Emergency Reunion

by Abigail Gordon

  All right, Kyle had made a friendly gesture last night when he’d invited her to eat with him, but he’d explained why. He was grateful to have somewhere to live and probably didn’t want to eat alone.

  When she’d started to wilt he must have felt responsible and had acted accordingly, but on finding out that he was giving the wrong signals he’d retreated.

  ‘I’m going to land between those two office blocks behind the main shopping area,’ Jack called over his shoulder as they hovered over the heads of the workbound masses. ‘It’s the nearest I can get.’

  Kyle nodded his agreement and within seconds they were down. As they scrambled out they didn’t have far to look for the scene of the accident. The traffic was snarled up for as far as the eye could see, and the taxi driver was leaning against his cab, his head in his hands.

  His would-be passenger was lying in the road. While Pete and their own man from the unit ran towards them, Hannah and Kyle sprinted to where the motorcyclist lay in a crumpled heap beside his similarly affected bike.

  As they approached a by-stander said, ‘This guy hit the other fellow and then with his bike out of control crashed into these iron railings at an entrance to the underground. He’s been unconscious ever since it happened,’ he informed them. ‘The crash helmet protected his head but there could be neck and spinal injuries.’

  Kyle was already bending over him and as Hannah crouched beside him he said urgently, ‘I don’t like the looks of him. He checked the man’s breathing and his face tightened in alarm. ‘No function!’ he said urgently. ‘We’re going to have to resuscitate him. I’ll do the mouth-to-mouth while you apply cardiac compression. OK?’

  She nodded as the bedlam caused by the accident went on around her. There was the screeching of police sirens, the tooting of horns in cars brought to a halt by it, and the noise from the crowds that congregated so quickly at the slightest sign of anything out of the ordinary in a city street.

  As they worked side by side all Hannah’s earlier annoyances fled in the urgency of the moment. This is what it’s all about, she told herself. Getting here! A fast response to an emergency! And with one of the country’s top men in A and E, it makes everything else in one’s life seem unimportant.

  When the youth began to breathe again their eyes met and he smiled briefly. ‘Well done, Dr Morgan. The next thing is to get this young fellow fixed up with a collar and onto a spinal board. We’ll get moving before any more complications set in.

  ‘But first I must check on our other patient to see which of the two is the more serious and will need to be airlifted, while the other is transferred by ambulance when it gets through. Stay with him,’ he ordered, and went running to where Pete and the paramedic were still treating the other man.

  ‘He’s badly shaken with a broken ankle and arm,’ he reported when he came back, ‘but that appears to be all. So this fellow is our priority. You can supervise him being stretchered to the helicopter while I ring the hospital with details of his injuries. Pete can follow on with the other casualty.’

  When the young motorcyclist had been admitted to the hospital Kyle said, ‘I’ve got to get back and so has the Eurocopter. Pete and his assistant are tied up here for the time being so I’ll send a car for them. You can travel back with me.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she agreed meekly, knowing that she didn’t have much choice.

  ‘And so where is that brother-in-law of yours these days?’ Kyle asked suddenly as they became airborne.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she told him calmly, as if the question was of no consequence. ‘At the time he remarried, Paul was living in the Midlands. I’ve no idea where he is now.’

  ‘Who did he marry?’

  ‘His secretary.’

  ‘So when did you last see him?’

  ‘Six, maybe seven years ago.’

  ‘So you split up soon after I left?’

  ‘No, we didn’t! There was nothing to split up from! You would have found that out if you’d stayed long enough to listen to me,’ she told him coldly. ‘Paul was totally distraught when my twin died. I not only had my own grief to contend with, but had to support him as well. I knew you weren’t happy about the time I was spending with him, but what could I do? Leave him to wallow in misery? He was threatening suicide half of the time.

  ‘And do you have to be so nosy anyway?’ she flared. ‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to start questioning me in this manner. You forfeited any right to interfere in my life when you went storming off like a cuckolded husband.’

