LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      “Signorina Blake, my apologies for not being here to meet you when you first arrived.”

      He had a beautiful voice, deep and hypnotically soothing with its lilting Italian intonation. And beautiful hands. His long fingers closed around hers in a grip at once gentle and sure. Slightly dazed, Danielle allowed him to lead her to one of two club chairs situated at the other end of the room, next to a wall of windows looking out on a reflecting pool surrounded by rhododendrons already in full bloom.

      “Thank you for seeing me now,” she said stiffly, horrified that, with her father so dreadfully ill, she could find herself drawn to this magnetic stranger. “I understand you’ve been busy.”

      “Always, I’m afraid.” He took a seat in the other chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “No sooner is one emergency taken care of than another arises. But you are not here to listen to me complain.” His eyes, a deep velvety gray trimmed with indecently long lashes, surveyed her soberly. As for his mouth…! In terms of sheer sex appeal, nothing the latest Hollywood idol could offer came even close to it. “You wish to discuss your father’s condition, yes?”

      She nodded, the gravity in his voice leaving her almost hyperventilating.

      “You are familiar, of course, with what happened to him? How he came to be brought here?”

      “No,” she said. “All I was told was that he’d had an accident and was badly hurt.”

      “He was in the mountains, snow-boarding in an out-of-bounds area, and fell down a sheer rock face.”

      Snow-boarding? She shook her head, stunned. How like her father to take up a sport better suited to someone a third his age, and to break the rules when he did so. But then, Alan Blake had always believed he was a law unto himself. “I had no idea he was in Italy, let alone that he had taken up snow-boarding.”

      If Carlo Rossi was surprised that she knew so little of her father’s activities, he didn’t let it show. “I’m afraid he sustained a very serious head injury,” he said.

      “How serious?”

      “He fractured his skull.”

      “Wasn’t he wearing a safety helmet?”

      “I suspect not, although given the severity of his fall, I doubt a helmet would have helped very much. All skull fractures are cause for concern, signorina, but an occipital fracture such as your father suffered, is particularly critical.”

      “Why is that?”

      “Because of its location.” He reached for the pad of paper on the occasional table next to him, took a pen from the breast pocket of his tunic, and drew his chair closer to hers. “The skull is made up of several bones. The largest is the parietal bone here.” He sketched rapidly and with the fluid skill of one very familiar with his subject. “The occipital bone sits immediately below it, at the base of the skull. Fractures in this vulnerable area occur as the result of what we term a ‘high energy blunt trauma,’ and are divided into three types. The first two are classified as stable. A Type 111 fracture, however, is the most severe and potentially very unstable.”

      “And that’s the kind my father has?”

      “Sadly, yes.”

      “Is that why he’s unconscious.”

      “Yes. With such an injury, coma is the rule rather than the exception.” He paused and spared her a very direct look. “That’s not to say he won’t eventually come out of it…”

      “I hear a ‘but,’ Dr. Rossi,” she said coolly. “What aren’t you telling me?”

      He flexed his fingers and expelled a long breath. Regret intensified the fatigue in his eyes, and she knew in that moment that she had yet to hear the worst. “Because of the proximity of cranial nerves,” he said, “there’s a high incidence of associated injuries.”

      With every carefully chosen word, he increased her level of fear. But she’d had a lifetime’s practice at keeping her emotions in check, and it stood her in good stead now. Projecting a calm she was far from feeling, she asked, “What kind of injuries?”

      “Impaired swallowing, paralysis of the vocal cords with subsequent phonation difficulties. Hemiplegia, or even quadriplegia. In layman’s terms, Signorina Blake, if your father recovers consciousness, he may be paralyzed in much the same way that he would had he suffered a massive stroke. The paralysis could extend down one, or both sides of his body.”

      Alan Blake, the man who prided himself on running a marathon at age fifty-five, paralyzed? Unable to dominate the conversation at his frequent, ultrasophisticated dinner parties? Incapable of controlling his bodily functions?

      Horrified by the implications, and filled with pity for the father who’d have spared little for her had their situations been reversed, Danielle spoke without thought for how her words might be interpreted. “You should have let him die! He’d be better off!”

      “By whose assessment, signorina?” Carlo Rossi asked, his gray eyes suddenly as glacial as his voice. “Yours, or his?”

      He thought she was cold and unfeeling, that she spoke out of selfishness. But he didn’t know her father, and trying to explain Alan Blake to a stranger would merely sound as if she was making excuses for herself. “Let me put it this way, Dr. Rossi,” she said. “Would you want to be kept alive under such conditions, trapped in a body that refused to obey you?”

      “My personal preferences are irrelevant. I am committed to saving lives, not ending them. In your father’s case,

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