‘So what’s happened since then? Did you have an argument or something? Because I would have thought an event so big would bring you together, but you act weirdly around each other, like you’re annoyed or mistrustful or something. How come you’re now working together?’
‘That night I told him I owed him a favour and to ask if he ever needed me. He said they needed a paediatrician urgently. He asked. I came. Simple.’
‘Why now, I wonder?’
‘I don’t know. That’s been bothering me too. He hasn’t said a word about it, in fact we’ve both avoided the subject like the plague. So maybe it was a subconscious thing.’
She cupped his hand with both of hers. ‘There’s so much you need to say to each other. I haven’t seen you talking. There’s no camaraderie there, not really.’
‘I guess neither of us wants to go there again.’
‘Maybe you have to. Maybe you have to push through it.’
‘I don’t know what headspace he’s in. If it’s anything like mine, I pity the guy.’
‘You’ll only find out by trying.’ She made it sound as if breaking that silence might actually be a good thing, that it could be as simple as starting off a conversation. Maybe it was.
‘Until I arrived here I hadn’t seen him since that night. I know it’s weird, but we didn’t get along before the avalanche, and there was no need to have some kind of faux friendship afterwards. His best friend died there and he wasn’t looking for another one to fill the spot, well, not me anyway. He had to make a choice about who to save and he picked me,’ he explained.
‘Wow. That’s intense, Ethan.’
‘You could say that.’ You’d better be worth it. Those words had framed everything Ethan had done since then. ‘To be honest, I couldn’t walk for a while afterwards and was in hospital for months. I damaged my spine a little; it’s fine now but I spent a long time in rehab and lost touch with everyone from the team.’ Rather, he’d purposefully pulled away from all that, not wanting to face the other survivors. ‘It was all a mess. Everyone was grieving the dead and in such shock. It was just easier to fade away and concentrate on getting better.’
‘You went home to your parents? Surely they made an effort for you then?’
‘I was in the spinal unit and then at home for a while, but it was frustrating for us all, to say the least. They weren’t suited to being nurses and I was the worst kind of patient.’
‘They must have been heartbroken when you were so badly injured.’
‘Some of the team’s parents flew to be with us in the French hospital, but mine were unable to get away and just wanted updates.’
Claire swore in French and shook her head. ‘How could they be like that?’
‘We never discussed it, of course, but I’m pretty sure I was a mistake, an unplanned baby and very much in the way. I left for medical school as soon as I could, never put on skis again; in fact, I haven’t been near snow again either.’ Just the thought of it made his body feel like ice. He shivered and tried to cover it up.
But she noticed. He got the feeling Claire noticed a lot. She nodded and smiled kindly. ‘Now I understand.’
‘I wish I did. You think you’re over it and then you get palpitations and sweating, like in the lift, a few minutes of blackness or being hemmed in and it all comes rolling back.’
She watched him for a moment. ‘So you know more about wanting to be free than anyone. No wonder you do the work you do.’
He knew more about being locked into guilt and fear than about freedom.
Her fingers stroked his jaw. ‘I’m sorry, Ethan. You look shaken up.’
He forced the memories away. Stupid to ruin such a great night with that. ‘It’s just weird, going back there. Being with Chase has pushed it front and centre again.’
‘I get that. Do you want to go somewhere else?’
He wanted to haul her against him and find comfort in her, with her. To wipe away the stale tainted memories and fill his head with new ones of her. He didn’t care what the geography was. ‘You want to leave without getting your gelato?’
‘No. We can do both. I mean, we can pretend we’re somewhere else and eat gelato here.’
He thought for a moment, listened to the early evening laughter, the upbeat band, the hum of the scooters, Claire’s laughter. Italy. Pizza. Claire. He breathed off the heavy weight and breathed in the light and the laughter and Claire. ‘I’m happy to be right here.’
‘Me too.’ She smiled and it was honest and pure, and instead of always wanting to be on the move he actually wanted to stop. Right here.
