It wasn’t anything with a strong perfume—she couldn’t ever remember him smelling of anything other than plain clean soap and water—and when it was underscored by the individual musky scent of his skin, it made her body react more strongly than Edward’s expensive colognes ever had.
His raised eyebrow reminded her that she hadn’t replied to his last comment but her brain was so overloaded with his proximity that she couldn’t even remember what he’d said.
Luckily, her blushes were spared by a head appearing around the door to announce the imminent arrival of several ambulances and she was left with the choice of scalding her mouth, trying to finish her coffee too fast, or abandoning the mug. She abandoned it with one last longing look and a mental note to try again soon. Her brain would soon slow down if she became dehydrated.
The brain is a perverse thing, she mused an hour later as she ducked a flailing fist as she tried to position an IV.
The patient on the table was suffering from multiple injuries from a car crash, yet, in spite of the fact he desperately needed their help, insisted in trying to fight them off.
Her own brain was no more logical.
Her first response to having to leave Zach to get to work on the unending influx of patients was relief. But, at the same time, her brain seemed to be silently counting the seconds until she could see him again, desperate to know whether her initial reaction to his presence had just been the result of shock.
It must be, she told herself reassuringly. It couldn’t be anything more than a knee-jerk reaction to meeting the man she’d been thinking about just last night. She’d got over that silly crush years ago.
Really? taunted the voice inside her head. Then why are your eyes searching him out every time you walk to your next patient and why are you straining your ears for the sound of his voice?
‘That’s just because…because I want a chance to find out what happened to turn his life around,’ she justified defiantly under her breath as she pulled on a second pair of gloves to treat one of the department’s ‘regulars’—a young drug addict whose HIV had already developed into full-blown AIDS.
‘What happened this time, Tommy?’ she asked gently as she took in the battered face. The way he was hunched over with his arms wrapped protectively around his ribs told her that they were probably in the same state.
‘Some people don’t seem to like beggars,’ he mumbled painfully through split lips.
‘I think you just can’t stay away from me,’ she teased as she slowly helped him to take off the clothing hanging on his skeletal frame, hoping she wouldn’t find anything more than bruises. She didn’t know whether he had enough reserves in his system to cope with broken ribs or, even worse, a punctured lung.
‘Sorry, Doc. You aren’t my type,’ he retorted with an attempt at a smile that ended in a wince as he opened up the cut on his lip again. ‘On the other hand, that is someone I could really go for…’ There was an unexpected gleam of appreciation in his least swollen eye as he nodded at something he could see beyond her shoulder.
Amy turned to find out who had caught his eye, and there, through a gap in the curtains, was Zach, a quizzical expression on his face as he watched…what? Tommy? Her?
Their eyes met and when her heart felt as if it turned a complete somersault in her chest she realised that this was something more than the lingering memory of a teenage crush.
‘You and me both,’ she muttered with feeling, and her hands tingled with more than a remembered longing to explore the clean lines of his face and the strength of his powerful body.
Tommy laughed aloud. ‘Down, girl!’ he teased as Zach responded to the sudden burst of sound, his dark eyes seeming to find hers unerringly. ‘It wouldn’t be a fair contest…I’m in no condition to fight you for him.’
The reminder that the young man was her patient and had potentially serious injuries snapped her back to what she should be doing with a guilty start, but she still had to force herself to drag her eyes away from the man outside the curtain.
‘So, let’s see what we can do to get you back in fighting form,’ she suggested, and began to palpate the darkly bruised ribs.
‘I dunno about fighting form,’ he said around a groan of pain. ‘I’d be grateful just to have a good summer. I’d rather not be around when winter comes.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, concerned. There had been such resignation in his tone…far too much for someone who hadn’t even reached his twenties yet.
‘I won’t make it through another winter on the street,’ he said bluntly. ‘And to tell the truth, I don’t really want to.’
‘Oh, Tommy…If you had a place in a hostel…’ Amy began, but he was shaking his head before she could complete the sentence.
‘They’ll only take you in if you’re clean—off drugs,’ he clarified, in case she didn’t understand.
‘But I’m sure we could find you a place on a programme to—’
‘Not a lot of point, is there, Doc, with me in this state? Anyway, I’m not too keen on going back into the system, seeing as how it was the system that did this to me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said quietly while she systematically cleaned up his wounds one by one, taping steristrips over the cuts that would heal without stitches and leaving the worst until last for suturing. This was the most she’d ever heard Tommy say about his life but she’d known that there were dark shadows in his background—she could tell by the expression in his eyes. They held the same fathomless, wary depths that she’d first seen in…Zach?
‘I was put into care when I was about four, when my mum dumped me at the social services office, and the system was so glad they’d found somewhere to put me that they forgot about me.’
He fixed her with eyes that were uncannily like Zach’s for the amount they kept hidden, but suddenly she realised that there was also a banked inferno of emotions raging underneath his apparent apathy.
‘By the time someone thought to check up on why I kept trying to run away, the bastard who was supposed to be looking after me like a father had been abusing me for years and I was HIV positive.’
