She forced herself to keep her eyes on Mac’s face, so saw a mobile eyebrow rise.
‘In an exaggerative mood today, are we, Peterson?’ he said smoothly. ‘You know damn well the kid’ll learn. First day today, and he was flustered. And you didn’t help, bossing him around. He’s already complained to me about your attitude.’
‘He’s complained about me?’
Amelia was aware her voice had risen an octave, but the statement was so outrageous she was surprised she could speak at all.
Mac’s face, or what she could see of it now he’d lifted the cup and was sipping her revolting drink, remained bland.
‘Says you were out of order, the way you spoke to him.’
Amelia rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll give the brat “out of order”,’ she muttered angrily.
‘You’ll treat him with respect,’ Mac snapped. ‘And that’s an order, Peterson!’
She stared at him in disbelief. Mac was usually the first to complain about inexperienced staff in the A and E. She looked around for support, but Brian had eased away—or disappeared into thin air.
Left on her own to handle the ogre, she remembered the tearful nurse she’d seen when she’d arrived at work.
It had definitely been Mac’s voice in that cubicle!
‘Oh, yes?’ she snapped right back at him. ‘Well, in that case, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. You try treating my nurses with respect as well. The kid you had in tears this morning is still a student. From the look on her face when she came out of that cubicle, she might give up her studies right now.’
Mac frowned down at her, then shook his head.
‘I haven’t upset anyone this morning,’ he said, and Amelia found her anger had vanished and, contrarily, she wanted to smile at the innocent confusion she could hear in Mac’s voice.
But she wasn’t going to let him off so easily. If you didn’t stand up to Mac he steamrollered right over you. And if he thought one night of terrific sex was going to have her kowtowing to him, he could think again.
‘First thing this morning,’ Amelia said firmly. ‘Young Allison Wright. The student. She came out of cubicle two in tears.’
‘Ah!’ Mac said, and a broad grin lit his craggy features.
The grin made an array of tendons tighten in Amelia’s belly, as if it had tugged some strings inside her, but she ignored all that as best she could and continued to scowl at him so he’d know he hadn’t answered.
‘Tears, eh? Fancy that!’ he added, then, with another smile, he turned and walked away.
CHAPTER FOUR
MAC sought refuge among his paper alps. He’d been dreading seeing Peterson this morning. In his experience, on the rare occasions when chance, and possibly overindulgence in alcohol, had led to an unexpected but still pleasurable sexual encounter, the woman in question had found it more difficult to handle afterwards than he had. Although he’d have said he knew Peterson quite well, Saturday night had put paid to that assumption and he had to admit he’d had no idea how she’d react.
So coming to work this morning, with thoughts of facing up to Peterson again, had been stressful to say the least.
Personally, of course, he could draw a line under the incident and file it tidily away.
‘Just like all this paperwork,’ he muttered sarcastically to himself. ‘And who are you trying to fool? Ordinarily you can draw a line under it. But Peterson? Might take a while to forget that incident.’
‘Talking to yourself again, Mac?’
The cause of his confusion breezed into the room, and while his pulse rate accelerated with concern over what she might have come to say, his body also reacted, mainly because he seemed to be seeing right through her rather crumpled uniform to the slim, porcelain-skinned and utterly desirable body he now knew lay beneath it.
‘Well, I won’t interrupt you—it’s probably an important discussion. But I wanted to remind you that Enid Biggs is due back next week, so this week’s MAC meeting is the last chance you’ll have to raise the issue of in-service training for the A and E nurses.’
She positively smirked as she added, ‘A bargain’s a bargain, remember.’ Then she turned and headed for the door.
But before exiting, she must have thought of something else, for she swung around.
‘Oh, and I owe you an apology,’ she said. ‘I spoke to Allison, the student nurse, and she said she was crying because she’d just seen her first baby delivered, not because you yelled at her.’
And on that note, she departed.
