The Australian's Desire (Mills & Boon By Request)

by Marion Lennox, Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy

  The theatres were windowless but Charles wasn’t giving them over for ward use.

  ‘Even if there are no injuries from this bus crash, if this turns into a full-blown cyclone we’ll have trauma enough. I want additional linen, stores and pharmacy supplies in Emergency, Intensive Care and both theatres. Move.’

  A big storeroom at the back of the doctors’ house was used for back-up medical supplies. Charles wanted everything brought into the main building. Everything.

  ‘I don’t want to run out of bandages and not be able to get at more,’ he growled. There were six elderly people in the nursing-home section of the hospital. Charles had them sorting and stacking as if they were forty instead of ninety, promising them they could rest at the civic hall when they’d finished.

  Amazingly they rose to the occasion. Everyone did. Including Alistair. Georgie was supervising storage, making sure she knew where everything was so it could be easily reached. Alistair was one of those doing the ferrying of gear from the doctors’ house. He was using a car to travel the short distance but even so he was soaked to the skin. Every time she saw him his clothes were soggier. His beautiful suit would be ruined.

  They passed each other without speaking. There was no time for speaking. The threat was rising with every howl of the wind.

  She couldn’t locate the oxygen cylinders. Where were they? The normal storeroom was now a ward, housing Lizzie and her four children. Megan’s cot had been wheeled in there as well, and Georgie paused in her search to check on her little patient.

  She was still sleeping but she was looking great. A quick check on the notes at the end of the cot indicated she’d woken up and had a drink and smiled at her mother. Fantastic. Thanks to Alistair.

  But there were problems. Lizzie was sitting bolt upright in bed, looking terrified. ‘Georgie, is the jail secure?’

  ‘You’re worried about Smiley?’

  ‘I don’t want him to be killed,’ Lizzie muttered, and Georgie abandoned her task and crossed to the bed to hug her. She included Davy and Dottie in her hug.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ she said, understanding. ‘Smiley’s the kids’ dad. He’s been your husband. Of course you’re worried.’

  ‘I don’t hate him enough to want him killed.’

  ‘We checked.’ Help was suddenly there from an unexpected source. Alistair was standing in the doorway, dripping wetly onto the linoleum. ‘Charles has had people contact everyone this side of the creek, letting them know what’s happening, making sure they’re safe. Harry told him the holding cell’s a prefabricated makeshift building and he’s worried about it. So he’s let Smiley out for the duration. Harry has the feeling Smiley thinks he might skip town, but he’s not too worried—there’s no way out of here until this is over.’

  ‘But—’ Lizzie said, and Georgie answered her fears.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told her. ‘Look where we put you. Smiley would have to walk through two wards to reach you, and the whole town knows his story. He’ll be too busy saving his own skin to worry you now.’

  ‘Do you care about him?’ Alistair asked, and Lizzie flashed him a look of astonishment.

  ‘Of course I care. He’s the kids’ father.’

  ‘And you don’t want to waste your time worrying about him,’ Georgie said, understanding the young woman’s fear. ‘Which you would if you knew he was in danger. So now you can put him aside.’

  ‘So where’s your Max?’ Lizzie asked.

  Georgie froze. She’d been watching Alistair in the doorway. Looking at the way his shirt clung wetly to his chest. Just looking. But her thoughts were dragged sideways to her little brother.

  ‘One of the nurses said Max was in trouble,’ Lizzie said shyly. ‘It’s only … Davy got into a fight at school last year and Max stood up for him. I hate to think of him out there in this.’

  ‘He’s not out there.’

  ‘No, but the nurse said you didn’t know where he was.’

  ‘He’s with his father.’

  ‘And his father’s on the run? Oh, Georg …’

  ‘We do get ourselves into trouble,’ Georgie said, and gave her another hug. ‘Who needs men? What a shame Max and Davy and Thomas will grow into the species.’

  ‘They’ll be nice,’ Lizzie said stoutly. ‘My Davy and my Thomas will be nice, caring men. I won’t let Smiley turn them into thugs. And I bet your Max will be great, too.’

