A Very Special Proposal Read online

  And that was ridiculous.

  Obviously, the only reason she’d thought about him—and the way he’d made her feel all those years ago—was because of that stupid conversation about those internet sites and her aborted search last night.

  And now this man, with eyes every bit as dark as Zach’s had been, was stirring things inside her that were best left sleeping, especially when she should be concentrating on the unconscious woman under her fingertips.

  ‘Hey, Doc, have you started coming out looking for work?’ teased the paramedic as he reached her side. ‘Are you trying to do us out of a job?’

  ‘Just holding the fort while you get your act together, Harry,’ she retorted with a smile for the familiar face as she shifted across to give him access to their patient. ‘Her breathing is obviously being impaired by the position of her head and neck but although it’s rather fast, her pulse is surprisingly strong. She was just about to be run over and tried to step back too quickly on a leg that looked as if it already urgently needed a hip replacement. She just sort of crumpled to the ground and hit her head with a dreadful thump.’

  At Harry’s suggestion, she took over setting up IV access to save time while he selected the rest of the equipment he’d need, and then she took responsibility for holding the woman’s head perfectly still while he carefully positioned the collar to protect the woman’s spinal cord. Then they were going to have to straighten her limbs before they could put her on the backboard, checking for breaks and compromised circulation at every stage before they could log-roll her onto it and load her into the ambulance for transportation. Silently, she was worried that the poor woman could easily slip into a coma after such an accident, but it was also a mercy that she was too deeply unconscious to be aware of the pain of her injuries.

  Over the paramedic’s shoulder she saw one young policeman trying to impose some sort of order on the rapidly developing traffic chaos while another was scribbling furiously into his notebook as the motorcyclist spoke to him.

  His helmet was now propped on one hip, discarded leather gauntlets inside and held in position by an apparently nonchalant arm that ended in a knotted fist that seemed to give mute evidence to his underlying impatience with bureaucratic niceties—or was it an indication of his anger at the callous disregard of the driver who had caused the tragedy?

  Amy regretted the fact that his back was turned towards her so that she couldn’t see his face. Not that the back view was anything to sniff at, all long lean legs and narrow waist topped by broad shoulders. Disappointingly, after her memories of Zach, the sleek dark hair was cut close to the owner’s head.

  Zach’s had been quite a bit longer, far too long to satisfy school rules, and the natural curl in it had made it unruly and tempting and…and what on earth was the matter with her? She was in the middle of the road, holding the head of an injured woman, and one false move on her part could paralyse her if she’d fractured bones in her neck. What on earth was she doing, ogling a motorcyclist she’d never seen in her life before and thinking about a classmate she hadn’t seen in more than a decade? Concentrate! she berated herself.

  She joined Harry in a sigh of relief when the collar was successfully secured and had to stifle another sigh as she wondered how much longer it would be before she felt free to go to work. Doubtless, she would have to give her statement, too, and her colleagues wouldn’t be pleased if they had to wait hours for her to arrive before they could hand over and clock off at the end of a long shift. None of them would dream of walking out of the department, knowing that their departure would leave it understaffed, but they wouldn’t be happy if they had to stay on indefinitely, especially those with families waiting for them to come home.

  As if he’d heard her thoughts, the young officer smiled in her direction and called, ‘Would it be better if I caught up with you at the hospital, Doctor?’

  ‘Perfect!’ Amy called back, knowing he would be able to see her relief in her answering smile. She might actually be able to get to work on time if she didn’t have to stop to answer questions now. ‘I’m Dr Willmott. Amy Willmott, and I work in A and E.’

  Then she bent towards the fragile lady to help slide the backboard gently into position on the wheeled stretcher, hoping that the motorcyclist wouldn’t see her blush and guess at the cause. It was certainly the most blatant she’d ever been, deliberately announcing who she was and where he could contact her if he was as interested as his dark eyes had implied.

