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‘Annika!’
She felt a wash of relief as one of her fellow students waved at her. Cassie was down for the children’s ward rotation too and, remembering to smile, Annika made her way over.
‘Are you on a late shift?’ asked Cassie.
‘I am,’ Annika said. ‘It’s my first, though. You’ve already done a couple of shifts there—how have you found it?’
‘Awful,’ Cassie admitted. ‘I feel like an absolute beginner. Everything’s completely different—the drug doses, the way they do obs, and then there are the parents watching your every move.’
It sounded awful, and they sat in glum silence for a moment till Cassie spoke again. ‘How was your assessment?’
‘Fine,’ Annika responded, and then remembered she was going to make more of an effort to be open and friendly ‘Well, to tell the truth it wasn’t great.’
‘Oh?’ Cassie blinked at the rare insight.
‘My grades and things are okay; it is more to do with the way I am with my peers …’ She could feel her cheeks burning at the admission. ‘And with the patients too. I can be a bit stand-offish!’
‘Oh!’ Cassie blinked again. ‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I had my assessment on Monday. I’m to stop talking and listen more, apparently. Oh, and I’m to stop burning the candle at both ends!’
And it did make her feel better—not that Cassie hadn’t fared well, more that she wasn’t the only one who was struggling. Annika smiled again, but it faded when she looked up, because there, handing over some money to the cashier, he was.
Dr Ross Wyatt.
He was impossible not to notice.
Tall, with thick black slightly wavy hair, worn just a touch too long, he didn’t look like a paediatric consultant—well, whatever paediatric consultants were supposed to look like.
Some days he would be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, finished off with dark leather cowboy boots, as if he’d just got off a horse. Other days—normally Mondays, Annika had noticed—it was a smart suit, but still with a hint of rebellion: his tie more than a little loosened, and with that silver earring he wore so well. There was just something that seemed to say his muscled, toned body wanted out of the tailored confines of his suit. And then again, but only rarely, given he wasn’t a surgeon, if he’d been on call he might be wearing scrubs. Well, it almost made her dizzy: the thin cotton that accentuated the outline of his body, the extra glimpse of olive skin and the clip of Cuban-heeled boots as she’d walked behind him in the corridor one morning….
Ross Wyatt was her favourite diversion, and he was certainly diverting her now. Annika blushed as he pocketed his change, picked up his tray and caught her looking. She looked away, tried to listen to Cassie, but the slow, lazy smile he had treated her with danced before her eyes.
Always he looked good—well, not in the conventional way: her mother, Nina, would faint at his choices. Fashion was one of the rules in her family, and Ross Wyatt broke them all.
And today, on her first day on the paediatric ward, as if to welcome her, he was dressed in Annika’s personal favourite and he looked divine!
Black jeans, with a thick leather belt, a black crewneck jumper that showed off to perfection his lean figure, black boots, and that silver earring. The colour was in his lips: wide, blood-red lips that curved into an easy smile. Annika hadn’t got close enough yet to see his eyes, but he looked like a Spanish gypsy—just the sort of man her mother would absolutely forbid. He looked wild and untamed and thrilling—as if at any minute he would kick his heels and throw up his arms, stamp a flamenco on his way over to her. She could almost smell the smoke from the bonfire—he did that to her with a single smile …
And it was madness, Annika told herself, utter madness to be sitting in the canteen having such flights of fancy. Madness to be having such thoughts, full stop.
But just the sight of him did this.
And that smile had been aimed at her.
Again.
Maybe he smiled at everyone, Annika reasoned—only it didn’t feel like it. Sometimes they would pass in the corridor, or she’d see him walking out of ICU, or in the canteen like this, and for a second he would stop … stop and smile.
It was as if he was waiting to know her.
And that was the other reason she was dreading her paediatric rotation. She had once let a lift go simply because he was in it. She wanted this whole eight weeks to be over with, to be finished.
She didn’t need any more distractions in an already complicated life—and Ross Wyatt would be just that: a huge distraction.
They had never spoken, never even exchanged pleasantries. He had looked as if he was going to try a couple of times, but she had scuttled back into her burrow like a frightened rabbit. Oh, she knew a little about him—he was a friend of her brother’s, had been a medical student at the same time as Iosef. He still went to the orphanages in Russia, doing voluntary work during his annual leave—that was why he had been unable to attend Iosef and Annie’s wedding. She had paid little attention when his name had been mentioned at the time, but since last year, when she had put his face to his name, she had yearned for snippets from her brother.
