Tamed by her Brooding Boss

‘Ah, there you are.’ She turned as James Benson’s voice alerted her to his presence. Her heart began to race, pounding as those familiar, deep tones smoothed over her like melting, dark chocolate. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you,’ he added. ‘We’ve all been changing into our flight suits and generally getting ready for the off.’

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak just then. He was every bit as striking as she remembered, with that compelling presence that made you feel as though he dominated the room. Or perhaps it was just that she was unusually on edge today. He was tall, with a strong, muscular build, and he still had those dark good looks which, to her everlasting shame, had been her undoing all those years ago, the chiselled, angular bone structure and jet-black hair, and those penetrating grey eyes that homed in on you and missed nothing.

He was looking at her now, his thoughtful gaze moving over her, lighting on the long, burnished chestnut of her hair and coming to rest on the pale oval of her face.

‘I wasn’t sure if it really would be you,’ he said. ‘When I saw your name on the acceptance letter I wondered for a minute or two whether it might be some other Sarah Franklyn, but the chances of there being two doctors in the neighbourhood with the same name was pretty remote. I know you went to medical school and worked in Devon.’ His glance meshed with hers, and she steeled herself not to look away. He’d obviously heard, from time to time, about what she was doing. She straightened her shoulders. She would get through this. Of course she would. How bad could it be?

‘I expect my taking up a medical career seems a strange choice to you, knowing me from back then.’ Her voice was husky, and she cleared her throat and tried again, aiming to sound more confident this time. ‘You weren’t in on the interviews, so it didn’t occur to me that we would be working together.’

He inclined his head briefly. ‘I was away, attending a conference—it was important and couldn’t be avoided or delegated, so the head of Emergency made the final decision.’ His mouth twisted in a way that suggested he wasn’t too pleased about that, and Sarah felt a sudden surge of panic rise up to constrict her throat. So he didn’t want her here. That was something she hadn’t reckoned on.

His glance shifted slowly over her taut features and she lifted her chin in a brash attempt at keeping her poise.

His grey eyes darkened, but his voice remained steady and even toned. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and change into your flight suit, and then I’ll show you around and introduce you to the rest of the crew. We’ll have coffee. The kettle should have boiled by the time you’re ready.’

‘Yes. That sounds good.’

At least he was accepting her presence here as a done thing. That was a small mercy. And it looked as though he wasn’t going to comment on what had happened all those years ago. Just the thought of him doing that was enough to twist her stomach into knots, but for now perhaps she was safe. After all, she’d been a vulnerable seventeen-year-old back then, and now, some nine years later, she was a grown woman who ought to be in full control of herself. Why, then, did she feel so ill at ease, so uncertain about everything?

But she knew the answer, didn’t she? It was because, sooner or later, the past was bound to come up and haunt her.

He showed her to a room where she could change into her high-visibility, orange flight suit, and she took those few minutes of privacy to try and get herself together. She’d keep things on a professional level between them, nothing more, no private stuff to mess things up. That way, she could keep a tight grip on her emotions and show him that she was a totally different person now, calm and up to the mark, and nothing like she’d been as a teenager.

She cringed as she thought back to some of the things she had done in her early teen years. Had she really driven Ben Huxley’s tractor around the village on that late summer evening? He’d forever regretted leaving the keys in the ignition, and his shock at discovering his beloved tractor stranded at a precarious angle in a ditch an hour later had been nothing to the concern he’d felt at finding a thirteen-year-old girl slumped over the wheel.

And what had been James’s reaction when she’d broken into the stables on his father’s estate one evening and saddled up one of the horses? It had been her fourteenth birthday and she hadn’t cared a jot about what might happen or considered that what she had been doing was wrong. She had loved the horses, had been used to being around them, and on that day she’d felt an overwhelming need to ride through the meadows and somehow leave her troubles behind. She had been wild, reckless, completely out of control, and James had recognised that.

‘None of this will bring your mother back,’ he’d said to her, and she’d stared at him, her green eyes wide with defiance, her jaw lifted in challenge.

‘What would you know about it?’ she’d responded in a dismissive, careless tone.

She’d been extremely lucky. No one had reported her to the police. She’d got away with things, and yet the more she’d avoided paying for her misdemeanours, the more she’d played up. ‘Mayhem in such a small package,’ was the way James had put it. No wonder he didn’t want her around now.

He made coffee for her when she went back into the main room a short time later. ‘Is it still cream with one sugar?’ he asked, and she gave him a bemused look, her mouth dropping open a little in surprise. He remembered that?

‘Yes … please,’ she said, and he waved her to a seat by the table.

‘Tom is our pilot,’ he said, nodding towards the man who sat beside her. Tom was in his forties, she guessed, black haired, with a smattering of grey streaks starting at his temples.

‘Pleased to meet you, Sarah,’ Tom said, smiling and pushing forward a platter filled with a selection of toasted sandwiches, which she guessed had been heated up in the mini-grill that stood on the worktop next to the coffee-maker. ‘Help yourself. You never know if you’re going to get a lunch break in this line of work, so you may as well eat while you get the chance.’

‘Thanks.’ She chose a bacon and cheese baguette and thought back to breakfast-time when she’d grabbed a slice of toast for herself while the children had tucked into their morning cereal. It seemed a long while ago now.

‘And this is Alex, the co-pilot,’ James said, turning to introduce the man opposite. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, with wavy brown hair and friendly hazel eyes.

