The Italian Doctor's Mistress

“I will page his resident.”

“I don’t want to speak to his resident. I want to speak to the man who performed the surgery. I’m not interested in a second-hand account from his assistant.”

“Dr. Brunelli is well qualified to address your concerns, signorina,” the nurse insisted. “We do not disturb Dr. Rossi when he is at home, except in cases of extreme emergency.”

The reverence in her tone suggested the almighty Dr. Rossi lay on a par with God. Curbing her irritation, Danielle said, “And my father doesn’t fit into that category?”

“Signor Blake is now stable, signorina, and closely monitored at all times,” the nurse replied, the hint of censure in her voice suggesting that a sincerely concerned daughter wouldn’t have waited this length of time before putting in an appearance at her father’s bedside. “Should there be any change in his condition, Dr. Rossi will be informed and can be here at a moment’s notice.” Her dark eyes softened in sympathy. “You are anxious, which is, of course, to be expected, but rest assured your father could not be in better hands. He is fortunate, if indeed such a word can be applied to his situation, that he was brought here, to such an excellent facility.”

Danielle had to admit there was some merit to the nurse’s claim. When she’d heard that her father had been taken to a small private hospital, in a small town on the northeast shore of Lake Como, her immediate impulse had been to have him transferred to a larger facility, in Milan, or even Rome; one better equipped and better staffed to deal with serious head injuries. But he was in no condition to be moved, she’d been informed, and certainly everything she’d so far seen of the Karina Rossi Hospital spoke state-of-the-art, from the sleek reception area to this room in the Intensive Care Unit.

“Is he related, this Dr. Rossi?” she asked the nurse. “To the woman the hospital’s named after, I mean?”

“Si,” the nurse replied. “She was his wife. They were a very devoted couple. Sfortunamente, Signora Rossi died some years ago.”

“What a lovely way to remember her.”

“She was a very lovely woman. Very warm, very…” She searched for the word. “Comprensiva…very kind.”

“And her husband?”

“Oh!” Her face illuminated with admiration, the nurse flung out her hands. “So skilled! So dedicated and compassionate! He could work anywhere. Would be welcomed with arms spread wide, in any hospital, anywhere in the world. He is the best!”

Somewhat reassured, Danielle glanced again at her father and said, “It helps to know that.”

Tipping her head to one side, the nurse observed her closely. “You are tired and need rest, signorina. Do you have a place to stay?”

“I thought I’d stay here—in case he wakes.”

“He is in a deep coma, my dear. It is unlikely that…” She shrugged and, obviously thinking better of what she’d been about to add, said simply, “You could be here many days, Signorina Blake. A comfortable bed at night, an occasional change of scene, a good meal—they will help you cope with what lies ahead.”

“Is my father going to die?”

The nurse backed away, perturbed at having such a question fired at her out of the blue. “As long as we have life, we continue to hope,” she said, choosing her words with the care of someone crossing a minefield. “But it is not my place to predict…when you meet with Dr. Rossi, you must ask him.”

“I intend to do just that,” Danielle told her. “And until I receive his answer, I will remain here.”

“As you wish. I’m sure, if your father senses your presence, it will comfort him to know that you’re at his side. I’ll have pillows and a blanket sent in, and a tray of something from the cafeteria.”

“I’m not hungry, but I could use a cup of coffee.”

“I’ll see to it at once.”

The hours crawled by, interrupted only by brief, efficient visits from the night nurse. Some time between three and four in the morning, Danielle fell into an uneasy sleep, and awoke at eight, just as the first light of day poked into the room. At her father’s bedside, another nurse, one she hadn’t seen before, adjusted one of the IV drips and smoothed the sheet over his chest.

“He remains unchanged, signorina,” she murmured, “but I’ll be here for a while longer, if you’d like to take a break. There’s a visitors’ lounge at the end of the hall. You’ll find a light breakfast set out there, and facilities where you can freshen up.”

Danielle supposed she needed both. Her eyes felt gritty, her mouth dry as sand. She hadn’t run a comb through her hair in more than twenty-four hours and couldn’t remember the last time she’d brushed her teeth. As for eating, the last meal had been the rubber chicken served on the aircraft, somewhere over the Atlantic, and she’d barely touched it.

“I won’t be gone long,” she said, retrieving her carry-on travel bag from the corner where she’d stashed her luggage the day before. “I want to be here when Dr. Rossi makes his rounds.”

But she hadn’t anticipated that the “facilities” the nurse mentioned would include changing rooms equipped with hair dryers, and showers stocked with towels, shampoo, soap, and body lotion. She hadn’t expected the platter of fresh fruit set out on a linen tablecloth in the lounge, or the basket of warm croissants and thermos of strong, aromatic Italian coffee.

She found them all too hard to resist, so when her planned fifteen-minute break stretched to an hour, and she returned to her father’s room to discover that his doctor had been and gone, she knew she had no one but herself to blame.

Still, she was disappointed, and seeing it, the nurse said, “Dr. Rossi is aware you have arrived and wish to speak to him, Signorina Blake. He asks that you meet him in his office at four o’clock.”

