Lily's Scandal

by Marion Lennox

‘Just say leeches are needed urgently,’ she told the nurse. There was no need to say the agency temp had ordered them. ‘Be it on my head if they’re not.’

  And it would be her head, too, she thought. Leeches were kept in only a few medical facilities around the country. Her order might well involve helicopter, urgency, cost.

  So sack me, she thought grimly, and went back to what she was doing. Elaine, the senior scrub nurse, needed to back off a little; there was only so long that she could hold the suction tube steady, that her fingers would do as she bid.

  Luke’s fingers didn’t have a choice, they had to keep going.

  ‘Lily, move in,’ Luke growled, and he’d sensed it too, that the older nurse was faltering.

  She moved in and kept on going.

  Two hours later her decision was vindicated. The flap of skin was finally closed around the nostril and left lip. Luke was working under the little boy’s eyelid but he rechecked the lip and swore.

  ‘The blood’s coagulating,’ he said. ‘I need drainage. Hell, I didn’t think we’d get this far.’

  ‘We have leeches on hand if you can use them,’ she said diffidently, and the nurse in the background was already unfastening the canister.

  ‘How the … ?’ Luke was momentarily distracted. ‘Did Dr Lockheart order these?’

  ‘Lily did,’ the junior said, and grinned, the atmosphere in the theatre lightening as the outlook improved. ‘She’s not bad for an agency temp, is she?’

  ‘Not bad at all,’ Luke said, and caught Lily’s gaze and held, just for a moment, a fleeting second, before he went back to work.

  Lily went back to work, too, but she was flushing under her mask.

  Not bad at all.

  His glance had unnerved her.

  Luke Williams was a womanising surgeon, she told herself. She was here as a temporary nurse, knowing no one, wanting to know no one.

  But his gaze …

  It did something to her insides. Twisted …

  She didn’t have time for anything to twist.

  Work. Anonymity. Just do what comes next.

  At five in the morning she was totally drained.

  ‘Go home,’ Dr Lockheart told her. ‘We’ve thrown you in at the deep end tonight. I know you’re not off duty until six but no one’s expecting anything more of you now.

  ‘And if you’d like to change agency nursing for permanent nursing at the Harbour, you’d be very, very welcome,’ Elaine said warmly. ‘Dr Williams is already asking that you be made a permanent member of the plastics team.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a permanent member of anything,’ she said wearily, and went to change and fetch her gear from her locker.

  Home.

  Problem. She didn’t actually have a home. Not until ten o’clock.

  She’d arrived in Sydney yesterday, fresh from her mother’s dramas, wanting only to escape.

  Her mother was, even by Lily’s dutiful daughter standards, an impossible woman. She drifted from drama to drama, and the small town they lived in had labelled her as trash, for good reason. She wasn’t trash, Lily thought. She was … needy. She needed men. And in between needing men, she needed Lily.

  This last fling, though, had pushed the townspeople to the limit. It had pushed Lily to the limit. Two days ago—had it really been only two days ago?—the wife of the local vicar, a woman who was also the head of the hospital board, had stormed into Lighthouse Cove hospital and slapped her. As if her mother’s actions were Lily’s fault.

  ‘Get your mother away from my husband. You and your mother … She’s a slut and you’re no better. She needs a leash! You think you can be a respectable nurse in this town while your mother acts as the town’s whore?’ She’d slapped Lily again. A couple of patients’ relatives had had to pull her away and she’d collapsed in shock and in fury. Lily had caught her as she’d fallen, stopped her from hurting herself, but there had been no gratitude. No softening of the vitriol.

  Why would there be?

  ‘Get out of my sight,’ the woman had hissed as she’d recovered. ‘Get out of our hospital. Get out of our town.’

  She’d had no right to sack her. It was her mother who’d played the scarlet woman, not her.

  But in a tiny town distinctions blurred.

