have two computers with a complete medical library.”
He waited until they settled again. “So...I expect you to get to know one another. Those I haven’t met, come later, one at a time, please, and introduce yourselves. Now, problems! When they’re medical, you report to me. If I’m unavailable, you report to Dr Cassandra St James. If it’s anything else, I advise you run to Harry, or anyone from our management team, consultants or logisticians.” He stopped, his eyes panning over the crowd. “Hi, there, Ashley.” Cassandra heard Ashley’s splutter. He moved his focus at once but Ashley’s distress didn’t end that easily. “OK— questions?”
No one said anything. What was there to say? He’d said it all.
So the man had rhythm, focus, and clarity of communication. He’d make a hell of an instructor.
He snapped the baton closed and sighed. “I see I’ve put you to sleep. Good, you’ll need it in the coming months. In fact, I advise you to grab every moment of rest you can. And don’t eat anything you don’t recognize. We don’t want any of you on our patient lists. Anyone interested in going over the Jet for real, follow me.”
The light came back on and she blinked. He passed by her seat, not even looking at her. Her every hair stood on end nevertheless. She rose, followed the line that had formed in his wake. All the women were in that line.
She gritted her teeth. His harem had already formed. The worst part was she knew why. She’d gotten a first-hand taste—and touch and scent—of his influence, hadn’t she?
But it wasn’t only that roiling inside her. Her mind was tangling over his contradictions. His multiple personalities, more like. Which was the real him? The Vidal who’d rushed to save the little boy, who was heading this most ambitious humanitarian mission? Or the Vidal who’d treated the people who loved him like dirt, who’d made a staggering fortune combining his surgical talents with the tricks he’d perfected through his years as a con artist and a thief?
CHAPTER THREE
“HAVE you made up your mind yet?”
Chocolate cake went down the wrong way. A second later one sound thump between Cassandra’s shoulder blades saved her from choking.
“Did I startle you?”
Vidal came to sit beside her and her coughing intensified, tears running down her face. “No, it’s a hobby of...mine,” she choked. “Inhaling... chocolate cake!”
Dispassionate eyes watched her until she settled down and back in her seat. “Ask a stupid question. Care to answer the one that startled you so much?”
She squinted at him, wiping her tears. “If it made sense, I would.”
“I did ask you at the end of our tour of the plane, before take-off.”
“You asked if I intended to bring anything personal, real or imagined as you put it, into our work. I already said of course not.”
“I know what your lips said, but it doesn’t seem your mind is co-operating. You’ve been close to hostile with me so far.”
She didn’t answer straight away. His accent was suddenly back. Its absence when she’d first met him had been one of the things that had thrown her off track. Although he’d been born in the United States, he’d grown up in an almost exclusively Spanish-speaking community. He’d had dodgy English until the age of fourteen and an accent until the day she’d last seen him. He didn’t any more, but now it was back again. Weird.
“Well?”
“I’ve been totally professional. And if I made a short comment or two, they were for your ears only.”
“You know what big ears people working together have. And living in such close quarters, believe me, they’ll be picking up the vibes sooner rather than later. Having their so-called leaders at odds with each other won’t be conducive to a good working environment.”
“Vibes? Not much I can do if we enter the realm of the metaphysical.”
“Just tell me this—what are you so resentful about? I’m the one you made a fool of. Just what do you have against me?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Por Dios, you’ve always been on my case, even after I got out of your life, and I’ll be damned if I know why you hate me so much. Was today payback for that day you suddenly decided I made good target practice for your budding feminine wiles?”
“I don’t hate you, Vidal. I don’t do destructive emotions. You’re not on my list of favorite people, that’s all. And, really, today had nothing to do with the incident you refer to.”
“The incident? In the singular? I seem to remember a string of disasters. Ending with me drenched in cocktail in my so-called moment of glory, with palm imprints on both my cheeks, two women calling me names I’ve yet to know the meaning of, accusing me of things I never even imagined, in front of a hundred people. And all captured on video. I even made it to some gossip column. Complete with photographs.”
She’d been sixteen and what everyone had described as wild. At least as far as extreme sports, hobbies and fashion went. And she’d been reeling with the discovery of the secret from which her parents had protected her and her siblings so well. It had been Vidal who’d told her, erasing the knight’s image she’d superimposed on his true character, rewriting history, her very memories, making her feel lost and agonizingly foolish. So she’d retaliated. Surely such a big, bad man could handle being made to look foolish, too?
She’d invited his last two discarded girlfriends to the graduation party her father had thrown for him in their home, knowing what harpies they were. And he had been there sporting his latest conquest, the girl who’d taken the state beauty-queen title from both of them. It had just been a matter of waiting for the fireworks to start. She couldn’t have anticipated they’d be so violent, though.
Things had gotten ugly, fast. But funny, too. The women had been so over the top, while Vidal had been so immovable, so unresponsive in the middle, it had turned into a farce. Her lips twitched at the memory.
An intimidating sable eyebrow rose in irony. “So you’re still enjoying the joke. The old, or the new? Both, no doubt. To be expected really. You were always a pain in the—”
“Is this any way to talk to an old friend?” She couldn’t hold back. A chuckle escaped.
“You were right the first time, Cassandra. We were never friends.” His voice was as bored as his eyes. “We stayed in the same house and you harassed me from the first day I set foot there until I stopped giving you the chance.”
Stayed in the same house? That was how he viewed living in her home, her parents equally his, till he’d walked out of their lives, never to look back? And “harassed” him? That was how he viewed her misguided hero-worship? The man was as cold as they came.
“Then I went and gave you another chance today.” He leaned closer. Not improper close, but she still felt trapped.
Trapped. Like that night of the party. He’d chased her to her father’s study, trapped her against the wall, his muscular arms on both sides of her head, the bars of a prison she’d been desperate to escape—desperate never to escape. He’d stood there above her, the cocktail still dripping from his hair and glasses, his fury lashing her, everything about him making her weak, dizzy, scared—elated. She’d stared at him, trying to reconcile the image she’d held of him all her life with what she’d discovered. He’d stared down at her until time had warped and stopped, then he’d sworn in Spanish and exploded out of the room, out of the house. He’d never returned.
“Fourteen years