they’d deposited him on. ‘What are you asking him for? I’m not dumb!’ he snarled.
‘We should be so lucky,’ his friend breathed quietly.
‘What was that, Joe…?’ Matt growled.
‘When did you last take any pain relief?’ You didn’t need to be psychic to figure out that wiping the sheen of perspiration from his furrowed brow would not go down well. Fortunately his colour was looking more healthy than it had outside.
Kat’s eyes slowly worked their way up the strong column of his throat to his lean, angular face. Though pale after his hospitalisation, Matthew Devlin had the sort of olive skin tones that would darken given the first hint of sunlight.
She had a sudden and deeply distracting image of him stretched out on a beach, his skin gleaming with a healthy glow. She gave her head the tiniest of shakes to dispel the unprofessional hallucination.
She gave a whimsical but worried grin. Just as well he didn’t have a personality to match his looks or she might have trouble staying impersonal! If someone had forced her to produce a fantasy lover he would have looked remarkably similar to Matthew Devlin—which just went to show that looks weren’t everything!
‘I need a drink, not a pill. Pass me a Scotch, Joe.’
Kat wondered if he ever said please as she laid a restraining hand on Joe’s arm.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any reason you can’t have both, but it depends on what sort of painkillers you’re taking.’
‘I’m not taking pain relief…I don’t need crutches of any sort,’ he announced with scornful and not strictly accurate distaste.
Lips compressed into a stubborn white line, he rose to his feet. Deliberately ignoring the crutches and his audience’s combined concern, he walked over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a whisky.
Kat was pretty sure that every step he took was agony, but the only external evidence of this in his drawn face were the beads of sweat that appeared across his upper lip. The man had guts—she had to hand him that. It was just a pity he didn’t channel his energies into something more constructive than thumbing his nose at the world in general and her in particular!
He lifted the glass in a mocking salute before downing the amber liquid in one swallow.
‘A pill to go to sleep, another to wake…I’m not buying into that merry-go-round. I thought pain was the body’s way of telling a person something.’
Matt had been the soul of restraint up until very recently. Even when they hadn’t known how bad the spinal damage was, and life in a wheelchair had been a nightmare possibility, he’d managed to retain control of his stiff upper lip.
It had been the killing slowness of the whole convalescence thing that had finally made him snap. He was used to setting himself a goal and working towards it; he didn’t see why getting back to full fitness should be any different, but the blasted medics were constantly holding him back.
‘Going on the evidence so far, I rather doubt you’ve been listening to your body at all this morning, Mr Devlin.’
She’d seen his type before—though not quite so spectacularly packaged—the sort of man who’d push himself and his body to the limit of endurance and beyond. That sort of willpower was all very laudable, and probably made the person successful at anything he set his mind to—but it also made him a terrible patient!
‘My mother may think I need the attentions of some sultry little nursey…’
To Kat’s intense discomfort he did that undressing thing with his eyes again. She didn’t doubt for a second it was meant to unsettle her, but she’d not give him the satisfaction of showing how well the crude tactics worked.
‘…but I can assure you I don’t. So ignoring the fact I’ve fired you isn’t going to change my mind.’
It wasn’t a comfortable experience being pinned down by those arrogant eyes but Kat knew it would be fatal to back down at this point. However, facing down this man was proving to be one of the hardest things she’d ever done. It made her shudder to think how difficult it would be to thwart him when he was fully fit. She didn’t think she’d ever come across anyone who had such an ingrained aura of command.
‘I’m a physio, not a nurse.’
‘If you say so…’
Did the man think she was pretending, for God’s sake? Kat repressed the strong inclination to dig out her certificates and wave them under his infuriating nose.
‘Ignoring the fact you’ve got pain isn’t going to make it go away,’ she responded serenely.
Did she think he didn’t know that? Matt ground his teeth.
‘And being rude and unreasonable isn’t going to make me go away, either. I’ve worked with some very difficult children…’
A choking noise emerged from Joe’s throat. Matt was too stunned to notice his friend’s heaving shoulders.
‘Are you suggesting I’m acting like a child?’ he grated incredulously.
‘You’re only a child to your mother, Mr Devlin,’ she explained kindly. ‘To me you’re simply a client.’
The little witch was patronising him! The fact she looked like a fantasy figure made the fact she acted like a damned nanny all the more unpalatable. What sort of underwear did a nanny-pin-up hybrid wear—naughty black lace or prissy white cotton? His mental preoccupation with her damned underwear represented yet another example of his diminished mental control to Matt.
‘Client?’ he snarled. ‘A fancy name for a patient! Bloody doctors!’ he yelled, his frustration showing. ‘What do they know…?’
Hell! Why not go the whole way and stamp your feet, Matt? Small wonder her smile had a definite smug tinge to it. What, he wondered, had happened to the man of few words—none of them sulky—who could alter the course of a high-powered meeting with an effortlessly enigmatic look? It was humiliating to be forced to recognise he’d substituted infantile for enigmatic!
‘About flying a helicopter, probably nothing,’ she soothed. Matt was beginning to be able to predict the precise moment that dimple would peep out. ‘About relieving pain, hopefully quite a lot. It might seem very macho to suffer in silence, but there’s nothing particularly clever about suffering when there’s no need. There’s no disgrace in admitting you need help.’ With a small frown, her critical eyes ran over his stubbornly erect figure. If he’d ever had any excess flesh on his greyhound lean frame, it had been burned off long ago. ‘Actually, I’m surprised they discharged you so soon.’
‘So soon?’ he blasted. The memory of weeks and months of immobility was still in sharp focus in his mind as glared with intense dislike at the interfering female his mother had seen fit to inflict upon him.
‘They didn’t discharge him,’ Joe volunteered. ‘Though I suspect they might be breathing a large collective sigh of relief about now. You’ll probably find this hard to believe, but he was the perfect patient up until about three weeks ago… Uncomplaining, charming…’
‘Displaying
