strand of black hair which was threatening to escape from Nicolette’s chignon. ‘Er—it’s just that Dr Le Saux likes order.’
‘Order?’ Nicolette echoed in surprise as she tried unsuccessfully to tuck the errant curl behind her ear. Obviously one tried to keep a hospital ward as orderly as possible, but, in Nicolette’s experience, doing so with any degree of efficiency on a children’s ward was doomed to failure. Children and order, like electricity and water, simply did not mix!
Nurse Jones nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘What kind of order?’
‘Oh, you know, a tidy ward. A quiet ward—’
It sounded as though this list might go on and on and Nicolette gave a strangled kind of smile. ‘On second thoughts, say no more! Dr Le Saux can tell me all his likes and dislikes himself.’ But if he thinks I’ll be straightening sheets when I should be cuddling babies, he’s got another think coming, she thought with a determined tilt of her square chin. She handed the baby over to Nurse Jones, who, even after one morning, she could tell loved small children just about as much as she did. ‘Would you like to give Thomas a feed for me?’
‘Oh, could I?’ asked Nurse Jones gratefully, then screwed her nose up as she noticed that the bath still hadn’t been cleaned. ‘You’re going to leave cleaning the bath, then?’
‘Leave it? Leave it? Certainly not, Nurse Jones! Are you trying to encourage cross-infection on the ward?’ squeaked Nicolette indignantly, but then her full mouth softened with irrepressible humour as she saw the younger girl’s startled face. ‘I’ll do it myself, you ninny,’ she chided gently.
‘You?’ The student nurse’s eyebrows disappeared into her fringe.
‘Sure. Just because I’m qualified doesn’t mean I can’t do a bit of the donkey work now and again. Besides, you’re leaving here soon, aren’t you? And there won’t be much chance to feed babies on the pychiatric ward.’
Nurse Jones grimaced. ‘Please don’t remind me!’
‘Oh, you’ll love it,’ prophesied Nicolette cheerfully. ‘I did.’
‘Just not as much as paediatrics?’ guessed Nurse Jones.
‘That’s right. But then for me nothing was ever as much fun as paediatrics. Now, shoo! Take that baby before I change my mind,’ and Nicolette laughed as she picked up the cloth and started to sing tunelessly as she began to wipe the bath out.
Life was good.
Very good, she sighed contentedly.
After doing her nurse training in one of London’s biggest teaching hospitals she had done the additional studying required to become a registered paediatric nurse. And after all that hard work had decided that she needed a break!
So she had taken a year off to travel around Australia and had had an absolute ball of a time, exploring the country’s beautiful wide, open reaches and enthusiastically entering into the sporty lifestyle which the Australians seemed to take for granted. When the year was up she had found that she had changed her mind about returning to London and her training hospital. The thought of crowded metropolitan life in comparison to the great outdoors had made her feel positively claustrophobic. So she had applied for the post of staff nurse here at pioneering Southbury Hospital, set in the glorious south of England. And although Southbury itself was a big naval port, with a thriving city centre, Nicolette couldn’t dispel her image of it as a sun-baked, sleepy haven—a little like a lazy cat sleeping in front of a banked fire!
She didn’t hear footsteps; she was too busy belting out a number from the year’s hit musical and attacking the side of the bath with her usual enthusiastic vigour. She didn’t even hear a voice, and surely someone wouldn’t have just come and stood at the bathroom door without saying anything?
Consequently she didn’t know how long it took for her to register that there was someone else in the bathroom with her.
She saw a leg. Correction: two legs swung into her line of vision. Or, rather, it was the feet connected to the legs that she noticed first, because the feet were wearing the kind of shoes which Nicolette had never seen before, and she knew instinctively that the soft black leather was handmade, that it was very definitely not English, and, furthermore, that the shoes had cost a fortune. They were also polished and bright and extraordinarily clean. Now who on earth had the time to keep their shoes that clean? she thought fleetingly as her bright blue gaze travelled upwards.
Nice trousers, too, she thought absently. Grey and immaculate. Worn casually loose. Nicolette blinked.
And not doing much . . . Correction: not doing anything to disguise thighs so strapping and so muscular and so. . . This man could be an Olympic sprinting champion, she decided, keen to see whether the top half of the mystery intruder would match the bottom half, when a cold, clear and crisply incisive voice cut into her thoughts like a tape-measure into the hips of an unnsuccessful dieter.
‘When you’ve quite finished,’ the voice said repressively.
Nicolette sat back on her heels and found herself looking into the most spectacular pair of eyes she had ever seen. She swallowed.
Beautiful brown eyes.
She swallowed again. Brown was far too ordinary a word to use in conjunction with eyes which reminded her of velvety chocolate, and of treacle . . . of all things dark and sweet and mysteriously delicious. And when she looked more closely they weren’t a uniform colour at all, because there were flecks of other colours hidden in their depths. An arresting green—as fresh and as verdant as a spring day—and gold, too, precious and gleaming and . . . and . . .
‘Er. . .hello,’ she managed.
His mouth, which also happened to be the embodiment of perfection, twisted into a grim, hard line as his eyes flicked disparagingly over her dripping hands. ‘Staff Nurse,’ he growled dangerously, ‘would you mind telling me what you think you’re doing?’
Nicolette should have interpreted the dangerous glint in those magnificent eyes, but she foolishly attempted to chivvy him out of a blatantly foul temper. ‘Well, I’m not writing out my tickets for the National Lottery, am I?’ she joked.
He didn’t move a muscle of his face in an answering smile. Instead he surveyed her with a cold, unblinking scrutiny as though she were something which had just been dragged in by the cat. ‘Are you or are you not supposed to be in charge of the ward?’ he demanded curtly.
The implication being, she supposed, that she’d left work on the ward undone, which she knew darned well she hadn’t! Nicolette’s soft features rearranged themselves into a mutinous expression. ‘I am!’ she fired back with equal curtness, her good humour evaporating completely. Just let him dare criticise her—just let him!
Not seeming at all perturbed by her expression, he proceeded to do just that. ‘And is this how it is deemed proper—’
Oh, what a pompous word!
‘—for a staff nurse to run the ward?’
‘What am I doing that’s so wrong—Doctor?’ enquired Nicolette sweetly. ‘At least, I’m assuming that you’re a doctor and not a pharmacist or a dietician or one of the many