  ‘Thanks for your assistance,’ Harry said as he finally locked one door shut then climbed into the back of the ambulance to join his patient. ‘I’ll probably see you again in a minute, if you’re on duty?’

  Amy glanced at her watch and grimaced.

  ‘I’m due to clock on in about six and a half minutes, so I’ll see you there,’ she confirmed as she reached in her pocket for her keys.

  She hurried towards her car, still sitting in front of the pedestrian crossing where she’d left it, although someone had sensibly closed the door so it wasn’t causing quite so much of an obstruction.

  Her heart sank when she realised that the motorcycle was no longer beside it. She had to fight the urge to look around for its owner, even though she knew it was crazy to expect him to hang about at the site of an accident just for a chance to speak to her again, then she heard a heavy engine being kick-started into life nearby and her pulse rate soared.

  Unable to help herself, she cast a quick glance across, her eyes finding him at the side of the road just in time to see him finish pulling his helmet on over that sleek dark hair while the engine rumbled powerfully between his thighs.

  ‘Drat!’ she muttered crossly as she fastened her seat-belt, realising that she’d only just missed her chance to see his face.

  As she set her car in gear and threaded her way through the tangle of vehicles and strobe-type lights ringing the accident site, she had to suppress the old pang of regret that she’d never been brave enough to ask Zach to take her for a ride on his bike. She’d wanted to, desperately. She’d even dreamed about it, imagining how it would feel to have her hair flying out behind her as they outraced the throaty roar of the engine with her arms wrapped tightly around his lean waist and her head pressed against his shoulder…

  ‘Just another fantasy, of course,’ she muttered wryly as she manoeuvred her car into a tiny corner space left near the light that would illuminate this part of the staff car park as soon as dusk came. She wriggled out of the door that was so close to the next car that it could only open halfway, grateful that she was still slim enough to do it, and set off at a brisk walk towards the main entrance to the hospital. ‘The reality would probably have been very different,’ she scolded herself. ‘My ears would have got so cold that they made my teeth ache and I’d have got a collection of dead flies in my teeth and up my nose.’

  ‘You made it, Amy, girl,’ said a softly accented voice as she arrived at the admissions desk, her belongings hastily stuffed in her locker and a white coat pulled on over her clothes to try to disguise the grubby scuffs that had appeared on the knees of her trousers.

  ‘With a minute and a half to spare, Louella,’ Amy pointed out to the colleague waiting to hand over and get back home to her children before they had to leave for school. ‘I would have been here earlier, but there was an accident—’

  ‘On the crossing by the supermarket,’ Louella finished for her. ‘Yes, Harry told us when he brought her in. He told us it wasn’t his fault if you were late because you’d volunteered to hold his hand.’

  ‘As if!’ Amy scoffed. They both knew that Harry was a very happily married man whose paramedic expertise didn’t need any hand-holding either. ‘Who’s looking after the lady he brought in?’

  ‘Ben Finchley and the new guy starting today.’

  Ben was one of the best in the department so she didn’t have to worry that her little lady was getting anything but first-class treatment.

  ‘New guy? Remind me,’ she demanded as she
cast an eye over the multicoloured annotations on the grid of the whiteboard and stifled a groan at the sheer number of patients waiting for attention. ‘I hope he’s not someone still wet behind the ears or we’ll never get through this lot.’

  ‘Hardly!’ Louella exclaimed as she signed off on the last of the patients she’d treated with a flourish. ‘Apparently, he’s just finished a six-month stint in a huge A and E somewhere in Africa. I think it might have been that big hospital in Johannesburg.’

  Amy blinked in surprise at the information, then wondered with her usual feeling of uneasiness if he was one of the doctors who’d been lured to Britain to prop up the ailing health service. When were the bean counters ever going to realise that it would be far more economic to retain their own staff by paying them properly, rather than robbing the rest of the world of their indigenous and desperately needed medical staff.

