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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
IT HAD been a good wedding.
Ryan was surprised. He’d been dreading it, in a way. Since Ann had died, weddings weren’t his favourite thing. He was OK till they got to the ‘till death do us part’ bit, then he was inclined to go to pieces inside.
Strangely, this time he hadn’t. Time healing and all that? Maybe. Maybe it was just because Jill and Zach so obviously belonged together. Maybe it was because this time the children had been with him and had been fidgety and he’d had to entertain them. Maybe it was all sorts of things that he couldn’t account for.
Whatever the reason, it had been a lovely wedding. He shrugged into his white coat, peered at his reflection in the little mirror behind the door and finger-combed his hair.
It was too short, really, but it had been so hot and he’d had it cut for the wedding. It sprang back now, tawny and rebellious—streaked paler by the sun—and he gave up. When it was longer he’d be able to make it co-operate. For now, it just stuck up with that wiry kink in it and that was the way it was. Still, it suited him in a way, made him look younger than his thirty-five years. He searched his face thoughtfully. Was he imagining it or were the lines of grief fading?
About time. It had been two years now, just over. Two long, lonely, heartbreaking years. The children had been more accepting of Ann’s death, but he’d challenged God at every turn. It hadn’t helped. He’d still woken up every morning alone.
Perhaps it was time to change that. A little light flirtation, perhaps? Maybe an affair? Nothing wild, just a discreet liaison with a woman who understood the rules.
A bit of ego-massage.
Yeah.
He grinned at himself—pleased with the idea—and his eyes sparkled back, green light dancing in their depths.
A woman. His gut tightened at the thought, and he chuckled softly. Would he even remember what to do?
Ginny found the accident and emergency department and looked around. Already, at eight-thirty in the morning, it was bustling with life.
Good. She couldn’t bear standing around all day with nothing to do. That was why she’d chosen A and E. Now to find her boss.
It wasn’t difficult. She sort of fell over him, really. One minute she was walking along the corridor minding her own business and wondering where she should go to find him, the next a door opened and a tall, fair-haired man walked smack into her path.
Literally.
His hands came up and grabbed her shoulders, her breasts bounced off his iron-hard chest, and sensation exploded inside her.
Heat—Lord, yes, such heat! Not body heat but power, coiled energy, sheer sex appeal. And strength, from the hands gripping her shoulders to steady her to the muscles of his chest bunching beneath her flattened palms. Gentleness, too, his hands relaxing instantly but staying there—cupping her shoulders with their long, blunt fingers.
Stunned, confused for a second, and yet unwillingly fascinated, Ginny stepped back and looked up—and found herself transfixed by the most astonishingly green eyes she had ever seen.
Funny, they hadn’t seemed so green at her interview. And now, she realised, they were more than green. They were interested.
‘Dr O’Connor?’ she murmured. ‘I’m Virginia Jeffries—your new SHO?’
Ryan felt as if he’d been hit over the head by a rock. One minute he was dreaming of a woman—any woman—to lighten his life, and the next minute—bang!—there was a woman in his arms.
And what a woman! Soft, cloud-grey eyes framed by long black lashes untainted by mascara, dark glossy hair swinging sleekly to her chin, a soft, full mouth curved in a smile of greeting—he might as well die now and go to heaven.
Had she really been so lovely at her interview? He didn’t remember. How strange that he could have been unaware of her as a woman. Impossible. Lord, he must have been unconscious at the time!
He remembered himself and let her go, stepping back out of harm’s way and sucking in his first breath for almost half a minute. ‘Um—hi, there,’ he managed inanely, and could have kicked himself. Damn, had it really been so long since he’d chatted up a woman that he couldn’t remember how to talk to one?
Yes—but more to the point she was a junior colleague, and he would do well to remember that. No cosying up to this one, no matter how good she might feel squashed up against his chest.
His body was busy disagreeing. He buttoned his coat to allow it a little privacy until he had time to argue about it. Meanwhile he had work to do and an impression to create—if he could just unscramble his tonsils and get the words out!
