‘How’d he do that?’
Vic sighed. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know.’
Lawson grinned. ‘Is it haemorrhaging much?’
‘It has been. I’ve controlled the bleeding now though.’
‘Nine sixty’s available. I’ll call it in to Coms and be at your place in a few minutes.’
Vic hung up the phone. ‘Lawson will be here in three.’
‘I’m sorry, Vic, I—’
She slashed her hand through the air, bringing Ryan’s apology to an abrupt halt. ‘Don’t talk to me. Just be quiet.’
‘But—’
‘Don’t,’ she snapped.
Now the emergency was under control and she was away from sickening amounts of her brother’s blood other feelings flowed. Disbelief, anger, relief. She allowed herself to be a sister for a moment.
‘I can’t believe I raised you. How bloody stupid,’ she said to Ryan. ‘How am I supposed to go off to the other side of the world when you two are still acting like children? Hell, even little kids know not to play with knives. You’re nearly eighteen, for crying out loud. You’re supposed to be mature. Responsible. You’re supposed to be studying for your biology exam.’
‘Vic—’
‘I said don’t talk,’ she snapped again. Ryan was looking pale and she guessed from his blood loss he was a little shocked. The what-ifs were starting to circle.
‘I’ve worked all night, for Pete’s sake. All you had to do was let me sleep and be uninjured until I woke up. Is that too much to ask?’
Ryan and Josh looked at their feet and shook their heads. ‘Dad’s gonna have a fit,’ she continued. ‘Do you think his blood pressure can take this?’ Their father was borderline overweight and on medication for his hypertension. They both shook their heads again. ‘I swear you two are going to be the death of him.’
Moments passed in silence while she took stock. Ryan’s face was twisted into a permanent wince and she felt a momentary streak of sympathy. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yeah.’ Ryan grimaced.
The streak fizzled as quickly as it had arrived. ‘Good.’
She pushed some hair off her face and realised her hand was shaking. The sound of a distant siren reached them and Vic had never heard a sweeter noise. Not that she thought Ryan was about to expire from blood loss, but he had lost a good amount of the red stuff and would definitely be anaemic. She wouldn’t be surprised if he required a transfusion.
And had Lawson been much longer she might well have succumbed to the urge to do something drastic to prevent him from doing anything else so overwhelmingly stupid again.
She put her hand under Ryan’s elbow and urged him up. ‘Come on. Walk. We’ll meet Lawson out the front. Keep your arm above your head.’
‘ Jeez, Vic, is your bedside manner always this good?’ Ryan grouched as he stumbled beside her.
‘No. I reserve this treatment for too-stupid-to-live teenagers.’
Lawson pulled up at the Dunleavy residence, a place he’d been to hundreds of times since he’d taken up residence on the island. He killed the siren at the same time the trio reached the driveway and jumped down from the cab. Striding around the back, he opened the doors as Victoria and her brothers appeared at the rear.
He took one look at a worried Joshua, an obviously chastised Ryan and a thunder-faced Victoria and made an executive decision. ‘Why don’t I look after Ryan in the back and you go and get cleaned up, put on your uniform and drive us in?’
Vic was about to argue when she noticed Lawson’s eyes taking in her attire. Amidst the crisis she’d forgotten that she was in her pyjamas. Not that there was anything indecent about them—they certainly covered more than a lot of clothes did these days.
Brief silky boxers with high scooped-up side seams and a shoestring-strapped grey singlet that didn’t quite meet the waistband of her shorts. But it was perhaps the blood that was most off putting.
She gave Ryan one last big-sister glare. ‘Fine. I’ll be ten minutes.’
Lawson tried really hard not to look as she walked away. She was his partner, for crying out loud. He’d seen her out of uniform hundreds of times. Hell—he’d seen her in a bikini! But he’d already noticed the way her bed-rumpled hair hung loosely around her face and the slight chest bounce as her unfettered breasts had jiggled against the taut fabric of her shirt. The desire to look a bit more was strangely compelling.
So he failed miserably at the not looking and allowed himself a second or two to indulge in her unselfconscious swagger. The words bite me printed across the backside of her boxers swayed hypnotically in front of his eyes and for a second he imagined just that.
‘Er, hello, Lawson? Bleeding here.’
Lawson startled and dragged his gaze away, horrified at where his mind had been. This was crazy. It was the abstinence. It had to be. Being a sole parent and a shift worker to boot wasn’t exactly conducive to dating.
He forced himself to focus on the Dunleavy twins, noting the beginnings of red seepage on Ryan’s outer dressing. He helped Ryan into the back of the ambulance and laid him on the gurney using two pillows across the teenager’s chest to elevate the injured hand above heart level.
He pulled the BP cuff from its receptacle on the wall and wrapped it around Ryan’s uninjured arm. Eighty on fifty. A little on the lowish side. ‘I might pop a drip in while we wait for Victoria.’
Ryan lifted his head off the pillow and screwed up his face. ‘What? No way. I hate needles.’
Lawson chuckled. How many times over the years had he tended to Victoria’s brother in the back of an ambulance? ‘Ryan, you just almost hacked off your finger. Do you think one little tiny needle can compare to that?’
Ryan held his head up for a few more seconds, then let it drop back in surrender. ‘I guess not.’
Lawson grinned. He reached into the nearby IV drawer and pulled out the things he was going to need. He glanced at Josh sitting in the back passenger seat looking pale, his knee bouncing, his fingers drumming against his thigh. ‘It’s okay, mate. He’ll be all right. Really.’
Josh looked at Lawson intently and then nodded, his shoulders sagging, and the fidgeting stopped.
‘So, do I want to know how you managed to nearly amputate your finger?’ he asked as he swabbed the crook of Ryan’s elbow with alcohol. There was silence from both the boys and Lawson pressed his lips together to suppress the smile. ‘Hmm,’ he said, uncapping the needle and lining it up with the bulging vein staring at him. ‘That stupid, huh?’
‘Ow!’
Lawson ignored Ryan’s protest as he slid the cannula straight into the vein and got an instant flashback. He taped it, flushed it and set up a drip to replace some of the volume Ryan
