by Andrews, Amy
‘Thanks, Dr Reece,’ Christine enthused, pulling her headphones off.
Nash smiled and stood. Brodie was becoming more fractious, rubbing his eyes. ‘No probs.’ He started to sway as Brodie’s grizzling became louder. ‘Better get this little one back to the ward.’
Christine nodded. ‘See you later.’
He nodded to the teenager then looked down at Maggie, who was colouring in studiously. ‘See you, Maggie.’
Maggie looked up, unprepared for the picture Nash made as he swayed with a bandage-headed Brodie. He was lean and sexy and utterly endearing. Yesterday she had thought how totally out of his league she was but today, child on hip, amidst the background chaos of Radio Giggle, he looked totally down-to-earth.
Easily within reach. Temptingly so.
‘Bye,’ she dismissed, returning her attention to Dougy almost immediately, gripping the crayon harder as his sexy chuckle lingered in the studio well after he’d gone.
If she was ever granted the use of a magic wand for even just a few seconds, Maggie would use it to completely annihilate night duty from existence.
She hated it. With a passion.
Her first night in particular. So, she wasn’t in the best of moods the next night when she switched off her ignition and climbed out of the car beneath a star-studded sky. Ten hours stretched before her and she yawned. Not a good sign!
Oh, she knew once she actually walked through the doors and greeted her fellow sufferers she’d be fine — it was the thought that was the most depressing. And the older she got the harder they were to get over.
Back in her student days she’d bounce straight back. Twenty years later it took her a good couple of days to get over a run of nights.
After communal handover in the tearoom Maggie was allocated bed three and took bedside handover from Ray, the nurse who’d been looking after Toby Ryan since his admission to the unit at lunchtime.
Toby was a three-year-old boy who’d been born with a rare hereditary haematological disease. He’d been in and out of hospital most of his brief life, undergoing a multitude of different therapies in a bid to cure him. When everything had failed a bone-marrow transplant had been his only option and he was now fifty days post-procedure.
But not out of the woods.
Unfortunately, nothing had gone smoothly for little Toby and his chest X-ray had deteriorated in the last few days and was looking very pneumonic. He’d been started on antibiotics and had had sputum collected for analysis, but it had become obvious that morning that he required closer monitoring and further respiratory support so he’d been shifted to PICU.
She watched her patient carefully, noting even in his sleep he was using the accessory muscles in his chest to help him breathe. The sound of high-flow oxygen whooshing through his face mask and filling the attached plastic reservoir bag was surprisingly loud in an already noisy environment.
He was as cute as a button with tight black curls crowning his head, clutching a raggedy-looking teddy bear that was missing an eye and half an ear. He was wearing only pyjama pants, leaving his upper half exposed. Maggie frowned. He was working really hard, which was concerning especially considering his state of slumber.
Maggie did her start-of-shift checks and nursing assessments. Linda, the nurse in charge of the shift and a close friend, was setting up bed four for a retrieval patient when Maggie asked her to check some drugs shortly after. Then Toby’s mother, Alice, returned and Maggie chatted with her for a while.
It was a good couple of hours before Maggie had the chance to sit down and read back over Toby’s notes. The PICU had electronic charting, with each bedside having its own computer terminal. Maggie sat at hers and read back through her patient’s history. She noted that Toby’s cousin had died from the same condition only last year.
She looked up from the screen and took in Alice dozing by her son’s bed, his hand in hers. Maggie couldn’t even begin to imagine how scary it must be for her and the rest of Toby’s family.
The night settled into a familiar rhythm. Toby slept and held his own. Around her the other patients were behaving themselves also. The everyday noises of the unit didn’t register as Maggie went about her work. The low hum of machines, the beeping and trilling of monitors, the slurp of suckers and the variety of alarms attached to the technology-saturated environment, formed a continuous background drone.
