Tempted by Mr. Off-Limits

by Amy Andrews

  He was big and hard and solid in her hand. She squeezed him and he swore into her neck, his voice like gravel, his breath a hot caress.

  This. She wanted this. Him. Inside her. Right where his knee was pressed tight and hard.

  Lola moved her hand to his waistband, sliding her fingers beneath it, her pulse so loud in her ears it was like Niagara Falls inside her head. But before she hit her objective, his big hand clamped around her wrist.

  ‘Wait.’

  He panted into her neck for a few more moments, his body a dead weight on top of hers. Lola also panted, blinking into the dark room, grappling with the sudden cessation of endorphins, confused yet still craving at the same time.

  He eased himself up a little, his hand still shackling her wrist. ‘Are you sure about this, Lola?’

  His gaze bored into hers once again and she could see he was struggling with this as much as she was. His arousal was as obvious in his eyes as it had been in her hand. But there was conflict there as well.

  ‘Because if we keep going like this we’ll end up having sex on this couch again, and I’m telling you now I don’t think I can go back to being just roomies again if we do.’

  The implication of his words slowly sank in, the sexual buzz fizzling as Lola’s brain started to kick in. It was like a cold bucket of water.

  But it was the cold bucket of water she needed.

  ‘Right.’ She nodded and pulled her hand out of his, her breathing erratic. What the hell had she been thinking? ‘Of course. Sorry... I...’ She trailed off because she didn’t have any kind of adequate explanation for what the hell had just happened.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’ He rolled off her, his butt sliding to the floor, his back against the couch.

  ‘No...it’s not,’ she said breathily, her hands shaking a little. He was right, they’d overstepped their boundary. And they probably needed to re-establish it. ‘I think we need to talk about it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He didn’t turn and perversely Lola wanted him to turn and look at her. And, Lordy, she wanted to touch him.

  She didn’t.

  ‘It wouldn’t work out between you and me. No matter how good the sex is. We have different jobs and different lives and different goals.’

  He nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m sorry that we got carried away but I think we both need to agree that if this living arrangement is to work out, we just can’t go there.’

  He nodded again before rising to his feet. He was looking down at her but his eyes were too hooded in the semi-darkness to really see what he was feeling. He shoved a hand through his hair. ‘You’re right.’

  Lola reached for his hand but he pulled back slightly and it felt like a slap to the face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered once more.

  ‘Me too,’ he whispered back then stepped away, feet crunching over popcorn as he headed to his room.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NOVEMBER MORPHED INTO DECEMBER. The weather got hotter, the days longer. The Christmas tree had gone up in the apartment. Hamish had been in Sydney for five weeks and was working his first run of night shifts. He didn’t mind working nights usually, he was a good sleeper and night shift in Sydney was a hell of a lot busier than back home. Which was great—there was nothing more tiring than trying to fill in twelve empty hours.

  But Lola was also working nights, which meant they were home together during the day. Sleeping. A much bigger psychological temptation than being at home together and sleeping during the night.

  Because the night was for sleeping. And being in bed during the day felt decadent. Like flying first class or a good bottle of cognac. Or daytime sex.

  Totally and utterly decadent.

  They weren’t having daytime sex, of course. They weren’t having any sex, thanks to their conversation after things had got out of hand on movie night. She was right, their lives were going in different directions and he respected that.

  But it didn’t help him sleep any better.

  Having Lola just across the hallway from him was far too distracting. Sure as hell not conducive to sleep. Not conducive to night shifts. Not conducive to being a safe practitioner when he was so damn tired when he was on shift he couldn’t think straight.

  Consequently, Hamish wasn’t looking forward to heading home in a few hours to repeat the whole not-sleeping process again. But it was his third night. Maybe if he was tired enough he could sleep despite the temptation of Lola in the next room.

  Hamish’s thoughts were interrupted by a squawk from his radio. ‘Damn,’ Jenny grumbled. It was almost two in the morning, they’d been going since they’d clocked on at eight and they’d only just left the hospital from their last emergency room drop-off. ‘Are we ever going to get a chance for a cup of coffee tonight?’

  But her grumbles quickly ceased when the seriousness of the call became evident. Some kind of explosion had happened in a night club in Kings Cross. It was a Saturday night in one of the city’s oldest club districts. ‘We have a mass casualty incident. Repeat mass casualty. Multiple fatalities, multiple victims. Code one please.’

  Code one. Lights and sirens.

  Neither Hamish nor Jenny needed to be told that. As intensive care paramedics, all their jobs were lights and sirens, but the urgency in the voice on the other end of the radio painted a pretty grim picture.

  Jenny flicked on the siren. ‘Hold onto your hat.’

  * * *

  Hamish had never seen anything like what greeted them when they arrived on scene twelve minutes later. A cacophony of sirens from a cavalcade of arriving emergency services vehicles—police, fire and ambulance, including several intensive care cars—whooped into the warm night air. The area had been cordoned off and over two dozen firemen were battling the blaze that currently forked out of the windows on the upper storey.

