The Italian Effect

She must have made a sound, because suddenly both of them were looking at her. The expression of pleasure in their dark eyes was subtly different, but they had almost identical smiles of welcome on their faces.

“Lissa! You’re late! Papa has already started the story,” Taddeo exclaimed. “Come and sit next to me so you can see the pictures.”

When she hesitated, Matt seconded the invitation, but the expression in his eyes wasn’t nearly so candid.

“Yes, Lissa. Come and sit next to us so you can find out if the sky is really falling down.”

There was a sweet pain in leaning close to the two of them to share the book, knowing that it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. One half of her mind was relishing every nuance, from the fresh, soapy smell of Taddeo’s skin to the deep resonance of Matt’s voice. The other half was desperately trying to preserve even a little distance, so that when she was no longer part of the circle, her heart wouldn’t forever mourn their loss.

Dear Reader,

I was only a child the first time I saw it, but I can still remember my first view of the Adriatic and the stark scenery of the southern Italian coast.

Many people travel to ancient monuments to learn about other cultures. For me, though, the land of the inhabitants, the rocks they climbed and the sea they gazed out over, tell me far more of who those ancient peoples were, deep inside, where it matters.

When I wanted to write Lissa’s story, that long-treasured region in Italy was the obvious place for her to meet Matteo and his daredevil son and to discover the powerful effect both of them would have on her life.

Happy reading,

Josie Metcalfe

The Italian Effect

Josie Metcalfe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

COVER

Dear Reader

TITLE PAGE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

COPYRIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

TWO days into her holiday Lissa flopped back on her beach towel and heaved a great sigh.

She might have booked it at the very last minute, but it was all exactly as the travel agent had promised. The Italian sky was impossibly blue, the sand was soft and white and the sun was warm and bright.

It wasn’t exactly the exotic Far-Eastern destination she’d been looking forward to for the last six months, but it was her grandmother’s native country. She just wished she were visiting it under happier circumstances.

As it was, all around her was a complete selection of nationalities and every one of them, from the oldest to the youngest, was enjoying themselves…and she was already bored to tears.

‘There’s nothing to do,’ she muttered, slapping shut the thick glitzy novel she’d picked up at the airport and closing her eyes in disgust. It was by a favourite author and she’d been so certain that it would be able to hold her attention. She needed it to be able to hold her attention because there were things she didn’t want to have time to think about.

After the last year of non-stop activity and the excitement of making all those plans for her future…No, she wasn’t going to think about that disaster and the way it had changed her life for ever.

She desperately needed this break and had been looking forward to having time to relax, but, oh, she was finding it so hard to unwind.

Yesterday she’d hired a car to take a preliminary look at the local sights and had promised herself a longer look at the nearby countryside which her grandmother had described so many times. She had a whole month to fill, after all, she reminded herself with a silent groan, and it was still far too soon to start thinking about anything further away than that.

This morning she’d even visited the hotel’s beauty salon for more than an hour’s pampering and then had promptly undone most of the beautician’s efforts with a dip in the sea. Unless she was willing to waste her time wandering around the small parade of souvenir-filled shops lining the sea front, all that remained was to lie here and listen to the world go by.

Thank goodness the ice-cream vendor seemed to have switched his chimes off for a while. It had been a welcome surprise to recognise the very English sound of ‘Greensleeves’ instead of the ubiquitous ‘O sole mio’—at least until the thirty-seventh repetition.

Lissa sighed again and then forced herself to play the game of trying to separate out all the different elements of the sounds surrounding her.

First and most pervasive was the rhythmic susurration of the waves on the shore, punctuated by the raucous shrieks of seabirds. She’d watched them earlier, wheeling about the edges of the rocky outcrops that edged the beach.

Almost as raucous were the children, their cries and laughter ebbing and flowing around her with the intermittent thuds of running feet. There were several family groups with youngsters ranging from a few months old to young teenagers, and the way they all seemed to play together it was difficult to tell which children belonged with which parents.

Nearby was a young couple, honeymooners by the self-obsessed look of them and the shiny newness of their matching wedding rings. Their soft murmurs reached her on the fitful breeze and faded every so often into meaningful silences and husky laughter.

If the steamy kiss she’d witnessed a few moments ago was anything to go by, it wouldn’t be long before they disappeared back to their room. When it happened, she wouldn’t allow herself to dwell on the fact that she was probably the only person on the beach by herself; that she should have been part of a pair by now, if only…

She shook her head to dispel the thought before it got any further and concentrated again on the life going on around her, determined to become part of it even if only by observation.

