One Baby Step at a Time Read online

  ‘The tourniquet is holding back blood loss from the brachial artery,’ Bill said, making Nick wonder if their childhood ability to follow each other’s thoughts was still alive and well.

  He looked across to where she was gently probing the damaged arm, flushing debris and carefully tweezing out bits of dirt and straw—the work a surgical assistant would be doing in a major trauma centre.

  ‘I’ve been releasing the tourniquet and can see where the artery is damaged but he’s so shocked I doubt that’s the only source of blood loss.’

  They were definitely following each other’s thoughts!

  He moved round the table, leaving another nurse to control the fluid while a third watched the monitors. He’d have liked to have an anaesthetist present, but that, too, was for city trauma centres, so he used a nerve block to anaesthetise the arm before examining it.

  ‘There,’ Bill said, passing him a loupe so he could see the torn artery more clearly.

  Two tiny sutures and the tear was closed, but the nurse watching the monitors reported falling blood pressure.

  Drastically falling blood pressure...

  ‘V-tach,’ the nurse said quietly.

  The words were barely spoken before Bill had the defibrillator pushed up against the trolley and was already attaching leads to the paddles. Nick set the voltage, gave the order to clear, placed the paddles above and below the heart and watched as the patient’s body jerked on the table.

  He looked at the monitor and saw the nurse shake her head.

  He upped the voltage, cleared again and felt the tension in the room as the body jerked and stilled, then the green line on the monitor showed the heartbeat had stabilised.

  A release of held breath, nothing more than a sigh, but he knew everyone had been willing the lad to live.

  For now!

  ‘He’s had three litres of fluid—he’s definitely losing blood somewhere else,’ he muttered, then turned to Bill. ‘We need full blood—has he been cross-matched?’

  ‘It’s on its way,’ she said quietly, then nodded towards the door where a young man in a white coat had appeared, stethoscope around his neck and, thank heavens, two blood packs in his hands.

  ‘Rob Darwin, I’m one of two doctors on duty upstairs but Bill said you needed help down here, and when Bill calls, I obey. Her slightest wish is my command.’

  He was joking, teasing Bill, but Nick had no time for jokes.

  ‘Get that blood into him—it’s warmed?’

  Rob nodded and took up a position at the head of the table, fiddling with the fluid lines as he prepared to give the patient the transfusion.

  ‘The bleeding has to be internal, but how? Where?’

  Nick was talking to himself as he looked at the swollen, badly dislocated shoulder, picturing how the machine must have caught the arm and twisted it, trying to imagine where internal damage would have occurred.

  ‘A tear to the axillary artery?’ Bill suggested quietly, looking up from where she was putting clean dressings on the damaged arm.

  ‘That or the subclavian,’ Nick agreed. ‘I’m going to have to go in and have a look.’

  He glanced up at Rob.

  ‘You okay with anaesthesia?’

  Rob grinned.

  ‘I haven’t been here long but as Bill told me soon after I arrived, country doctors do the lot,’ he said. ‘How long would you want him out to it?’

  ‘Hopefully twenty minutes, but double it—make it forty to be on the safe side. He’s due to be flown out if we can get him stable.’

  ‘The plane will wait,’ Rob assured him, already checking the available drugs and drawing up what he’d need.

  Bill prepared the area beneath where the young man’s shoulder should be, quickly shaving the hair and swabbing antiseptic all around then stepping back as Nick made the incision.

  ‘We know it’s in the armpit—it should be right there,’ Nick grumbled, but the muscle had been torn so badly it was hard to see where the armpit should have been.

  A fresh flush of blood as Bill moved the lad’s scapula revealed the tear, blood pulsing from it into the surrounding tissues.

  ‘The pressure must have been enormous,’ he murmured. ‘It looks as if it’s been ripped apart. I’ll have to cut off the torn ends and sew it back together. The vascular surgeons in Brisbane can do the fancy stuff.’

  Bill watched in utter amazement as the man she’d known so well as a boy—her first best friend—calmly performed life-saving microscopic surgery on their patient. But the whole shift had been one surprise after another, beginning with Nick walking into the ER as if he belonged there.

  ‘Another suture!’

  He snapped the order, making her realise he’d already asked while she’d been reliving the shock of his arrival. Her mind back in gear, she worked with him, actually thrilled to be seeing him in action—seeing just how good an emergency doctor he’d turned out to be.

  Not that she’d ever doubted it. Nick had always been able to do anything, and even excel at it, once he’d set his mind to it.

  Her friend Nick...

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PATIENT WAS finally wheeled away, heading for an airlift to Brisbane and the experts who might or might not save his life and, with even more luck, his arm. Bill slid down the wall and slumped to the floor of the trauma room, oblivious to the mess of packaging, blood, swabs and tubing that littered the floor.

  ‘Not bad for a first night on duty?’ she said to Nick, smiling up at the man who leant against the wall across from her. ‘Think you’ll enjoy work back in the old home town?’

  His face was drawn, the stress of the two-hour fight to keep the youngster alive imprinted clearly on his features, yet he found the shadow of a smile.

