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She shook her head, trying to clear it. She had other things to think about than a perfect stranger. It was time to go to work. She searched through her bag for an elastic band to tie up her hair. The air was muggy, heavy with moisture, and having her hair hanging halfway down her back was making her feel hotter. She gathered her dark hair into a ponytail that hung in a thick rope between her shoulder blades, picked up her bag and headed for the air-conditioned comfort of the corrugated-iron and weatherboard building.
She walked past the helicopter that was the latest addition to the QMERT fleet. The night crew was obviously back at base and she wondered what kind of shift they’d had. She hummed show tunes as she crossed the tarmac, pushed open the door to the base and headed for the communications centre. Comms was always her first port of call as she always wanted to check what was happening.
‘Morning, Lou, what have I missed?’ she greeted the dispatch officer who was stationed at her desk.
‘Nothing much,’ was the answer. ‘The boys have just got back from an IHT,’ Louise went on, using the abbreviation for an inter-hospital transfer, ‘but other than that it was pretty quiet overnight.’
Georgie pulled a face, her dark eyes flashing with good humour. She loved the pace and hype of busy days. Flying off in the helicopter to save lives was a huge buzz and while quiet days were good because they meant no one was getting injured, busy days meant the chance to put her skills to use.
‘It’s not all bad,’ Louise added. She knew how Georgie felt about quiet days—everyone on the team felt the same. ‘The new doctor starts officially today. Showing him the ropes should keep you out of trouble.’
‘That’s Josh Wetherly, right? The emergency specialist from Brisbane?’ Georgie recalled some details from the bio that had been circulating about him.
Louise nodded. ‘His experience looks pretty good on paper but, trust me, he looks even better in real life. I reckon you’ll be more than happy to show him around the chopper and maybe even around Cairns.’
Georgie rolled her eyes. She was used to Louise trying to find her a man. Louise and her husband had been married for twenty-five years and she thought everyone deserved the same happiness. Georgie didn’t disagree. Her parents were also a fine example of a happy marriage, but she didn’t want to be reminded that at twenty-seven years of age people were starting to expect her to settle down. There were still things she wanted to do before she settled down to domestic life and she certainly didn’t need another mother figure trying to find her a husband. Her own mother was perfectly capable of that! Besides, at fifty and almost twice her age, Louise’s idea of a hot man was not quite the same as Georgie’s. It took more than good manners and a nice head of hair to get her attention.
One of the reasons Georgie had moved to Cairns had been to get away from the pressure her family had been putting on her to find a partner but so far her plan wasn’t working too well. Her family continued to show a tendency to send eligible bachelors her way and she’d lost count of the number of blind dates she’d been obliged to go on. She didn’t need Lou on her case as well. She needed a project, something to occupy her time so she could legitimately say she was too busy to date. Showing Dr Wetherly around Cairns wasn’t her idea of a suitable project. She’d have to find something else.
The phone on Louise’s desk rang before Georgie could think of a smart retort. She waited for Lou to take the call, knowing it would probably mean a job for the team.
Lou jotted notes as she spoke to the clinical co-ordinator in Brisbane, nearly fourteen hundred kilometres south of their Cairns base. The information the retrieval team received was almost always third hand: the emergency call would be put through to headquarters in Brisbane and, depending on the location of the emergency, the Brisbane co-ordinator would pass the call on to the dispatch clerk in Brisbane, Townsville, Toowoomba or Cairns. They would then pass the information on to the retrieval team. QMERT was responsible for an area extending in a radius a few hundred kilometres around Cairns, including the waters and islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia. The Royal Flying Doctor Service took over to the north up to Cape York and further inland into the Outback, while QMERT Townsville covered the area to the south.
Louise hung up the phone and relayed the scant information she had to Georgie. ‘A four-month-old baby in respiratory distress. She’s in Tully hospital, they’ve requested an IHT. I’ll find Pat—’
‘And I’ll get changed and track down Dr Wetherly.’ Georgie finished Lou’s sentence. She knew she had time. Pat, the helicopter pilot on duty, would need to get details about the flight and landing, do his pre-flight checks and refuel if necessary. She only needed a few minutes to get changed and find the new doctor. A job this early in the morning wasn’t going to be an ideal introduction for the new recruit on his first day but there was no way around it. She just hoped he was up to the challenge.
