Awakening The Shy Nurse / Saved By Their Miracle Baby

She could feel the absolute control that Hugh had but she could sense the strength behind it and she wanted more. So much more. If a kiss with this man could be like this, what would sex be like?

Any judgement she might have had about people on cruise ships who were intent on finding as much pleasure as possible in the shortest amount of time were disappearing—getting buried under the weight of curiosity. No…make that a kind of desire that Lisa had never, ever experienced before. Hugh hadn’t been that far off the mark, had he, when he’d suggested that she didn’t like sex that much? She’d never been kissed like this, though. Or felt desire that was more like a desperate need to discover something she might otherwise miss out on for the rest of her life.

It was a subtle change in the engine noise beneath them that finally broke that kiss. Or perhaps it was a need for more oxygen because Lisa knew she was breathing far more rapidly than normal as they pulled apart. Her lips were still parted as well, and her eyes drifted open to find her gaze locking onto Hugh’s.

His smile grew slowly. ‘I take it back,’ he said.

‘Take what back?’ The thought that he was already regretting that kiss was like a shower of cold water in her face.

‘Thinking you were so uptight,’ Hugh said. ‘Where did you learn to kiss like that, Lisa Phillips?’

She couldn’t say anything. Because she’d have to admit that she’d never learned to kiss like that until he’d taught her? Or because she was processing the fact that he’d considered her to be uptight? Lisa could feel herself taking a step back to create some more distance between them.

Was Hugh laughing at her? She couldn’t let him know that that kiss had, quite possibly, been life-changing for her when it was probably no more than an everyday occurrence for Hugh. He’d think she was immature as well as uptight, wouldn’t he? Had he just been amusing himself all along by kissing her in the first place? Or…and it was a horrible thought…had she been the one who had initiated that kiss? Lisa could feel her cheeks reddening in one of her hated blushes so she turned away so that she could catch the breeze on her face.

‘We’re slowing down.’ Hugh broke a silence that was on the verge of becoming really awkward moments later as the engine noise dropped another note. ‘We can’t be that far away from docking. I expect we’ll have a busy clinic in the morning. When most of the passengers have gone ashore, it gives a lot of the crew a chance to visit us.’

He was talking like her boss, which prompted Lisa to shift her gaze to catch his again. Was he dismissing that kiss as something that shouldn’t have happened between people who had to work together? Or was he warning her that it couldn’t go any further? It was more like there was a question to be seen in his eyes than a warning, however. Maybe he was wondering if he should say something about that kiss? Or was he waiting for an indication from her that she’d enjoyed it as much as he had? That she wasn’t that “uptight” after all?

Well…she didn’t have to prove anything. And she didn’t want to talk about it either—certainly not with someone who thought sex was just something to enjoy as a physical activity, like dancing or drinking champagne. She’d already let Hugh know how much she disapproved of people who simply jumped into bed with each other for no other reason than giving in to lust.

Okay, she might have just gained a disturbing new insight into how it could easily happen but, now that she’d had a moment to catch her breath, she could remember that she wasn’t that type of person herself. That she knew it was dangerous to break rules or step too far outside the boundaries of what you knew was the right thing to do. The safe thing.

Maybe what Hugh was really asking was if she’d like to pretend the kiss had never happened. Or that it was no big deal—which it obviously wasn’t for someone like Hugh. It was the first thing she’d ever seen him doing, after all. Perhaps he’d mentioned work because it was a safer topic and a place where they had discovered a professional connection and that was absolutely something Lisa could use as a life raft when her head was such a whirlpool of jumbled sensations and emotions she was in danger of drowning. She grabbed hold of it.

‘And it’s late,’ she added briskly, turning away. ‘Don’t know about you but I need some sleep before I turn up for work. See you in the morning, Hugh.’

CHAPTER FOUR

HOW THE HELL had that happened, exactly?

Okay, he’d been pushing her a bit after being irritated by that unimpressed comment that he had interpreted as judgement on his performance in bed. Deliberately being in her personal space as well as he’d prodded that barrier Lisa seemed to have between herself and the good things in life, but he’d certainly never expected it to end in a kiss. He hadn’t even been attracted to her, given that she was so not his type. Was that what had made that kiss seem so different? Why it had haunted his dreams in the few snatched hours of sleep he’d managed later and why it was still lurking in the perimeter of his consciousness this morning?