‘Oh, Tommy…’ Amy breathed, her heart breaking for all the misery he’d suffered in his life…was still suffering, she realised, confronted with the evidence of his latest assault.
‘Hey, I’m cool,’ he said with an awkward shrug, even though the slight flush of colour in his pale cheeks told her he’d been touched by her sympathy. ‘If I’m lucky, it’ll be a good summer. I’ve got no job to go to so I’ll be outside in the sunshine with plenty of time to listen to the birds and smell the flowers while I stick my hand out for money for my next fix. By the time winter comes…who knows?’ he finished with another shrug and a corresponding grunt of pain when the manoeuvre jarred his ribs.
‘Have you been taking any anti-retroviral medications?’ Even as she asked, Amy realised that Tommy’s drug abuse would probably preclude his adherence to any regular preventative treatment.
‘Nah,’ he said dismissively, obeying her silent gesture to turn his head for the next set of stitches to close the wound in his scalp. ‘They made me feel worse than coming off dope, and it was already too late to have any real effect. Anyway, if I was given a supply of drugs…any drugs…I’d more than likely be mugged for them.’
Amy couldn’t argue with that. Tommy was the expert when it came to conditions on the streets.
‘Well, you probably already know that one of the dangers now is developing an infection that your body can’t fight.’
‘So they tell me, but I’ve been lucky so far—apart from having the crap kicked out of me. Haven’t had anything more than a cold.’
The conversation died for a few minutes while Amy concentrated on making a neat job of his scalp, grateful that he’d chosen such a brutally short hairstyle as it made the task so much easier.
Finally, as she handed over to the nurse to tape a protective dressing in place, she positioned herself so that she met
his gaze head on, her pen poised over the clipboard that held his notes.
‘So, Tommy, if I give you a course of antibiotics, will you promise me that you’ll take the whole course?’
‘How long is a course?’ he parried warily.
‘Just until you come back to have your stitches taken out?’ she bargained, her heart aching that there was so little she could do for him. ‘A week? Would you be able to keep them out of sight for a week?’
‘Make it five days and I’ll do my best,’ he countered, then grinned cheekily. ‘And that’s only because you asked nicely.’
‘They break your heart sometimes, the way they’ve had to survive,’ said a quiet voice just behind her, and when Amy looked over her shoulder and up into Zach’s dark eyes she realised that he understood far more about the hell Tommy had gone through than she would ever know.
‘So, who is Mr Willmott?’ said that same voice right behind her in the cafeteria queue, and Amy gasped, dragged out of her pessimistic thoughts about young Tommy’s chances of surviving into his twenties by the man who could have ended up just like Tommy, if his teachers had been right.
‘Dr Willmott,’ she corrected automatically, only remembering as she said it that, of course, it had reverted to Mr when Edward had climbed up the next rung of the promotion ladder. Not that it was relevant any more.
‘Really,’ Zach said as he took a tray from the pile and kept pace with her slow shuffle in the queue towards the hot meals. ‘I presume he works here. Is he in A and E, too, or one of the other departments?’
‘No, he doesn’t work here.’ Suddenly she felt strangely guilty to be talking about her husband with Zach, but couldn’t find a way to end the conversation without sounding rude. ‘He’s…He was killed. A year ago. On the motorway.’
The words emerged in jerky lumps. Uncomfortable. Unpractised.
After the initial ‘getting to know you’ enquiries, the other A and E staff had tactfully refrained from asking for any more painful details and she certainly hadn’t volunteered. The only people who talked about Edward any more were her parents, bewailing the loss of her handsome, successful husband every time she set foot in their house, and his parents, endlessly, when she made her duty visits.
And yet…for the first time, she actually wanted to talk about what had happened. Did this mean that she was actually coming to terms with her loss, or was it because it was Zach she was telling?
Almost as soon as they were sitting down she found the stark details pouring out of her as if she needed to purge herself of the words. Somehow, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t seen him for so many years—and hadn’t really known him well even then—she knew that she could trust him with her confidences.
‘There was a pile-up in bad weather…dozens of cars involved…a woman had been thrown out of a vehicle. Apparently, Edward saw it happen. He pulled over and got out to help and was hit by another car. He was killed instantly.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Zach said, visibly shocked and clearly at a loss for what to say.
‘He was on his way back from a conference,’ Amy went on, the words coming easier now that she’d started. ‘I didn’t even know it had happened…that he was dead…until the police came to tell me.’ She shuddered at the memory of the late-night knock at the door.
‘Did you have any children?’ he asked, a perfectly ordinary question but one that caused a familiar pang for lost opportunities.
‘No. We hadn’t got as far as starting a family,’ she admitted sadly. ‘It’s still just me and my parents.’
For a second she thought she saw something dark in his eyes at that information, but couldn’t be sure—it was gone too soon.
She knew it couldn’t have been put there by her mention of her family, because he’d never met them, but that didn’t stop her speculating that she might have reminded him about something painful in his past.
How many relationships had he had since the days when she’d sighed over him in their biology and chemistry lessons? Probably far too many to count, with his bad-boy good looks…and why the thought of all those women should cause something painful to tighten around her heart…
‘Do you still live in the same place?’ he asked. ‘The big stone house near the top of the hill?’
