More Than Caring

‘It would make more sense if I volunteered,’ he said firmly, the direct expression in those smoky grey eyes almost daring her to object. ‘Then all the others get an equal chance to see what’s going on.’

He was right, of course, but just the thought of being in any sort of close contact with the man was enough to have her pulse throbbing at twice its usual rate.

‘Well, yes, of course,’ she muttered, startled to realise that there was more than a little anticipation mixed in with the apprehension. ‘Good idea.’

‘So,’ he said as he pushed his sleeves up to reveal surprisingly muscular forearms shaded with dark hair, ‘what do you want me to do?’

‘Grab me…or rather, grab my clothing,’ she directed, then prayed that she’d manage to fight the blush working its way up from her throat. ‘I want to demonstrate how to break your hold.’

It didn’t take long to demonstrate several ways to break an attacker’s hold but Lauren was glad when it was time for each member of the class to take a turn to be victim and aggressor. At least with Marc sharing the supervision she had a chance to calm down.

It shouldn’t be like this, she told herself sternly. He was just a colleague, and a rather disapproving one at that. He certainly wasn’t someone who should be sending her hormones into orbit when all he was doing was grabbing hold of a handful of her clothing.

‘Now, grab my hair,’ she directed, trying to adopt an air of briskness as she demonstrated several ways of breaking his hold while losing as little hair as possible in the process. ‘And don’t forget, as soon as you’ve broken free, run before he’s had a chance to work out how you got away.’

Once again, Marc assisted as each of the members of the class practised the simple manoeuvres that would startle an attacker into releasing his hold.

It was just by chance that Lauren caught sight of the clock on the wall and realised that they’d overrun their allotted time.

She could almost have predicted the groans that went up when she called an end to the session. All of them were obviously taking everything seriously, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t prepared to have fun while they were learning. Especially if it came at Marc’s expense, it seemed.

‘If you’re going to start teaching them how to throw me around, I don’t think I’ll come next time,’ he groaned theatrically as they made their farewells. The others laughed sympathetically and promised to dump him gently if he was brave enough to turn up for the next instalment.

Lauren was surprised at the sudden stab of disappointment his announcement caused, then cross with herself for being disappointed.

She hadn’t expected him to turn up in the first place and when he had, she hadn’t expected that he would be so helpful, not after the way he’d been keeping such an eagle eye on her in the ward.

She also hadn’t expected to find herself responding to him as anything other than the man intent on watching and waiting for her to make a disastrous error of some sort. She certainly didn’t want to see him as an attractive man who set her blood racing.

‘Thank you for your help,’ she said politely as he waited beside the door to switch the light off behind them.

‘You’re welcome. I actually enjoyed it.’

Lauren couldn’t help chuckling. ‘In a masochistic way?’

‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it?’ He gave one of those grins guaranteed to set a firecracker under any woman’s libido. ‘I actually meant the whole thing. You’re good at putting the stuff across so they take it in.’

‘I had a good teacher,’ she said briefly, allowing herself a fleeting memory of the indefatigable woman who had made it her life’s mission to teach self-defence after she’d lost her only daughter in an attack.

They’d reached her car, sitting safely under the blue-white glow of the safety light. As she turned to say goodnight she was suddenly aware of a strange reluctance for the evening to end. Not that she had any reason to prolong her farewell. Marc was far too busy even to take time out to attend her class this evening, let alone walk her out to her car.

‘Lauren, you haven’t remembered anything more about the other night, have you?’ he demanded, much to her surprise. She’d actually managed to put the whole incident to the back of her mind.

‘Remembered anything more?’ she repeated, puzzled. ‘Like what? I barely saw the man because it was so dark, remember?’

‘So you wouldn’t recognise him if you saw him again?’

‘Not if he were standing in front of me right this minute,’ she confirmed honestly.

‘Well, did he say anything? Make any threats? Did he have a particular regional accent, for example?’

‘I honestly can’t remember…’ she began, only to pause as that niggling impression rose up from its hiding place in the back of her mind. ‘Wait a minute…There was something…’

He started to speak but she put up her hand to stop him, not wanting anything to interfere with her concentration. There had definitely been something odd about the encounter…something that had stuck like a burr in a totally inaccessible place…

‘He called out to me,’ she said aloud as she ran through the events, like replaying a video in her mind. ‘I’d broken my own rules because until he spoke I hadn’t even realised that he was there. Then he grabbed me…’

‘And you sent him neatly over you to land in a heap,’ Marc finished for her with an unexpected edge of satisfaction in his voice. ‘I saw that part, but do you remember what his voice sounded like? Or what he said?’