Collectively they were as familiar to Maggie as the sound of her own breath, the beat of her pulse. And subconsciously she registered what each of them were. She knew which ones to worry about and which ones to ignore. And even deeply involved in other tasks, she knew instantly when something sounded different.
Linda relieved Maggie for her first break. She returned half an hour later, coinciding with the arrival of the retrieval patient. Two paramedics pushed the gurney accompanied by a wards man and Gwen, the retrieval nurse.
But none of them held her interest or her gaze. Maggie could focus only on the other member of the party making their way towards her.
Nash Reece.
What the hell? What was Nash doing here? Wasn’t it bad enough that visions of the man with a child on his hip had been in her head like a recurring nightmare since yesterday?
His gaze locked with hers as the gurney rolled past and he winked at her. ‘Hello, Maggie Green.’
Maggie stared at him, not even registering that he now knew her last name as her brain grappled with how exactly he came to be doing a PICU retrieval. Or at least it was trying to underneath the surge of one hundred per cent octane lust that had flooded her system and threatened to overload her circuits.
The man looked incredible. His hair was mussy in a too-sexy-to-be-true fashion, no doubt aided by the inflight helmet. The navy-blue shirt of the retrieval uniform fitted snugly across his broad shoulders and chest, the pocket announcing his position as Doctor in vibrant red stitching. The cuffs were rolled back to reveal those strong forearms dusted with blond hairs.
Flaunting propriety, he wore a pair of faded jeans instead of the matching navy trousers. They clung in all the right places and Maggie found herself wondering what he’d look like in nothing but the jeans.
‘I’ll shut this across, Maggie, so we don’t wake Toby,’ Linda said.
Maggie nodded mutely and watched as the concertinaed divider between beds three and four shutout not only the spill of light but also Nash Reece and those damn distracting Levi’s.
Trying to concentrate on her work now was utterly useless. The voices next door were muted but she seemed finely tuned in to every low rumble or murmur that was distinctly Nash. Luckily Toby continued to sleep and although his effort remained the same, he still appeared to be coping.
An hour later, as Maggie typed her username and password into the computer to sign for a drug, she felt Nash’s presence behind her like the heat from a nuclear power plant.
‘MMG,’ he mused, reading over her shoulder.
It had taken Nash a few days to get a handle on the electronic charting and there was probably a heap of features he’d yet to work out, but he did know that all the staff user-names consisted of their initials. ‘What’s your middle name, Maggie Green?’
Maggie ignored him, refusing to turn and acknowledge his query. It was none of his business.
Nash moved so he was standing in front of her, one tanned elbow and one lean hip propped against her mobile computer table. ‘Is it May? Are you a “Maggie May”? Was your mother a Rod Stewart fan?’
Maggie thanked her lucky stars for the relative dimness of the room as he crooned the opening notes of the well-known song.
‘Okay, okay,’ she said cutting into his surprisingly good baritone not sure she could stand being serenaded with that particular song about an illicit love affair between a younger man and an older woman. ‘It’s May. But I was named May after my grandmother,’ she said frostily. ‘Not the song. Which had already bene around for ten years when I was born.’
Nash chuckled. ‘I’ve never met
a woman so keen to talk up her age.’
Maggie shrugged with as much nonchalance as she could muster. She couldn’t help it if the twentysomethings he dated avoided talk about aging.
‘I guess I’d better get used to it seeing as how I’m working here for the next three months.’
Maggie took a moment to reel in the leap of her pulse. Three months? She frowned at a sudden realisation. ‘You knew!’ she accused. ‘The other day...at lunch...yesterday ...you knew you were coming here.’
Nash smiled. ‘Guilty.’
Maggie looked into his utterly guiltless face. ‘You might have told me.’
‘And have you prepared?’ He laughed. ‘I like seeing you flustered, Maggie Green.’
Nash suspected not much flustered her and the fact that he’d put her off balance three times now was the boost his ego needed in the face of her continued resistance.