  ‘Can you blame me?’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘You were spending every moment of your free time with him, and where at first I understood, after all those months it became a bit much.’

  ‘I know,’ she agreed in a quieter tone. ‘In the end I realised he was manipulating me. Pulling my strings to keep me by his side.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said grimly, ‘but that was some clinch I found you both in.’

  ‘On Paul’s part maybe. It was like he had me in a vice. His excuse afterwards was that I was so like Janine that he couldn’t resist me.’

  ‘That was a sick thing to say.’

  ‘Yes, it was and I told him so, but, of course, you weren’t there to listen. You always were too quick to jump to conclusions.’

  ‘Maybe I was,’ he admitted with a twisted smile. ‘And now? Do I still appear to be the same?’

  ‘I’ll have to wait and see, won’t I?’ she replied smoothly, with an uneasy feeling inside that last night it had been she who’d been guilty of that.

  He lowered his voice. ‘I think we’ve both changed since then, Hannah. You aren’t as soft and malleable as you were then and I’m more tolerant.’

  ‘Huh! Thank you for that!’ she hooted. ‘Maybe in my case it’s been that absence has made the heart grow “harder”. Which wouldn’t be likely to occur in yours as your heart was like a stone from the start.’

  He was actually laughing. ‘Past tense. Since Ben was born I’ve been soft as putty.’

  Hannah caught her breath. It hurt to know that he had a child that she hadn’t borne him, but there was nothing she could do about it. The chance to give him children had been taken from her.

  He was touching her arm and as usual the contact made her blood warm. ‘Well done this morning anyway. We got the lad to hospital in record time. So let’s hope that there is good news on him soon and on the unfortunate pedestrian.’

  Hannah nodded. The motorcyclist and the man who’d dashed into his path could have been killed in the accident at Piccadilly Circus. Even so they would be facing long and painful treatment.

  And what were she and Kyle doing? Playing at cat and mouse? Opening up old wounds that were best left alone. It was over and done with. Only the present mattered, unnerving though it might be.

  In the days that followed a pattern developed between them, based on a cool politeness when on the job and a guarded sort of neighbourliness if they met in or around the apartment block. It seemed as if the brief yet searching talk they’d had on the helicopter the third day after Kyle’s arrival had set the seal on future relations. Or the lack of them.

  The fact that she was all the time achingly aware of him was hard to cope with, but Hannah had a gut feeling that any forward move had to come from Kyle. If it came from her she would never be sure of what his feelings were.

  When she sat alone in the evenings she was acutely conscious that he was up there, high above her, doing his own thing just as she was doing hers, and there was no comfort in it. It was a strange feeling. Just as it was when they caught the same train on the underground. Or were thrown together on the job.

  Hannah knew that he went to see his son on his days off.

  That he set off in the early hours and returned very late and that he was always very sombre the following day.

  On one occasion she asked, ‘Is everything all right with Ben?’

  He observed her with surprised dark eyes. ‘Yes.
He’s settled down famously. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s just that you’re always very quiet when you’ve been to see him.’

  His smile was wry. ‘I find it hard to leave Ben every time I see him. I want him here with me in London. But first I have to find a suitable house. I don’t want him caged up in an apartment or suchlike. I’m relieved that he’s happy at my parents’ place but…’

  ‘You want him with you?’

  ‘Correct.’ He hunched broad shoulders. ‘I miss him, Hannah. I suppose I should have taken a job in gentler surroundings if I was intent on coming back to England. Maybe in the same area as my mum and dad, so that we could all be together.’

  His glance took in the busy operations room and the bright outline of the helicopter, and he went on to say, ‘Bu this place is me. It’s where I belong. I’ve done this kind of work for a long time and it’s a very rewarding occupation.’

  She wasn’t able to argue with that. They all felt the same, but Kyle was the best, and in only a short time Smitty, Pete Stubbs and David, who was finishing on the coming Friday, all acknowledged his skills and dedication.

