EATING dinner with Sam had been difficult—although talking to someone about hospital routine while battling physical reactions to the same someone probably needed a stronger word than difficult. But worse was to come, Meg realised as she slipped into a scrub suit and pulled paper slippers over her shoes.
Operating theatres had an intimacy all of their own. Was it the soft background music, or the desultory chat, or the fact the only part of the others you could see were their eyes, protected by clear glasses but still sending all the messages only eyes could send?
And it proved just as bad as Meg had suspected it would. Because this particular surgeon liked his theatre nurse to pass instruments across the patient, Meg was standing close to Sam. Close enough to feel the heat of his body. Kissing close when she turned towards him to pass him something or ask for direction.
Their gloved hands touched time and time again, and although Meg also felt the touch of the surgeon’s fingers as well, those gloves sent no messages along her nerves—caused no distraction.
‘We insert a titanium plate in here to hold the bone together, ’ the surgeon was explaining, while Meg held the tiny screws that would hold the plate in place. ‘Although it would mend with the teeth wired to close the gap, it would remain weak at this point, hence the plate.’
He inserted the plate into Riley’s gums then indicated to Sam to screw it into the bone. Meg handed him one screw and the small electric tool he’d need to screw it home, then passed him the second screw, wincing at the noise of the tool.
‘Great job,’ the surgeon said, then prepared to wire the teeth together, finally wiring the lower jaw to the upper one, leaving enough room for Riley to sip liquids—the only nourishment he’d get for the next month.
‘He’s Barry Jensen’s boy?’ the surgeon asked, as Sam snipped the last piece of wire.
‘Yes,’ Meg replied, wondering how an oral surgeon would know the fisherman.
‘Is he here at the hospital?’ the man persisted.
‘He should be by the time we come out,’ Meg told him. ‘Sarah called him on the boat and he was coming straight back to dock.’
‘Missing his night fishing,’ the surgeon said. ‘Anyway, I’ll have a talk to him. Man brings in the best prawns of the whole fleet. Soaks them then cooks them in some way that they’re free of grit. I reckon a couple of kilos of prawns every now and then will more than pay my fee.’
Meg was so relieved she could have flung her arms around him and given him a big hug, but it was hardly the time, and she barely knew the man. Instead, she smiled at Sam, and the reflected delight in his blue-green eyes sent ripples of excitement down her spine.
‘Good result all round,’ he said a little later, when, back in their ordinary clothes, they met in post op where a sleepy Riley was realising just how hard it was to talk with his mouth wired shut.
‘He talks too much anyway,’ Barry said gruffly. ‘Be nice to have a bit of peace and quiet around the place.’
But the fingers he rested against his son’s cheek were gentle, and the way he held tightly to Sarah’s hand betrayed his dismay at seeing his injured lad.
Meg swallowed hard. What was it with this emotional stuff that kept swamping her? Surely it couldn’t all be laid at the door of Sam’s return to the Bay!
‘Time you went home,’ he said, guiding her out of the room with his hand in the small of her back.
He’d been talking to the doctor who had done the anaesthetic, and who would stay with Riley until he was transferred to a ward.
‘Everything’s fine here.’
Meg let him guide her, relishing the warmth of his hand, although she knew she shouldn’t. There was still something bothering her—something she couldn’t pin down—but all the early warning systems in her body were on full alert, reminding her not to get too close to Sam.
‘Walk on the beach?’
They were walking together to the car park and it had seemed such a natural thing for Sam to ask—a long day followed by a relaxing stroll on the beach—he was surprised when Meg jumped as if she’d been shot and spun to face him.
‘With you?’
‘Why not?’
She frowned at him.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sounding as crabby as she used to sound thirteen years ago when she’d been out of sorts over something.
Then she added, ‘If we do, I don’t want you kissing me.’
Sam hid a smile and held up his hands in surrender.
‘I only suggested a walk.’
‘I know, but I don’t trust you.’
‘Or don’t trust yourself?’
The scowl she shot at him told him she was still crabby, but she was honest enough to add, ‘That, too!’
He opened the door of her beat-up old car for her, then drove home behind her, hoping she’d decided on a walk, wondering if she’d really mind a kiss.
Or two…
But when she’d parked her car in the little carport beside the house, she walked across to where he was getting out of his.
‘I think I’ll give the walk a miss tonight, Sam,’ she said quietly. ‘I got a bit of sleep last night, but not enough. Some other time, perhaps?’
Sam opened his mouth to argue then closed it again. She probably was tired, but beyond that there’d been something else in her voice. Some nuance that told him Meg was distancing herself from him.
Protecting herself?
If she was feeling half the physical symptoms he was whenever they were together, then he could understand she might be wary.
