Resisting Her Rescue Doc Read online

  Okay. The attraction wasn’t just to do with the situation they had both found themselves in. And it wasn’t just that she was over being celibate. This Cooper was something special. He was also a foreigner who might only be in the country for a limited amount of time, which could be a real bonus. If—and, given the impression she already had of him, it might be quite a big if—he was single, it was possible he might be interested in a friendship. One of those friendships that had benefits, even, and were as close to a conventional relationship as Fizz was prepared to allow.

  She cast a somewhat furtive glance over her shoulder but she was still alone in the staffroom. Carefully, she ripped off the front page of this old newspaper and then folded and tore around the edges of that photograph. Then she folded the image until it became a small square that she slipped into the pocket of her scrubs tunic.

  It was an odd thing to do but...she might want to have another look at it later. When she wasn’t in danger of being interrupted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘HI, COOPER, HOW’S it going?’

  ‘Hey, Maggie... I didn’t know you rode a bike.’ Cooper shut the door of his SUV, which he’d parked in the corner of the staff parking area at Aratika Base, well away from any rescue vehicles and especially the big trucks that might need to exit the park quickly.

  ‘It’s what helped me get a job here, I think.’ Maggie tucked her helmet under her arm and fell into step beside Cooper as they headed for the ground-floor entrance on one side of the helicopter hangar. ‘We can rotate sometimes if we need a change or there’s a gap that needs filling in the roster—that’s why Joe’s on the road crewing with you at the moment. He’ll probably be back on the choppers next week.’ Maggie used her security card to open a steel door. ‘I love spending a few shifts on a bike. If there’s a major snarl-up in traffic due to a crash, a bike is the best way to get on scene fast. We can respond first and do what we can before the police can clear a way in for an ambulance or find somewhere for a chopper to land.’

  ‘I haven’t ridden a bike for a few years. Maybe I’d better brush up on my skills.’

  ‘Good thinking. I see you’ve got an SUV, though. Do you do some off-road four-wheel driving?’

  ‘Not yet. Could be a fun thing to get into here. There must be some great places to go.’

  ‘I’ve been out with Fizz. She belongs to a big four-by-four club and they have days where they get onto some farms with steep gullies and rivers to get across. Or they get into a forest near a beach so there’s sand dunes and things to deal with. It’s a bit hair-raising but pretty exciting.’ Maggie was leading the way into the ground-floor locker room. ‘It’s also a great way to pick up driving skills. I should do more of it. Oh... I had a chat to my other flatmates, Laura and Jack, last night and told them you might be interested in our spare room. They’re keen, so come and have a look after work today, if you like.’

  ‘That would be fantastic. I’m not into hotel living. A few days has been more than enough.’ Cooper put his gym bag into his locker and shut the door. He was already wearing his uniform and the overalls for helicopter or other callouts were hanging on his hook at the end of the row on the wall.

  ‘It’s a cool old house. Big villa. It’s in the Aro Valley, which isn’t too far from here. Less than a fifteen-minute drive even if the traffic isn’t great.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘We’re all either paramedics or nurses so, with our shift work, it means it’s not that much of an issue that we’ve only got one bathroom. We’re hardly ever all there at the same time. There is one thing you should probably know, though...’

  ‘What’s that?’ Cooper had been distracted by someone coming through the door of the changing room.

  Fizz...

  He hadn’t seen her since the day before he’d started work on the base and that was nearly a week ago. Long enough for him to have got over that odd reaction and the even crazier notion that maybe there was a possibility they could hook up.

  ‘Hi, Maggie...’ Fizz was walking with a confidence that said she knew exactly where her locker was. That she was completely at home here, in fact. ‘And...um... Cooper, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah...’

  Had she had trouble remembering his name? The effect of the hesitation was not dissimilar to having a bucket of cold water thrown at him. So much for thinking that there might have been a mutual spark of attraction there.

  ‘Cooper Sinclair,’ he added. ‘We never did get properly introduced, did we? Your real name isn’t actually Fizz, is it?’