  ‘He will be,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Georg, where do you want the extra stretchers?’ Alistair asked, and if his voice sounded strained she was going to ignore it. Back to work.

  ‘In the corridors. We’ll stack them near the entrance so they can be grabbed easily by whoever needs them.’

  ‘You think it’s going to be big?’ Lizzie asked.

  Georgie shrugged. ‘I hope not. We should miss the brunt of it.’

  ‘But you think—’

  ‘I think we have to be prepared. Do you need help with the stretchers, Dr Carmichael?’

  ‘No.’ He looked at her for a long, hard moment. ‘I’m fine by myself.’

  He disappeared the way he’d come.

  ‘He’s sweet on you,’ Lizzie said, and Georgie felt herself change colour.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘It’s no matter whether he is or not,’ she snapped. ‘Like you, I always fall for losers. So if he’s falling for me, he’s a loser by definition.’

  And then the casualties from the bus came in.

  This was no minor accident. The driver was dead. The first grim-faced paramedics told them that, and told them also to expect more deaths and more life-threatening injuries.

  It seemed they had a major disaster on their hands before the cyclone even hit.

  The first ambulance brought in a woman with multiple fractures and major blood loss and an elderly man who was drifting in and out of consciousness and showed signs of deep shock. Query internal bleeding? X-rays, fast.

  X-Ray was in huge demand. Mitchell Caine, their radiologist, was supposedly on holidays, but his locum had been delayed by bad weather. Mitch had been dragged in that morning to assess Megan’s scans, and now he was back again.

  ‘I shouldn’t be doing this, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said as he worked his way through the queue of patients needing urgent assessment. ‘I’m so tired I’m not dependable. Just double-check any results I give you before you operate. If I say right leg, check I’m not talking about an arm.’

  But his X-rays and reports were solid and dependable. Nothing like a code black to make a man forget about holidays.

  Hell, this situation was impossible, Alistair thought. One overworked radiologist and no one else for three hundred miles?

  ‘No one’s going to sue here,’ Georgie told him as they worked on. ‘Everyone does what they have to do.’

  Which was why twenty minutes later Alistair, a neurologist, was in Theatre, trying to set a fractured leg well enough to stabilise blood supply to the foot. With Georgie, an obstetrician, backing him up.

  There was no time to question what they were doing. They just did it.

  With the blood flow established—Alistair had worked swiftly and efficiently and their patient could now wait safely until a full orthopaedic team was available to fix the leg properly—they returned to the receiving ward to more patients.

  The second ambulance was there now, and a third, and there was a battered four-wheel-drive pulling in behind it.

  There were patients everywhere, some walking wounded, suffering only bruising and lacerations, but others serious.

  For all the chaos, the place was working like a well-oiled machine. Maximum efficiency. Minimal panic. Charles had divided his workforce into teams, but the teams were fluid, doctors and nurses moving in and out of teams as an individual needed specific skills.

  Every medic in Croc Creek was on duty by now, including a nurse heavily pregnant with twins.

  ‘Don’t mind my bump,’ she said cheerfully as the
y worked around her. She was cleaning and stitching lacerations with skill. ‘Yeah, I’m ready to drop but I’ve told them to be sensible and stay aboard until this is over. Just hand me the stuff that can be done sitting down.’

  There was more than enough work to hand over.

  This was emergency medicine at its worst. Or at its best.

  ‘You know, if this had happened in my big teaching hospital back in the US, I doubt if we’d do it any better,’ Alistair muttered as they worked through more patients, and Georgie felt it was almost a pat on the back.

  For all of them, she said hastily to herself, but it didn’t stop a small glow …

  She was carefully fitting a collar to a man who’d been playing it hardy. ‘I’m fine, girl,’ he’d said. He’d come in sitting in the front of one of the cars but now he was white-faced and silent. Georgie had noted him sitting quietly in a corner and had moved in. Pain in the neck and shoulders. Query fracture? Collar and X-rays now, whether he wanted them or not.