But might she not want to see where they would lead?
He certainly did…
Inevitably the next day was Wednesday, and although knowing they always followed Tuesdays, Sam was disconcerted by the confirmation of this when he saw Sally’s neatly typed schedule on his desk.
Every morning she did that—typing up a list of his appointments and explaining where he should be when, and until today—for a whole two days—he’d been grateful. But today seemed to be entirely taken up with meetings, the first one with the director of nursing.
The same director of nursing who’d closed herself off from him the previous evening, refusing even a guaranteed kiss-free walk on the beach.
But would it have been kiss-free?
The part of him that registered his physical reactions every time he saw her—even in the distance—doubted it.
He shut his mind to the distracting thoughts, though he was aware as he did so that the detachment on which he’d always prided himself didn’t seem to be working too well. Refusing to give the matter any more time, he tried to concentrate solely on work. His first meeting of the morning with the DON was so, Sally had written, they could review patient numbers for the week, discuss staff issues, equipment concerns and general ‘running of the hospital’ business.
And according to the timetable Bill would then join the pair of them for a working lunch so their needs could be put to him and budgetary matters thrashed out.
Meg came in looking as if she hadn’t slept for a month, although the pale blue of the hospital uniforms did little for her anyway.
Mentally, he stripped the uniform away, seeing her in the tiny thong and an itty-bitty bra like one of those in the drawer full of undies he still had in his wardrobe.
His body stirred.
When did keeping someone’s undies go from a kind of accident to a fetish?
He had to get rid of them!
He had to think work—look at her face!
The dark circles under Meg’s eyes moved him to pity, a reaction that annoyed him too much to give in to it.
‘Maybe you should have walked—you might have slept better,’ he said, although he knew this was totally unprofessional behaviour.
‘Telling me I look shocking? Thanks, Sam. My ego needed a boost.’
He considered blustering into some kind of apology but one look at her face, white and tight, warned him to back off.
‘Bad night?’
She sighed and sank down into the chair.
‘You could say that,’ she said, with a smile so pathetic it caused a little hitch in his heart. ‘Debbie Waring—the pregnant woman who came in last night? She gave birth at three this morning. Tiny, premmie twins. When Matt realised she had gone back into labour he phoned the special neonate team and they were here by three-thirty, and had the babies stabilised in humidicribs by four. They flew out shortly afterwards, babies and mum, but they were so tiny, Sam—there’s a lot of doubt…’
She brushed a hand across her forehead as if to clear away her emotions, and though Sam longed to speak—knew he should—his own emotional reaction prevented it. A reaction caused not by this news about the babies of a woman he didn’t know, but by the echo of the news he’d learned yesterday—that Meg had had a baby and that baby had died.
‘We can put off this meeting,’ he said, when he finally got his head into order and decided concentrating on work was the best thing to do.
‘No way! If I go back to my office I’ll fall asleep at my desk then wake up stiff and sore and probably find I’ve drooled on my notes.’
Sam felt a frown forming on his forehead and willed it away, not wanting Meg to think he was frowning at her. But it was at her—or rather at her ability to tamp down her emotions. He’d always been the one who could do that. Meg—well, the Meg he’d known—was more likely to let them all flow out, excitement, despair, whatever. He’d always known what Meg was feeling about something…
‘OK,’ he said. If she could switch so quickly from personal to professional, so could he. ‘Let’s meet! From the little experience I have of it, the hospital appears particularly well run. As I’m only here in an acting capacity, I’ve no intention changing anything, so it seems to me these meetings will mainly be about issues you want to raise.’
That was the little speech he’d prepared before he’d seen her—in fact, he’d prepared it yesterday when Sally had told him the meeting was on today’s agenda.
Now he sat back and waited.
And waited.
But when Meg finally spoke, it wasn’t about issues and they were right back to personal again.
‘Why did you come back?’
He drew in air—hoping she wouldn’t notice his chest expanding and contracting—because although it had all seemed so simple, so practical, when the idea had been mooted, now emotional garbage kept coming up and he wondered if perhaps subconsciously…
‘I thought we were discussing the hospital.’
The stilted words seemed to make things worse, not better, and Sam gave up all pretence, shrugged his shoulders, walked past Meg to shut the office door, then turned back to face her.
‘It was to do with Mum, or at least I thought it was, but now I’m back, I wonder if I didn’t have to come anyway, if only to…’
He ran his hands through his hair, aware it was becoming a habit he’d never had before.
