Kitabı oku: «It Happened One Night Shift», sayfa 3

CHAPTER FIVE

THE REST OF the night and the two following were better than Billie could have hoped. The gore was kept to a minimum and she managed to get through them without any more near nervous breakdowns.

Or requiring any more resuscitative kissing.

Not that she wasn’t aware of Gareth looking out for her. Which should probably have been annoying but which she couldn’t help thinking was really sweet. And kind of hot.

She knew the last thing he needed was having a squeamish doctor to juggle as he ran the night shift with military-like efficiency—overseeing the nursing side as well as liaising with the medical side to ensure that the ER ran like a well-oiled machine. But he seemed to take it in his stride as just another consideration to manage.

He was clearly known and well respected by both nurses and doctors alike, he was faultlessly discreet, he knew everybody from the cleaning staff to the ward nurses, he knew where everything was and just about every answer to every procedure and protocol question any of them had.

By the time she’d knocked off on Sunday morning she was well and truly dazzled.

St Luke’s was lucky to have Gareth Stapleton.

Which begged the question—why wasn’t he running the department as he apparently used to? What had happened to cause his demotion? What was the incident Helen had made reference to? Annabel Pearce, the NUM, was good too, but from what Billie could see, Gareth ran rings around her.

Billie yawned as she entered the lift, pushing the button for the top floor. Her mind drifted, as it had done a little too often the last couple of days, to the kiss. She shut her tired eyes and revelled in the skip in her pulse and the heaviness in her belly as she relived every sexy nuance.

Not only could Gareth run a busy city emergency department but he could kiss like no other man she knew.

And Billie had been kissed some before.

She’d had two long-term relationships and a few shorter ones, not to mention the odd fling or two, including a rather risqué one with a lecturer, in the eight years since she’d first lost her virginity at university. She liked sex, had never felt unsatisfied by any of her partners and wasn’t afraid to ask for what she wanted.

Essentially she’d been with men who knew what they were doing. Who certainly knew how to kiss.

But Gareth Stapleton had just cleared the slate.

She wet her lips in some kind of subconscious memory and grimaced at their dryness. Between winter and the hospital air-con they felt perpetually dry. She pulled her lip gloss out of her bag and applied a layer, feeling the immediate relief.

The lift dinged and she pushed wearily off the wall and headed to the fire exit for the last two flights of steps to the rooftop car park. She jumped as a figure loomed in her peripheral vision from the stairs below, her pulse leaping crazily for a second before she realised it was Gareth.

And then her pulse took off for an entirely different reason. ‘You took the stairs?’ she said in disbelief. ‘All eight floors?’

Of course he had. Super-nurse, freaked-out-doctor whisperer, kisser extraordinaire. What wasn’t the man capable of?

‘Of course.’ He grinned. ‘It’s about the only exercise I get these days.’

Billie shook her head as they continued up the last two flights, which was torture enough for her tired body. By the time they’d reached the top and Gareth was opening the door, her thighs were grumbling at her and she was breathing a little harder.

Of course, that could just have been Gareth’s presence.

Was it her overactive imagination or had his ‘After you’ been low and husky and a little too close to her ear?

She stepped out onto the roof, her brain a quagmire of confusion, thankful for the bracing winter air cooling her overheated imagination. She zipped up her hoody and hunched into it.

Gareth was hyper-aware of Billie’s arms brushing against his as they walked across the car park to their vehicles. ‘You on days off now?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Three. How about you?’

‘Me too.’ Which meant they’d be back on together on Wednesday. An itch shot up Gareth’s spine.

Fabulous.

Three days didn’t seem long enough to cleanse himself of the memory of the kiss and he really needed to do that because Billie, he’d discovered, was fast becoming the only thing he thought about.

And that wasn’t conducive to his work. Or his life.

The last woman he remembered having such an instantaneous attraction to wasn’t around any more, and it had taken a long time to get over that. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d managed it yet. He grimaced just thinking about the black hole of the last five years.

Billie was in the ER for six months and the next few years of her life would be hectic, with a virtual roller-coaster of rotations and exams and killer shifts sucking up every spare moment of her time. She didn’t have time to devote to a relationship, let alone one with a forty-year-old widower.

They were in different places in their life journeys.

They reached their cars, parked three spaces from each other, and he almost breathed a loud sigh of relief.

