Rescue Nights

by Nina Hamilton

  Rescue Nights

  Nina Hamilton

  Rescue Nights

  Nina Hamilton

  Opposites attract in this medical romantic suspense set in the high adrenalin world of the Cairns Rescue Helicopter team.

  English surgeon Andrew Wentworth left behind a successful career and a failed engagement to join the Cairns Rescue Helicopter team, but it’s not shaping up to be the rejuvenating working holiday he expected.

  Rescue paramedic Kate Spears is used to proving herself in a man’s world, so informing the handsome surgeon that all his orders now come from her is deliciously satisfying. But she soon finds that Andrew cannot only take everything she throws at him, he keeps coming back for more.

  They couldn’t be more different, from their histories to their personalities to their plans for the future, but the flames between them can’t be ignored. And, in the close quarters of chopper rescue, they’re about to find that there’s no place to hide from love.

  About the Author

  Nina Hamilton grew up in the northern New South Wales town of Mullumbimby and firmly believes that no fictional character could ever be as colourful as the real life figures who live in the Far North Coast communities.

  Nina graduated from the University of Queensland with a journalism degree in 2003. A fascination with pop culture has been a lifelong addiction.

  Living now in the beachside town of Byron Bay, she gets to share of love of reading through working in the local library.

  Rescue Nights is her second book. Her first, also published through Escape, Rescue Heat shares the setting of Cairns helicopter rescue.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to Clare, who is my first and last reader, always showing real love and dedication.

  Thanks to the romance writing community, and the Escape writing family in particular, who are always willing to share their knowledge. Final thanks to the eagle eyed editors who look so closely at my work — without them it would be a lesser overall experience.

  To Robbie who named the book and who helped me discover the Cairns region.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Bestselling Titles by Escape Publishing…

  Chapter One

  ‘Does it always rain like this?’

  As soon as the question left his lips, Dr Andrew Wentworth wished he could bite it back, such were the amused looks that passed between the rest of the rescue crew. He had already realized his distinctive English accent marked him as the new boy, now he had to sound soft with it.

  ‘Wait until the wet season in North Queensland,’ said Kate, the rescue paramedic leading the team. ‘You’ll soon get used to being soaked to the bone.’

  She, at least, looked fetching in her water logged helicopter rescue uniform, her dark ponytail secured neatly under a cap. Andrew was sure he looked a bit, well, wet, under the relentless downpour.

  They were standing on an exposed rocky outcrop, with the earth falling away from them, revealing a steep cliff face. To get to their patient, they were going to have to climb down.

  Kate and the rest of the team were efficiently setting up ropes and anchor points that would allow them to abseil. Andrew had offered to help with the equipment set up, but the team had waved him away. He had been a surgeon for enough of his adult life to be miffed at the casual dismissal.

  As the last rope slipped into place, Kate threw him a harness. With a smile, she said, ‘I’d remind you to make sure that you get the proper traction in the wet on the way down, but I’ve heard you are a mountaineer, so I’m sure you will be fine.’

  Andrew couldn’t be sure of the level of her sarcasm, as halfway through the sentence Kate had ducked her head to concentrate on her harness. For the sake of unity in his new team, he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  However, biting his tongue was going to get real old, real fast.

  He watched as Kate backed her body over the cliff. She easily manoeuvred the light rigid stretcher in front of her at the same time. The woman might have a smart mouth on her, but he couldn’t fault her grace out here in the elements. Long legs braced her weight as she bounced her well-made body down the craggy cliff face.

  Standing there, about to step over a five-metre drop, Andrew was wondering why he had left his very comfortable position at a London hospital for this. Surely, there were better places he could be diversifying his resume than in the middle of an Australian rainforest.

  As soon as Kate’s feet touched the ground, Andrew followed her path over the edge. It wasn’t as easy an abseil as she had casually made it seem. Footholds were slippery and hard to come by. Andrew was grateful when he was able to touch both feet to the ground. Needing help off the cliff was not the way he wanted to introduce his abilities to his new team.

  He and Kate were going to be the only team members to attend the stranded patient, as they might need the other team members above to leverage them up again.

  ‘At least we can leave the ropes in place here, with the pilot and winch man to guard them,’ Andrew said, as he unclipped from the lead rope. ‘Hopefully the guy’s mates followed the dispatcher’s instructions enough to resist the urge to move him.’

  Kate nodded her agreement. ‘If the GPS co-ordinates they gave us are right, they should be about three hundred metres that way,’ she said, as she pointed into the heavy bush.

  No wonder they hadn’t been able to spot the group from the sky; the canopy looked impenetrable.

  Even as they were speaking, they were both shouldering heavy med bags. They had been told that there were four healthy men with the one injured trekker, so they were expecting some extra hands on the way back.

  As they started moving, Kate recited their patient’s particulars. ‘We have a twenty-two-year-old man, out hiking with friends. They have reported he fell into a ditch and has a leg injury that they can see, and other unspecified injuries. If you rule level four spinal precautions we will have to carry him to an area where he can be airlifted out.’

