Nurse, Nanny...Bride!

She was still staring at the profile of the man who presented a new and very unwelcome threat. Both professional and personal.

Why had he come all the way to the opposite side of the earth and picked the one place that was hers? It wasn’t as if New Zealand was that small. He could have picked one of the larger cities in the north island. Maybe they didn’t have as many ski fields or mountains to climb but they had plenty of water. He could have learned to sail. Or surf!

Maybe Pam would know why. Contact with the only friend she had kept from her time in London was well overdue and if what she was seeking was the kind of gossip she deliberately avoided, so be it. Knowledge was power and Alice certainly needed a boost.

Just making the decision to email Pam gave Alice the illusion of regaining some control. About to drag her gaze away from the new member of staff, she only just caught the movement as he raised his left hand to indicate something of interest on the image.

Unaware of the frown on her face, she turned to help Jo smooth and tuck fresh linen onto the bed. The last time she had seen Andy Barrett he had been wearing a wedding ring. A tight band of gold that had successfully suffocated any stupid fantasies she might have nurtured.

He wasn’t wearing it now.

The case in Resus 1 was a trauma. A thirty-five-year-old woman who was well known to emergency department staff: one of their ‘frequent flyers’. Her boyfriend had gang affiliations and was only too ready to use his fists and his feet when something displeased him, but Janine had steadfastly refused to lay any complaints against him on earlier visits. Maybe this time would be different, the triage nurse told the consultant. It was the worst punishment they’d ever seen her receive.

Janine lay, oddly quiet, on the bed, her face now so swollen it was obviously painful for her to speak.

‘No!’ she managed in response to Andrew’s careful suggestion. ‘No police. I told you. I fell down the stairs.’

Yeah…right. Stairs that had knuckles and heavy boots. The lacerations on her eyebrow and upper lip needed extensive suturing. A cheekbone was probably fractured and Andrew didn’t like the ugly purple bruises already appearing on her ribs as a nurse cut away her clothing.

‘Can you take a deep breath for me?’ Andrew was using both hands to examine her ribs as gently as he could.

‘Ahhh!’ It was the first indication Janine had given of her level of pain.

‘Pretty sore, isn’t it?’ Her breathing was adequate but unsurprisingly shallow. ‘What score would you give it on a scale of one to ten, Janine? Ten being the worst.’

‘I’m all right.’ Janine sounded as if she was holding her breath now. She had her eyes closed and beads of perspiration mingled with the blood on her forehead. She was a long way from being all right.

‘Anything else hurting that much?’

A tear escaped puffy eyelids. ‘My…arm, I guess.’

The sleeve of a ragged jersey was being peeled away and the deformity of Janine’s wrist and lower arm was obvious. Another fracture. Almost open. Andrew could see the bone just under the skin. Checking limb baselines like movement and sensation and perfusion seemed inadvisable until the fracture was secured. Even trying to wriggle her fingers might be enough to break the skin and risk infection. He turned to the nurse and lowered his voice.

‘She didn’t come in by ambulance, did she?’

Jo shook her head. ‘Private car. She was left outside Reception to make her own way inside.’

Andrew’s mouth tightened as he shook his head in disgust. He had to bury the anger that might have made him storm out of here if the bastard was hanging around. He had to rid his head of the ugly words he would like to have said to the kind of man who could treat a woman like this.

And, most of all, he had to dismiss the memory of what it felt like to be suspected of being that kind of man. ‘Let’s get an IV line in and a splint on this arm,’ he ordered crisply. ‘We’ll get some pain relief on board and then do a thorough secondary survey before we start the X-rays.’

Another nurse entered the resuscitation area as Andrew slipped a tourniquet around Janine’s arm and tightened it. ‘I’m going to put a small needle in your hand,’ he warned his patient. ‘Then we can give you something for the pain. Okay?’

Janine nodded. The movement made her wince. In his peripheral vision, as he anchored a vein and slipped a cannula into place, Andrew could see the new nurse sliding a well padded cardboard splint under Janine’s broken arm and then starting to secure it. Her movements were sure and careful enough not to cause further damage or pain.

He taped the cannula and looked up properly this time, intending to let the nurse know that she’d done a good job. It was just as well he hadn’t done this a few seconds ago. He might have missed the vein completely.

Alice Palmer?

He’d known she came from New Zealand. Why had it not even occurred to him that she might be working in a hospital here again? Because the odds of it being the same one he’d been offered a job in by an old acquaintance were so small? Or was it because he’d been so determined to put any thoughts of her and the period of his life she’d been a part of completely behind him?