‘Ah—call me Ryan, please? And can I call you Virginia?’ Wow, what a smile! He could feel his socks beginning to smoulder.
‘Do—or Ginny. Whichever.’
He nodded. He had to. His brain had disconnected from his tongue and gone walkabout. He cleared his throat. ‘Ah—right, well, if you’ll come with me we’ll see what we can do. You’ll need a coat—’
‘I got one at Reception.’
‘—and a stethoscope?’
‘Here.’
She waggled it at him and he nodded. Lord, her grin was delicious. ‘Fine,’ he croaked. ‘Right. Let’s go and find some patients.’
He was lovely. Dreadfully uncomfortable, fascinated by her, embarrassed by his reaction—what a sweetheart! And she had to admit to a certain fascination herself. What healthy woman wouldn’t? He wasn’t conventionally handsome, but his craggy good looks and wonderful green eyes had a definite masculine appeal.
And that voice—soft, deep, a little gruff, with a slow drawl that put his origins from across the pond—Canada, perhaps? His speech was quite precise—or would have been if he’d been able to get his tongue off the roof of his mouth! Poor man. Hormones could be quite ruthless.
She didn’t remember his voice from the interview. Perhaps he hadn’t said a great deal. She seemed to remember that it had been Jack Lawrence who had done most of the talking. She was sure she would have remembered if Ryan had said much, with that smoky, gravelly voice just made for loving—
A shiver ran down her spine and she sighed. It was a shame he was a colleague. She didn’t like muddying the waters with personal matters.
Still, for him perhaps she could make an exception…?
She followed his broad, straight back down the corridor and round into the hub of the treatment area. There were trolleys with patients on, cubicles with people sitting and lying in varying states of undress and distress, and nurses bustling busily from one to the other, quietly efficient.
And once there, of course, they were instantly in demand. A nurse showed her the staffroom where she could stow her bag, and she slipped on her coat, hung her stethoscope round her neck and went back out into the fray.
‘Here.’ Ryan handed her a badge that said, Dr VIRGINIA JEFFRIES—SHO, and she pinned it to her lapel, grinned at him and looked around.
‘Where do we start?’
‘Over here,’ he said. He sounded better now, more in command of himself, his words precise and yet spoken with that lovely soft transatlantic drawl that made her skin shiver.
He picked up a file from a stack on a table. ‘I think for the morning you’d better stick close to me and see how things work,’ he said, and then turned away—but not before she saw recognition of the double meaning of his words strike home.
She nearly chuckled. The skin on the back of his neck warmed to a delicate shade of brick, and her grin wouldn’t be suppressed. If she’d got much closer to him she would have known exactly how things worked, she thought mischievously. She schooled her face into a businesslike mask and kept her chuckle private.
There would be plenty of time for jokes once she knew him better!
The morning removed the urge to laugh. Instead, she wanted to scream with frustration because, despite the early bustle the work died to a trickle and she was forced to stand around like a fourth-year student and watch the maestro at work.
It would have been a good idea if she’d been able to concentrate on taking in all the technical detail, like where the X-ray request forms were kept and who did the strapping on the sprains and which nurse did the casts and where the vomit bowls were in an emergency!
Instead, she watched his hands, long and strong, the fingers careful but thorough as he explored injuries. She studied his bent head, the hair short-cropped and springy—the ends tipped blond by the sun.
And she listened to his voice, and the warm, melodious flow of it lulled her into a sensuous daze.
But still she did no work, put her hands on no one, wasted a morning.
Ginny didn’t like wasting time—even time spent admiring Ryan O’Connor. She was glad, then, when things started to hot up a little and she actually got to examine a cut for fragments of glass and, wonder of wonders, examine, diagnose and admit an elderly lady with a Colles’ fracture of her wrist.
She was just about to lance an infected abscess on a young woman’s finger when the sister popped her head round the cubicle curtain and told her that there were two coming in on a blue light, and could she stand by in Resus with Ryan as Jack Lawrence, the other consultant, was busy with a cardiac arrest and couldn’t be spared, and Patrick Haddon, the SR, was similarly occupied with a child with severe bums?
