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She glared at him. ‘I’m not having a panic attack. I just wasn’t expecting … that. I’m better if I’m mentally prepared. But I’ll be fine.’ She turned those big brown eyes on him. ‘Just give me a moment, okay?’
‘Okay.’
She nodded again and he noticed tears swim in her eyes. Clearly she was disappointed in herself, in not being able to master her affliction.
Gareth shoved a hand through his hair, feeling helpless as she struggled for control. ‘Try not to think about it like it is,’ he said. ‘Next time you go out there it’ll be all cleaned up. No blood. No gore.’
She nodded. ‘Okay.’
But her wide eyes told him she was still picturing it. ‘You’re still thinking about it,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ she denied, chewing on her bottom lip.
Gareth took a step closer to her, wanting to reach for her but clenching his hands at his sides. ‘Yes, you are.’
She gnawed on her lip some more and he noticed she’d chewed all her gloss off.
‘Look. I’m trying, okay?’ she said, placing her palm flat against his chest. ‘Just back off for a moment.’
Her hand felt warm against his chest and he waited for her to push against him but her fingers curled into the fabric of his scrub top instead and Gareth felt a jolt much further south. As if she’d put her hand down his scrubs bottoms.
Oh, hell. Just hell.
Now he was thinking very bad things. Very bad ways to calm her down, to take her mind off it.
For crying out loud, she was a freaked-out second-year resident who needed to get back to the lac and get the stupid thing sutured so he could free up a bed. Gareth had dealt with a lot of freaked-out people in his life—the wounded, the addled, the grieving.
He was good with the freaked out.
But not like this. Not the way he was thinking.
Hell.
And that’s exactly where he was going—do not pass ‘Go’, do not collect any money—because all he could think about now was her mouth.
Kissing it. Giving her a way to really forget what was beyond the door.
It was wildly inappropriate.
They were at work, for crying out loud. But her husky ‘Gareth?’ reflected the confusion and turmoil stirring unrest inside him.
The look changed on her face as her gaze fixed on his mouth. Her fingers in his shirt seemed to pull him nearer and those freckles were so damn irresistible.
‘Oh, screw it,’ he muttered, caution falling away like confetti around him as he stepped forward, crowding her back against the door, his body aligning with hers, his palms sliding onto her cheeks as he dropped his head.
Billie whimpered as Gareth’s lips made contact with hers. She couldn’t have stopped it had her life depended on it. Her pulse fluttered madly at the base of her throat and at her temples. Everything was forgotten in those lingering moments as his mouth opened and his tongue brushed along her bottom lip.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Again and again.
Maddening. Hypnotic. Perfect.
The kiss sucking away her breath and her thoughts and her sense. Transporting her to a place where only he and his lips and his heat existed. The press of his thighs against hers was heady, her breasts ached to be touched and her belly twisted hard, tensing in anticipation.
She didn’t think she’d ever been kissed like this. And she never wanted it to stop.
She slid her hands onto his waist, anchoring them against his hips bones, feeling the broad bony crests in her palms, using them to pull him in closer, revel in the power of his thighs hard against her, fitting their bodies together more intimately.
A groan escaped his mouth, deep and tortured, as if it was torn from his throat and then Gareth pulled away, breathing hard as he placed his forehead against hers, staying close, keeping their intimate connection, not saying anything, just catching his breath as she caught hers.
‘You okay now?’ he asked after a moment, looking down into her face.
Billie blinked as she struggled to recall what had happened before the kiss. To recall if there had been anything at all—ever—in her life before this kiss.
He groaned again, his thumb stroking over her bottom lip, and it sounded as needy and hungry as the desire burning in her belly. ‘We can’t … do this here,’ he muttered. ‘We have to get back.’
She nodded. She knew. On some level she knew that. But her head was still spinning from the kiss—it was hard to think about anything else. And if that had been his plan, she couldn’t fault it.
But it was hardly a good long-term strategy.
He took a step back, clearing his throat. ‘You all right to do the lac now?’ he asked.
The laceration. Right. That’s what had happened before the kiss. She tried to picture it but her brain was still stuck back in the delicious quagmire of the kiss.
