Fran dared not look at his mouth. She wanted to but knew if she did she would not be able to resist closing the distance and pressing hers to his to see if it was as warm and sensual and commanding as it looked. She kept her eyes on his, even though she could feel herself drowning in their startling blue depths.
‘I’m not sure it would be a good idea for you to…for me to…for us to…you know…get involved…’ She faltered.
He held her gaze for a throbbing beat or two before stepping back from her. ‘Pity,’ he said in an offhand tone. ‘But let me know if you change your mind.’
Fran frowned at his casual, laid-back manner. Her heart was still hammering like a piston while he seemed largely unaffected. She didn’t know whether to be insulted or disappointed, although she knew if she was honest with herself, she was both. Was he on the hunt for a temporary playmate and thought she would fit the position? How demeaning! But then again she
had
wanted him to kiss her.
The let-down, out-of-sorts feeling lingering in her stomach was annoying. She wondered if he had been playing with her, testing her to see what sort of woman she was. She knew there
were plenty of her peers who would think nothing of a casual fling with an attractive partner. One-night stands or having a sex buddy was commonplace these days. But she wasn’t built that way.
‘Rufus, time to go home,’ she said briskly, slapping her hands against her thighs to get the dog’s attention.
Rufus got up from the floor and came over with his tail wagging and sat at Jacob’s feet, looking up at him adoringly.
Fran felt like rolling her eyes. She folded her arms and tilted her head at the dog admonishingly. ‘Traitor.’
Jacob ruffled Rufus’s ears and jangled his keys. ‘Ever been in a police car before, Dr Nin?’ he asked.
She squared her shoulders and sent him a brittle look. ‘No.’
He held open the front door for her, amused by her stiff carriage. ‘Loosen up, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘You’re not under arrest.’
Her eyes widened momentarily at the endearment, but just as quickly she lowered her gaze, her small white teeth sinking into her bottom lip as she brushed past him to make her way to the car.
Jacob moved ahead to open the car door for her, noting how her limp had worsened. She caught the tail end of his empathetic look and immediately set her mouth, a mantle of cold hauteur coming over her as she got into the passenger seat.
He waited until Rufus was stowed safely in the back and he was behind the wheel before he spoke. ‘I have a home gym with some equipment that might help strengthen your leg. I broke mine a few years back in a car chase. I could write out a programme for you. You’d be amazed at the way it helps.’
Her eyes met his for a brief moment before turning to stare sightlessly out of the windscreen. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said in a small stiff voice.
Jacob pulled down his seat belt and clicked it into place. ‘You do that,’ he said, and, gunning the engine, drove out of his property, leaving a spray of gravel in his wake.
T
HE
drive back to her sister’s house took only a few minutes but just as Jacob was pulling into the drive his radio informed him of a hit-and-run accident just out of town.
‘I’ve got Dr Nin with me right now,’ Jacob said to Constable Jeffrey. He glanced at Fran. ‘Have you still got the trauma kit from Candi Broderick’s fall?’
‘It’s at my sister’s place,’ Fran said, feeling her nerves tighten beneath her skin like steel wires under extreme pressure.
Not a hit and run. Not a roadside rescue with no back-up. She couldn’t do it. She would have to tell him. Right now. She would have to come straight out and tell him what a coward she was, what a failure, what a nervous wreck…
‘We’re about ten minutes away,’ Jacob said to the constable on the radio. ‘How far away are the ambos?’
Fran heard the constable’s voice crackle over the radio. ‘Two volunteers are on their way. They should be almost there by now.’
Jacob was out of the car and opening her door before she had unclipped her seat belt. She forced her stiff leg to move and hurried inside to collect the kit, pushing Rufus inside as she went.
When she got back in the police vehicle she sucked in a breath as Jacob put his foot to the floor. He turned on the lights and siren, the sense of urgency making her blood pound.
Keep calm, keep calm, keep calm
, she chanted to herself, mantra-like.
The car’s speed pushed her back in her seat but she kept working on keeping herself focussed and in control. She’d done roadside retrievals with mock patients during trauma training a few years ago. She had dealt with hundreds of cases of trauma in A and E but that had been with help and every medical aid you could ask for. Treating a real patient at a dusty roadside was going to test her in every way imaginable. The ambulance officers were volunteers, not trained paramedics. Small communities like Pelican Bay could not afford a full-time service. Fran knew she would be expected to take charge as she had with Candi and Ella, and the thought of the unknown terrified her. How badly would the victim be injured? Hit-and-run accidents could be anything from a slight clip with barely any damage to a victim being crushed, dragged or thrown by the vehicle. Various scenarios flashed through her brain, each one ramping up her panic. She was out of her depth. She was not as experienced as she should be for a situation like this. She was still getting over her own trauma—how could she possibly manage someone else’s? What if she had another blank moment like she’d had with little Ella? Jacob was a competent cop but she doubted he would be able to take over if she fell apart.
She clenched her hands into tight fists in her lap, using every second of the journey to try and mentally prepare herself for who knew what.
