For which she was truly grateful. Or at least she should try to be, she thought with a sigh as she squared her shoulders and walked towards the staircase which would lead her down to the very last man on earth she had ever wanted to work with.
‘Why me?’
Elijah Munroe’s tone was calm, neutral, and if George Leslie hadn’t been his boss for five years he might have been deceived, but George wasn’t deceived.
‘I don’t suppose you’d settle for, “Why not you?‘” he said with a broad, avuncular smile, then sighed as Elijah gave him a hard stare. ‘No, I didn’t think you would. Eli, we both know Frank’s going to be off sick for at least a fortnight. I’ve no one to team you up with, and I can’t send out an ambulance unless it’s two-manned, so unless you’d rather sit on your butt in the office…’
‘I’m stuck with the number cruncher,’ Eli finished for him. ‘You do realise sending her out on the road with me is probably illegal? Okay, so she’s only going to drive, but what if I discover I need help—that I’ve been sent on a two-man job?’
‘Miss O’Brian is a fully qualified nurse. In fact, she was a charge nurse in A and E at the Waverley General until a year ago,’ George Leslie declared triumphantly, and Eli frowned.
ED7 ambulance station might be situated in the heart of Edinburgh’s old town, which meant most of the patients he collected ended up in the Pentland Infirmary, but he’d occasionally had to go to the Waverley and he couldn’t remember any nurse called O’Brian.
‘George—’
‘Eli, if the ambulance service have decided she’s not just qualified enough to drive, but also to assist you if required, that’s good enough for me, and it should be good enough for you.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Seven nights,’ George Leslie said in his best placating tone. ‘Seven night shifts when she’ll drive you around—’
‘Noting down all she considers to be ED7’s inefficiencies—’
‘Which is why it’s vital you keep her sweet,’ George Leslie declared, then his lips twitched. ‘And I know how easy it is for you to keep women sweet.’
‘Anyone ever tell you you’d make an excellent pimp?’ Eli said drily, and his boss’s smile widened.
‘Oh, come on, Eli, it’s common knowledge you’ve a way with the ladies.’
‘And right now I’m on the wagon. And before you ask,’ Eli continued as his boss’s eyebrows rose, ‘it’s not because I’ve contracted a sexually communicable disease. I’ve just decided to take a break from dating for three months.’
‘Eli, I’m not asking you to get inside Miss O’Brian’s knickers,’ George protested. ‘Just to be as pleasant and as winning as I know you can be with women. Look, there’s a lot riding on this government report,’ he continued swiftly as Eli opened his mouth clearly intending to argue. ‘There’s talk of amalgamating stations, job cuts—’
‘But we’re already pared right back to the bone,’ Eli declared angrily, and his boss nodded.
‘Exactly, but in the current economic situation the authorities are looking for ways to save money, and if they can shut down a station they will.’
‘But—’
George Leslie put out his hand warningly.
‘Miss O’Brian’s just arrived,’ he said in an undertone. ‘I’ll leave you to introduce yourself, but you be nice to her, okay? There’s a hell of a lot riding on her report.’
Which was great, just great, Eli thought as his boss hurried away. He didn’t want to be ‘nice’, he didn’t want to be the poster boy for the station. All he wanted was for this number cruncher to go away and annoy the hell out of someone else but, dutifully, he pasted a smile to his face and turned to face the woman he was going to be sharing his ambulance with for the next seven nights.
At least she wasn’t a looker, he decided as he watched her walk towards him. Having managed to stick to his ‘no dating’ decision for the past two months, it would have been plum awkward if she’d turned out to be a looker, but she was…ordinary. Mid-thirties, he guessed, which was younger than he’d been expecting, scarcely five feet tall, with short brown hair styled into a pixie cut, a pair of clear grey eyes, and her figure…He tilted his head slightly, but it was impossible to tell whether she was buxom or slender when she was wearing the regulation green paramedic cargo trousers, and bulky high-visibility jacket which concealed pretty much everything.
‘Thirty-six, twenty-six, and none of your business.’
His head jerked up. ‘Sorry?’
‘My measurements,’ she replied. ‘You were clearly scoping me out, so I thought I’d save you the trouble.’
Not ordinary after all, he thought, seeing a very definite hint of challenge in her grey eyes. Sassy. He liked sassy. Sassy was always a challenge and, where women were concerned, he liked a challenge.
No, he didn’t, he reminded himself. No dating, no involvement for one more month. He’d made the three-month pledge, he intended to stick to it, and yet, despite himself, a lifetime of pleasing women kicked automatically into place, and he upped his smile a notch.
‘You haven’t,’ he observed. ‘Saved me the trouble, that is,’ he added as her eyebrows rose questioningly. ‘There’s still the unanswered question of, “none of your business.”’
‘Interesting approach,’ she said coolly. ‘Do the staff at this station always assess the physical attributes of government assessors?’
‘Only the pretty ones,’ he replied, upping his smile to maximum, but to his surprise she didn’t blush, or look even remotely confused, as most women did when he complimented them.
Instead, she held up three fingers and promptly counted them off.
‘Number one, I’m not pretty. Number two, charm offensives don’t work on me so save your breath and, number three, I’m here to assess the efficiency of this station so your personal opinion of my looks is completely irrelevant.’
Uh-huh, he thought, wincing slightly. So, Miss O’Brian was no pushover. That would teach him to make assumptions, and it was something he wouldn’t do again.
‘I think we should restart this conversation,’ he said, holding out his hand and rearranging his smile into what he hoped was a suitably contrite one. ‘I’m Elijah Munroe. My friends call me Eli, and I’m very pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m Miss O’Brian, and I’ll let you know in due course whether I can reciprocate the pleasure,’ she replied, shaking his hand briefly, then releasing it just as fast.
Snippy, as well as sassy. Well, two could play that game, he decided.
‘No problem,’ he observed smoothly, ‘but though I fully understand your desire to keep our relationship strictly professional, I feel I should point out that calling you by your full name could prove a little time-consuming in an emergency.’
And that is round three to me, sweetheart, he thought with satisfaction, seeing a faint wash of colour appear on her cheeks.
‘Fair point,’ she conceded, and then, with clear and obvious reluctance, she said, ‘My name is Brontë. Brontë O’Brian.’
A faint bell rang somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, but he couldn’t for the life of him quite grasp it.
‘Brontë. Brontë…’ he repeated with a frown. ‘Could we possibly have met before? Your Christian name…It sounds strangely familiar.’
Damn,