Hence the guilt.
It was as if their stars had collided and their mutual gravitational forces had snapped together, despite what was in their pasts or futures. Melded, for one short night. But that was ridiculous. He’d come here to get away from emotion.
He wanted peace, remember?
To remain isolated and insulated from others.
Just a FIFO locum, using his skills to the max and forgetting about Sydney and all the trauma it held while the house sold. The plan was to shake the exhaustion that was bone-deep from twelve months of grieving.
Then Ava had happened.
Bloody hell. He really had intended just to have a meal together.
If only he hadn’t slept with her. He felt more ensnared by strands of the searing memory of last night and the almost desperate pure lust he’d let loose than he could possibly hope to deal with. It wasn’t just her strong, sweet face or her innate calmness that had captured him.
He shook his head. It was nothing. Just fascination.
As if he could seriously fall in love with this woman in one night.
That was crazier than him being here in Alice Springs to work instead of back in Sydney. This was all temporary. He and Roslyn had grown up in the same world, but even that hadn’t turned out perfectly. What hope did he and an outback midwife have to live happily ever after?
He’d stop this. Ava had gone, and despite there being a crossover of their professions, he was an emergency doctor and she an agency nurse for maternity. There wasn’t much chance they’d interact. He wouldn’t ring her number, and he had the solid belief she would wait for him to call first.
His hand reached to the back of his head and pulled the hair at the nape of his neck until it hurt. He needed to wake up. Shake it off. A one-night stand in a place thousands of kilometres from where he lived?
It wasn’t too bad.
He could handle that.
He decided to go for a run. Wear himself out and then get a couple of hours’ sleep before he started work tonight. And. Forget. Ava.
Sixteen hours later, just after midnight, Alice Springs Emergency Department looked like the floor of the stock exchange during a financial crash, with arms raised and voices loud. The dozen or so partially curtained cubicles surrounding the central office had reached capacity, the staff had doubled with call-ins, and there were trolleys bearing patients in the walkways around the central computer hub where nobody had time to sit to type or even answer one of the insistently ringing phones. The majority of the patients came from a busload of inebriated young footy players. Most had not been wearing seatbelts and had been thrown violently forward when their vehicle had ploughed into an unfortunate camel herd out of town. The impact had catapulted passengers down the bus corridor and resulted in broken bones, multiple lacerations and some magnificent bruises. They’d arrived in a convoy of ambulances to enliven the night.
Though the injured men were partially anaesthetised by their alcohol consumption, the emergency department rang with groans and muttered expletives and some not-quite-so-muttered outbursts. Zac stood to the left of the ambulance entrance, examining tipsy and torn players who were triaged his way. There weren’t enough ED staff to manage the patient flow, but help came from other wards, pulled from less frantic areas in the hospital until the rush could be contained, with an efficiency he could only wish for in his Sydney hospital. Thankfully, the emergency department had been rebuilt recently, so the layout and lighting made for effective flowthrough.
He looked up as an additional two nurses appeared from the staff entrance and he waved to direct them his way. His come-hither head signal froze as he took in the shorter blonde woman gliding towards him and his breath hitched in his chest – Ava! Recognition and a flare of something else ignited. Something he didn’t know he had inside him as he glanced around at the alcohol-infused patients that filled the room.
Ava’s delicious curves were hidden beneath the purple scrubs she wore, but he didn’t need to see them to know. Every delectable inch lay imprinted in his brain. He dragged his eyes to the taller nurse, who reached him first, and kept them on the unknown woman’s face.
‘I’m Jade and this is Ava, from maternity,’ the nurse said. ‘The nursing supervisor said you guys need extra hands down here for a while?’
Zac’s grip loosened for a second in shattered concentration, and the swollen, tattooed arm he held shifted under his fingers. The man groaned in a cloud of alcoholic fumes, and Zac muttered an apology as he focused back on stabilising the fractured humerus. When he looked up again, he had himself under control.
