A Very Special Proposal

by Josie Metcalfe

‘Since you put it like that, I’ll be good,’ he said seriously. ‘Go and help my mates…And keep your head down,’ he called after her, and terror returned in a rush to remove most of the starch from her knees, almost dropping her in her tracks.

  There were gunmen somewhere in the darkness, she reminded herself as she bent double and made for Zach’s voice. If they saw her moving along the river bank, they might think she was one of the bailiffs and…

  ‘Where are you?’ she called shakily into the darkness as she started round a slight bend in the river and there they were, several torches illuminating a scene of carnage.

  ‘There’s two of them,’ Zach said tersely. ‘One with a gunshot wound. Are you wearing a belt?’

  Before he’d even finished asking the question, her hands were at her waist, the spurting blood from an arterial bleed in the injured man’s thigh obscenely bright in the stark glare of the high-powered torches. In the absence of any other means of slowing the blood loss, a makeshift tourniquet would be essential.

  ‘Has anyone got some cloth—a clean handkerchief or something—to put pressure on the wound?’ she demanded, as she threaded the leather under the wounded thigh. ‘And I’ll need a stick of some kind to tighten the tourniquet.’

  A white shirt was thrust hastily in her direction and it was the unique mixture of soap and male musk that told her it had come from Zach, but there wasn’t even time to look up and drool over his naked torso. If this man wasn’t to lose a critical amount of his blood volume, she would have to work fast.

  It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to fold the donated shirt into a thick pad and to tighten the belt to keep it in place over the wound, but eventually she twisted the ligature tight enough to stem the flood.

  ‘Hold this for me,’ she demanded of one of the uninjured men, and a hand appeared to do her bidding, leaving her free to check the victim’s pulse.

  ‘How is he?’ Zach demanded distractedly, clearly still struggling with his own unexpected patient.

  ‘Bleeding under control with the tourniquet,’ she reported, grateful for the reprieve. ‘Pulse faster than I’d like and thready. He’ll need some IV fluids before I have to loosen off the tourniquet to maintain circulation to his lower leg. What have you got?’

  ‘Chest,’ he hissed succinctly between gritted teeth. ‘He dived in the river to escape and impaled himself on something. There are broken ribs…he’s bleeding like a stuck pig…and his breathing’s…Hell! I’m losing him!’

  In the far distance, Amy heard the familiar sound of sirens with a lift of her heart, but this man couldn’t wait even that long for help.

  ‘I can’t find a pulse,’ she reported urgently, her fingertips searching for the reassuring thump of the carotid in the man’s neck. ‘He’s arrested!’

  ‘Breathe for him,’ Zach barked, and as if they’d worked together for years rather than days he began to perform chest compressions while Amy counted and delivered the interspersed breaths.

  From that point on, nothing else mattered than that they maintain the rhythm if their patient was to stand any chance of recovery, but it was only that thought that kept them going when it seemed as if it took for ever for relief to arrive.

  ‘Right, mate, I’ll take over,’ said a hearty voice, and a figure in the familiar green uniform positioned himself to take over the exhausting job of pumping the unresponsive chest. The reassuring smile he threw Amy turned into an expression of surprise. ‘Hey, Doc! Don’t you get enough of this at work? Do you have to come out looking for it?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  AMY saw Zach sink back onto his heels, his chest heaving and his face gleaming with sweat. She knew only too well how badly every muscle must be burning after such sustained exertion.

  When she realised that he was too short of breath to begin to report what had been happening, she began, even as another ambulance man was taking her place at the patient’s head.

  ‘Hi, Wayne,’ she said, silently stifling a groan, knowing that this story—and her presence with Zach in this isolated spot—would be all around the hospital within minutes of the ambulance returning to base. ‘There’s a penetrating wound to the chest and broken ribs that may have pierced the lung. He started having breathing difficulties then went into cardiac arrest. Oh, and the injuries happened in the river, so there’s probably water contamination in his chest, too.’

