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Assignment
Single Man
By Caroline Anderson Mills & Boon
Copyright © 2003 Caroline Anderson
All right reserved. ISBN: 0263178900
Chapter One
It was the sexy grin that did it. That and those arresting cobalt blue eyes that seemed to spear right through her.
She'd come out of the back office to Reception to tell Jackie she was going for a second interview with Xavier Giraud, but she didn't get a chance. Jackie was no longer alone, and the man in there with her was a man she recognised, a man with a sexy, lopsided grin and the most arresting blue eyes she'd ever seen.
Josh looked up at her, and his smile widened in recognition. "Well, if it isn't the bodacious Sister Williams," he said, and Fran suppressed a smile.
"Well, if it isn't the accident-prone Mr Nicholson. It's good to see you alive."
"Do you two know each other?" Jackie chipped in, clearly agog, and he chuckled.
"Let's just say we met over a red-hot needle a little while ago."
"Yes. How is the chest?" Fran asked him, and he gave a short, humourless laugh.
"Oh, the chest is fine - it's healed beautifully. Unfortunately, though, the rest of me is lagging behind a little, hence my visit here. I need a nurse."
His smile challenged her - almost dared her to take the job.
Why it seemed like a dare she couldn't imagine, but for some inexplicable reason it did and her heart was beating a tattooagainst her ribs. She forced herself to ignore it.
"Why do you need a nurse?" she asked, ruthlessly sticking to the point. "If you've been discharged from hospital ..."
"I've discharged myself," he said dryly. "The consultant didn't quite seem to see eye to eye with me about that, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."
Fran kept her expression carefully neutral. "You discharged yourself?"
He nodded, the grin kicking up one side of his mouth in a charming, little-boy appeal that had no business affecting her the way it did. She ignored the flutter in her heart - again - and studied him as he sat there in old jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt, one leg stuck out in front of him, his trousers cut up the side to accommodate the paraphernalia of the external fixator.
His right arm - the same side - was in a cast below the elbow, and his hair had been cropped short, perhaps to stitch a scalp wound? It suited him, she thought, sidetracked again by his lazy good looks and those arresting eyes.
Eyes clouded with pain, she realised. His body must have taken a real hammering.
And yet oddly, as mangled as he was, he still exuded power and confidence as well as an undeniable sex appeal. She dragged her mind back into order.
"So, how long ago exactly did you have this accident?" she asked, eyeing the cast on his arm and the metalwork protruding through his trouser leg with concern.
"Twelve days ago."
Fran blinked. Could it really only have been twelve days? She remembered the news breaking, just as her world was falling apart. He'd been the only bright spot in a hellish week, and when the accident happened it had been all the more shocking because she'd only just treated him. He'd fallen over a cat and landed in a bin bag full of rubbish, cutting his chest. She'd teased him, and then a few days later he'd nearly died.
Was it really only twelve days ago? It seemed forever, but that was her own personal perspective. In terms of this man's injuries it was probably plenty - unless there was more than his arm and leg involved.
He shrugged, the crooked grin widening. "Well, apart from the bruised spleen, the split liver and the right femur which had to be pinned, not a lot really. Well, except for the clot on my brain. They had to make a little borehole to get it out. Oh, and there's a crack in my pelvis, apparently."
Fran felt sick. How many young men had she seen like that - and how many of them had lost their tenuous hold on life? Too many, over and over again, day after day, until she thought she'd go mad. She buried the hideous memories and rolled her eyes.
"You must be out of your mind, discharging yourself," she told him flatly.
The grin faded, showing her for the first time just how bad he really felt. His face was etched deeply with lines of pain that added years to his true age, and as he turned his head towardsthe light a little, she could see the fading greenish-purple remains of some startling bruises round his eyes, shot through with a truly colourful yellow.
"I was going out of my mind," he corrected. "What I need now is rest, that's all, but I'm not so suicidal that I want to go home on my own, and the last thing on God's earth I need is my mother fluttering around me like a demented hen."
"Maybe that's exactly what you need," Fran suggested, suppressing a smile. "A bit of home cooking, a little motherly love, all from someone who knows you inside out -"
She was interrupted by a rude snort. "You've never met my mother," he said bluntly. "She doesn't do home cooking, and she certainly doesn't know me inside out. I'm not even sure about the motherly love, but I do know she'd drive me even crazier than being in hospital. And if I don't have a nurse, she'll insist on coming to look after me, and I might just have to kill her."
The grin surfaced again. "You could always look on it as your moral duty as a law-abiding citizen, preventing a murder."
The eyes twinkled in his bruised and battered face, and she crumpled. Let's face it, she thought to herself, he certainly needs help, and you aren't in a position to be fussy. Looking after him might even turn out to be fun.
"This is a live-in post, I take it?" she asked him, but her eyes were on Jackie, sitting back and watching the byplay between her newest recruit and her even newer client with avid interest.
"Jackie?" Fran prompted, wanting her input. It was her nursing agency, after all, and she was the one in charge of who went to which client and under what terms and conditions.
Jackie collected herself visibly and nodded. "Oh, yes, it would have to be, wouldn't it, Mr Nicholson?"
He nodded agreement. "Absolutely. The slightest loophole and my mother will be in there quicker than a sniper's bullet."
Fran suppressed another smile. "And the hours?"
He shrugged. "Whatever. Minimal. However long it takes to go to the supermarket and buy some instant food and whack it in the microwave - oh, and I suppose the pins in my leg will need looking at from time to time. The rest of the time you can do what you like, so long as you're around to take me anywhere I need to go. I take it you can drive?"
"I can drive," she confirmed.
Continues...
Excerpted from Assignment by Caroline Anderson Copyright © 2003 by Caroline Anderson. Excerpted by permission.
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