‘WILL YOU KEEP STILL?’ Eva Bergen told the man sitting on the stool before her. She’d staunched the bleeding from the wound on the bridge of his nose and had the tiny sterilised strips ready to close it up. What should be a relatively simple procedure was being hampered by his right foot tapping away and jerking the rest of his body.
He glared at her through narrowed eyes, the right one of which was swollen and turning purple. ‘Just get it done.’
‘Do you want me to close this up or not? I’m not a nurse and I need to concentrate, so keep still.’
He took a long breath, clenched his jaw together and fixed his gaze at the distance over her shoulder. She guessed he must have clenched all the muscles in his legs too as his foot finally stopped tapping.
Taking her own deep breath, Eva leaned forward on her stool, which she’d had to raise so she could match his height, then hesitated. ‘Are you sure you don’t want one of the medics to look at it? I’m sure it’s broken.’
‘Just get it done,’ he repeated tersely.
Breathing through her mouth so she didn’t inhale his scent and taking great care not to touch him anywhere apart from his nose, she put the first strip on the wound.
It was amazing that even with a busted nose Daniele Pellegrini still managed to look impeccably suave. The quiff of his thick, dark brown hair was still perfectly placed, his hand-tailored suit perfectly pressed. He could still look in a mirror and wink at his reflection.
He was a handsome man. She didn’t think there was a female aid worker at the refugee camp who hadn’t done a double-take when he’d made his first appearance there a month ago. This was only his second visit. He’d called her thirty minutes ago asking, without a word of greeting, if she was still at the camp. If he’d bothered to know anything about her he would’ve known she, like all the other staff based there, had their own quarters at the camp. He’d then said he was on his way and to meet him in the medical tent. He’d disconnected the call before she could ask what he wanted. She’d learned the answer to that herself when she’d made the short walk from the ramshackle administrative building she worked from to the main medical facility.
When Hurricane Ivor had first hit the Caribbean island of Caballeros, the Blue Train Aid Agency, which already had a large presence in the crime-ridden country, had been the first aid charity to set up a proper camp there. Now, two months after the biggest natural disaster the country had ever known and the loss of twenty thousand of its people, the camp had become home to an estimated thirty thousand people, with canvas tents, modular plastic shelters and makeshift shacks all tightly knit together. Other aid agencies had since set up at different sites and had similar numbers of displaced people living in their camps. It was a disaster on every level imaginable.
Daniele was the brother of the great philanthropist and humanitarian, Pieta Pellegrini. Pieta had seen the news about the hurricane and how the devastation had been amplified by the destruction of a large number of the island’s hospitals. He’d immediately decided that his foundation would build a new, disaster-proof, multi-functional hospital in the island’s capital, San Pedro. A week later he’d been killed in a helicopter crash.
Eva had been saddened by this loss. She’d only met Pieta a few times but he’d been greatly respected by everyone in the aid community.
She and the other staff at the Blue Train Aid Agency had been overjoyed to learn his family wished to proceed with the hospital. The people of the island badly needed more medical facilities. They and the other charities and agencies did the best they could but it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough.
Pieta’s sister, Francesca, had become the new driving force for the project. Eva had liked her very much and admired the younger woman’s determination and focus. She’d expected to like and admire his brother too. Like Pieta, Daniele was a world-famous name, but his reputation had been built through his architecture and construction company, which had won more design awards than any other in the past five years.
She’d found nothing to like or admire about him. Although famed for his good humour and searing intellect, she’d found him arrogant and entitled. She’d seen the wrinkle of distaste on his strong—now busted—nose when he’d come to the camp to collect her for their one evening out together, a date she’d only agreed to because he’d assured her it wasn’t a date and that he’d just wanted to get her input on the kind of hospital he should be building as she was something of an expert on the country and its people. He’d flown her to his exclusive seven-star hotel on the neighbouring paradise island of Aguadilla, spent five minutes asking her pertinent questions, then the rest of the evening drinking heavily, asking impertinent questions and shamelessly flirting with her.
She would go as far as to say his only redeeming features were his looks and physique and the size of his bank account. Seeing as she was immune to men and cared nothing for money, those redeeming features were wasted on her.
The look on his face when she’d coldly turned down his offer of a trip to his suite for a ‘nightcap’ had been priceless. She had a feeling Daniele Pellegrini was not used to the word ‘no’ being uttered to him by members of the opposite sex.
He’d had his driver take her back to the airfield without a word of goodbye. That was the last she’d seen of him until she’d walked into the medical tent ten minutes ago and found him already there, waiting for her. It was immediately obvious that someone had punched him in the face. She wondered who it was and if it was possible to track them down and buy them a drink.
‘I’m not a nurse,’ she’d said when he’d told her he needed her to fix it.
He’d shrugged his broad shoulders but without the ready smile she remembered