More Than Caring

‘You’d think so, from the fear and trepidation some people exhibit when they have to come here.’ He leant back in his chair, the steel barrel of the pen he’d been using clasped between both hands as he rested his elbows on the arms.

His eyes only left hers for a second to drop in a swift sweep down her body and when a wash of heat followed it she felt almost as though she’d been just one pace too close to the fiery breath of the dragon.

‘You, on the other hand, don’t seem in the least bit intimidated,’ he added thoughtfully, and she was relieved that he apparently hadn’t recognised her reaction to him.

It was completely crazy. She had no more interest in him than he had in her. They were both hospital employees who, apart from his unofficial supervision, would have little cause to meet.

Even if her department were to need to requisition replacements for expensive equipment, the submission would be made on paper rather than in person. Yet, here she was, her eyes defensively fixed on the slender length of his fingers as he slid them back and forth on his pen, only too aware of the fact that his eyes were fixed on her face.

‘Actually,’ she said hurriedly, her face heating when she realised that he was still waiting for an answer, ‘I wanted to ask how to go about arranging a series of self-defence classes.’

He gave a snort of laughter. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you needed any classes, seeing how you took care of two people all by yourself.’ He pointedly rubbed one elbow with a grimace.

She laughed a little uncomfortably. ‘Yes. Well, I’m sorry about that, but I wasn’t asking about taking classes. I was actually proposing to teach them.’

‘You’d teach them?’ He seemed startled by the idea and her pride was stung. It wasn’t only big burly men who could teach such things. Sometimes the fact that she was a slender female and well able to defend herself made her point to other women far more effectively.

‘I’ve done them before, as I said on my CV,’ she reminded him. ‘At my last post, we were having increasing problems with hospital staff being attacked, especially in A and E. The first class started with a small group of female staff just from the accident department, and the word spread.’

He had a frown on his face and she was certain that he was going to turn the idea down. Whether that was because he disapproved of the proposal in principle or because of his continuing wariness about her, she didn’t know.

Well, he might pour cold water on the suggestion this time, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t going to bring it up again. She knew at first hand the benefits of learning self-defence and she would keep trying until he finally agreed to let her…

‘I’ll see what I can do about scheduling time in the physiotherapy department,’ he announced, completely taking the wind out of her sails with his unexpected agreement.

‘Oh, that’s…great,’ she managed, completely wrong-footed. She’d been so certain that she was going to have a fight on her hands.

‘Unless I’ve got a meeting, I can usually manage to be free by six. Do you want me to organise it for after you’ve finished a shift, or would you rather I made it on one of your off-duty days?’

‘Oh, but you don’t have to be there,’ she said hurriedly, suddenly nervous at the idea of having to put on a performance in front of eyes as keen as lasers.

‘You’ll need a body to use for your demonstrations,’ he pointed out calmly, and her pulse tripped into overdrive.

He expected her to be able to concentrate while he grabbed her and held her close to that lean, muscular body? There might be a constant prickly animosity between the two of them but that didn’t mean that her hormones couldn’t recognise the fact that he was a good-looking man. In spite of the solemn expression he usually wore, he was so gorgeous that few women would want to fight him off.

Then her innate level-headedness kicked in and she brought her whirling emotions under control.

‘You mean you’re volunteering to get thrown around again? Wasn’t one set of bruises enough for you?’ she challenged.

He chuckled wryly and, much to her annoyance, her pulse kicked up another notch.

‘At least this time I can make sure I won’t be landing on concrete. In fact, I’ll make sure the physiotherapy department has taken delivery of the new mats they ordered before I schedule the first class.’

Over the strident summons of one of the three telephones on his desk he promised to call her as soon as he had some dates for her, and suggested she have a think about how she wanted to publicise the classes.

On her way down to the ward to start her shift Lauren should have been thinking about the tasks awaiting her attention, or she should have set her concentration to deciding whether word of mouth would be a better advertisement than putting up posters. But all she could think about was Marc Fletcher’s grin.

Well, it wasn’t just his grin. It was the effect that smiling had on his whole face, from the sparkle it added to the smoky grey of his eyes to the lifting and lightening of the angle of his jaw and the gleam of strong teeth in a surprisingly sensual-looking mouth.

‘Oh, good grief!’ she muttered when she realised she was fixating on the man’s teeth, for heaven’s sake. ‘He’s the hospital manager, remember? He’s got something against you that makes him turn up all the time to keep an eye on you, remember?’

