An Irresistible Flirtation

by Victoria Gordon

  When he rolled up the sleeve of his tartan shirt to allow her to fit the collar to test his blood pressure, she adjusted the strap around a muscular bicep that seemed to take on a life of its own under the touch of her fingers. His blood pressure was well within normal limits; her own was in serious question as she looked up from her reading to find his eyes calmly grazing along the lines of her throat and bosom.

  He observed with sardonic detachment as she explained and demonstrated how to prick his finger with a lancet, how to ‘milk’ a drop of blood for analysis, how to check it against the colour chart on the indicator strip container.

  He didn’t flinch at the infinitesimal pricking of the lancet, but Saunders was certain it wasn’t through any sense of false macho imagery. It was, she knew by her own reactions, at least in part due to the fact that he wasn’t paying any attention to the tiny bit of pain; he was too busy watching her again.

  While she, for the first time since she’d been a raw student nurse, found her own fingers trembling just a smidgen, and knew beyond question that it was a direct result of how she could feel his eyes on her, could feel a definite, undeniable undercurrent of blatant sexual attraction.

  Which was reciprocated; she had to admit that to herself, even though all her instincts screamed at her to deny it. Not that there was much sense in that. Fordon Landell knew it as well as she, herself.

  About the only saving grace was when she had used the lancet and had turned away to reach for a medicated swab for him to wipe his finger. She turned back to find him calmly licking away the excess blood, looking for all the world like a wayward child who’d come crying to mommy only to find that it didn’t hurt any more after all.

  When she was explaining the elements of the various available blood glucose monitoring machines, she knew somehow that this part of her spiel was probably wasted, at least for now. And wasn’t at all surprised by his response.

  ‘It may sound ridiculous, but I don’t trust machines all that much. For now, I think, I’d prefer to trust my own eyes and judgement; I can always change my mind later.’

  Saunders definitely did not consider herself a salesperson in this regard. She, herself, didn’t use a glucometer, except when at work, where she had one handy anyway. But her blood sugar had been stabilised so well for so long that she hardly needed to test at all, except to keep in the habit. She was totally in tune with her body, or had been, she thought, until this man had come into the picture.

  ‘You’re going to have to test four times a day for a while,’ she said. ‘Peter … Dr Mahoney has you on the minimum dose of tablets, and it may work out that getting your diet and exercise patterns into proper balance will mean you can manage without any medication at all. May! You’ll have to expect it to take up to three months for that to become clear, as I expect he’s already told you. But, regardless of whether you take tablets or not, you must expect to monitor regularly, especially in the early stages.’

  ‘First thing in the morning and before all meals. OK,’ he said. ‘And what, exactly, am I looking for? I’ve read about it, but I want to hear it from you; somehow I think it might register better coming from you.’

  And his eyes said other things, intimate things, things Saunders both wanted to hear and didn’t even want to think about. It was insane, she thought. Here she was, trying to educate him, sticking needles into him, and he was trying to seduce her at every step. Worse, she didn’t know who was winning.

  ‘Ideal control is three to six millimols before meals and no more than eight after meals — two hours after, but we’ll come to that over time,’ she replied, reciting the figures from memory and wishing he would stop looking at her that way. ‘Those are our figures, mind; the Americans measure differently. Now, our time for today is just about up, but before you go I want you to make an appointment for some time soon with Diane, our dietician, and also with Yvonne, who’s our podiatrist.’

  ‘And with you?’

  Such a simple question. Simple in words, but so complicated by the look in his eyes, just by the way he asked it, by the way he looked at her when he did!

  Saunders had a momentary thought to switch him to one of the junior nurse-educators, felt a curious tremor of confusion at the very thought. It was going to be dangerous dealing with Fordon Landell, everything in her instinct told her that. Besides, he didn’t really need her particular talent of empathy and reassurance. He already understood power, had already determined to control his condition. This man had controlled his own life almost from the beginning; he wouldn’t become one of those diabetics like her parents, who couldn’t or wouldn’t face up to reality, who insisted and kept on insisting that they were sick, as if that could automatically become the precursor to some miraculous cure.