  ‘Don’t go there.’ Maggie laughed. ‘Her real name is Felicity and she hates it. You won’t be popular if you try using it.’

  There was a slight flush of colour on Fizz’s cheeks and she barely held eye contact with Cooper for more than a heartbeat. As if she was a little flustered, perhaps? He might not really know this woman at all, but instinct told him that being flustered was out of character for this woman. Interesting. And, no, he wasn’t going to make himself instantly unpopular by using a name she didn’t like but, for the moment, he was certainly going to keep any interaction between them completely professional. Because instinct was also telling him that if he came on too strong, he would get a very firm knock back.

  ‘I heard you went up to Theatre with our patient from that accident the other day,’ he said. ‘Sonya?’

  ‘I did.’ Fizz was opening her locker but it wasn’t to find any uniform items. She was already wearing the black T-shirt with the rescue base’s logo of a helicopter flying above a path leading straight towards a mountain range and she had it tucked into the standard issue black pants that brushed the top of her steel-capped boots. With her hair firmly drawn back and tamed into a long braid, she looked ready to leap into a car or a helicopter and respond to any emergency. She hung her big shoulder bag on a hook in the locker, having extracted a stethoscope, notebook, pens and a couple of muesli bars as she continued talking to Cooper.

  ‘She lost a lot of blood when we got a chest tube in so she needed a transfusion. They did a thoracostomy in Theatre and found some small arteries that were still bleeding so they got repaired, along with the lung damage.’

  ‘Is she still in hospital?’

  ‘No. She went to the intensive care unit, got extubated the next day. The chest tube got taken out forty-eight hours later and she was discharged yesterday.’

  ‘Wow...good to hear.’ Cooper was impressed. Not just that their patient was recovering so quickly from both the injury and the surgery but that Fizz had clearly kept a very close eye on her progress. ‘Do you always follow your patients up that closely?’

  ‘Try to...’

  Fizz slung her stethoscope around her neck and looked even more ready to respond to anything. She also looked as if she either had no interest in continuing this conversation or couldn’t think of anything to say. There was a moment’s silence that could have become awkward if Maggie hadn’t broken it.

  ‘Cooper might be moving into the spare room at my place,’ Maggie told Fizz. ‘Except he doesn’t know about Harrison yet.’

  ‘Harrison?’ It was a relief for Cooper to turn towards Maggie and stop wondering why there was any awkwardness in the atmosphere. ‘Is he a flat pet?’

  Maggie laughed. ‘Kind of. One of the housemates is Laura, who’s an ED nurse at the Royal, and she’s a single mum. Harrison is five. He’s no trouble and they share the biggest room in the house that’s got an ensuite bathroom. It just depends on how you feel about kids.’

  ‘I’m fine with kids,’ Cooper said. His mouth curved into a grin. ‘I like them. As long as they’re not mine, that is.’

  ‘You don’t like your own kids?’ Fizz shut her locker door with a decisive clunk and shot him a glance from beneath raised eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t have any,’ he responded. ‘And don’t intend to in the foreseeable future, anyway.’<
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  Maggie let out an audible sigh. ‘What is it with the men around here? Nobody seems to want to settle down and have a family. Not just the men, either,’ she added. ‘Seems like half the staff here are single. Look at me—I’m thirty-five. If I don’t get on with something soon, it’s never going to happen.’

  ‘Ah...but would you want to give up this job?’ Fizz slung her arm around Maggie’s shoulders as they both walked towards a steel staircase. ‘Imagine how boring it might be to be stuck at home with a few rug rats. You won’t catch me doing that...’

  ‘You’re only thirty-two, aren’t you? Just you wait, Fizz. Your biological clock will start ticking one of these days.’

  Fizz laughed. ‘Doubt it. And if it does, I’m going to ignore it. Life’s too much fun just the way it is.’