Mac rubbed his eyes and stared at the space where Peterson had been. He knew she couldn’t possibly have been naked as she’d walked out the door, but he was sure he’d seen a slim naked back and two pert buttocks swaying seductively into the hall.
It had to be shock.
Peterson apologising was enough to send anyone into shock.
But before that had been the shock of her coming in—something he’d been dreading. Kind of dreading…
But she hadn’t even mentioned Saturday.
It wasn’t natural. Women always wanted at least a small post-mortem, while most of them seemed to consider enjoyable indulgence in sex would lead inevitably into a relationship. It was one of the reasons he avoided casual sex.
More like avoided any sex, his libido reminded him.
He swiped a pile of papers onto the floor in sheer frustration. With himself for wasting time even thinking about the issue, and with Peterson for behaving as she was—acting as nothing had happened between them.
What was she made of?
Ice?
‘Mac, have you got a form called an A4726?’
Colleen, his secretary, appeared in his doorway.
Fully clothed, so he wasn’t seeing all females naked…
‘Heavens, what have you done?’
She swooped on the spill of papers across the floor and started gathering them into a large bundle.
‘Honestly, Mac, we’ve got to sort these out. How about I stay late tomorrow and we go through the lot together? You can tell me whether to file or shred and we’ll get down to the surface of your desk.’
‘In one evening? It’d take a month.’
Colleen sighed, though she knew it aggravated him to have her make that long-suffering noise.
‘One evening might be a start. And why are you such a bear today? I thought after Petra’s christening yesterday, you’d be all sweetness and light.’
She stopped stacking papers long enough to glance up at him. ‘Well, maybe not that good, but at least bearable.’
Mac nodded to concede her point. Colleen had been with him for years, first as a general secretary in A and E and then moving into the position of his personal secretary when he was appointed director of the department. As a result, she knew him well—though how she’d discovered his utter fascination with his new niece, Mac had no idea.
He just hoped she’d keep it to herself. It certainly wasn’t something he wanted publicised—the fact that he’d gone soppy over a newborn baby. The entire A and E department would take it as a sign of either senility or that he was cracking up.
‘About the A4726?’ Colleen said as she straightened up and dumped the pile of papers on his spare chair.
Mac sighed even more deeply than she had earlier.
‘Let’s hope we find it tomorrow night. The darned thing’s already caused a heap of trouble.’
Colleen looked expectantly at him, but as he had no intention of explaining he ignored the silent query, instead agreeing that, yes, tomorrow evening would be a good time to make a start on sorting the paperwork.
But if Colleen had expected his mood to have improved, she was in for a shock. He’d spent the entire day trying to avoid Peterson, even going so far as to start sorting papers himself so he didn’t keep bumping into her between cubicles. Yet she’d kept bobbing up—like one of those weighted blow-up toys that you could punch and hit and whack and it still bounced back.
Not that
he wanted to punch, hit or whack Peterson, but there were numerous other things he’d never before considered doing with her which now seemed to have shifted to the forefront of his mind. While his eyes continued to see right through her clothes, and his fingers twitched with a need to loosen her hair from the knot arrangement she wore it in at work.
Damn the woman!
‘There, we’ve reduced it down to a couple of piles, which you can clear away tomorrow,’ Colleen announced.
It was after ten and, though they’d taken half an hour off their sorting to grab a sandwich and coffee earlier, Mac was starving.
‘You want to go across the road to Mercurio’s for some pasta?’ he asked Colleen. ‘My shout because you’ve been so helpful. And though you can claim overtime, we both know you’ve Buckley’s chance of getting it.’
Colleen shook her head.
‘No, I’m heading home for bed, and I’m going to take a long lunch later in the week in lieu of overtime.’ She eyed him sternly. ‘That is all right, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is,’ he grumbled, put out by her refusal because, although he usually ate alone and didn’t mind it, tonight he’d have welcomed company—any company—to stop his thoughts straying where they shouldn’t stray. ‘As if you need to ask.’