As Jacob drove along the Rainbow Creek Road, about fifteen kilometres out of the Bay, Fran could see the ambulance
had already arrived. The two volunteers looked up from the patient with visible relief, one of them hurrying towards her as she got out of the car.
‘We’ve got a serious head injury and a leg fracture,’ the woman in her sixties said. ‘He’s barely breathing. Mick’s trying to give him some oxygen now.’
Fran took a steadying breath and, approaching the victim, quickly assessed the situation. The man was about fifty, one of his thighs at an acute angle, dark blood seeping onto the road from a head injury. And as the volunteer had said, he was hardly breathing.
‘Can you get me a cervical collar?’ she asked the woman who had introduced herself as Karen.
Once she had the collar on, Fran asked for the portable sucker to be set up. She quickly donned gloves and goggles and suggested Jacob do the same. He was looking down at the victim, his expression inscrutable.
‘Sergeant Hawke?’ she prompted, frowning at him.
He appeared to give himself a mental shake. ‘Sorry?’
‘You’d better glove up,’ she repeated. ‘And goggles, too, in case there are blood splashes. You also, Karen, and Mick, is it?’
‘Yeah.’ The man nodded.
Fran used the sucker on the victim’s mouth before she inserted a Guedel’s airway and administered oxygen. There was no response from the victim to voice or pain. Although the airway was clear, he had stopped breathing.
‘Can you pull on his leg to straighten it?’ she asked Mick, and once he had done so, with Jacob and Karen’s help they log-rolled the man onto the spinal board while Fran controlled the neck.
As soon as Fran had the patient on his back she could see
the front of the neck had been in an impact with whatever had hit him and that the larynx was probably crushed, which meant the likelihood of intubating would be remote.
‘I’m going to have to put in a surgical airway,’ she said, reaching for a disposable scalpel, forcing her hand to stay steady and controlled while inside she felt doubt nip at her nerves with sharp pointed teeth as she made the incision.
‘Mick, you ventilate him while I listen to his chest,’ she directed.
‘Er…this is my first time,’ Mick said, a fire-engine blush running over his cheeks. ‘I’m not sure I can do it properly.’
Fran swung her gaze to the female officer. ‘Karen?’
‘Sergeant Hawke had better do it,’ Karen said with a grimace. ‘Mick and I are not very experienced. Jack’s on leave this week and Hamish is out of town. We were the only two available.’
‘Right, Sergeant,’ Fran said, but before she could instruct him on what to do he had already taken over with the sort of competence she had come to expect from him. His cool, calm composure helped her. It suddenly occurred to her how automatic her responses to the scene had been so far. It helped her shattered confidence somewhat, good enough to keep going for now.
‘OK…’ She took another deep breath and, reaching for a stethoscope, addressed Karen. ‘Can you cut the patient’s shirt off his chest?’
Karen did as she was directed and Fran leant down to listen to the man’s chest. There was no air on entry to the right side. All the signs pointed to a tension pneumonthorax, which was rapidly fatal if not treated immediately.
Before early management of severe trauma courses had been conducted in Australia, giving doctors the skills to recognise
and deal with injuries such as this, many patients had died because of the failure of those attending them to prioritise their assessment and treatment. ABCDE—airway, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure/environment—and treat each injury as it was found.
Fran mentally rehearsed the stages of primary survey as she located a large-bore IV needle. After wiping it with an alcohol swab, she inserted the needle a few millimetres at a time over the top border of the third rib and into the second intercostal space on the right, sensing a ‘pop’ as the needle punctured the pleura. There was an immediate hiss of air out of the needle. Quickly glancing at Jacob, Fran could see the ventilation of the victim had become easier.
‘So far so good,’ she said, more to herself than to the others, thrilled that she had got this far without falling apart.
‘You certainly know what you’re doing,’ Karen remarked. ‘Thank God you’re in town right now, otherwise this guy wouldn’t have a chance.’
Fran acknowledged Karen’s comment with a strained smile, although deep inside she felt another link of confidence snap into place as she inserted a canula into a large vein in each of the patient’s arms, rapidly infusing normal saline.
‘Mick, can you take his pulse and BP?’ she asked, glancing up as another police car with two officers arrived, one of them the young officer she had met before, Constable Jeffrey.
Mick nodded. ‘Yep, onto it now.’
‘Karen, if you can use those scissors on his jeans now, please,’ Fran said. ‘I need to check that foot pulse and get a blow-up splint on.’
‘Pulse is 140 and BP 80 over 50,’ Mick informed her.
Once the splint was in place, Fran carefully examined the head wound. There was no bony fracture underlying the laceration
but she noted the unequal pupils as she lifted each eyelid. She bandaged the bleeding scalp wound and once she had the patient as stable as she could, she supervised his loading into the ambulance with the assistance of the two police officers who had just arrived.
One of them had called for helicopter evacuation at Jacob’s command and informed Fran it would be landing on the cricket oval near the clinic within the next half-hour.