‘I think they’re critical,’ she told Ginny. ‘Ryan’s on the phone to the paramedic in the ambulance, giving him instructions about one of them—could you come and talk to the other one?’
There was hardly time, though, because no sooner had she excused herself from the patient she was treating than they heard the sound of sirens entering the hospital grounds.
All hell broke loose then. The doors were held open, the trolleys brought in at a run and Ryan was working on the first casualty before they entered the resuscitation room. Ginny just had time to register masses of frothy blood around the girl’s face before her own patient was there under her nose.
The second trolley was pulled up parallel with the first, and the paramedic gave her a quick breakdown of the findings.
‘Motorbike accident,’ he said unnecessarily, as the lad was still wearing his leathers although his helmet had been removed. ‘Unconscious at the scene, hasn’t regained consciousness. Left leg is splinted—it’s very deformed in the lower third of the femur, but it looks like a closed fracture. Don’t know about spinal injuries but it’s possible. We put a backboard on to make sure, but we couldn’t leave the helmet on because we needed to get an airway in.’
She nodded. ‘OK. Thank you.’
While he was talking she checked the patient’s airway and ensured that it was working, and then frowned. His breathing was laboured and she was concerned about his chest.
‘Can we get these clothes off him, please?’
‘Put him on a sliding plate trolley first so we can X-ray him in situ,’ Ryan said from across the room.
So they shifted him with extreme care to support his head and neck in a neutral position, and then the splint was taken off his leg and his clothes were cut away to reveal his injuries.
‘If he lives he’ll complain like mad about this,’ the nurse working alongside Ginny said with a grin as she sliced up the side of the expensive leather gear the man was wearing.
‘Let’s just hope he lives to complain,’ Ginny muttered under her breath, and then ran her eyes over each part of him as it was revealed.
As the paramedic had said, his femur was distorted just above the knee and his right wrist looked very strange, but it was his chest that Ginny was concerned about. The left side was not inflating properly and when she pressed down gently she could feel the crepitations of the bone-ends scraping together.
‘Lower ribs have gone on the left—I think he’s got a punctured lung,’ she told Ryan.
‘Watch him for shock—the spleen might have gone too,’ Ryan mumbled, and then swore as his patient began to shudder and convulse. ‘Damn—I need to get this airway sorted,’ he growled.
Ginny tuned him out and concentrated on her patient. His pupils were equal and reactive to light, which she was grateful for, but he didn’t respond at all to voice and only slightly to pain.
She recorded the information on a neurological observation chart because of the suspected head injury, but she was more concerned for the moment with the immediate problem of his chest and abdomen.
She put in two chest drains—one for air and one for blood—using local anaesthetic in case he could feel it but not react, and asked the nurse for a report on his status as she watched the steady ooze of blood from the lower chest drain. She was glad she’d done it before. Now was not the time to learn!
‘Pulse one-twenty, thready, blood pressure seventy over thirty and falling.’
‘Damn. Let’s get some IV lines in and fill him up a bit. Is the X-ray coming?’
The door opened then and the radiographer came in. They worked round her, Ginny refusing to step back and continuing to put in the IV line into his left arm while the pictures were taken.
‘You shouldn’t do that—you’re a young woman,’ the radiographer scolded gently.
‘Don’t worry about me, I’m fine,’ Ginny said shortly, withdrawing some of the precious blood for cross matching. ‘Can we have the chest results quickly, please?’
‘Sure.’
They were left in peace then, squeezing the plasma expander in fairly rapidly to bulk up his blood volume while they waited for cross-matching. His blood pressure picked up a little, and they inserted another line into his damaged right arm.
‘I don’t want to use his legs because of the femur injury and possible internals,’ she said to Ryan, ‘and the neck I want to avoid until we’re sure he hasn’t got a head injury, so is it OK to use this broken arm?’
‘You’ve got no choice,’ he told her absently. ‘That’s more like it. OK, aspirate, please; get the blood out of her trachea. Can you cope, Virginia?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Get four units of blood into him stat—use O neg while you wait for cross-match. There should be some coming up.’