‘Thanks. One of you with Ruth over there.’ He nodded his head towards a tall young woman in a white coat bandaging a bloody leg. ‘And one with me would be great, thanks.’ He knew which one he wanted, but he shook that thought and focused on the task at hand.
‘I’ll stay here.’ Ava spoke crisply, and Jade nodded and moved swiftly towards the other doctor.
‘What can I do, Doctor?’ Her voice was professionally neutral and she didn’t meet his eyes. He would have loved to know what was going on inside her head because he surely didn’t know what to think. Just when he’d decided it was best he never see her again … That certainly wasn’t what he was thinking now. His emotions were cheering and whooping and totally letting him down with the delight of the moment, and he was ridiculously aware of some of the ribald comments from the footballers when Ava passed them. She completely ignored them, but he found himself wanting to growl with an unexpected silent baring of teeth in the direction of the other men.
‘Could you check with X-ray to see if they’re ready for us?’ At least his mouth was working. ‘I think this will set with stabilising, without a trip to theatre, so as soon as we have the pictures then we’ll head to the plaster room.’
He caught the glance she slanted at him and the tiny smile on her lips.
Had that sounded like a come-on? His voice had dropped. Hurriedly he added, ‘To hand this guy over to the physios for some plaster.’
She flashed him a grin and turned for the phone. He watched her go and told himself it had just been a spur-of-the-moment connection. He’d already chosen to close that door. This had no future and the attraction was too strong to save them from hurt.
When she returned, he leaned towards her and said quietly in her ear, ‘I know already that this place works like a small town. Probably better not to mention we’ve already met to avoid unnecessary gossip.’
She raised her brows at him, then inclined her head. ‘Who’s our next patient?’ she asked slowly.
He’d just asked her to lie to everyone here and she’d only looked at him and moved on. He needed to do the same. He searched the room. ‘That guy just in on the spine board.’
That was the last time they had a chance to talk about anything other than work. They were too busy dealing with a neck-injury patient who needed a collar and a CAT scan before transfer, not to mention treatment for a slew of nasty glass cuts from his rapid exit through the broken back window of the bus.
‘Dr Logan?’ Ava called out to him from where she stood by the man brought in after falling from a tree. Zac had just handed the man over to Ava to admit for observation overnight for any further developing injuries. They could do further tests on him when the others had been triaged. ‘I think there’s a difference in air entry now. On the left side,’ she said.
Zac shifted back beside her and listened with his stethoscope. He met her eyes. ‘Great pick-up. There’s a definite change in breath sounds.’ He could hear the difference himself and noted the uneven chest rise as the lung began to collapse. ‘X-ray ASAP for pneumothorax.’ Zac looked down at the man and touched his shoulder. ‘Sorry, mate. We’ve more to do yet. Feeling breathless?’
The pale, quiet guy gasped a little and nodded, and Zac walked alongside his bed, heading for a phone, as the orderly whisked the patient towards X-ray.
‘I’ll set up the underwater sealed drain down there.’ Ava’s
voice carried from the other end of the stretcher where she helped the orderly push the patient swiftly away. Zac nodded and picked up the phone to warn X-ray to clear for an urgent patient before he followed.
She was good at diagnosis. He might have missed that deterioration considering his workload if she hadn’t asked his opinion. As for the treatment, he had no doubt she’d acquire the necessary equipment and be ready to assist with the decompression drain. The hidden depths of this woman he’d passed in the night continued to amaze him. He’d scored the one-woman assist team he could see the other doctors envied.
Which wasn’t helping the attraction he tried to mask with a set face. There was no denying the fact that he noticed whenever she moved his way, or that his eyes would follow her as she worked. And once, when a high-as-a-kite footballer put his hand out to fondle her backside, Zac was between the two of them in an instant, casually blocking the guy’s reach and delivering a hard stare.
‘I can manage,’ Ava had told him with a smile, ‘but thanks.’