  ‘Well, you probably won’t need to see me again quite that soon,’ she replied. ‘But, of course, if you have problems of any kind, I’m always available…’

  She was stopped in her tracks there by the look of quiet satisfaction that flickered across his eyes, a look that might have been laughter, might have been just a trick of the light, but wasn’t really either. It was, she found, a prelude to something far less easy to deal with.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d accept an immediate plea that I just can’t manage to monitor my own blood properly, and that it would be nice if you could do it for me?’

  ‘No more than I’d accept that you can’t manage to change your own socks,’ she replied firmly, but the firmness was turned to a chuckle by his impish grin. He was having her on, deliberately flirting now, and making no real effort to conceal the fact,

  Saunders deliberately glanced down at her wrist-watch, knowing his appointment was well into overtime, and only glad there was nobody being kept waiting by the situation. Fordon Landell, in tune with her thinking, took the hint.

  She rushed through the rest of the preliminaries, lending him a packet of test strips until he could arrange his own supply through Diabetes Australia, giving him the various forms to be filled out to that purpose, running through the material in the prearranged folder of information on diet, the need to watch himself in case of the tablets driving him into a hypo: the low blood sugar condition of hypoglycaemia.

  ‘It isn’t a problem, really,’ she explained. ‘You’ll quickly come to recognise the symptoms, and if you’re in doubt, just gobble down a glucose tablet or a couple of jelly beans or something. Only remember to get some proper carbohydrates into you as quickly as possible afterwards, or the process will just repeat itself, because the sugar gets absorbed too fast and you’re left with low blood sugar again.’

  ‘I know we’re getting into overtime here,’ he replied, ‘but I do have to worry about that aspect of things, as I’ve already mentioned. Much of the time I’m working alone, and a damned long way from any sort of help if I did need it. Should I be worried about that more than I am, or what?’

  The ringing of her telephone interrupted Saunders’ train of thought, and she answered to find her next appointment waiting, which didn’t help.

  ‘I think you should try to get in touch with your reactions fairly quickly,’ she replied. ‘The symptoms are sometimes a bit tricky, but once you’ve experienced a hypo or two, you’ll recognise them readily enough. If it causes real problems, I’d get Peter … Dr Mahoney to think about changing your medication.

  ‘Considering the remote circumstances in which you work, it’s worth considering, but I have to say also that it isn’t my job to go about second-guessing your doctor. Doctors have a habit of getting quite narked by nurses who do that.’

  ‘My old mate Peter, narked with a beautiful woman? I’d have to see that one myself to believe it,’ was the reply, and Saunders shivered inside at the somehow special emphasis he put on that word ‘beautiful’. She wasn’t beautiful, and she knew it, but she was a woman, and as susceptible to flattery — even deliberately blatant flattery — as any other woman.

  Fordon Landell knew that Even at their most heated moments, duri
ng this hour and a bit that seemed far longer than that, he had been deliberately setting out to charm her, and both of them, she realised, knew he was succeeding beyond all logic.

  Which was why she put up her mental and emotional shield; with this moment of his departure she was suddenly frightened by it all, by the quickness of her responses, by the apparent quickness of his responses. By the seemingly mutual attraction, the way his look could stir her, the way his touch could make her tummy turn over, her pulse race into oblivion. And there was no logic to it at all. At their first encounter in the city he’d seemed to hate her, had seemed…

  ‘Why did you seem so angry with me during our … encounter in the city the other day?’ she asked abruptly, the words out before she’d even realised it.

  ‘Angry with you? I wasn’t angry with you at all,’ he replied immediately. ‘I was a bit narked with your friend, but very definitely not with you. Actually, I rather thought you were just about as embarrassed by the whole situation as I was.’