In fact, now she thought about it, that was probably the reason why he’d suggested coming along to the classes, too. It wasn’t that he wanted to offer his services as the willing victim so much as he wanted to see what she was getting up to.

Well, he wouldn’t find anything amiss in one of her self-defence classes. She knew only too well how vital the information she would pass on could be—the difference between life and death, in some cases. There was no way she would do anything less than her best, no matter who was standing there supervising her.

In the meantime, there was a ward waiting for her to take over the reins, with the night staff champing at the bit to go home.

An hour later Lauren was beginning to wonder just how many more things were going to go wrong.

There had been a complete mix-up over the patients’ meals, with dietary requirements completely ignored for some and meals being supplied for two ladies who were designated ‘nil by mouth’.

‘Surely you know that pre-operative patients shouldn’t be tucking into bacon and scrambled eggs?’ she demanded of her hastily gathered staff once she’d sorted everything out. ‘Just because the kitchen made a mess of things doesn’t mean you switch your brains off. You know better than this.’

‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ muttered the hapless staff nurse, looking close to tears. ‘It won’t happen again, I promise.’

‘See that it doesn’t,’ Lauren said sternly. ‘Luckily, this time it won’t make too much difference as Mrs Lisle hadn’t eaten more than a couple of mouthfuls before she was stopped. I’ve warned Theatre that she’ll have to be switched to the end of the list as a precaution.’

It was such an elementary mistake that she was quite concerned. Staff Nurse Roberts was usually very dependable. Such a potentially dangerous mistake was unlike her and would bear closer scrutiny.

‘Next point on the agenda is the state of cleanliness, or rather the lack of it,’ she said briskly. ‘There are dust bunnies under some of those beds that are nearly old enough to talk and I spotted used paper hankies lying behind one of the curtains. In a postoperative ward that’s a recipe for disaster. We don’t want an environment where MRSA can flourish, so strict cleanliness, please.’

There were extra arrangements about transporting one patient up for X-rays and a rescheduling of physiotherapy for another, but Lauren was uncomfortably aware that her juniors were only too pleased to escape from her stern presence a few minutes later.

‘Can’t be helped,’ she muttered under her breath as she accessed the computer records to correct the time of administering pre-med to the patient wrongly given her breakfast. ‘I didn’t enter nursing to win popularity contests, and the sooner they learn my ways, the sooner we’ll get along with each other.’

Not that they were a bad bunch by any means. She’d found them very hard-working up to now, so perhaps this was just a minor glitch.

In the interim, she’d have to see if she could engineer a few minutes with Jackie Roberts. Perhaps over a cup of coffee she might loosen up enough to tell her what had brought on this unexpected lapse.

She nearly groaned when she saw how much to heart her nurses had taken her words. Over the next few hours there was almost a full-scale blitz on the ward with every surface attacked as though for a military inspection. What the cleaners didn’t do, the nurses did, prompting the patients to joke that they were expecting to be next on the list for a good scrubbing.

With all that going on she should have had plenty to occupy her mind. Unfortunately that didn’t stop her eyes straying towards the door every so often in expectation of seeing Marc Fletcher standing there with his habitual frown in evidence.

She was almost disappointed when the phone rang just before she was due to hand over at the end of her shift and she heard his voice instead. Had she actually been looking forward to seeing the man, even though she knew he was probably trying to find fault?

‘Would Monday evening be good for your first session?’ he asked briskly. ‘That gives you four days to get the word around.’

Lauren’s mind switched into high gear.

She still had a spare set of the notes she’d made for the last course. It wouldn’t be difficult to have them copied so each attendee could take a set home at the end of the session. That just left the publicising to organise.

‘Monday works for me,’ she agreed. ‘And I wondered if it might be a good idea to start pretty low-key with the publicity this time. I thought I could put up notices in the female staff cloakrooms initially, to see what interest they stirred.’

‘Sounds reasonable for a pilot scheme,’ he said after a brief pause for thought. ‘But put my phone as the contact number just to make sure you don’t get any nuisance calls as a result.’

She’d been wondering how to get around that problem and was grateful for the suggestion but, ‘Won’t that tie up your line?’ she worried.

‘Rather mine than yours,’ he said simply. ‘People who need to get hold of me can always go through the switchboard and get my secretary if my direct line’s busy. Anyway, it’s better that way than leaving you open to the chance of an undesirable getting hold of your number.’