want to take my time to suture this,’ Phillip told Oliver. ‘Which means you might have to wait for a few hours until I’m able to give it the attention it deserves.’
The patient nodded.
‘For now, Adele will put on a saline dressing to keep it moist. Adele,’ Phillip asked, ‘is the overnight ward open?’
‘It’s about to be.’ Adele nodded.
She was going to take Gladys around after this.
‘Well, why don’t we admit you there?’ Phillip said to his patient. ‘You can get some rest and then when the place is quiet I’ll come and suture you.’ He turned to Adele. ‘Hourly obs, please.’
‘Sure.’
Adele started to dress the laceration as Phillip wrote up his notes and then he opened up the curtain to head out to see the next patient.
It was then Adele heard an angry shout. ‘There he is!’
It all happened very quickly after that.
A group of men—not the ones from the waiting room—had come into the corridor and had found who they were looking for.
They barged Phillip aside, and he was knocked to the floor and trampled over in their haste to get to Oliver.
Unfortunately for Adele, she was now the only thing between them and the man they wanted. As Oliver went to jump down, the gurney moved and the punch aimed at Oliver hit Adele’s cheek. She fell to one side, her fall broken by a metal trolley to her middle.
It was over in seconds.
The security guards hauled the men out of the cubicle and Adele found out the police had already been alerted as soon as the group had burst into the department.
She could hear the sirens.
Janet moved her away from the drama and onto the computer chair at the nurses station and Adele just sat there, feeling her eye and trying to work out what had just happened.
‘You’ll be okay,’ Janet said as she checked her eye.
And then Adele remembered Phillip and that he had been knocked to the floor.
‘How’s Phillip?’ she asked.
‘He’s a bit winded. He’s in his office. Helene’s with him.’
No work was getting done.
The night manager was on her way down and would arrange cover. Ambulances would be placed on bypass for now as the department dealt with what was, unfortunately, not a particularly rare occurrence.
Helene came around then and brought Janet up to date. ‘Phillip’s okay,’ she said. ‘Just a few bruises and his glasses are broken.’
‘Is Zahir on his way?’ Janet checked.
‘He’s fifteen minutes away,’ Helene replied.
Zahir would make it in ten.
ZAHIR WAS TAKING Bella home when the phone call came in.
Rather, he was taking Bella back to her apartment.
They had loosely dated for a few weeks and though he had been upfront from the start—that they would go nowhere—Bella seemed to have completely blanked out that particular conversation.
When she had rung to say she had tickets to the theatre, Zahir had told her that he was considering going home.
‘I could come over and visit.’
For Zahir it was by far the worst suggestion she could have made.
But it wasn’t the rules of his land that made him end things.
He just couldn’t ignore his feelings for Adele any more and he was certain that they were reciprocated. Perhaps it wasn’t such a foolish idea for her to see where he lived.
If he was going to fight for them.
Zahir had never run from a challenge, yet he knew this was perhaps an impossible one.
Now he chose to face it.
Zahir hadn’t rushed from Emergency to take Bella out.
Instead, he had stopped by to visit his mother.
After that he had dropped in at Emergency to hopefully speak with Adele but she was busy making out with a mannequin and making others laugh.
And at the theatre, instead of watching the performance, he had sat in the dark, thinking about Adele and what she had been through.
Who was he to deny her a holiday?
He loved his homeland very much.
Oh, there were problems. Serious ones at that. Yet there was a certain magic to Mamlakat Almas that Adele deserved to experience.
He knew, even if she would be looking after his mother, that she would be beautifully taken care of at the palace. He thought of the golden desert and the lush oases. He thought of steam rising from hot springs and the majesty of the stars at night. How, no matter how many problems you had, the night sky held you in such awe that it reduced them. So much so that sometimes you simply forgot your troubles completely.
Adele could certainly use that.
And as for the two of them?
He didn’t know the answer—just that they could not end without a chance.
He was just about to launch into his it’s not you, it’s me speech with Bella when his phone had rung.
Seeing that it was the hospital, he took the call, hoping that there wasn’t a problem with his mother.
It was Helene and she sounded somewhat breathless.
‘Zahir, there’s been a gang fight in the emergency department and some of the staff were in the middle of it. A couple have been injured, not seriously, though.’
‘Who?’ Even as he asked the question he was executing a U-turn.
‘Phillip. He’s got a few bruises and his glasses are broken. Adele has a black eye and is a bit winded, and Tony, the security guard, was kicked.’
As they approached the hospital Zahir could see blue lights from several police cars and vans outside the ambulance bay.
‘Wait here,’ he said to Bella as he pulled into his reserved spot.
Bella though had no intention of waiting in the car, he soon realised, because as he arrived at the nurses’ station he turned and saw that she had followed him in.
‘It
