Holding Out For a Hero

by Caroline Anderson

  ‘Not really. Oh, thank God it’s you. How is he? How’s Andy?’

  ‘OK. He’ll need surgery, but he’s stable and the hand’s looking good. The hand surgeon will come down in a minute and see him and decide if it’s possible to reattach it, if the dog hasn’t done it too much damage.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t have done. He’s a spaniel—very soft mouth—and he brought it straight to me in the kitchen. We were having breakfast, and the next thing was the dog ran in and the kids screamed. I thought it was something disgusting at first, but then I realised what it was, and I knew straight away it was Andy’s, because of the finger. If Rufus hadn’t brought it—well, I hate to think what would have happened. I might have gone out with the kids and left Andy there…’ She broke off, tortured by the horrors of what might have been, and Meg put an arm around her and hugged her.

  ‘But you didn’t,’ she said, ‘and he’s here, and he’s going to be fine. Come on, come and see him.’

  ‘Can we come?’ the boys asked, and she nodded and ushered them all towards Resus, the children gathered into her other arm.

  ‘Come on, all of you come in and see him for a minute. He’s asking for you.’

  ‘Will the kids be all right in there?’ Jill asked anxiously.

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ Meg assured her. ‘There’s all sorts of equipment, but we’re just keeping an eye on him, it’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Is there lots of blood?’ the little one asked, his eyes wide and hopeful.

  ‘No, not really. We’ve cleaned it up.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, crestfallen, and Meg grinned.

  ‘Bloodthirsty little monster,’ his mother said affectionately, and then looked at Ben. ‘Are you really Ben Maguire?’

  He nodded, his mouth tilting into something that was almost a smile. ‘For my sins. We’re filming in the department. Is it all right to follow you?’

  ‘Wow, Mum, we’ll be on the telly!’ the elder one said, and his brother perked up again and looked suitably impressed.

  Meg was glad. It would take their minds off their father, and that could only be a good thing at the moment.

  Their visit was only brief, but it was enough to reassure them that he was alive and staying that way, and then she ushered them to the relatives’ room and left them with Sophie in charge of drinks and biscuits.

  A quarter of an hour later Andy was off to Theatre, the hand having been declared viable. Meg had time to register that the whole scene had been recorded, warts and all, and she had blood smeared on her cheek and her uniform was trashed and all her careful pressing had been in vain.

  She turned to the camera, looking full into it for the first time.

  ‘That bloodthirsty enough for you?’ she said cheekily, and Pete chuckled.

  ‘I think that’ll satisfy even the most ghoulish of our viewers. Can we talk it through?’ he asked, but she shook her head.

  ‘Give me five? I need to change into fresh clothes before the next case descends on us, and we’ll catch up then.’

  ‘Any chance of a coffee?’ Steve said hopefully, and Meg pointed them in the direction of the staffroom.

  ‘Help yourselves. I’ll be with you in a tick,’ she said, and hurried off.

  ‘Meg?’

  She stopped and turned, to find Ben following her. His hand reached up towards her breast, and her heart lurched, but then it settled as he unclipped the mike from her lapel and dropped it down the neck of her tunic.

  Idiot! What on earth did she think he’d been about to do?

  She undid the belt, slid off the battery pack and handed it to him wordlessly, then turned and retreated to the relative safety of the changing room.

  She didn’t know what the hell was eating him, but he’d been almost silent throughout Andy’s treatment. If he wasn’t going to talk, to ask her anything or comment, the programme was going to be vastly different to all the others.

  She shrugged. It was hardly her problem, and, anyway, the last thing she needed when she was working was someone asking her stupid questions. She ought to be relieved.

  So why was she worrying about Ben instead?

  One down, however many to go, Ben thought, and turned and followed the others into the staffroom.

  ‘Well, that went fine,’ Pete said, rubbing his hands together and grinning. ‘How obliging of that man to cut his hand off for us—and they know him, too, so lots of touchy-feely. Excellent. Very dramatic—brilliant start, don’t you think, Ben?’