‘Give me five minutes and then come to the cubicle. I promise it’ll be a different sight altogether.’
Billie nodded. ‘Okay.’ She shifted off the door so he could open it.
And then he was gone and she was alone in the staffroom, her back against the door, pressing her fingers to her tingling mouth.
Billie took a few minutes to review the chart of her head lac patient. His blood alcohol was way over the limit. He’d gone through a glass window. The X-ray report was clear—no fractures, no retained glass—but she pulled it up on the computer to satisfy herself nonetheless.
The laceration wasn’t deep but it was too large for glue.
Ten minutes later she pulled back the curtains of the cubicle. Gareth faltered for a moment as he looked at her and she didn’t have to be a mind-reader to know what he was thinking.
The way his eyes dipped to her mouth said it all.
‘All ready,’ he said briskly, as he indicated the suture kit laid out and the dramatically changed wound. The blood was gone, leaving an uneven laceration, its edges stark white. It followed the still-sleeping patient’s hairline before cutting across his forehead.
Billie swallowed as she took in the extent of it. It wasn’t going to be some quick five-stitch job.
‘Size six gloves?’
She nodded as she dragged her gaze back to Gareth, thankful for his brisk professionalism.
‘Go and scrub,’ he said. ‘I’ll open a pair up.’
Billie stepped outside the curtain and performed a basic scrub at the nearby basin. When she was done she waited for the water to finish dripping off her elbows before entering the cubicle again. She reached for the surgical towel already laid out and dried her hands and arms then slipped into her gloves, hyper-aware of Gareth watching her.
She took a deep breath as she arranged the instruments on her tray to her liking and applied the needle to the syringe filled with local anaesthetic.
She could do this.
She glanced at Gareth as she turned to her sleeping patient. His strategy had worked—she wasn’t thinking about the gruesome chore ahead, all she could think about was the kiss.
‘Good grief,’ she said, screwing up her nose as a blast of alcoholic fumes wafted her way. ‘Think I should have put a mask on.’
‘Aromatic, isn’t he?’
‘It’s Martin, right?’ she enquired of Gareth as if they’d been professional acquaintances for twenty years. As if he hadn’t just kissed her and rocked her world.
Gareth nodded. ‘Although he prefers M-Dog apparently.’
Billie blinked. ‘I’m not going to call him M-Dog.’
Gareth laughed. ‘I don’t blame you.’
‘Martin,’ Billie said, raising her voice slightly as she addressed the sleeping patient.
Gareth shook his head. ‘You don’t have much experience with drunk teenage boys, do you? You need to be louder. You don’t hear much in that state.’
She quirked an eyebrow. ‘You talking from experience?’
He grimaced. ‘Unfortunately, yes.’
Billie returned her attention to the patient. ‘Martin!’ she called, louder, firmer. But still nothing.
‘Allow me,’ said Gareth. He gave the teenager’s shoulders a brisk hard shake and barked, ‘Wake up, M-Dog.’
The teenager started, as did Billie, the demand cutting right through her. It was commanding, brooking no argument.
And very sexy.
Had he learned that in the military?
‘Hmm? What?’ the boy asked, trying to co-ordinate himself to sit up and failing.
Billie bit down on her cheek to stop from laughing. ‘I’m Dr Keyes,’ she said as Martin glanced at her through bloodshot eyes. ‘I’m going to put some stitches in that nasty gash in your head.’
‘Is there going to be a scar?’ he asked, his eyes already closing again. ‘Me mum’ll kill me.’
Billie figured that M-Dog should have thought about that before he’d gone out drinking to excess. But, then, her sister Jessica had never been big on responsible drinking either. She guessed that was part and parcel of being a teenager.
For some, anyway.
‘Martin, stay with me,’ Billie said, her voice at the right pitch and command for M-Dog to force his bleary eyes open once again. ‘I’m going to have to put a lot of local anaesthetic in your wound to numb it up. It’s going to sting like the blazes.’
He gave her a goofy grin. ‘Not feelin’ nuthin’ at the moment.’