  Others were running in and out of the lower floor, evacuating victims, masks in place to protect them from the smoke that billowed from the blown-out windows. It hung in the air, clogging Hamish’s nose and stinging his eyes.

  He and Jenny, their fully loaded packs in hand, reported to the scene controller. ‘Some kind of incendiary device, although we won’t know for sure until afterwards. Blast killed several people instantly and started a fire on the first floor, panic caused a stampede and the upper balcony collapsed under the weight of people trying to get out. The night club was packed to the gills, so we’re talking at least a couple of hundred people.’

  Hamish glanced around the scene as evacuated victims huddled in groups across the road from the night club. Some stood and some sat as they stared dazedly at the building, their faces bloodied, their clothes ripped. A lot of them were crying, some quietly in a kind of despair, others loudly in shock and rage and disbelief, railing against the police who had been tasked to question them and stop them from running back into the building to find their mates.

  An incendiary device?

  Someone had done this deliberately?

  ‘Go to the triage station. There are several red tags there and more coming out all the time. The collapse has trapped quite a few people and the rescue squad are digging them out.’

  ‘Red tag’ referred to the colour system employed in mass casualty events to prioritise treatment. Everyone in the triage section would be tagged with a colour. Green for the walking wounded, yellow for stable but requiring observation, white for minor injury not requiring medical assistance.

  And black. For the deceased.

  Red identified patients who couldn’t survive without immediate attention but still had survivable injuries.

  Hamish followed Jenny down the street, adrenaline pumping through his system at the job ahead. He slowed as he passed an area that was obviously being used as a temporary morgue, a tarp being erected to shield the scene from the television cameras already vyi
ng for the most grisly footage. He didn’t need to see them to know the dozen or so bodies lying under the sheets would be wearing black tags.

  He glanced away, concentrating on what was ahead of them, not behind. On the people he could help, not the ones he couldn’t. If he went there now, if he started thinking about such a senseless waste of life, about the horror of it, he’d get too angry to be of any use. He needed to channel his adrenaline, harness it for the hours ahead, not burn it all up in his rage.

  A dozen paramedics, their reflective stripes glowing in the flare of emergency sirens, were working their way through the victims when they pulled up at triage. Jenny introduced both of them to the senior paramedic in charge. She calmly and efficiently pointed them to a section where two other intensive care paramedics were currently working among half a dozen casualties. ‘Over there, please.’

  Jenny shook her head in dismay as they made their way over. ‘Who would do this?’

  Hamish didn’t have an answer, he was still grappling with it himself.

  They got to work, steadily treating the red cards—establishing airways, treating haemorrhages and burns, getting access for fluids and drugs. In two hours Hamish had intubated four patients who hadn’t looked much older than twenty and dispatched them for transport to one of the many hospitals around the city that had already activated their mass casualty protocols.

  He’d hadn’t been able to save two people and they’d died despite his attempts to treat their life-threatening injuries.

  One, a girl wearing an ‘Eighteen today’ sash across her purple dress, was going to haunt his dreams, he just knew it. The dress was the colour of Lola’s jacarandas, with the exception of the bright crimson blood spray across the front.

  ‘Help me.’ That’s what she’d said to him, her eyes large and frightened, just before blood had welled up her throat and she’d coughed and spluttered and the light had drained from her eyes as she’d lost consciousness.

  Hamish had worked frantically on her to staunch the bleeding, to stabilise her enough to get her to hospital, but he hadn’t been able to save her.

  He hadn’t even known her name.

  In all probability the chunk of whatever the hell had hit her chest had probably ruptured something major. What she’d needed had been a cardiothoracic surgeon and an operating theatre. What she’d got had been him.

  And he hadn’t been enough.

  ‘This is the last of them,’ a female voice said.

  Hamish looked up from the chest tube he was taping into place, surprised to realise that dawn had broken. He hadn’t noticed. Just as he hadn’t noticed the stench of smoke in the air any more or the constant background wail of sirens as they came and went from the scene.

  He’d shut everything out as he’d lurched from one person to the next, concentrating only on the one in front of him.

  Two rescue squad officers, a male and the female who’d spoken, placed a stretcher bearing a long, lanky male on the ground. He was sporting an oxygen mask and there was a hard collar around his neck. A small portable monitor blipped away next to his head.

  Hamish nodded at a crew who were waiting to whisk his current patient away. ‘Thanks,’ he said as they snapped up the rails of the gurney and pushed the patient briskly towards the waiting ambulance.

  He turned his attention to the new patient. ‘He’s breathing,’ the female officer continued as if she hadn’t stopped. ‘His pulse is fifty-eight but he’s unconscious, sats are good.’

  Hamish didn’t like the pulse being that low—it should be rattling along, working overtime to compensate for the trauma his body had sustained.

  ‘He was right at the bottom of the collapsed balcony debris.’

  The guy looked remarkably untouched, considering, but Hamish had been doing this long enough to know that sometimes it was the way of things. That internal injuries weren’t visible from the outside.