‘My name. No! That was it! It wasn’t my name, but just for a moment I thought it was, so I was a bit slow on the uptake.’

‘So, what did he say?’

‘He called me Laura…no, Laurel something. I can’t remember exactly.’ Lauren resorted to the trick she used with crossword puzzles of running through the alphabet in her mind. She’d almost reached the end when she exclaimed, ‘Wright! No, that’s still not quite…Something-Wright…Arkwright? Wainwright? Yes! That’s it. He called me Laurel Wainwright.’

‘And you’ve no idea why?’

‘None at all. I’ve never heard the name before.’

‘And it’s not as if you’re from the area, so he couldn’t have recognised you and just forgotten your name,’ Marc mused.

‘Oh, well. It’s probably destined to remain one of life’s great mysteries,’ Lauren quipped. ‘Along with what happened to my other pair of walking socks when I did the laundry yesterday. I could have sworn I put both pairs in, but only one pair came out.’

‘Hmm. They can’t have gone to the Planet of Lost Socks, then. They only accept them if they arrive one at a time,’ Marc retorted with a straight face, then spoilt it by laughing at her expression.

Lauren couldn’t help joining in. The last person from whom she’d have expected such whimsical nonsense was super-efficient, perennially serious Marc Fletcher, but with just that one sentence he’d revealed another, deeply hidden facet.

Suddenly, she knew she was in trouble; knew it was time she said a swift goodbye and made her way as far away from the man as quickly as she could.

It had been easy to resist his physical attraction…with a minor lapse or two while she’d watched that gorgeous body striding away down yet another corridor. All the while he was being so suspicious and grouchy her emotions were in no danger.

Unfortunately, the Marc Fletcher she’d seen this evening was another matter altogether—generous with his time, sharply intelligent, and with a surprising sense of the absurd.

This was a man who could easily chip away at the self-sufficiency that had become so much a part of her over the last decade or so.

CHAPTER THREE

‘LAUREN? It’s Marc Fletcher,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.

Her knees gave a very unseemly wobble but Lauren firmly refused to admit that that was the reason why she perched swiftly on the corner of the desk. She was a responsible ward sister after all, not a teenager with a crush on the nearest good-looking boy.

Nor was Marc Fletcher a boy, not with those broad shoulders and muscular legs, to say nothing of the age and experience he couldn’t hide no matter how enigmatic the expression in those smoky grey eyes.

And the fact that she’d hardly seen him in nearly a week had nothing to do with her reaction either. She’d told herself that he must have been too busy to check up on her, or perhaps she’d somehow convinced him that she was no threat to his precious hospital. She’d also told herself that she should be glad that he wasn’t breathing down her neck all the time. What she couldn’t tell herself was that she’d been relieved not to see him.

‘How can I help you?’ she returned brightly, determined that he shouldn’t have a hint of the turmoil just the sound of his voice engendered in her these days.

‘I’ve got my bed manager’s hat on at the moment, so this call’s just by way of a rather late warning that I’m sending you another patient. The ambulance set off about an hour ago so she should be with you fairly shortly.’

She could hear something in his tone that told her there was something a bit different about this admission, then marvelled at the flight of fancy. As if she could possibly know the man well enough to read such things into his voice…and over the phone, no less.

‘Actually,’ he continued after a thoughtful pause, ‘there’s a bit of a tale behind her condition, but I’ll leave it to her to tell you.’

Lauren was torn between shock that she had been right about his tone of voice and curiosity at the mystery.

‘You’re not going to tell me any more, are you?’ she accused. ‘You’re just going to leave me dangling until she gets here.’

‘Well, I can tell you that she’s been in your old city hospital for nearly a month and needs another week or ten days of your gentle ministrations before she’ll be ready to go home again. Apart from that, I’ll just tell you that she’s either been remarkably unlucky or extremely lucky. I’ll leave it to you to decide when you’ve spoken to her.’

With that, he hung up, leaving Lauren spluttering.

At the end, there, she’d been sure there had been an almost playful tone to his voice and it certainly wasn’t like the formidable man she’d first met to taunt her with a ‘wait and see’ situation.

Now she could hardly wait for the woman to arrive. She was also going to have to find some way to turn the tables on him, unless…

She grinned when she remembered what day it was. Tonight she was due to teach the second self-defence class, and if Marc fulfilled his intention of providing her with a demonstration opponent, she was going to be able to do more than turn the tables on him. She might actually be able to turn his whole world upside down.

She grinned at the image of Marc lying in a crumpled heap at her feet, the victim of yet another crime-busting manoeuvre.