Maggie took a breath, refusing to rise to his bait or let him see how the prospect of three months in his vicinity rattled her. ‘So how’d you swing that? The current registrars are only halfway through their term.’
‘A short-term position came up. Dr Perkins offered it to me.’
Maggie frowned. Dr Gemma Perkins, the PICU director, never offered reduced terms. He must be bloody good. ‘Why only three months?’
‘I’ve got a position at Great Ormond Street in January.’
Maggie blinked. London? It must be part of his great career plan. ‘Good hospital,’ she murmured.
Still...London?
She found it hard to believe how he’d survive in the environs of British medicine where suits and ties were mandatory. He’d changed from his retrieval top into a T-shirt, that combined with the faded fashion of his low-rider jeans, was the epitome of laid-back.
Did he even own a tie?
Nash grinned at her understatement. G.O.S.H. was a world leader. ‘The best.’
She nodded. ‘I worked there, years ago.’
Nash couldn’t resist. ‘Back when you were my age?’
Maggie looked into his open flirty gaze, humour skyrocketing his attraction tenfold. ‘No. Back when I was first married. Twenty years ago. I do believe you must have been about ten at the time?’
‘About that.’
Maggie shook her head at his unabashed reply. He was never ten.
‘Well, I guess I’d better get my A into G,’ Nash said, reluctant to leave. ‘I’m sure Mac wants to be getting home.’
Tonight? He was working tonight?
She gave an inward groan. She’d assumed he was just doing the retrieval and then leaving. Great! Now she had to add Nash Reece and his unsettling presence to her first-night blues.
Two hours later Maggie lay in the darkened break room on a mattress on the floor, cocooned in warm blankets from the blanket warmer, trying to sleep. But her thoughts kept turning to Nash Reece with his impossible blue eyes.
Damn it! She was supposed to be sleeping.
She had one precious hour to recharge her batteries and here she was staring at the ceiling with Nash’s I like seeing you flustered, Maggie Green whispering its treachery into her subconscious.
After twenty minutes she admitted defeat, got up and headed for the tearoom, feeling tired and irritable. She was going to have to settle for bad late-night TV and a cup of tea instead. She was channel-surfing when Nash entered the room a little later.
‘Couldn’t sleep, Maggie?’
His voice purred around her and her irritation ballooned. It was all his fault she was going to feel like death warmed up in the morning.
‘Are you watching that?’ he asked, not waiting for her to answer.
Maggie passed him the remote control. There was nothing on. ‘Not really.’
‘Goodo.’ He took the gadget and flicked it to a sport channel. ‘Country versus city,’ he said to her. ‘I missed it this afternoon.’
‘You can take the boy out of the country, hey?’
He grinned at her. ‘Something like that.’
Maggie sipped her cup of tea for a few minutes while Nash watched the television. The silence between them was unsettling. Not that he looked unsettled but she sure as hell felt it. It was too...intimate.
‘So where exactly is home?’ she asked.
‘Far western New South Wales. The family owns a couple of hundred thousand acres.’
‘You’re a long way from your roots. I thought country boys hated the city?’
Nash hooted. ‘Are you kidding? I love the city. I may be a country boy at heart but I feel like a kid in a lolly shop here. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting down and dirty and dusty...’ Nash waggled his brows, a smile hovering on his mouth as she rolled her eyes. ‘But I love the theatre and the shopping and the night life.’
Maggie swallowed a snort. She just bet he liked the night life. She just bet he fitted right in and the girls in the clubs drooled over his strange mix of metro-sexual hottie and country-boy charm.
He was going to adore London. London was certainly going to adore him.
‘So you’re converted?’
‘It’ll do for now.’
‘Ah. Your great career plans? Your path? Tell me about it.’ This was good, they were chatting. Like two normal, reasonable adults. No vibe, just polite small talk.
Nash shrugged. ‘Become the best damn paediatrician in Australia and then take myself back home. The bush is notoriously under resourced and underfunded. I want to start up a flying Paed service.’
