by Fiona Lowe
It’s the bowels of the hospital. There are all sorts of noises down here. Just keep walking.
She wished she’d counted steps with Gerry last week, but she’d stuck to him like glue, listening only to his reassuring voice. She continued edging along the wall until she felt the turn of the corridor pressing into her back. You’re halfway. Knowing she was closer was enough to speed up her feet.
Click. Click. Tap. Tap. Tap. The sounds echoed around her like the boom of a cannon.
Her feet froze. Her breath stalled. It’s probably the furnace. Or pipes.
God, she hated this. She was one exam away from being a fully qualified surgeon. She duelled with death on behalf of her patients every single day, winning more often than not. Facing down blood, guts and gore didn’t faze her at all so she absolutely loathed it that the dark could render her mute and terrified.
You’re close to the lights. Keep going.
Ten, nine, eight, seven … She silently counted backwards in her head as she scuttled sideways like a crab. Finally, she felt the bank of switches digging sharply into her spine. Yes! She swung around, pushed her eight fingers against the plastic and started pressing switches.
Bright, white light flickered and then filled the space with wondrously welcome light and Hayley rested her forehead against the cool wall in relief. She gulped in a couple of steadying breaths and just as her pulse stared to slow, she heard a click. She swung around and her scream echoed back to her.
‘Are you hurt?’ A tall man in black jeans, a black merino sweater and a black moleskin jacket turned from three metres away, holding something in his hand that she couldn’t quite make out.
Her heart jumped in her chest and then pounded even harder, making her head spin, but somewhere buried in her fear a shot of indignation surged. ‘No, I’m not bloody hurt, but you scared the living daylights out of me.’
‘Why?’ The question sounded surprised and he stared at her, but he didn’t move to close the gap between them.
She threw her arms out as if the answer was self-evident. ‘I didn’t know you were here!’
His mouth twitched, but she didn’t know if it was the start of a smile or the extension of a grimace. ‘I’ve known you were here for the past few minutes.’
She blinked. ‘How? It was pitch-black until a moment ago.’
His broad shoulders rose slightly and his empty hand flexed by his side. ‘I heard the ping of the lift.’
‘But that’s in the other corridor and I might have gone in the opposite direction.’
‘True, but you didn’t. I could also smell you.’
Her mouth fell open at the matter-of-fact words and she couldn’t stop herself from raising one shoulder as she took a quick sniff of her armpit before looking back at him. His gaze hadn’t shifted and offence poured through her. ‘It’s been a long night saving lives so sue me if I don’t smell squeaky clean and fresh.’
‘I didn’t say it was offensive.’
Something about the way the deep timbre of his voice caressed the words should have reassured her and made her smile, but the fact he was still staring at her was utterly disconcerting. He hadn’t made any move towards her, for which she was grateful, even though she could see a hospital ID lanyard hanging out of his pocket. With his black clothes, black hair, bladed cheekbones, a slightly crooked nose and a delicious cleft in his stubble-covered chin, he cut a striking image against the white of the walls. Striking and slightly unnerving. He wasn’t a fatherly figure like Gerry the maintenance man in his overalls, neither did he have the easygoing manner of Theo. Neither of those men ever put her on edge.
Even so, despite her thread of anxiety, she would have had to be blind not to recognise he was handsome in a rugged, rough-edged kind of a way, and that was part of her unease. She had the feeling that his clothes were just a veneer of gentrification. Remove them and a raw energy would be unleashed that would sweep up everything in its path.
An unbidden image of him naked exploded in her mind, stirring a prickle of sensation deep down inside her. It wasn’t fear and that scared her even more.
‘Scent aside …’ he tilted his head ‘… which, by the way, I believe is Jenson’s Floral Fantasy.’
