for his body, she was quite ashamed to admit that she’d actually found her eyes following him as he’d stalked off down the corridor the other day. She’d been almost mesmerised by the lithe, ground-eating strides and the evidence of taut, compact muscles camouflaged by his impeccably pressed suit, and she wasn’t someone prone to ogling men.
He certainly wasn’t ogling her when he appeared in the ward, at least once every day. It was almost as if… ‘As if he expects to find me pocketing the silver,’ she finished on an exasperated laugh.
Well, if this continued she was going to have to confront him…ask him if he had some sort of problem with her. She was thoroughly enjoying her new post and if there was something she could do to remove the single fly in the ointment—a rather large fly going by the name of Mr Marcus Fletcher—then she just might have found that elusive niche she’d been searching for all her life.
In the meantime, she was going to have to mention the safety lighting again. One of the staff nurses had mentioned seeing someone loitering at one end of the staff car park, and as they hadn’t been smoking, she’d known it hadn’t been just a fugitive from Denison Memorial’s strict no-smoking policy.
The thought of deliberately seeking out the openly disapproving man sent a shiver up her spine. There was just something about him that set all her nerves on edge; something she’d never encountered before and made her wary of him.
It wasn’t that Marcus Fletcher was one of those enormous hulking brutes she’d grown accustomed to seeing when she’d started frequenting the gym a few years ago. He certainly didn’t seem to be the type to waste his time building muscles for the sake of measuring the number of inches gained. He struck her as more the lean, predatory type—quietly fit and ready for anything that came his way. Or at least he might have been before he’d settled into his administrative job. There certainly wouldn’t be much call for muscles when his day was spent wrestling with columns of figures.
Still, national statistics detailed a year-on-year increase in the number of attacks on all hospital employees, not just accident and emergency staff, a fact she’d seen for her own eyes in her last post at a busy city hospital. An injured friend had actually prompted her to offer her services to run several self-defence courses for her colleagues. Before she’d left, she’d had the satisfaction of knowing that at least two of her pupils had been able to use what they’d learned to ward off attackers.
A similar effort wouldn’t go amiss at Denison Memorial.
Perhaps, she mused as she crossed the last open stretch before she got to her car, at the same time as she reminded her nemesis about the need to replace the lights as soon as they failed, she could make the same offer here—to run a basic course of self-defence for any female staff who were interested.
Yes, that’s what she’d do as soon as she came in to work in the morning.
She was so busy thinking about her plans for the next day that she failed to follow one of her own basic rules—she had completely forgotten to be aware of what was going on around her.
The scuffling sound of furtive footsteps was only a few feet away from her when she suddenly became aware of them, almost too late to react.
‘Laurel? Laurel Wainwright?’ the shadowy figure demanded as he reached for one arm.
His grip was rough and bruising and for just a split second she was taken back to that nightmare time when she’d been sixteen and feeling so hopelessly alone and vulnerable.
Then Lauren’s carefully honed instincts kicked in…literally. Shrugging off the memories that could still paralyse her with fear if she let them, she whirled into action.
It was easy enough, with a dozen years of practice behind her, to send her would-be assailant cartwheeling over her shoulder to land on the ground with a thud.
She barely had time to draw breath before she recognised the sound of more feet, running this time.
This man was bigger and stronger and she was careful to make sure that he didn’t get a chance to grab hold of her before she flipped him over to join his partner in a heap.
‘Dammit! What did you have to do that for?’ the second assailant demanded angrily, already on his feet as quickly as a big cat and straightening up to his full height. His companion was taking far longer to drag himself up from his ignominious heap, but even he managed to get there in the end.
Lauren took a hasty step backwards, careful to remain out of reach. She certainly hadn’t expected them to recover from her throws quite so quickly. The second one was almost as light on his feet as though he, too, was trained in martial arts, but she should have had time to get into the safety of her car before they both got their breath back.
As it was, the second one, the larger of the two, was already taking a menacing step towards her and she had to force herself to concentrate. It would do her no good at all to notice that his shoulders seemed much broader and his height much more impressive now that he was prepared for her self-defence tactics.
She was just wondering whether she dared attempt a kick manoeuvre on such a gravelly surface when he spoke again.
‘If you’re thinking of drop-kicking me into next week, don’t bother,’ he growled in a voice full of disgust. ‘I was only trying to help.’
‘Help?’ she exclaimed. ‘Help who?’
‘You, of course. I thought I saw someone following you when you left the hospital so I investigated.’
He’d gestured towards the way she’d come, turning just far enough for the light of a distant lamp to catch his face, and she suddenly realised who he was.
‘Mr Fletcher!’ she gasped, horrified to realise that she’d just flung the hospital’s chief administrator over her shoulder. He hadn’t been very keen on her appointment in the first place and this certainly wouldn’t make him any more pleased. ‘I’m so sorry! Did I hurt you?’
‘Only my pride,’ he said wryly, brushing the gravel off the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Who was your friend?’
‘My friend? He’s no friend of…’
She suddenly remembered her first assailant and whirled to discover that he’d taken advantage of her preoccupation with her second opponent and disappeared into the surrounding darkness.
‘Damn. Did you see which way he went?’ she demanded.
‘Why? I hope you’re not thinking of chasing after him.’
‘I should have kept my eye on him so he couldn’t have got away in the first place,’ she retorted. ‘I would have done if you hadn’t got in the way.’
‘Well, excuse me for being concerned. I hope you’re not waiting for me to apologise for coming to help,’ he snapped, visibly affronted.
Lauren could almost feel sorry for him. Not many men could accept the fact that a woman didn’t need them for protection. But, then, none of them would know about the situations she’d been in, where the only person she’d had to rely on had been herself.
‘No, but if you’d done something about the broken lights when I told you about them, the whole situation could have been avoided,’ she pointed out briskly. ‘Perhaps you could manage an apology
