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So she wasn’t the only one feeling this was beyond bizarre.
‘Okay, let it down,’ he said, the words another order.
Maybe she’d been wrong about the confusion.
Only then he added, ‘Please,’ and suddenly he was her old Keanu again, teasing her, almost smiling.
And the confusion that caused made her wish Jill hadn’t taken off again so quickly. She had come here for peace and quiet, to heal after the humiliation of realising the man she’d thought had loved her had only been interested in her family money.
What was left of it.
‘Here’s a key.’
Keanu’s fingers touched hers, and electricity jolted through her bones, shocking her in more ways than one. ‘You’ll find phials of local anaesthetic in the cupboard marked B, second shelf. Bring two—no, he’s a big guy, maybe three—and you’ll see syringes in there as well. Antiseptic, dressings and swabs are in the cupboard next to that one—it’s not locked. Get whatever you think we’ll need. I’m off to find a saw.’
The patient gave a shriek of protest but Keanu was already out of the room.
Slipping automatically into nurse mode, Caroline smiled as she unlocked the cupboard and found all she needed.
‘He’s not going to cut off your foot,’ she reassured the man as she set up a tray on a trolley and rolled it over to the examination table. ‘Hospitals have all manners of saws. We use diamond-tipped ones to cut through plaster when it has to come off, and we use adapted electric saws and drills in knee and hip replacement, though not here, of course. I’d say he’s going to numb your leg from the calf down, then cut through the nail between your flip-flop and the wood. It’s easier to pull a nail out of rubber and flesh than it is out of wood.’
Their patient didn’t seem all that reassured, but Caroline, who’d found where the paperwork was kept, distracted him with questions about his name, age, address, any medication he was on, and, because she couldn’t resist it, what he was doing on the island.
‘Doing up the little places down on the flat,’ was the reply, which came as Keanu returned with a small battery-powered saw and a portable X-ray machine.
‘The research station,’ he said, before Caroline could ask the patient what little places.
‘They’re doing up the research station when there’s not enough money to keep the hospital running properly?’
The indignation in her voice must have been mirrored on her face, for Keanu said a curt, ‘Later,’ and turned his full attention to his patient.
After numbing the lower leg—Caroline being careful not to let her fingers touch Keanu’s as she handed him syringes and phials—he explained to the patient what he intended doing.
‘Nurse already told me that,’ the man replied. ‘Just get on with it.’
Asking Caroline to hold the wood steady, Keanu eased it as far as it would go from the flip-flop then bent closer to see what he was doing, so his head, the back of it, blocked Caroline’s view. Not that she’d have seen much of the work, her eyes focussed on the little scar that ran along his hairline, the result of a long-ago exercise on her part to shave off all his hair with her grandfather’s cut-throat razor.
Fortunately he must have been able to cut straight through the little bar of the nail, for he straightened before she could be further lost in memories.
Caroline dropped the wood into a trash bin and returned to find Keanu setting up a portable X-ray machine.
‘We need to know if the nail’s gone through bone,’ he explained, helping her get back into nurse mode. ‘And the picture should tell us if it’s in a position that would have caused tendon damage.’
‘Why does that make a difference?’ Now he was pain-free—if only temporarily—the patient was becoming impatient.
‘It makes the difference between pulling it out and cutting it out.’
‘No cutting, just yank the damn thing out,’ the patient said, but Keanu ignored him, going quietly on with the job of setting up the head of the unit above the man’s foot.
Intrigued by the procedure—and definitely in nurse mode—Caroline had to ask.
‘I thought the hospital had a designated radiography room,’ she said, remembering protocols at the hospital where she’d worked that suggested wherever possible X-rays be carried out in that area, although the portables had many uses.
Keanu glanced up at her, his face once again unreadable.
‘There is but I doubt you and I could lift him onto the table and with his leg already numb he’s likely to fall if he tries to help us.’
Which puts me neatly back in my place, Caroline thought.
‘Move back!’
Ignoring the peremptory tone, she stepped the obligatory two metres back from the head of the machine, watched Keanu don a lead apron—so protocols were observed here—and take shots from several angles.
That done, he wheeled the machine to the corner of the room, hung his apron over a convenient chair and checked the results on a computer screen.
‘Come and look at this. What do you think?’
Assuming he was talking to her, not the immobile patient, she moved over to stand beside him—beside Keanu, who had been the single most important person in the world for her for the first thirteen years of her life. Important because, unlike her father, or even Christopher, he’d always been there for her—her best friend and constant companion.
Until he’d disappeared.
But this Keanu …
It was beyond weird.
Spooky.
And, oh, so painful …
‘Well?’ he demanded, and she forgot about the way Keanu was affecting her and concentrated on the images.
‘By some miracle it’s slipped between two metatarsals and though it’s probably hit some ligament or tendon, because the bones are intact it shouldn’t impact on the movement of the foot too much.’
‘And don’t look at me like that,’ she muttered at him, after he’d shot yet another questioning glance her way. ‘I am a trained nurse, and have been a shift supervisor in the ER at Canterbury Hospital.’
‘I don’t know how you found the time,’ he said as he headed back to the patient.
She was about to demand what the hell he’d meant by that when she realised this was hardly the time or place to be having an argument with this man she didn’t know.
Her friend had been a boy—was that the difference?
It certainly was part of it given the way her body was reacting to the slightest accidental touch …
‘Okay, so now I need you to swab all around the nail then hold his foot while I try to yank the nail out. I’d prefer not to have to cut it out.’
Caroline put on new gloves, cleaned the areas above and beneath the foot, changed gloves again and got a firm grasp of the man’s foot, ready to put all her weight into the task of holding on if the nail proved resistant.