  Cooper was just behind them as they headed up to the first floor and the staff area. The contrast between these two women was quite startling. Maggie was very attractive with her curly blonde hair and blue eyes. He’d been out as third crew on a helicopter callout with her on his second day here, so he’d seen her at work and knew that her intelligence and skills more than made up for any lack of height or brute strength. She rode a Harley-Davidson motorbike, which gave her an edge that should have added to her attractiveness, and it sounded like she was looking for someone special in her life.

  Maggie should be exactly the type of woman that would be perfect for Cooper—if he was looking, of course—which he wasn’t.

  But when Maggie was standing beside Fizz, she seemed to become pale and it wasn’t just her colouring against Fizz’s dark hair and eyes and olive skin. It was as if her personality paled as well, to the point of being almost insipid? Cooper knew that wasn’t the case, it was just that Fizz had an extraordinary kind of glow about her. She was a maverick, all right. Clearly she wasn’t about to bow to any social pressure any more than she was inclined to automatically follow orders regarding safety. She wasn’t looking for a conventional future of finding a partner and settling down to raise a family. Instead, she was throwing herself at life and extracting all the fun she could out of it. And if that meant throwing caution to the wind and doing things that were reckless, then so be it.

  She was a bit wild.

  And that wasn’t just attractive, it was undeniably exciting. It felt as if the aura around this woman was touching his own skin. Making it tingle oddly. No wonder he’d been aware of awkwardness between them—he was creating it. Not that Cooper was going to allow even a hint of his reaction to show. The fact that Fizz had barely remembered his name was quite enough for self-protection barriers to have been engaged instantly. He wasn’t about to make an idiot of himself in front of his new colleagues. With one of his new colleagues, in fact, even though her presence on the base was intermittent.

  Oh, man...

  It was a relief to get into the staffroom with the group of friendly, familiar faces. Enough people to dilute how powerful the presence of Cooper Sinclair was when he was breathing the same air that Fizz was. He was too big. Too cute. Too...everything...

  It was disturbing, that’s what it was.

  ‘Fizz...how are you, love?’ Shirley was calling from where she was standing in front of the stove. ‘It’s poached eggs on toast this morning. Can I tempt you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, please, Shirley. You’re an angel. I went for a run this morning and there was no time to do more than grab a couple of these muesli bars.’ She held out her hand to reveal her snacks.

  ‘Keep those for later. Sit down and I’ll bring you some eggs. Maggie? Cooper? You up for eggs?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ve had my breakfast.’ She went towards the big pine board on the wall behind the dining table, where Don was pinning up a notice. ‘Is that the new roster?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d love some,’ Cooper said to Shirley at the same time. ‘I went running this morning, too, and I’m starving.’

  Oh, no... If Shirley had asked Cooper first, then Fizz might have lied and said she’d already eaten breakfast as well. But now he was sitting beside her at the table and, any moment now, they’d be eating a meal together, albeit a snatched one before their shift was due to start. Joe was also sitting at the table, along with Andy, one of their pilots, and a couple of paramedics from the night shift. She was more than familiar with sitting down with team members from this rescue base. It shouldn’t feel any different with the inclusion of someone new. But it did. And Fizz knew why.

  It was entirely her own fault that she was feeling a bit...well, weird, around Cooper Sinclair. She’d looked at that newspaper clipping a few times too often, hadn’t she? Remembering his voice and that cute Scottish accent. The sheer, solid size of him that made her feel quite small and feminine, which was no mean feat for a girl who’d reached nearly six feet by the time she was sixteen. She’d remembered too often how it had felt to have him holding her hand as well and that had morphed into imagining a whole lot more by the time she was lying awake in her own bed in the early hours of the mornings. The idea that a friendship might be possible, a really close friendship, had become more and more attractive.

  It was embarrassing, that’s what it was. She was a thirty-two-year-old woman, for heaven’s sake, and she was having a bit of a crush on someone? She’d actually felt herself blushing when she’d gone into the locker room this morning and had seen him for real again and not just in a rather crumpled photograph. And Felicity Wilson never blushed. She needed to get a grip and keep any interaction between herself and this new team member strictly, and utterly, professional until she could get her head around this.

