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‘I think that’s the wisest course of action.’ He nodded grimly.
Just as long as they weren’t leaving together.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘THIS IS TOMMY, nine years old. At approximately ten o’clock this morning Tommy began suffering an asthma attack. By the time we got there he was in respiratory arrest and the ventilating was deteriorating. There was vomit in the airway.’
Bridget listened to the heli-med doctor as he gave the MIST report—the Mechanism of Injury, the Illness pattern, the Signs or observations, and the Treatment given—to her team. It was her last case of this posting, before she was scheduled to fly out to her briefing for her new foreign aid mission in three days’ time.
Less than a week from now she would be at Jukrem camp. And a few days after that Hayden and his regiment of Royal Engineers would be arriving.
Her pulse fluttered weakly, just as it had on each of the occasions she’d thought about him since that night at the club. And there had been far too many of those thoughts.
Cross with herself, she pulled her head back into the present as the A and E doctor running the case began to address them.
‘Let’s get him stable so that we can get a scan and check for fluid in the airways,’ the doctor running the shout concluded, and they each began to do their part. Putting on the monitors and administering the anaesthetic and the medications to try to regulate his stats.
Hour after hour. Interspersing it with other patients whenever there was a long enough lull. And then it was over. Bridget’s shift was done and it was time for her to go home. Or rather to the cramped rented flat that passed for home.
No more cases of asthma, or diabetes, or emphysema—a few of the many things that had constituted the bread and butter of her UK work. Instead, she had to get her mind back into malaria, TB, measles and, almost always underlying it all, malnutrition.
And then there was the added complication of Hayden.
No matter how hard she tried to block it out, memories of the other night flooded her head, flushing her cheeks with heat—and her body with something even more molten. She shook her head viciously, as if that could somehow dislodge the inconvenient attraction, but it didn’t work.
Had she really expected it to?
She couldn’t ignore what had happened any more than she was going to be able to avoid seeing Hayden. The only solution was going to be to find a way to deal with it.
Lost in her thoughts, she was halfway out of the hospital grounds before she realised she’d walked past her bus stop. She could turn back around but it had stopped raining, and a perverse part of her welcomed the walk. As if it could somehow help her to clear her head.
* * *
Hayden was five miles into his eight-mile run when he saw her heading up the pavement towards him. The shock of it almost winded him, far more than the punishing pace he’d meted out to himself had managed.
He supposed he could have run past her as her head was bowed so low that she wouldn’t have even noticed him until he was in line with her. Plus, he’d expected to have longer to wrap his head around how carried away he’d been the other night at the club. And he’d expected it to be in an army camp in the middle of the desert.
Still, much as he hated to admit it, he’d wanted to see her. Why else would he have chosen a running route that passed so close to the hospital in which she worked?
He slowed down. Stopped.
‘Hello, Birdie.’
Her head snapped up in undisguised shock.
It was strange how seeing her again was a lot harder than Hayden had anticipated.
‘Hayden.’
‘Hayd,’ he corrected. As though it mattered.
‘Hayd,’ she repeated carefully, like she was rolling it around her tongue.
And just like that he was back to the randy schoolboy of the other night, his mind full of all the other ways she could roll him around her tongue.
What the hell was it about her?
‘What are you doing here?’ she managed, breaking the silence. Looking altogether too cute and vulnerable for his peace of mind.