  She’d sat in the nurses’ station with her stomach cramping, feeling sick, knowing she couldn’t live with this stress a moment longer. She was being unfairly tarred with the same brush as her mother, and she knew she didn’t deserve it. But it was a small town and so far she’d always stuck up for her mother … that couldn’t go on.

  On the way home she’d stopped to buy groceries. Walking into the general store had been a nightmare. Shocked, judgmental faces had been everywhere.

  The Ellis women.

  Then she’d tried to use her card to pay for groceries. ‘Declined: Limit exceeded.’

  Her mother had been using her credit card?

  Speechless, she’d gone home and there was the vicar, pudgy, weak and shamefaced, but totally besotted with her mother.

  ‘Make yourself scarce for a while, there’s a good girl,’ her mother had said. ‘We need time to ourselves. It’ll be okay, dear,’ she’d cooed as Lily had tried to figure what to do, what to say. ‘We were going to go to Paris but we’ve run out of money. It doesn’t matter. If Harold can just borrow a little bit more from his relatives we’ll leave. We’re in love and everyone just needs time to accept it.’

  Enough. What had followed had been the world’s fastest pack. She’d driven eight hundred and fifty miles from Adelaide to Sydney. A seventeen-hour drive, her stomach cramping all the way. She’d had cat naps at the side of the road, or she’d tried to, but sleep had refused to come. She’d arrived in Sydney late in the afternoon, trying to figure how she could survive on what little money she had.

  She’d walked into the nursing agency before it had closed and they’d fallen on her neck.

  ‘All your documents and references are in order. There’s a job tonight, if you’re available. Sydney Harbour Hospital is desperate.’

  She’d found a cheap boarding house, dumped her luggage and booked accommodation for the next night. That was tonight, she thought, glancing at her watch. She could have the room from ten.

  But it was five hours until ten o’clock, and she was so tired she was asleep on her feet.

  Her stomach hurt.

  She stared at her locker, trying to make her mind think. The thought of finding an all-hours café until then made her feel ill. There’d be an on-call room somewhere for medical staff, she thought. Probably there’d be a few. There’d be rooms for obstetricians waiting for babies. Rooms for surgeons waiting for their turn in complex multi-specialist procedures.

  Rooms to sleep?

  Just for a couple of hours, she thought. Just until it was a reasonable time to find breakfast and book into her boarding house.

  Just for now.

  He had a whole hour of thinking he’d done it right. One lousy hour and then the phone went off beside his bed.

  ‘Problem.’ It was Finn. Of course it was Finn—when did the man ever sleep?

  When did Finn ever wake him when it wasn’t a full-blown emergency? Luke was hauling his pants on before Finn’s next words.

  ‘It’s Jessie,’ Finn snapped. ‘It seems he has a congenital heart problem. No one thought to tell us, not that it would have made a difference to what you did anyway. His heart’s failing. You want to come in or you want me to deal?’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  She woke and he was right beside her. Luke Williams, plastic surgeon. He looked like he’d just seen death.

  The on-call room was tiny, one big squishy settee, a television, a coffee table with ancient magazines and nothing else. She’d curled into a corner of the couch and fallen asleep. Until now.

  The man beside her wasn’t seeing her. He was staring at the blank television screen, gaze unfocused.

  She’d never seen a man look so bleak.
<
br />   ‘What’s wrong?’ she breathed, and touched his arm.

  He flinched.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was harsh. Breaking. It was emotion that had woken her, she thought. Raw grief, filling the room like a tangible thing.

  ‘I don’t get into my boarding house until ten,’ she told him. ‘So I’m camped out, waiting. But what is it? Jessie?’

  ‘He died,’ he said, and all the bleakness in the world was in those two words. ‘Cardiac arrest. He had a congenital heart problem and no one thought to tell us. As if we had time to look for records. The admission officer didn’t even read the form, she was too upset. We patched him up, we made him look like he might even be okay, and all the time his heart was like a time bomb.’

  ‘There was no choice,’ she managed, appalled.

