by Amy Andrews
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he whispered as he slowly lowered his mouth to hers.
Their lips met and her soft moan was like a hit of adrenaline to his system, tripping through his veins, whooshing through his lungs, taking the kiss from a light touch to a long, drugging exploration that left them both breathless and needy.
When he pulled back her lips were full and wet from his kisses and a deep reddish-pink. She looked like she’d been thoroughly kissed and damn if being the one to put that look on her face wasn’t a huge turn-on. His hands slid to her shoulders, his thumbs hooking into the open lapels of her gown, which he slowly pushed back. The gown skimmed the tops of her shoulders before sliding down her arms, and falling off to pool at her feet.
Hamish sucked in a breath at the roundness of her breasts, at the light pink circle of her areolas and the way the nipples beaded despite the heat. His hands brushed from her neck to the slopes of her breasts, trailing down to the very tips before palming them, filling his hands with their fullness.
‘Hamish.’ Her voice was a breathy whisper and she swayed a little and shut her eyes as he kissed her again. Kissed her as he stroked and kneaded her breasts, kissed her until she was moaning and arching her back, her thighs pressed to his.
His hands slid lower, skimming her ribs and her hips, using his thumbs once again as a hook to remove her underwear, breaking off the kiss as he slid them down, crouching before her to pull them all the way down her legs. He looked up as she stepped out of them and her hands slid into his hair and he dropped a kiss on the top of each thigh, his nostrils filling with the heady scent of her arousal.
Hamish kissed his way back up, brushing his lips against her hip bone and her belly button and the underside of each breast and the centre of her chest and her neck then back to her mouth, groaning as she slid her arms around his neck and smooshed her naked body along the length of his, grinding her pelvis into him.
‘Mmm...’ he murmured against her mouth, his hands tightening on her ass. ‘That feels good.’
‘It’d feel better if you were naked too,’ she said, her voice husky.
Hamish didn’t need to be told twice and quickly pulled off his own underwear to stand in front of her naked, his erection standing thick and proud between them.
‘Oh, yes,’ she whispered, her hand reaching out to stroke him. ‘Much better.’
Hamish shut his eyes as she petted him, her fingers trailing up and down his shaft, the muscles in his ass tensing uncontrollably, electricity buzzing low in his spine, his heart thumping like a gong in his chest.
Her fingers grew bolder, sliding around him, and he groaned again as he opened his eyes. ‘Enough.’ He grabbed her hand. ‘I’m not sure how long I’m going to last and I want to be inside you.’
‘God... Yes, please.’
Hamish lowered himself onto the bed and pulled her down on top of him, revelling in the easy way she straddled him, in the way his erection slid through the slickness between her legs, in the way she grabbed the condom and sheathed him, in the way her breasts swung and she moaned as he touched them, in the way her blonde curls blew around her head as she looked down at him.
His hands tightened on her hips. She was magnificent on top of him, so comfortable with her nudity and taking charge. She lifted her hips and took him in hand, notching his erection at her entrance, closing her eyes to enjoy the feel of it for a moment.
She took his breath away. ‘You look like a goddess.’
She opened her eyes and smiled. ‘You can call me Aphrodite.’ And she lowered herself onto him.
Hamish groaned, watching her as he sank to the hilt inside her, watching pleasure spread over her face and satisfaction take over as she settled on him, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
‘Oh, yes,’ she whispered, raising her arms above her head and sinking her hands into her hair, her breasts thrusting, her back arching.
She was gloriously unrestrained and she was his.
‘Now you’re Aphrodite.’
He moved then and she moved with him, her hands still in her hair, rocking her hips, undulating her stomach, riding him like a belly dancer, taking his thrusts, absorbing them, consumed in the rocking and the pounding, building her, building him—building them—to fever point, the frantic whistle of the fan a back note to the wild tango between them.
Hamish’s climax gathered speed and light and momentum, little daggers of pleasure burrowing into his backside, the tension in his stomach and groin starting to unravel, and he could almost reach out and touch the rapture. He slid his fingers between her legs, wanting her there with him, needing her there.
She moaned as he found the hard knot of her clitoris and she gasped as he squeezed it, the sensation jolting like a shock through her body, her internal muscles clamping hard around him.
‘Hamish!’
She sobbed his name as the rapture took her, and he cried out to her too, as it collected him, his fingers digging into her hips as his spine electrified and his seed surged from his body. He pulsed inside her and she pulsed around him, the pleasure sweeping them along, ravaging them, their movements jerky, their dance disorganised, neither of them caring as they rode the rapture right to the very end.
It lifted as dramatically as it had descended, Lola collapsing against him, her curls spilling over his chest as she gasped for breath. She was hot against him but he didn’t care. He was burning up too and moisture slicked between their bodies, but all that mattered was that they were burning up together.
She rolled off him eventually and Hamish groaned as he slid from her body. He turned his head to watch her. She looked utterly sated, a satisfied tilt to her lips. There was a line of sweat on her upper lip as well as on her forehead and her chest and in the hollow at the base of her throat.
