LITMIR.BIZ

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than a couple of mouthfuls before she was stopped. I’ve warned Theatre that she’ll have to be switched to the end of the list as a precaution.’

      It was such an elementary mistake that she was quite concerned. Staff Nurse Roberts was usually very dependable. Such a potentially dangerous mistake was unlike her and would bear closer scrutiny.

      ‘Next point on the agenda is the state of cleanliness, or rather the lack of it,’ she said briskly. ‘There are dust bunnies under some of those beds that are nearly old enough to talk and I spotted used paper hankies lying behind one of the curtains. In a postoperative ward that’s a recipe for disaster. We don’t want an environment where MRSA can flourish, so strict cleanliness, please.’

      There were extra arrangements about transporting one patient up for X-rays and a rescheduling of physiotherapy for another, but Lauren was uncomfortably aware that her juniors were only too pleased to escape from her stern presence a few minutes later.

      ‘Can’t be helped,’ she muttered under her breath as she accessed the computer records to correct the time of administering pre-med to the patient wrongly given her breakfast. ‘I didn’t enter nursing to win popularity contests, and the sooner they learn my ways, the sooner we’ll get along with each other.’

      Not that they were a bad bunch by any means. She’d found them very hard-working up to now, so perhaps this was just a minor glitch.

      In the interim, she’d have to see if she could engineer a few minutes with Jackie Roberts. Perhaps over a cup of coffee she might loosen up enough to tell her what had brought on this unexpected lapse.

      She nearly groaned when she saw how much to heart her nurses had taken her words. Over the next few hours there was almost a full-scale blitz on the ward with every surface attacked as though for a military inspection. What the cleaners didn’t do, the nurses did, prompting the patients to joke that they were expecting to be next on the list for a good scrubbing.

      With all that going on she should have had plenty to occupy her mind. Unfortunately that didn’t stop her eyes straying towards the door every so often in expectation of seeing Marc Fletcher standing there with his habitual frown in evidence.

      She was almost disappointed when the phone rang just before she was due to hand over at the end of her shift and she heard his voice instead. Had she actually been looking forward to seeing the man, even though she knew he was probably trying to find fault?

      ‘Would Monday evening be good for your first session?’ he asked briskly. ‘That gives you four days to get the word around.’

      Lauren’s mind switched into high gear.

      She still had a spare set of the notes she’d made for the last course. It wouldn’t be difficult to have them copied so each attendee could take a set home at the end of the session. That just left the publicising to organise.

      ‘Monday works for me,’ she agreed. ‘And I wondered if it might be a good idea to start pretty low-key with the publicity this time. I thought I could put up notices in the female staff cloakrooms initially, to see what interest they stirred.’

      ‘Sounds reasonable for a pilot scheme,’ he said after a brief pause for thought. ‘But put my phone as the contact number just to make sure you don’t get any nuisance calls as a result.’

      She’d been wondering how to get around that problem and was grateful for the suggestion but, ‘Won’t that tie up your line?’ she worried.

      ‘Rather mine than yours,’ he said simply. ‘People who need to get hold of me can always go through the switchboard and get my secretary if my direct line’s busy. Anyway, it’s better that way than leaving you open to the chance of an undesirable getting hold of your number.’

      Lauren nodded, silently acknowledging the sense in his caution even though he couldn’t see her. Part of her railed at the need for it, but she had to live with the reality of modern life. Before she had time to say anything, he was continuing inexorably.

      ‘You’ll want to give some guidelines about what clothes they’ll need to wear, how many sessions and how long each session will last,’ he listed without pausing for breath. ‘If you drop off the outline with my secretary, she can photocopy it so you’ve got the right number to go around. Tomorrow morning, perhaps?’

      He’d made it sound like a question but there was the unmistakable air of command in his tone that made her grin, glad that he couldn’t see her response.

      The hospital grapevine had suggested that Marc Fletcher had a military background and she could well believe it. He certainly liked to have everything organised and by the book.

      ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, only just resisting the temptation to say Yes, sir!

      Her mind was full of all the things she was going to have to do before she came to work the next morning—not least the fact that there was laundry waiting to be done and carpets needing a clean before she could settle down to design an eye-catching poster.

      She wasn’t so busy with her thoughts that she didn’t notice that there was a full complement of safety lights this evening, but still she kept her eyes open. This time there were no unidentified people lurking in the shadows at the edge of the shrubbery, at least none that she could see.

      She could chalk up her unfortunate experience yesterday to a random mugging that she’d foiled in spite of her inattention.

      Still, there was a strange niggling doubt at the back of her mind. Something that she’d ignored, or a detail that had slipped her memory. There was something about the whole event…or non-event, as it had turned out…that was irritating her like a burr caught in clothing, if only she could remember what it was.

      Unfortunately, the thing she remembered most clearly was the strangely electric sensation that had shot through her when she’d realised that the second man that she’d just deposited unceremoniously on the ground had been the punctilious Marc Fletcher.

      Mixed in with the dismay at her faux pas was a wicked thrill that she’d actually caught the man by surprise and, big and strong as he was, flipped him base over apex.

      She wished she had a photo of that. It was something that would have been able to make her smile on even the greyest of days. As it was, she was just going to have to rely on the memory.

       CHAPTER TWO

      MARC waited until he saw the taillights of Lauren’s car disappear into the September dusk before he switched the light back on in his room and sat down behind his desk.

      Wretched woman would probably cause a scene if she knew that he’d been looking out for her this evening, but he couldn’t do anything else. At thirty-nine, the sense of responsibility had been part of him for far too many years for him to switch it off now.

      If only he could switch it off, his life might be less stressful, but there would still be the guilt to keep him awake at night.

      He sighed heavily, forcing himself to focus on the file spread open on his desk, then groaned again when he saw what it was.

      In a larger hospital he wouldn’t have been so intimately involved with so many of the different departments. Here, at Denison Memorial, he had a role to play in almost every aspect of the day-to-day running of things. That included being a member of the interview panel for the appointment of new members of staff, but he was guiltily aware that wasn’t the reason why Lauren Scott’s file was on his desk.

      As she’d reminded him, there was documented evidence of the self-defence courses she’d run at her previous post. What she didn’t know was that, in the course of checking her references, he’d also managed to find out about her involvement, almost to Olympic level, with several of the more strenuous forms of martial art.

      He shook his head, bemused all over again. To look at her, so slender and elegant even in the loose-fitting tunic and trousers of her hospital

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