  ‘But you hardly even looked at Charlotte,’ Saunders protested, quite happy to accept his explanation but still a touch confused by it. ‘And the way you were looking at me didn’t indicate anything like sympathy over shared embarrassment.’

  ‘I didn’t waste much time looking at your friend because it was much more pleasant looking at you,’ was the reply. ‘In fact, looking at you was about the only saving grace in the entire performance.’

  Which wasn’t entirely the truth, Ford admitted to himself. When he had looked at Saunders, all thought of her friend and that woman’s feminist nonsense had been driven from his head. But he wasn’t about to tell her that.

  Not now — now when his head was filled with other thoughts, still concerning this woman with the unusual name and equally unusual affect on him.

  It seemed incredible, somehow, that all these thoughts about the hereditary aspects of diabetes had forced themselves into his head, that what had begun as a simple attempt to stir — or so he had thought at the time — now took on a quite different aspect, a quite different seriousness.

  When he had first begun to read the various books available on the subject, the issue had been only one of many, and because he had not, then, even so much as thought about marriage, much less children, the issue had seemed almost irrelevant.

  Until today, when it had sprung full-blown from his weary mind with an importance he couldn’t have imagined. Just because of this woman? Just because of this small, too-slender, too-calming woman with the enormous dark blue eyes?

  You want out of this, my lad. Ford Landell told himself. This woman is getting to you, and it’s nothing you bargained for, nothing you’re prepared to handle. He grinned, then, but only on the inside. It was also, he knew, too late to get out of it!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The nearest Saunders could find to park near the Mahoneys’ luxurious home was almost two blocks away, leaving her an uphill journey into a biting wind that seemed bent on eroding her already fading enthusiasm for the visit.

  She didn’t really like large parties; only her doctor friend’s insistence, and the fact that it was a Friday night, so no work tomorrow, had convinced her to attend.

  That, and ... Oh, admit it, you goose, she told herself, gritting her teeth against a particularly nasty wind-gust, you might as well. But it did little for her enthusiasm to admit that the vague possibility Fordon Landell might also be there had been at least a consideration.

  Admit too, she thought almost angrily, that, despite not having seen him since his visit to her office, his existence had been a seemingly constant intrusion into her thoughts.

  ‘Woooweee! Isn’t he just about the niftiest, most gorgeous hunk you’ve ever seen?’

  Diane, the centre’s dietician, had fairly floated into Saunders’ office after her first session with Fordon Landell, her entire being positively alight with interest.

  ‘He ... who?’ Saunders had replied, looking up from some paperwork that had barely managed to capture her entire attention. But even as she’d asked, she had known. Checking over the day’s roster that morning, his name had leapt from the page as if printed in huge, flaming letters that had burned into her brain and distracted her from the morning’s work ever since.

  She also didn’t need to re-check the roster to know that ‘He ... who?’ was now closeted with Yvonne the podiatrist, who…

  ‘Lucky Yvonne — she’ll actually get to touch’ Diane gushed, apparently reading Saunders’ mind and adding her assumption that, despite her query, Saunders knew exactly who and what she was talking about.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Diane. He’s only a man, after all,’ Saunders snapped. And added, ‘He isn’t some film star, or whatever; I don’t know what you’re so frothy about.’

  Thus, having admitted that she didn’t need to be told ‘He ... who?’, and having startled herself with the admission, she snapped her jaw shut and glared at her associate while wishing that she, herself, would some day learn to keep her mouth shut.

  Then she had to grin. How long had it been, after all, since the centre had drawn a client of such undeniable attractiveness? The grin evolved to a hearty chuckle as she recalled the hulking, muscular blond surfie who had drawn a similar reaction from Diane last year, until she’d grown tired of explaining to him that an insulin-dependent diabetic simply could not survive on junk food and beer!

  She found herself wondering — but definitely not asking! — about Diane’s assessment of Fordon Landell’s dietary habits. They would be, she thought to herself, simple and yet sophisticated, perhaps even contrary, like the man himself.