She headed for the change rooms to stow her bag and change into the navy and grey jumpsuit that was the retrieval team’s uniform. As she pushed open the door and stepped around the privacy wall that screened the room from the corridor she was greeted by the sight of semi-naked men. The QMERT building was not overly large and the change rooms were unisex. There was a central changing area divided by lockers with male and female showers and toilets off to each side, which afforded a little privacy but not a lot.
The night-shift team was changing to go home. Sean, the duty doctor, was towelling his hair after his shower; she recognised his stocky build even though his face was hidden under a towel. And Marty, an intensive care paramedic like herself, was already dressed and was pulling his motorbike helmet from a locker.
‘Morning, guys,’ she said in greeting.
As Marty stepped away from his locker Georgie could see a third man at the end of the room. He was stripped to the waist, his jumpsuit top hanging on his hips. His back was tanned and smooth, muscular and strangely familiar. She could see two dimples at the base of his spine, just above his waistband, teasing her in a repeat performance. Georgie felt her heart rate increase. It couldn’t be, could it?
He was turning around now at the sound of her voice and his abdominals rippled down his side. Did she dare move her gaze higher?
She lifted her eyes. Abdominals and then pectoral muscles came into view followed by full lips that were smiling, and above those a narrow, perfectly straight nose and grey eyes. Gunship grey.
Her eyes widened. Standing in front of her, semi-naked, was the cute doctor from yesterday. All that was missing were the Australian flag board shorts.
He was the new doctor?
She could feel her heart beating in her chest and she imagined everyone else could hear it too in the quiet of the room.
‘You’re Dr Wetherly?’ She broke the silence but didn’t apologise for bursting in on him while he was changing. Anyone who was at all self-conscious needed to learn to change in the bathrooms. Besides, she’d been treated to the same spectacular view yesterday and looking at this man’s semi-naked body she couldn’t think of a single reason why he might need to hide away. She swallowed hard, forcing herself to continue speaking. ‘I’m Georgie Carides.’ She took a deep breath and tried to relax.
‘Please, my name’s Josh,’ he said as he extended his hand and stepped forward to meet her halfway. He was several inches taller than she was and as he closed the distance between them her gaze fell on his bare chest. Again. It took all her self-control to force her gaze up to his face. But even that was no great hardship. His grey eyes were watching her with amusement and she realised he was still holding his hand out, waiting to shake hers, while she stood there, staring at him. She couldn’t believe he was the new doctor.
Quickly she clasped his hand, unprepared for the tingle that shot through her. It was the same reaction she’d experienced yesterday when he’d helped her to her feet on the pontoon. It felt as though he’d triggered a connection in her palm that led straight to her chest. Her breathing was shallow and rapid and her heart was racing. Again. Yesterday she’d put the feeling down to the adrenaline that had been flowing through her but that wasn’t the case today. This time she knew it was all Dr Wetherly’s doing. Josh.
‘It’s good to see you again,’ he said. He appeared completely unflustered, calm and relaxed, behaving as though he was the old hand, while she felt completely disoriented. He let go of her hand and pulled a grey T-shirt over his head, before slipping his arms into the sleeves of his jumpsuit and zipping it closed. ‘Small world.’
‘Isn’t it?’ she replied, able to speak now that he’d let go of her and her breathing had returned to normal.
‘You guys know each other?’ Marty’s voice came from behind her, startling her. She’d forgotten Marty and Sean were there.
‘We met yesterday—’ she told him.
‘But I didn’t know who she was.’
‘You’re in good hands, mate. Georgie’s a good operator,’ Sean said.
‘We’re going to be working together?’ Josh’s grey eyes hadn’t left her face. He was watching her intently, almost as though he was committing her face to memory. But why he’d need to do that she had no idea. His gaze was intense and focussed but not obtrusive.