‘So that first time wasn’t a fluke, then?’ she said, slurring her words a little, obviously sleepy.
Hamish chuckled. ‘Nope.’
He assumed she knew how special that was. To be so simpatico with another person? To feel as if you fitted together. As if you were their perfect fit. He’d never felt it with another woman.
He shut his eyes, enjoying the thought and the coolness of the air from the fan drying his sweat and the stillness in his head, surrendering for a second or two to the tug of exhaustion, before rousing to dispose of the condom. Lola was already asleep, her body rosy from their contact, her blonde curls frothing around her head, a small smile still touching her mouth.
He crawled back in beside her—it never occurred to him to return to his own bed. Not now. This might only be a one-off but he was going to hold onto it for as long as he could.
He was going to lie down beside her and sleep—wonderful, wonderful sleep—and he was going to worry about the rest later.
CHAPTER TEN
ON HER LAST night shift, Lola was assigned to Emma who, although stable, still desperately needed a heart transplant. She’d been listed for almost six weeks now, which was truly pushing it, and there would come a point where Emma started to decompensate, despite medical technology’s best efforts to keep her stable.
Then she’d be just another died on the waiting list statistic.
Which was tragic at any age but at twenty-three it was just too awful to contemplate.
Despite the underlying desperation of the situation, Emma was chugging along and Lola found her mind drifting back to Hamish. In her bed. They’d slept together three days in a row and she was counting on making that a fourth.
They hadn’t talked about what had happened between them that morning after the bombing. Lola had just understood what he’d needed and hadn’t been able to deny him. Not when he’d been her comfort, her solace, her soft place to land that first night they’d spent together all those months ago.
And she’d wanted to be that person for him.
They hadn’t discus
sed sleeping together again either. When she’d made the offer, it had been a one-time-only kind of thing.
The rest had just kind of happened.
They’d arrived home that next morning at the same time and it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to join him in the shower, to soap him up, lay her hands on him, her mouth on him, until he had her up against the tiles, driving into her, withdrawing as he came because neither of them had thought about their lack of protection when things had started to get handsy.
And then he’d carried her through to her bed, both of them still wet, and they’d drifted off, their skin cooling under the roar of the fan, her heart happy. They’d woken twice during the day to join again, half-asleep but reaching for each other despite the fact she had to work that night.
Lola wasn’t used to being gripped by such...attraction. Sure, she’d been with good-looking men, but she didn’t need a hubba-hubba reaction to a guy to go to bed with him and sex had just been an itch to scratch. A fun but necessary biological function.
But these last few days had blown that theory out of the water. There was sex, there was good sex and there was whoa Nelly! sex. She’d had some of the first, quite a bit of the second but never any of the third. Until Hamish. He was the whole package—physically attractive and a magician between the sheets—and it had been totally consuming.
‘Hey.’
Lola glanced up after finishing a suction of Emma’s tracheostomy tube—a breathing tube had been inserted into her neck a few weeks ago—to find Grace approaching. She’d been here when Lola had arrived on shift but it didn’t stop the spurt of guilt Lola felt every time she saw her friend, especially given the direction of her thoughts.
‘Hey.’
Heat crept into Lola’s cheeks despite telling herself she’d done nothing wrong. Hamish was an adult. He didn’t have to check it was okay with his sister to sleep with Lola and Grace had already dismissed those concerns anyway. But, deep down, Lola knew that Grace would want to know.
It might not be one of the Ten Commandments but Thou shall not sleep with your best friend’s brother without at least giving her all the gory details was ingrained in the female psyche.
Lola thanked God for the low lighting Emma’s stable condition allowed at the bed space and smiled, determined to act normal, even if she did feel like she was wearing an ‘I’m sleeping with your brother’ sign around her neck.
‘How are you?’ Lola asked.
It wasn’t a standard throw-away question. It was a genuine enquiry about what Grace was dealing with tonight. Just prior to Lola commencing, Wesley, who hadn’t recovered or responded in the seventy-two hours since the bombing of the nightclub, had undergone his second set of neurological function tests and been declared brain-dead.
It was a tragic end to such a young life and had raised the death toll from the bombing to thirty-five. The one glimmer of hope from the situation was Wesley’s parents, who had generously and selflessly consented for his organs to be donated.
And it was Grace’s job to co-ordinate everything. Which was a massive undertaking. Everything from ensuring all the correct tests were done and protocols followed, to liaising with other teams and hospitals involved with the recipients, to choreographing the harvesting that was going to occur in a few hours, to being there for Wesley’s family fell under Grace’s purview in this instance.
‘Are you okay?’ Lola pressed.
She knew how difficult these cases were to deal with. How talking with bewildered and bereaved people looking for answers you couldn’t give them was emotionally sapping. How being strong for them required superhuman levels of empathy and patience and gentleness and sometimes meant bearing the brunt of their grief and anger.