‘Well …’ he said, staring out at the Brisbane city skyline, ‘I guess I’ll be seeing you on Wednesday.’

She looked like she was about to say something but thought better of it, nodding instead, as she jingled her keys in her hand. ‘Sure,’ she murmured. ‘Sleep well.’

Gareth nodded, knowing there was not a chance in hell of that happening. ‘Bye.’

And he turned to walk to his vehicle, sucking in the bracing air and refusing to look back lest he suggest something crazy like her coming to his place and sleeping off her night shift there.

In his bed.

Naked.

Get in the car, man. Get in the car and drive away.

He opened the door, buckled up and started the engine. It took a while for his car to warm up and the windscreen to de-mist and he sat there trying not to think about Billie, or her sparkly dress, or her cute freckles.

Or that damned ill-advised kiss.

A minute later he was set to go and he reversed quickly, eager to make his escape. Except when he passed her car, it was still there and she was out of it, standing at the front with the bonnet open, looking at the engine.

He groaned out loud. No, no, no! So close. He sighed, reversing again and manoeuvring his car back into his car space. He disembarked with trepidation, knowing he shouldn’t but knowing he couldn’t not offer to help her.

‘Problem?’ he asked, as he strode towards her.

Billie looked at him with eyes that felt like they’d been marinating in formaldehyde all night. If possible he looked even better than before. ‘It won’t start,’ she grumbled.

‘Is it just cold?’

‘No. I think the battery’s flat.’

‘Want me to give it a try?’

‘Knock yourself out,’ she invited.

Gareth slid into the plush leather passenger seat and turned the key. A faint couple of drunken whirrs could be heard and that was it. He placed his head on the steering-wheel. Yep. Dead as a doornail.

‘Did you leave your lights on?’ he asked, as he climbed out.

She shook her head. She’d taken her hair out of her ponytail and it swished around her face, the tips brushing against the velour lettering decorating the front of her hoody. Her nose was pink from the cold.

‘The car automatically turns them off anyway.’

Of course it did. It wasn’t some twenty-year-old dinosaur. A pity, because if it had been he could have offered her a jump start. But with the newer vehicles being almost totally computerised, he knew that wasn’t advisable.

‘Do you have roadside assistance?’

‘No. I know, I know …’ Billie said, as he frowned at her. She rubbed her hands together, pleased for the warmth of her jeans and fleecy top in her unexpected foray into the cold. ‘It expired a few months back and I keep meaning to renew it but …’

His whiskers looked even shaggier after three nights and his disapproving blue eyes seemed to leap out at her across the distance. ‘You’re a woman driving alone places, you should have roadside assistance.’

Billie supposed she should be affronted by his assumption that she was some helpless woman but, as with everything else, she found his concern for her well-being completely irresistible.

He sighed. ‘I’ll drive down to the nearest battery place and get you one,’ he said.

Billie blinked as his irresistibility cranked up another notch. Was he crazy? ‘It’s Sunday, Gareth. Nothing’s going to be open till at least ten and I don’t know about you but I’m too tired to wait that long.’ She shut her bonnet. ‘I’ll get a taxi home and deal with the battery this afternoon after I’ve had a sleep.’

Gareth knew he was caught then. He couldn’t let her get a taxi home. Not when he could easily drop her. Unless she lived way out of his way. ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’

He hoped it was somewhere really far away.

Billie would have been deaf not to hear the reluctance in his voice. And she was too tired to decipher what it meant. Tired enough to be pissed off. ‘You don’t have to do that, Gareth,’ she said testily, fishing around in her bag for her mobile phone. ‘I’m perfectly capable of ringing and paying for a taxi. I could even walk.’

She watched a muscle clench in his jaw. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he dismissed. ‘You’ve worked all night and I’m here with a perfectly functioning car. It makes sense. Now … Where. Do. You. Live?’

She glared at him. ‘Only a really stupid man would call a tired woman stupid.’

Gareth shut his eyes and raked a hand through his hair, muttering, ‘Bloody hell.’ He glanced at her then. ‘I apologise, okay? Just tell me where you live already.’

‘Paddo.’

Paddington. Of course she did. Trendy, yuppie suburb as befitted her sparkly dress and expensive car. ‘Perfect. You’re on my way home.’ He was house-sitting in the outer suburbs but she lived in his general direction.