A couple of the stroppy men had needed a firm word and a glare before they behaved for their purple-scrubbed nurse, and Zac had delivered both out of sight of their target. If he’d hesitated over something she was there with a suggestion, her knowledge of emergency treatment the adjunct to his.
‘Ava,’ a man called out. Zac looked up as a blond guy, one who seemed to know her well, put his hand out to grab her arm, but she steered around him deliberately, with an emphatic shake of her head. Something about the smirk on the man’s face made Zac want to pin him to the wall by the throat. Interestingly, the other midwife who’d arrived with Ava made a beeline for the man and towed him away before Zac could insert himself between them. Which really was out of character for him – he never lost his cool and concentration at work. He didn’t know where this caveman act was coming from.
After nearly two hours of frantic sorting, there were poignant moments in the mayhem. The older gentleman admitted for palliative end-of-life care, with his wife needing a hug from both Ava and Zac, showed such gratitude when the pain relief began to work properly and he could relax. And a three-year-old girl who’d stuck her mother’s earring into her ear canal, making Zac produce some pretty fast wheedling for permission from the small child to remove it with success.
At last, most patients had been shipped off to wards or home, the triage area began to clear, and Zac finally was able to lift his head to allow less immediate thoughts to intrude. He could see the nurses had begun the mammoth task of restocking for the next onslaught, which could come in an instant or in many hours. He stood back and watched the ED as it reverted to quiet calm with many empty, freshly made beds. Someone was missing. He scanned the empty open area again, but there was no sign of her.
Ava had gone. She’d left the emergency department without saying goodbye, and he felt jolted. Stupidly bereft. But of course she wouldn’t say goodbye. There could be no future between him, with his city practice, and the bush midwife, so why would she waste any more of her time with him? Plus, he’d been the one to mention he didn’t want to be the cause of any awkwardness for her. He’d be leaving soon, but she had to work in this community. There was no need to advertise their connection if nothing was to come of it.
‘Hey, Ruth. Did you see where Ava went?’
‘Back to maternity. She’s good, isn’t she?’ The tall woman smiled. ‘She’s one of the desert midwives and works here as a casual nurse. She spends most of her time doing outreach midwifery with the stations and remote communities between Uluru and Katherine, and she’s pretty passionate about it.’
‘I can imagine that.’ The words were more to himself than to his colleague.
Ruth hadn’t finished. ‘I guess she needs to deal if she’s the only medical person in an outreach settlement, and it makes for good intuition.’ She glanced longingly towards the staffroom. ‘I’m going for coffee. Wanna come?’
Zac followed Ruth thoughtfully. He’d been wrong to assume Ava would be here a long while and it would be his job to avoid her. She’d be disappearing to another post soon, possibly hundreds of kilometres away, and when this shift ended in the morning, it might just be his last chance to see her before she vanished into the outback.
Chapter Three
Ava
By six the following morning, Ava decided the drama of emergency had moved to the birthing suite. She’d hardly had time to catch her breath all night. She’d had to press the emergency response bell for reinforcements fifteen minutes ago, and thankfully there had been ED staff free to respond and things were settling.
As she surveyed the carnage of the birthing room, she could see blood from the mother’s post-birth haemorrhage pooled on the bed and dripping on the floor. A few drops had splashed on the TV screen that was suspended from the roof of the unit. Still, she thought, as she tried to be as gentle as she could in rubbing the new mother’s abdomen, at least I can rejoice in the now firm uterus below my fingers. Ava glanced at Zac and nodded with relief. ‘There’s no further bleeding.’
Ava couldn’t help reflecting on the emergency situations she’d spent with Zac in the past eight hours. And here they had another good outcome, despite the gory mess of the room. But that was a minor issue. The room would scrub clean and mum and baby were safe.
She remembered other places where she hadn’t been so blessed with instant expert help like Zac. It was so important to have cohesive teamwork come into play when there was an unexpected haemorrhage after a birth.