‘I’ve got my own place now, not far from the hospital, but…How did you know where I lived?’
There was a glimpse of that shadow in his eyes again but then it was gone, hidden behind those thick dark lashes that he still seemed to have a habit of using to camouflage his thoughts.
‘How did I know where the princess’s castle was?’ he teased, looking up from the coffee he’d purchased to finish his meal, but there was an edge to his voice that was all too reminiscent of the old Zach. ‘Everyone knew where the Bowes Clarks lived. It certainly wasn’t any secret.’
And how Amy had hated the fact that, all too often, as soon as people realised who her parents were, they treated her differently, as though family wealth made her something other than just another teenager trying to get good exam results. Unfortunately, her parents still had some sort of crazy idea that their family was somehow inherently ‘better class’ than their neighbours and that their daughter should automatically—
Her thoughts were cut off by the simultaneous shrilling of their pagers.
‘Well, we almost managed an uninterrupted meal,’ Zach said as they both hastily piled the debris onto a single tray, depositing it in the appropriate place as they hurried towards the door, knowing that the ‘multiple trauma’ message could be anything from a small handful to dozens that would require all available staff.
‘Sorry to interrupt your meal break,’ the co-ordinator said as they appeared in the department, her gaze taking on a speculative air as she saw them arrive together. ‘We’re taking in the overflow from a major motorway incident. Initial estimates of ten vehicles involved seems to be going up every time the emergency services speak to us. The last person I spoke to said it could be as many as thirty.’
‘So, where do you want us, Liz?’ Amy offered, not envying her the major logistical nightmare she was going to have to deal with over the next few hours.
‘Could you both start off processing the walking wounded to keep the decks clear for the major injuries coming in? At some stage you’ll have to be redirected to Resus as the more serious patients start arriving, but—’
‘Has someone warned the patients already waiting that they could be about to be pushed to the back of the list again?’ Zach asked with a glance towards the grid on the whiteboard that was heavily populated with the names of the people already signed into the department and waiting for attention.
‘I’m just about to do that,’ the co-ordinator said with a grimace. ‘I wanted to get my troops organised first.’
‘Bang goes the department’s performance targets,’ Amy said grimly. ‘Those politicians who think they can sit at a desk and tell a doctor how many minutes it should take to treat a patient should try coming down here and seeing what it’s like living in the real world. It couldn’t be less like a production line in a factory.’
‘Don’t get me started!’ Liz warned. ‘If they’d only pay the staff properly we’d have enough of them willing to stay to do the job. As it is, all the money seems to be swallowed up by employing more and more administrators to carry stopwatches for the politicians.’
‘I heard that there are now more administrators in the hospital than there are patients!’ offered one of the staff nurses as she moved a patient’s name from one place on the board across to the list signifying that they were now waiting their turn for X-rays.
‘Don’t depress me!’ Liz groaned with a shake of her head as Amy hurried after Zach, her voice carrying along the corridor. ‘I wouldn’t mind if the extra staff were actually doing some of the real work…cleaning floors, delivering meals or spending time with patients. As it is, it seems as if their only function is to draw eye-watering salaries for shuffling unnecessary papers�
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‘Oops! I’m sorry I spoke!’ Amy murmured with a wry grin as she and Zach stationed themselves in adjoining stations in a three-bay treatment room, donning gloves and disposable aprons in preparation for their first patients. ‘I didn’t mean to set her off like that.’
‘It’s such a sore spot with medical personnel that it’s difficult not to,’ Zach said sombrely. ‘When you apply to medical school, they certainly don’t warn you just how demoralised you’ll be by the time you finish your training. You’ve just spent years piling up debt while you slog your guts out to qualify, and you…we…can see what’s wrong and how to fix it, but they bring in someone from big business who hasn’t a clue what medical priorities are and he builds an empire of bean counters trying to run it like…like…’
‘Perhaps you should think about something else, too, or your blood pressure will be astronomical,’ Amy teased, even as she appreciated the fire in his eyes as he voiced his views.
They barely had time to treat one patient apiece before the floodgates opened and from that point on there certainly wasn’t time to conduct a debate about the shortcomings of the health service. There was time, though, for Amy to realise that Zach’s impassioned pronouncement showed a different side of his character to the Zach she’d known all those years ago.
Then he’d mostly kept his head down below the parapet, limiting his subversion to the length of his hair, his leather jacket and his motorbike. Even so, the teachers had seemed to target him for scorn and derision, belittling his work in front of his peers and denigrating his chances of ever making anything of himself.
‘If they could only see him now!’ she breathed into her disposable mask as she hurried to lend him a hand putting in a drain when a patient collapsed spectacularly with a previously undiagnosed flail chest. Every movement was swift, decisive, accurate and, in its own way, beautiful to watch. There was absolutely nothing of the juvenile delinquent in this caring, dedicated man.
‘Thanks for your help,’ he said, the slightly gruff tone to his voice her only clue to the fact that he’d been worried whether he would be able to sort out the problem before it resulted in brain damage and heart failure.
A Very Special Proposal Page 3