How did he know that? She frantically glanced around, looking for a camera or any sign that this was some sort of a set-up, a joke being played on her because she was a new staff member, but she couldn’t see anything. She turned back to him and his tight expression suddenly faded, replaced by a smile that crawled across his face, streaking up through jet stubble and crinkling the edges of his eyes. It lit up his aura of darkness and she wondered why she’d ever been scared of him.
His rich laugh had a bitter edge. ‘I would need to be deaf not to hear the argument you were having with your feet.’
He knows you were scared.
Stung into speech, she tried for her most cutting tone—the one she knew put over-confident medical students in their place. ‘I was not arguing with my feet.’
‘Is that so? What else would you call that stop-start shuffle you were doing?’
‘It was dark and I couldn’t see.’
‘Tell me about it.’
The harshness of his words crashed over her and still he kept staring. It was as if he could see not only her fear of the dark but so many other things that she kept hidden. His uncanny detective skills left her feeling vulnerable and exposed. She hated that and it harnessed her anger. ‘Will you stop staring at me?’
He flinched and turned forty-five degrees. ‘I apologise.’
The tension in his body was so taut she could have bounced a ball off it and his broad shoulders seemed to slice into the surrounding air. As ridiculous as it seemed, she got the impression she’d just insulted him. ‘I’m sorry, that was rude. It’s just I’m not used to meeting anyone down here at this time of the day and, as I said before, I got a fright.’
He didn’t look at her. ‘Please be assured I have no plans to rape, assault or hurt you in any way.’
The harsh edge of his voice did little to reassure her. She’d never met anyone who spoke so directly and without using the cover of social norms. ‘I guess I’ll take that in the spirit it’s intended, then.’
‘You do that.’ A silence expanded between them and was only broken by his long sigh. ‘The only reason I’m in this corridor is because it’s the mirror image of every other corridor in this wing of The Harbour. If you were on level one, what would be on your left?’
She shook her head as if that might change his question. ‘Is this some sort of test?’
‘Something like that.’
His muttered reply didn’t ease her confusion. ‘Um, we’re underneath the theatre suite.’
‘We’re standing directly under theatre one.’ He almost spat the words at her.
She’d had enough. ‘Look, Mr um …?’
‘Jordan.’
‘Okay, Jordan, I’ve been at The Harbour for a month, but you know this, right? You’re in on some crazy initiation joke at my expense.’
He turned back to face her, his cheeks suddenly sharper. ‘Believe me, none of this is a joke, Ms …?’
This was ridiculous. Everything about this encounter held an edge of craziness, including her reaction to him, which lurched from annoyance at his take-no-prisoners attitude to mini-zips of unwanted attraction. She closed the gap between them and extended her hand in her best professional manner. ‘Grey. Hayley Grey. Surgical registrar.’
Sea-green eyes—the electric colour of the clear waters that surrounded a coral cay—bored into her, making her heart hiccough, but his hand didn’t rise to meet hers. She dropped her gaze to his right hand and now she was closer she could see it gripped what looked like black sticks. With a jolt and a tiny but audible gasp, she realised it was an articulated cane.
Her cheeks burned hot. Oh, God, she’d just accused a blind man of staring at her.
Before she could speak, the doors to the car park opened and a young man wearing e
lastic-sided boots, faded jeans and a hoodie crossed the threshold and stood just inside the doors.
Jordan immediately turned toward the sound of cowboy heels on lino. ‘Jared?’
‘Yeah.’ The young man grinned and shot Hayley an appreciative look that started at her head and lingered on her breasts.
Jordan turned back and this time his blind stare hit her shoulder. ‘Now you have light, can I assume you’re able to find your way to the car park alone?’
His tone managed to combine a minute hint of concern with a dollop of superciliousness and it undid any good intentions she had of apologising for her massive faux pas. Her chin shot up. ‘I wouldn’t dream of holding you up.’
‘Goodbye, then, Hayley Grey.’ He flicked out his cane, clicked his tongue and started walking.
She watched his retreating back and slow and deliberate stride as the clicks echoed back to him, telling him where the walls were.