  ‘And,’ he went on in a totally different kind of voice, ‘if I hadn’t come to this place I wouldn’t have met you again, would I?’

  ‘Would that have mattered?’ she asked with rising colour. ‘I can’t see me ever competing with Ben.’

  ‘Two people. Two different compartments,’ he told her enigmatically, and if he’d been intending to elaborate on that she wasn’t to hear it as the alarm was sounding. Another emergency was waiting for them.

  Hannah had finished her probation and was as functional as the rest of them now, taking her own call-outs with a paramedic to assist and sometimes with Kyle himself on board when the mood took him or he felt that an extra pair of hands was going to be needed.

  On those occasions she was always tense. Not sure if he was there because she was so recent an addition to the team that she needed watching, or whether it was coincidence that it was nearly always her emergency responses he attached himself to.

  Jack had noticed and when she’d refused to go out with him a fourth time he’d said good-naturedly, ‘It’s not Templeton, is it? I’ve seen the way he looks at you.’

  ‘No. It’s not. I’m too tired to go anywhere when I’ve finished here,’ she’d told him and he’d had to be satisfied with that.

  David Wainright was taking up a consultancy in one of the London hospitals on the following Monday, and on the Friday night, once darkness had settled over the city, they all went to a nearby wine bar to have a farewell drink with him.

  Everyone was there—the operations officer, the firemen based at the helipad, the paramedics and, of course, the doctors.

  Hannah was conscious of being the only woman present and she’d brought a smart, black silk trouser suit to change into which showed up darkly against her silver fairness.

  From the moment of seeing her in it Jack had been hovering, as beneath the soft lighting of the wine bar she looked even more desirable.

  A far cry indeed from the doctor in her vivid surgical suit, who earlier that day had attended a woman dragged from the Thames and a barrow boy who’d been lying unconscious on the pavement with a cracked skull after an altercation with a fellow trader.

  Kyle hadn’t been with her on those occasions as she’d frantically resuscitated the half-drowned woman and later managed to get the injured man to Charing Cross in record time, and she hadn’t known whether to be glad or sorry.

  It wasn’t so much that he made her nervous. She was quite capable of handling those sort of emergencies, but it was the same whenever they were together in whatever circumstances. She was so aware of him she could hardly breathe.

  When she turned he was beside her, glass in hand, eyes cool and inscrutable, and she wondered if he’d noticed that she was dressed up for the occasion.

  If he had he wasn’t letting on. ‘Are we going to share a taxi later?’ he asked.

  ‘Er…yes…if you want,’ she said coolly, as the hope that he might have come to talk about something other than travelling arrangements died at birth.

  ‘Let me know when you’re ready to go, then, and I’ll ring for one.’ As she nodded dumbly he moved away.

  Feeling unaccountably miffed at his attitude Hannah sauntered across to where Jack was chatting up the girl behind the bar and, linking her arm in his, smiled up at him.

  If Kyle’s attention was an unattainable sort of thing, not so this man’s. He was immediately tuned in and for the rest of the evening she let him monopolise her.

  ‘Does our arrangement still stand? Or is Krasner taking you home?’ Kyle said abruptly as the party began to make a move towards departure.

  ‘It still stands,’ she told him calmly, knowing that if she let Jack take her home he wouldn’t want to leave…and would read something into it that wasn’t there.

  ‘Come on, then, or he’ll be thinking that I’m muscling in on him.’

  That will be the day! Hannah thought grimly.

  After a quick farewell to David, Kyle hustled her out onto the pavement, and when she turned she could see Jack through the window, looking over the remaining members of the party with a puzzled eye. It seemed as if he hadn’t noticed her rapid exit or he would have been out there, staking his claim.

  Kyle had followed her glance and as a taxi pulled in at the kerb he said drily, ‘You’ve still time to change your mind.’