Hugh arrived early at the medical centre, despite his lack of sleep, but moving around his familiar environment as he checked that everything had been thoroughly cleaned and restocked in the wake of managing their dramatic case of Alex’s respiratory arrest due to anaphylaxis in the early hours of this morning, he was aware of an unfamiliar tension.

He might not understand how that kiss had happened exactly but there was no getting away from the fact that it had happened and now it felt like it was going to be more than a little awkward working with Lisa. Most women he knew would be happy to either dismiss that kiss as fun but naughty, given they had to work together, or to enjoy a bit of sexual tension and have fun playing with it for a while. But Lisa wasn’t like any of the women he knew and Hugh wasn’t confident he would know how to respond to a different, less relaxed reaction.

Sure enough, when she arrived a few minutes before morning surgery was due to begin, she avoided any direct eye contact with him when he gave her a friendly greeting and said that he hoped she’d had enough sleep, given her extended working hours last night.

She merely nodded, still not meeting his gaze as she reached for a stethoscope to hook around her neck. ‘Shall I set up in the second consulting room to do the initial obs?’

‘Yes, please.’ So she was going to pretend the kiss had never happened? That was a bit “head in the sand”, but he could go along with that. And it was always useful to get an idea of what a patient was presenting with, along with baseline observations that let him know whether they had any signs of infection like a fever or any problems with their blood pressure or heart rhythm. A competent nurse could also deal with minor stuff herself, like dressing a burn or closing a small laceration with sticky strips or glue.

It was a walk-in clinic that didn’t require appointments and the knowledge, based on experience, that they might be very busy for the next couple of hours should have been enough to focus Hugh’s attention completely on his job.

Except it wasn’t quite enough. He was watching Lisa from the corner of his eye as she moved swiftly around the medical centre for the next few minutes, collecting supplies like the plastic sheaths for the tip of the tympanic thermometer, a new roll of graph paper for the ECG monitor and dressing supplies and antiseptic ointments that might be needed to deal with minor injuries that didn’t need a doctor’s attention. How hard was she finding it to pretend that the kiss hadn’t happened?

Was she thinking about it as much as he was? Those unwanted flashes of memory that were strong enough to interfere with anything else he might be trying to focus on? Did she have the same, disturbing idea that it could be tempting to do it again or was she avoiding even looking at him directly because she really was wishing it had never happened in the first place?

He found himself listening in from the treatment room as he made sure the electronic equipment like the X-ray machine was turned on and ready for use, when Janet arrived to help with the surgery by manning the reception area and triaging to get the most important cases seen first.

‘Tim’s been telling me about all the excitement last night. Can’t believe something like that happened when I’m not even on call.’

‘It was a memorable night, that’s for sure. Possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.’

Hugh flicked another switch to turn the steriliser on. Was Lisa making a reference to the case…or the kiss? Not that it mattered, because maybe he agreed with her—on both counts.

‘You could be right. I’ve never seen a cricothyroidotomy done on land, let alone at sea.’

‘I’d never seen one done either and I’ve worked in ED a lot. It was amazing. Hugh was amazing. He saved that guy’s life…’

‘We saved that guy’s life.’ Hugh couldn’t eavesdrop any more when he was the subject of the conversation.

Perhaps it was because she was startled by his sudden appearance or the genuine compliment he was offering that Lisa finally looked at him properly and something in Hugh’s gut did an odd little flip as her gaze met his. The last time he’d seen those eyes had been very close up indeed…

‘Lisa was first on the scene,’ he added, ‘and I couldn’t have handled his airway later without her excellent assistance.’

‘So he actually arrested?’ Janet was open-mouthed.

‘Close enough. His oxygen saturation got down to below seventy percent at one stage and he was unconscious.’

‘Wow…’

‘Have you had any update on his condition?’