He set the A4726, which he’d found marking the place in a medical book he’d been reading, squarely on the desk, right in front of his chair, so he could deal with it first thing in the morning, then grabbed his jacket and walked out, nodding to staff who bustled past him but resolutely ignoring the usual behind-the-scenes chaos of the department.
At this time of night, Mercurio’s was quiet, though Mac recognised a couple of tables of hospital staff—one of senior hospital staff.
Recognisably senior staff…
Damn and blast!
‘Just coming off duty, Mac?’ Phil Allen, head of the medical advisory committee, called to him. ‘Want to join us and hear all the boring stuff we discussed at the meeting?’
Panic was churning in Mac’s stomach by now. Could he join them and mention Peterson’s idea? That way, he could tell her he’d brought it up.
Lie to Peterson?
‘No!’ he said, answering his thoughts but obviously startling Phil, so he added a quick, ‘Thanks, anyway, but I’m only here for a take-away. Sorry I missed the meeting, but it’s been hectic down there today.’
‘Don’t I know it,’ Kel Roberts, a senior surgeon, said. ‘Most of your intake seemed to end up in Theatre, though yesterday was worse. I think we saved that fat chap’s arm, by the way.’
Mac chatted for a few minutes, then excused himself and moved away, part of his mind working sufficiently well to order a pizza with the works, while a far larger part flapped about in panic-stricken upheaval, wondering how it could possibly explain to Peterson he’d forgotten the MAC meeting.
Not that he needed to explain, as it turned out. She was waiting—with the A4726—in his office next morning, and the fire in her quite lovely brown eyes suggested she’d already heard.
‘So, have you any excuse?’ she demanded, putting paid to any hope he might be imagining things.
‘I just forgot,’ he said, trying hard to sound contrite, while fighting an extraordinary urge to kiss the tightly compressed lips back to their usual fullness. ‘Colleen offered to stay back and help me sort the paperwork.’
He waved his hand towards the one remaining pile, neatly encapsulated in his in-tray.
‘I’m sorry, Peterson, I really am, and I’ll certainly bring it up in a fortnight and even fight the DON for you. I promise.’
Her clothes had disappeared again and his body throbbed with memory.
‘You’d better!’ she growled, and walked away, leaving him once again with a strange, spun-out-of-orbit sensation.
‘She’s not going to mention last Saturday night!’ Speaking the thought aloud didn’t make it less unbelievable. ‘It’s as if it never happened, as far as she’s concerned.’
Which is how you wanted it to be, surely, he told himself, though he was beginning to doubt if he knew what he wanted.
Apart from another night with Peterson, of course…
Amelia walked away from Mac’s office. When she’d bumped into Phil Allen in the canteen earlier and learnt Mac had missed the meeting, she’d been so mad she’d gone charging through the building, ready to rip his head off.
Well, maybe not rip his head off, but certainly do a bit of yelling. For a start, a good yell might release some of the tension working anywhere near him now caused. She’d told herself a thousand times that nothing had changed between them, but her body failed to grasp this fact and her nerve endings did excited little dances every time she heard his voice, while his physical presence resulted in complicated tangos in her abdomen and a flutter of waltzes in her lungs.
But when she’d walked into his office and seen the tidy desk, she’d realised just what an effort sorting all that paper must have been and her anger had ebbed away, replaced by the foolish wish that she might have been the one to help him.
As if! she’d upbraided herself, then, hearing his footsteps in the hall, she’d straightened her spine, donned the fiercest scowl she could muster and gone on the attack. There was no way he was going to guess what was going on inside her.
The stand-off continued for another nine days. A and E was as busy as usual, with the usual array of cases coming in through the doors. On the Friday, Amelia, who’d been congratulating herself on keeping out of Mac’s way ninety per cent of the time, was called to a patient admitted by ambulance, unconscious but without obvious complaint or injury. Until they removed his clothes and found massive bruising on the skin across his belly, the result of some inexplicable accident or a severe beating.