There was a group of young men farther over, fit and healthy and obviously proud of revealing it in their choice of skimpy beachwear. They were locals if their dark hair and deep tans were any indication and had been taking a delight in passing comments among themselves about the women going by. Apparently they were assuming that pale skin meant their targets were newly arrived visitors ripe for a holiday romance. They were also clearly taking it for granted that the women they were dissecting wouldn’t understand their conversation.

It wasn’t the first time that Lissa was glad of her own mixed heritage. Not only did her dark hair and the natural olive tint of her skin offer her a degree of protection against these predators, but her comprehension of Italian was easily good enough to put her on her guard. An insult spoken with an apparently admiring smile was still an insult.

She heard a group of giggling female English voices arrive nearby and opened one eye to peer in their direction. It didn’t take long to discover that they were apparently a group of girls on their first foreign holiday without their parents.

Lissa could remember that age of innocence—just left school and waiting for exam results to know whether she was going to be able to follow her dream of becoming a doctor—but it seemed so much longer than ten years ago.

She didn’t need a crystal ball to know what was going to happen next and the grim inevitability of it kept her watching.

It only took a few minutes for the local males to close in on their new quarry with swaggering walks and gleaming smiles. The girls clearly didn’t understand the crudity of the comments being made about them and their physical attributes, or the bargaining going on between the men as they apportioned the girls among themselves. Lissa could, and it turned her stomach to see them led off like lambs to the slaughter.

She closed her eyes again but what little pleasure she’d found in the day had been soured. It didn’t seem to matter that she tried to concentrate on the soothing sounds of the ocean. All she seemed to hear were the insincere compliments that had been showered on the naïve girls just a few feet away. How long would it be before their eyes were opened? Hours? Days? At least it wouldn’t be longer than the one- or two-week span of their holiday.

In her case, it had taken months for the penny to drop.

She tried to shut the sounds out and was seriously contemplating going back to the hotel when she heard a new sound added to the cacophony and every nerve switched to full alert.

‘Oh, my God,’ shrieked a voice not far away, a young and obviously frightened girl’s voice. ‘Help me, someone. He’s fallen. He’s hurt…’

Lissa was on her feet almost before she realised she was moving, her eyes scanning the far end of the beach.

Several other people had obviously heard the scream and they were all looking towards the rocks that curved round like a protective arm at the far end of the strip of sand.

Second nature had her reaching for her bag and then she was off and running.

A small crowd had started gathering, several voices calling out advice.

Lissa sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that she’d never lost her basic comprehension of Italian even though her speech might not be quite fluent. It was certainly enough to understand that the voices in the crowd were suggesting that the unseen victim should be moved into a more comfortable position.

‘Fermo! Non muoverti!’ she shouted as she pushed her way through the gathering knot of onlookers, terrified that they might move the victim and damage his spinal cord. ‘Stia attento della spina dorsale!’

Her voice must have conveyed both the urgency of the situation and the fact that she was an authority of some sort, because everyone stood back to let her through. Even the young woman who had first called the alarm grew silent, but tears still streamed down her face as an older woman wrapped her in comforting arms.

‘Chiami un’ambulanza!’ she ordered as soon as she caught sight of the scene in front of her, then dropped to her knees in the sand and concentrated on beginning her observations.

She couldn’t help thinking that the little boy lying crumpled and unconscious on the unforgiving rocks looked just like an abandoned puppet. He looked so small and fragile that she just wanted to pick him up and cradle him in her arms.

‘ABC,’ she murmured under her breath, grounding herself in the routine she’d been following ever since she’d begun her training in emergency medicine. ‘Airway, breathing, circulation.’

He was lying on his back across the rocks with his head twisted to one side, but all the while he was able to breathe it was far safer not to move his neck. His pulse was good, too…a little fast but strong and regular.

In between, she was being peppered with information about her little charge. It seemed as if almost half of the people on the beach knew little Taddeo.

A voice called something from the back of the rapidly growing crowd and the message was passed forward. With so many voices chiming in it could have been garbled, but Lissa understood enough. There had been an accident a few miles up the coast. A car had crashed into a motorcycle. It could take half an hour or even more before qualified help arrived.

‘It’s up to me, then,’ she murmured as she rested her fingers gently over the steady pulse in the fragile neck. ‘No proper equipment. Nothing except all those years of training to fall back on.’

Suddenly her brain seemed to be working at lightning speed.

‘I need a small surfboard,’ she announced, the Italian word emerging from her mouth without conscious thought. She’d been watching some of the children riding the waves into shore on them a little while ago and one of them would have to serve as a makeshift backboard. ‘And some towels and some leather belts…Oh, and some strong men with gentle hands.’