  ‘How long has he been down?’ Harry demanded as he set up the portable defibrillator to take a reading of the heart activity.

  ‘For ever!’ growled Zach, his breathing almost under control again.

  ‘Almost twenty minutes,’ supplied one of the water bailiffs in the background. ‘Doc here wouldn’t let us take over for him.’

  ‘Stop compressions. Let’s see what we’ve got,’ came the order, and Wayne lifted his hands away from the ominously still body.

  The machine whined to show it was working but they could all see the complete absence of any sort of convertible heart trace on the oscilloscope. This was one heart that wouldn’t be beating again.

  ‘Sorry, Doc,’ said Wayne, all joking put aside. ‘What do you want us to do?’

  ‘There’s nothing else you can do,’ he confirmed quietly, although Amy could tell that he felt the same sort of impotent rage that always gripped her when they lost a patient.

  ‘He died?’ demanded a new voice in incredulous tones, and they all turned to look up at the young constable who’d been sent across to join them. ‘How did he…? Oh…He’s…’His eyes widened when he took in the scene and Amy knew just how gory it would look to the uninitiated as he played his torch over the body on the ground. Then he was whirling away, his torch falling from his hand as he retched violently into the darkness.

  Amy got to her feet and approached him.

  ‘First time?’ she asked softly, when he’d finished heaving.

  ‘God, yes!’ he groaned. ‘I never thought…’ He propped his hands on his knees and shook his head. ‘There’s just so much blood! I wasn’t expecting that.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up about it. It gets most people like that the first time—even doctors and nurses.’

  ‘So how do you cope with it?’ He cautiously straightened, as though uncertain whether his stomach would behave.

  ‘You mean, as a mere woman?’ she teased, and drew a pale smile from him that told her that he was going to be all right.

  ‘Also, there’s the fact that she happens to be an A and E doctor and sees this sort of thing all the time,’ Harry volunteered cheerfully, as he began to stow away their equipment with the efficiency of years of practice.

  His partner, Wayne, joined in. ‘When I was training, I found it helped if I concentrated on what I was doing for the patient, rather than what it all looked like. So, in your case, you would need to…what? Take note of the surroundings? Make a list of the people present?’

  Amy left him giving his pep-talk to join Zach beside the second victim, who was now festooned with IV lines connected to replacement fluids. She was relieved to see that her makeshift tourniquet had been removed and replaced with a pressure bandage, so she could put a stop to the silent clock that had been counting inside her head, monitoring the length of time that the leg had been deprived of proper circulation.

  ‘I’ll probably see you back at the hospital,’ Zach was saying to the injured bailiff, a consoling hand on the man’s arm. ‘I’ll be following the ambulances in, in case they need any further details.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc—both of you!’ he called back, as his stretchered form was being hurried towards the strobing lights of the nearest ambulance, probably unaware just how precarious his health had been before those vital fluids had started running into his body.

  They both turned towards their final patient and as they hurried round the bend in the riverbank towards the second pool of light, Amy was startled to feel Zach’s hand take hold of her own.

  For a moment she wondered if it was just because he was concerned tha
t she might stumble in the darkness—a darkness seeming all the more intense in comparison to the painful brightness of the lights over the third victim. Then he tightened his fingers in a deliberate squeeze.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Well, you certainly know how to show a girl a good time.’ Amy chuckled and threw him a teasing glance, hoping he couldn’t feel the way her pulse had rocketed at the contact.

  Their help wasn’t needed to load the final patient into the ambulance as he’d already been strapped to a stretcher with his neck and back protected by a stiff white collar and a spinal board and his arm supported across his body.

  ‘Enjoy the rest of your evening,’ the injured man called as he disappeared inside the ambulance. His voice was muffled by the oxygen mask, but the glint in his eyes told Amy that he hadn’t forgotten the fact that he’d tripped over the two of them. Even with a healthy dose of analgesia taking the edge off his senses, he was probably well able to regale the paramedic with the facts as he saw them.