‘His blood pressure’s dropping. I want a Guiac and UA,’ Angus Rhyles, the resident on duty, said to Amelia as he listened for sounds in the patient’s bowels.
Amelia gloved up and performed the simple task of obtaining a stool sample then testing it with developing solution. It turned a bright blue, proving there was blood in the bowels, which could be the result of a blunt trauma injury or disease.
She passed on the information to Angus, who was ordering a peritoneal lavage—fluid washed through the abdominal cavity then retrieved and checked for blood—and catheterised the patient to obtain a urine sample. This was sent off to the lab.
‘Blood in his abdominal cavity—could be his spleen or liver, and the blood in the sample means his bowel could be torn as well,’ Angus was saying, as Amelia, alerted to a further drop in blood pressure by the nurse who was watching the monitors, prepared a resuscitation tray.
She didn’t need to be told whom Angus was addressing—the tightening of the nerves in her skin had already told her that.
‘Let’s sort out the BP first,’ Mac said briskly. ‘Peterson, get on to Theatre and tell them he’ll be up in a few minutes—internal bleeding, possibly bowel damage and query peritonitis. And don’t listen to any half-assed excuses about lack of staff or theatres—they’ve got the biggest budget in the hospital and have surgeons lying about in the on-call rooms half the day.’
Amelia left the cubicle, glad to escape. It had been obvious from the start that as far as Mac was concerned their night of love-making might never have happened.
Well, that suited her just fine—and today it also made her just angry enough to yell at the theatre secretary who dared to suggest they keep the patient in A and E a little longer.
‘He’s on his way up now,’ Amelia told her, and slammed the phone back in its cradle.
By the time she returned to the cubicle, two policemen had arrived, and while Mac worked to stabilise the man, Angus answered questions from the police about the patient’s condition. He was careful only to explain what they’d found, and not draw conclusions as to the cause.
‘OK, take him up,’ Mac said, turning to a porter who was pressed back against the curtain. ‘Peterson, you go with them in case a
nyone argues.’
One of the policemen objected and Mac turned on him.
‘The bloke’s unconscious—you can’t question him!’ he growled.
‘But we have to stay with him,’ the policeman replied.
‘Then sit outside Theatre—just don’t bother my staff.’
So both policemen accompanied the gurney up to the fourth floor, where Amelia left them arguing with the theatre secretary and retreated back to A and E.
A young man who’d had a fall on a building site had been admitted, deeply unconscious and with massive internal and external injuries. For the next three hours she worked under Mac’s barked orders, but in the end the specialist trauma team of which she was part had to admit he was beyond their help.
By then the new shift had arrived, and the exhausted and emotionally depleted day-shift members who’d lost their patient made their way to the tearoom, where they all collapsed into chairs and stared blankly into space.
Mac was the first to speak.
‘It happens, gang, you all know that. We did what we could, and it wasn’t good enough, but that’s not our fault.’
‘It’s harder at the end of the day,’ Angus said, ‘because you have the time to think about it. All the way home—all night. When it happens earlier in the day, you’re too darned busy to worry about it.’
‘Which isn’t always good,’ Amelia told him. ‘Too much gets shut away, and that’s how burn-out happens.’
‘I just hate seeing young healthy people die in stupid accidents,’ the respiratory tech, a young man Amelia hadn’t met before, said. ‘Makes you think too much about your own mortality.’
‘Working in A and E has a tendency to do that,’ Mac told him. ‘So, what’s the saying? Live for today?’
He rose stiffly to his feet.
‘Peterson, can I see you in my office?’
The rest of them watched him leave the room, then turned to Amelia.
‘You in trouble again, Peterson?’ one of the nurses asked, while Angus cocked an eyebrow in her direction.
The Pregnancy Proposition Page 6