  It was just so different.

  Not that Fizz was a stranger to interactions with men. She’d experienced a wide spectrum, in fact—from having been head over heels in love at one point in her life to having to fight off determined advances from extremely undesirable people at the other end of the spectrum—but this was different.

  She wasn’t in any danger of falling in love, of course. That state of mind—which was pretty close to being crazy, given how it could take over your life—had been a one-off and had died at the same time that Hamish had. Any relationship in the years since that life-changing event had...well, it had just happened. Had come from a friendship that involved doing things together, preferably extreme sports, and sex just became part of the friendship. A bonus that got added in later, when and if it seemed like a good idea.

  That was why she was feeling so flustered right now, wasn’t it? Because she wasn’t even friends with Cooper Sinclair yet but she was already thinking about how nice it would be to touch him? To be touched?

  She needed to take a big step back. Fast. It had to be Cooper who took that first step towards friendship. Chasing men—like falling in love—was another thing that Fizz never did, but she’d given off some pretty strong signals already, hadn’t she? Like voicing her approval of Cooper’s statement that he had no intention of having kids by letting him know that she felt the same way. Had he sensed the underlying message that a friendship between them could work well because neither of them was interested in something long term or permanent? That neither of them would be harbouring secret plans for a potential future?

  The eggs arrived, on thick pieces of buttered, sourdough toast, sprinkled with fresh parsley.

  ‘Wow...’ Cooper eyed his plate after thanking Shirley. ‘This looks amazing.’ He glanced sideways at Fizz. ‘I’ve never come across an ambulance station or rescue base that has its own cook before.’

  ‘Shirley isn’t employed here,’ Fizz told him. ‘She’s a volunteer. Everybody puts into a kitty for a grocery fund.’ She ate the first bites of her breakfast in silence but then spoke again. This was good. Just a friendly sort of conversation.

  ‘She’s a bit of a legend is our Shirley. Her son’s life got saved by a helicopter crew years and years ago and she wanted to thank people so she started baking cakes an
d bringing them in for morning tea, and organising fundraisers and so on.’ She lowered her voice, although Shirley was now stacking dishes into the dishwasher and the clatter meant that she couldn’t possibly know she was being talked about.

  ‘After her husband died a few years ago, her involvement here just grew. She started being here in the mornings to cook breakfasts and now she does a roast dinner on a Sunday. I’ve only been lucky enough to be on a Sunday duty a couple of times but I can tell you that Shirley does the best roast beef and Yorkshire puddings you’re likely to get outside England.’

  Fizz turned her attention back to her plate but she could feel Cooper’s gaze on her face. A thoughtful kind of gaze. Good grief...he could just look at her and it felt like a physical touch? This was definitely odd.

  ‘Is that typical of people in this country? That kind of generosity?’

  ‘Well, Shirley’s one in a million, of course, but I think it is true to some extent,’ she told him. ‘And I think that we get to see it more than others in this job. The ambulance service or first response in isolated areas is always run by volunteers who give up a lot of their own time for training and being on duty. I can’t count the number of times I’ve arrived on scene on a callout to find local people going above and beyond to do what they can to help. It’s part of what I love about doing this—why I signed up to volunteer.’

  ‘You don’t get paid to be here?’ Cooper sounded surprised.

  ‘It’s one of my hobbies,’ Fizz told him. The admiration she caught in his expression was more than a little disconcerting. Okay, she wanted him to be interested in her as a friend but as an equal, not someone on a some sort of pedestal. Finding it so hard to break that eye contact was even worse. How could something become so intense within the space of a single heartbeat? Somehow, she needed to lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘I get a free uniform.’ She managed a smile as she dragged her gaze free. ‘And great breakfasts. And sometimes cake for morning tea as well.’ She wiped up the last of her egg yolk with a crust of the bread and then jumped to her feet, picking up her plate, as her gaze scanned the other people scattered throughout this space. She raised her voice slightly.