She nodded and remembered what had brought her in here. ‘I’m the rostered paramedic today and our first call has just come in. A four-month-old girl in respiratory distress—she’s in the Tully hospital but they’re concerned her condition is deteriorating. Pat, our pilot, is just getting the flight details. We should be ready to take off in about ten.’ That was better. If she concentrated on work, she could block out the image of a bare-chested doctor.
‘The chopper’s restocked and ready to go,’ Marty said as he slammed his locker closed. ‘Good luck, Josh.’
‘Thanks, guys,’ Josh replied as the night crew headed out the door. He turned back to Georgie, watching her with his grey eyes. ‘So you drew the short straw.’
Georgie could see flashes of silver in Josh’s eyes. The colour was striking. She forced herself to concentrate on speaking. Gazing into his eyes was not terribly professional. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You get to work with the new guy on his first day.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said with a grin. ‘This way I can get you trained up just how I want.’ And she didn’t mind. She’d seen his CV and she knew he came with an excellent reputation, although she had expected someone older. Josh looked to be in his early thirties, pretty young for a specialist with his credentials, but that didn’t bother her because this time she’d be in charge.
In an effort to stop ogling him, she opened her locker and threw her bag inside. She needed to get changed.
‘I’ll meet you outside,’ Josh said as she slipped off her sandals and stowed them in her locker.
She turned to him and nodded. He was standing very close to her; she could have reached out a hand and touched him but she didn’t.
As he stepped away she wondered if he was nervous about her disrobing in front of him? Surely not, she thought. He was a doctor, he’d have seen it all before. And he’d seen pretty much all of her just yesterday, she recalled. Her cheeks darkened a little as she remembered what she’d been wearing. Her black bikini hadn’t seemed revealing out on the pontoon, not when everyone else had been dressed in a similar fashion, but now she felt her outfit yesterday may shown him more than she would have liked. She was glad of her olive complexion. Hopefully he hadn’t noticed the blush staining her cheeks.
‘See what other info you can get about the job,’ she said as she tried to quell her embarrassment. ‘Louise should have a contact number for someone at Tully hospital.’
He nodded and said, ‘No worries, I’ll get onto it.’
He turned and left the change rooms, taking the image of Georgie Carides with him. Hearing her voice today and realising they were to be colleagues had been a surprise. A very pleasant surprise, he thought as he entered the corridor. Working with an attractive woman was always a bonus.
He could remember her features. Her face was round and almost perfectly symmetrical. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face and her widow’s peak in the centre of her forehead further highlighted the roundness of her face. Her nose was small and straight and her olive skin smooth and tanned. Her almond-shaped eyes were the colour of chocolate and were accentuated by perfectly shaped black eyebrows. The only splash of colour on her face was the red of her lips.
Her natural demeanour seemed to be quite serious and solemn but when she smiled her whole face changed. Unsmiling, she was striking to look at but when she smiled she was beautiful. Her whole face came to life. Her teeth were brilliantly white against her skin tone and her mouth and eyes and eyebrows all lifted. It wasn’t just her lips that smiled, it was everything.
He’d wanted to give her some privacy to get changed but it had been an effort to make himself leave the room. The room was unisex but it seemed wrong to stand around and chat to her while she was changing when they’d only just met. But when he recalled what she’d been wearing yesterday he’d been tempted to stay. He’d seen plenty of her in her black bikini and he could recall every detail.
Despite the fact they’d been working to stabilise a patient, he was able to recollect every one of her curves. The curve of her waist as it had flared out to her hip. The curve of her bottom at the top of her thigh. The curve of her cleavage where the Lycra of her halter-neck top had pushed her breasts together.
He’d known he couldn’t stand there talking to her while those images had been flashing through his mind, that wouldn’t have been a very professional start to their working relationship. He had no plans to get involved with anyone during his six-month stint; but if there were more women like Georgie Carides in town, his time in Cairns was looking more promising.
