LITMIR.BIZ

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much more than shadows. ‘Give cyclists a good metre.’

      ‘Doing it. So, did you crash into anything this morning?’

      Tom could imagine the cheeky grin on Jared’s face—the one he always heard in the young man’s voice whenever he’d given him unnecessary instructions. ‘No, I didn’t crash into any walls.’

      ‘What about that woman you were talking to?’

      Hayley Grey. A woman whose smoky voice could change in a moment from the trembling vibrato of fear to the steel of ‘don’t mess with me’. ‘I didn’t crash into her.’

      ‘She looked pretty ticked off with you just as you left.’

      ‘Did she?’ He already knew she had been ticked off by his ill-mannered offer—an offer generated by the anger that had blazed through him the moment he’d heard her realisation that he was blind. He refused to allow anyone to pity him. Not even a woman whose voice reminded him of soul music.

      Jared had just given him a perfect opportunity to find out more about her. Making the question sound casual, he asked, ‘How exactly did she look?’

      ‘Stacked. She’s got awesome breasts.’

      Tom laughed, remembering the gauche version of himself at the same age. ‘You need to look at women’s faces, Jared, or they’re going to punch you.’

      ‘I did start with her face, Tom, just like you taught me, but come on, we’re guys, and I thought you’d want to know the important stuff first.’

      And even though Jared was only twenty, he was right. When Tom had had his sight, he’d always appreciated the beautiful vision of full and heavy breasts. He suddenly pictured that deep, sensual voice with cleavage and swallowed hard. ‘Fair enough.’

      If Jared heard the slight crack in Tom’s voice he didn’t mention it. ‘She’s tall for a chick, got long hair but it was tied back so I dunno if it’s curly or straight, and she’s kinda pretty if you like ‘em with brown hair and brown eyes.’

      Knowing Jared’s predilection for brassy blondes, Tom instantly disregarded the ‘kinda’.

      ‘Her nose wasn’t big but it wasn’t small neither but her mouth …’ Jared slowed to turn.

      A ripple of something akin to frustration washed through Tom as he waited for Jared to negotiate the complicated intersection he knew they’d arrived at. The feeling surprised him as much as the previous rush of heat. He hadn’t experienced anything like that since before the accident. Even then work had given him more of a rush than any woman ever had—not that he’d been a recluse. He’d had his fair share of brief liaisons, but he’d always ended them before a woman could mention the words, ‘the future’.

      The car turned right, changed lanes and then took a sharp left turn. Tom’s seat belt held him hard against the seat as they took a steep descent toward the water and his apartment. He broke his code and said, ‘What about her mouth?’

      ‘Her mouth was wide. Like it was used to smiling, even though it wasn’t smiling at you.’

      ‘I gave her a fright.’ He wasn’t admitting to more than that.

      He heard the crank of the massive basement garage door opening, and as Jared waited for it to rise, Tom assembled all the details he’d just been given, rolling them around in his mind, but all he got was a mess of body parts. It was a pointless exercise trying to ‘identikit’ a picture because all of it was from Jared’s perspective.

      His gut clenched. He’d lost his job, his career and, damn it, now all he ever got was other people’s perspectives.

      Stick with what you know.

      His ears, nose and skin had become his eyes so he concentrated on what he’d ‘seen’. Hayley Grey was a contradiction in terms. Her fresh scent of sunshine and summer gardens said innocence and joy, but it was teamed with a voice that held such depth he felt sure it had the range to sing gut-wrenching blues driven by pain.

      ‘Tom, Carol rang from Fiji. She said, “Good luck with today, not that you’d need it.” I told her you’d call her back. She’s sort of like a mum, isn’t she?’

      ‘Sort of.’ He smiled as he thought of Carol working with kids in the villages, glad she’d actually respected his wishes and had not come rushing back to Sydney when he’d finally told her about the accident and his blindness. She’d be back in a few weeks, though.

      Thinking about Carol’s message grounded him—centring him solidly where he needed to be: in the present. Reminding him he had far more important things to be thinking about than a surgical registrar. Just like before he’d lost his sight, work came ahead of women and now he had even more of a reason to stick to that modus operandi. Sure, he’d given the occasional lecture before he’d gone blind, but he wasn’t known for his lecturing style. No, he’d been known for a hell of a lot more.

      What was the saying? ‘Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.’ Bitterness surged. Lecturing was hardly going to set the world on fire. The accident had stolen so much from him and was now forcing him to do something that didn’t come naturally, but until he worked out if he was staying in medicine or not, it was all that was open to him. He couldn’t fail. He wouldn’t allow that to happen, especially not in front of his previous colleagues.

      He wasn’t afraid of hard work—hell, he’d been working hard since he was fourteen and Mike had challenged him to improve at school so he could stay on the football team. His goals had changed, but his way of achieving them had not—one hundred per cent focus on the job at hand with no distractions from any other quarter. This morning’s trip to SHH had been all about navigating his way around the hospital in preparation for his first lecture. He was determined to show everyone at The Harbour that although his domain had changed and had been radically curtailed, he was still in charge and in control, exactly as he’d been two years ago.

      Jared was his sole concession in acknowledging that with driving he required assistance. The fact that Jared had turned up in Perth and refused to leave had contributed to the decision.

      ‘I’ve got two lectures. One at one p.m. and the other at six.’ Tom hoped he’d hidden his anxiety about the lectures, which had been rising slowly over the last two days. ‘I’ll need you to set up the computer for me both times.’

      He heard Jared’s hesitation and his concerns rose another notch. ‘Is there a problem with that?’

      ‘You know I’d do anything for you, Tom.’

      And he did. He’d saved Jared’s life and now Jared was making his life more tolerable.

      ‘I’ve got a chemistry test at six and I asked the teacher if I could sit it with the full-time students, but that’s the same time as your lecture.’

      It had taken Tom weeks to convince Jared to return to school and he wasn’t going to let him miss the test, even though it meant he was going to have to ask for assistance from The Harbour. He swallowed against the acrid taste in his mouth that burned him every time he had to ask for anything. ‘You can’t miss a chem test if you want to get into medicine.’

      ‘Yeah, but what if someone sets up your computer all wrong?’

      Tom gave a grim smile. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

      ‘Push fluids!’ Evie Lockheart tried not to let the eviscerating scream of the monitors undo her nerve. She had a patient with a flail chest and she knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was bleeding, but from where exactly she was yet to determine.

      ‘See this bruise?’ She hovered the ultrasound doppler over her patient’s rigid abdomen.

      James, a final-year medical student, peered at it. ‘From a seat belt?’

      ‘Yes. So we’re starting here and examining the spleen and the liver first.’

      ‘Even though he’s

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