She folded her arms. He could tell she was deciding between being churlish and grateful. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind?’

Gareth shook his head. ‘Of course not,’ he said, indicating that she should make her way to his car. ‘As long as you don’t mind slumming it?’

Billie shot him a disparaging look. ‘I’m sure I’ll manage.’

Gareth nodded as she passed in front of him. The question was, would he?

CHAPTER SIX

THEY DROVE IN silence for a while as Gareth navigated out of the hospital grounds and onto the quiet Sunday morning roads. He noticed she tucked her hands between her denim-clad thighs as he pulled up at the first red traffic light.

‘Are you cold?’ he asked, cranking the heat up a little more.

‘Not too bad,’ she murmured.

Gareth supposed the seats in her car were heated and this was probably a real step down for her. And maybe when he’d been younger, before life had dealt him a tonne of stuff to deal with, he might have felt the divide between them acutely.

But he’d since lived a life that had confirmed that possessions meant very little—from the pockmarked earth of the war-torn Middle East to the beige walls of an oncology unit—he’d learned very quickly that stuff didn’t matter.

And frankly he was too tired and too tempted by her to care for her comfort.

Her scent filled the car. He suddenly realised that she’d been wearing the same perfume last Saturday night but he had been too focused on the accident to realise. Something sweet. Maybe fruity? Banana? With a hint of vanilla and something … sharper.

Great—she smelled like a banana daiquiri.

And now it was in his car. And probably destined to be so for days, taunting him with the memory.

She shifted and in his peripheral vision he could see two narrow stretches of denim hugging her thighs, her hands still jammed between them.

‘So,’ Gareth said out of complete desperation, trying to not think about her thighs and how good they might feel wrapped around him, ‘you called yourself Dr Keyes … the other night. With M-Dog.’

Yep. Complete desperation. Why else would he even be remotely stupid enough to bring up that night when they were trapped in a tiny, warm cab together, only a small gap and a gearstick separating them, the kiss lying large between them?

But Billie didn’t seem to notice the tension as she shrugged and looked out the window. ‘It’s easier sometimes to just shorten it. Ashworth-Keyes is a bit of a mouthful at times and, frankly, it can also sound a bit prissy. I tend to use it more strategically.’

‘So drunk teenagers who go by the name of M-Dog don’t warrant the star treatment?’

Billie turned and frowned at him, surprisingly stung by his subtle criticism. ‘No,’ she said waspishly. ‘Some people respond better to a double-barrelled name. There are some patients, I’ve found, who are innately … snobbish, I guess. They like the idea of a doctor with a posh name. Guys called M-Dog tend to see it as a challenge to their working-class roots … or something,’ she dismissed with a flick of her hand. ‘And frankly …’ she sought his gaze as they pulled up at another red light and waited till he looked at her ‘… I was a little too … confounded by our kiss to speak in long words. I’m surprised I managed to remember my name at all.’

Billie held his gaze. If he was going to call her on something, he’d better get it right or be prepared to be called on it himself. She might be helplessly squeamish, she might not be able to stand up to her family and be caught up in the sticky web of their expectations but she’d been taught how to hold her own by experts.

There was nothing more cutting than a put-down from a surgeon who thought the sun shone out of his behind.

‘Yes,’ he said after a moment or two, his throat bobbing as he broke eye contact and put the car into gear. ‘That was … confounding.’

Billie almost laughed at the understatement. But at least he wasn’t denying it. They’d studiously avoided any mention of the kiss since it had happened, but it was there between them and she knew he felt it as acutely as she did.

She’d spent the last couple of days telling herself that it hadn’t meant anything. That it didn’t count. That Gareth had used it only as a strategy to snap her out of her situation.

But it had still felt very real.

They accomplished the rest of the trip in silence, apart from her brief directions, and Gareth pulled up outside her place in under ten minutes.

‘Thank you,’ she said, unbuckling.

Gareth nodded. ‘No problems,’ he murmured, as he let the car idle.

He waited for her to reach for the door handle but she didn’t. ‘No. I mean for everything,’ she said. ‘For just now but also for the other night. For what you did. For how you helped … calm the situation. For the kiss.’

