Would it hurt to lean back a little, to have just a moment today that made sense?
Even if it didn’t?
Evie held her breath as his body swayed a little and then seemed to slowly relax back against hers. His scrubs felt warm on her skin and she could sense the vitality of him as they stood in silence, cradled against each other, her cheek brushing his shoulder blade.
It was a magical moment and she shut her eyes to absorb every second. Everything suddenly seemed … right. Evie felt safe. She felt understood.
‘You were brilliant today,’ he whispered.
Evie eyes fluttered open at the barely discernible words. Had he said it or had she only imagined it? She opened her mouth to return the compliment but a beeping pager shattered the intimacy.
Finn’s eyes opened instantly. His surroundings came
into sharp focus, the feel of Evie pressed against him suddenly too, too close for comfort.
What the hell was he doing?
He shrugged her away. ‘I have to go,’ he said gruff ly.
Evie stepped back from him, reeling from the quick severing of the fragile emotional connection they’d just made.
He didn’t even look back as he departed.
Mia headed straight for Pete’s Bar after work later that evening. It had been a harrowing day for all of them, with Evie seeming particularly stressed when she’d finally returned to the department. They’d arranged to meet for a drink and a bit of a debrief session. Her friend was obviously taking the soldier’s death hard.
Evie, however, was nowhere to be seen amidst the surprising Sunday night crowd as Mia made her way to the bar.
Luca, on the other hand, was easily spotted by her specially tuned senses and even if she’d been able to resist his devilish smile, she couldn’t resist his I’ve-been-waiting-for-you stare.
Luca slid over as Mia approached, a sense of inevitability taking hold. What was it about this woman that made him want more? Her complete lack of sexual inhibitions or was she just a novelty, something familiar for a change instead of just another pick-up?
Or maybe it was her emotional unavailability? Knowing that she wanted the same thing he did—no commitments, nothing but a good time.
He watched the tame swish of her ponytail as she came closer, knowing what that hair looked like loose
and wild and knowing from the heat in her gaze that tonight was going to get very wild indeed.
Mia refused to look at Luca as she slid in beside him. She didn’t want to alert the two other occupants to what was going on between them. She and Luca were sex—just sex—and she didn’t want the others to get the wrong impression.
She greeted Charlie Maxwell, the orthopaedic surgeon who had operated on the partially severed leg earlier, and Carl Todd, the anaesthetist. They were chatting about the bomb blast at Douglas and the two operations that had followed.
‘He’s not out of the woods yet,’ Charlie said, taking a mouthful of his cola. He was on call and could well be called back to amputate the leg. ‘We managed to save it but I’m not entirely convinced it’ll be viable in the long term. There was extensive blood loss and a lengthy ischaemic time.’
Mia was always surprised whenever Charlie was serious. The lovable, laid-back, ex-pro surfer with his shaved head and wicked sense of humour gave new meaning to the Aussie word ‘larrikin’. It was hard to tell at first glance that beneath it all he was a dedicated and committed professional.
‘The trip from the army barracks isn’t exactly short,’ Mia mused. They were the nearest tertiary hospital to the barracks but in a situation where every second was vital, it was just a little too far away.
‘Absolutely,’ Charlie agreed. ‘You guys did a great job getting him to me as quickly as you could.’
They chatted about the procedure for a while and Mia was pleased to hear that the patient was still stable
in ICU with good pulses when Charlie rang to get an update.
Working on saving the leg today with Luca had been an exhilarating experience, and it was good to know that their efforts had contributed to the thus far positive operative outcome.
She glanced at Luca and felt her breath hitch as he chose that moment to glance at her. Heat surged up the side seam of her jeans where their legs touched. Under the table, his hand slid onto her thigh.
She felt her breath seize in her lungs. But, as his fingers started to smooth the fabric of her jeans in light patterns, she didn’t remove it.
‘Well, at least you had better luck than Finn,’ Carl commented, dragging Mia’s attention back to the conversation. He inclined his head to indicate the man in question, who was sitting at the bar by himself, staring into his Scotch.
‘He worked like a demon, trying to save the other soldier. It was like he was possessed or something.’