  There was a flurry of activity at the door and Cal was striding through at the head of a stretcher. ‘Alistair, can we swap duties?’ he called across the room, and Georgie intercepted the silent message that crossed the room with his words.

  Uh-oh. Alistair was a neurosurgeon. If Cal wanted him, it’d be bad.

  It was.

  ‘Head injury,’ he said briefly. ‘We had to intubate and stabilise her before bringing her in. Mitch has already run her through X-Ray. His notes and slides are here. Georgie …’ She was near enough for him not to have to call her. ‘Can you assist here?’

  ‘Mr Crest needs X-rays.’

  ‘I’ll take that over,’ Charles called. He’d just finished a dressing and he wheeled over to take Georgie’s place. He glanced across at Cal’s patient and saw what they all saw. A laceration to the side of her face. Deeply unconscious. ‘Jill,’ he said to their chief nurse, ‘you work with this one, too. That’s all I can spare. Do your best.’

  ‘She’ll need you all if she’s to pull through,’ Cal said gravely. ‘The notes are there, guys.’

  Jill was already wheeling the trolley swiftly into a side examination cubicle where they could assess the patient in relative privacy. Alistair was working as the trolley moved, while Georgie skimmed through Mitch’s notes.

  The woman—young, blonde, casually dressed but neat and smart by the look of it—was limp on the trolley, lying in the unnaturally formal pose that told its own story. Her breathing was the forced, rasping sound of intubation. Such breathing always sounded threatening, Georgie thought as she read. As it should. It meant the patient wasn’t breathing on her own.

  ‘Show me the films,’ Alistair said.

  Jill flicked on the light on the wall and held them up.

  He winced.

  ‘We’re looking at interthalamic haemorrhage.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Georgie said grimly.

  ‘Glasgow scale?’

  ‘It was five half an hour ago,’ Georgie said, referring again to the notes. ‘But Cal has it now improving. It might have been initial shock that drove it so low.’

  ‘Either way, I want an EVD in now,’ Alistair said.

  An EVD. A line to drain bleeding into the brain to prevent build-up of pressure. It was in many ways a repeat of the operation he’d done that morning on Megan.

  But that morning they’d had six in theatre. Now …

  ‘Let’s find out if we have anyone else spare,’ Alistair said grimly, reading her thoughts. ‘But we move regardless. If pressure builds up any more, we’re looking at major brain damage. We may be too late already.’

  And in the end it was all down to Alistair, Jill and Georgie. In another life Jill had been a theatre sister in a teaching hospital that housed the major neurological centre for the state. She proved invaluable here. She had to be Jill of all trades. Surgical assistant. Charge theatre nurse. Junior. Everything else.

  Because, to her horror, Georgie had to give the anaesthetic.

  ‘You can do it with your eyes closed,’ Alistair told her.

  ‘Are you kidding? I can’t—’

  ‘We have three operations running consecutively,’ Alistair said bluntly. ‘You know that so let’s stop the objections and just do it.’

  So she did it, and she needn’t have worried. She’d done the basics of anaesthetics in medical training and she’d performed almost as many gynaecological operations in Croc Creek than she’d had hot dinners. Up until now she’d had an anaesthetist every time she’d operated, but she’d watched what they’d done and enough had soaked in to make this almost instinctive.

  But as well as that she had Alistair. She’d watched him work on Megan and his skill had stunned her. This was more of the same, and the woman under his hands had just as much chance of survival as if she’d been transported to a major neurological surgical team within minutes of the accident occurring.

  The response team out in the field had intubated the woman and administered drugs to reduce the swelling of the brain as it haemorrhaged. They’d saved her life, and now Alistair was doing his damnedest to save her intellect.

  He worked swiftly, referring to the CT scans again and again, making sure he was working on the source of the bleeding, his fingers moving with the instinctive speed of the highly skilled. The magnificently skilled. And every time Georgie faltered about anaesthetic dosage he snapped orders before her question was framed.

  And finally it was done. The woman was as safe as they could make her. As Alistair applied the dressings and the pressure eased, Georgie checked the woman’s pupils once again. There was a flicker of response.

  ‘Hooray,’ she said in a voice that was none too steady. ‘This might just work.’