‘Wouldn’t we all?’ quipped one of the women in the crowd. There was a sudden ripple of laughter at her wry comment and Lissa couldn’t help smiling, in spite of the tense situation.

It took very little time for her strange shopping list to arrive and then it was a case of demonstrating exactly what she needed her untrained assistants to do.

It seemed as if it took for ever before she had five-year-old Taddeo positioned to her satisfaction, his head braced by rolled-up towels on either side to prevent his neck from moving and held still by several strips of adhesive tape from the first-aid kit in her bag. The rest of his body was cushioned by more towels and stabilised by the borrowed belts wrapped around the board.

He was still unconscious and there was a large knot on the back of his head that was bleeding sluggishly. It didn’t look as if he’d broken any limbs, but only an X-ray would tell. As for any further injuries…

‘Carry him carefully,’ she encouraged the men who took either end of the board. ‘Don’t slip or you’ll jolt him. We don’t want to risk paralysing him.’

She raced back across the narrow beach to grab the rest of her belongings before rejoining the small cavalcade, sparing a brief reassuring smile for the young woman being comforted by the matriarch of the boisterous family.

It was a precarious trek up the winding pathway to the road at the top. She’d taken the much steeper steps on the way down, but even this route seemed almost as precipitous as Mount Everest now that she wanted to cover the distance quickly.

She knew that the first hour after an accident—the so-called ‘golden’ hour—could be the most crucial in deciding the survival of a patient. It would have been impossible not to be conscious that time was ticking by at an alarming rate.

‘La macchina,’ announced one of the volunteer porters as they came to a halt beside a luxurious car.

While she supervised the loading of her little charge across the back seat she subdued a brief pang of worry at abandoning her own hired vehicle. It could be awkward if she was left stranded at the hospital without transport, but it was far more important that she should be close at hand to watch over Taddeo.

Lissa perched herself on the edge of the seat, bracing her hip against the edge of the makeshift backboard to ensure it didn’t shift as the engine roared into life. She tightened one hand over the luxurious leather upholstery, the other probing gently around the wedged towels to check on her charge’s pulse.

Still strong and steady, thank goodness, although his continued unconsciousness was worrying. Supposing he had sustained something more than concussion? A haemorrhage? Brain damage? Was he in a coma, dying even as she counted his pulse and monitored his breathing?

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she muttered, giving herself a mental shake. ‘Just because you aren’t surrounded by the usual equipment in the emergency department doesn’t mean that your brain isn’t functioning the way it usually does.’ She checked the size of the child’s pupils, having to peer closely because the irises were so dark a brown that they almost merged with the pupil.

‘Still even,’ she whispered, relieved that they also seemed to be equally responsive to changes in light levels.

‘Uno minuto,’ her unofficial ambulance driver called over his shoulder, announcing their imminent arrival at the hospital. Lissa sighed with relief, then started to brace herself for the task of dredging up enough of her rusty Italian to try to explain the situation and her observations.

She marshalled her thoughts into some semblance of order and spared a brief thought for the paramedics who had to do this on a daily basis. She’d always appreciated the ones who managed to give the maximum of pertinent detail in the minimum of words but had never realised how difficult it could be to do it.

‘Può aiutarmi?’ she called, beckoning two gentlemen in uniform standing near the entrance to the small regional hospital’s emergency entrance. They certainly looked strong enough to help to lift the makeshift stretcher out of the car.

‘There’s been an accident. He’s hit his head. He’s unconscious,’ she said, relieved that the hastily collected phrases had the desired effect.

Her redundant driver waved off her expressions of gratitude and called his good wishes after her as she hurried away. In no time at all she was following the child into the department, relieved to have arrived so swiftly.

Once inside the doors she was stopped by a wall of bodies and sound, unable to believe her eyes.

The whole place seemed to be completely crowded with a multitude of people wailing in misery, and for a moment she wondered how on earth she was going to get her little charge the attention he urgently needed.

Her press-ganged porters obviously knew their way around, as there was no hesitation in their passage through the unit. She followed closely behind, her eyes darting around in the hopes of spotting someone in authority as soon as possible.

One of her willing companions called out urgently to a harried nurse who pointed towards a curtained cubicle. The woman’s reply was totally incomprehensible to Lissa, the words lost in the volume of misery surrounding them.

Lissa supervised as they gently deposited their burden onto an examining table then checked the little figure again. There was still no sign that he was returning to consciousness and she was growing increasingly frustrated that there was absolutely nothing she could do about the delay in getting someone to look at him.