Even knowing how much Carl liked to embellish things, Mia was startled by the anaesthetist’s description of the frantic efforts in Finn’s theatre that afternoon—no wonder Evie needed to debrief.
‘Evie’s pretty wrecked,’ Mia commented when Carl finished.
‘She’s in the wrong specialty. She’d make a great surgeon,’ Carl mused. ‘Kept her head no matter how testy Finn got.’
Mia glanced at Finn again just as Suzy plonked herself down in the chair next to him. The theatre nurse was a regular at Pete’s and Mia had seen her flirting
with Finn here before, but a blind fool could see that Finn was not in the mood for company.
He gave her one of those polite frozen smiles she’d seen Finn give once too often to hapless medical students or to Eric Frobisher in particular, but Suzy seemed as oblivious or impervious to Finn’s signals as Eric did.
Luca’s signals, however, as his fingers continued to brush against her thigh, were loud and clear. Mia fought the urge to turn her body towards him, raise her mouth to his.
Carl looked over his shoulder again. ‘Well, well, well. Looks like Finn’s found a little distraction for the night.’
Mia just stopped the eye-roll. Carl was a top-class anaesthetist and still fancied himself as a bit of a ladies’ man but he obviously wasn’t a student of body language—he was way off the mark.
Luca winked at her. ‘Oh, you think so?’ he asked, watching an obviously distant Finn.
Carl took a swallow of his beer. ‘Oh, yes.’ He tapped his nose three times with his index finger. ‘I’ve been around long enough to tell when there’s hanky-panky going on between the staff.’
Luca felt Mia’s thigh tense beneath his palm and he grinned. ‘Really?’ he murmured as he resisted Mia’s sudden attempt to remove his hand from her thigh.
He easily won the necessarily subdued struggle.
Carl nodded. ‘Of course. I picked Luke and Lily long before anyone else did. And this bloke …’ he jerked his thumb towards Charlie. ‘… is virtually an open book.’
Charlie looked affronted. ‘Me? What about him?’ Charlie pointed to Luca. ‘His reputation
preceded
him.’
‘Ah, well.’ Carl laughed. ‘That’s true.’
Luca laughed good-naturedly. ‘And what about Mia?’
he enquired innocently, daring to stroke his fingers closer to the apex of her thighs. He didn’t even wince when his ankle suffered a short, sharp jab from a hard pointy toe. ‘Any gossip on her?’
Carl shook his head with a faux crestfallen look. ‘Oh, no. Mia informed me a long time ago that fooling around with someone from work was a recipe for disaster. I think they were the words, right, Mia?’
Mia nodded her head graciously. She’d told Carl that most emphatically one day just after he’d tried to come on to her. And she meant it as much now as she had then.
So why the hell was she sitting at a booth with an Italian devil who was practically bringing her to orgasm in front of two oblivious colleagues?
Surely Carl could see the pheromones wafting off her body?
‘What?’ Luca feigned shock, looking down into Mia’s face, gratified to see heat shimmering in her eyes like a mirage as his finger found her inner seam. He noticed her knuckles whiten as her grip on the edge of the table tightened. ‘There’s been no work flirtations?’
‘Oh, no,’ Carl answered for her. ‘As far as I can tell, there’s been no one. And I have a pretty good radar,’ he added, tapping his nose again and smiling at Mia.
Luca flicked a finger across the seam that ran down from the bottom of her zip where it joined the two inner thigh seams. He felt her resistance melt to nothing as her legs eased apart a little and he thought,
Carl, you are a fool!
Mia knew she shouldn’t. They were in a public place, for crying out loud. A place that was crawling with staff
from The Harbour
.
But his fingers were creating such delicious havoc … and no one could see …
She spread her legs a little further and smiled at Charlie as she changed the subject.
Evie was late to Pete’s but that was the nature of the job. A last-minute patient had kept her involved for a while, which had been fine by her. Becoming absorbed in her work had helped keep her mind off Finn and what had happened between them today.
Because, whether he liked it or not—whether
she
liked it or not—something
had
happened. She’d had a glimpse of his humanity and no matter how many patients she’d seen since, she just couldn’t banish that from her head.