  Ben didn’t. Ben thought Pete was sick, but that was nothing new. He shot him a withering look, then turned to Rae. ‘Did you talk to his wife?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, she’s fine with it, and the kids think it’s great. I’ve got the consents. Here, have a coffee.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  He took it from her, taking a gulp and burning his tongue. Damn. He needed to concentrate, not think about Meg and what it had been like to watch her hands working deftly on their patient.

  No. Her patient. Not theirs. It was nothing to do with him. He didn’t work here, and it was just as well, because his heart had been racing and his legs had turned to jelly.

  Not because of Andy Johnson, not because of the blood or the sight of his wound or because of watching Meg, but the noises, so familiar, so evocative, so—

  The coffee slopped, burning his hand and bringing him slamming back to the present with a jolt.

  ‘Damn,’ he muttered, and ran his hand under cold water.

  ‘You OK?’ Rae asked, her eyes curious, as well they might be. This was most unlike him. Normally he was utterly laid-back, laughing and joking with the others between shots, totally easygoing.

  Not now. Not here, in this damned hospital, torn between dread and a totally unprecedented lust for a woman he knew nothing about, whose life he was about to become privy to in intimate and microscopic detail.

  Every last nuance of her days would become his, the highs, the lows, the in-betweens—all of it, on and off duty—because that was how the programme worked.

  And beyond even the bounds of duty, he wanted the rest, the bits no one would ever see, the utterly private and off-limits moments his body was screaming for.

  Crazy.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he muttered, and then she came in, her smile turning on the sun, driving out the shadows and riveting his attention on her with the brush of her startling eyes.

  ‘Anybody made me one?’

  He would have done it if he’d been able to move, but his muscles didn’t seem to belong to him. And anyway Rae had done it, Rae, calm and unflappable and brilliantly organised, keeping them all in order and ticking all the boxes, so all he had to do was stand and look at Meg, draped in the curiously sexy pale blue theatre scrubs that she’d changed into.

  Scrubs? Sexy? Sheesh, he was in trouble.

  He gulped the coffee, cooler now so it didn’t precipitate a crisis, and watched her in amazement.

  How could she turn something so sexless, so shapeless, into something so incredibly alluring? It didn’t seem possible.

  She sloshed cold water into her cup, drained it and turned to him. ‘Right, I’d better have my mike back on and then we need to get back to work.’

  ‘We were going to talk through that last case,’ Pete reminded her, but she shook her head.

  ‘Not now. We’re too busy—the waiting time’s up to three hours. Mondays are always chaos, with all the little things people have been sitting on over the weekend while they’ve been too busy. It’ll settle down, though. If there’s a gap later we can do it then.’

  ‘And if there isn’t?’

  She shrugged. ‘We’ll do it after I’ve finished.’

  ‘But we need more information—’

  ‘Then you’ll have to wait. I thought the idea was that you shadowed me. So shadow. I don’t stand still, I can’t. If you want to shadow something easy, go find a tree.’

  Ben felt his mouth twitch, but Meg was right there in front of him, holding out her
hand palm up. He passed her the mike and tried not to watch as she threaded it up through the top of the scrubs and clipped it on the open V. Then she slipped the belt round her waist and tightened it to hold the battery pack in place, and he turned it on again.

  ‘How’s that?’ she asked, looking at Steve, and he nodded.

  ‘Fine, got you.’

  ‘Right, let’s go,’ she said, and without ado she went out, leaving them all to follow.

  ‘Grumpy mare,’ Pete muttered, and Ben gave him another killing look.

  ‘She’s right—hospitals are busy places, and she doesn’t have time for us. She can’t dangle about while you cross all your T’s and dot your I’s.’

  ‘So ask the relevant bloody questions instead of standing there with your hands in your pockets,’ Pete growled, and Ben felt a surge of irrational anger, because he knew his producer was right.

  ‘I was giving her space until she was used to us,’ he retorted, keeping his temper with difficulty. There was a grain of truth in his reply, but no more than a grain. The rest of it was to do with keeping a low profile and keeping his emotions under control.