Gareth swallowed hard as Billie once again mentioned the one thing he was trying hard not to think about. She’d been right when she’d said it was confounding and he wished she’d just leave it alone so he could put it away in his mental too-hard-to-deal-with basket.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t thank me for that.’ Confounding or not, it hadn’t been proper. ‘What happened … it pretty much constitutes sexual harassment.’

Her snort was loud in the confined space between them, the world outside the warm bubble of the car forgotten.

‘That’s rubbish, Gareth,’ she said. ‘Kissing me at work is only sexual harassment if I didn’t want or encourage it, if it was unwelcome, and while I appreciate you trying to give me a pass on my behaviour, you can be damned sure I wanted you to kiss me, very very much. We’re not just two people who met at work, we’re not just colleagues, and you know it. We’re both adults here so let’s not pretend there hasn’t been a thing between us since the accident.’

Gareth looked at Billie, her brown eyes glowing at him fiercely, her chest rising and falling, stretching the fabric of her hoody in very interesting ways across her chest. He found it hard to reconcile this woman with the one who had been a pale wreck over a head lac or vomiting at the scene of an accident.

He nodded. ‘Of course. You’re right. I apologise.’

The thing pulsed between them and God knew he wanted her now.

He looked away, inspecting her house through the windscreen for a few moments, the heater pumping warm air into the already heated atmosphere. It was one of those old-fashioned worker cottages that had been bought for a song twenty years ago, renovated and sold for a goodly sum.

‘Do you want to come in? For a coffee.’

Gareth shut his eyes against the temptation, feeling older and more tired than he had in a long time. ‘Billie,’ he murmured, a warning in his voice.

Billie looked at his profile. ‘Don’t trust yourself, Gareth?’ she taunted.

He looked at her, her lip gloss smeared enticingly, a small smile playing on her mouth, a knowing look in her eyes, and his tiredness suddenly evaporated.

He didn’t trust himself remotely.

‘Billie … This isn’t going to happen.’

She looked at him for long moments. ‘Why not?’

The enquiry could have come across sounding petulant. If she’d pouted. If she’d injected any kind of whine into her voice. But she didn’t. She just looked at him with that slight smile on her mouth and asked the very sensible, very reasonable question.

They wanted each other. They were both single and of age.

Why not indeed?

Gareth sighed. ‘You’re, what, Billie? Twenty-seven?’

She shook her head. ‘Twenty-six.’

Gareth groaned. Dear God, It was worse than he’d thought. ‘I’m forty years old,’ he said. ‘I think you need to play with boys your own age.’

‘You think I’m too young for you?’

He nodded. ‘Yes.’ Way too young. ‘And …’

‘And?’ She skewered him with her gaze. ‘You think I’m too forthright, don’t you?’

‘No! I don’t care about that. I like forthright women.’ His wife, a complete stranger at the time and stone-cold sober, had come right up to him in a bar and kissed the life out of him in front of everyone.

‘Well, then?’

‘Billie …’ he sighed. ‘I’m at a different stage of my life than you are. You’ve got many years ahead of you, with a lot of hard work and dedication to get where you’re going. You don’t have the time to devote to serious relationships and I’m—’

‘It’s coffee, Gareth,’ she interrupted.

Gareth shook his head at her, his gaze drifting to her mouth, the gloss beckoning, then back to her earnest brown eyes. ‘It’s not just coffee and you know it.’

She shrugged then slid her hand onto his leg. ‘Would that be such a bad thing?’

A hot jolt streaked up Gareth’s thigh and he was instantly hard. His hand quickly clamped down on hers as it moved closer to ground zero. ‘Give me a break here, Billie. I’m trying to do the right thing.’

‘How very noble of you,’ she murmured glancing at her hand held firmly in place by his before returning her attention to him. ‘Look … I understand that you think I need kid gloves after the other night but I really don’t need you looking out for me in this department. I think this is the right thing.’

Gareth’s sense of self-preservation told him otherwise. There wasn’t one part of him that believed their coffee session would be the end of it. And, despite her confidence right now, he’d met enough doctors in this stage of their careers to know how many relationships didn’t make it.

His wife’s death had left Gareth very wary. It had taken a huge chunk out of him. One that had never grown back. He had no intention of lining up for another pound of flesh. And something told him Billie could do exactly that.

So she wanted a fling? Not going to happen. Not when they worked together.