  ‘There was a choice. If I’d known … I could have taken the flap off, thought about grafts later, concentrated on getting his heart stable first.’

  She took a deep breath. What to say?

  This man’s anguish was raw and real.

  A congenital heart problem …

  If Luke had known he might well have decided not to try and save his face, but without that immediate operation Jess would have been left with a lifetime of skin grafts. With a face that wasn’t his.

  ‘What sort of life would he have led?’ she whispered.

  ‘A life,’ he said flatly. ‘Any life. I can’t bear …’

  And she couldn’t bear it either. She took his hands and tugged him around to face her.

  There was more to this than a child dying, she thought. This man must have lost patients before. He couldn’t react like this to all of them. There was some past tragedy here that was being tapped into, she guessed. She had no idea what it was; but she sensed his pain was well nigh unbearable.

  ‘I killed him,’ he said, and for some reason she wasn’t sure he was talking about Jessie.

  ‘The dog killed him,’ she said, trying to sound prosaic. ‘You tried to save him.’

  ‘I should have—’

  ‘No. Don’t do this.’

  He shuddered, and it was a raw and dreadful grief that took over his whole body.

  Enough. She pulled him into her arms and held him. And held and held. She simply held him while the shudders racked his body, over and over.

  This couldn’t just be about this child, she thought.

  Something had broken him.

  He was holding her as well now. Simply holding. Taking strength from her. Taking comfort, and giving it back.

  A man and a woman, both in limbo.

  The events of the past two days had left Lily gutted. Her mother … The vicar…. Losing her job. The judgement of the town.

  The Ellis women.

  She held to comfort, but he was holding her as well and she needed it.

  Jessie’s death. The trauma of finding what her mother had done, planned to do. Forty-eight hours with little sleep.

  If she could give comfort …

  If this was what they both needed …

  He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be holding this woman.

  But he wasn’t thinking of now. He was thinking of Jessie, four years old and red-headed.

  The past was back with him. Four years ago, walking into their apartment after surgery that had lasted for fourteen hours. Exhausted but jubilant. Calling out to Hannah. ‘I’m home. It’s over and she’ll live. Hannah …’

  Walking into the bedroom

  Ectopic pregnancy, the autopsy said. Fourteen weeks pregnant.

  By her side, a letter to her mother in Canada.

  ‘Tonight I’m finally telling Luke I’m pregnant. I’ve been waiting and waiting—I thought a lovely romantic dinner, but there’s no chance. He’s been so busy it’s driving me crazy but now he’ll have to make time for us. I want a son. I’m hoping he’ll be red-headed like me. I want to call him Jessie.’

  Tonight, four years later, he hadn’t been able to save a red-headed boy called Jessie.

  The woman in his arms was holding him. She smelled clean, washed, anonymous, clinical.

  But more. The scent of faded roses was drifting through, like some afterthought of a lovely perfume. The silken threads of her fair hair were brushing his face.

  She was an agency nurse. She didn’t know him.

  She was warm and real and alive.

  He’d come in here to sit, to try and come to terms with what had happened. He had two hours before his morning list started. He needed to get himself under control

  Jessie.

  Hannah.

  They were nothing to do with the woman who was holding him.

  She shuddered and he thought, She’s as shocked as I am. He tugged away a little and searched her face.

  Her sky-blue eyes were rimmed with shadows. Her shock mirrored his. She looked like she, too, was in the midst of a nightmare.

  ‘Lily …’ It was the first time he’d used her name and it felt like … a question?

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just hold me. Please.’ And she tugged him back to her.

  He should back away.

  He didn’t. He couldn’t. He simply held. And held and held.

  A man and a woman—with a need surfacing between them as primeval as time itself.

  Stupid. Crazy. Wanton?

  It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.

  His hands were slipping under her blouse, feeling the warmth of her, the heat. He needed her heat.