  And that didn’t seem to be working at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN CONTRAST to that morning, the rest of the day went dead. Not that they weren’t busy, because they were, but it was a constant stream of the sort of things she sensed Pete didn’t like.

  Not cutting edge enough, not enough blood and guts.

  Ben, however, started getting involved and asking more questions, although Meg could still feel the tension coming off him in waves. She wondered if he was always like this and the editing just took care of the growly bits, or if it was a simple personality clash with her—perhaps because she’d told him he didn’t need to get to know her that well?

  Well, tough. She didn’t want to be doing the programme either, and she was stuck with it, so he could just darned well cope. At least he was being paid to do it. She was just doing her job, and having him and the rest of the crew hanging around was most definitely not a perk!

  A child came in with something stuffed in his ear and, with Ben to distract him and keep him occupied on his mother’s knee, Meg was able to use suction to get the foreign body out.

  ‘There,’ she said, showing him the little bead, and his mother sighed with relief and fluttered her eyelashes at Ben.

  His answering smile was warm—too warm—and Meg felt an uncharacteristic flash of jealousy and had to look away before the camera caught her glaring at him. Why should she feel like that? So he was very decorative and charming—well, he could be, some of the time. And intriguing for the rest of it.

  But—could she really be jealous? Because he’d smiled at the boy’s mother and made her laugh?

  Ridiculous.

  She gave the bead back to the mother and sent them off, then pulled a splinter out from under a nail, put a support on an ankle declared by Nick Baker to be just a nasty sprain and gave the appropriate advice—MICE, short for mobilisation, ice, compression and elevation—and a set of crutches, gave a child an emetic to make her sick after she’d possibly taken some of her mother’s herbal weight-loss pills and then discovered the pills when they fell out of the child’s pocket as the little one was busy retching over yet another set of scrubs…

  Retching, while Meg held on to her stomach contents with difficulty and wondered why she’d been lumbered with this one.

  But Ben was asking her stupid questions and Steve dutifully recorded her answers and Pete twitched and hovered in the background, no doubt wishing the sky would fall in and cause a major incident to give the programme some zip.

  No such luck. She might have been busy enough, then, to put Ben out of her mind, but as it was he was right there, right under her nose with his sexy grin and his rumpled hair and the stubble that darkened his jaw as the day wore on.

  Then as she emerged from the cubicle with the evidence of the emetic still splattered over her front, Tom caught up with them.

  ‘So, how’s it been?’

  ‘Dull,’ she said, getting in before Pete could.

  Ben shrugged. ‘It’s just swings and roundabouts. That’s how it is. It’s fine.’

  Tom grinned. ‘Don’t get too comfortable. It’ll pick up for sure just before I knock off. Meg, while I think about it, they need some more sponsor forms on the front desk. Ben, are you joining Meg on Saturday for this lunatic plunge to doom?’

  ‘Lunatic plunge?’ Ben said, and her heart crashed into her throat.

  ‘Did you have to remind me?’ she groaned.

  ‘What lunatic plunge?’ Ben said again, his face puzzled.

  ‘A charity abseil,’ Tom told him, and Meg gave another groan.

  Damn. It had totally escaped her mind because of Ben and this filming nonsense, and now she felt sick all over again.

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ she mumbled. ‘Oh, rats.’

  But Tom was telling Ben all about it. ‘They go off the top of the surgical block—that great tall thing. It’s a massive event—draws a huge crowd and raises a fortune every year.’

  ‘Cheers, Tom,’ she said drily—very drily. Her throat had closed and her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth with fear. ‘And can we have less of the great tall thing stuff? I’d totally forgotten,’ she said again, wondering how she could possibly have let something that terrified her so much completely slip her mind.

  ‘And you’re doing this?’ Ben asked, and she nodded.

  ‘For my sins. And for the new 3-D scanner. We do it every year for some damn piece of equipment or other, and every year without fail I seem to get sucked in.’

