LITMIR.BIZ

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      Suddenly, she knew she was in trouble; knew it was time she said a swift goodbye and made her way as far away from the man as quickly as she could.

      It had been easy to resist his physical attraction…with a minor lapse or two while she’d watched that gorgeous body striding away down yet another corridor. All the while he was being so suspicious and grouchy her emotions were in no danger.

      Unfortunately, the Marc Fletcher she’d seen this evening was another matter altogether—generous with his time, sharply intelligent, and with a surprising sense of the absurd.

      This was a man who could easily chip away at the self-sufficiency that had become so much a part of her over the last decade or so.

       CHAPTER THREE

      ‘LAUREN? It’s Marc Fletcher,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.

      Her knees gave a very unseemly wobble but Lauren firmly refused to admit that that was the reason why she perched swiftly on the corner of the desk. She was a responsible ward sister after all, not a teenager with a crush on the nearest good-looking boy.

      Nor was Marc Fletcher a boy, not with those broad shoulders and muscular legs, to say nothing of the age and experience he couldn’t hide no matter how enigmatic the expression in those smoky grey eyes.

      And the fact that she’d hardly seen him in nearly a week had nothing to do with her reaction either. She’d told herself that he must have been too busy to check up on her, or perhaps she’d somehow convinced him that she was no threat to his precious hospital. She’d also told herself that she should be glad that he wasn’t breathing down her neck all the time. What she couldn’t tell herself was that she’d been relieved not to see him.

      ‘How can I help you?’ she returned brightly, determined that he shouldn’t have a hint of the turmoil just the sound of his voice engendered in her these days.

      ‘I’ve got my bed manager’s hat on at the moment, so this call’s just by way of a rather late warning that I’m sending you another patient. The ambulance set off about an hour ago so she should be with you fairly shortly.’

      She could hear something in his tone that told her there was something a bit different about this admission, then marvelled at the flight of fancy. As if she could possibly know the man well enough to read such things into his voice…and over the phone, no less.

      ‘Actually,’ he continued after a thoughtful pause, ‘there’s a bit of a tale behind her condition, but I’ll leave it to her to tell you.’

      Lauren was torn between shock that she had been right about his tone of voice and curiosity at the mystery.

      ‘You’re not going to tell me any more, are you?’ she accused. ‘You’re just going to leave me dangling until she gets here.’

      ‘Well, I can tell you that she’s been in your old city hospital for nearly a month and needs another week or ten days of your gentle ministrations before she’ll be ready to go home again. Apart from that, I’ll just tell you that she’s either been remarkably unlucky or extremely lucky. I’ll leave it to you to decide when you’ve spoken to her.’

      With that, he hung up, leaving Lauren spluttering.

      At the end, there, she’d been sure there had been an almost playful tone to his voice and it certainly wasn’t like the formidable man she’d first met to taunt her with a ‘wait and see’ situation.

      Now she could hardly wait for the woman to arrive. She was also going to have to find some way to turn the tables on him, unless…

      She grinned when she remembered what day it was. Tonight she was due to teach the second self-defence class, and if Marc fulfilled his intention of providing her with a demonstration opponent, she was going to be able to do more than turn the tables on him. She might actually be able to turn his whole world upside down.

      She grinned at the image of Marc lying in a crumpled heap at her feet, the victim of yet another crime-busting manoeuvre.

      ‘Mrs Roker’s here, Sister,’ said a voice behind her, and she suddenly realised that she was still standing there with the telephone clutched in her hand and an inane grin on her face. She hadn’t even had time to run a critical eye over the bed that her new charge was to occupy to make sure that everything was exactly the way it should be.

      ‘Good. I’m coming,’ she said hastily, cradling the phone and smoothing her hands over her uniform before she hurried out into the ward.

      ‘Please, Sister, call me Cissy,’ her new patient requested when they’d finally got her settled into her bed.

      ‘If that’s what you’d prefer,’ Lauren agreed as she retrieved the thick file of notes that had arrived with her latest charge. ‘It looks as if by the time I’ve read all this lot I’ll know your complete life’s history.’

      ‘Oh, no, Sister,’ Cissy exclaimed. ‘That’s just the last couple of months. The rest of my life would probably fit on a single sheet of paper, and that includes having four children.’

      ‘Wow.’ Lauren blinked when she had her first inkling of what Marc had been hinting at. ‘How about if you give me the edited highlights as an introduction?’

      ‘Well, Sister, I think you’d better make yourself comfortable. This is more of a saga than a two-minute short story.’

      Lauren chuckled as she perched one hip on the edge of the bed, careful not to move the cage keeping the weight of the bedclothes away from Cissy’s injured leg.

      ‘It all started when I went in to have my blood pressure checked just after my seventieth birthday,’ she began. ‘Well, my doctor—not one of the ones at Denison Memorial, by the way; we live a little further afield—he said it was fine and did I have any problems he could help me with? I said I was fit as a fiddle apart from the nasty scrape on my shin from where I’d caught it when I walked into the edge of the coffee-table. He took a quick look at it and suggested I went straight along to the practice nurse to have it cleaned up and a protective dressing put on it.’

      Lauren suddenly noticed that the room seemed strangely quiet. A quick glance around told her that almost every person in the room had tuned into the tale and was waiting with bated breath for Cissy to continue.

      ‘Well,’ Cissy went on, her softly lined face animated, ‘she cleaned it up and put some stuff on it. Then, because my skin’s a bit thin, she put a bandage on instead of a sticky plaster and told me to come back in three days to have the dressing changed.’

      Apparently blithely unaware of her audience, she drew a quick breath and continued. ‘It was a different nurse the next time and when she took the bandage off she said it was an awful waste of dressings for such a little scrape. I tried to tell her what the first nurse had said about my skin but she got all huffy.’

      Cissy stuck her nose in the air and put on an affected voice. “‘I do know what I’m doing, Mrs Roker. I’m a fully qualified nurse, you know.”’

      Lauren couldn’t help joining in the round of chuckles. The woman was evidently a wicked mimic as well as a natural storyteller.

      ‘Anyway, when she put the sticky plaster on, I had to tell her that she’d stretched it too tight and it was pulling the skin. Well, she took hold of the corner and whipped it up—the way you nurses often do to get it over and done with—and she took off a chunk of skin with it.’

      This time it was a chorus of sympathetic murmurs and winces and Lauren noticed that Cissy had started playing to the gallery.

      ‘She stuck it straight back down again, pretending that she hadn’t realised what she’d done, and told me to come back in four days, but by that time it was pretty sore.’

      Lauren guessed that that was probably an under-statement. If this was the first real medical

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