Annie Claydon - Resisting Her English Doc

Rick took the file, opening it and scanning the details quickly, before his eye was drawn to the photograph stapled inside the front cover. One look at the blue eyes, staring candidly at the camera, and he forgot about everything else. Long, dark hair framed a face that no one in their right mind could fail to consider beautiful, but her eyes held something more. The promise that this woman was a force to be reckoned with.

“Fleur Miller came to us before Christmas.” Alex’s voice cut through the spell that seemed to bind Rick to the image. “She was part of a theater group—See the Beat.”

“I think I’ve heard of them. They specialize in theatrical dance and acrobatics.” He remembered them from one of those late-night arts programs that he’d had a habit of dozing through, instead of going to bed.

“Yes, that’s right. Fleur had a bad fall and sustained extensive injuries. They’re all in the file.”

Rick concentrated on the print, trying to ignore the photograph. Severe concussion, a broken shoulder and collarbone, a fractured hip and a knee that had been so badly damaged that the joint had required replacement.

“Is all her surgery complete?”

“Everything major. She has a ganglion on her wrist, probably caused by the trauma of the fall, but that’s relatively insignificant and we’ve decided to wait until she’s moving around without crutches. Cody will take care of it then.”

“She should be almost recovered by now, though. Eight weeks at the Boston Harbor Hospital, and then several more weeks here.”

“Yes, physically she’s doing well. Emotionally, not so much. She’s a model patient, smiles at all the nurses, does what she’s told when the physio’s watching her. But when she’s alone, she just lies down on her bed and stares at the ceiling. We reckon she’s having a good day when we find her staring out of the window.”

Rick frowned. He wasn’t usually mistaken about a face, and he thought he’d seen determination in Fleur’s. “Has the clinic’s mental health team been involved?”

“Yes, they have, but she’s stonewalled them. Her attitude is that loss is a perfectly normal thing for a person to feel, and that we should just leave her alone while she deals with it.”

“She has a point. With these injuries it doesn’t look likely that she’ll be returning to a career in dance anytime soon, if ever. Everyone needs a bit of time to grieve, whatever the nature of their loss.”

Alex and Cody knew that too. And all three men knew that there must be a time for moving forward as well. In the time it had taken Rick to kick-start his own life, after Lara’s death, he’d almost lost everything else that he’d cared about. It sounded as if Fleur was in danger of making the same mistake that he had.

Alex broke the short silence. “We think that Fleur has found herself a comfort zone, and she won’t venture out of it. She’s made up her mind that she can just sit her time out here.”

“Which isn’t what the clinic’s all about,” Rick mused. It was one of the topics that Alex and Cody had discussed with Rick during a series of in-depth video interviews. The clinic aimed to prepare its patients for life, and not just attend to their medical needs.

“No, it isn’t. We’d like to hear some ideas on how you think you might get through to her.”

“Everyone else has failed,” Cody interjected with a frown. It was clear that both Alex and Cody were taking this personally. Committed doctors had a habit of thinking that way.

Rick took a few moments to read through the patient profile. Fleur had grown up on the island, leaving when she was fifteen to go to theater school in Boston... Her parents were still on the island, visited every day and were supportive... No financial issues...

Almost against his will, his gaze was drawn back to the photograph. The confidence in Fleur’s gaze suggested that this was someone who knew how to meet the world headlong. Someone who could fight. Rick dismissed the thought that if she could be persuaded to fight him there was the strong possibility that he might enjoy every moment of it, and then come crawling back for more. Fleur Miller would be nothing more than a patient who presented him with a medical conundrum.

“If Fleur’s reached the kind of standard she has in dance, then she’s clearly no stranger to meeting a challenge.” Rick ventured an opinion. “Perhaps the difficulty for her now is that she can’t see any challenge ahead of her. I can imagine that for someone like her, that must be very demotivating.”

“And your solution?” Alex pursed his lips.

Rick grinned. “This is a wonderful place, but maybe that’s just the problem. It’s making everything a bit too easy for Fleur. We need to find something that will confront her and give her a reason to start fighting. I think that then the underlying emotional issues that are getting in the way of her recovery might become more apparent and we’ll have a chance to address them.”

Alex exchanged a glance with Cody, and then nodded. “Agreed. And we can rely on you to pursue that approach?”

It made sense. He was a new face, and that meant a fresh start and a chance to succeed where others had failed.

“Yes. I’d welcome the challenge.”

The next hour was devoted to a bombardment of names, smiles and handshakes as Alex and Cody took him on a whistle-stop tour of the clinic. This place had everything. But the smiling faces, the state-of-the-art gym equipment and the beautiful setting didn’t provide the one thing that he guessed his newest patient might need.

He spent half an hour with Ellie at lunchtime. She had obviously been exploring her new surroundings, and excitedly showed him around the daycare center. Their second goodbye of the day was only marginally less harrowing than the first, but Ellie took it in her stride, running back to the play area where she’d already made some friends.

Rick walked determinedly to the private room marked on Fleur’s notes. The door was open, and he could see a figure lying on the bed, her back to the door. She didn’t move when he knocked so Rick walked inside.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Richard Fleming. I’m going to be overseeing your rehab for the next few weeks.”

The woman rolled slowly onto her back, giving him a smile that was clearly a matter of doing what was expected of her. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

It was like a before and after. The woman in the photograph didn’t know the meaning of failure. The one in front of him looked beaten. It was nothing to do with the fact that her dark hair was in a messy plait instead of a shining waterfall around her shoulders, or that she had a small healed scar on her lip. It was everything to do with the blank look in her eyes.

“Yes. Fresh off the plane.” Rick sat down in the easy chair beside her bed to signal that this wasn’t a flying visit.

“You’re... English?”

“Yes, from London.”

She gave a small nod. Rick reckoned he could have told her that he was from Mars and she probably would have shown the same indifference. But he was going to get a reaction out of her, and if he had to work for it, then so be it.

He opened the file he’d brought with him, deliberately angling it on his lap so that Fleur couldn’t see the contents. “As I’m going to be your new doctor, I’d like to review your case notes with you.”

“All right.” She didn’t move.

“And that’s better done while you’re sitting up.”

The sudden, momentary flash of defiance in her eyes stirred something deep in Rick’s gut. If he managed to succeed in what he was setting out to do, there would be a whole new set of problems to contend with. But he’d deal with those, because Fleur was going to start fighting, and the most obvious place to start was to give her a reason to fight him.