Jacob had handed over the ventilation to Karen, who seemed more confident once she had been shown how to do it. He moved around the accident site, crouching down at one point to inspect the gravel, Fran supposed for skid or swerve marks. He still had that inscrutable expression on his face, but she could sense something in his stance that made her wonder what was going on behind the screen of those ice-blue eyes of his.
He caught her looking at him and, stripping off his blood-stained gloves, put them in the bin in the back of the ambulance. ‘Whoever hit him did a good job of it,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t been on hand he wouldn’t have lasted long enough to get him in the chopper.’
Fran felt her cheeks begin to glow at his compliment. From the moment she had met him he hadn’t struck her as the type to throw words around just to people-please. What he said, when he said it, was genuine. ‘How could someone run into another person and just drive off like that?’ she asked.
He looked back at the victim lying on the stretcher for a moment. He turned back to meet her frowning gaze. ‘It takes all types, Dr Nin.’ He let out a sigh that seemed to be somewhere between resignation at the state of the world and relief that he was no longer needed as roadside assistant. ‘It takes all types.’
After loading the patient into the ambulance, Fran inserted an intercostal chest drain to better manage the pneumothorax, and on the way to the clinic she catheterised the patient and inserted a nasogastric tube. By the time they arrived, she had completed her secondary survey, noting several additional injuries. The patient was still deeply unconscious but his blood pressure was nearly back to normal.
She communicated by mobile phone to the receiving hospital, giving them a rundown of the patient’s injuries and how she had managed them to this point. The words rolled off her tongue as they had done so many times in the past, and she wondered if this was another limping step forward on the long, twisting road to recovery.
The blades of the helicopter created a wind that lifted Fran’s hair about her face as the victim was finally loaded. The Careflight team was trauma trained and took over the management of the patient, congratulating her for the job she had done.
Fran brushed her hair back off her face and stood watching as the helicopter lifted off, hoping the man made it in spite of his life-threatening injuries.
Constable Jeffrey came over to where she was standing. ‘Sergeant Hawke instructed me to give you a lift home,’ he said.
Fran glanced around. ‘Where is he? I thought he followed the ambulance back to town.’
‘He’s back at the accident site,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go back there once I take you home to do further investigations.’
‘Do you know who the victim is?’ she asked as Constable Jeffrey drove to her sister’s house.
‘He didn’t have any ID on him but apparently he’s a fairly new resident to the bay. Wade Smith’s his name, or so
Sergeant Hawke said. Comes from Sydney originally—he knew him back there.’
Fran lifted her brows as she glanced at him. ‘In a personal or professional sense?’
Constable Jeffrey gave her a mask-like look which reminded her of every cop she had ever met, in particular Jacob Hawke. ‘He’s got a record, if that’s what you mean. Car theft, aggravated assault, domestic violence, you name it, he’s been there and done it. He’s supposed to be on the straight and narrow now but how long that will last is anyone’s guess.’
Fran chewed her lip. Patients were patients, no matter what they did or who they were. She would not have treated Mr Smith any differently if she had known he was a well-known criminal. As far as she was concerned, he was a fellow human being who had needed her expertise. But thinking back to those first few minutes at the scene of the accident, she recalled Jacob Hawke’s silent scrutiny of the victim.
‘Does Mr Smith have family that need to be contacted?’ she asked.
‘Our people will deal with that,’ he said as he parked in the driveway, with the engine still running. ‘Thanks for helping out this evening, Dr Nin.’
‘No problem,’ she said, and got out of the car. She gave him a wave as he drove off, her smile fading as soon as he’d disappeared from sight.
She was tired, filthy and more than a little annoyed that Jacob was occupying her thoughts far more than she wanted him to.
Fran had showered and was just thinking about whether to eat something or not when Rufus pricked up his ears as a car
came up the driveway. She pulled the edges of her wrap tighter around her waist, releasing her hair from the neck of it as she went to the door.
Jacob too had showered and changed. He was dressed in blue denim jeans and a white T-shirt, the close-fitting fabric clinging to his muscular form. Every muscle was highlighted, making her want to run her hands over him and feel their taut perfection under her fingertips.
‘Sorry to bother you so late,’ he said, his gaze swiftly but thoroughly taking in her attire.
‘It’s fine,’ Fran said, opening the door for him to come in, holding the edges of her wrap with the other hand. ‘I’m not on my way to bed. I was actually trying to decide whether to have dinner or to give it a miss.’
‘You’ve had a tough day, you should eat something.’
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Have you had dinner?’
‘I had a lukewarm cup of coffee about an hour ago.’
Fran tucked a damp strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I could rustle up something for us both…I mean, if you don’t mind…It won’t be fancy but…’
‘That would be great,’ he said with a hint of a smile.
She took a steadying breath and led the way to the kitchen, conscious of him a couple of steps behind. ‘Would you like a glass of wine or a beer or something?’ she asked as she rummaged in the fridge for ingredients. ‘Nick has light beer here if you’d prefer it.’