  ‘I’ll sponsor you,’ he said, and she turned to him, laughing in disbelief.

  ‘Like hell you’ll sponsor me,’ she said. ‘Don’t think you’re getting away with it that lightly. You’re shadowing me, Maguire—and that means you’re doing it with me, every last blasted inch of it. It’s the least you can do.’

  He backed up, his arms folded defensively across his chest, his head shaking firmly from side to side.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Sorry, it’s not negotiable. I’ll get you a sponsor form.’

  ‘I don’t do stunts.’

  ‘It’s not a stunt,’ she said patiently. ‘It’s a charity fund-raiser. And, believe me, you’re doing it. You’re shadowing me, and if I have to, then you have to. End of story. Trust me, nobody wants to do it less than I do.’

  And she turned on her heel, snatched the next set of notes and headed for the waiting room.

  Ben shook his head and stared after her, then turned to Pete, ready to share a joke about stroppy women, to find his producer grinning cheerfully.

  ‘Great. Excellent. Abseiling for charity—couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Who for?’ Ben muttered. ‘Hell’s teeth, Pete.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Falling off a log.’

  Or a high building. Very high. Extremely high. ‘So you do it if it’s so damned easy,’ he suggested.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Pete laughed, holding up his hands. ‘I’m a nobody.’

  ‘Glad you realise it.’

  ‘But you, on the other hand, are not, and as part of the programme—well, it’s like manna from heaven.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t have a choice,’ Pete reminded him, and he got the overwhelming urge to deck him. Again.

  ‘You’ll wear that trump card out if you aren’t careful,’ he growled, curling his fists in his pockets and hanging on for dear life.

  Pete looked at him, his eyes narrowing, then he grinned that slow barracuda grin. ‘You’re scared!’ he said with relish. ‘You great big girl’s blouse!’

  Ben shot him a look and stalked off to find Meg. She was already ensconced in a cubicle, and Rae was there, checking details and charming the patient into agreeing to the filming.

  Damn. Why couldn’t they all refuse, and he could go home?

  ‘I’ve got your sponsor form,’ Meg told him in a rare
quiet moment. ‘Here.’

  He looked down at it in her outstretched hand, and shook his head.

  ‘No. You get me your half-dozen or so sponsors, and I’ll pay up what they would have given, but I’m not doing it.’

  She ran her eyes over his face, over the determined eyes and the mutinous set of his mouth, and laughed.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, and he just raised a brow, but it didn’t impress her. Besides, she had an idea, and once she’d finally escaped from Pete and his endless urge to go over the day’s footage, she put her plan into action.

  Hanging up after the last phone call, she smiled smugly.

  ‘Get out of that, Maguire,’ she said to the empty room. Curling up in her favourite chair with a cup of tea and the TV remote, she settled down for an evening of channel-hopping.

  Nothing. Even with cable, there was nothing.

  She eyed the pile of video tapes on the floor. Tapes of Ben’s programmes, courtesy of her mother, a passionate fan forced to record them because they clashed with something her father would rather watch.

  And she hadn’t seen them all.

  She put the first one in and watched it, fluctuating between laughter and tears and nail-biting tension, and wondering what had happened to the easygoing, sensitive and fun-loving person in the video to change him into the crotchety, awkward and uptight man she’d been dealing with all day.

  Was it her? Or the situation?

  The situation, she decided, because during the war correspondent one she’d just watched, when they got a bit close to the medical bits after one of the soldiers had been badly injured and airlifted out, he grew tense and withdrawn.

  Once more she wondered why Ben had given up medicine. Maybe the other tapes would hold the clue, she thought, and reached for the next.

  The smell hit Ben the moment he opened the door.

  Stunned, he shut it behind him, staring round, searching for the source, and then he found it.

  Lilies, a huge vase of them—white lilies, their scent cloying in the closed room. Suffocating him. Of all the things—

  There was a tap on the door. ‘Ben? Did you like the flowers?’

  He hardly heard her. Hardly heard anything over the roaring in his ears and the pounding of his heart.