He fell back onto the pillow and stared blindly up at the ceiling. His heart rate slowed and the tightness in his chest eased and for one brief and blessed moment he felt nothing at all. Then the ever-present emptiness, which the dream had momentarily absorbed, rushed back in. It expanded wide and long, filling every crevice, every cell and tainting every single breath.
Sleep was over. He swung his legs out of bed, walked into the lounge room, stared out into the night, and waited for the dawn.
‘And how long have you had this pain, Sam?’ Poppy pulled the modesty sheet back over the young man’s abdomen.
He shrugged. ‘Dunno. I think I saw Dr Albright about a month ago but then it just went away.’ ‘And is today’s pain worse than a month ago?’
‘A lot.’
‘The nurse tells me you’ve been vomiting?’ ‘Yeah, sorry about that.’
Poppy tried not to smile. Dressed in tough mining workwear, and looking like not even a bullet could take him down, Sam’s politeness and air of bewilderment reminded her of a young boy rather than a strapping and fit man of twenty.
‘I’ll be back in a bit, Sam.’ Poppy pulled the screen curtains shut behind her as she stepped out into the compact emergency department, running the symptoms through her head—fever, high white blood cell count, rebound tenderness and an ultrasound that showed nothing unusual, although that in itself wasn’t unusual. The process of diagnosis soothed her like the action of a soothing balm and she relaxed into the feeling.
The shock of landing two hours ago on the Marsscape that was Bundallagong still had her reeling. The green of the river-hugging suburbs of Perth had not prepared her for the barrenness of the Pilbara. When she’d exited the plane, her feet had stuck mutinously to the roll-away airport stairs as her gaze had taken in the flat, red dust plains that stretched to the horizon in three directions. Then the ferocious dripping heat had hit her like an impenetrable wall and it had been like walking into a raging furnace with an aftershock of wet, cloying steam. The irony wasn’t lost on her—William had sent her to hell.
The only way to reduce her ‘sentence’ was to start work so she’d asked the taxi driver to take her directly to the hospital. The fact it was a Sunday afternoon mattered little because the sooner she started her rotation, the sooner she could finish. She’d planned to spend a couple of hours studying medical histories and drawing up her first week’s surgical list but as she’d arrived, so had Sam. The nurse on duty had happily accepted her offer of help with a smile, saying, ‘Thanks heaps. It’ll give the on-call doctor a break.’
Now Poppy walked briskly to the nurses’ station and dropped the history in front of Jen Smithers, whose badge read ‘Nursing Administrator’. ‘Sam’s got appendicitis so if you can arrange everything, I’ll meet him in Theatre in an hour.’
The nurse, who Poppy guessed was of a similar age to her, looked up, a startled expression on her face. ‘So it’s an emergency case?’
‘Not strictly, but he’ll be better off without his appendix and there’s no time like the present.’
‘Ah.’ Jen spun a pen through her fingers, as if considering her thoughts.
Poppy rarely took no for an answer and the ‘Ah’ sounded ominous. She made a snap decision: she needed the nursing staff on her side but she also needed to show she was the one in charge of the team. ‘Jen, I call a spade a spade and I don’t play games. I’ll be straight with you and you need to be straight with me. I want to operate on Sam this afternoon and I expect you to do your job so I can do mine.’
Jen nodded, her demeanour friendly yet professional. ‘Fair enough. I can get nursing staff in to staff Theatre and Recovery, but that isn’t going to be enough. It’s the anaesthetic registrar’s weekend off and he’s not due back from Bali until this evening’s flight.’
Gobsmacked, Poppy stared at her, not knowing whether to be more stunned that a person could fly direct to Bali from the middle of nowhere or the fact that it left the town without an anaesthetist. ‘Surely there’s someone else?’
‘Well, yes, technically there is, but …’
A tight band of tension burned behind Poppy’s eyes. Hell, she really had come to Mars. She didn’t have time for staff politics, especially if they got in the way of her doing her job and proving to William that she deserved the chief of surgery position back in Perth. ‘Just ring the doctor and get him or her here, and leave the rest to me.’
Jen gave a wry smile. ‘If you’re sure, I can do that.’
‘Of course, I’m sure.’ Poppy headed back to her patient, shaking her head. It seemed a very odd thing to say but, then again, she was a long way from Perth. She busied herself inserting an IV into Sam’s arm, administered Maxolon for his nausea and pethidine for the pain.
‘This will have you feeling better soon.’ ‘Thanks, Doc.’ ‘No problem.’
She clicked her pen and started scrawling a drug order onto the chart when she heard voices coming from the direction of the nurses’ station. She couldn’t make out Jen’s words but could hear her soft and conciliatory tone, followed quickly by a very terse, deep voice asking, ‘Why didn’t you call me first?’
‘Because Ms Stanfield was here and I thought I could save you—’
As Poppy hung the chart on the end of the trolley, Jen’s voice was cut off by the male voice. The anger was unmistakable and his words hit painfully hard. ‘Save me? I don’t need you or anyone else in this town making decisions for me, do you understand? I’m the on-call doctor today and that means I get called.’
Sam’s head swung towards the raised voices, his expression full of interest.
Staff politics. She’d asked Jen to call in this guy so she needed to be the one to deal with him. ‘Back in a minute, Sam.’ Poppy grabbed the cubicle curtains and deliberately pulled them open with a jerk, making the hangers swish against the metal with a rushing ping to remind Jen and the unknown doctor that there was a patient in the department. She marched briskly to the desk.
‘Oh, Ms Stanfield.’ Jen glanced around the man standing with his back to Poppy. Her organised demeanour had slipped slightly but instead of looking angry or crushed at being spoken to as if she was a child, her expression was one of resignation tinged with sadness and regret. ‘Poppy Stanfield, meet Dr. Matt Albright, Head of ED.’
The tall, broad-shouldered man turned slowly, his sun-streaked chestnut hair moving with him. It was longer than the average male doctor’s and the style was either deliberately messy-chic or overdue for a cut. A few strands fell forward, masking his left cheek, but his right side was fully exposed, and olive skin hollowed slightly under a fine but high cheekbone before stretching over a perfectly chiselled nose. A dark five-o’clock shadow circled tightly compressed lips, leaving Poppy in no doubt of his masculinity.
With a jolting shock she realised he wasn’t handsome—he was disconcertingly beautiful in a way that put everyone else into shadow. In ancient times he would have been sculpted in marble and raised onto a pedestal as the epitome of beauty. Poppy found herself staring as if she was in a gallery admiring a painting where the artist had created impossibly stunning good looks that didn’t belong on battle-scarred earth.
He was heart-stoppingly gorgeous and she’d bet anything women fell at his feet. Once she would have too but thankfully, due to years of practice, she was now immune and not even a quiver of attraction moved inside her.
Nothing ever does any more.
Shut up. Work excites me. She extended her hand towards him. ‘Matt.’
His hand gripped hers with a firm, brisk shake, and a faint tingling rush started, intensifying as it shot along her arm. Immune, are you?
Compressed nerve from a too-firm grip, that’s all.
‘Poppy.’