There was, and she was glad to see it. Her patient’s pulse was very weak and thready, although they had boosted his blood volume, and she wondered how much he was losing into the thigh and how much through what she was beginning to be sure was a ruptured spleen.
‘Should we do a peritoneal lavage to see if he’s haemorrhaging?’ she asked Ryan.
He shook his head. ‘No. Treat as if he is—there should be a general surgeon on his way down to check. If he’s not here in five minutes—or if the lad deteriorates—I’ll stick a needle in and see what we come up with. Better catheterise him anyway—he’s going to have to go to Theatre. Do we have any ID?’
The sister lifted her head from the catheter she was already inserting. ‘Yes. The police are on it, apparently. They’re contacting relatives now.’
A man came in then, tall and rangy, his white hair in sharp contrast to the bushy black brows beneath. ‘Query abdomen for me?’ he said in a soft Scottish burr.
‘Oh, hi, Ross. Yeah, Virginia’s got it. She’ll fill you in.’
She met his eyes and smiled briefly. ‘Hi. I think his spleen might have gone. His ribs have penetrated his left lung low down, but he’s also got a possible head injury and his left femur and right wrist have gone.’
Ross nodded. ‘OK. Can I have a trocar, please?’
He scrubbed quickly while they prepared the abdomen for his incision, then Ginny watched as he carefully pushed the sharp instrument into the abdomen and pressed gently.
Blood welled rapidly out of the little hole, far too much and too fast to be because of the incision.
‘Damn. Right, we’d better have him now. Have we got head and spinal X-rays?’
‘Just done.’ They were snapped up on the light box by the radiographer, and Ross scanned them quickly. ‘That looks OK. Right, we can assume his head injury is of secondary importance to his internal haemorrhaging. The spleen looks enlarged and the abdo contents are displaced—aye, I’m sure it’s gone. I’ll get the orthopaedic boys to sort his leg and arm out after I’ve finished with the spleen and chest. How stable is he?’
‘Not bad,’ Ginny replied. ‘I think he’s improving. He’s certainly not getting any worse, but his blood pressure’s still a bit low.’
Ross nodded. ‘OK. Can you send him up as soon as he’s stable enough, please? I’ll go and scrub. How about this one?’
Ryan grunted. ‘Smashed mandible, lacerated tongue—I’m just suturing it now to stop the bleeding. Apart from that and the coma and the leg fractures, she’s fine.’
Ross snorted and left the room.
Ginny’s patient’s parents arrived at that point, so he was covered with a blanket; Ginny warned them about the breathing tube and the chest drains and IV lines, and then they came in for a few moments.
They were shocked and upset but, as Ryan said later, at least they knew he was still alive and recognisable, which was more than could be said for the girl who had been on the back of his bike. Her facial injuries were extensive and would require the intervention of a plastic surgeon—if she survived the head injury. Ryan thought her helmet must have been too big for her, as it had come off at the scene. Either that or it had been ripped off, thus damaging her jaw.
The boy’s parents were distressed by her condition, as well as their son’s. It seemed they were going out together and had been for some time.
‘Do you know where the police might find her parents?’ Ryan asked them.
‘Possibly.’
‘Would you talk to them? Sister has some forms for you to sign first, then if you could talk to the police?’
‘Of course.’ With shaking hands they signed the consent form for surgical treatment of their son’s various injuries and, as Ginny was happy with his blood pressure and pulse, he went off to Theatre.
Ryan’s patient, on the other hand, was still causing concern. The fragments of her fractured lower jaw had penetrated her mouth and tongue and were causing serious problems. Ryan had been unable to get an airway in and had had to do a tracheostomy to allow her to breathe because of the blood in her throat and her swollen tongue, but he had been able to suture the worst cut on the tongue to halt the outpouring of blood into the back of her throat that was threatening to drown her.
Her parents hadn’t yet arrived, but she was at least stable now. Ginny went over to Ryan and asked if she could help.
He grinned tiredly. ‘No, not really. You could finish off that patient you abandoned. I’ll be through here in a minute and she’ll be transferred to ITU. I’ll come with you if you hang on.’