Billie did laugh this time. ‘Just as well,’ she said, but the teenager was already drifting off. ‘Okay,’ she muttered, taking a deep breath and picking up the syringe. She glanced at Gareth. ‘Here we go.’
Gareth nodded. She looked so much better now. She had pink in her cheeks, her freckles were less obvious and she’d lost that wide-eyed, freaked-out expression.
Billie’s hand trembled as she picked up some gauze and started at the proximal end of the wound, poking the fine needle into the jagged edge and slowly injecting. M-dog twitched a bit and screwed up his face and Billie’s heart leapt, her hand stilling as she waited for him to jerk and try and sit up. But he did nothing like that, his face settling quickly back into the passive droop of the truly drunk.
Clearly he was feeling no pain.
Gareth nodded at her encouragingly and Billie got back to work, methodically injecting lignocaine along the entire length of the wound, with barely a twitch from M-Dog. By the time she’d fully injected down to the distal end, the local had had enough time to start working at the beginning so she got to work.
Her stomach turned at the pull and tug of flesh, at the dull thread of silk through skin, and she peeked at Gareth.
‘Talk to me,’ she said, as he snipped the thread for her on her first neat suture.
He glanced at her, his gaze dropping to her mouth, and the memory of the kiss returned full throttle. ‘What do you want me to talk about?’
Not that, Billie thought, returning her attention to the job at hand. Anything but that. The military. The incident that had caused his demotion, which Helen had hinted at earlier. But neither of those seemed appropriate either. Not that appropriateness hadn’t already been breached tonight. But they needed to steer clear of the personal.
They’d already got way too personal.
‘Tell me about the patients out there.’
And so he did, his deep steady voice accompanying her needlework as they wove and snipped as a team.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE REST OF the night and the two following were better than Billie could have hoped. The gore was kept to a minimum and she managed to get through them without any more near nervous breakdowns.
Or requiring any more resuscitative kissing.
Not that she wasn’t aware of Gareth looking out for her. Which should probably have been annoying but which she couldn’t help thinking was really sweet. And kind of hot.
She knew the last thing he needed was having a squeamish doctor to juggle as he ran the night shift with military-like efficiency—overseeing the nursing side as well as liaising with the medical side to ensure that the ER ran like a well-oiled machine. But he seemed to take it in his stride as just another consideration to manage.
He was clearly known and well respected by both nurses and doctors alike, he was faultlessly discreet, he knew everybody from the cleaning staff to the ward nurses, he knew where everything was and just about every answer to every procedure and protocol question any of them had.
By the time she’d knocked off on Sunday morning she was well and truly dazzled.
St Luke’s was lucky to have Gareth Stapleton.
Which begged the question—why wasn’t he running the department as he apparently used to? What had happened to cause his demotion? What was the incident Helen had made reference to? Annabel Pearce, the NUM, was good too, but from what Billie could see, Gareth ran rings around her.
Billie yawned as she entered the lift, pushing the button for the top floor. Her mind drifted, as it had done a little too often the last couple of days, to the kiss. She shut her tired eyes and revelled in the skip in her pulse and the heaviness in her belly as she relived every sexy nuance.
Not only could Gareth run a busy city emergency department but he could kiss like no other man she knew.
And Billie had been kissed some before.
She’d had two long-term relationships and a few shorter ones, not to mention the odd fling or two, including a rather risqué one with a lecturer, in the eight years since she’d first lost her virginity at university. She liked sex, had never felt unsatisfied by any of her partners and wasn’t afraid to ask for what she wanted.
Essentially she’d been with men who knew what they were doing. Who certainly knew how to kiss.
But Gareth Stapleton had just cleared the slate.
She wet her lips in some kind of subconscious memory and grimaced at their dryness. Between winter and the hospital air-con they felt perpetually dry. She pulled her lip gloss out of her bag and applied a layer, feeling the immediate relief.
The lift dinged and she pushed wearily off the wall and headed to the fire exit for the last two flights of steps to the rooftop car park. She jumped as a figure loomed in her peripheral vision from the stairs below, her pulse leaping crazily for a second before she realised it was Gareth.
And then her pulse took off for an entirely different reason. ‘You took the stairs?’ she said in disbelief. ‘All eight floors?’