‘Have you been up in a helicopter before?’ Alex asked, and Sarah nodded.

‘I worked with the air ambulance in Devon for a short time,’ she answered. ‘This is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, so when this job came up it looked like the ideal thing for me.’

He nodded. ‘James told us you’ll be working part time—is that by choice? It suits us, because our paramedic is employed on a part-time basis, too.’

‘Yes. I’ll just be doing one day a week here, and the rest of the time I’ll be working at the hospital in the A and E department.’

‘Sounds good. You’ll get the best of both worlds, so to speak. It’s unusual to do that, though, in A and E, I imagine?’

‘Not so much these days,’ Sarah murmured. ‘And it suits me to do things this way.’ She bit into her baguette and savoured the taste of melted cheese.

‘Sarah supplements her income by doing internet work,’ James put in. ‘She writes a medical advice column for a website, and one for a newspaper, too.’

How had he known that? She looked up at him in surprise, and his mouth made a wry shape. ‘I came across your advice column when I was browsing one day, and there was mention there of your work for the newspaper.’ He frowned. ‘I’m not sure it’s wise to make diagnoses without seeing the patient.’

‘That isn’t what I do, as I’m sure you’re aware if you’ve read my columns.’ Perhaps he was testing her, playing devil’s advocate, to see what kind of a doctor she really was, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with implying she might not be up to the job. Neither was she going to tell him about her personal circumstances and give him further reason for doubting her suitability for the post. She needed to work part time so that she could be there for Sam and Rosie whenever possible, and the writing had provided an excellent solution in that respect. Working from home was a good compromise.

‘I mostly work with a team of doctors,’ she said, ‘and we pick out letters from people who have conditions that would be of interest to a lot of others. We give the best advice we can in the circumstances, and point out other possible diagnoses and remedies.’

‘Hmm. You don’t think the best advice would be for your correspondents to go and see their own GP, or ask to see a specialist?’

‘I think a good many people have already done that and are still confused. Besides, patients are much better informed these days. They like to visit the doctor with some inkling of what his responses might be, or what treatment options might be available to them,’ she responded calmly.

He nodded. ‘I guess you could be right.’ He might have said more, but the red phone started to ring and he lifted the receiver without hesitation. He listened for a while and then said, ‘What’s the location? And his condition? Okay. We’re on our way.’

Food and coffee were abandoned as they hurried out to the helicopter. ‘A young man has been injured in a multiple-collision road-traffic accident,’ James told them. ‘He has a broken leg, but he’s some thirty miles away from here, and the paramedics on scene feel they need a doctor present. He needs to go to hospital as soon as possible.’

They were airborne within a minute or two, and soon Sarah was gazing down at lush green fields bordering a sparse network of ribbon-like roads. James sat next to her, commenting briefly on the landmarks they flew over.

‘There’s the hospital,’ he said, pointing out the helipad on top of the building. ‘We’ll be landing there when we have our patient secured.’

A little further on, they passed over a sprawling country estate, which had at its centre a large house built from grey, Cornish stone. It was an imposing, rectangular building, with lots of narrow, Georgian windows.

‘Your family’s place,’ Sarah mused. ‘Do you still live there?’ It was large enough for him to have the whole of the north wing to himself. That’s how things had been when she’d lived in the area, though he’d been away at medical school a good deal of the time, or working away at the hospital in Penzance. His younger brother had taken over the east wing, leaving the rest of the house to their parents.

He shook his head. ‘I have my own place now. It seemed for the best once I settled for working permanently in Truro. It’s closer to the hospital. Jonathan still lives on the estate, though he has a family of his own now. He has a boy and a girl.’

‘I wondered if he might stay on. He was always happy to live and work on the family farm, wasn’t he?’

James nodded. ‘So you decided to come back to your roots. What persuaded you to leave Devon? I have friends who worked there from time to time and, from what I heard on the grapevine, you were pretty much settled there. Rumour had it your mind was set on staying with the trauma unit.’

‘That’s pretty much the way it was to begin with … I was hoping I might get a permanent staff job but then I was passed over for promotion—a young male doctor pipped me at the post, and after that I started to look around for something else.’

He winced. ‘That must have hurt.’ He studied her briefly. ‘Knowing you, I guess his appointment must have made you restless. You wouldn’t have let the grass grow under your feet after that.’

‘No, I wouldn’t, that’s true.’ She wasn’t going to tell him about her situation—although it hadn’t been voiced at the time, she was fairly certain that she’d lost the promotion because of her family ties, and now she had to do everything she could to find secure, permanent work. This job promised all of that, but she was on three months’ probation to see how things worked out on both sides, and she didn’t need him to go looking for excuses to be rid of her before she signed a final contract.

By now they had reached their destination, and as the pilot came in to land, she could see the wreckage below. It looked as though a couple of motorcyclists had been involved in a collision with a saloon and a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and there were a number of casualties. A fire crew was in attendance, and from the blackened appearance of the saloon, it seemed that a blaze had erupted at some point. She could only hope the occupants of the car had escaped before the fire had taken hold.

‘You’ll be shadowing me,’ James said, unclipping his seat belt as the helicopter came to a standstill, ‘so don’t worry about getting involved with the other patients. We’ll take them in strict order of triage.’

Sarah bit her lip. She had no objection to following his lead and learning the ins and outs of this particular job, but surely she’d be of more use helping with the other victims of the crash?