This time they’d been lucky, and the last quarter-hour had been tense but ultimately rewarding. She watched Kareena, a strong Mutitjulu woman from the community near Ava’s family station, snuggle her new son. Ava had known Kareena since they were chubby toddlers, and Kareena’s grandmother knew Ava’s through their shared mukata, or needle-felting, classes, so their history and rapport had helped keep the new mum and her support women calm during the drama. Even the shock in Kareena’s mother’s eyes had begun to fade into pride and excitement.
While she shifted to take Kareena’s pulse, she watched Zac as he talked to another doctor who’d also responded from ED. My, hadn’t seeing Zac at work been an eye-opener on her laughing lover of the night before. He had been easygoing but firm with the inebriated footy players, so gentle and kind with an elderly couple, and cleverly relaxed with a frightened toddler. But she couldn’t help noting that now, five hours after she’d last seen him in ED, his eyes read absolutely shattered. She felt the lack of sleep herself, but he seemed as if he had no reserves, and she wondered about that. Most people had reserves, and he’d only just arrived.
She had her own problems. The hardest part was pretending she didn’t know or care about him. She looked away. It wasn’t so easy to stop that subliminal awareness she felt when he was near.
She turned to help Kareena’s baby settle at the breast, careful not to interfere, but her mind lingered on Zac. If what had been between them had all ended yesterday, she wasn’t going to chase him.
Dammit – she didn’t regret learning what her body could do. Though she did feel like she’d been dreadfully uninhibited. Luckily, she supposed, nobody else knew. But they would. They always found things out. Her mother would be horrified. Her sister-in-law would be thrilled to hear of Ava’s escapades. And her grandmother ecstatic. The thought of her family’s input, which was inevitable because they dragged everything out of her, made her mouth kink upwards. Oh my.
And, regrettably, she remained mightily attracted to the man in an I-could-wake-up-next-to-him-for-the-next-millennium way. She couldn’t help feeling depressed about the waste of what could have been an amazing, if only short-term, relationship. But, if the secrecy he’d asked for was an indication of their lack of future together, that was that.
She peeked quickly back across at him and their eyes met. He smiled at her with a tired little waggle of his determined brows, the relief of another life saved between them. Although the deep chocolate eyes swirled with other emoti
ons that baffled her.
She was used to being able to peg people – her job depended on it – but Zac resisted all efforts to peg him, and she really hated that. And it now seemed unlikely she’d get the chance to know the real man.
‘We really have to stop meeting like this,’ he mouthed quietly.
She half laughed. That was the most ironic understatement in the world. ‘I know.’
Then he looked away, pushed himself upright off the wall and nodded to the room in general. ‘Right. Good job, team. You’re all amazing. I’ll go type some notes and then head back to ED.’ And with that he walked out, his shoulders slumped.
Ava narrowed her eyes. When you were the only medically trained person in a remote town – which she often was – you learned to be observant. Her instincts said this guy, this absolute champion of a doctor who’d done as good a job at triage as anyone she’d worked with, one whom she’d incidentally spent most of the last twenty-four hours with, was on the edge of collapse. And she didn’t think it was her newly awakened libido that was killing him.
Despite the fact that they’d spent hours wrapped together in the same bed – not that they’d slept a lot – she didn’t have any right to nag him about looking unwell. Mostly because of that big ‘keep out’ sign she kept running into. Nope, she was not going there without an invitation, and he obviously thought the craziness of yesterday had to burn itself out.
Except – judging by the fresh sparks between them overnight at work – the fire still had some fuel in it.
Thankfully, the first of the three shifts in maternity she’d taken at the last minute – silly her – had almost finished. Soon, she could go to the family flat and regroup, and contemplate the final chaste kiss of yesterday morning. Jock and Hana, her brother and sister-in-law, were residing there for a few days this week, so Hana would lend a sympathetic ear if they could shake Jock for long enough to have a sisterly chat.
The Desert Midwife Page 2