Lisa shifted her gaze swiftly as he looked back to answer her question. The way she was biting her lower lip was another sign that she was finding any interaction between them awkward this morning and that had the effect of making whatever that was in Hugh’s gut flip back the other way. Yep…this was awkward all right and Hugh was aware of a beat of another, unfamiliar emotion.

Guilt? He’d imagined himself in a big brother kind of role with Lisa, hadn’t he? Well…nobody would trust him to take on that kind of role again, would they? Had he really asked her if she was a virgin? And suggested that maybe she didn’t like sex? How insulting had that been? Plus, he’d told her how uptight he’d thought she was as well and that had been an unkind thing to say. No wonder Lisa had backed off so fast. She probably wasn’t looking forward to working with him at all and he couldn’t blame her.

‘Alex is fine,’ he said aloud. ‘They monitored him in Intensive Care for the rest of the night but everything had settled by the time I spoke to someone an hour or so ago. They’re going to patch up his neck, give him a course of steroids for a couple of days and have advised him to wear a medic alert bracelet and make sure he has his auto-injector within reach at all times. He should be back on board before we sail this evening.’

A late sailing, Hugh remembered, turning to head into his consulting room as Janet moved to open the doors to their first patients. And after this morning’s surgery he had the day to himself in one of his favourite parts of the world, which was just what he needed. A chance to relax and soak up some of the very best things in life. The kind of things that Lisa didn’t seem to be at all familiar with. That he’d thought he could help her discover. Maybe he could try and step back into that helpful role.

He turned back. ‘What are you going to do with your first onshore leave, Lisa?’

If nothing else, he could provide some recommendations for things she could see or do and that might get them past this awkwardness.

‘I’m not sure.’ Lisa’s gaze skittered away from his again. ‘One of the team on the excursions desk told me about a walk that was lovely around the Cap d’Antibes but what I’d really love to see is one of the medieval towns.’

‘Get up to Eze, if you can. It’s an outstanding example of a medieval village. Or St Paul de Vence, although that could still be pretty crowded on a lovely day like this. It’s a shame we won’t finish in time for you to tag along with one of the organised bus tours. They’re always keen to have someone from our team available as medical cover but a taxi probably wouldn’t be too expensive. Less than fifty euros, probably.’

The expression on Lisa’s face suggested that their ideas of what wasn’t too expensive were poles apart. She was the one to turn away this time but he caught the hint of smile that felt like an acknowledgement of his effort to restore their working relationship to its former amicability. Not that it seemed to have worked particularly well.

‘I expect I’ll just take a walk around Villefranche sur Mer from where the tender boat drops us,’ she said. ‘Or I can find the bus that goes into Nice. I’ll explore the old town and then find somewhere lovely for a late lunch. I’m sure it will be gorgeous.’

Oh…help…

The first time Lisa had been in this reception area and had realised that she was going to be working with Hugh, she hadn’t been able to dismiss the memory of having seen him kissing that leggy blonde woman.

Now she was totally unable to dismiss the memory of having been kissed herself. And it was so much more than merely a thought. She could actually feel it happening again. The soft press of his lips on hers. The taste of his mouth. The fierce lick of desire that sent an electric buzz to every cell in her body and made her knees feel distinctly weak.

Biting her bottom lip hard enough to hurt helped. So did avoiding any more than a split second of eye contact. Even better was being able to focus on the patients that started arriving within the next few minutes. Hugh had been right—they were in for a very busy few hours and, best of all, there was plenty for Lisa to do in her consulting room and she wasn’t being asked to assist Hugh in any way.

An hour in and she was starting to feel a lot more confident that they could continue working together without the awkwardness of that kiss hanging in the air between them. A purely professional exchange presented no problems at all after the first couple.

‘This is Elaine.’ Lisa handed the clipboard to Hugh as she took her tenth patient into his consulting room. ‘She’s running a fever of thirty-nine point six, has frequency and pain on urination and the dipstick test was positive for blood in her urine.’

It would be a quick consult for Hugh to double check the history and any other health issues that Elaine had and then prescribe the antibiotics and other medications to ease the discomfort of a urinary tract infection for their patient.