His heart hummed for her, his body too, and he wondered how it would feel to give up everything he knew and find a way to be with her. Then he stopped himself from getting carried away because she had to do her thing, on her own, and he had to repay his debt for as long as that took.
He couldn’t ask her to come to Africa and relentlessly try to save people for ever and ever and ever, making a tally, wondering what infinitesimal number would ever be able to fill the gap Nick’s death had left. Or whether it could ever be enough in Chase’s eyes. No, he couldn’t push his burdens onto someone else and make them bear that weight with him. And he couldn’t take on someone else’s.
But it didn’t stop him wondering how it would be if he stopped.
Impossible. He ordered the gelato, hoping the cold would freeze some sense into him, but when it came, Claire’s eyes were so full of life that all he wanted to do was rock into her and keep that shine in her irises bright. This was no good. The more time he spent with her the more time he wanted to spend with her. As she scraped the last drop of ice cream from her bowl he checked his watch. ‘It’s getting late, we need to go.’
‘Back to reality.’ She sighed. ‘Okay, time to activate the trigger point plan.’
‘It’s been activated for the last few days as far as I’m concerned.’ He laughed and started to tick the list off on his fingers. ‘So don’t forget, no smiling. Smelling. Licking lips.’
‘Half smiling, that’s the killer. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Stop it, Ethan.’
‘I can’t help it.’ He gave her his full-beam grin. ‘You make me smile.’
She sighed again, but her smile grew and as she stood she swayed a little towards him. ‘If you don’t stop saying things like that we’re going to have to add talking to the list too.’
After they’d paid the bill they walked through the maze of dark streets, trying to find their way back to the port, but all that seemed to happen was they’d come across another narrow alley instead of the main road down to the ship. It was getting dark and the streets took on a different hue. Ethan steered her down an alleyway that looked vaguely familiar. ‘Pretty sure it’s the next left. Then right and straight down to the dock.’
She came to a halt at the end of the street. ‘No left turn here. I think we’re lost. Let me get my phone out, I can find a map or something.’
‘It’s fine, Claire. Don’t worry, we’re not lost.’
‘I’m not worrying.’ She leaned against a terracotta-coloured wall under a streetlight and gazed at her phone, tapping and tapping. ‘There’s something exciting about trying to find your way, don’t you think, along a new path?’
She was so goddamned beautiful in this light his heart almost couldn’t take it. As she concentrated on looking at the screen, the tip of her tongue ran along her bottom lip.
‘Claire...’ It was half warning, half a hymn to her. Then he was cupping her face and sliding his mouth over hers.
There was a moment when she hesitated, inhaled the shock. Then she softened against him, moaning his name, and opened her mouth to him. She tasted of lemon gelato, her lips still cold. She tasted of freedom and excitement and everything good.
She wound her arms round his neck and pressed herself hard against him and he hung
on, deepening the kiss, grinding her against the wall. His hands skimmed her breasts and she panted at his touch, a light mewl escaping from her throat that was like oxygen to burning embers. Desire sparked through his veins, setting every nerve cell alight. He wanted her naked. He wanted to rock into her, to watch her come, to hold her until the morning.
Someone on a scooter tooted as they sped by, dragging him back to reality.
This was insanity.
He tugged his mouth from hers, tried to control his breathing. Failed. ‘God, Claire, I’ve been wanting to do that for so long.’
‘Me too.’ Her lips were plump from the kiss and a jolt of pride shot through him: he’d done that; he’d made her lose control. He’d tasted and teased. She put her palm to his jaw and her smile was all sex and wanting, and if he had been a weaker man he’d have found somewhere close by where he could have taken her and...taken her. ‘At this moment I can’t think of anything more exciting than kissing you, Ethan.’
He ran the back of his fingers down her cheek. ‘We said we shouldn’t—’
‘We said not on the ship. We didn’t say anything about not down an alleyway in Naples.’