  ‘Anything you can do I can do better,’ he teased, using a phrase that had been bandied back and forth between them a thousand times in their youth.

  A young nurse poked her head into the room.

  ‘Want me to clean up?’ she asked.

  Bill shook her head.

  ‘I’m off duty, I’ll do it in a minute.’

  She turned back to Nick to find him studying her, a strange expression on his face.

  ‘What?’ she asked, disturbed not by him looking at her but by her reaction to it—to him, the new him.

  ‘Rob Darwin? Love interest?’ he asked.

  ‘As if!’ Bill snorted. ‘Not that he’s not a nice young man, and not that he wouldn’t like there to be something, but...’

  She hesitated, finding her reluctance to date hard to put into words.

  ‘No spark?’

  Nick had found the words for her.

  ‘None at all,’ she said, ‘and it seems a waste of my time and unfair to him just to date for the sake of dating.’

  ‘Very noble of you,’ he teased, then he smiled again.

  This smile was better than the first one, and her reaction more intense.

  Weird when this was Nick, but she didn’t have time to consider it as he was speaking again and, anyway, maybe the reactions were nothing more than tiredness and the aftermath of stress.

  ‘There must have been a spark with Nigel,’ he was saying. ‘What really happened there? You could have married him, the Great God of Surgery, and been taken away from all this. You could be down in the city, doing social stuff, running fundraising balls, lunching for good causes, decked out in designer gear instead of bloody scrubs.’

  ‘Now, there would be a fate worse than death!’

  The words were lightly spoken but pain pierced her heart as she remembered it had been that same ‘Great God’ who’d ordered her to have an abortion a month before their wedding because he didn’t want people thinking they’d got married because she was pregnant. She breathed deep
ly, aware that too much bitterness still leaked into her veins when she thought of that disastrous time.

  The realisation that the man she’d loved had been nothing more than a shallow, social-climbing pretender had rocked her self-confidence and made her question her judgement about people, particularly men. The miscarriage two months later had exacerbated her loss of self-worth and it had taken years, back here in Willowby with her family and friends, to rebuild it.

  Although now she’d grown a thicker skin and heavier armour to shield her fragile heart...

  Nick heard the change in her voice and wondered how much damage her broken engagement had done to her trust—to Bill herself, given she was the most trusting person he had ever known. It worried him that he didn’t know the background to the break-up—didn’t know a lot of things about his friend.

  His best friend!

  What did the kids call it these days? BFF? Best friends for ever?

  ‘Anyway,’ she was saying, while his mind had drifted back to the past, ‘if we’re going to talk of what might have happened in our lives, you could have married Seraphina or whatever she called herself when she fell pregnant, and gone swanning off to New York to live off her earnings as a top supermodel.’

  That was better, more like old times, Bill taking the fight to him!

  ‘Serena,’ Nick corrected. ‘You’re muddling her up with Delphina, who was the one before, and, anyway, I did offer to marry Serena but she wanted none of it, not me, not a child and definitely not marriage.’

  Silence fell, the ghosts of dead children lying between them among the empty packaging and blood.

  Bill reacted first, pushing herself up off the floor, stripping off her soiled apron and flinging it into a bin, then bending to begin collecting the rubbish off the floor.

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  The young wardsman who appeared, mop and bucket in hand, waved her away and although she picked up a few more bits of rubbish, she was happy to leave him to it, following Nick out of the trauma room to find the big open area of the ER eerily quiet at six on a Monday morning.

  ‘Everyone’s sleeping in,’ Andy, the duty ER manager, told them. Newly arrived on shift, he was spic and span, his face alert, his smile bright. ‘Go home, both of you.’

  ‘Got to dictate some notes on that last case,’ Nick said.

  ‘And I’m having a shower then heading for beach,’ Bill told them. ‘I need some sea air to clear my head before I can think about sleeping.’

  Would she go to Woodchoppers? Nick wondered, not wanting to ask in front of Andy but aware he’d like to join Bill at the beach. Weird name for a beach, but it had been their favourite swimming beach growing up, Bill and her six brothers declaring it their personal fiefdom, keeping it free of any less desirable elements, particularly those pushing drugs to impressionable teenagers.

  Whillimina de Groote and her brothers! They’d become the family he’d never had. Bill dragging him to her home after his first day at school, insisting her brothers teach the five-year-old Nick how to defend himself.

  They’d taught him a lot after that...

  * * *

  Bill stood under the shower, the water so hot that steam was fogging the cubicle, but no amount of heat or water could wash away the uneasiness that lingered over her reaction to Nick.

  To Nick as a man!

  How pathetic!

  She’d known him for close to thirty years, considered him her best friend in all the world, so why, now, would she be reacting to him as a man?

  Maybe it was nothing more than the stress and tiredness engendered by their battle to save the teenager’s life.

  She could only hope...

  Accepting that the hot water wasn’t helping, she turned off the taps, dried herself hurriedly, rubbed at the tangled mess of red curls that topped her head and fell down past her shoulders, then pulled on an old bikini she kept in her locker, covered it with a voluminous T-shirt, grabbed her handbag and hurried out the staff exit, not wanting to bump into Nick before she’d had a good run on the beach and a swim in the limpid, tropical waters to clear her head.