Jeff, the next patient, only needed a certificate to be signed by Hugh to give him a day away from his job as a kitchen hand.

‘It’s a second degree burn but the blisters are still intact,’ Lisa told him. ‘I’ve cleaned it, put antibiotic cream on and a non-stick gauze dressing and I’ve told Jeff to come back tomorrow for a dressing change so that I can make sure it’s not infected. If it’s looking okay, I think he’ll be able to work as long as he wears gloves and keeps it dry.’

Hugh scrawled his signature on the certificate. ‘How’s the waiting room looking?’

‘Still quite full. I’ve got someone with chest pain to do an ECG on now, but he’s a dancer in one of the cabaret acts and I suspect he’s pulled a muscle.’

‘It should start to slow down soon.’ Hugh handed back the piece of paper and smiled at Lisa. ‘You’re doing a great job,’ he told her. ‘Thanks…’

She tucked the praise away as she went back to Jeff to give him his final instructions on how to look after his burn injury today and sort out an appointment for a dressing change tomorrow morning. Hugh’s words made her feel good, she decided, but they hadn’t undermined the relief of stepping back into the purely professional interactions between herself and her boss. If anything, they were giving what had happened in the early hours of today a dreamlike quality—as if that kiss couldn’t possibly have happened for real.

The final patient that came in turned out to be the real test of whether things were back to normal. A tall, brusque Scotsman in his fifties, he was reluctant to admit to having anything wrong.

‘But if it gets any worse, I’m not going to be able to do any more of these tours, Nurse,’ he said as he limped from the waiting room. ‘I can barely put any weight on my foot now.’

His anxious wife was by his side. ‘We’re supposed to be doing a tour of St Jean Cap Ferrat that includes lunch at that amazing hotel that was in a movie we saw recently. The Abolutely Fabulous one? It would be such a shame to miss out.’

Lisa had a look at the sole of the man’s foot. He had a reddened area just below his middle toes that could be a deep blister.

‘Let me just run a couple of checks and then we’ll get the doctor to have a look.’ Lisa wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm. ‘You haven’t been doing a lot of walking in a new pair of shoes, have you? Going barefoot more than usual? Could you have had an injury that you might not have taken much notice of, like a stone bruise?’

She went in with her patient to give handover to Hugh a few minutes later. ‘This is Gordon,’ she told him. ‘He’s presenting with nine out of ten pain when he tries to put any weight on the ball of his left foot. Vital signs are all normal. He had an injury two weeks ago when he was replacing boards on his deck and fell through a rotten part but he was treated in his local ED and discharged.’

‘Oh? What did they do for treatment?’

‘Cleaned out a small cut but it wasn’t anything to worry about.’ Gordon shook his head, dismissing the incident. ‘They X-rayed my foot, too, in case I’d broken something but they said it all looked fine. They gave me a tetanus shot and some antibiotics.’

‘And it’s only started to get painful again now?’

‘It’s been sore ever since.’ It was Gordon’s wife who spoke. ‘He’s just been putting a brave face on it but when he got up this morning it was suddenly a whole lot worse. He almost fell over.’

Lisa had been about to leave Hugh to deal with his patient and go and finish up her own paperwork but he caught her gaze.

‘Could you set up the treatment room for us, please?’ he asked. ‘I think we’ll have a look with the ultrasound.’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ Gordon’s wife echoed Lisa’s first thought. ‘I thought ultrasounds were just for when you were pregnant.’

Lisa had seen that kind of smile on Hugh’s face many times already but this time she noticed the crinkles around his eyes as well. It wasn’t that he was making fun of a layperson’s lack of medical knowledge in any way. This smile held understanding rather than amusement and it was also reassuring. Lisa knew that the people in front of him would be confident that he cared about them. That he was doing what he believed might help.

‘There are some things that don’t show up on X-rays,’ he told them. ‘It could be that there’s something in your foot, like a piece of glass or a splinter.’

Sure enough, there was something to be seen on the screen as Hugh gently examined Gordon’s foot.

‘The entry wound’s healed over now,’ Hugh warned. ‘We’ll need to do a bit of minor surgery to open it up and see what we can find. Are you happy for us to do that or would you like a referral to an emergency department of a local hospital?’

