The Perfect Wife and Mother?

‘—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?’