  After seeing the terrain up close, Andrew was glad they had earlier established a Plan B. A man with spinal injuries wouldn’t benefit from them bumping him up that particular cliff face.

  Andrew and Kate picked their way through the dense bush. With each step, Andrew found himself pushing back palm fronds and branches heavy with water.

  Kate wasn’t slowing her pace, ducking and weaving before him. The chopper rescue staff’s motto seemed to be, ‘Keep the bloody hell up’.

  Kate’s voice acknowledged his presence. ‘We should intersect with the walking path shortly.’

  A few steps proved her words right. An echoed ‘Cooee’ meant they first heard rather than saw the trekking group.

  Once there, Andrew saw a group of young men clustered around a prone body. Their patient was lying at the bottom of a short rock fall. An awkwardly twisted bleeding leg made the initial diagnosis all too easy.

  Kate clambered down before him.

  ‘I’m Rescue Paramedic Kate Spears and this is Doctor Andrew Wentworth. So what have we got here?’

  Andrew joined her and knelt next to the young man. His patient’s friends loo
ked only too happy to make room and hand over responsibility to the professionals.

  The good news was that the kid was conscious. The bad news was his pale face was lined with pain and the towel wrapping his leg was seriously soaked with blood.

  As Andrew made his visual assessment, Kate was unpacking his med bag. She pulled out the green whistle and, in question, raised her eyebrows at Andrew.

  ‘Colin, do you have any allergies to drugs?’ he asked.

  Once he got a clear ‘no’, Andrew handed over the pain-relieving instrument, advising him to ‘suck slowly.’

  Before his patient disappeared into a pain-free haze, Andrew ascertained Colin’s levels of discomfort in the other parts of his body. At the same time as keeping up the conversation, Andrew was pulling two space blankets out of the rescue pack he had been carrying. One he placed over Colin, the other he used to create some sort of tent over the injured leg. Rain protection would be absolutely necessary when he removed the towel. With an open fracture the last thing you wanted was infection, and the streams of water dripping from the trees might contain something exotically undesirable.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Kate scribing neat notes in their blue patient folder.

  Looking at the wound, Andrew dictated, ‘I’m going to use the external cast and bandages to temporarily splint the leg and get the bleeding really stopped. The hospital surgeon will need to do the rest.’

  As Andrew instructed one of Colin’s friends to hold the silver sheet protecting Colin’s leg taut, he felt another sense of unreality, here practicing medicine in these conditions. It was so far from the absolutely controlled environment of his sterile surgical theatre. Hey, it was weird even to be treating a leg wound. For years, his cardio speciality had him staring at the inside of other people’s chests. However, Kate’s helping hands were as quick and sure as even the best theatre nurse, and between them they quickly had Colin’s leg packaged up ready for transport.

  A jerk of Kate’s head had Andrew getting off his knees to confer with her in semi-privacy, a few steps away.

  ‘He was complaining about spinal pain so we are going to have to put him in the chopper directly,’ said Andrew.

  Kate’s resigned expression told him that she was expecting the news. ‘I’ll radio the chopper and designate a pick up time with them.’

  ‘One, two, transfer,’ Andrew counted into the roll. Luckily, all of the friends worked together, and Andrew and Kate were able to slide the plastic stretcher under Colin’s body. The edges of the stretcher wrapped around his injured body, and the spinal collar and velcro cast provided temporary protection.

  Andrew figured that Kate would need her hands free to co-ordinate with the chopper, so he jumped at organising the stretcher’s handles into the hands of the healthy trekkers.

  Kate might have been annoyed at having her role usurped, but she hid it well behind her calm demeanour. ‘Colin,’ she said, ‘you are going to be feeling a lot better in about forty-five minutes. The Cairns Base nurses would have to be preferable to this lot.’

  Watching her smile down at their patient, Andrew was reminded just how attractive the rescue paramedic was. Long strong limbs, brown hair etched with gold streaks, green eyes and symmetrical features completed a surprisingly delicate picture. That delicacy was especially surprising, considering Andrew had no doubt she would willingly take his place carrying one corner of the stretcher, a job that currently felt like it could dislocate his shoulder.

  The half-kilometre walk to the clearing was downhill, on a narrow walking path, a small mercy for which Andrew was grateful. His own muscular body was fit enough, but Colin was no lightweight and no one had ever designed a stretcher that was truly comfortable to carry.

  The rhythmic thumping overhead was a welcome signal that the rescue chopper was close by.

  ‘The chopper can’t land anywhere near here. So the doctor, Colin and I will have to be lifted up via wire,’ Kate was explaining to the other men.

  Now the responsibility of looking after a seriously injured friend had been shouldered by someone else, their mood had considerably lightened. Andrew was still unsure why any of them would have chosen to go walking in the rain. Although, to be fair, when he had been a student he had thought nothing of going climbing in almost blizzard conditions.

  At the clearing, Andrew looked up at the chopper still providing a thunderous soundtrack overhead. From it, a metallic wire was descending. For Andrew, this would be the first time he had been airlifted outside of training.