  He pulled off his gloves and grabbed a new pair from the box in his bag and snapped them on. The bag was somewhat depleted now. He crouched then knelt against the rough bitumen yet again. His knees protested the move but Hamish ignored the pain. Gravel rash was a minor inconvenience compared to burns, blast injuries and the other trauma he’d seen in the last few hours.

  ‘Do you know his name?’ So many of the victims hadn’t had an ID on them but Hamish always liked to know who he was treating.

  ‘Wesley, according to the driver’s licence in the wallet we found in his pocket.’

  Hamish nodded. ‘Thanks.’ The rescue squad officers turned to go. ‘How many fatalities?’ His voice was quiet but enough to stop the woman in her tracks. He’d been trying not to notice the line of bodies beneath the sheets growing but every time he lifted his head they were in his line of sight.

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  He shut his eyes briefly, the image of a purple dress fluttering through his mind like the sails of a kite. It was going to be a really terrible Christmas for a lot of families across the city.

  ‘Wesley.’ Hamish turned to his patient, his voice deep and authoritative as he delivered a brisk sternal rub.

  Nothing.

  ‘Wesley,’ he said again, deeper and a little louder as he shone his penlight into the patient’s eyes. Both were fixed and dilated. Neither responded to light.

  Oh, no. Crap.

  Jenny crouched beside him. ‘Bad?’

  Hamish nodded. ‘Non-responsive. Pupils fixed, dilated. GCS of three.’

  ‘Okay, then.’ Jenny grabbed her bag. ‘Let’s intubate, get some lines in and get him to hospital. This guy has a date with a neurosurgeon’s drill.’

  Hamish didn’t think Jenny really believed performing a burr hole was going to result in a positive outcome. They had no idea how long Wesley had been in this condition. If he’d had surgery performed immediately post-injury, it might have helped, but it was probably way too late by now.

  More likely the sustained pressure in his head from a bleed, which had probably occurred when his skull had crashed into the ground, had caused diffuse injury. If he came though this, the likelihood of a severe neurological deficit was strong.

  But one thing he knew for sure was that sometimes people surprised you and it wasn’t their job to make ethical decisions. It was their job to save who could be saved and Wesley had made it thus far. And, hell, Hamish wanted to believe that a guy who was still breathing, despite the trauma he’d received, could pull through this.

  God knew, they needed a Christmas miracle after everything tonight.

  * * *

  Lola wasn’t surprised to see Hamish pushing through the swing doors of her intensive care unit. Normally paramedics dropped patients in the emergency department and Emergency brought them to ICU if warranted. But when a patient was already intubated it saved time and handling for paramedics to bring the patient directly to ICU. They’d had two admissions like this already tonight from the night club bombing.

  She was pleased it was him accompanying the patient this time, though. She’d figured he’d be there on scene somewhere and she hadn’t realised how tense she’d been about it until she’d spotted him and the grimness of his mouth had kicked up into a familiar smile.

  It wasn’t that she thought Hamish might be in some kind of danger, it was more professional empathy. Lola could only guess at the kind of carnage he must have witnessed from what had already come in here and from the news reports they were hearing. Dozens of crushed, broken and burned bodies. Bright young things just out having fun. And so close to Christmas.

  Things like that could do a number on your head.

  ‘Bed twelve,’ she said.

  As one of the shifts runners, it had been Lola’s job to get the bed space ready for their new admission. They’d been alerted to this arrival about fifteen minutes ago so she’d had time to customise the set-up for a patient with a head injury. And now it w
as action stations as two more nurses—the one assigned to look after Wesley and the nurse in charge—and two doctors—the ICU and the neuro registrar—descended on bed twelve.

  They worked as a team, listening to Hamish’s methodical handover as they got Wesley on the bed, hooked him up to the ventilator, plugged him into the monitors, started up some fluids and commenced some sedation.

  The ICU registrar was inserting an arterial line as Hamish’s handover drew to a close. By the time he’d answered all the questions that had been thrown at him, the arterial line was in, they had a red blood-pressure trace on the screen with an alarmingly wide pulse pressure and the registrar had thrust a full arterial blood gas syringe at Lola and she filled some lab tubes with blood from another syringe.

  ‘Go and get some coffee,’ she threw over her shoulder to Hamish and Jenny as she headed for the blood gas machine out back. Jenny knew where the staffroom was and they looked like they could do with some bolstering.

  Lola was inserting the blood-filled syringe into the machine when Hamish appeared and said, ‘Hey.’

  He reeked of smoke and looked like hell. ‘Hey.’ She smiled at him for a beat or two, her heart squeezing, before she returned her attention to entering Wesley’s details into the computer.

  He didn’t say anything, just watched her, and she waited for the machine to beep at her to remove the syringe before she said anything. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  It would take a couple of minutes for the machine to print out the results so she had the time to check up on him.

  ‘Yep.’ His smile warmed his eyes and was immensely reassuring. ‘Just tired.’

  She nodded. ‘How was it out there?’

  He didn’t say anything for a moment then shook his head. ‘Awful.’