A Very Special Proposal. Josie Metcalfe

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.