  ‘You do realise that this story is only going to grow with the telling,’ she groaned when there were only the able-bodied bailiffs and several policemen left on the scene.

  ‘My reputation can only benefit from being pumped up into hero status,’ Zach quipped. ‘And the fact that I was with you…’ He waggled lascivious eyebrows at her before sobering with a heavy sigh. ‘If only we’d been able to do something for the bloke with the chest wound…’

  ‘I was thinking about that…’ Amy closed her eyes for a second, visualising the horrific injury analytically. ‘We couldn’t have left him in the water or he would have drowned, so leaving the branch in position wasn’t an option either, as it looked as if it was still attached to the tree. And, anyway, the penetration looked as if it was at an upward angle. Do you suppose that it might have nicked the aorta or even hit the heart itself?’

  ‘You mean, the reason why we couldn’t keep his heart going was because there just wasn’t enough blood left in the system?’ He gave a single nod. ‘That’s entirely possible—it would make perfect sense, in fact—but we won’t know until the post-mortem’s done. I just wish…’

  ‘I know.’ She put a consoling hand on his naked arm then had to remove it quickly before she completely lost the thread of the conversation. It had been bad enough keeping her eyes off that expanse of muscular chest while there had been lives depending on their skills. Now that the crisis was over, there was nothing to stop her looking her fill, except sheer willpower. ‘You don’t like losing a patient any more than I do, but we both know that it’s statistically inevitable.’

  ‘Statistics!’ he growled in disgust. ‘Sometimes it seems as though the whole of medicine has been reduced to statistics and balance sheets.’ He went to drag his hand over his head and suddenly froze with a look of horror on his face.

  ‘Zach, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Gloves,’ he ground out, holding both blood-stained hands up with their broad palms facing towards her. ‘Neither of us were wearing any, dammit!’

  Amy gasped as she looked at her own, similarly coated fingers. ‘It just didn’t cross my mind,’ she admitted, thinking back to her first frantic efforts to stem the blood flow from the bailiff’s thigh.

  ‘Well, we both need to go straight back to the hospital and get some tests done,’ Zach said grimly, as he strode rapidly towards the bike and shrugged his way back into his jacket. ‘I hope someone knows whether we have to get a court order to draw blood from the deceased.’

  Amy honestly couldn’t remember. She must have been told about the legal procedures during lectures on medical ethics, but as the possibility hadn’t come up in a practical situation…

  She donned her borrowed helmet and swung her leg over the back of the bike to slide up close behind him, overwhelmingly aware that there was a very different atmosphere between them as they prepared for the return journey.

  That didn’t mean that she couldn’t appreciate the feeling of having her arms wrapped around him, but this time all the teasing that went with the start of a male-female relationship was gone. It was a far more urgent tension that permeated every muscle and sinew.

  ‘Hey! Look at you two!’ exclaimed Louella, when Zach escorted Amy into A and E a short while later. ‘Harry and Wayne said we wouldn’t believe our eyes when we saw the biker chick going out with our Zach!’

  ‘Harry and Wayne will be lucky if I let them live beyond midnight,’ Zach muttered under his breath, as he led the way into the closest empty treatment room and stripped his ancient leather jacket off Amy, before dumping his own on the nearest chair.

  ‘Lordy! Were you hurt, too?’ Louella demanded, all teasing gone when she caught sight of their bloodied hands for the first time.

  ‘Not so far,’ Amy said, trying to reassure her concerned friend even as she tried to ignore the grim possibilities sprouting up like poisonous weeds in her own mind.

  ‘Unfortunately, we didn’t have any gloves with us when we got caught up in that little lot, and we’ve got two different lots of blood all over us.’

  ‘Well, the first thing you need to do is get yourselves cleaned up,’ Louella decreed, switching instantly to organisation mode. ‘And I don’t just mean washing your hands. Have a good hot shower, at least, and when you get back, we’ll do all the other things that need doing. I’ll have it all set up and ready to go.’