Annika swallowed as she felt the weight of his eyes still on her. She had the craziest notion that he was going to walk over and finally speak to her, so she concentrated on stirring her coffee.
‘There are compensations, of course!’ Cassie dragged her back to the conversation, only to voice what was already on Annika’s mind. ‘He’s stunning, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’ Annika flushed, stirring her coffee, but Cassie just laughed.
‘Dr Drop-Dead Gorgeous Wyatt.’
‘I don’t know him.’ Annika shrugged.
‘Well, he’s looking right over at you!’ Cassie sighed. ‘He’s amazing, and the kids just love him—he really is great with them.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know …’ Cassie admitted. ‘He just …’ She gave a frustrated shrug. ‘He gets them, I guess. He just seems to understand kids, puts them at ease.’
Annika did not, would not, look over to where he sat, but sometimes she was sure he looked over to her—because every now and then she felt her skin warm. Every now and then it seemed too complicated to move the sandwich from her hand up to her mouth.
Ross Wyatt certainly didn’t put Annika at ease.
He made her awkward.
He made her aware.
Even walking over to empty out her tray and head to work she felt as if her movements were being noted, but, though it was acutely awkward, somehow she liked the feeling he evoked. Liked the thrill in the pit of her stomach, the rush that came whenever their paths briefly crossed.
As she sat in handover, listening to the list of patients and their ages and diagnoses, he popped his head around the door to check something with Caroline, the charge nurse, and Annika felt a dull blush on her neck as she heard his voice properly for the first time.
Oh, she’d heard him laugh on occasion, and heard his low tones briefly as they’d passed in the corridor when he was talking with a colleague, but she’d never fully heard him speak.
And as he spoke now, about an order for pethidine, Annika found out that toes did curl—quite literally!
His voice was rich and low and without arrogance. He’d made Caroline laugh with something he said—only Annika couldn’t properly process it, because instead she was feeling her toes bunch up inside her sensible navy shoes.
‘Back to Luke Winters …’
As the door closed so too did her mind on Ross, and she began concentrating carefully on the handover, because this rotation she had to do well.
‘He’s fifteen years old, Type 1 Diabetes, noncompliant …’
Luke Winters, Annika learnt, was causing not just his family but the staff of the children’s ward a lot of problems.
It was his third admission in twelve months. He was refusing to take his insulin at times, ignoring his diet, and he had again gone into DKA—a dangerous, toxic state that could kill. He had an ulcer on his leg that had been discovered on admission, though had probably been there for some time. It would take a long time to heal and might require a skin graft. His mother was frantic—Luke had come to the ward from ICU two days ago and was causing chaos. His room was a mess, and he had told the domestic this morning, none too politely, to get out.
He was now demanding that his catheter be removed, and basically both the other patients and the staff wanted him taken to an adult ward, though Ross Wyatt was resisting.
‘“Teenagers, even teenagers who think they are adults, are still children.”’ Caroline rolled her eyes. ‘His words, not mine. Anyway, Luke’s mum is at work and not due in till this evening. Hopefully we can have some order by then. Okay …’ She stared at the patient sheet and allocated the staff, pausing when she came to Annika. ‘I might put you in cots with Amanda …’ She hesitated. ‘But you haven’t been in cots yet, have you, Cassie?’
When Cassie shook her head and Caroline changed her allocation Annika felt a flood of relief—she had never so much as held a baby, and the thought of looking after a sick one petrified her.
‘Annika, perhaps you could have beds eight to sixteen instead—though given it’s your first day don’t worry about room fifteen.’
‘Luke?’ Annika checked, and Caroline nodded.
‘I don’t want to scare you off on your first day.’
‘He won’t scare me,’ Annika said. Moody teenagers she could deal with; it was babies and toddlers that scared her.
‘His room needs to be sorted.’
‘It will be.’
‘Okay!’ Caroline smiled. ‘If you’re sure? Good luck.’
Lisa, who was in charge of Annika’s patients, showed her around the ward. It was, as Cassie had said, completely different. Brightly painted, with a detailed mural running the length of the corridor, and divided pretty much into three.