If this had been the accident and emergency department she’d been working in for the last year, she wouldn’t even have had to raise her voice to have at least a nurse in attendance. What kind of place was this to have the reception area filled with such a noisy rabble and not a member of medical staff in evidence? Was there anyone in charge?

When the curtain was whisked aside behind her she whirled to face the intruder. She would have loved to demand answers to each one of those questions but doubted whether her grasp of Italian was up to it. Neither was it the time or place for such recriminations. It was Taddeo who mattered.

A distant part of her brain registered the fact that the man who had just joined them was the epitome of every cliché about handsome Italian males—all lean good looks and flashing dark eyes. The more rational side registered the fact that his clothing might be in immaculate good taste but it was decidedly rumpled and he looked as exhausted as if he hadn’t slept for a week.

That didn’t mean that those dark eyes were lazy about skimming over her from head to toe, lingering pointedly in several places.

Lissa glared at him when his gaze finally rose high enough to reach her face, angry that her body was stirring in response to the admiration she could read there.

The sudden shiver of awareness drew her attention to the fact that she was wearing little more than a gauzy shirt over a swimsuit that covered her as faithfully as a second skin. It was a measure of how single-minded her concentration had been over the last half-hour that she’d completely forgotten her skimpy attire, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

‘You are a doctor?’ she demanded with a lift of her chin that denied the previous few seconds of byplay, and received a cool nod in reply. ‘Well, there’s been an accident,’ she announced, the words beginning to sound more fluent the more often she used them. ‘The child fell and hit his head. He’s still unconscious.’ She gestured towards her charge, affording him his first view of their patient.

He gasped and she found herself unceremoniously nudged aside as he strode to the side of the bed.

‘Mio figlio!’ he exclaimed in a voice full of horror as he began to examine the child, and they were almost the only words she understood in the following flood of words. All she could tell was that they were questions and that he was very angry.

‘I’m sorry, but when you speak so fast I can’t understand,’ she announced, reverting to English and stopping him in his tracks. ‘Did you say he’s your son?’

‘Si…Yes,’ he corrected himself impatiently, his dark brows pulled together in a deep V as he checked the unconscious child’s pupillary reaction. ‘Taddeo Aldarini. He’s almost five years old…But what happened to him? Where is Maddelena, and what are you doing with my son?’

He’d straightened up by then and his final question was almost an accusation, not softened at all by the sexy accent shaping his words.

Lissa chose to answer the more important one first.

‘He fell at the beach and landed on his back on the rocks.’ She held up her hand when he went to interrupt. ‘He’s been unconscious since he fell but his vital signs are all within normal bounds. I didn’t let anyone move him until I could stabilise his spine on an improvised backboard. As far as I can see, his only external injury is a bump on the back of his head where the skin has been broken.’

‘You are a nurse?’ he questioned as he swiftly jotted down what she’d told him on the case notes.

‘A doctor,’ she corrected as an amplified voice cut through the hubbub outside the curtain. The electronic distortion meant that she understood little more than the fact that the man was being paged in a hurry.

‘What sort of a doctor?’ he demanded with a suspicious look.

‘Accident and emergency for the last year but I’ve been thinking about going into general practice.’ At least, she had been before her private life had collapsed in ruins around her.

‘You can prove this?’ he challenged with a harried look over his shoulder as the disembodied voice called his name again.

‘Now? No,’ she said, startled by the demand. Was he going to sue her for practising medicine without permission in a foreign country? But Italy was part of the European Union. Didn’t that mean that people were free to work in any of the member states?

The thoughts scrambling around in her head screeched to a halt with the memory of her little bag of belongings.

‘Just a minute.’ She crouched down to tip everything out onto the floor and grabbed the flat leather wallet hidden right at the bottom. ‘Is this what you want to see?’

She held out both her passport and her hospital identity card. She had no idea how she’d come to pack it when she’d had no intention of doing anything other than vegetate for the next four weeks, but when she’d been preparing for her day on the beach had found it with the rest of her documents.

He examined both of them in silence then gave a decisive nod.

‘I would like to ask a favour of you,’ he said, his choice of words strangely formal. ‘Would you accompany Taddeo to the…radiografia? As you see, I already have so many people waiting and now there are the victims of…scontrarsi.’ He mimed a collision and gestured towards the throng all too audible on the other side of the curtain, but his glance towards his son was very telling. He was obviously torn between his duty to his patients and his personal wish to be beside his son.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t her problem but, having become involved in the situation, how could she not see it through?

‘I’ll stay with him on one condition—that you find me something a little more…’ She gestured towards her skimpy attire with a grimace. It had seemed fairly modest on the beach, but next to his fully clothed body, there was something almost…intimate about the contrast.