LITMIR.BIZ

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Blue Eyes said, now clad all in waterproofs. She tugged open the door, allowing contact between doctors and patients. Before she even had Finn’s okay.

      ‘Ross, you go with Dr Williams, Robbie, you’re with Dr Lockheart, Craig, you’re with Mr Kennedy and, Jason, you’re with me,’ she said. She turned to the parents. ‘Could you leave the kids with us? They’re in the best of hands; we have the most senior doctors in the hospital working with them. We’ll clean them, check there are no problem burns and then get them back to you. Maybe you could find an all-night supermarket and pick up some loose clothes. Is that okay with everyone?’

      But before they could answer they were interrupted. ‘Excuse me …’ The night receptionist edged into the emergency area like a scared rabbit. Of course she was nervous, Luke thought. Everyone in this hospital was nervous around Finn Kennedy, and for good reason. ‘The police are here,’ she ventured, and before she could say more two cops pushed past her.

      Uh-oh. They hadn’t realised, Luke thought with grim humour, that they’d just entered Finn Kennedy territory. Facing gun-toting drug dealers might be safer.

      ‘These youths are facing charges of breaking and entering,’ the older policeman said, looking at the boys as if they were truly bad smells. ‘The orderly outside said they don’t seem badly injured. Can we get the paperwork out of the way so we can get on with our night’s work?’

      Uh-oh, indeed. Luke held his breath. Finn’s fuse, already short, was suddenly down to the core explosive, and he had a target.

      ‘Breaking and entering?’ His voice was icy.

      ‘That’s right, sir.’ The cop still didn’t see the danger—but here it came.

      ‘These kids have fallen into exposed hot fat,’ Finn snarled. ‘A life-threatening hazard to anyone who comes near it. An unsecured environment. Unlocked windows. You know as well as I do that a simple padlock on a closed door doesn’t begin to cover such a risk. Breaking and entering … You can tell whoever’s thinking of pressing charges that he can go back to whatever stinking worm-hole he crawled from and expect a visit from Occupational Health and Safety, with lawyers following. These children are traumatised enough, and you’re adding more. Now get out of this hospital before I phone someone with enough clout to have you thrown out.’

      Then, as the cops backed out with astonishing speed, he turned to Luke. ‘What are you waiting for? Get those waterproofs on and get these kids clean. Do what the nurse says. Now.’

      The really good thing about being a nobody was that it didn’t matter whose toes you stood on. You were still just a nobody.

      These guys were all big-wigs. Lily knew it, but she’d watched the outburst of sound and fury with dispassion, not really fussed if the anger turned on her. What was the worst that could happen? She’d move on.

      There were other hospitals. Her credentials were good. She could go somewhere else and be anonymous all over again.

      The feeling was extraordinary. She felt like she was floating, light and free. She’d escaped.

      She’d return eventually to Lighthouse Cove, the tiny community that judged her mother and who judged her. She knew deep down that this was a momentary escape. A promise was a promise. But right now her mother was in the middle of a dizzying affair with the local parish vicar, the whole town was on fire with gossip and Lily was staying right here, in nice, anonymous Sydney.

      She was a bank nurse, employed by an agency. She was sent where she was needed, so if she stood on toes, if she wasn’t needed, if these Very Important Doctors decided they wished to dispense with her services, then so be it.

      She practically chuckled as she led Jason into a shower cubicle and along the line of cubicles three Very Important Doctors followed her lead.

      Two of them looked grim. The other … not so much. He was the head of plastic surgery, she gathered. Luke Williams looked lean and ripped, hovering above six feet, with sun-bleached brown hair and deep green eyes that glinted with repressed laughter. Very repressed, though. She caught his gaze and she could have sworn he was laughing, but he averted his eyes fast. It wouldn’t do to laugh out loud.

      There wasn’t enough laughter in her life, she thought, and she needed it. But she’d taken the first step, and it had felt good to exchange her first attempt at laughter in her new job with a doctor as hunky as Luke Williams.

      There’s an inappropriate thought, she chided herself, but she was still smiling inwardly.

      ‘Will this hurt?’ Jason quavered, and she gave him a reassuring smile.

      ‘I suspect mostly just your pride. We need to get those clothes off. Are you hurting?’

      ‘Stinging,’ he admitted. ‘A bit.’

      The meatworks proprietor should have washed them straight away, Lily thought, growing serious. If the tallow had been really hot, they’d have been facing a nightmare. The owner of the meatworks hadn’t checked. He’d simply threatened them with police and they’d fled. Their parents had brought them straight here, with hot tallow still intact. If it had been boiling it would have kept right on burning.

      They’d been so lucky. Apparently the vat had only just started warming. The boys had climbed in through a high window, seen huge planks laid across to skim off impurities and dared each other to rollerblade across. The stupidity left Lily breathless. She’d heard the outline. One kid falling, clutching his mate as he fell, both grabbing the planking, which had come loose, tumbling their mates in after them.

      Lily turned the shower to soft pressure, skin temperature. She put Jason’s hands on the rails and produced scissors.

      ‘Just to my knickers,’ Jason whimpered.

      ‘There’s nothing I haven’t seen,’ Lily told him. ‘If you’ve burned anything personal, you’ll need it fixed.’

      Another whimper.

      ‘There’s nothing to this,’ she told him cheerfully. ‘These jeans are going to stink for ever so we might as well cut ‘em off. So … rollerblading over steaming tallow. Quite a trick. How long have you been blading?’

      ‘A … a year.’ The water was streaming over the kid; his clothes were falling away and so was the muck that was covering him.

      ‘You any good?’

      ‘Y-yeah.’

      ‘So of the four of you, who does the neatest tricks?’

      Luke was in the next cubicle. He was scissoring clothes from his own kid. Ross had been blustering when Luke had first seen him, whinging to his parents that it wasn’t his fault, that his ‘expletive’ mates had pressured him to do it, Craig had pushed him, his dad should sue.

      Under the water, with Luke scissoring off his clothes, he calmed down. His legs were scalded. They were only first-degree burns, though, Luke thought, little worse than sunburn. He’d sting for a week but there’d be little long-term damage.

      He’d been swearing as Luke had propelled him under the shower, but when Luke had attacked with scissors … the boy had shut up. ‘We need to check down south,’ Luke had told him. ‘Check everything’s still in working order. Steamed balls aren’t exactly healthy …’ Luke wasn’t reassuring him just yet. He liked him quiet, and, besides, with him quiet he could hear the conversation in the next cubicle.

      ‘I’ve been blading since I was twelve,’ Blue Eyes was saying.

      ‘Girls can’t blade.’ That was her kid—Jason.

      ‘You’re kidding me, right? I suspect you’ll need to come back in a week or so to make sure these scalds have healed. You bring your blades; I’ll organise time off and I’ll meet you in the hospital car park. Then we’ll see who can’t blade.’

      Luke blinked. An assignation …

      ‘What, you can blade fast?’ Jason had been shakily terrified

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