  The closeness of the chopper’s blades to the tree canopy reminded Andrew why they had decided that abseiling to where Colin was injured was less risky than arriving in this way.

  ‘I’ll take Colin first and be back for you.’ Kate’s voice broke into his thoughts.

  The masculine spirit inside of Andrew wanted to protest at this sort of babysitting, but he had been strictly drilled in the chain of command of rescue scenario planning. He was not on top of that pyramid.

  Kate carefully strapped four clips to the spinal board, and harnessed herself to the same wire, before waving her hand in the universal ready signal.

  ‘Now that is a hot woman.’

  Andrew heard the statement from the hiker standing close, despite the noise from the rain and the helicopter dominating. Somehow, he didn’t think the focused paramedic would appreciate the sentiment, much less the fact that he secretly agreed. Luckily for all concerned, Kate was out of hearing range. She was currently fifteen metres in the air, leveraging their patient through the chopper’s open door.

  Minutes later, as she was being lowered again, Andrew could see that some of the tension had left her frame now she wasn’t guiding their patient’s body through the air. When her feet touched the ground there was a friendly challenge in her eyes as she motioned him closer, clipping their harnesses together.

  With water trickling inside his collar and his feet suddenly weightless, Andrew experienced a rush distinctly different from training. Although that might have been because, instead of a spotty twenty-five year old guy, he was now tethered to the startlingly pretty Kate. The charge that came from their physical closeness, as well as the sensation of soaring through rain, was unexpectedly pleasurable.

  The approaching helicopter door had both him and Kate reach out, in unison, to the interior rail and swing inside. A wave to the trekkers below was their only concession to pleasantry as they pulled on their headsets and focused in on their patient.

  Andrew stripped off his wet-wear layer and put his hand out to gently probe his patient’s chest for any broken ribs. He had already done so at the accident scene, but chest fractures were notoriously hard to accurately identify without an x-ray. If he was going to have to deal with a punctured lung mid-flight, he would like some warning.

  ‘Colin, pity you can’t sit up. We are doing a very scenic flight over the rainforest. Have you seen it from the air before?’ Andrew asked.

  The view was certainly spectacular. They were flying low below the cloud cover to avoid turbulence, but Andrew’s question had an ulterior motive. He wanted a close eye on the young man’s answer. All of Colin’s friends had sworn that he hadn’t lost consciousness, but any fall meant it was absolutely necessary to keep an eye out for concussion.

  While Andrew was making these more subtle judgement calls, Kate was taking down the more standard observations and hooking Colin up to the helicopter’s monitoring equipment.

  ‘Cairns Base Hospital ETA is fifteen minutes,’ their pilot, Joe, reported through the intercom.

  ‘Are we able to land at the hospital helipad today?’ Andrew asked. He knew they sometimes had to transfer patients via ambulance from the helicopter base.

  ‘We are going straight to the hospital, Doctor. Kate passed on that you were observing Level Four Spinal Precautions, so we are taking him the most direct route.’

  Andrew was glad that, although he had he been left out of rescue operational decisions, it seemed that
in the medical field, at least, his word was law.

  He switched back to the patient’s channel and asked, ‘Colin, are you sure that you didn’t throw yourself down that ledge, to avoid walking back in that bloody rain?’

  Colin smiled. His face had regained some colour, as the painkillers banished some of his earlier stress.

  Reassured about his patient’s prospects, Andrew was able to relax back into the helicopter’s jump seat. He looked across to where Kate was busily updating their handover file. In repose, she was again looking appealing. Andrew cursed himself once he realized his train of thought.

  Dammit, he had left London after he had ended an engagement with a co-worker. Anyway, Kate just screamed hard work.

  The next words out of her mouth seemed to prove his thoughts right. ‘I’ll come with you to the hospital, barring any immediate call-outs,’ she said.

  It looked like she was determined to keep Andrew’s training wheels forcibly on.

  Chapter Two

  After spending the morning in the rain, Kate’s muscles were melting under the welcome warmth of a hot shower. Unfortunately for her sense of comfort, she was all too aware of the new doctor who was showering in the next stall. A thin section of painted chipboard was all that stood between their naked bodies. Three years working at this rescue base, and never had Kate felt so hyper-sensitive about any man she had worked with.

  Kate had been particularly annoyed when she had heard they were getting a doctor on their team who was new to rescue medicine. Not only an ordinary doctor but a successful English surgeon.

  From the moment Kate had set eyes on Dr Andrew Wentworth, she had known he was going to be very difficult to properly train. He had walked in, secure in the aura that surrounded men used to bending the world to their will. A tall blond man with dark eyes, Andrew Wentworth’s reputed mountaineering skills were made more believable by his fit rangy body.

  Doctors were at the centre of the hospital system. Attractive doctors were the centre of the hospital universe, and took their treatment as superstars as their due. At the Cairns Base Hospital patient handover, Kate had been inundated by nurses mouthing, ‘Who is that?’ After the hospital rumour mill had experienced a good look at Dr Andrew Wentworth, Kate was convinced that the next time the rescue chopper landed at the Cairns Base helipad, there would be double the usual number of willing hands to greet them.