‘I’m not into recreational sex.’

‘Really?’

She smiled then, her voice clearly disbelieving. She tried to move her hand further north but he held tight for a few moments before finally giving away to her insistence. Gareth watched her palm move closer to his crotch, torn between stopping her again and grabbing her hand and putting it where his groin screamed for attention.

She halted just short of his happy zone and he tore his gaze away from her neat fingernails so very, very close to his zipper.

‘I think you must be the only man in the world who doesn’t see the value in a little harmless physical release,’ she said.

Gareth absently noticed that the windscreen was fog-ging up on the inside and tuned in to the roughness of her voice and the heaviness of his own breathing as the pads of her fingers brushed awfully close to nirvana. He knew if he didn’t stop this now, he wouldn’t.

And with his normal self-control lulled due to lack of sleep, he was just weary enough to succumb.

‘I think you’re tired,’ he said, turning his face to look at her. ‘We’re both tired. I think people can make bad decisions when they’re tired.’

She slid her hand home and Gareth shut his eyes, biting back a groan as pleasure undulated through the fibres deep inside his belly and thighs.

‘I’m awake now,’ she murmured, her voice husky in the charged atmosphere. ‘And I gotta say …’ she paused to give his erection a squeeze ‘… you don’t feel that tired to me.’

God.

She was trying to kill him.

Gareth gave a half-laugh. ‘Trust me,’ he said, his eyes opening as he gathered his last scrap of self-control and removed her hand from his hard-on, ‘that is a really unreliable measure of tiredness. Of anything, for that matter.’

Billie’s stomach plummeted, and not in a good way, as she placed her hand back between her thighs. She’d felt so sure that she’d be able to persuade Gareth to stay and she squirmed a little in the seat to ease the ache that had started to build between her legs in delicious anticipation.

‘I’m sorry, Billie.’

She tossed her head and looked out the window. ‘It’s fine,’ she said.

Billie supposed she should feel embarrassed or mortified. And perhaps if she’d been more mentally alert she might have been. Hell, if she’d been more mentally alert she probably wouldn’t have propositioned him at all.

Or been so damned persistent.

No doubt the mortification was yet to come but for now she just felt disappointed.

‘I just … don’t want you to do something that you might regret tomorrow,’ he continued. ‘This kind of step needs to be taken when all your faculties are intact and I don’t want to be on your dumb-things-I-did list, Billie. We have to work together for the next six months and I’ve been around long enough to see how awkward that can be in the workplace.’

Billie nodded. Just her luck to develop a thing for the first man she’d ever met who didn’t think with his penis.

She turned to look at him. ‘You have one of those?’

He frowned and his eyes crinkled and he looked all sexy and sleepy and perplexed and she wanted to drag him into her house, into her bed so freaking bad even if it was just to snuggle and sleep. ‘One of what?’ he asked.

‘A dumb-things-I-did list.’

His frowned cleared and then he laughed. ‘Oh, hell, yeah.’

His laughter was deep and rich and warm, a perfect serenade in their intimate cocoon, so nearly tangible Billie felt as if she could pick it up and wrap it around her like a cloak. Interesting lines buried amidst all that stubble bracketed his mouth and she squeezed her thighs together tight, trapping her hands there.

Hands that wanted to touch him.

Billie didn’t have that kind of list, although she suddenly wished she did. Even if it meant he was at the top. Although no doubt there were plenty who would think living out her sister’s dreams to keep her parents happy was a really dumb thing to do.

The unhappy thought pierced the intimacy and Billie stirred. She didn’t want it in here with them. She unbuckled her seat belt. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

Billie reached for the handle and pulled; the door opened a crack and cold air seeped in as she half turned her body, preparing to exit. But Gareth’s hand reached across the interior, wrapping gently around her upper arm.

‘You understand it’s not about not wanting you, right?’

Billie’s heart almost stopped in her chest. She looked over her shoulder at him. He looked bleak and tired and torn.

‘I know,’ she murmured, and then, without thinking about it, she leaned across the short distance between them and kissed him quick and hard.

For a brief few seconds she felt him yield. Whiskers spiked her mouth and scraped her chin and she tasted the spice of his groan.

And then she pulled away—pulled away before she did something crazy like straddle him—and exited the car without looking back.