Just watching Wesley’s distraught family as they came and went from his bedside had taken a little piece of Lola’s heart. It was simply heartbreaking to watch and there wasn’t one nurse on the unit tonight who wasn’t affected by it.
Grace grimaced. ‘I’m okay.’
A silent moment passed between them. An acknowledgment that the situation sucked, that Wesley’s death was a tragedy about to spawn a lot of happy endings for people staring down the barrels of their own tragedies.
Organ transplantation was truly a double-edged sword.
Lola stripped her gloves off. ‘Everything sorted now?’
Grace gave a half-laugh that told Lola she wasn’t getting home to Marcus any time soon. ‘Things are coming together,’ she said, obviously downplaying how much still had to be put in place.
It didn’t fool Lola an iota.
‘But I do have some good news.’ She tipped her head to the side to indicate Lola should meet her at the bottom of the bed.
Lola removed her protective eyewear and washed her hands at the nearby basin before joining her friend at the computer station at the end of Emma’s bed. ‘I thought you might like to be the first to know,’ Grace said, her voice low. ‘Emma’s a match for Wesley’s heart.’
Lola stared at Grace incredulously for a moment. The possibility had been in the back of her mind but she’d dismissed it as being highly unlikely. Lola had seen it once before a few years back when the donor and a recipient had been on the unit together but it wasn’t common.
‘Really?’
Grace beamed. ‘Really. They’re ringing Emma’s parents now.’
Lola’s heart just about grew wings and lifted out of her chest. It was a moment of indescribable joy. Emma was getting a new heart. The backs of Lola’s eyes pricked with moisture and her arms broke out in goose-bumps.
‘That’s...wonderful news.’
Grace nodded. ‘Right? It’s nice in this job when you get to give happy news.’
Lola gave her friend a hug because she was overjoyed but also because Grace probably needed it after all she’d been dealing with. Of course, it didn’t take long for the logistics to dawn. To know that her night was suddenly going to get a lot busier, following all the pre-donation protocols and getting Emma ready for the operating theatre.
But the realisation that a usually anonymous process might not stay that way dawned the heaviest.
The truth of the matter was that families of ICU patients talked to each other. The unit had a very comfortable, well-equipped relatives’ room, where people hung out. And talked. They talked about their loved ones—about the ups and downs, about the good days and the bad days, about the improvements and the setbacks.
Often they became very close, particularly in long-term cases like Emma’s.
But donation was supposed to be anonymous. In most cases, donor families never met recipients. Usually about six weeks after the patient had died and their organs had been transplanted, the donor family was written to and given some basic information about the recipients in very generic detail.
Like, the right kidney went to a fifty-eight-year-old male who had been on the waiting list for ten years. Or the left lobe of the liver went to an eighteen-month-old baby girl and the remaining lobes were transplanted into to a thirty-one-year-old father of three.
But never names. Identities were always kept confidential. The whole process was ruled by a protocol of ethics and anonymity was strictly adhered to. It was too potentially fraught otherwise for recipients if donor families knew their names and where they lived. Also fraught for donor families.
If a recipient died due to complications after transplant—which did happen—what extra burden of grief could that put on already fragile families?
Organ donation was the ultimate altruistic gift and the lynchpin of that was anonymity.
Except now there were two families in the relatives’ room—one whose son was brain-dead and about to have his organs harvested and the other whose daughter was about to get a heart transplant.
It wasn’t going to take great powers of deduction to figure out the link.
> ‘Have Wesley’s family been interacting much with Emma’s family?’ Lola asked.
‘Apparently not. They’re still in that numbed, shocked stage and have kept to themselves. And Emma’s family are down the coast for the night at some family thing so hopefully Wesley will be gone from the unit by the time Emma’s family arrives back.’
‘Fingers crossed we’ll get lucky and neither will figure it out.’ The other time it had happened, they’d managed to maintain the anonymity of the process. It had been touch and go for a moment but it had all worked out in the end. ‘Are they going to use the Reflections Suite?’
Reflections was a self-contained unit two floors up that families of deceased patients could use to spend time saying goodbye to their loved ones, in private, before they were taken to the morgue. It was roomy with comfy chairs and couches and a kitchenette with a fridge. They were able to take all the time they needed to grieve as a family and be together in their loss.
Grace nodded. ‘Yes. I’ll go up with Wesley to the suite after the operation is finished and sit with the family for a bit if they want.’
Lola nodded. Grace was going to have a long, emotionally challenging night. ‘Isn’t that what the on-call social worker is for?’
‘He’ll be available to them too. But it’s me they’ve been dealing with through this process so...’ Grace shrugged. ‘I want them to have some continuity and be able to answer any lingering questions they might have.’
‘Yeah.’ Lola nodded.
Caring for ICU patients meant caring for their families as well. And continuity, especially in acute situations, made everything much easier for grieving families.
Grace’s pager went off and she pulled it off her belt, reading the message quickly. ‘That’s the Adelaide co-ordinator. Gotta go.’