  Hannah shook her head. Suddenly she was very tired and not without cause. It had been a long day. Up at six-thirty, on the tube at seven, and taking her place along with the rest of them at seven-thirty. Now it was close to midnight and she knew that her exhaustion was mental as much as physical…and Kyle Templeton was to blame for that.

  If only she knew what was in his mind. He was easy enough to understand when it came to the job. He’d not concealed his feelings about Ben. But he was rarely forthcoming with regard to herself.

  Maybe he saw what had happened in the past as too long ago to even think about, she thought as they settled themselves into the back of the cab. Or if he did still have reservations about her, perhaps he’d decided that he would have to grin and bear it until her six months were up.

  He was gazing through the taxi window with his head turned away from her and Hannah had a sudden crazy desire to touch his cheek with the tips of her fingers. She was actually reaching out to him when he turned, and as their eyes met her hand fell away.

  He’d seen the movement.

  ‘What?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The driver pulled up in front of their apartment block at that moment and those seconds together in the darkness of the cab were over.

  As Kyle settled the fare Hannah prepared to follow him onto the pavement, but her heel caught in the hemline of the silk trousers and she lurched forward. She would have fallen if he hadn’t caught her in his arms, and as the taxi sped away his hold tightened.

  She looked up at him. ‘Thanks for that,’ she said breathlessly. ‘For a moment I thought I was going to end up in a heap.’

  He didn’t speak, just continued to hold her and she became still. As the seconds passed Hannah prayed that he couldn’t feel her trembling. She didn’t want to move out of the circle of his arms, but neither did she want him to think that he had only to beckon and she would be there.

  When she could stand it no longer she breathed his name and like a man in a dream Kyle shook his head as if to clear it. Then he held her away from him so that he could see her face beneath the streetlights.

  This time, as their eyes locked, they were so tuned in to each other’s need she felt as if her legs would give way beneath her.

  ‘Shall we see if it’s as good as it was before?’ he said as he put a finger under her chin and tilted her face up to his.

  Hannah stiffened. ‘Do you have to bring up the past, Kyle? It’s gone. Done with, as far as I’m concerned.’

/>   ‘So you’ve no regrets?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  It was hardly the moment to tell him that she’d lived on a diet of regret for years and all because she’d been too malleable in the hands of a grieving widower…and he, Kyle, had been a lover with a very short fuse.

  ‘Right. So let’s say that this is for old times’ sake, shall we?’ Placing his mouth on hers, he kissed her with the hungry intensity that she remembered so well.

  They drew apart at last and as they did so sanity returned.

  ‘That should have been for the present,’ she whispered. ‘Not the past.’

  He raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’ and to her chagrin he glanced at his watch. ‘Goodnight, Hannah Morgan. If we don’t make tracks it will be time for the morning rush hour before we’ve even hit the sack.’

  Hannah nodded bleakly and, leaving him standing on the pavement, hurtled through the doors of the apartment block. Without waiting for the lift, she went up the stairs two at a time.

  Once inside her own flat she leant against the door and stayed there until her heart stopped hammering. Then she walked slowly to the sofa and eased herself down amongst its soft cushions.

  She could still feel his mouth on hers, his possessive hold and the magic of being where she belonged after the long fast. But Kyle hadn’t said anything to make her think that he still cared. For all she knew he’d seen her as a temporary diversion, and tomorrow they would be back in routine.

  They were. The following day he was brisk, businesslike, the man at the top. All of those things as the day got under way. If Kyle had any lingering thoughts about the night before he wasn’t showing it.

  It was Graham Smith’s turn to lead the major response team today, while Hannah and Pete Stubbs would deal with any secondary calls that came in if the helicopter was already in service. In those instances an ambulance was used and consequently there was a longer time factor in getting the patient to hospital.

  By lunchtime the Eurocopter had been called out twice, which had meant a busy morning for Graham and his team but for Pete and herself there had been time to relax for once.