  Her breasts were moulding to his chest. Skin was meeting skin, and conscious will was slipping. Their bodies were meeting, in a desperate, primitive search for …

  What?

  For life?

  That was a crazy idea. He was crazy.

  It didn’t matter.

  For now, for this moment, he was kissing her, holding her, wanting her, with a desperation that was so deep, so real that nothing could interfere.

  They were only kissing. They were only holding. They were only touching.

  No. This was much, much more. This was a man and a woman come together in mutual need, giving, taking …

  Holding desperately to life.

  ‘Luke …’

  ‘Just hold me,’ he ordered, and she did, she did. She held.

  Fire to fire. Need to need.

  They held—and two minutes later a junior nurse looking for something to read in her coffee break slipped into the room and saw two entwined bodies.

  One passionate embrace.

  The girl stared, dumbfounded, as she realised who it was. The solitary Luke Williams. Head of Plastic Surgery. A man who walked alone.

  Kissing an agency nurse. Slipping his hands under her blouse.

  And, oh, that kiss …

  She gasped in disbelief and backed out, her magazine forgotten.

  Who needed magazines when there was much better fodder right through the door? Boy, was this juicy titbit about to fly around the hospital.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LILY had signed up for four weeks at Sydney Harbour. That was approximately three weeks and six days too long. She knew it the moment she turned up for duty that night. Gossip reached her the moment she crossed the threshold.

  From the lady in the florist shop on the ground floor, to the orderlies, to the nurses and interns working in Emergency where she’d been rostered, it seemed they all knew what had happened that morning.

  They didn’t know her—many of them hadn’t even been working last night—but they knew Luke Williams and it seemed the gossip machine was in overdrive.

  A mutual offering of comfort had turned to something stronger, and the hospital gossip machine had flamed the story to the next level. Even before she’d walked out this morning she’d realised the news was flying all over the hospital—that she and Luke Williams had indulged in wild sex in the on-call room.

  It had taken sheer willpower to walk back into the Harbour tonight—plus the fact that, thanks to her mother, she was broke. She’d agreed to
four weeks and if she didn’t fulfil her contract she’d have to find another agency. This was the only agency that dealt with acute-care hospitals and she didn’t have the money to leave Sydney.

  The alternative was to go back home to her mother. And the vicar.

  No way.

  So get over it, she told herself. She’d been caught in a clinch with the head of plastic surgery. So what? Who cared what these people talked about? In four weeks she could pick up her pay and move on.

  How far did she have to run to escape gossip?

  For ever if she brought it with her, she told herself, keeping her chin deliberately high. What had she been thinking, letting Luke hold her as he had? She was just like her mother.

  Um … no. Her mother would never do what she’d done. Her mother would now be declaring to the world that she was in love, and she’d be destroying anything and anyone she needed in order to get what she wanted. Her mother would get her heart broken and launch herself into suicidal depression when it was over.

  Lily had simply made one mistake. She’d been emotionally shattered and she’d fallen into the arms of someone who was equally shattered.

  There was no need for everyone to look at her sideways.

  They did anyway.

  ‘Wow.’ Elaine, a woman who’d looked intimidating and severe last night, relaxed enough to greet her with laughter as she appeared at the nurses’ station. ‘Who’s on your list tonight?’ Then at Lily’s expression her smile softened; becoming friendly. ‘Don’t look like that. Lots of women in this place would offer to comfort Luke Williams any way they know how. That man is a walking suit of armour. I don’t know how you managed it but his armour was well and truly pierced last night, and thank heaven for it. Maybe now he can move on.’

  ‘Move on?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Obviously things were quiet right now, because the senior nurse was ready to talk. ‘Luke’s wife died four years ago. She was gorgeous, a redhead with a temper to match. She had an ectopic pregnancy, went into septic shock and died, and Luke didn’t even know she was pregnant. Since then it’s been like he’s built the Great Wall of China around himself. No one gets near. And then you did.’

  ‘I don’t usually …’ she managed.