‘Ground myself sounds trite and stupid, but I can’t think of any other way to say it. You accused me the other day of not thinking through my return, and that’s not right. I had thought it through! But that was back when Mum was alive and it was her dream, not only to come back here but to do some good here. Things worked out that she got some money, quite a lot of money, and she wanted to build a private hospital—I guess if I’d been a teacher she’d have built a school. So, because she’d left the Bay originally because of me and because I owed her in more ways than I can ever tell you, I thought it through and reckoned I could do it.’
‘And then she died?’ Meg said quietly, and for the first time in weeks Sam felt a lump of sorrow harden in his throat, killing any chance of answering.
So he nodded, but he turned away so Meg wouldn’t see his weakness, going back behind his desk and picking up Sally’s typed agenda.
‘Before I’d finished the administration course I was doing. Before she could get here!’
Another pause, while Meg searched for words that might ease just a little of his pain, but before she found them, Sam spoke again.
‘Which might be why the whole experience has thrown me for a loop,’ he managed gruffly. ‘Made me vulnerable, I suppose, to the past.’
He looked at her and waved the sheet of paper he still held in his hand.
‘Vulnerable doesn’t sit well with me, Meg,’ he said. Understatement of the year! ‘I pride myself on being in control.’
In control—two words and they reminded Meg of what had puzzled her in Sam’s explanation of their break-up. He’d been in control—cutting her out of his life with one swift stroke—controlling the break to the extent she hadn’t been able to question it—hadn’t been able to ask for an explanation.
Why hadn’t he talked to her about it? That was the question she wanted—needed—to ask.
But not now, when she was so tired and her heart was still aching for the tiny babies flown away that morning.
Not now when she was, to use Sam’s unexpected word, so vulnerable.
Sam was sitting down again—behind his desk—agenda in hand.
‘Ready now?’ he said, and she knew the time for questioning had passed.
‘I guess so,’ she agreed, though she wondered if it would be possible to behave normally when the air between them hummed like the wind through high-voltage lines.
‘The hospital is running well,’ she began, when it became obvious Sam wasn’t going to open proceedings. ‘Though with the flu that’s been going around we’ve been short-staffed, which meant having to transfer two elderly patients to the city.’
‘Why elderly patients in particular?’ Sam asked, and Meg relaxed. Not entirely, but enough so she could ignore all the Sam-Meg stuff happening inside her while she discussed work-related matters.
‘We closed a ward. Well, not a ward in the way you think of a ward, but a two-bedded room. You’ll have realised that the kids’ ward is the only real ward-type room in the hospital. All the other rooms are singles or doubles, configured in such a way we can have more or fewer patients under each umbrella. So we might have six postsurgical patients one week and only three medical patients, or vice-versa if we haven’t had a visiting surgeon for a week. With the absenteeism, we just didn’t have the staff to cope with the two elderly patients who were here waiting for accommodation in a nursing home. They’re not high-level care, but they do need help, and they really didn’t mind being transferred for a week. In fact, I think they looked on it as a pleasant change.’
‘Don’t regulations mean you can’t have patients here indefinitely, even if they are awaiting placement somewhere else?’
Sam’s question, more an administrative than a medical one, surprised Meg, although she didn’t know why. He’d always been inquisitive, asking why and how and wherefore. No doubt he knew the hospital regulations as well as she did, possibly better if he’d done an administration course.
‘Well, they do,’ she admitted. ‘They limit the number of nights that a patient can stay but, of course, now these two have been away for a week, we can start again.’
She tried a smile and thought he was trying hard not to smile back at her.
‘Bending the rules, Sister Anstey?’ he asked, allowing a little bit of the smile to escape around the edges of his mouth.
‘It’s impossible not to!’ Meg snapped, more annoyed by her reaction to that faint smile than by his question. But at least she could get rid of some pent-up emotion, because she did think the regulations were all wrong.
‘What are we supposed to do with elderly people who have nowhere to go and no family to turn to? Put them out on the street? Give them a refrigerator carton and supermarket trolley to set them up for their new life?’
He smiled properly now.
‘That’d be the least we could do,’ he agreed. ‘And I’m not criticising you for keeping these people here, just wondering if there’s something we can do to alleviate the problem in the future. Are there too few places in nursing homes? I would have thought an area like the Bay, where people have been coming to retire for generations, would be well equipped with retirement villages, hostels and nursing homes.’
‘It is,’ Meg said, and sighed. ‘There are more of the damn things than you can poke a stick at—but nowadays there are entry fees, or you have to buy your place. How are people who’ve never owned their own homes going to pay for a bed in a nursing home?’
‘But means-tested government subsidies exist—surely they’re available for those people,’ Sam protested.
‘Of course, but there’s a waiting list, and in the meantime the privately owned nursing homes and hostels can fill their beds with fee-paying clients, so why bother taking someone off the subsidy list?’
