The Shy Nurse's Rebel Doc

by Alison Roberts

  But she didn’t want him to come because she’d have to be on guard all the time and make sure she didn’t say something stupid or...or drop a slice of pizza or something.

  She wanted him to come because it would be the first time she’d seen him in a social setting and, while she didn’t think it would make him behave any differently, she was curious to find out.

  She didn’t want him to come because it would mean that the safety barriers of having a professional reason to be in his company would be less visible and...and anything could happen.

  Okay. Wanting him to come had just resoundingly won the internal battle and, at the same moment, she heard Blake speak.

  ‘Sure...why not? I need to have a chat with some of the guys on station here first, to make sure we’re set up for tomorrow, but I’ll join you soon.’

  * * *

  Several wood-fired, delicious-smelling pizzas had been delivered to the long, wooden table before Blake joined the group but, for a long time, Sam found it easy to resist the temptation. She was too distracted by keeping a corner of her eye on the doorway that led out to this garden, waiting for a glimpse of those cowboy boots or the shape of that long, lean body heading towards her. Would he have taken his ponytail down so that he looked like a guitarist from some cool rock band again? Like he had the first time she’d seen him in the ED, when she’d made the incorrect assumption that he was the baby’s father and not a doctor?

  The conversation around her was lively.

  ‘I can’t wait for tomorrow,’ Wayne said. ‘I’m not so keen on all this theoretical stuff. I want to learn about the search techniques. Be out there throwing some rubble around and actually rescuing someone.’

  ‘Yeah...’ Sean was nodding. ‘What’s a “line and hail” search, d’ya reckon? What’s the weather got to do with it?’

  Everybody laughed and Tom smiled. ‘Hail isn’t just icy rain, Sean. It’s another word for calling out to somebody.’

  Wayne shook his head. ‘You’re an idiot, mate.’

  ‘Hey...and you think you can just throw rubble around? You wanna give yourself someone else that needs rescuing?’

  But the friends were grinning at each other. And then Sean pushed a platter closer to Sam.

  ‘You not eating? This one’s really good. Meat lovers.’

  ‘This one’s better...’ Andrea held out another platter. ‘Vegetarian with extra cheese.’

  ‘Mmm...’ Sam took a wedge of the vegetarian pizza and then took a big bite. There was definitely extra cheese. A long string of mozzarella was still attached to the rest of the slice as she pulled it away from her mouth. She lifted her hand up high enough to break the string, which then fell into a coil all over her face. With one hand still holding her pizza and the other trying to pull cheese off her face, it was the worst possible moment to notice that Blake had finally arrived. That Wayne and Sean were moving to make space for him, in fact. Directly opposite her.

  He had a frosty bottle of lager in his hand, with a wedge of lime stuffed into the neck, a one-sided smile and a gaze that was firmly fixed on Sam’s face.

  ‘Looks like you’re getting into it,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm...’

  With a wave of something like relief, Sam realised she might as well give up worrying about her image in front of this man. She was doomed. And, with that realisation, she relaxed, smiled back at him and broke one of her mother’s sternest childhood rules of not speaking with your mouth full.

  ‘It’sh great. Try shome...’

  Even Blake looked surprised at her rule breaking. His smile widened to include both sides of his mouth.

  ‘I think I will. That looks like it’s got jalapenos on it.’ He reached for a huge triangle, expertly dealing with the string of cheese that trailed after it. ‘My favourite.’

  He took a huge bite and Sam couldn’t look away. Wasn’t that another note in her mother’s etiquette bible—that it was rude to watch people eat?

  Why was it that every movement he made was so fascinating?

  Clearly Andrea was sharing the fascination. She even leaned further across the table towards Blake.

  ‘I’ve been dying to ask you,’ she said. ‘What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done, Blake?’

  * * *

  Blake stopped chewing.

  The answer to that question that popped—uninvited—straight into his head was that the most exciting thing he’d ever done was quite possibly ‘sitting across the table, right now, from Samantha Braithwaite’.

  That jolt of sensation when he’d caught sight of her pulling that string of cheese off her face and then making it disappear between her parted lips hadn’t worn off yet, despite trying to distract himself with food.

  He’d been doing so well, today, too.

  He’d been so aware of her in his classroom. He’d actually been able to feel her gaze on his skin whenever he was talking and it had been a conscious effort not to let his own line of sight connect with hers any more often than would have been normal, but he’d never been more aware of what was in his peripheral vision.

  He now knew how straight Sam sat when she was listening to something that interested her and that she was inclined to fiddle with something at the same time, like her pen or the end of that long braid hanging over her shoulder. He had learned the timbre of her voice and it had the same effect as hearing a favourite song on the radio when he walked into a café. He just wanted to stand still for a moment and listen. To turn up the volume...

  He knew that Sam had the bluest eyes of anyone he’d ever met. Did she wear contacts to get that extraordinary depth of colour?