But, no, it slid out easily, and as the wound was bleeding quite freely now, it was possible the risk of infection had been limited.
‘Antibiotics and tetanus injections in the locked cupboard,’ Keanu told her as he examined the wound in the patient’s foot. ‘And bring some saline and a packet of oral antibiotics as well. Everything’s labelled as we get a lot of agency nurses coming out here for short stints. I’ll use the saline to flush the wound before we dress it.’
He worked with quick, neat movements, cleaning the wound, putting the dressings on—usually, in her experience, a job left to a nurse—before administering the antibiotic and a tetanus shot. He even pulled a sleeve over the foot to keep the dressings in place and keep them relatively clean.
‘Now all we have to do is get you back to your accommodation,’ Keanu said. ‘Keep off the foot for a couple of days and find your workboots before you go back on the job. If you don’t have any you can phone the mainland and have some sent out on tomorrow’s plane. Nurse Lockhart and I will help you out to a cart and I’ll run you back down the hill.’
‘I’ve got workboots,’ the man said gruffly. ‘And I’ll phone my mate to come and get me, thanks. The foreman on the job doesn’t like strangers on the site.’
‘Strangers on the site? What site? What’s happening at the research station, Keanu?’
He touched her on the arm.
‘Leave it,’ he said quietly, and the touch, more than his words, stopped her questions.
Since when had her body reacted to a casual touch from Keanu’s hand?
It was being back on the island …
It was seeing him again …
Remembering the hurt …
Caroline closed her eyes, willing the tumult of emotions in her body to settle. She was here to heal, to find herself again, but she was also here to work.
She cleaned up, dropping soiled swabs into a closed bin marked for that purpose and the needles into a sharps box. Their patient was now sitting on the examination table, chatting to Keanu about, she found as she edged closer, fishing.
Well, it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss right now, and as she needed time to sort out her reactions to seeing Keanu again, she slipped away, heading back down the track to the airstrip to collect her suitcase.
She could walk up to the house on the path behind the hospital and so avoid seeing the source of her confusion again. And once she was up at the house—home again—she could sort things out in her head—and possibly in her body—and …
And what?
Make things right between them?
She doubted that could ever happen. He had disappeared without a word, returned her letters unopened.
But now she’d have to work with him. Was she supposed to behave as if the life they’d shared had never happened?
As if his disappearance from it hadn’t hurt her so badly she’d thought she’d never recover?
Impossible.
She’d reached the airstrip and grabbed her case by the time she’d thought this far and as further consideration of the problem seemed just that—impossible—she put it from her mind and started up the track, feeling the moisture in the air, trapped by the heavy rainforest on each side, wrap around her like a security blanket.
She was home, that was the main thing.
The track from the strip to the big house led up the hill behind the hospital and staff villas.
Staff villas?
Keanu.
Forget Keanu!
For her sanity’s sake, she needed to work—she’d already sat around feeling sorry for herself for far too long as a result of another desertion.
And another nurse would always come in handy on the island even if they couldn’t afford to pay her. She had her own place to live and some money Steve hadn’t known about tucked away in the bank.
And wasn’t this what she and Keanu had always planned to do?
He would become a doctor, she a nurse, and they’d return to Wildfire to run a hospital on the island. As children, they’d shared a picture book with a doctor and a nurse that had led to this childhood dream. Had it seemed more important because they had both lost a parent who possibly could have been saved if medical aid had been closer?
Half-orphans, they’d called themselves …
But as she hadn’t existed for Keanu once he and his mother had left the island permanently, seeing him here, and seeing him carrying out his part of their dream, had completely rattled her.
Trudging up the track, she shook her head in disbelief at his sudden reappearance in her life, especially now when all she wanted to do was throw herself into work as an antidote to the pain of Steve’s rejection.
Could she throw herself into work with Keanu around? Even seeing him that one time had memories—images—of their shared childhood flashing through her head.
Helen, his mother, had died not long after leaving the island. Caroline’s father had passed on that information many years ago, but he’d offered no explanation the year Caroline had found out she wouldn’t be going to the island for her holidays as Helen and Keanu had left and there’d been no one to care for her.
And despite her grief at Helen’s loss, she’d felt such anger against Keanu for not letting her know they were leaving, for not keeping in touch, for not telling her of his mother’s death himself, that she’d shut him out of her mind, the hurt too deep to contemplate.
‘I’ll take that.’
Keanu’s voice came from behind her, deep and husky, and sent tremors down her spine, while her fingers, rendered nerveless by his touch, released her hold on the case.
Why had he come back?
And why now?
But it was he who asked the question.
‘Why did you come back?’
Blunt words but something that sounded like anger throbbed through them—anger that fired her own in response.
‘It is my home.’
‘One of your homes,’ he reminded her. ‘You have another perfectly comfortable one in Sydney with your father and your brother—your twin. How is Christopher?’
She spun towards him, sorry she didn’t still have the suitcase to swing at his legs as she turned.
‘How dare you ask that question? As if you care about my brother. People who care for others keep in touch. They don’t just stop all communication. They don’t send back letters unopened. I was twelve, Keanu, and suddenly someone who had been there for me all my life, someone I thought was my friend, was gone.’
Keanu bowed his head in the face of her anger, unable to bear the hurt in her eyes. Oh, he’d been angry at her reappearance, but that had been shock-type anger. He’d returned to Wildfire thinking her safely tucked away in Sydney, enjoying a busy social life.
Then, seeing her appear out of nowhere, so much unresolved anger and bitterness and, yes, regret had churned inside him he’d reacted with anger. But that anger should have been directed at another Lockhart. It was regret at the way he’d treated her—his betrayal of their friendship—that had added fuel to the fire.