  But there was no point voicing her thoughts here, in an A and E department that was frequently rushed off its feet. She’d be preaching to the converted, both about the effect of poor levels of pay on staff retention and their general dislike of poaching staff from other countries.

  ‘So, you think he’s going to be worth having on staff?’

  ‘Even if he isn’t able to pull his weight, he’ll be worth having around,’ Louella said with a decidedly lascivious grin. ‘He’s definitely what the kids would call eye candy!’

  ‘Louella! What would Sam think if he heard you talking like that?’ Amy chided with a spurt of laughter. Life was never dull with Louella around.

  ‘Sam knows I’m married, not dead!’ the Caribbean woman declared robustly. ‘And he knows I’ve got good taste because I chose him! Now, let me tell you what you’ve got waiting for you, then you have a good day, girl, and don’t get up to too much mischief.’ A few minutes later, the relevant information listed, she blew Amy a jaunty kiss as she bustled eagerly out of the department, clearly anticipating the welcome waiting for her at home.

  For just a second, the lack of anything like a welcoming family in her own home made Amy aware that her life wasn’t quite as perfect as she liked to pretend, but there were too many patients waiting for attention for her to spend any more time bewailing the things she didn’t have any more. She had her health and a satisfying job, she reasoned as she reached for the first file, and that was more than many could boast.

  She’d dealt with more than half a dozen assorted cases before she caught up with Ben Finchley as he came out of one of the treatment rooms.

  ‘Hey, Ben, what happened to that little lady? Broken leg and head impact first thing this morning?’ she demanded, thoughts of the poor woman having haunted her ever since the ambulance had whisked her away from the scene of the accident. ‘Were you able to do anything for her, or…?’

  ‘You mean Ruth?’ he said with a chuckle that shocked Amy. The woman had looked so fragile that she’d been trying to prepare herself for a worst-case scenario all morning, certainly not laughter. ‘If ever there was a case of being fooled by first appearances, it was that little lady,’ Ben said, gesturing towards the staffroom then walking beside her as she took the hint that she looked as if she was overdue for a break. ‘She looked so frail that we were convinced she must have shattered half of the bones in her body, but when we X-rayed, the only major things we could find wrong were a broken femur and a collection of spectacular bruises.’

  ‘But…’ Amy blinked. ‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same patient? You can’t mean the woman who had to throw herself backwards to avoid being run over. Her legs collapsed under her and she hit the ground so hard…’

  ‘The very same,’ Ben confirmed with a broad grin. ‘Like you, we were convinced we were going to find a fractured skull, at the very least, and we were half expecting her to peg out before we could do anything for her. Instead, she’s already conscious and it looks as if she’s going to pull through and come out of it with colours flying, once the orthopods patch her leg up with a shiny new joint.’ He lifted the jar of coffee and a questioning eyebrow and Amy nodded, still bemused by the incredible tale he was telling.

  ‘Mind you,’ he continued, as he poured in the hot water and added a splash of milk to each when she nodded again, ‘that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t got the mother and father of all headaches at the moment, but when we tried to give her some morphine to take some of the pain away while she waited to go to Theatre, she told us in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want any of that nasty stuff because it made her sick the last time she was given it—when she had her appendix taken out as a teenager.’

  He turned to hand her the steaming mug and offer her a giant glass jar of sugar when he caught sight of someone over Amy’s shoulder. ‘Hey, here’s the man who was working on Ruth with me. Have you met our new colleague? He’s just joined us from a hospital on the other side of the world where the sort of thing we deal with here would be nothing more than a walk in the park. Amy Willmott, meet Zach Bowman.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  WITH a strange sense that fantasy and reality had just become inextricably entwined, Amy’s heart almost forgot how to beat.

  It felt almost as if she was turning in slow motion until she finally faced the man who’d been standing behind her.

  There was a weird feeling of inevitability as she looked up into those newly familiar dark eyes but it wasn’t until she caught sight of that sleek dark hair cut close to his head, when once it had curled rebelliously almost to his shoulders, that the pieces fell into place.

