Picking up the Pieces

Compared to the way she worked with Trevor, it was a miracle, but then Trevor often did what she would not have done. Perhaps that was the answer. Nick seemed blessed with a methodical logic that was a gift to follow — or perhaps he was just her sort of person.

She didn’t want to think about that. The last time she had worked with a surgeon who was ‘her sort of person’, he had turned out to be someone else’s sort of person, too — and that person had been his wife.

The hurt had been deep, and the wariness still lingered, three years later. Oh, there were dates, but nothing serious, nothing — well, physical. Not now. Not since Simon.

Nick shifted slightly and she was instantly aware of the change of pressure between them, standing as they were so close together. She tried to move away, but it was impossible without moving the trolley, so she was forced to stand there, his hip hard against hers, desperately conscious of the warmth of his body and the subtle flex of muscle in his thigh as he shifted again.

He held out his hand, and she blindly reached for the trolley and slapped an instrument in his hand.

There was a little snicker from Mary-Jo, and Nick sighed pointedly.

Her eyes flew up to his face, and the blaze of fury and contempt in his eyes took her breath away. Horrified, she looked down at his hand and saw a scalpel lying there.

‘How the hell am I meant to suture him with that?’

His voice was cutting, and she felt the flush crawl up her throat and stain her cheeks. ‘Sorry, I was thinking about something else,’ she mumbled helplessly.

‘Evidently. I want —’

‘I know what you want,’ she muttered, reaching for the suture.

He said something under his breath. It could have been ‘You and me both,’ but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t about to ask him to repeat it, anyway. She was ready with the suture but his admonishment had wounded her and she bit her lip.

She wouldn’t be much use either to him or to the patient if she couldn’t keep her mind on the job!

It seemed to take forever, but finally he was satisfied that the circulation and nerve supply was restored as well as possible. At last the fixator was screwed home, and the patient wheeled out to recovery.

As he moved away to talk to the anaesthetist about the next case, she checked her instruments, wheeled the trolley out and stripped off her gloves.

Her hands were shaking, but whether from the contact with his body or the reaction to his anger she didn’t know. It was going to be a long old night.

It was, every minute of it as long as she could have imagined, and fraught with difficult cases. As Nick said, it was the anaesthetist who had the hardest job, because several of their patients had had a skinful and their systems were already severely depressed, but she would have swapped with the anaesthetist in a second. Anything rather than stand hip to hip with a man whose temper had scalded her.

Not that she hadn’t deserved it; although her lapse hadn’t been that major, it had thrown his concentration. Not hers, though. Hers had already been thrown, or she wouldn’t have done anything so stupid. Even so, she had been unprepared for the anger in his eyes — not to mention the contempt. And they had been working so well together until then …

One man was seriously touch and go, and when the anaesthetist reported a plummeting blood-pressure Nick shook his head and stood back.

‘He doesn’t need me. He’s got comparatively little bleeding from this femur — he needs someone to take a look inside that abdomen.’

‘Spleen?’ the anaesthetist murmured, and Nick nodded.

‘I reckon. He was the driver, wasn’t he? I think he’s got an encapsulated haemorrhage, and I’m not going to go rooting about in there. Is there anyone available?’

‘Ted’s on, isn’t he?’ Cassie said quietly.

Stephen, the anaesthetist, nodded. ‘I believe so.’

Mary-Jo, the circulating nurse, left the room at Cassie’s signal, and came back moments later.

‘The switchboard are paging him. He’s in the hospital.’

He appeared within seconds, and within minutes was scrubbed and opening the man up.

‘Ouch,’ he muttered. ‘Splenectomy — that’ll get his new year off to a good start!’

They were running whole blood into him as fast as possible, and as soon as the blood supply to the spleen was clamped his condition started to pick up immediately.

‘Lucky.’

The surgeon peered at Nick over the patient. ‘He may not think so when he comes round. What are you going to do about the femur?’

Nick frowned. ‘I’ll have to pin it — it’s a nasty spiral. If we could do it with traction I would, but it’ll just slide every time he moves and he’ll be back to square one. I’ll let you finish and see how he is.’

‘He seems stable now,’ the anaesthetist told them from the head of the table.

Ted shrugged. ‘You carry on — I’ve done the tricky stuff. Just warn me if you’re going to hammer anything and shake him about so I don’t stick a suture into his aorta.’

Nick grinned, his eyes crinkling above the mask. ‘OK. Here we go, then.’

They worked well together, pausing for each other occasionally, and when they were finished and the man was taken away they left the operating-room and went into the staff lounge in the theatre suite.

‘New, aren’t you?’ Ted asked, eyeing Nick over his coffee.

Nick grinned at Cassie, his anger apparently forgotten. ‘Ah — you could say that. Actually I’m supposed to start officially on Tuesday, but technically my contract runs from the first of January, so I guess I’m on the staff as of about —’ he glanced up at the clock ‘— six hours ago.’

‘Is that the time?’ Cassie asked incredulously.

The ODA popped his head round the door. ‘That’s all, folks. All quiet on the Western front.’

‘Well thank the lord,’ Mary-Jo said with a heartfelt sigh, and, kicking off her rubber boots, she curled up in the chair and rubbed her feet.

Now how does she manage to look elegant doing that? Cassie wondered in amazement. Even more amazing was the sudden realisation that Nick didn’t even seem to have noticed, but was turning to her, just as her mouth opened in an enormous yawn.

He followed suit, displaying a full set of even, gleaming white teeth, and then chuckled.

‘I wonder why yawning’s so infectious?’ she said with a strained little laugh.

Nick’s mouth lifted in a heart-stopping, crooked grin. ‘Defence mechanism. If you yawn, perhaps your body knows something mine doesn’t, so if I yawn, I’ve covered my bases without having to go to the effort of finding out why.’

‘You’re crazy,’ she told him, her voice uncooperatively breathless.

‘Mmm. Fancy some breakfast? I’m starved. I didn’t get round to eating last night, and I could eat a horse.’

Cassie’s stomach rumbled in anticipation, and she clapped a hand over it and giggled. ‘Betrayed! How can I pretend otherwise?’

His smile was slow and lazy. ‘Your body’s not very good at keeping secrets, is it?’

She flushed, suddenly aware of him again and wondering what else her body was giving away apart from exhaustion and hunger. Oh, lord, had he known what she was thinking when she handed him the wrong instrument?