And that brief moment when he’d leaned into her … It had felt like some kind of … surrender.
She’d never seen Finn emotionally vulnerable but today had been different. Today he’d leaned on her. Actually let himself go for once and trusted her enough to drop the cantankerous-but-brilliant-surgeon facade and just be a doctor who’d lost a patient. Be human. Be a man.
She could still feel the imprint of him against her. The flat of his shoulder blade against her cheek, the warm, solid roundness of his shoulder beneath her palm, the press of his broad back against her chest, their hearts beating almost as one.
She wasn’t stupid enough to read anything into it. But she was intrigued. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know what had happened in his past to make Damien’s case so personal to Finn. So personal that he’d
let his guard down to her, of all people. Let her touch him. Let himself touch her back.
You were brilliant today, Evie.
Those words had meant more to her than any compliment she’d ever received-professional or personal. She hugged them to herself as she crossed the road to Pete’s
.
If Finn was at Pete’s, she was going to repay the compliment. She was going to buy him a drink, tell him he was brilliant and badger him until he talked.
Staff at The Harbour always talked about what a maverick he was, what a legend. They held him in awe, hoisted him on high like some kind of trophy, made him untouchable. Like he was a machine, a robot. But they seemed to forget, underneath it all he was also a man.
But she hadn’t. She’d seen the man today.
And men needed to be touched too.
Finn probably most of all.
Finn wasn’t really listening to Suzy as she prattled on about some movie she’d just seen. He didn’t want her there, he didn’t want to talk or make light conversation.
He didn’t want to hook up. Even if Suzy was extremely attractive and obviously up for it.
He came to Pete’s for one reason only. To drink.
Sure, he could drink at home. And he’d do that too. But drinking a little in public tempered the urge to drink a lot when he got back to his apartment.
The Scotch helped with the pain from his injuries and it helped obliterate the events that had caused them.
Suzy couldn’t do that. No woman could. Not even Lydia.
And then Evie’s lovely face entered his vision and
for one crazy moment panic rose in him as he thought he’d conjured her up. But then she pushed the heavy door open wider and their gazes met.
For a moment there was a shimmer of recognition between them, a whisper of what they’d both endured together, and then she smiled at him, a smile that seemed to see right inside him. A smile that said, I know you’re hurting; let me help you.
And for one mad instant he wanted that. He wanted to feel again what he’d felt that afternoon in the change room cocooned against her. That strange kind of peace—like nothing he’d ever known.
The panic intensified.
The sheer power of these strange, unwanted feelings Evie evoked overwhelmed him. He dragged his gaze away, his heart beating like that of a wild animal suddenly caged and fighting for his life. She didn’t know him. She didn’t know anything about him. How could she? Princess Evie couldn’t even begin to comprehend where he’d come from, the things he’d seen, the promises he’d broken.
He turned to Suzy and dazzled her with a smile. ‘Whaddya say we get out of here?’
Evie, her heart light as she spotted Finn, made a direct line for him. She stopped three paces later when she realised he wasn’t alone. The smile he gave the blonde, one she’d seen him with here before, took her breath away and she struggled with the sudden urge to turn on her heel and run.
Or slap someone.
Back off!
But he wasn’t hers to make such an order. The realisation brought with it a sudden crushing sense of despair.
Just because they’d shared a moment, that didn’t make him hers.
Finn smiled down at Suzy as she leaned forward and whispered in his ear. Her cleavage was exposed to his view and he looked his fill.
It was an impressive cleavage and he was a man, damn it.
A man who appreciated a woman’s body but did
not
get emotionally involved with them. And the sooner Evie got that through her head, the better.
He wasn’t some wounded hero that needed saving. He was a cantankerous bastard beyond redemption.
‘C’mon,’ he said, sliding off the stool, putting his hand out to help Suzy off hers but looking directly over her head, meeting Evie’s shocked look with practised indifference. ‘Let’s go back to my place.’
Evie couldn’t move for a moment, the cold of Finn’s piercing gaze freezing her to the spot. He seemed totally unreachable as his eyes told her things he couldn’t say in a crowded bar.
Like
, what happened this afternoon meant nothing.