Darn it all—she’d got all hot and bothered again, just when she was trying to be cool and sensible. And Sam had read her feelings easily, for he was smiling once again.
‘I’m glad you haven’t lost your fire, Megan,’ he said. ‘It is, and always has been, one of the most attractive things about you.’
He’d meant it as a compliment, and Meg knew it, but somehow in her head it got twisted up with what he’d had the hide to say earlier—about how terrible she looked.
‘Well, that’s just great,’ she snapped at him. ‘You might look awful, Meg, but at least you’re fiery!’
‘You know damn well I didn’t mean it that way, Megan!’ Sam glowered at her, jolted out of what had been becoming a dangerous complacency. ‘You just looked tired.’
‘Well, you weren’t afraid of saying exactly what you thought when I came in,’ Meg reminded him. ‘So why should I imagine you’re handing out compliments now?’
Sam held up both hands in surrender, but before Meg could speak again, Bill tapped on the door, then opened it and popped his head in.
‘Do come in, Bill, and rescue me before she kills me,’ Sam told him.
‘You’ll need more than Bill for protection,’ Meg warned, but she stood up and moved her chair, making room for Bill to join them at the meeting.
But before they could begin again, Sally poked her head around the door.
‘Sorry, Meg, but there’s an ambulance just come in with a couple of car accident victims so the doctors on duty are flat out, and now we’ve had a call that there’s been a logging accident over on the island. A helicopter’s on the way to pick you up.’
‘Pick you up?’ Sam repeated, looking towards Meg who had stood up, excused herself and moved towards the door as if there was nothing strange in the statement.
‘I’m a trained paramedic,’ she said briefly, and continued on her way.
‘But if a doctor’s available…’ Sam began, following her out the door and along the corridor. ‘I don’t mean to diminish your ability, but surely if there’s one available—’
‘You want to come?’ she asked, turning towards him. ‘Feel free! Four hands are always better than two and, yes, if a doctor is available, he or she will usually go.’
‘So you’ll go anyway? Even if I’m available?’
Meg continued walking towards the back of the hospital, though she did turn her head and give him a brief glance.
‘What do I really know about you, Sam? You’re acting super, but a lot of supers don’t do hands-on medicine. Have you had recent A and E experience? Have you done helicopter rescues? For all I know, you’ve been administrating or treating geriatrics or doing anaesthetic work since you finished training. Why would I, or Sally, for that matter, think you’d want to do a rescue flight?’
‘You could have asked,’ he snapped, glaring down at her, mainly because she was right—she didn’t know what experience he had. What he did know was that having inexperienced or untrained staff on rescue flights could often not so much jeopardise the rescue but slow it down.
‘I’m paramedic trained,’ he said. ‘I’ve recent experience and, as you said, four hands might be better than two.’
The helicopter was waiting for them outside, Simon, the pilot, standing at the door.
‘We can land close by,’ he said, handing them overalls to pull on over their clothes. ‘Ten-minute flight—I’ll fill you in on what I know once we’re in the air.’
They climbed into the little aircraft and put on the helmets that held the communication equipment they would need to hear and speak.
‘There were three men cutting old-growth timber at the top end of the island. They had the chains wrapped around one log ready to drag it out but it was too long or unwieldy, so one of the blokes was cutting it in half when the chainsaw hit the chain and flew out of his hand, cutting his arm. The other bloke reaches out to grab the chainsaw and loses half his hand. The third man gets them both into his ute, thinking he’ll drive them out, and in his panic tips the thing over.’
‘So who contacted you?’ Meg asked.
‘The fellow with the injured hand. Used his mobile to dial triple zero. He thinks the driver must have knocked his head and is unconscious and he thinks the other bloke is dead, but as they’re all jammed into the front seat of a ute that’s upside down by the side of a timber track, who knows?’
Sam felt his stomach squirm at the thought of what lay ahead, but the pilot was telling them to keep a lookout for a clearing in the trees that would denote a timber track.
‘He said they had a cleared camp,’ Simon added, then he turned the chopper into a low swoop and Sam saw the camp below them. The men had chosen well, right beside one of the beautiful blue fresh-water lakes for which the island was famous. And a nice sandy beach on which the helicopter could land.
‘We’ll just have to follow the track. The guy said they weren’t far from camp. The girl who took the call on triple zero is still talking to him. I’ve just called in that we’re down and on our way.’
The pilot was unloading gear as he spoke, and Sam picked up the biggest of the backpacks, frowning as he saw Meg shoulder one not much smaller, wondering just how often she did this kind of work.
With Simon carrying the third pack, they walked swiftly down the track that led out of the camp, Simon, calling out from time to time, hoping, once other tracks started to diverge, to get a direction from a voice.
Hoping they were in time…