Ben shook his head, trying to get the school of silverfish that were floating past his eyes to disappear. In all the years he’d been cycling he had never once been knocked off by someone opening a car door on him, and it was a Porsche no less. The silly woman hadn’t even looked!
‘The ambulance is two minutes away,’ she said, dropping to her knees beside him with what looked like a doctor’s bag.
He watched as she began to rummage inside it, his eyes widening again as she brought out a hard cervical collar.
‘Hey, I don’t need that!’ he said, trying to back away.
‘It’s a safety precaution,’ she told him. ‘You might have sustained a cervical fracture. You hit the road pretty hard.’
‘Look,’ he began again. ‘I’m fine. I just—’
The sound of a screeching siren cut off the rest of Ben’s words, not to mention the stricture of the collar around his neck. He lay back and grimaced as the young woman rapidly bandaged his scraped knees and elbows with enough bandages to make him feel like an Egyptian mummy instead of one of Sydney’s leading neurosurgeons.
Georgie shone a bright light into his pupils, relieved to find they were both equal and reactive. She couldn’t help noticing what dark blue eyes he had, fringed by long sooty lashes. He had a chiselled leanness to his features, his body toned and tanned, his unshaven jaw adding to his overwhelming maleness.
Focus, she reminded herself sternly. He might be super-fit and super-attractive but right at this moment he was a patient.
She took his arm, applied a tourniquet, and before he could protest through the choking cervical collar she warned him,
‘This will sting a bit,’ and had an IV line into his antecubital fossa just as the ambulance pulled up.
Once the paramedics joined in, Ben gave up protesting. He was placed on a spinal board with a sandbag either side of his neck, had a litre of normal saline running into his arm and an oxygen mask shoved over his face, pouring rubbery dry oxygen into his mouth and nose. After a final feeble attempt at freeing himself, he was loaded into the back of the ambulance, just as the police arrived.
‘It was all my fault,’ he heard the young woman tearfully confess to the officers, as the back door of the ambulance was slammed shut and the siren turned on
.
‘Yep, it certainly was’ Ben mumbled to himself as the vehicle accelerated towards his own hospital.
CHAPTER TWO
‘NOT your usual mode of transport to work,’ Rob Athol, the accident and emergency doctor, remarked dryly as Ben was unloaded from the ambulance. ‘They phoned through and told us you got knocked off your bike. How are you feeling?’
Ben gave him a scowl as he ripped off the oxygen mask and collar. ‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you,’ he said. ‘Some stupid girl flung her car door open on me. I was lucky another car wasn’t coming.’
‘You were lucky she was a doctor,’ Rob commented, as his gaze ran over the bandages on Ben’s arms and legs. ‘It looks like she did a pretty good job on you.’
Ben gave him another furious scowl as he struggled out of the bandages, tossing them in the bin as he went. ‘I’m more than half an hour late for Theatre,’ he growled. ‘And it couldn’t have happened on a worse day. I’ve got a new registrar to train.’
‘You sure you’ll be OK to operate?’ Rob asked, reaching for his ophthalmoscope.
‘Don’t you start,’ Ben said. ‘Besides, I’ve got a full list today. Too many public lists get cancelled as it is, without me adding to them. I’ve got ten patients fasted and all keyed up for their surgery—it’s not right to turn them away just because I took a tumble.’
‘If you’re not up to—’
‘I’m fine, for pity’s sake,’ Ben insisted. ‘I’ve got a bit of gravel rash, that’s all. I bet that girl was straight out of med school, brandishing her new skills on whoever she could. Pity she didn’t think to brush up on her driving skills while she was at it, especially since she was driving a Porsche.’
‘It could have been much worse, Ben,’ Rob said with a sober cast to his expression. ‘At least she stopped to help you. A lot of people these days would have driven off without a backward glance. Remember that teenage patient three weeks ago? I still have nightmares about telling his parents he didn’t make it. It made their ordeal all the harder, having no one stepping up to the plate to take the blame.’
Ben blew out a breath as he finger-combed his hair. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s why this morning rattled me so much. Not only did she stop, this girl was OK to look at, which is some sort of compensation, I suppose.’
Rob’s eyes began to twinkle. ‘So if you met her again, all would be forgiven?’ he asked.
Ben shouldered open the swing doors. ‘She was cute but not that cute,’ he said as he left.
‘Where’s the new registrar?’ Ben asked as he came into Theatre a few minutes later.
‘Not here yet,’ Linda Reynolds, the scrub nurse, said as she set out the instrument tray.