Of course he had. Super-nurse, freaked-out-doctor whisperer, kisser extraordinaire. What wasn’t the man capable of?
‘Of course.’ He grinned. ‘It’s about the only exercise I get these days.’
Billie shook her head as they continued up the last two flights, which was torture enough for her tired body. By the time they’d reached the top and Gareth was opening the door, her thighs were grumbling at her and she was breathing a little harder.
Of course, that could just have been Gareth’s presence.
Was it her overactive imagination or had his ‘After you’ been low and husky and a little too close to her ear?
She stepped out onto the roof, her brain a quagmire of confusion, thankful for the bracing winter air cooling her overheated imagination. She zipped up her hoody and hunched into it.
Gareth was hyper-aware of Billie’s arms brushing against his as they walked across the car park to their vehicles. ‘You on days off now?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Three. How about you?’
‘Me too.’ Which meant they’d be back on together on Wednesday. An itch shot up Gareth’s spine.
Fabulous.
Three days didn’t seem long enough to cleanse himself of the memory of the kiss and he really needed to do that because Billie, he’d discovered, was fast becoming the only thing he thought about.
And that wasn’t conducive to his work. Or his life.
The last woman he remembered having such an instantaneous attraction to wasn’t around any more, and it had taken a long time to get over that. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d managed it yet. He grimaced just thinking about the black hole of the last five years.
Billie was in the ER for six months and the next few years of her life would be hectic, with a virtual roller-coaster of rotations and exams and killer shifts sucking up every spare moment of her time. She didn’t have time to devote to a relationship, let alone one with a forty-year-old widower.
They were in different places in their life journeys.
They reached their cars, parked three spaces from each other, and he almost breathed a loud sigh of relief.
‘Well …’ he said, staring out at the Brisbane city skyline, ‘I guess I’ll be seeing you on Wednesday.’
She looked like she was about to say something but thought better of it, nodding instead, as she jingled her keys in her hand. ‘Sure,’ she murmured. ‘Sleep well.’
Gareth nodded, knowing there was not a chance in hell of that happening. ‘Bye.’
And he turned to walk to his vehicle, sucking in the bracing air and refusing to look back lest he suggest something crazy like her coming to his place and sleeping off her night shift there.
In his bed.
Naked.
Get in the car, man. Get in the car and drive away.
He opened the door, buckled up and started the engine. It took a while for his car to warm up and the windscreen to de-mist and he sat there trying not to think about Billie, or her sparkly dress, or her cute freckles.
Or that damned ill-advised kiss.
A minute later he was set to go and he reversed quickly, eager to make his escape. Except when he passed her car, it was still there and she was out of it, standing at the front with the bonnet open, looking at the engine.
He groaned out loud. No, no, no! So close. He sighed, reversing again and manoeuvring his car back into his car space. He disembarked with trepidation, knowing he shouldn’t but knowing he couldn’t not offer to help her.
‘Problem?’ he asked, as he strode towards her.
Billie looked at him with eyes that felt like they’d been marinating in formaldehyde all night. If possible he looked even better than before. ‘It won’t start,’ she grumbled.
‘Is it just cold?’
‘No. I think the battery’s flat.’
‘Want me to give it a try?’
‘Knock yourself out,’ she invited.
Gareth slid into the plush leather passenger seat and turned the key. A faint couple of drunken whirrs could be heard and that was it. He placed his head on the steering-wheel. Yep. Dead as a doornail.
‘Did you leave your lights on?’ he asked, as he climbed out.
She shook her head. She’d taken her hair out of her ponytail and it swished around her face, the tips brushing against the velour lettering decorating the front of her hoody. Her nose was pink from the cold.
‘The car automatically turns them off anyway.’
Of course it did. It wasn’t some twenty-year-old dinosaur. A pity, because if it had been he could have offered her a jump start. But with the newer vehicles being almost totally computerised, he knew that wasn’t advisable.
‘Do you have roadside assistance?’
