‘Someone,’ admitted Jane, looking at the skeleton of her hand and wondering how such a tiny fracture could cause so much pain.
‘Any other injuries?’
‘No—I think I just split his lip. He roared like a wounded bull so I don’t think his jaw was broken or anything...’
‘I mean to you,’ the doctor said wryly. ‘Was it your husband? What did he do?’
‘Oh.’ Jane flushed at his assumption. ‘No, nothing like that...I mean, we hardly know each other. We’re just...’
The doctor’s grey eyes suddenly sparked with recognition. ‘Just good friends? Hang on a minute.’ He spun aside and walked over to pull a broadsheet newspaper out of the waste-paper basket beside his desk—a national daily. He leafed through the crumpled sections until he found the one he was looking for and smoothed it out.
‘I thought I recognised you when you walked in.’
There were two long photographs side-by-side—one a slightly blurred shot, obviously taken the moment after impact, showing Jane’s left arm at full extension and Ryan Blair, head snapped back, arms flung out, toppling across the restaurant table; the other, horribly crisp and clear, was a close-up of their seemingly steamy kiss in the street.
Some wag of a sub-editor had headlined the pictures:
SHE’S A KNOCKOUT!
And the story underneath was wittily couched as a boxing match... ‘Weighing-in’. ‘seconds out’, ‘round one’, ‘the final bell’...
Thank God the reporter obviously hadn’t bothered to go very far back in the files, for it was very much a ‘once-over lightly’ piece, dealing only with the tail-end of the Sherwood Blair feud and too full of deliberate boxing puns to be taken seriously.
As Ryan Blair had predicted there was much sly speculation about business turning into pleasure, but there was no mention of Jane being the veiled woman who had aborted his wedding—probably thanks to the Brandons, whose damage control at the time had consisted of smothering the intriguing, ‘disappearing mistress in the hat’ story with urgent bulletins on the life-threatening viral infection which had caused Ava’s untimely collapse and subsequent withdrawal from society for a lengthy period of convalescence.
Looking at the picture of herself wrapped in Ryan Blair’s bear-like embrace, her neck arched by the apparent passion of his kiss, her half-open eyes suggesting a dreamy bliss, Jane felt an unwelcome frisson of excitement.
‘Right, well...let’s fix that up, shall we...?’ The doctor became all efficiency again, directing her to sit on the edge of the examination table, drawing a wheeled trolley up beside him.
‘Do I have to have it in plaster?’ she asked, her heart sinking at the prospect.
‘Nope. Not this baby.’ He delicately lifted her hand. ‘It’s a fairly straightforward break so I’m just going to strap it to your ring finger to pull the bone straight while it heals.’
‘Just strap it up?’ It sounded too easy. ‘For how long?’
‘Probably three weeks.’ He touched her little finger and she winced. ‘Have you taken anything for the pain?’
‘Only a couple of aspirin last night...it was all I had in the flat.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘You’ll definitely need something stronger than that by the time I’ve finished with you. You’re going to have an uncomfortable few days until the local inflammation eases and the healing process starts. I’ll give you an injection of local anaesthetic now and a prescription for painkillers that you can have filled at the clinic pharmacy. They’re fairly strong, so don’t mix them with anything else.’
The anaesthetic was fast-acting, and Jane could watch in detachment as he tucked cotton wool between her little and ring fingers and firmly strapped them together, covering the adhesive with a short crepe bandage that encompassed her hand, leaving her thumb and other two fingers free.
‘That’ll protect the strapping and remind you and everyone else that you have an injury. Try to keep it dry and use the hand as little as possible. Don’t drive or do anything that puts a strain on the blade of your hand—the more you promote movement in the area the longer the bone’ll take to heal. And if the pain gets worse, or you’re worried for any reason, come back.’
Jane frowned. Her father had been a stoic, but she was a weakling when it came to physical suffering. Perhaps it was something she had inherited from her mother, who had walked out on her husband and child when Jane was only six because—according to Mark Sherwood—‘She didn’t have the guts to make a go of it. Typical woman—would rather snivel and run away than stand up for herself when the going gets tough.’
‘Why should the pain get worse?’ she asked the doctor warily.
‘The most likely reason is because the strapping is too tight. But...sometimes, if there are complications and the bone doesn’t heal properly, we might have to ask an orthopaedic surgeon to operate. But it’s highly improbable in your case—unless you intend to try for another knockout!’
Jane ignored this tactless attempt at a joke and studied her hand with its bulky wrapping. ‘Three weeks...’ she said gloomily.
‘Look on the bright side—at least it’s your left hand,’ he said.
Jane looked up at him. ‘I’m left-handed.’
‘Oh. Bad luck. What kind of work do you do?’
‘At the moment, none at all.’
He quickly recovered his irritating bounce. ‘Good. That’s good! It means you can rest that hand—’
‘It means I can starve,’ she corrected him. ‘If I don’t find a job soon I won’t be able to pay for food and rent, let alone medical bills.’
He put his hands up. ‘Hey, don’t shoot—this is covered by Accident Compensation; you’ll hardly have anything to pay. What kind of job are you looking for? What sort of qualifications do you have?’
If Jane hadn’t been tired, hungry and scraped raw by the previous night’s encounter she might have been amused at being patronised by an earnest young man no older than herself who was probably scarcely out of medical school.
‘Managerial,’ she said tersely. ‘But the sort of positions I’m interested in seem few and far between these days.’
Especially with Ryan Blair handing her the modern equivalent of the Black Spot—a red-flagged credit-rating.
‘So I’ve lowered my sights and lined up a few interviews for office jobs, sales, temping...the kind of thing that requires a certain manual dexterity, or at least an ability to write...’
‘You can still use a keyboard—’
‘Not very efficiently.’ She shrugged. ‘If I was doing the hiring I probably wouldn’t give me a job. You don’t take on someone if there’s a chance they’ll be applying for sick leave before they even get started!’
‘What