  It hadn’t made any significant difference that she was wearing those practical, loose-fitting clothes today. His memory banks had been only too happy to use a kind of mental photo-editing software and superimpose a pair of faded denim shorts over those cargo pants and replace the T-shirt with a soft top that not only revealed a delicious cleavage but had the bonus of being just a little transparent.

  And now, here they were in a social situation. With food and alcohol and loud music coming from within the trendy restaurant. A drum beat that was an invitation to break rules and get a little wild.

  Oh, yeah...it was exciting, all right.

  A damn shame it wouldn’t be going any further but it wasn’t exactly unpleasant. A bit like holding an expensive gift he had no intention of unwrapping but it was irresistible to pick it up and feel its shape and wonder what might be hidden inside. Not that he was doing that on a conscious level, of course. He hadn’t bothered trying to analyse how it was making him feel at all, until Andrea had asked that question.

  The shock of realising just how much being this close to Sam was affecting him must have been evident in some facial twitch because Andrea grimaced, apologetically.

  ‘I mean...you know...with USAR?’

  ‘Ah...’ Blake finally swallowed his mouthful of pizza as he nodded and then gave Andrea his laziest smile. ‘In that case, I guess it’s okay to tell you.’

  ‘And how often do you get called out?’ Wayne asked. ‘For real, I mean?’

  ‘I’m not involved with a dedicated USAR team right now,’ Blake said. ‘I’m part of a specialised disaster response team at my hospital and we can be called out to almost anything—from a multi-car pile-up to a cyclone at the other end of the country—so we actually get called out a lot. We’re a medical response, but we have team members like myself who have USAR qualifications and we work closely with other teams who can already be on scene.’

  He risked a quick glance across the table as he took another bite of his pizza. Sam wasn’t looking at him but she wasn’t eating, either. She was breaking little pieces of her pizza crust off. Fiddling.

  She was listening...

  ‘Before we set up our hospital-based team, I used to belong to a USAR unit. A few y
ears ago we responded to a big earthquake in China. There were teams there from all over the world and we were on site for nearly two weeks. I reckon the most exciting thing was finding someone alive who’d been trapped for ten days. I’ll never forget hearing the sound of his voice on that line and hail search.’

  His peripheral vision told him that Sam’s fingers had stilled. And he could feel that gaze on his skin again, as if the hairs on his arm had lifted slightly.

  ‘Talk us through that,’ Wayne said eagerly. ‘How does it work?’

  ‘The team is in a line, obviously.’ Blake smiled. ‘And you get assigned an area to cover. There’s a safety officer whose job it is to identify and mark hazards and you take turns calling along the line and then stay quiet to see if anybody can hear anything. You’ll learn all about this in the morning.’

  But everyone around the table stayed quiet. They wanted to hear more now.

  ‘What do you call?’ Sean asked. ‘Is it like “Can anyone hear me?”’

  ‘Pretty much. Usually, it’s “Rescue team above, can you hear me?” Or, sometimes, if there’s a bit of metal poking through the rubble, like some reinforcing poles, you can tap on it with a rock or something. Sounds like that can travel a lot further than a human voice.’

  ‘And they tap back? Is that how you found that guy still alive?’

  ‘Actually, I heard his voice. Very faintly. I was on the end of that line and we’d been searching all day and it was the last thing I expected to hear. Nobody had been found alive for the last five days.’

  ‘So what happened then, after you heard him?’

  It was the first contribution Sam had made to this conversation and it would have been rude not to look at her but, when he did, his response seemed to vanish and it felt like he was simply staring.

  It was only for the space of a heartbeat but he knew that Sam was aware of that tiny pause just as much as he was.

  Tom saved it becoming awkward. ‘Did you start digging straight away?’

  ‘No. There’s a protocol. You have to pinpoint, as best you can, exactly where the sound is coming from. That means changing the position of everybody in the line to try and surround where you think it’s coming from. And then you have to plan how to remove the debris and start well away from where the victim is because you don’t know what position they’re lying in or how stable the void is.’

  ‘That must have been so exciting,’ Andrea said. ‘To get him out...’

  ‘It was,’ Blake admitted. ‘But I think the biggest thrill was to hear that response in the first place.’ He took a long pull of his lager. ‘It’s weird because you’re part of a team but it can feel like you’re working alone at the same time.’

  Why was he telling them this stuff? He wasn’t into discussing feelings.

  Maybe it was because he could still feel that prickle on his skin that told him how intently Sam was listening to every word he said.

  For some weird reason, he didn’t want to stop.

  ‘It’s kind of like being lost and walking for the longest time and then seeing a tiny star of light up ahead that tells you that maybe you’re not going to be alone for much longer.’ He pulled a self-deprecating face. ‘It’s hard to describe but maybe some of you will actually get to experience it one day.’

  Blake helped himself to another piece of pizza. ‘Enough shop talk,’ he said. ‘And eat up, guys. You’re going to need plenty of energy tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Wow...

  Sam excused herself to go to the restroom a short time later and ended up splashing a bit of cold water on her face.