  ‘I’d like to check up on those two bailiffs,’ Zach began, but Louella shook her head.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she said firmly. ‘They’re both in good hands. The bullet wound is already in Theatre and the broken bones are on their way up to Orthopaedics to wait for a space in Theatre…probably first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘But don’t we need to—?’

  Louella grabbed both jackets and thrust them into Zach’s arms. ‘All you’ve got to do is take care of yourself…and your biker chick!’ she added mischievously.

  Feeling almost like a child told to take her bath before bedtime, Amy meekly set off out of the department, her feet automatically heading for the nearest showers while she shuddered at the thought that she and Zach were now a juicy item of gossip.

  ‘Here,’ Zach said several minutes later, and thrust a fresh set of scrubs in her hands. ‘So you don’t have to put your clothes on again until you’ve had a chance to wash them.’

  She stared up at him, silently mourning their disastrous outing. And it had started off so well.

  There were shadows in his eyes, too. ‘I’m sorry, Amy,’ he said grimly. ‘The last thing I intended was putting you in danger.’

  ‘But you couldn’t have known…you couldn’t possibly have known that we would get caught between gun-wielding poachers and water bailiffs!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘But if I hadn’t asked you to help me take care of them, you wouldn’t be covered in blood that could be contaminated with HIV, hepatitis…’

  ‘And you think that I needed to wait for your invitation before I jumped in?’ she scoffed. ‘Get real, Zach! This is what I do for a living, and we both forgot about the gloves because we could see that they needed help straight away, not when the paramedics arrived with a spare packet of disposable gloves!’

  She pushed past him, marching furiously towards the door to the showers.

  ‘Amy…’ The hand that caught hold of her elbow was gentle but inescapable as he drew her back. ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘So, explain it to me.’ She pulled her arm out of his grasp and was annoyed with herself when she immediately missed his gentle warmth, belligerently planting a fist on either hip. ‘What did you mean?’

  For a moment he said nothing, the rhythmically bulging muscles in his jaw telling her that he was probably grinding his teeth. His soft-voiced reply was a testament to his control.

  ‘I meant that you were out with me, and that meant your safety was my responsibility, and if you’d been shot or you’ve been infected by a life-threatening disease—’

 
‘Then it’s because I made a choice of my own free will,’

  she interrupted firmly, even as a strange warmth spread through her at his words. It couldn’t just be because he felt responsible for her as her superior in the department, could it? Surely, there was something more…more personal in his concern?

  Or was that just wishful thinking?

  She was certainly guilty of that with his naked chest only tantalising inches from her, but it wasn’t just his body that attracted her. It was the whole man, and she was having difficulty dragging herself away, even though she knew she ought to be cleaning the blood off herself.

  ‘You did well out there, Amy,’ he said. ‘Much better than I did with my first GSW.’

  His praise was an unexpected bonus, even though she didn’t think she’d done enough to earn it.

  ‘It was the first time I’d been confronted by one,’ she admitted. ‘And for it to happen almost in front of us, with absolutely no equipment to hand…I have no idea how you coped when you had half a dozen to deal with at a time. I take my hat off to you.’

  To her surprise, the glaring overhead lights picked up the swift wash of colour that darkened his face and she wondered at his reaction. Had there been so few people to lavish praise on him or was it her approval that mattered more?

  ‘Well, Louella’s going to be waiting for us, so go and have your shower,’ he said, but still lingered as though every bit as loath to end their time together as she was. When he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘Do you want to go for a coffee afterwards?’ she leapt at the suggestion.

  ‘Cafeteria coffee while we wait to find out how the bailiffs have got on?’ she teased, then decided to take a chance with a little honesty. ‘If it’s in your company, and is accompanied by ordinary everyday conversation, I accept.’

  The surprise on his face almost had her wishing the words unsaid, but she couldn’t back down now, not if she was going to find out if a relationship between the two of them was possible after all this time.

  ‘Amy, dear! Where have you been? Are you all right?’ demanded her mother, when the phone rang almost as soon as she got inside her door.