  Then she pondered briefly if he, like most newly diagnosed diabetics she’d encountered, had some particular, special, favourite dish that would turn out to be forbidden in his unchosen but unavoidable new lifestyle. With Diane’s ravings floating half-heard around her, she pored through visions of Fordon Landell devouring waffles drowned in maple syrup — her own downfall, or gigantic ice-cream sundaes, handfuls of exotic peppermint-cream chocolates. Then, unbidden, came the mental image she had received after pricking his finger, when he had sucked away the final drop of blood with that mischievous, little-boy look in his eye. Memory of that brought a shiver that Saunders was glad Diane didn’t notice.

  ‘…take up podiatry; there’s nothing romantic about food.’

  Diane’s voice finally won out, but only because Saunders’ sense of humour was tickled by the ridiculousness of what she was hearing. All the old platitudes linking romance and food poured into her head, followed by an almost identical complaint, in reverse, that she’d heard Yvonne utter not six weeks earlier.

  ‘There’s not a lot of romance in feet either, unless you’re a fetishist,’ she replied, perhaps too sharply. She was remembering, and trying not to, just how her own pulse had raced in the simple process of taking Fordon Landell’s blood pressure. ‘And now, if you’re through gushing, I have a client due.’

  That client had taken up her time well past the end of Fordon Landell’s session with the podiatrist, but Saunders hadn’t been able to resist, during the final moments of the interview, wondering if he might have found some excuse to wait for her.

  He hadn’t, and she had been annoyed with herself for presuming that he might, then even more so at finding she was wishing he had.

  And now you’re going to a party you won’t enjoy, probably overflowing with people you’ll enjoy even less, just on the off-chance that he might be there? You want your head read, my girl, she thought as she reached the front door and paused to compose herself before ringing the bell.

  Ignoring entirely the rather battered trench-coat — it lived in her car, mostly, and served, as tonight, a totally utilitarian role — the lightweight woollen dress, as sweeping in its line as in its multi-coloured, swirling pattern, was neither new nor classically fashionable, but it suited her colouring and, because of its sweeping lines, tended to obscure how much too slender she had let herself become.

 
; The matching shoes had withstood the two-block hike without damage, and her tights had also survived. A miracle, she thought, given her usual luck. Of course. the wind had frothed her already rowdy hair into disarray, but a moment in the powder-room would fix that, or at least fix it as much as mattered.

  I’ll never make a fashion-plate, she thought, frowning slightly, and then switching the frown for a smile as the door opened to reveal Gail Mahoney, resplendent in a gown Saunders expected she had made herself, but which looked astonishingly expensive.

  ‘Welcome, stranger. It’s been too, too long,’ was the greeting she received, and Saunders had to agree. It had been too long. The doctor and his wife were among her favourite people, and if she were more of a social animal…

  "My fault,’ she replied, i can’t even plead overwork, as I’m sure Peter could. Just ... well…’

  A finely-drawn eyebrow was raised as Gail helped relieve Saunders of the ancient raincoat. ‘You can’t plead overeating as an excuse either, 1 see.’ The doctor’s wife shook her bright blonde head, frowning as she did. ‘Honestly, Saunders; anorexia at your age? You’re taking slenderness to an extreme, and I’m not just being envious when I say that.’

  Gail Mahoney was frankly pudgy, might even have been called dumpy, except that her vivid personality made any such description a wasted exercise. She was ... just herself, and so comfortable with that persona that Saunders knew envy was the last thing on her mind.

  ‘I’m in top form,’ she replied. ‘Never felt better in my life.’

  Then their conversation was interrupted by new arrivals, and Saunders found herself moving through a dense crowd of people, a glass of wine in one hand, as she twisted and squirmed her way to a less crowded area of the large house.

  There were some people there she knew; greetings assailed her from various sides as she smiled and nodded her way through the pack. But although she tried her best to survey the crowd without being too obvious about it, she saw no sign of Fordon Landell.