Barega was indeed blessed to have him here.
The bowel had been ripped and a small section completely torn out. Such a wound would have left Fern helpless with horror but Quinn didn’t falter. He hardly talked during the reanastomosis-the joining of the torn ends of the bowel-or as he performed a meticulous peritoneal lavage, carefully washing out the abdominal cavity. Slipshod work here would cost Sam his life.
This was no slipshod work.
The fingers doing the surgical procedures were skilled and sure and Fern knew that Sam wouldn’t be in any better hands if he’d been in Sydney.
The two island nurses stayed in Theatre and it took the four of them, working flat out, to give Sam a chance of life. This job in a major teaching hospital would have warranted a team of seven or eight. Here they had to make do with what they had.
Fern could only marvel as she watched Quinn sew the abdomen closed. There was still a massive defect-the dressing had to be applied over an area with no skin-but Sam now had a chance.
Finally, Quinn had done all he could. Fern adjusted intravenous antibiotics to maximum dosage and reversed the anaesthetic as the last dressing was put in place.
Quinn’s work had been little short of brilliant. It was now up to Sam…
When Quinn wearily pushed his mask from his face, it was more than he who sighed with relief. The nurses pushed the trolley away with their shoulders sagging in exhaustion. Neither nurse had been in such an intense surgical situation since their training hospital-and even then Fern doubted that they’d been under such pressure.
‘That was…That was magnificent…’ Fern told Quinn as she walked unsteadily over to the sink. She hauled her own mask from her face with a feeling of unreality.
‘It wasn’t too bad a job you did yourself, Dr Rycroft,’ Quinn told her and Fern flashed him a look of astonishment.
‘You don’t even sound exhausted.’
‘I guess I am,’ he admitted, ‘but I’ve gone onto automatic pilot.’
‘Some automatic pilot. It’s saved Sam’s life…’
‘I just hope that’s right. It’ll be days before we know for sure. His chances of infection are still high. You realise he’ll have to go to Sydney? It’s a rough job I’ve done tonight. Cosmetic stuff will have to be done by the plastic guys.’
‘As long as he lives…’
‘As you say.’
Fern closed her eyes, exhaustion sweeping over her in waves. The urgent needs past, she felt just plain sick.
Quinn stepped behind her and untied the ribbons of her surgical gown. He flicked his gloves into the waste bin and then put his hands on her waist.
‘You’re all done, Dr Rycroft,’ he said gently. He pulled her back to lean against him and she was too tired to care…
Not true.
She was too tired to resist.
‘Bed, I think, Dr Rycroft.’ Quinn’s head dropped and he planted a light kiss on her hair.
‘I…I think so…’
‘You realise you lost a fiancé tonight?’
Quinn’s voice was coming from a very long way away. Fern leaned back against his chest and let his words drift. They didn’t make an awful lot of sense.
What had he said?
‘Sam’s going to live,’ she said unsteadily. ‘I know he is.’
‘Not with you, he’s not.’
‘Why…?’
She had to force herself to ask the question. What Quinn was saying didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was the feel of his arms around her, the feeling that here-against this man’s body-she was secure against all peril.
The nightmare of the night was just that-a nightmare. It couldn’t touch her now. She was with Quinn.
She was home.
You don’t have a home, remember, Fern? a tiny voice whispered into the back of her head. That voice had been a shout since the night her parents died. Now the shout was fading almost to oblivion.
‘Your Sam nearly went crazy when we told him what Lizzy was doing-that she was drowning,’ Quinn said gently across her thoughts. His arms didn’t slacken for a moment. She was enfolded in a cocoon of compassion as he spoke.
‘I have to admit I thought the man incapable of passion. When I told him Lizzy would drown without him, though, he was out of his bed in seconds. He insisted point-blank I go with him; his theory was that I was a better trained doctor than you, and his Lizzy-his Lizzy-was going to have the best.
‘I still had Maud to consider and you were already out with Lizzy so I refused and I thought Sam would kill me. So it wasn’t me threatening to pick up Sam and take him out to sea-it was the other way round!’
‘Sam…’ Fern said faintly.
‘Sam.’
Quinn’s arms tightened even further. Surely this wasn’t a professional approach at comfort by one imparting bad news…
Surely this was something more.
‘Jess came back from her rounds just then-fortunately,’ Quinn told her. ‘She can do cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and can operate the defibrillator if necessary and she offered to stay with Maud before Sam did me physical violence. But it was a close thing.’
‘Sam…Sam and Lizzy have always been friends,’ Fern whispered. ‘Sam and Lizzy and me.’
‘Well, I think you have to face it.’ Quinn swung Fern round in a gentle but firm movement so that her weary, shadowed face was looking up at him. ‘Fern, I think tonight the “me” was taken out of the equation.’
‘You don’t know…’
‘I do know,’ he told her, his eyes never leaving her face. Quinn’s hands were on her shoulders and without their support she would have toppled. ‘I thought your Sam was incapable of passion and I was right. He was. Your Sam is. Lizzy’s Sam, though…’
‘I don’t want to hear this…’
There was a long silence. The theatre clock ticked above their heads and that was the only sound there was.
‘You have to hear it, Fern,’ Quinn said softly at last. ‘I just wish to blazes I could make you stop looking like that…’
‘Like…’
‘Like a woman Sam’s crazy to abandon…Like a woman I could…’
He didn’t finish. He couldn’t. What was growing between them was too strong for words.
Fern didn’t have to wonder this time whether she raised her lips in invitation to be kissed. She knew she did.
It was no act of flirtation or seduction, though. It was two magnetic poles finding their home. The force pulling them together was something that Fern had never felt in her life before.
She only knew it felt right.
At that moment they had no separate will-only their mutual need-only their mutual acceptance of what was right.
They stayed, locked together, for what could have been hours. Fern didn’t know. The clock ticked above them and Quinn’s lips stayed on hers. His hands held her waist to his body and there was no other movement.
There was no need for further movement.
This wasn’t passionate love-making. It was a process of healing-of bringing together two parts of a separate whole.
The aching void that had been in Fern since the night her family was killed was closing, filling, as though the link between herself and Quinn was feeding her something as essential as the plasma they had placed in Sam’s veins. This wasn’t blood, though. It was a nectar so sweet that it made her want to cry.
But she couldn’t cry when she was here.
She couldn’t cry when she was being kissed by someone like Quinn.
He was still wearing his bloodstained surgical gown and the jeans Fern had on were even more gory than his surgical greens. It didn’t matter. The time for dissembling was over.
There was only Quinn…
She opened her lips to him and her aching heart felt as though it opened at the same time, allowing the sweetness of love to flow through…
His hands came up under her blouse, cupping her breasts with fingers that were exquisitely gentle. It was as if he was touching the most precious thing this world had to offer, Fern thought, and knew that her thought was truth.