How ironic that he’d come this far to get away from it all. To start again and here it was, staring him in the face. Right beside a case that graphically represented most of what he’d been trying to escape.

He stared back.

How much did Alice know? Not much, presumably, because she’d lost her job before it had started. Unfair dismissal, as it had turned out. And he’d been responsible. He had had every intention of telling her, but when he’d gone to the address the woman in Personnel had given, he’d found an empty house with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside that had a cheerful ‘Sold’ sticker planted in the centre. It had been six months after the event, in any case, and someone in Emergency had suggested that Alice had left the country.

He couldn’t tell her now. It was ancient history and here she was, working in a senior position so it hadn’t affected her career. And if he did tell her, she’d want to know how he knew and that was what had had to be left behind.

For Emmy’s sake.

He held her gaze and kept his tone carefully neutral as his brain worked overtime, tossing up whether to acknowledge the fact that they knew each other.

‘I’d like some morphine drawn up, please,’ he said.

No. He couldn’t acknowledge her. That would bring a flurry of interest from others. Questions he didn’t want to hear, let alone answer. His next words emerged before he’d had a chance to even think them through. A form of attack as a defensive shield.

‘If you have keys to the drug cabinet, that is.’

Heat scorched Alice’s cheeks.

She dragged her eyes away from his face. An olderlooking face. Thinner and far more distant. Had he changed so much from the man she remembered or was this coolness due to a determination to hide recognition? So this was how it was going to be. They were not going to acknowledge having worked together, let alone knowing what they did know about each other.

A warning shot had been fired. If she said anything about the rumours she’d been hearing before she left London, he would warn her superiors that allowing her access to restricted drugs might be inadvisable.

The unfairness of it added a new element to the emotional turmoil Alice was dealing with. Despite the traitorous reaction of her body earlier, she knew she wasn’t in love with the man any more. She’d got over that a very long time ago. About when she’d been standing in front of his desk and he’d said he couldn’t trust her enough to let her keep the job she loved.

She’d tried to hate him for that but hadn’t succeeded. Her heart had been incapable of flipping the coin to embrace the dark side of love. Especially when her head, coupled with an innate sense of fairness, had forced her to acknowledge that he’d only been doing what he had to do as head of department. Quite generously, really, when he’d offered her the opportunity to resign instead of launching an official investigation and a paper trail that would have haunted the rest of her working life.

What was really unfair was that she’d never believed the rumours about him. Even now, with the dark emotions sparked by seeing the poor battered woman they were treating at the moment and the cool distance he had placed between himself and an old colleague, she knew he was as incapable of hurting someone deliberately as she was of stealing and taking drugs. If Andrew had been interested enough to actually get to know her properly, he would have had—would still have—the same kind of faith in her.

Clearly, he didn’t. The implication beneath his request for morphine had been a deliberate reminder of the humiliating rumours she’d been unable to disprove. That he hadn’t trusted her. That he’d never really seen who she was. That hurt.

Quite apart from being an intimately personal slight, mud had a habit of sticking. Enough to ruin lives. Alice actually felt sick to her stomach as she pulled an ampoule of morphine from the cabinet and signed the register. She could feel Andrew watching her.

Jo did the drug check with her. The name of the drug. The dose. The expiry date. She watched as Alice snapped the top of the ampoule and slid a needle in to draw it up. Try as she might, Alice couldn’t disguise the subtle trembling of her hands.

‘You still need toast,’ Jo whispered.

Alice needed something a lot more than food. She needed to be a long way away from their new consultant. How could she possibly work with him when he was watching every move she made? Knowing that, despite the best of intentions and for very different reasons, she would have to fight the desire to watch every move he made? Looking for a reminder of the man she remembered. Hoping not to find one, possibly, so she could decide it had been a lucky escape and move on, once and for all.

She could switch departments, she thought wildly. Go into Cardiology. Or Paediatrics. Or Theatre. No. This was where she loved to work. Where she got a taste of everything and the adrenaline rush of helping to deal with major, life-threatening situations. This department was a big part of why her life was on track again.

She drew up the saline to dilute the morphine. She taped the ampoule to the barrel of the syringe to identify its contents and then she walked back to the bed to hand it to Andrew.

Watching Janine relax as the effect of the narcotic took the edge off her pain had a curiously similar effect on Alice. She eyed the bruised and swollen face of the woman again. The marks of brutality on the woman’s ribs and the misshapen arm now resting in a splint. The thought of someone enduring a beating like this was horrific. Sickening. Alice raised her gaze, knowing that her reaction would be evident in her eyes.

Deliberately capturing the gaze of Andrew Barrett before that reaction dimmed.