Maggie shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given the stuff he’d talked about yesterday during his interview. His childhood promise to his sister.
But she was.
She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said he was going to drop out of medicine and become an exotic dancer.
When he’d talked about being married to his career the other day and finding out about London tonight, she’d assumed it was for some hotshot, high-profile calling. To discover he was staying true to his boyhood promise was stunning.
Nash Reece, the charming flirt who’d made it clear he wanted her, had been pretty irresistible. Nash Reece, honourable doctor with a selfless purpose born from his sister’s illness, was completely irresistible. She’d caught a glimpse of this man yesterday in the studio.
And she was looking at the rest of him now.
‘Your sister must be very proud of you,’ she murmured.
shrugged. ‘I’m sure she would be if she was alive.’
Maggie stilled as a sense of dread washed over her, Nash’s features now shuttered. ‘Oh, Nash. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ he dismissed. ‘She had leukaemia. I was eight. She was ten. It was a long time ago.’
‘I’m sorry, I just assumed yesterday...you didn’t say,’ she ended lamely.
‘I didn’t think it was appropriate to broadcast my sister’s death on a kid’s radio show in a children’s hospital.’
‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I suppose not.’
Nash was silent for a moment as the overwhelming rawness of that time came back to him. He didn’t often talk about Tammy. Maybe the interview yesterday had sparked the memories again but he found himself wanting to tell Maggie about it.
‘She died in the city because there weren’t the appropriate support services at home to help with palliative care. Having to make long trips into Sydney was a drain on our family life and my parent’s finances. Being separated from Tammy a lot of the time was really, really hard on the rest of us. We missed her.’
Maggie nodded. ‘I can imagine.’
He looked at her, compassion swirling in the fudge-brownie depths of her eyes. It was nice not to have to explain the true impact of that to someone. The PICU got its share of oncology patients and he knew Maggie would understand the true horrors of the illness.
‘It took a long time for Mum and Dad to get over it. I mean, they tried hard...for the rest of us, but they were just...sad.’
‘Of course they were,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sure
you all were.’
Nash eyed her, seeing not only compassion but respect. Suddenly she wasn’t regarding him like he was an annoying bug buzzing around. Or a child, to be tolerated or humoured. Suddenly she was taking him seriously. Not dismissing him with a pat on the head.
She was looking at him like he was a man.
Sort of like how he’d felt about her yesterday when he’d discovered her background with Radio Giggle. Instantly she’d become a three-dimensional entity and he’d had to face that there was more than a physical trigger to the tug he felt when they were together.
He didn’t know whether to be pleased by this development or to get up and leave the room. There was something in her gaze that saw deep inside him. Something he knew for sure would demand more from him than he was usually prepared to give.
The television erupted. The crowd cheered and the commentator’s voice rose an octave or two as one of the country team made a mad dash for the goalpost. Nash was grateful for the diversion and he dragged his gaze from hers and feigned interest in the game.
Maggie was also pleased for the distraction. Things had suddenly gotten quite intense and it was the last thing she wanted. Writing Nash off as a frivolous jack-the-lad had made it easier to ignore the attraction between them. But his family tragedy and dedication to his career had added a whole further dimension. A fully fleshed-out Nash Reece was going to be much harder to ignore.
‘Well, my time’s up.’ Maggie stood. Actually, she had another eight minutes but she really needed to get away.
Nash nodded, deliberately keeping his eyes trained on the television. Something had passed between them, making his interest in Maggie Green very unwise. He needed to give up on her pronto, because the Maggie who had just looked at him with compassion and respect in her eyes wouldn’t be so easy to turn his back on come January.
And that he couldn’t allow. There was London and then home. No woman had ever swayed him from his goal and he wasn’t about to get tangled up with one who could.
So...there was chemistry. So...he wanted her. Maggie Green was off limits.
He’d better get used to it.