  ‘It was you!’ she breathed when she recognised the motorcyclist from the scene of the accident that morning, the broad shoulders she’d admired earlier in the day so much wider and more muscular than those of the teenage boy she remembered so clearly. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘It wasn’t the time or the place and, anyway, I didn’t know if you’d even remember me,’ he said, then she caught a glimpse of that old familiar gleam in his eyes. ‘So, ABC, how have you been?’

  ‘ABC? Do you two know each other already?’ Ben was trying to keep up with this unexpected development but Amy barely heard him, every atom of her concentration focused on the man she’d nearly looked up on the internet just last night, the man she’d been convinced that she’d never see again because he was probably in prison or dead. Zach was a doctor? In her hospital?

  ‘Amy Bowes Clark was my lab partner for sciences when we were at school together,’ Zach explained with a slightly dismissive air, as though the matter was hardly worth mentioning, and Amy was struck by a pang that felt almost like disappointment.

  ‘You know very well that I never used the Clark, and I regretted ever telling you about it,’ she added crisply, remembering the way it had given him ammunition for teasing her about being far too upper crust for an ordinary state school. But at the same time it had also caused a strange sense of connection with him that he’d actually felt at ease enough with her to tease her about her family name and what it did to her initials. It had been more than he ever had with the other members of their class.

  ‘Dr Bowman?’ called a voice from the door, and all three of them turned to see one of the younger receptionists there. Her eyes were bright with appreciation as they travelled over Zach’s lean frame and Amy was startled to feel the sharp claws of possessive jealousy rake her when he smiled back at the young woman.

  ‘The police just phoned through and I thought you’d like to get the message as soon as possible,’ she said with an ingratiating smile that clearly telegraphed her availability. ‘They said to tell you that they ran that licence plate you gave them, and they’ve tracked the car down. They found clear evidence that it had been involved in a recent accident and wanted to know if it could have struck the patient. They’ll want to compare DNA from your patient.’

  ‘Did they leave a contact number?’

  ‘Oh, yes! Here,’ she purred as she offered him a piece of paper, then added in a blatant attempt at seduction, ‘And I put my number on t
here, too…in case you needed it for…anything.’

  ‘Thank you for passing the message on so promptly,’ Zach said blandly, tucking the piece of paper in his pocket unread. He turned to Ben and Amy. ‘What are the protocols in the hospital for getting permission for taking DNA samples?’

  There was a silence that went on just a beat or two too long as the woman left the room, clearly crestfallen that Zach hadn’t responded to her invitation with something more personal, but as soon as the door closed behind her there was a definite response from the rest of the males in the room.

  ‘Hey! You’re in there, Zach!’ called one.

  ‘Way to go!’ hooted another. ‘That’s quick work.’

  ‘You haven’t even been here for a day and they’re already panting after you. You’ll have to tell us your secret,’ said a third.

  ‘It’s probably just that I’m new,’ Zach said dismissively, and when Amy saw the darker colour seeping over the lean planes of his face she suddenly realised that he was genuinely uncomfortable with the attention.

  ‘It always happens with fresh meat, male or female, or can’t you remember that far back, John?’ she teased one of the older consultants who’d joined in the catcalls. ‘Give it a day or two for her to see him haggard and unshaven at the end of a long shift and she’ll soon turn her sights on someone else.’

  ‘Now I don’t know whether to thank you for taking the heat off me or feel insulted that you were so dismissive of my charms,’ Zach said so softly that his voice probably didn’t reach even as far as Ben’s ears.

  He’d leaned closer to her, close enough for her to see every one of those absurdly long eyelashes and the start of creases at the corners of his eyes put there, in all probability, by six months of squinting into fierce African sunlight. He was also close enough for her to be able to feel the warmth emanating from his body and smell the hint of soap or shampoo that still lingered on his skin in spite of several hours of hard and often messy work.