‘You did that tongue thing.’ He rested his forehead against hers, his heart rattling at the rightness and wrongness of kissing her.
‘You smiled. You smiled when you kissed me and I was lost. It’s just a little excitement on dry land. That’s all.’ They both knew it was a whole lot more than that. She laughed softly then glanced at her phone and cursed. ‘We need to hurry, the ship’s leaving soon.’
‘So now it stops.’
‘Yes. Now it stops.’ She tugged her clothes back into place and sighed, as if stopping the physical could stop the emotional. As if. ‘Still, Ethan, that’s something to think about tonight when I’m in my bunk.’
He groaned at the image in his head of her naked, wearing only him. ‘Don’t. I don’t want to think about you in a bunk. Or naked. It’ll drive me crazy.’
‘It’ll be harder working with you every day and not being able to do it again.’
And saying goodbye at the end. It was better to put a stop to it all now, rather than trying to break off something even more intense a few weeks down the track. He started to walk down the alleyway, resisting the urge to hold her hand. ‘I think it’s this way. Trigger points activated?’
‘I’m being serious, Ethan.’ She tugged him to stop. ‘What’s going to happen?’
‘Nothing.’ He shrugged and saw the fun die in her eyes. ‘Nothing can happen, Claire, we both know that.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIFE BACK ON the ship was so busy Claire almost didn’t have time to think about Ethan and the kiss they’d shared. And...everything. At least, she tried not to think about it because she was even more confused now. But with sixty-four new refugees on board, her medical skills were being well used and her free thinking time was mercifully limited.
It had been four days since those wonderful few hours of freedom but now the medical room had become her new home. Today she was working on a patient who, like many of the others, was suffering from the effects of poor nutrition, dehydration and exposure to who knew what bugs on a tiny boat with people from almost as many different countries as the number of passengers.
Claire gave the details to Kristina, who’d just finished a stint with a woman suffering from horrendous chemical burns. They really did have to be ready to deal with whatever was thrown at them, or at least get the patient basically stabilised until they could dock somewhere.
‘This is Fuaad, aged forty-two, from Somalia. His temperature’s thirty-nine point seven. He’s got rigors, low blood pressure and a thready pulse. There’s obviously some sort of infection going on but nothing obvious.’ Claire looked at the emaciated man, who was shivering despite the warm spring day, and touched his hand to give him some comfort. ‘He just says he aches all over, but reports no pain in any specific area.’
‘Could be anything. Make sure we maintain strict infection control protocol.’ Kristina did a quick examination of Fuaad with the help of a translator. ‘He’s badly dehydrated but his chest is clear. Grab some normal saline, will you? We’ll set up a drip, give some antipyretics and see if that brings the temp down. We’ll have to start him on some broad-spectrum antibiotics too, until we can get a positive result from a swab or urine sample. If only we had a blood culture machine.’
‘Dream on, Doctor.’ Claire smiled at Kristina as she slid an IV canula into a vein in the man’s arm.
It was so different from working in a hospital where you had everything to hand. Here, often the only option was to reach some sort of working differential diagnosis and hope.
They worked on him for a while, checking and double-checking his temperature and response to the fever-lowering drugs. Claire noted his observations. ‘He’s a little more comfortable now, although we still need to know where that infection is.’
‘It’s like a game of pin the tail on the donkey, but we don’t even know where the donkey is. We’ll just have to keep an eye on him until we get to port.’ Shaking her head, Kristina washed her hands and dried them. ‘I need to go and see the baby that’s not keeping anything down, so can you apply a dressing to Geesi’s foot laceration? He’s waiting outside. Then there’s the blood-sugar check on Ahmed, he’s all over the place at the moment. This last group have all been quite sick.’