  Not before she happened to be on duty with him again, in fact, and if she spoke to the ER secretary who drew up the rosters, total avoidance might be possible.

  Well, not total. He was back to see his gran, so they’d undoubtedly run into each other at Gran’s house...

  But at least he’d come home.

  She pulled up in the small parking area at Woodchoppers Beach and slogged across the sand dunes, glad the effort of crossing them made the beach the least used of the beaches around Willowby. Pulling off her T-shirt and dropping it on the sand, she began to run, slowly at first then, as her muscles warmed, sprinting faster and faster—short sprints then slow jogs, alternating the two, feeling the blood surge through her body, bringing it to life in a most satisfactory manner.

  Two more lengths of the beach and then she’d swim.

  ‘You shouldn’t come here on your own—you never know who might be around.’

  Nick’s appearance startled her.

  ‘Obviously!’ she snapped at him.

  But as he ignored her comment and fell into stride beside her, she knew all the good of her run had vanished, and with it her peace of mind.

  It’s only Nick, she told herself, but that didn’t seem to stop the awareness that prickled in her skin all down one side—the side closest to her jogging companion.

  Veering away from him, she headed for the water and dived from ankle depth into the clear, green-blue sea, surfacing to breathe then diving again to porpoise along parallel to the beach, relishing the silken kiss of the water against her skin.

  * * *

  Had she always been this gorgeous?

  Long, lean, and tanned in a way redheads weren’t supposed to tan?

  Nick watched as she dived and surfaced in the water, only to dive again, her limbs flashing in the sunlight, her hair trailing behind her—a mermaid at play.

  Was it because she’d always been a friend that he’d never seen her as a woman? Not that he could afford to see her that way now—they were friends! There’d be plenty of interesting and intelligent, even beautiful, women here in Willowby. It was only a matter of connecting up with some of them, and the thoughts he found himself having about Bill would disappear.

  For all she joked about having escaped a fate worse than death when she’d dumped Nigel, she was the kind of woman who should be married—married with a tribe of red-headed kids clustered around her—because she’d always been a mother hen, adopting not only him but any fellow pupil in danger of being bullied or excluded from one of the childhood gangs.

  He stripped down to his jocks and dived into the water, surfacing a little distance from her, uncertain enough about the strange reactions of the night to not want to be too close.

  ‘Race you to the rocks,’ she challenged, and started immediately, but his longer strokes and stronger kick soon had him catching up, so they swam together towards the smooth, rounded rocks that jutted into the water at the end of the bay until they were close enough for him to swim away, beating her by a body length.

  Strange reactions or not, he wasn’t going to let her beat him!

  ‘Oh, that was good,’ she said, coming up out of the water, her hair streaming down her back. ‘I find it’s so much easier to sleep during the day if I have a run and a swim before I go home.’

  She looked at him for a moment, her golden-brown eyes assessing.

  ‘And a hearty breakfast at the surf club back at the main beach. You up for that, or has your body become a temple so you can’t eat delicious crispy bacon, and beef sausages, and fried tomatoes, and all the other things that are loaded with cholesterol and fat?’

  Nick shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘So you sti
ll eat like a navvy and stay as slim as a whip. Some metabolism you de Grootes inherited.’

  ‘Not all of us,’ Bill told him, smiling as she waded in front of him back to the beach. ‘Bob’s developed a most unsightly paunch, and Joel’s heading in the same direction. Too many business lunches and not enough exercise, that’s the problem with those two.’

  Nick watched the way her butt moved as she walked in front of him and tried to think of Bill’s brothers rather than how those twin globes would fit into his hands.

  ‘Have you already moved into the apartment?’

  She threw the question over her shoulder but it brushed right past him, his attention snaffled by the way the woman in front of him moved, and how her breasts hung low as she bent to retrieve her T-shirt from the sand, the bikini she wore barely covering her nipples.

  ‘Nick?’

  Had she caught him watching her as she turned, her eyebrows raised as she waited for a reply?

  What had she asked?

  Had he moved in...?

  ‘If you call dumping a couple of suitcases in the bedroom and unpacking my wash bag as moving in, then yes,’ he responded, hoping the gap between the question and the answer hadn’t been too long. ‘It’s fully furnished so all I had to bring were clothes and personal stuff. I’d hardly begun to unpack when the hospital phoned to ask if I could work last night.’

  Bill didn’t respond, so disturbed was she by the sight of Nick’s lean, toned body that casual conversation was beyond her. He’d shrugged as he’d mentioned unpacking, an unfortunate movement as it had drawn her attention back to his chest, with its flat wedges of pectoral muscles and clearly defined six-pack.

  She wanted to ask if he’d been working out, but that would give away the fact she’d noticed and the way she was feeling it was better if the question went unasked.

  She climbed the first dune and raced down the other side then up the next, aware he was pacing himself to stay beside her—aware of him!