‘Mrs Roker’s here, Sister,’ said a voice behind her, and she suddenly realised that she was still standing there with the telephone clutched in her hand and an inane grin on her face. She hadn’t even had time to run a critical eye over the bed that her new charge was to occupy to make sure that everything was exactly the way it should be.

‘Good. I’m coming,’ she said hastily, cradling the phone and smoothing her hands over her uniform before she hurried out into the ward.

‘Please, Sister, call me Cissy,’ her new patient requested when they’d finally got her settled into her bed.

‘If that’s what you’d prefer,’ Lauren agreed as she retrieved the thick file of notes that had arrived with her latest charge. ‘It looks as if by the time I’ve read all this lot I’ll know your complete life’s history.’

‘Oh, no, Sister,’ Cissy exclaimed. ‘That’s just the last couple of months. The rest of my life would probably fit on a single sheet of paper, and that includes having four children.’

‘Wow.’ Lauren blinked when she had her first inkling of what Marc had been hinting at. ‘How about if you give me the edited highlights as an introduction?’

‘Well, Sister, I think you’d better make yourself comfortable. This is more of a saga than a two-minute short story.’

Lauren chuckled as she perched one hip on the edge of the bed, careful not to move the cage keeping the weight of the bedclothes away from Cissy’s injured leg.

‘It all started when I went in to have my blood pressure checked just after my seventieth birthday,’ she began. ‘Well, my doctor—not one of the ones at Denison Memorial, by the way; we live a little further afield—he said it was fine and did I have any problems he could help me with? I said I was fit as a fiddle apart from the nasty scrape on my shin from where I’d caught it when I walked into the edge of the coffee-table. He took a quick look at it and suggested I went straight along to the practice nurse to have it cleaned up and a protective dressing put on it.’

Lauren suddenly noticed that the room seemed strangely quiet. A quick glance around told her that almost every person in the room had tuned into the tale and was waiting with bated breath for Cissy to continue.

‘Well,’ Cissy went on, her softly lined face animated, ‘she cleaned it up and put some stuff on it. Then, because my skin’s a bit thin, she put a bandage on instead of a sticky plaster and told me to come back in three days to have the dressing changed.’

Apparently blithely unaware of her audience, she drew a quick breath and continued. ‘It was a different nurse the next time and when she took the bandage off she said it was an awful waste of dressings for such a little scrape. I tried to tell her what the first nurse had said about my skin but she got all huffy.’

Cissy stuck her nose in the air and put on an affected voice. “‘I do know what I’m doing, Mrs Roker. I’m a fully qualified nurse, you know.”’

Lauren couldn’t help joining in the round of chuckles. The woman was evidently a wicked mimic as well as a natural storyteller.

‘Anyway, when she put the sticky plaster on, I had to tell her that she’d stretched it too tight and it was pulling the skin. Well, she took hold of the corner and whipped it up—the way you nurses often do to get it over and done with—and she took off a chunk of skin with it.’

This time it was a chorus of sympathetic murmurs and winces and Lauren noticed that Cissy had started playing to the gallery.

‘She stuck it straight back down again, pretending that she hadn’t realised what she’d done, and told me to come back in four days, but by that time it was pretty sore.’

Lauren guessed that that was probably an under-statement. If this was the first real medical problem she’d undergone in her life, Cissy obviously wasn’t one to complain lightly.

‘It was the first nurse again, thank goodness, and she was cross when she saw the plaster, especially when I told her I’d explained about the bandage to the other nurse. Then, when she took it off and saw the mess underneath, she had to ask the doctor to come in—not my own doctor because he was away on holiday by then.’

‘So, how was the graze you’d needed the dressing on in the first place? Was it healing while all this was going on or had it got worse, too?’ Lauren asked.

‘It was nearly gone, dear,’ Cissy said. ‘It was the place where that other nurse had pulled the skin off that had flared up, so the doctor gave me some antibiotics and told me to come back in three days to have the dressings changed again. Only I couldn’t wait three days because the pain got so bad and my leg kept swelling up more and more.’

‘You saw your own doctor again?’ Lauren was suddenly aware just how long this tale might go on for if she didn’t give it a gentle nudge along.

‘No, it was the locum standing in for my own doctor while he was away on holiday. He took one look and told me I needed to go to the hospital straight away. Not Denison either, but the big one in the city.’

Bearing in mind that this had all happened nearly a month ago, Lauren was almost dreading what would come next. It must have been a serious problem to have kept her in hospital all this time.

‘Well, when I got to the hospital they poked and prodded and took blood and X-rays and then a young man asked me to sign a piece of paper. “What’s that for?” I asked. “For your amputation tomorrow morning,” he said as calm as you like. “We’re going to be cutting your leg off because you’ve got gangrene.” And he never batted an eyelid.’

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