Georgie swapped her singlet for a T-shirt with ‘Paramedic’ stencilled across the back and swapped her skirt for her jumpsuit, before pulling on socks and lacing her boots. Her hands were shaking as she tied her laces. She took a deep breath. Although she’d said she didn’t mind working with the new recruit, she was nervous.
But it wasn’t Josh that made her nervous. It was her reaction to Josh.
She knew plenty of cute guys but she’d never had the sense that they could affect her physically. She certainly hadn’t expected to have such a strong reaction to him. Yesterday she’d put it down to adrenaline but today she knew it was more than that. She’d never experienced an instant, powerful physical attraction to a man and now it had happened twice in a matter of hours. It was unexpected and surprising, pleasant but scary—and it was making her nervous.
She wondered how she was going to be able to work with him. Would they work together smoothly? Would their styles be harmonious? Would she be able to concentrate? Questions buzzed through her mind as she zipped up her overalls. There was no way of knowing all the answers.
She’d have to rely on her skills and expertise. She was an experienced intensive care paramedic; Josh was an experienced emergency specialist. In theory she knew they should be fine. But in reality she was the one with experience in pre-hospital emergency medicine. She was the one who would need to take the lead, which meant she needed to be able to concentrate. Josh was used to working in a well-organised hospital environment and she knew, from her days as an emergency unit nurse, that hospitals were a long way from the chaotic, cramped, hot and dusty locations the emergency retrieval team often worked in. She needed to make sure she kept a cool, calm head. She couldn’t afford to be distracted. A lapse in concentration could put her patients at risk. She couldn’t afford to get sidetracked by cute doctors.
She closed her locker and headed out.
Josh was waiting. He held the door for her as they left the building and his stride matched hers as they crossed the tarmac and headed for the helicopter.
‘Are you feeling okay? Ready for this?’ she asked. She wondered if he was nervous, although he certainly didn’t look it. He looked completely at ease. If anything, he looked calmer than she felt.
He nodded his head. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not a complete novice.’
He’d obviously guessed the reason for her question or knew what she was thinking. It would make her job easier if he had a vague idea of what he was in for. ‘This isn’t your first retrieval?’ she queried.
‘I’ve done a couple of transfers before but no primaries and no S&R.’
The most common retrieval for the QMERT team was an inter-hospital transfer or IHT, which was what they were heading to now. Often, but not always, this was a fairly straightforward exercise and Georgie hoped that would be the case today.
Josh’s prior experience of IHTs was a bonus and she was comforted knowing that his confident walk wasn’t just window dressing, but, still, it was probably a good thing that their first callout wasn’t for a search and rescue.
They were almost at the chopper now and she could see Pat in the pilot’s seat, doing his pre-flight checks. Isaac, the air crew officer on duty, was stowing equipment. He closed the final hatch as they approached so it looked as though they were just about ready for take-off. She might just have time to introduce Josh to the rest of the crew but they’d have to check their equipment and run through their procedures in flight. She would have liked a little time to establish some rapport first before they were sent out on a job but, as often happened, the calls dictated their day and they’d just have to get on with it. She prayed it would go smoothly.
‘Have you met Pat and Isaac?’ she asked.
‘Yep, first thing this morning,’ he said as he raised a hand in greeting and Isaac nodded an acknowledgement.
‘G’day, Georgie, Doc,’ Pat greeted them, pointing backwards over his shoulder with his thumb, indicating they should board the chopper.
Georgie let Josh climb in first and she dragged the door shut behind them both, securing it with a flick of the lock. There were four forward-facing seats across the width of the chopper and another two rear-facing seats behind each of the flight deck seats. Josh had taken the third seat across. She could sit beside the door but she preferred one of the middle seats so she slipped into the seat beside him.
‘Baptism by fire,’ she commented as Josh strapped himself in.
She was relieved to see he was able to shrug into his harness, adjust the straps and snap it closed without difficulty. He seemed comfortable enough in the close confines of the chopper and she knew he’d flown before. Yesterday, in fact. She also knew he would have undergone the escape training course. All the rescue crews had to pass HUET—Helicopter Underwater Escape Training—because a lot of their flying could be over water. So transport wasn’t a problem, but what she didn’t know was how much medical experience he’d had outside a hospital situation. A few inter-hospital transfers wasn’t much.