‘I’d rather you did it, Doc. That way we can get it over with and we might make our posh lunch after all.’

‘Oh…’ His wife didn’t look so happy. ‘I can’t watch. Not if there’s going to be blood…’

Hugh’s smile reappeared. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll get Janet to make you a nice cup of tea while you wait. Lisa and I have got this covered. We’re the A team, aren’t we?’

Reopening a wound to explore it for the presence of a foreign body was a walk in the park compared to making an opening in someone’s neck to establish an emergency airway. Lisa found herself smiling back at Hugh in total agreement. They most definitely did have this covered and it could prove to be a very satisfying end to their morning clinic. Even better, it seemed that the awkwardness had finally evaporated.

This was fun.

Minor surgery was an unexpected finale to an ordinary clinic but Hugh really was enjoying himself. He’d already known that Lisa was someone that he could rely on in a tense, emergency situation but this time he could relax and appreciate her skilled assistance even more. As he filled a syringe with local anaesthetic, he watched her setting up everything he could need on a tray and then swabbing the skin of Gordon’s foot and arranging sterile drapes to protect the area.

‘This is going to hurt, isn’t it?’ Gordon’s stoic expression slipped a little.

‘Not once the local is doing its job,’ Hugh assured him. ‘Bit of a sting just to start with. Lisa, can you hold Gordon’s foot steady, please?

It wasn’t the easiest area of the body to be working on and it was frustrating to be able to feel the tip of whatever it was embedded in his patient’s foot but be unable to grasp it firmly enough to extract it. Hugh could feel Lisa watching him as he pressed a little deeper into the wound and opened the forceps a little wider. Then he took a grip and held it and this time he could feel something shift. The dark object slowly came out through the skin and just kept coming. With a silent whistle of how impressed he was, Hugh held up an enormous triangular splinter between the teeth of the forceps.

‘Look at that.’

He didn’t need to tell Lisa to look. She was staring in disbelief that anyone could have been walking around with something that size buried in their foot. Her gaze only had to shift a fraction to catch Hugh’s, given that he was watching her reaction, and he wasn’t disappointed. Her astonishment morphed into delight. Or maybe it was just professional satisfaction but it didn’t matter because just watching the change was a joy. The note of connection might pale in comparison to the satisfaction they’d shared in getting a secure airway into Alex last night but this was significant in its own way because it felt like that awkwardness between himself and Lisa had gone.

She certainly sounded happier. ‘You’re not going to believe how big this splinter is,’ she told Gordon. ‘You’ve been walking around with a log in your foot.’

Hugh showed their patient what he’d pulled out and Gordon grinned. ‘That’s a piece of my deck, that is. No wonder it was a wee bit sore.’

‘I’m going to clean out the wound thoroughly now,’ Hugh told him, ‘and then we’ll get you patched up and bandaged. You might want to keep the weight off your foot as much as you can today but there’s no reason you can’t go and enjoy your lunch.’

As he intended to enjoy his own. It was nearly two p.m. by the time Hugh had taken one of the tender shuttles to get into the port of Villefranche sur Mer and he was delighted to find that his arrangements for the afternoon were in place. He picked up the keys to the classic car he’d hired, and when the powerful engine of the gunmetal-grey nineteen-sixties E-type Jaguar purred into life a short time later he just smiled and listened to it for a moment, before pulling onto the road.

It was a sparkling blue day with that soft light and warmth that he loved about the French Riviera. He was going to put the roof of this convertible down and drive up towards the mountains and one of his most favourite restaurants ever. He might even indulge in a glass of the best champagne they had on ice.

Lisa Phillips had never tasted champagne…

The thought came from nowhere but with an intensity that let him imagine exactly what she might look like when she did taste it for the first time. He would see that surprise in her eyes and be able to watch it shift and grow and light up her whole face with the pleasure of something new and delicious. Kind of like the way he’d seen her satisfaction with her work but better somehow. More like what he’d seen in her eyes after that kiss? Until he’d ruined the moment by telling her how uptight she was.