‘Sure. It’s definitely gone crazy.’ Claire glanced at the wall clock. They’d been working non-stop for hours and every part of her ached with exhaustion, her stomach growled with a mix of nausea and hunger... She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything. But even though regular breaks didn’t happen, it helped to have her head full of work instead of other things. ‘I would have thought Ethan would be here by now. Do you know where he is?’
Clearly other things still squeezed into her brain.
Kristina threw a paper towel into the bin and frowned. ‘Oh, didn’t you hear? He’s swapped shifts. He’s working nights from now on.’
‘Really?’ Claire’s heart thumped a little too hard. Why? Had he changed shifts because he didn’t want to be around her?
No, she wasn’t that important in his life that he’d move things around. They’d just been messing about, two consenting adults having some shore fun. At least, that was what she’d been trying to tell herself. She tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Since when?’
‘I think he talked to Chase about it yesterday. It may have been the day before.’
After they’d got back from Naples. Was he actually activating the trigger plan and just avoiding her completely? She felt unaccountably upset all of a sudden. ‘Lucky we’re the dream team, then.’
But Kristina just smiled and went to see the sick baby, leaving Claire discombobulated. She hadn’t realised how much she’d enjoyed seeing Ethan every day and how easily they’d learnt to work alongside each other, how his care and compassion towards their patients brightened her day. How he made her laugh. The places he took her to in their down time.
Now their paths were only going to cross at handover.
It was what she’d wanted, right?
‘Claire?’ It was Fatima. ‘Fuaad is saying he has a bad headache.’
A simple cold? Flu? Dengue fever? Malaria? Zika? Meningitis? Claire’s gut clenched. That could be dangerous with so many people on board. She ran to Fuaad and ascertained he had no rash or sensitivity to bright lights. His temperature had dropped enough to be out of the danger zone but he was complaining that his vision was like shattered glass.
‘Now it sounds more like a migraine, but he had rigors, so it can’t be,’ she explained to Kristina when she came back after settling the baby. ‘But we need to keep an eye on him in case it isn’t something as simple, especially with so many people on board. The last thing we need is for an infection like that to spread.’
Claire set up a makeshift isolation unit as best she could with the scarcity of cabins available, and made sure she was the only person going in and out. Strict infection control was a pipedream in a place like this but she did what she could.
The next two hours dragged by slowly and gave her way too much time for her mind to wander. She tried hard not to think about Ethan and the reasons why he might have asked to change his roster.
She tried not to think about him, but she couldn’t help it. How could one person have become like oxygen to her in such a short time? And why did her stomach feel so unsettled at the thought of him? Was he having a physical effect on her too?
‘How’s Fuaad doing?’ Kristina asked when Claire came out of the isolation room just before her shift ended.
‘Much better. Brighter. No neck pain, just a dull headache, which he says is much less painful. No rash. Maybe we were being over-cautious?’
‘You can’t be too cautious. Imagine what would happen if meningitis or some other virulent infection got hold of everyone on here. Thanks for going the extra mile with him.’ Kristina grinned. ‘I am so glad today is almost over. Got any plans for the Marseille stopover?’
They were all leaving the ship tomorrow and having a break. Claire sighed at the thought of no more seasickness. ‘Three whole days to do nothing but sleep in a proper bed, eat pain au chocolat for breakfast and drink decent coffee. Maybe the pain and the coffee actually in bed. Oh, and a hot shower that I don’t have to keep to a four-minute time limit. Bliss. I never thought I’d be wanting all those things I’ve taken for granted my whole life. You?’
Kristina shrugged. ‘Oh, I’ll just see how it goes. Sightseeing would be good. And yes to decent coffee.’
‘Are we all staying at the same hotel? The St Martin?’
‘I think so. Pretty sure they make a block booking.’
Which meant Ethan might well be on the same floor as her again so things wouldn’t be as relaxed as she’d hoped. Either they’d get together again or they wouldn’t...either option would give her a lot to think about, mull over. Dream about.
Saved by Their One-Night Baby Page 10
