up his face and Billie’s heart leapt, her hand stilling as she waited for him to jerk and try and sit up. But he did nothing like that, his face settling quickly back into the passive droop of the truly drunk.
Clearly he was feeling no pain.
Gareth nodded at her encouragingly and Billie got back to work, methodically injecting lignocaine along the entire length of the wound, with barely a twitch from M-Dog. By the time she’d fully injected down to the distal end, the local had had enough time to start working at the beginning so she got to work.
Her stomach turned at the pull and tug of flesh, at the dull thread of silk through skin, and she peeked at Gareth.
‘Talk to me,’ she said, as he snipped the thread for her on her first neat suture.
He glanced at her, his gaze dropping to her mouth, and the memory of the kiss returned full throttle. ‘What do you want me to talk about?’
Not that, Billie thought, returning her attention to the job at hand. Anything but that. The military. The incident that had caused his demotion, which Helen had hinted at earlier. But neither of those seemed appropriate either. Not that appropriateness hadn’t already been breached tonight. But they needed to steer clear of the personal.
They’d already got way too personal.
‘Tell me about the patients out there.’
And so he did, his deep steady voice accompanying her needlework as they wove and snipped as a team.
THE REST OF the night and the two following were better than Billie could have hoped. The gore was kept to a minimum and she managed to get through them without any more near nervous breakdowns.
Or requiring any more resuscitative kissing.
Not that she wasn’t aware of Gareth looking out for her. Which should probably have been annoying but which she couldn’t help thinking was really sweet. And kind of hot.
She knew the last thing he needed was having a squeamish doctor to juggle as he ran the night shift with military-like efficiency—overseeing the nursing side as well as liaising with the medical side to ensure that the ER ran like a well-oiled machine. But he seemed to take it in his stride as just another consideration to manage.
He was clearly known and well respected by both nurses and doctors alike, he was faultlessly discreet, he knew everybody from the cleaning staff to the ward nurses, he knew where everything was and just about every answer to every procedure and protocol question any of them had.
By the time she’d knocked off on Sunday morning she was well and truly dazzled.
St Luke’s was lucky to have Gareth Stapleton.
Which begged the question—why wasn’t he running the department as he apparently used to? What had happened to cause his demotion? What was the incident Helen had made reference to? Annabel Pearce, the NUM, was good too, but from what Billie could see, Gareth ran rings around her.
Billie yawned as she entered the lift, pushing the button for the top floor. Her mind drifted, as it had done a little too often the last couple of days, to the kiss. She shut her tired eyes and revelled in the skip in her pulse and the heaviness in her belly as she relived every sexy nuance.
Not only could Gareth run a busy city emergency department but he could kiss like no other man she knew.
And Billie had been kissed some before.
She’d had two long-term relationships and a few shorter ones, not to mention the odd fling or two, including a rather risqué one with a lecturer, in the eight years since she’d first lost her virginity at university. She liked sex, had never felt unsatisfied by any of her partners and wasn’t afraid to ask for what she wanted.
Essentially she’d been with men who knew what they were doing. Who certainly knew how to kiss.
But Gareth Stapleton had just cleared the slate.
She wet her lips in some kind of subconscious memory and grimaced at their dryness. Between winter and the hospital air-con they felt perpetually dry. She pulled her lip gloss out of her bag and applied a layer, feeling the immediate relief.
The lift dinged and she pushed wearily off the wall and headed to the fire exit for the last two flights of steps to the rooftop car park. She jumped as a figure loomed in her peripheral vision from the stairs below, her pulse leaping crazily for a second before she realised it was Gareth.
And then her pulse took off for an entirely different reason. ‘You took the stairs?’ she said in disbelief. ‘All eight floors?’
Of course he had. Super-nurse, freaked-out-doctor whisperer, kisser extraordinaire. What wasn’t the man capable of?
‘Of course.’ He grinned. ‘It’s about the only exercise I get these days.’
Billie shook her head as they continued up the last two flights, which was torture enough for her tired body. By the time they’d reached the top and Gareth was opening the door, her thighs were grumbling at her and she was breathing a little harder.
Of course, that could just have been Gareth’s presence.
Was it her overactive imagination or had his ‘After you’ been low and husky and a little too close to her ear?
She stepped out onto the roof, her brain a quagmire of confusion, thankful for the bracing winter air cooling her overheated imagination. She zipped up her hoody and hunched into it.
Gareth was hyper-aware of Billie’s arms brushing against his as they walked across the car park to their vehicles. ‘You on days off now?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Three. How about you?’
‘Me too.’ Which meant they’d be back on together on Wednesday. An itch shot up Gareth’s spine.
Fabulous.
Three days didn’t seem long enough to cleanse himself of the memory of the kiss and he really needed to do that because Billie, he’d discovered, was fast becoming the only thing he thought about.
And that wasn’t conducive to his work. Or his life.
The last woman he remembered having such an instantaneous attraction to wasn’t around any more, and it had taken a long time to get over that. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d managed it yet. He grimaced just thinking about the black hole of the last five years.
Billie was in the ER for six months and the next few years of her life would be hectic, with a virtual roller-coaster of rotations and exams and killer shifts sucking up every spare moment of her time. She didn’t have time to devote to a relationship, let alone one with a forty-year-old widower.
They were in different places in their life journeys.
They reached their cars, parked three spaces from each other, and he almost breathed a loud sigh of relief.
‘Well
