whistled. ‘His daughter? The new guy? I handed over to him last week, another CVA. He seemed good—thorough, focused, not too arrogant—but he’s going to be a mess today.’
He was.
Hayley glimpsed him standing in the ambulance bay as they pulled in. He hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d seen him. He still had the broad shoulders of a swimmer, still wore his thick, soft hair short so that it would stand up in dark spikes when he towelled it dry...or when he ran his fingers through it in agitation, as he was doing now.
He had brown eyes. They weren’t puppy brown like Chris’s, however, but tiger brown with a glint of gold, an altogether more dangerous colour. He had a long straight nose, a wide, serious mouth and a broad forehead. Each of those features was stiff with tension now. They appeared to be etched more strongly than usual, as if the sculptor who’d made him—and any sculptor would be proud to have made a human form like Byron Black’s—had dug his tools in extra deep, manipulating them with force.
There had always been an aura around Byron, something that hinted at the capacity for deep-running passion and the capacity to contain that passion carefully inside him. Today it looked as if the passion was threatening to break free.
A nurse and an orderly appeared with a stretcher and a drip stand. Hayley opened the back of the car, unlocked the ambulance stretcher from its metal track and slid it out, extending the wheels down to ground level as she did so. Tori was light and little and easy to shift from one stretcher to the other.
‘Tori! Victoria!’ Byron said hoarsely, curving his long body over her.
He was in the way of the drip line, but Hayley managed to snake it around him. As she did so, the sensitive inner skin of her forearm brushed across the top of that dark, spiky head and his hair was as silky and clean as she remembered. With the hairs of her arm still standing on end, she passed the plastic bag of fluid across to the nurse, who hung it on her stand.
An orderly began to wheel the stretcher inside. Byron was still leaning over it, his long, strong legs working instinctively to keep up as they rumbled from concrete slab to vinyl flooring, through a set of automatic doors.
‘Daddy...’ came a little voice, fuzzy from the effect of the morphine. ‘Grandma wouldn’t wake up from her sleep.’
He went white, straightened like a released catapult and turned to Hayley, blind and helpless. Didn’t even recognise her. She wasn’t surprised. ‘What happened?’ he said. ‘What on earth happened?’
‘She has a partial thickness burn over twelve to fifteen per cent of her body.’ Hayley kept her voice calm and impersonal. He needed a clear report, not a lot of words wasted in sympathy. Not yet. ‘No facial or genital involvement. The other patient in the house with her appears to have had a CVA and she’s coming in a second vehicle. The other crew will be able to give you a better report on her status...’
‘A CVA? That’s my mother...’ Byron was paler than ever now. ‘Dear God, and the two of them were alone!’
They could all hear the sirens of the second ambulance now. Byron clearly didn’t know which way to turn next, his usual control and authority momentarily deserting him. His eyes looked wild, his lips were white, his fists were balled hard. Hayley ached with sympathy for him.
‘Tori must have been terrified,’ he whispered.
‘I think she wasn’t, Byron, not until she burned herself,’ she reassured him, using his first name without even thinking about it. ‘She was trying to make boiled eggs for lunch. She thought your mother was just having a little sleep on the couch.’
‘All right, yes. I guess that’s how she would intepret it, yes.’ His vision cleared suddenly, emphasising the golden glints in the depths of his eyes. ‘Hayley! Hayley Kennett! I’m sorry, I’ve only just...’ He gripped her arm.
‘It’s OK.’
She returned his gesture, squeezing the muscular forearm she’d seen so many times, tanned and dripping wet, at swim practice. With an arm like that, it felt as if he should be the strong one but, of course, he wasn’t today, not after what had happened. She didn’t waste time reminding him that she was Hayley Morris now. She hadn’t gone back to her maiden name after the divorce.
‘We don’t know how long she spent trying to rouse her grandmother,’ she said instead, as they covered the final few metres before entering the paediatric section of the emergency department. ‘Perhaps no time at all. She does seem to have taken the ‘‘nap’’ at face value. Her dress was wet all down the front, and there are burns on her thighs and feet, suggesting that she tipped boiling water over herself when she was trying to get the eggs out of the saucepan. We found the eggs broken on the floor.’
‘Mum’s all right?’
He stood back for a moment as they transferred Tori from ambulance stretcher to emergency department bed. Its fresh starched white linens were stretched smoothly across a firm mattress, and it was surrounded by equipment and supplies whose intimidating effect could only be partially offset by pictures of dinosaurs, landscapes and fairies on the walls.
‘She’s in the care of our second crew.’ Hayley repeated herself patiently. ‘Bruce McDonald is with her. He ruled out a heart problem and diabetes, secured her airway and was trying to stimulate her into waking up when I left. I can’t say any more than that yet.’
‘This is a nightmare!’ Byron muttered helplessly.
Then he turned to the A and E nurse, and was suddenly in complete control. Only on the surface, Hayley suspected. Only because he had to be.
‘Get whoever’s on call to come in now,’ he said. ‘We need a second doctor. Tori, Daddy’s here, sweetheart. OK, we need her on monitors. Hayley, how fast are you running that drip? You have her on morphine, right? How much? Tori, you’re fine, now. You were scared, weren’t you, and you were brave and just brilliant to phone the emergency number like that, and remember our new address. I’m so proud of you. Daddy’s going to have a look at your tummy and your feet now, OK?’
Hayley answered his questions, darting her responses into his uninterrupted flow of words. After recognising her, he hadn’t looked at her again. He had pulled a chair up beside Tori’s bed and hadn’t looked away from his daughter since he’d released that brief, almost painful squeeze on Hayley’s arm.
She stepped back with a reluctance that surprised her. Her role in this was over, apart from writing up her reports, but she didn’t feel ready to let go. She wanted to look after Byron, which was strange when they’d had so little contact over the years. He was so big and capable, so determined, strong-willed and confident. It was unsettling, heart-rending, to see him this vulnerable.
She wanted to make promises and assurances to him that she had no right to make. Things like, It wasn’t your fault. They’re both going to be all right. Don’t knock yourself out.
But she was just a casual friend from years ago, someone he’d yelled encouragement to and slapped on the back in congratulation. Someone he’d kissed just once, in the corner on a couch in the dark at a party.
It had lasted for, oh, at least an hour—a first, wonderful taste of the primal intimacy that a man and a woman could find together. Then a couple of days later he’d turned up at her front door to say something awkward about his imminent move to Sydney and not wanting to get involved in a relationship at the moment.
To tell the truth, she’d been relieved to hear it. At fifteen, just a girl, not a woman, she hadn’t been ready for a serious relationship with a university-aged boyfriend who already seemed to know exactly what he wanted out of life. For a few months she’d had romantic dreams about meeting up with him again when she was a mature adult—say, seventeen or eighteen—but then those dreams had drifted into insignificance, as a young girl’s dreams so often did, and at nineteen she’d met Chris.
The automatic doors opened again as Bruce and Paul wheeled Mrs Black into A and E. A second nurse came