There were cots for the littlest patients—two large rooms, each containing four cots. Then there were eight side rooms that would house a cot or a bed, depending on the patient’s age. Finally there were three large four-bedded rooms, filled with children of various ages.
‘Though we do try to keep ages similar,’ Lisa said, ‘sometimes it’s just not possible.’ She pointed out the crash trolley, the drug room, and two treatment rooms. ‘We try to bring the children down here for dressings and IV’s and things like that.’
‘So they don’t upset the other children?’ Annika checked.
‘That, and also, even if they are in a side room, it’s better they have anything unpleasant done away from their bed. Obviously if they’re infectious we can’t bring them down, but generally we try to do things away from the bedside.’
Annika was offered a tabard to replace her navy one. She had a choice of aprons, all brightly coloured and emblazoned with cartoon characters, and though her first instinct was to politely decline, she remembered she was making an effort, so chose a red one, with fish and mermaids on it. She felt, as she slipped it over her head, utterly stupid.
Annika started with the obs. Lunches were being cleared away, and the ward was being readied for afternoon rest-time.
The children eyed her suspiciously—she was new and they knew it.
‘What’s that for?’ A mother demanded angrily as her first patient burst into tears when Annika went to wrap a blood pressure cuff around her arm.
Lisa moved quickly to stop her.
‘We don’t routinely do blood pressure,’ Lisa said, showing her the obs form. ‘Unless it’s stated on the chart.’
‘Okay.’
‘Just pulse, temp and respirations.’
‘Thank you.’
The little girl wouldn’t stop crying. In fact she shrieked every time Annika tried to venture near, so Lisa quickly took her temperature as Annika did the rest of the obs. In the room, eight sets of eyes watched her every awkward move: four from the patients, four from their mothers.
‘Can I have a drink?’ a little boy asked.
‘Of course,’ Annika said, because that was easy. She checked his chart and saw that he was to be encouraged to take fluids. ‘Would you like juice or milk …?’
‘He’s lactose intolerant!’ his mother jumped in. ‘It says so above his bed.’
‘Always look at the whiteboard above the bed,’ Lisa said. ‘And it will say in his admission slip too, which is clipped to his folder.’
‘Of course.’ Annika fled to the kitchen, where Cassie was warming a bottle.
‘Told you!’ Cassie grinned when Annika told her all that had happened. ‘It’s like landing on Mars!’
But she wasn’t remotely nervous about a sullen Luke. She knew he had no relatives with him, and was glad to escape the suspicious eyes of parents. It was only when she went into the side ward and realised that Ross was in there, talking, that she felt flustered.
‘I can come back.’
‘No.’ He smiled. ‘We’re just having a chat, and Luke needs his obs done.’
‘I don’t want them done,’ Luke snarled as she approached the bed.
That didn’t ruffle her either—her extra shifts at the nursing home had taught her well, because belligerence was an everyday occurrence there!
‘I will come back in five minutes, then,’ Annika said, just as she would say to Cecil, or Elsie, or any of the oldies who refused to have their morning shower.
‘I won’t want them done then either.’
‘Then I will come back five minutes later, and five minutes after that again. My name is Annika; it would seem that you’ll be seeing a lot of me this afternoon.’ She gave him a smile. ‘Every five minutes, in fact.’
‘Just take them now, then.’
So she did.
Annika made no attempt at small talk. Luke clearly didn’t want it, and anyway Ross was talking to him, telling him that there was no question of him going home, that he was still extremely ill and would be here for a few weeks—at least until the ulcer on his leg was healed and he was compliant with his medication. Yes, he would take the catheter out, so long as Luke agreed to wee into a bottle so that they could monitor his output.
Luke begrudgingly agreed to that.
And then Ross told him that the way he had spoken to the cleaner that morning was completely unacceptable.
‘You can be as angry as you like, Luke, but it’s not okay to be mean.’
‘So send me home, then.’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
Annika wrote down his obs, which were all fine, and then, as Ross leant against the wall and Luke lay on the bed with his eyes closed, she spoke.
‘When the doctor has finished talking to you I will come back and sort out your room.’
‘And I’ll tell you the same thing I said to the cleaner.’
