Consultant Care

‘I know, Simon,’ interrupted Dr Le Saux in the gentlest of voices. ‘Home is better. How’s that stick insect of yours?’

‘It’s had a baby,’ said Simon proudly.

‘But I thought it was a male?’

‘So did Mum!’ grimaced Simon.

Nicolette giggled, and both of them looked at her, and both joined in with her laughter, and there was something so. . .so. . .startling about the transformation which came over the stern doctor’s face when he actually allowed himself to laugh that Nicolette felt suddenly breathless and it took a huge effort to keep her mind on the job and not on that disarming smile of his. ‘So w-when would you like Simon discharged, Dr Le Saux?’ she stumbled.

‘How about tomorrow morning?’

Simon raised an irresistibly appealing face up to the doctor. ‘How about today?’

Dr Le Saux turned a cool, questioning gaze towards Nicolette. ‘Is that possible, Staff?’

‘That depends on whether Simon’s mother can be contacted, but I’m sure it can be arranged. But we’ll need to get in touch with Pharmacy soon if we’re to get Simon’s drugs to take home with him.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll go and write them up now,’ he said briefly, and swung the curtain back.

Nicolette rang Simon’s delighted mother from the phone on the central nursing station.

‘Discharged, you say?’

‘That’s right,’ said Nicolette happily.

‘But that’s marvellous—we thought he’d be in at least over the weekend!’

‘He’s responded to the drug regime far better than we anticipated,’ Nicolette told her.

‘Dr Le Saux tried something new,’ confided Mrs Lomas. ‘He said he thought it might pay dividends.’ She gave a sigh. ‘That man is an absolute saint!’

‘So I believe,’ agreed Nicolette drily, with a shameless disregard for her own feelings on the subject!

‘I’ll be right up to collect Simon,’ Mrs Lomas promised eagerly. ‘I can be there in about fifteen minutes, Staff.’

‘Now hold on a minute!’ laughed Nicolette. ‘It’ll probably take us a couple of hours to get everything arranged. Why don’t you ring the ward before you come up? He can have his tea first—say, about three-thirty?’

‘OK, Staff Nurse, three-thirty it is,’ said Mrs Lomas happily, then lowered her voice. ‘And tell me, have you any idea what I could buy Dr Le Saux as a thank-you present? He must be fed up with chocolates and whisky, but we always like to get him a little something. We’re so grateful to him.’

What about a one-way ticket to Australia? thought Nicolette with grim humour. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t expect anything, Mrs Lomas. I think he’d like you to spend the money on Simon!’ She said goodbye, and put the phone down.

Nicolette assumed that the saint-like Dr Le Saux had gone into the doctors’ office to write up Simon’s prescription, but she was wrong, for she found him in Sister’s office, sitting at one end of the large desk, his dark head glinting deep red lights, bent over the pharmacy form he was completing.

Leander looked up as she entered, and frowned. Lord, but she was a distracting vision, was the unbidden thought which flew into his mind. She really shouldn’t be allowed to walk around like that, he decided a touch ruefully. All that clean, healthy skin and shiny eyes and hair—she looked as if she should be starring in an orange-juice commercial! He ruthlessly killed the thought stone-dead and levelled his gaze at her critically.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he said irritably, as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation. ‘Can’t you do something with your hair?’

Nicolette thought that she must have misheard him. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she queried faintly.

‘Your hair,’ he scowled. ‘Do something with it, for pity’s sake. It looks awful!’ How easily the lie slipped off his tongue.

Awful? thought Nicolette indignantly. It was untidy, true. Extremely untidy. But awful? She conveniently chose to ignore the fact that if it had been anyone else but Leander le Saux suggesting that she ‘do something with it’ she probably would have laughed and agreed with them. As it was, since it had come from a man she scarcely knew, who had already been ruder to her in less than an hour than she could remember anyone being in her whole life before, mad indignation began to sizzle away inside her, like an egg frying On a hot pavement.

She narrowed her blue eyes. ‘How dare you make such personal remarks to someone you’ve only just met?’

His frown deepened. ‘And how dare you walk around the place looking like Medusa?’

‘Like who?'

‘You heard,’ he snapped unrepentantly.

‘Oh!’ She bit her lip in outrage as she pulled the clip out of her hair, causing it to tumble unfettered to her waist. She scarcely noticed that the movement seemed to have arrested him, because she whirled round to fling at him, ‘It’s a pity I’m not Medusa,’ she raged loudly, ‘because I would have taken great pleasure from turning you into stone, Dr Le Saux!’

He opened his mouth to reply, when a female voice of authority interrupted them from the open doorway.

‘Staff Nurse Kennedy?’ came a high, disbelieving voice, and Nicolette found herself looking up in horror, into the set features of the senior specialist nurse manager.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_35baa314-ccba-580e-a09c-790ded9c28d5)

NICOLETTE recognised the stony-faced specialist nurse manager immediately, struck once again by the fact that she seemed much too young to hold such a senior position, being probably still under thirty. Her name was Miss Dixon and she had sat in on the interview panel when Nicolette had applied for the job, since she was the senior nurse overseeing both wards in Southbury’s state-of-the-art paediatric unit.

In looks, she was the absolute antithesis of Nicolette. Her hair was a smooth, ash-blonde cap that framed her head and her eyes were cool and grey and calculating. Her small, neatly boned body made Nicolette feel like a strapping great thing in comparison! She looked, thought Nicolette, like a woman who had never been late for an appointment in her life. And a woman who wouldn’t tolerate lateness in others. At Nicolette’s interview the had been noticeable for her probing style of questioning, and it had not escaped Nicolette’s notice at the time that her manner had not been exactly what you would describe as friendly.

And her manner now looked positively bristling as she surveyed Nicolette across the office. When she spoke her lips barely moved, but Nicolette could tell that was only because she was so angry.

‘Staff Nurse, you look a disgrace,’ she said tightly. ‘Go to the cloakroom and do something with your hair immediately. After that, come back here. I wish to speak to you!’

Nicolette was momentarily stunned into immobility. She could never remember having been spoken to so summarily, or so severely—not even as the most junior of student nurses.

‘Is that understood?’ quizzed the senior nurse abrasively.

Nicolette swallowed, feeling about six inches high. ‘Yes, Miss Dixon,’ she answered quietly.

‘Then see to it!’ she snapped. ‘Now!’

It was utterly humiliating. Unable to meet Leander Le Saux’s eyes, her cheeks stinging with mortification and hurt pride, Nicolette put her stiff shoulders back and said in an even voice, ‘Very well, Miss Dixon.’

‘Um—Staff Nurse?’ came Leander’s voice as she reached the door.

The effect of that deep, mocking voice on her already tightly stretched nerves was like that of leaping into an icy bath after a sauna. What now? She found that her answer was unsteady, and despised herself for it. ‘Y-yes, Doctor?’

‘You’ve left your hair-clip on the table. Here.’

Unwillingly, she turned round to find him holding it out, the clip, with its Mickey Mouse motif, looking incongruously feminine—as well as rather childish—against the tanned masculinity of his strong palm.

She took it as gingerly as if it had been an unexploded bomb. ‘Thank you,’ she said gravely, and surprised reluctant laughter lurking in the depths of his dark eyes.

But as she left the office she heard the specialist nurse manager say, in quite a different tone altogether from the one she’d used with Nicolette, a sort of soft, smoky whisper, ‘So what was the problem this time, Leander? Adulation or insubordination?’