As he approached the door he said, ‘You’re late, Jared.’
The young man jangled the keys in his hand. ‘Sorry, Tom.’
Hayley froze. Tom? She’d thought his first name was Jordan.
Mr Jordan. Tom Jordan.
The conversation about the mysterious disappearance of The Harbour’s favourite neurosurgeon came back to her in a rush.
No way.
It had to be a coincidence. Both names were common. There’d have to be a thousand Thomas Jordans living and working in Sydney. But as much as she tried to dismiss the thought, the Tom Jordan she’d just met knew the hospital intimately. Still, perhaps one of those other thousand Tom Jordans worked at the hospital too. He could easily be an I.T guy.
We’re standing directly under theatre one.
She might not know the complete layout of The Harbour, but she knew the theatre suite. Theatre one was the neurosurgery theatre, but the man walking away from her was blind. It was like trying to connect mismatching bits of a puzzle.
The man’s gone to ground and doesn’t want to be found.
And just like that all her tangled thoughts smoothed out and Hayley swallowed hard. She’d just met the infamous missing neurosurgeon, Tom Jordan, and he had danger written all over him.
CHAPTER TWO
TOM worked hard not to say anything to Jared about his driving as the car dodged and wove through the increasing rush-hour traffic. Tom knew this route from the hospital to his apartment as intimately as he knew the inside of a brain. In the past he’d walked it, cycled it and driven it, but he’d never been chauffeured. Now that happened all the time.
Being a passenger in a car had never been easy for him, even before he’d lost his sight. Whenever he’d got into a car he’d had an overwhelming itch to drive. Perhaps it was connected with the fact he’d grown up using public transport because his mother couldn’t afford a car. Whatever the reason, he remembered the moment at sixteen, after a conversation with Mick and Carol, when he’d decided that one day he would own his own car. From his first wreck of a car at twenty, which he’d kept going with spare parts, to the Ferrari that Jared was driving now, he’d always been the one with his hands on the wheel, feeling the car’s grip on the road and loving the thrum of the engine as it purred through the gear changes.
Tom stared out the side window even though he couldn’t make out much more than shadows. ‘Give cyclists a good metre.’
‘Doing it. So, did you crash into anything this morning?’
Tom could imagine the cheeky grin on Jared’s face—the one he always heard in the young man’s voice whenever he’d given him unnecessary instructions. ‘No, I didn’t crash into any walls.’
‘What about that woman you were talking to?’
Hayley Grey. A woman whose smoky voice could change in a moment from the trembling vibrato of fear to the steel of ‘don’t mess with me’. ‘I didn’t crash into her.’
‘She looked pretty ticked off with you just as you left.’
‘Did she?’ He already knew she had been ticked off by his ill-mannered offer—an offer generated by the anger that had blazed through him the moment he’d heard her realisation that he was blind. He refused to allow anyone to pity him. Not even a woman whose voice reminded him of soul music.
Jared had just given him a perfect opportunity to find out more about her. Making the question sound casual, he asked, ‘How exactly did she look?’
‘Stacked. She’s got awesome breasts.’
Tom laughed, remembering the gauche version of himself at the same age. ‘You need to look at women’s faces, Jared, or they’re going to punch you.’
‘I did start with her face, Tom, just like you taught me, but come on, we’re guys, and I thought you’d want to know the important stuff first.’
And even though Jared was only twenty, he was right. When Tom had had his sight, he’d always appreciated the beautiful vision of full and heavy breasts. He suddenly pictured that deep, sensual voice with cleavage and swallowed hard. ‘Fair enough.’
If Jared heard the slight crack in Tom’s voice he didn’t mention it. ‘She’s tall for a chick, got long hair but it was tied back so I dunno if it’s curly or straight, and she’s kinda pretty if you like ‘em with brown hair and brown eyes.’
Knowing Jared’s predilection for brassy blondes, Tom instantly disregarded the ‘kinda’.