Ginny had quite forgotten the woman whose infected finger she had been about to lance. ‘It seems hours ago,’ she murmured.
‘Only half an hour.’
He was still working. Ginny watched him as he checked the girl’s pupils again. ‘How’s her head injury?’
‘Not good. Her pupils are both equal and reacting, but she’s still very deep. She’s got multiple fractures in both legs and one arm, but all in all she’s got away with it lightly if the head injury isn’t anything too sinister. I think she was wrapped round a tree branch, from what I can gather. It may be just whiplash or it may be worse. She’s got a nasty cut on her leg as well. She’ll need a tetanus jab.’
He did that as they talked, and Ginny was able to see the long, jagged cut up her thigh. ‘Are you going to stitch it?’ she asked.
He looked horrified. ‘No. It’s dirty—we’ll pack it and leave it for a few days with antibiotics, then it can be sutured on the ward. If you close it now you trap all that road dirt in it and she’d get a nasty infected wound for sure.’
Ginny suddenly felt the yawning void of her ignorance opening up under her feet. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
Ryan lifted his head and met her eyes over the patient, and grinned. ‘Don’t apologise. That’s why you’re working with me—to learn these things. You did really well with that lad, by the way. Well done.’
His eyes glowed with appreciation, and Ginny felt as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds.
All the blood and gore receded and, as she returned his smile, her confidence came back and she straightened up.
‘Thanks,’ she murmured, and her voice sounded husky and emotional. ‘Um—what now?’
‘Your lady?’ he prodded gently.
She laughed and pulled herself together. ‘Oh. Right.’
She was heading out of the door when his pointed cough stopped her in her tracks.
‘Try removing some of the blood before you go out there,’ he said mildly.
She looked down at her coat, fresh this morning, and her eyes widened in surprise. ‘Mmm—I see what you mean.’
Ryan’s patient was collected and taken to Theatre while she cleaned herself up, and he joined her at the sink. Their eyes met in the mirror.
‘Shall we finish off that poor woman now?’ she said.
His grin was worth waiting for.
‘She’s probably got better on her own by now, but I suppose we ought to check.’
Chuckling, they left the devastation behind, and the team of nursing staff waded in for the clean-up, ready for the next onslaught—whenever that might be. While the nurses checked the instruments and relaid the trolleys and prepared the room Ryan and Ginny discovered that another doctor had taken over and finished treating Ginny’s patient, so they went into the staffroom. While a fresh pot of coffee brewed Ryan talked her through the treatment both their biker patients would go on to receive. Then, just as the coffee-machine chugged and spluttered to a halt, they heard a siren again.
Ryan looked at her with those extraordinary green eyes and arched a brow expressively. ‘We’re on again,’ he murmured. ‘You stay here and have a coffee, if you like; I’ll handle it.’
‘Are you being kind or was that a dismissal?’
He grinned. ‘Dismissal? You have to be kidding. I tell you what—you go and see to it, I’ll have the coffee.’
She got instantly to her feet. ‘I tell you what—we’ll both go and deal with it and we’ll both have a coffee!’
Well, as first days went, it had been a good one, Ginny mused. She kicked off her shoes, dropped tiredly onto her extremely comfortable bed and closed her eyes. Thank God she wasn’t on duty that night. She wouldn’t have been at her best, although she would have done it as she’d done it countless times over the past couple of years.
She replayed the day—or, at least, she meant to, but she didn’t get a great deal further than Ryan.
Ryan’s voice, Ryan’s laugh, Ryan’s hands on her shoulders, Ryan’s chest squashed up against hers—well, the other way round to be exact, as Ryan’s chest wouldn’t squash with anything as trivial as her impact on it. Hers, on the other hand, had squashed most convincingly. She peered down at her bust, full and ripe and overtly feminine, and wondered how Ryan’s hands would feel gently cupping that softness.
A dull ache started up behind her eyes. She was tired. She must be, to start imagining things like that about her new boss. After all, after that first initial contact, he’d been very circumspect and had kept his distance both physically and verbally.