CHAPTER ONE
Vincent leaned his head back against the wall of the hospital hallway, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.
This was hard. A lot harder than he’d ever imagined. When his brothers had dared him to put his money where his mouth was, he hadn’t hesitated. But now…
He wanted to laugh at the irony. If anyone saw him at present, dressed up like a happy-go-lucky clown, but hanging onto his shit for dear life, they wouldn’t recognize him.
Known for letting things roll off his large shoulders, Vincent had always poked fun in the direst of circumstances. He consistently found mirth in just about everything. Nothing got him down for very long. He’d learned to school any negative reactions.
But not here. Not now. No matter how deeply he dug, Vincent couldn’t find it in himself to conjure anything that remotely resembled humor.
These kids…
He’d gone into the chemotherapy unit with every intention of acting goofy, doing a few parlor tricks, and earning laughs before sashaying back out the door. How difficult could it be to entertain a munchkin audience?
Not too, as it had turned out. The kids had laughed, alright.
Vincewas the one who hadn’t been able to find anything funny in the situation. To him, what he’d witnessed was nothing short of heart-wrenching.
“You okay, there, Bozo?” someone asked.
Vincent’s lids snapped open. “Yeah. Yeah. Fine,” he demurred. “Just having a rest between performances.”
The guy in scrubs wasn’t having it.
“It takes some getting used to,” he told Vince gently. “Don’t beat yourself up. When I started my rotation here last year, I went home every day and cried.”
Wow. A young doctor admitting to those emotions was saying a lot. From Vince’s experience with field medics and health facilitators in the Navy, doctors were some of the toughest sons-of-bitches he’d ever met.
“Why do you do it?” Vincent eventually rasped.
The doctor shrugged modestly. “If we don’t, who will? And we have it lucky these days. Things are a lot better than they used to be. Thanks to all the research and medical advancements, cancer survival rates for these kids currently stands between eighty and eighty-five percent.”
Vincent still wanted to puke. The children with whom he’d just interacted were all cute as hell and plucky beyond their years.Onein particular, he couldn’t get out of his mind. She’d been funny and engaging, reminding Vince of himself when faced with adversity.
He shook his head.
Vince simply couldn’t fathom losing two out of every ten of these brave cherubs. He just couldn’t.
“People like you, coming in today, make it more bearable,” the young doctor continued. “Keep them laughing. Make them forget their troubles for a while. Let them know they aren’tdealing with this alone.” He spun to go, then turned back. “Thank you for caring.”
The words “you’re welcome” got stuck in Vincent’s throat. He sure didn’tfeellike he was doing much. A few parlor tricks, at best. And if he couldn’t get his shit together, he wasn’t going to be able to go back in there and do eventhat.
Waving the doctor off with a forced half-grin, Vincent stood for a few moments longer, talking himself through a litany of calming exercises.
Since when was he such a wimp? He could do this. After twenty years as a Navy SEAL, he’d seen some really heinous things—a number of those having been shoved to the recesses of his brain—and the whole point here today was to bring some kind of joy to these children. Which meant…failure wasn’t an option.
Closing his eyes again, he sent up a quick prayer for strength, then pushed off the wall and turned.
“Ooof!”
What the…?
Vincent’s eyes popped open and his hands flew automatically to the shoulders of the slender woman he’d bumped into, keeping her from doing an ass-plant. She was a tiny thing. Wearing scrubs and a surgical cap, she seemed to weigh no more than a feather. Still, by her posture, Vince could tell there was an underlying core of strength inside her.
Of course there was.
With her mode of dress, she was either a doctor, a nurse, or a clinician, and all three of those professions constantly dealt with the kind of gut-churning things Vincent had seen today. Things that had torn the shit out of him. Andhe’donly just scratched the surface, nearly losing his lunch over the realities that had punched him in the solar-plexus.