‘Her nose wasn’t big but it wasn’t small neither but her mouth …’ Jared slowed to turn.
A ripple of something akin to frustration washed through Tom as he waited for Jared to negotiate the complicated intersection he knew they’d arrived at. The feeling surprised him as much as the previous rush of heat. He hadn’t experienced anything like that since before the accident. Even then work had given him more of a rush than any woman ever had—not that he’d been a recluse. He’d had his fair share of brief liaisons, but he’d always ended them before a woman could mention the words, ‘the future’.
The car turned right, changed lanes and then took a sharp left turn. Tom’s seat belt held him hard against the seat as they took a steep descent toward the water and his apartment. He broke his code and said, ‘What about her mouth?’
‘Her mouth was wide. Like it was used to smiling, even though it wasn’t smiling at you.’
‘I gave her a fright.’ He wasn’t admitting to more than that.
He heard the crank of the massive basement garage door opening, and as Jared waited for it to rise, Tom assembled all the details he’d just been given, rolling them around in his mind, but all he got was a mess of body parts. It was a pointless exercise trying to ‘identikit’ a picture because all of it was from Jared’s perspective.
His gut clenched. He’d lost his job, his career and, damn it, now all he ever got was other people’s perspectives.
Stick with what you know.
His ears, nose and skin had become his eyes so he concentrated on what he’d ‘seen’. Hayley Grey was a contradiction in terms. Her fresh scent of sunshine and summer gardens said innocence and joy, but it was teamed with a voice that held such depth he felt sure it had the range to sing gut-wrenching blues driven by pain.
‘Tom, Carol rang from Fiji. She said, “Good luck with today, not that you’d need it.” I told her you’d call her back. She’s sort of like a mum, isn’t she?’
‘Sort of.’ He smiled as he thought of Carol working with kids in the villages, glad she’d actually respected his wishes and had not come rushing back to Sydney when he’d finally told her about the accident and his blindness. She’d be back in a few weeks, though.
Thinking about Carol’s message grounded him—centring him solidly where he needed to be: in the present. Reminding him he had far more important things to be thinking about than a surgical registrar. Just like before he’d lost his sight, work came ahead of women and now he had even more of a reason to stick to that modus operandi. Sure, he’d given the occasional lecture before he’d gone blind, but he wasn’t known for his lecturing style. No, he’d been known for a hell of a lot more.
> What was the saying? ‘Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.’ Bitterness surged. Lecturing was hardly going to set the world on fire. The accident had stolen so much from him and was now forcing him to do something that didn’t come naturally, but until he worked out if he was staying in medicine or not, it was all that was open to him. He couldn’t fail. He wouldn’t allow that to happen, especially not in front of his previous colleagues.
He wasn’t afraid of hard work—hell, he’d been working hard since he was fourteen and Mike had challenged him to improve at school so he could stay on the football team. His goals had changed, but his way of achieving them had not—one hundred per cent focus on the job at hand with no distractions from any other quarter. This morning’s trip to SHH had been all about navigating his way around the hospital in preparation for his first lecture. He was determined to show everyone at The Harbour that although his domain had changed and had been radically curtailed, he was still in charge and in control, exactly as he’d been two years ago.
Jared was his sole concession in acknowledging that with driving he required assistance. The fact that Jared had turned up in Perth and refused to leave had contributed to the decision.
‘I’ve got two lectures. One at one p.m. and the other at six.’ Tom hoped he’d hidden his anxiety about the lectures, which had been rising slowly over the last two days. ‘I’ll need you to set up the computer for me both times.’
He heard Jared’s hesitation and his concerns rose another notch. ‘Is there a problem with that?’
‘You know I’d do anything for you, Tom.’
And he did. He’d saved Jared’s life and now Jared was making his life more tolerable.
‘I’ve got a chemistry test at six and I asked the teacher if I could sit it with the full-time students, but that’s the same time as your lecture.’