Seven more hours of pacing, and imagining the worst? It was too much! “I had hoped see him much sooner.”

“It cannot be helped,” the nurse said. “A tour bus went off the road in the mountain pass just north of here, with many serious injuries to the passengers. We expect the casualties to be arriving within the hour. Dr. Rossi will be supervising his team in surgery most of the day.”

There it was again, the awestruck tone; the unspoken implication that, without the revered Dr. Rossi in charge, his staff would be helpless to save lives. Frustrated, Danielle bit back the uncharitable retort begging to be aired.

As if reading her thoughts, the nurse went on, “When your father was brought here, late in the day well over a week ago, Dr. Rossi concentrated all his energy and skill on attending to him, without regard for the inconvenience to himself or others. Regardless of the day or hour, it is always his way to be available for those most in need of his help.”

The gentle reproof struck home. She was being unreasonable, unfair, Danielle acknowledged privately. Of course the man had other patients; of course he had to prioritize. And yet, to see her father lying there, stripped of dignity, of that indomitable will which was so much a part of him, devastated her.

Not that he’d thank her for her concern. They had never been close. He wasn’t the kind to lavish warmth and affection on anyone but himself. But her mother had died when she was eleven, and he was the only family Danielle had left. After everything else she’d lost in the last year, the thought of losing him also was more than she could bear.

Turning away from the bed, she went to stand at the window. A woman sat on a bench in the courtyard below, talking to a man in a wheelchair. Something she said made him laugh. He reached for her hand. Raised it to his lips and kissed it. The obvious affection between them had Danielle choking back a sob. To be needed like that…to be loved…!

The nurse must have heard. She joined her at the window, her eyes full of concern. “If you feel up to it, there’s a footpath leading from the hospital grounds to the main part of town,” she suggested kindly. “You’ll find a map in the reception area, and a sign posted outside the front entrance, showing the way. It’s only about a twenty-minute walk, and it might do you some good to get out for a few hours. There’s nothing you can do here, except wait.”

It seemed to Danielle that she’d been waiting a lifetime already. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. Anything was better than watching the big hand on the wall clock jerk from second to second, from minute to minute. Anything was better than listening to the apprehensive thud of her own heart racing ahead of the unhurried blip and beep of the computer measuring her father’s.

Already the first ambulances were racing up to the emergency doors on the left as she came out of the building. And more would soon follow. The wail of their sirens growing closer echoed clearly in the still morning air.

Turning to the right, she set off in the opposite direction, walking briskly toward the little town of Galanio. The footpath wove from the manicured hospital grounds through a sloping meadow where tiny blue flowers grew in the grass, and ended at a bridge which spanned a bubbling stream of water so clear that it must have tumbled straight down the mountain from the snow fields. Beyond the bridge, a paved lane led directly to the center of town.

Galanio huddled between the Alps and the shore of Lake Como in a fairy-tale maze of steep, cobbled streets that opened into unexpected little piazzas and quiet parks. Splashing fountains, chic boutiques, and elegant restaurants lined the broad promenade bordering the waterfront. Magnificent old villas, their terraced gardens overflowing with flowering camellias and other spring blossoms, perched on the hillside, and spread some distance along the shores of the lake beyond the town itself.

Under any other circumstances, Danielle would have found the place enchanting. It was a town for lovers, for romance; a place she and Tom might have come for their honeymoon, if he hadn’t decided at the last minute that he’d rather marry her best friend. Instead, she was here alone, waiting for her father to open his eyes, and terribly afraid his doctor would tell her it was never going to happen.

What then? She knew what her father would say. Pull the damned plug, Danielle! Don’t let me lie here a vegetable.

But to authorize this Dr. Rossi to disconnect the machines that kept Alan Blake alive? In effect, to sign his death warrant? How could she do that?

Somehow the morning passed. At noon she stopped for lunch at a sidewalk café on the promenade. Then, hoping that a miracle had occurred during her absence, she made her way back to the hospital and her father.

Nothing had changed except for the angle of the sun creeping across the floor and striping the pale blue cover on his bed with bars of golden light. Dropping into the easy chair, she resumed her vigil until, at long last, four o’clock arrived.

She found the doctor’s suite of offices at the end of a wing on the main floor, with his name, Carlo Rossi, engraved on a small brass plaque on the door.

“Signorina Blake?” The middle-aged woman in the small outer office smiled pleasantly. “Dr. Rossi is ready to see you.”

Danielle had thought she was ready, too. From the various awed references to him, and his seniority in the hospital chain of command, she’d expected him to be an older man. Kindly, gray-haired, distinguished, and slightly built—in other words similar in appearance to the impeccably tailored maître d’ of the five-star Italian restaurant she frequented at home in Seattle.

In fact, the man rising to greet her from behind a paper-strewn desk was none of those things. In his late thirties, he possessed the fit athletic build of a cross-country skier, although the shadows beneath his eyes suggested he relied on too much strong coffee and too little sleep to get him through his long hospital shifts. But even in hospital greens, with exhaustion painting his features and his dark hair falling in disarray over his forehead, he was still the most strikingly attractive man Danielle had ever seen.