Pat had started the engine and the rotor blades were spinning. The noise made it impossible to continue a conversation until everyone was wearing headsets. She and Josh both grabbed sets and flicked the comms switch on so they could talk to each other and the air crew.
The chopper was lifting off its trolley. It tilted as it left the ground and the movement threw Georgie against Josh. There wasn’t a lot of room to move and she could feel his thigh, firm and muscular, where it rested against hers. His body heat radiated through the fabric of their jumpsuits and into her thigh. She’d never experienced such a visceral reaction to someone before. It was as though her body recognised him despite the fact they were strangers. On some level she knew him. She could feel her knees trembling but she couldn’t break the contact. There was nowhere to go.
There wasn’t much room to move in the back of the chopper. She often felt as though she only just fitted in between all the medical gear and Josh was several inches taller than she was. He was really jammed in. She was five feet six inches. He’d be six feet at least. The stretcher was locked in place in front of them. It ran the width of the helicopter, from one door to the other, between their seats and those opposite. Josh’s knees were crammed between the seat and the stretcher and now he had her practically lying on top of him as well. There was no escape for him, he was well and truly stuck.
‘Sorry,’ she said through the headset as Pat straightened the chopper and she was able to shift back into an upright position and away from Josh’s firm thigh. Perhaps she should have taken a different seat. Squeezed up against him in the back of the chopper, she was a bit too aware of him.
‘No worries.’ He looked at her and grinned, apparently completely unfazed by the lack of room. Her stomach did a lazy somersault in response to his smile and the look of mischief in his grey eyes made her blush. Her body was overheating, from her thighs to her cheeks. She was stifling and she wondered if she could ask Isaac to turn the air-sconditioning up higher but everyone else looked comfortable enough. She’d just have to put up with feeling as though her cheeks were on fire.
‘How did things go with Nigel yesterday?’ Josh’s voice was cool and relaxed, in sharp contrast to her flustered state. If he’d been surprised to find himself working with her he hadn’t shown it, and if their close proximity in the back of the chopper rattled him he wasn’t showing any outward signs of that either. Looking at him, one imagined that things were going exactly according to plan. ‘Did he get back safely?’
She decided she needed to chill out. She nodded. ‘No further dramas,’ she said as she filled him in on the outcome of the English tourist’s medical emergency from the previous day. ‘He was admitted to the Cairns hospital overnight but when I checked on him this morning he’d had an uneventful night and they were expecting to discharge him.’
‘The hospital doesn’t mind you following up?’
Georgie shook her head. ‘As you said, it’s a small world.’ She shrugged. ‘Cairns isn’t a big town, everyone seems to know everyone else and that’s especially true in the medical field. I think the hospital staff expect us to ring. Most of the QMERT doctors work in the hospital too, and we all like to know what happened to our charges. Will you be doing any shifts at the hospital while you’re here?’
He nodded. ‘I’ll do one or two a week but I’m in Cairns to get as much experience as I can with retrievals, particularly primaries. I imagine it’s vastly different from working in a first-class A and E department.’
Georgie finally relaxed. This was her area of expertise and discussing this topic kept her mind focussed. ‘You’ll find you’ll have to strip your medicine back to basics. The principles and the goals are the same, you just won’t have the same state-of-the-art equipment at your fingertips or the specialist services you’re probably used to. We become everyone from anaesthetist to scout nurse out here.’
‘Luckily I like a challenge,’ he said. ‘So what should we expect when we get to Tully?’
For the remainder of the flight they ran through possible scenarios that might greet them on landing, including the possibility that they might need to intubate the baby. Together they checked the medical kits to make sure they had everything they might need. Small regional hospitals would have standard supplies but they might not always have the less commonly required equipment.
Josh was methodical in his checking but that wasn’t surprising. It was a character trait attributable to most of the team—organised, meticulous and logical would describe almost all of them—and by the time they circled over the landing site in Tully Georgie was feeling confident that they would be able to work together comfortably.