‘No. I know, I know …’ Billie said, as he frowned at her. She rubbed her hands together, pleased for the warmth of her jeans and fleecy top in her unexpected foray into the cold. ‘It expired a few months back and I keep meaning to renew it but …’
His whiskers looked even shaggier after three nights and his disapproving blue eyes seemed to leap out at her across the distance. ‘You’re a woman driving alone places, you should have roadside assistance.’
Billie supposed she should be affronted by his assumption that she was some helpless woman but, as with everything else, she found his concern for her well-being completely irresistible.
He sighed. ‘I’ll drive down to the nearest battery place and get you one,’ he said.
Billie blinked as his irresistibility cranked up another notch. Was he crazy? ‘It’s Sunday, Gareth. Nothing’s going to be open till at least ten and I don’t know about you but I’m too tired to wait that long.’ She shut her bonnet. ‘I’ll get a taxi home and deal with the battery this afternoon after I’ve had a sleep.’
Gareth knew he was caught then. He couldn’t let her get a taxi home. Not when he could easily drop her. Unless she lived way out of his way. ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’
He hoped it was somewhere really far away.
Billie would have been deaf not to hear the reluctance in his voice. And she was too tired to decipher what it meant. Tired enough to be pissed off. ‘You don’t have to do that, Gareth,’ she said testily, fishing around in her bag for her mobile phone. ‘I’m perfectly capable of ringing and paying for a taxi. I could even walk.’
She watched a muscle clench in his jaw. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he dismissed. ‘You’ve worked all night and I’m here with a perfectly functioning car. It makes sense. Now … Where. Do. You. Live?’
She glared at him. ‘Only a really stupid man would call a tired woman stupid.’
Gareth shut his eyes and raked a hand through his hair, muttering, ‘Bloody hell.’ He glanced at her then. ‘I apologise, okay? Just tell me where you live already.’
‘Paddo.’
Paddington. Of course she did. Trendy, yuppie suburb as befitted her sparkly dress and expensive car. ‘Perfect. You’re on my way home.’ He was house-sitting in the outer suburbs but she lived in his general direction.
She folded her arms. He could tell she was deciding between being churlish and grateful. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind?’
Gareth shook his head. ‘Of course not,’ he said, indicating that she should make her way to his car. ‘As long as you don’t mind slumming it?’
Billie shot him a disparaging look. ‘I’m sure I’ll manage.’
Gareth nodded as she passed in front of him. The question was, would he?
CHAPTER SIX
THEY DROVE IN silence for a while as Gareth navigated out of the hospital grounds and onto the quiet Sunday morning roads. He noticed she tucked her hands between her denim-clad thighs as he pulled up at the first red traffic light.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked, cranking the heat up a little more.
‘Not too bad,’ she murmured.
Gareth supposed the seats in her car were heated and this was probably a real step down for her. And maybe when he’d been younger, before life had dealt him a tonne of stuff to deal with, he might have felt the divide between them acutely.
But he’d since lived a life that had confirmed that possessions meant very little—from the pockmarked earth of the war-torn Middle East to the beige walls of an oncology unit—he’d learned very quickly that stuff didn’t matter.
And frankly he was too tired and too tempted by her to care for her comfort.
Her scent filled the car. He suddenly realised that she’d been wearing the same perfume last Saturday night but he had been too focused on the accident to realise. Something sweet. Maybe fruity? Banana? With a hint of vanilla and something … sharper.
Great—she smelled like a banana daiquiri.
And now it was in his car. And probably destined to be so for days, taunting him with the memory.
She shifted and in his peripheral vision he could see two narrow stretches of denim hugging her thighs, her hands still jammed between them.
‘So,’ Gareth said out of complete desperation, trying to not think about her thighs and how good they might feel wrapped around him, ‘you called yourself Dr Keyes … the other night. With M-Dog.’
Yep. Complete desperation. Why else would he even be remotely stupid enough to bring up that night when they were trapped in a tiny, warm cab together, only a small gap and a gearstick separating them, the kiss lying large between them?
But Billie didn’t seem to notice the tension as she shrugged and looked out the window. ‘It’s easier sometimes to just shorten it. Ashworth-Keyes is a bit of a mouthful at times and, frankly, it can also sound a bit prissy. I tend to use it more strategically.’