Summer of Love Marie Ferrarella (easy books to read in english TXT) 📖

his chart. “Mr. Tuppele.” She omitted the words How are you? because it was pretty obvious this was the last place the man wanted to be. Instead, she aimed for cheeky. “Catch anything interesting today?”

Instead of smiling, the man scowled. “Great, I get a nurse who thinks she’s a comedienne.”

She bristled, but held out her hand anyway. “I’m Dr. Riley. How long have you been like this?”

“About an hour.” His gaze skipped away from hers, his words slurring the slightest bit. “My son caught me with his hook. It was his first fishing trip.”

“Hmm.” She kept the sound as noncommittal as possible, but from the way his face had turned scarlet and—she tried not to fan herself openly—the alcohol fumes that bathed every word the man spoke, she would almost bet there was no “son” involved in this particular party. Rather, she suspected a male-bonding episode that had gone terribly wrong.

Hip waders and booze. Not a good combination. They were lucky no one had drowned. “Did someone drive you to the hospital?”

She certainly didn’t want to let a drunk loose on the roads.

“One of my buddies. He’s down in the waiting room.”

Jessi could only hope the buddy had been less generous when it came to doling out those cans of beer to himself. She made a mental note to have someone check on his friend’s sobriety level.

She sat on her stool just as the worm—and, yes, it was indeed a piece of live bait—gave a couple of frantic wiggles. Lord, she did not want to touch that thing, much less have to handle it. But the best way to remove a fishing hook was to cut off the end opposite the barb and push the shank on through, rather than risk more damage by pulling it back out the way it had gone in. That barb acted like a one-way door. They went in, but they didn’t want to come out.

The worm moved again.

“Hell,” said the man. “Can you please get this damned thing off me? It stinks.”

And it’s creeping me out.

Mr. Tuppele didn’t say the words, but she could well imagine him thinking them, because the same thoughts were circling around in her head, too. Maybe this was the worm’s way of exacting revenge on anglers everywhere.

And maybe she could call one of the male nurses.

Ha! And give her patient a reason for his earlier sexist remark. Hardly. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Haven’t been to a doctor in twenty years. Wouldn’t be here now if one of my … er, my son hadn’t been so squeamish about taking it out himself. “Is my ear going to be permanently pierced? I don’t cotton to men with earrings and such.”

She smiled despite herself, tempted to match his it-was-my-son fib and tell him that, yes, he would be permanently disfigured and might as well go out and buy a couple of nice dangly pieces of jewelry. But she restrained herself. “No. I knew a man who had his ear pierced in high school but had to stop wearing an earring when he went into the military. It’s all healed up now.”

At least she assumed that’s when Clint had stopped wearing the single hoop in his ear, because there was no sign of it now. And how was it that she had even noticed that? Or remembered what he’d worn back then?

She’d kind of liked his earring, back in the day.

“Good. Don’t need anyone getting any strange ideas about me.”

Too late for that, Mr. Tuppele. She already had a few ideas about him. And they went much deeper than men sporting earrings. “Let me set up. I’m going to call in a nurse to give you a shot to numb your ear.”

“I don’t need it numbed. I just need that damned thing out.”

“Are you sure?” The rest of the staff was going to thank her patient for sparing them the need to get close to that wriggler.

“Just do it.”

“Okay.” Trying not to shudder, she got her equipment together, praying the worm died before she had to deal with it. As disgusting as she found it, she felt a twinge of pity for the creature. It hadn’t been its choice to be cast into a river for the first hungry fish to gulp.

Gloves in place, she squirted some alcohol on the wound in back of his ear, waiting for the string of cuss words to die down before continuing. She grabbed her locking forceps and clamped the instrument right behind the worm. If the barb had gone all the way through his ear, she could have just cut it off and backed the hook out, worm and all. But while there was a tiny bit of metal showing in the front of the lobe, the barb was still embedded in the man’s flesh. It was going to hurt, pushing it the rest of the way through. She got a pair of wire cutters and took a deep breath, then moved in and cut the eye, leaving as much shank as possible behind that worm.

“Okay, I’m going to have to push the barb through the front, are you sure you’re okay?”

“Fine.”

Holding the front of the man’s earlobe with her gloved fingers, she used the forceps to push hard, until the barb popped through.

The man yelled out a few more choice words, but he’d held remarkably steady. Having a hook shoved through your ear was evidently a surefire way to sober up. Fast.

“All right, the worst part is over. I just need to pull the hook the rest of the way out.” Holding a tray beneath his ear so she wouldn’t have to touch the worm, she removed the forceps and used them to grasp the barb in front. Then she pulled steadily, until the worm plonked onto the instrument tray and the hook was the rest of the way through his ear.

Praying the creature didn’t find his way off the counter and onto the floor, she set the tray down and used a piece