  ‘We’ll keep her asleep for a while,’ Alistair said. ‘We’ll leave her in an induced coma. We’ll check with one of the anaesthetists before we do that, though. All I know is that I don’t want her feeling any pain. If she surfaces now, she’ll emerge to confusion and I’m not risking any movement.’

  ‘We still don’t know who she is.’

  ‘That can wait, too,’ Alistair growled, and he stepped back from the operating table and let Jill run a swab over his forehead. He’d been sweating while he’d worked. He’d done the work of a team of doctors, Georgie thought.

  He was …

  One of the nice ones, she told herself, feeling more and more … strange? Weird. Here she was in one of the biggest medical crises of her career and she was thinking about Alistair? And she wasn’t just thinking about him medically.

  ‘Nice work, Turner,’ Alistair said, and he gave her a grin across the table that might just as well have been a caress, the way it made her feel.

  She didn’t fall in love with nice, gentle medics, she told herself fiercely—desperately. They didn’t keep her happy.

  Even if they were Alistair.

  By the time they emerged, the chaos had faded to a more manageable rush. The anaesthetist had finished working with another compound fracture and was free to take over the care of their unknown patient.

  Georgie and Alistair were able to take a break.

  Maybe even to go home. The emergency room was clear.

  ‘Charles got everything sorted fast,’ Jill told them as they emerged. ‘This cyclone’s moved now so we’ll get hit directly. They’re saying by morning at latest. We’ll all be wanted again then so Charles is saying if you’re free now, go to bed. He wants as many of his staff rested as possible.’

  ‘That’s fine by us,’ Alistair said, and took Georgia’s arm and led her out into the corridor. She should resist. She should …

  But she was capable of doing no such thing. She let his hand stay exactly where it was.

  Nice.

  The entrance was crowded, but not with people. Here was the baggage from the bus—a muddled heap of sodden belongings. Alistair steered her past and she barely glanced down.

  But she did just glance. And saw …

  ‘Oh, God.’ It felt like her heart ha
d stopped beating.

  ‘What is it?’ Alistair asked, but she was already fumbling through the pile to reach what she’d seen.

  She wasn’t wrong. She lifted a bag gingerly from the pile, using one finger as if it might disintegrate before her eyes. It couldn’t be.

  ‘Max,’ she whispered, and suddenly Alistair was beside her, holding her under her arm, looking down at her face in alarm.

  ‘You’re white as a ghost. Hell, Georg, what’s happening? Are you ill? We shouldn’t have let you work.’

  ‘This isn’t about me,’ she whispered, and she had to fight to get her voice to work. ‘It’s Max. This is his backpack.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked incredulously.

  She’d pulled away, squatting on the floor, unzipping the bag with fingers that trembled. She peered in, then upended it entirely. A pair of faded pyjamas. A ripped windcheater with the name of a sports team on the back. Bulldogs. A couple of pairs of a child’s underclothes. One teddy bear. Ancient. Minus an eye and with stuffing coming out one knee.

  ‘Spike,’ Georgie said. She lifted the little bear into her arms. ‘This is Spike,’ she said, and her voice had steadied. It was strangely calm. She turned to Harry, who’d just approached. ‘Max was on that bus,’ she said. ‘His dad must have put him on in Mt Isa. Dammit, he should have rung. Harry, have you found any kids?’ Her face suddenly blenched even more than before and she staggered backward so she was sitting on the floor.

  ‘He’s not … he’s not one of the bodies, is he? Oh, God, please …’

  ‘He’s not,’ Harry said, kneeling on the floor and gripping her hands. ‘Georgie, I’ve been up there. We found no kids.’

  ‘His dad … Ron’s on the run. They might both …’

  ‘I know Ron, Georgie,’ Harry said. ‘He wasn’t on the bus.’

  ‘But he might be hiding. He might—’

  ‘Georg, any person in that bus would be far too battered to be thinking about hiding. And the wind’s terrific. Your dad might be afraid of jail but there’s worse things than jail, and staying out in the rainforest tonight would be one of them.’