hovering above six feet, with sun-bleached brown hair and deep green eyes that glinted with repressed laughter. Very repressed, though. She caught his gaze and she could have sworn he was laughing, but he averted his eyes fast. It wouldn’t do to laugh out loud.
There wasn’t enough laughter in her life, she thought, and she needed it. But she’d taken the first step, and it had felt good to exchange her first attempt at laughter in her new job with a doctor as hunky as Luke Williams.
There’s an inappropriate thought, she chided herself, but she was still smiling inwardly.
‘Will this hurt?’ Jason quavered, and she gave him a reassuring smile.
‘I suspect mostly just your pride. We need to get those clothes off. Are you hurting?’
‘Stinging,’ he admitted. ‘A bit.’
The meatworks proprietor should have washed them straight away, Lily thought, growing serious. If the tallow had been really hot, they’d have been facing a nightmare. The owner of the meatworks hadn’t checked. He’d simply threatened them with police and they’d fled. Their parents had brought them straight here, with hot tallow still intact. If it had been boiling it would have kept right on burning.
They’d been so lucky. Apparently the vat had only just started warming. The boys had climbed in through a high window, seen huge planks laid across to skim off impurities and dared each other to rollerblade across. The stupidity left Lily breathless. She’d heard the outline. One kid falling, clutching his mate as he fell, both grabbing the planking, which had come loose, tumbling their mates in after them.
Lily turned the shower to soft pressure, skin temperature. She put Jason’s hands on the rails and produced scissors.
‘Just to my knickers,’ Jason whimpered.
‘There’s nothing I haven’t seen,’ Lily told him. ‘If you’ve burned anything personal, you’ll need it fixed.’
Another whimper.
‘There’s nothing to this,’ she told him cheerfully. ‘These jeans are going to stink for ever so we might as well cut ‘em off. So … rollerblading over steaming tallow. Quite a trick. How long have you been blading?’
‘A … a year.’ The water was streaming over the kid; his clothes were falling away and so was the muck that was covering him.
‘You any good?’
‘Y-yeah.’
‘So of the four of you, who does the neatest tricks?’
Luke was in the next cubicle. He was scissoring clothes from his own kid. Ross had been blustering when Luke had first seen him, whinging to his parents that it wasn’t his fault, that his ‘expletive’ mates had pressured him to do it, Craig had pushed him, his dad should sue.
Under the water, with Luke scissoring off his clothes, he calmed down. His legs were scalded. They were only first-degree burns, though, Luke thought, little worse than sunburn. He’d sting for a week but there’d be little long-term damage.
He’d been swearing as Luke had propelled him under the shower, but when Luke had attacked with scissors … the boy had shut up. ‘We need to check down south,’ Luke had told him. ‘Check everything’s still in working order. Steamed balls aren’t exactly healthy …’ Luke wasn’t reassuring him just yet. He liked him quiet, and, besides, with him quiet he could hear the conversation in the next cubicle.
‘I’ve been blading since I was twelve,’ Blue Eyes was saying.
‘Girls can’t blade.’ That was her kid—Jason.
‘You’re kidding me, right? I suspect you’ll need to come back in a week or so to make sure these scalds have healed. You bring your blades; I’ll organise time off and I’ll meet you in the hospital car park. Then we’ll see who can’t blade.’
Luke blinked. An assignation …
‘What, you can blade fast?’ Jason had been shakily terrified but Blue Eyes had him distracted. He sounded scornful.
‘Fast?’ Blue Eyes chuckled, and it was a gorgeous chuckle. ‘I do more than fast. I do barrel rolls, grapevines, heel toes, flips, you name it. I’m no gumbie, kiddo.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Would I kid about something like blading? My skates were the most important thing in my life for a long, long time.’ Blue Eyes suddenly sounded serious. ‘It took my mind off other things and I loved it. I can’t say I ever bladed over tallow, though.’
‘I bet you could.’ There was suddenly belief—and admiration—in the kid’s voice and Luke found himself agreeing. If this slip of a girl could get Evie and Finn to don waterproofs and wash off tallow, she might be capable of a whole lot more.
He wanted, quite badly, to explore the idea.
Bad idea.
She was an agency nurse. Her uniform told him that. She was one of the casual nurses employed to fill gaps at need in any hospital in the city.
After tonight he might never see her again.
But … she’d made an assignation with Jason in a week. That might mean the agency had positioned her here for more than a night.
She had a great chuckle.
No. Beware of chuckles. And blue eyes. And twinkles.
He thought of Hannah.
He always thought of Hannah. Of course he did. Her memory no longer evoked the searing pain it once had, but instead was a basic part of him, a knowledge that he’d messed with the most precious thing a man could be given. The emotions that went with the sort of involvement he was briefly considering with Blue Eyes were gone. They were left behind in a bleak cemetery with what was left of his wife and his little son.
‘Me balls …’ Ross whimpered. ‘They gunna be okay?’
‘They’re gunna be fine,’ he told the kid he was treating. ‘They’re a bit pink but they’ll live to father sons.’
‘I don’t want to father kids!’ The thought was obviously worse than hot tallow.
‘No,’ Luke said soothingly. ‘I guess you don’t, but one day you might. Meanwhile everything’s in working order for when you want them to do what they’re meant to do. For when your chance in life happens.’
Ross and Jason were sent home. Robbie and Craig were admitted. They’d been in the centre of the vat. It had taken them longer to get out, which meant they had patches of second-degree burning. No full-thickness burns, though. Evie took them in charge, patching them up before admitting them. Luke somehow found himself doing the paperwork while Lily gave Ross and Jason’s parents instructions on how to deal with minor scalds.
She then headed off to fill in a police report. Finn might have moved on, but Luke heard Blue Eyes asking questions, getting the boys to sign statements, and he knew because of her the open vats would be covered and there’d be no prosecutions of kids who were just being … kids.
Lily
