More Than Caring. Josie Metcalfe

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      On her way down to the ward to start her shift Lauren should have been thinking about the tasks awaiting her attention, or she should have set her concentration to deciding whether word of mouth would be a better advertisement than putting up posters. But all she could think about was Marc Fletcher’s grin.

      Well, it wasn’t just his grin. It was the effect that smiling had on his whole face, from the sparkle it added to the smoky grey of his eyes to the lifting and lightening of the angle of his jaw and the gleam of strong teeth in a surprisingly sensual-looking mouth.

      ‘Oh, good grief!’ she muttered when she realised she was fixating on the man’s teeth, for heaven’s sake. ‘He’s the hospital manager, remember? He’s got something against you that makes him turn up all the time to keep an eye on you, remember?’

      In fact, now she thought about it, that was probably the reason why he’d suggested coming along to the classes, too. It wasn’t that he wanted to offer his services as the willing victim so much as he wanted to see what she was getting up to.

      Well, he wouldn’t find anything amiss in one of her self-defence classes. She knew only too well how vital the information she would pass on could be—the difference between life and death, in some cases. There was no way she would do anything less than her best, no matter who was standing there supervising her.

      In the meantime, there was a ward waiting for her to take over the reins, with the night staff champing at the bit to go home.

      An hour later Lauren was beginning to wonder just how many more things were going to go wrong.

      There had been a complete mix-up over the patients’ meals, with dietary requirements completely ignored for some and meals being supplied for two ladies who were designated ‘nil by mouth’.

      ‘Surely you know that pre-operative patients shouldn’t be tucking into bacon and scrambled eggs?’ she demanded of her hastily gathered staff once she’d sorted everything out. ‘Just because the kitchen made a mess of things doesn’t mean you switch your brains off. You know better than this.’

      ‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ muttered the hapless staff nurse, looking close to tears. ‘It won’t happen again, I promise.’

      ‘See that it doesn’t,’ Lauren said sternly. ‘Luckily, this time it won’t make too much difference as Mrs Lisle hadn’t eaten more than a couple of mouthfuls before she was stopped. I’ve warned Theatre that she’ll have to be switched to the end of the list as a precaution.’

      It was such an elementary mistake that she was quite concerned. Staff Nurse Roberts was usually very dependable. Such a potentially dangerous mistake was unlike her and would bear closer scrutiny.

      ‘Next point on the agenda is the state of cleanliness, or rather the lack of it,’ she said briskly. ‘There are dust bunnies under some of those beds that are nearly old enough to talk and I spotted used paper hankies lying behind one of the curtains. In a postoperative ward that’s a recipe for disaster. We don’t want an environment where MRSA can flourish, so strict cleanliness, please.’

      There were extra arrangements about transporting one patient up for X-rays and a rescheduling of physiotherapy for another, but Lauren was uncomfortably aware that her juniors were only too pleased to escape from her stern presence a few minutes later.

      ‘Can’t be helped,’ she muttered under her breath as she accessed the computer records to correct the time of administering pre-med to the patient wrongly given her breakfast. ‘I didn’t enter nursing to win popularity contests, and the sooner they learn my ways, the sooner we’ll get along with each other.’

      Not that they were a bad bunch by any means. She’d found them very hard-working up to now, so perhaps this was just a minor glitch.

      In the interim, she’d have to see if she could engineer a few minutes with Jackie Roberts. Perhaps over a cup of coffee she might loosen up enough to tell her what had brought on this unexpected lapse.

      She nearly groaned when she saw how much to heart her nurses had taken her words. Over the next few hours there was almost a full-scale blitz on the ward with every surface attacked as though for a military inspection. What the cleaners didn’t do, the nurses did, prompting the patients to joke that they were expecting to be next on the list for a good scrubbing.

      With all that going on she should have had plenty to occupy her mind. Unfortunately that didn’t stop her eyes straying towards the door every so often in expectation of seeing Marc Fletcher standing there with his habitual frown in evidence.

      She was almost disappointed when the phone rang just before she was due to hand over at the end of her shift and she heard his voice instead. Had she actually been looking forward to seeing the man, even though she knew he was probably trying to find fault?

      ‘Would Monday evening be good for your first session?’ he asked briskly. ‘That gives you four days to get the word around.’

      Lauren’s mind switched into high gear.

      She still had a spare set of the notes she’d made for the last course. It wouldn’t be difficult to have them copied so each attendee could take a set home at the end of the session. That just left the publicising to organise.

      ‘Monday works for me,’ she agreed. ‘And I wondered if it might be a good idea to start pretty low-key with the publicity this time. I thought I could put up notices in the female staff cloakrooms initially, to see what interest they stirred.’

      ‘Sounds reasonable for a pilot scheme,’ he said after a brief pause for thought. ‘But put my phone as the contact number just to make sure you don’t get any nuisance calls as a result.’

      She’d been wondering how to get around that problem and was grateful for the suggestion but, ‘Won’t that tie up your line?’ she worried.

      ‘Rather mine than yours,’ he said simply. ‘People who need to get hold of me can always go through the switchboard and get my secretary if my direct line’s busy. Anyway, it’s better that way than leaving you open to the chance of an undesirable getting hold of your number.’

      Lauren nodded, silently acknowledging the sense in his caution even though he couldn’t see her. Part of her railed at the need for it, but she had to live with the reality of modern life. Before she had time to say anything, he was continuing inexorably.

      ‘You’ll want to give some guidelines about what clothes they’ll need to wear, how many sessions and how long each session will last,’ he listed without pausing for breath. ‘If you drop off the outline with my secretary, she can photocopy it so you’ve got the right number to go around. Tomorrow morning, perhaps?’

      He’d made it sound like a question but there was the unmistakable air of command in his tone that made her grin, glad that he couldn’t see her response.

      The hospital grapevine had suggested that Marc Fletcher had a military background and she could well believe it. He certainly liked to have everything organised and by the book.

      ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, only just resisting the temptation to say Yes, sir!

      Her mind was full of all the things she was going to have to do before she came to work the next morning—not least the fact that there was laundry waiting to be done and carpets needing a clean before she could settle down to design an eye-catching poster.

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