  Who knew that Blake Cooper had a poetic streak? The image he had conjured up was still haunting her—of him lost and alone in some wilderness, pushing himself towards a goal of...what...being rescued or not being alone? Or maybe they were the same thing.

  He could be in a team and still feel alone?

  That broke her heart but she could understand it.

  Sometimes Sam felt lonely in the middle of a crowd. And sometimes she was afraid she would feel like that for the rest of her life. Because she was scared to let people close enough that she wouldn’t feel alone? Because, even though it was suffocating to be wrapped in cotton wool, it was too scary to imagine existing without it?

  Maybe the scariest thing had been that urge to reach across the table when Blake had been speaking.

  To take hold of his hand, tightly enough to let him know that he didn’t need to feel alone any more.

  She knew it would be a bad idea to go and sit back at that table opposite Blake but her feet still took her in that direction. Was it disappointment or relief that washed over her when she saw that he’d already gone?

  ‘I’m going to head back to my hotel,’ she told the others. ‘I’ll see you all tomorrow.’

  Pushing through the crowd near the bar, Sam didn’t see the man whose arm brushed hers.

  But she knew who it was instantly.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said in surprise.

  ‘Only to get another beer. But I’ll be heading home soon. Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to my hotel.’ She wasn’t about to admit to her tutor that she needed some study time to make sure she aced the test tomorrow but sadly, her brain had to find a substitute reason. ‘I need my beauty sleep,’ she said.

  The look Blake gave her was unreadable. Intense.

  They were in the middle of a small, noisy crowd but it suddenly felt as if they were totally alone.

  Together.

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Sam found herself saying softly. ‘About being in a team but feeling like you’re working alone.’

  The intensity of that dark gaze increased. ‘Oh? Do you really think that’s the best thing to say to someone whose team you want to join?’

  Oh, help...was she ruining any chance she might ever have to join the SDR?

  ‘A team is made up of individuals,’ she said carefully. ‘Being aware of yourself doesn’t mean you can’t work with everybody else.’

  Blake leaned closer as someone pushed past him. His head was much closer to hers now.

  ‘And what are you aware of, Sam? When you’re part of a team?’

  ‘That people working together have a power you can never have alone. That that power can make it possible to get past the kind of boundaries that might otherwise hold you back.’

  ‘And why do you want to get past those boundaries?’

  ‘You have to,’ she said quietly. ‘If you ever want to find out who you really are and what you’re capable of. Don’t you think?’

  The response was no more than a lifted eyebrow.

  With a half-smile, Sam turned away and slipped through the crowd. She knew there were a lot of people between them by the time she got to the outside door of the restaurant.

  But she also knew that Blake was still watching her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘OKAY... ARE WE READY? You all understand what you have to do?’

  There was an enthusiastic, affirmative response from the line of people now standing in front of an impressive mound of hard waste. A lot of materials from demolished buildings got recycled but the rest of it ended up here, in a huge dump on the outskirts of Brisbane. Concrete blocks and bricks and lengths of curly, steel reinforcing rods, corrugated iron and wooden boards, broken doors, window frames and chimneys—even sections of carpeting and odds and ends of smashed furniture.

  It was a dangerous environment that wasn’t accessible to unauthorised people but parts of this dump were a perfect training ground for urban search and rescue personnel and they had used this particular section as an introductory exercise on many previous occasions.

  The current course members were checking that they were the correct distance from each other. Dressed in the overalls and other safety gear provid
ed, some were nervously adjusting items like their hard hats, knee pads, goggles or the dust masks covering mouths and noses. The person standing closest to Blake was holding an extra bit of gear—a can of fluorescent orange spray paint.

  There’d been a few disappointed faces when he’d named Sam as the safety officer for this exercise because it was a key role that he would be working alongside. Yesterday morning, when he’d spotted her amongst his pupils, having her by his side like this would have been at the very top of any list of things he would never have considered. This afternoon, however, after an intensive theoretical session on line and hail searches followed by the test of what they’d taken on board so far, he hadn’t hesitated for a moment in picking Sam.

  It wasn’t just that she’d scored a perfect hundred per cent on that test.

  Or that he could sense she’d wanted this important role as much as, say, Wayne or Sean did.

  No. It was all about what she’d said to him last night. Words that had echoed in his head long after she’d vanished back to wherever she was staying. Words—or maybe it was more like feelings—that had continued chasing him in his dreams.

  She wanted to push herself. To find out who she really was and what she was capable of. Well...he could help with that right now. He was going to push her in this exercise.

  Because maybe he wanted to find out who she really was and what she was capable of, too?

  No, it was more than that. Her words had connected on a deeper level. He’d never tried analysing the effect that being a member of an elite team had had on him but it was true that he’d always pushed himself that bit harder when someone else was in the picture. A team member. Or a patient that needed help. Not that he’d seen boundaries. He’d just known that he had to try harder. Get better at what he needed to be able to do. Had he accomplished that because of the power she’d identified?

  Sam also recognised that you could still feel alone amongst others. That battles were private as much as anything shared with even one other person, let alone a whole team.

  And that made her different.