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“Excellent. Don’t you think so, Ralph?” Jack asked their patient, who’d been talking a mile a minute about his logging business and how this same thing had happened a few years back.
Ralph glanced down at his closed cut. “Looks good to me. This mean I can go home now?”
Jack laughed. “Soon. Taylor is going to dress your wound, give you a tetanus vaccination, and print out wound-care handouts for you. When she’s done, I’ll write discharge orders. Then you can go home.”
Taylor finished cleaning the man’s more minor cuts and scratches. Really, the guy had been lucky. He’d been cutting timber and, unexpectedly, a tree had fallen near him. Some of the branches had left nasty cuts. The one on his left arm had been the worst and the only one requiring sutures.
“Nice job in there,” Jack commended when she returned to the nurses’ station where he sat with Amy.
“Thanks.” She gave him a smile she hoped conveyed her true appreciation of his patience and praise. “It’s been a while since I’ve sutured so I was nervous.”
“You did fantastically. You can assist any time on my patients, Nurse Hall.”
“Thank you, Dr. Morgan.” She met his gaze, wondering how any woman could ever resist the shimmering joy in his eyes. How she’d ever thought she could resist?
“Listen to you two being all normal co-workers,” Amy teased, standing up from the nurses’ station where she’d been charting. “There’s another new patient in Triage. I’ll attend to him.”
Taylor watched her go and fought sighing.
“She’s persistent. You have to give her that,” Jack mused, not sounding upset by Amy purposely leaving them alone.
“And as subtle as a ton of bricks.”
“Speaking of which, this is the weekend she’s out of town. She made me promise to make sure you didn’t sit home alone.”
“We both know what happened the last time she made you promise to watch out for me.”
He shrugged. “I liked what happened last time.”
She had, too, but that didn’t mean it should happen again. Getting all tangled up with a man was not on the agenda of her new life. It just wasn’t.
She glanced down to read the information on the patient Amy was triaging. A four-year-old with shortness of breath with suspected asthma. She pointed it out to Jack and he left to take a quick peek at the boy.
When he returned, he dropped in an order for a nebulizer treatment. “Amy took a verbal and has already gotten the treatment started. She said to tell you she’d let you know if she needed you.”
Next to him at the nurses’ station, Taylor studied Jack as he documented his physical examination of the child.
“Do you like kids, Jack?” The question popped out of her mouth as quickly as the thought had hit her. Her throat dipped somewhere in the vicinity of the pit of her stomach.
Pausing at the computer, he turned toward her. His eyes sparkled as he said, “All except the whiny ones.”
r /> “They’re all whiny at one point or another, aren’t they?” Grateful he hadn’t seemed to read anything into her question, she continued, “Honestly, I’m not one to give thoughts on kids. I was an only child and have little experience with children outside nursing school or work.”
“Only child? That makes you spoiled rotten, right?” he teased.
“Ha. Hardly, Mr. Also-an-Only-Child.” She shook her head. “My parents were in their forties when they got pregnant with me. They’d not planned to have kids, so I was a surprise they didn’t want and didn’t know what to do with once I arrived. I mostly did what they expected of me, stayed quiet and kept to myself as not to disturb them too much.”
If she ever had children, she’d make sure they never felt that way.
“That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Fun was not a word in the Hall household.”
“Poor Taylor.”
“Don’t mock me,” she scolded. “I didn’t say I had a bad childhood, just not a fun one. My parents were strict. Not quite military-school strict, but I imagine they got close. They weren’t mean or cruel. I was always taken care of. Never without food, clothes, shelter, books to read. I certainly didn’t have it bad. Just not the stuff of Normal Rockwell.”
He studied her a moment, then confessed, “I was home-schooled.”
