Confessions of a Naughty Night Nurse by Lily Harlem Page B

sucked in a deep breath.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said, standing behind me, bending and talking into my ear. ‘A helpless, defenceless man who can do nothing for himself!’
    I forced myself not to jerk away. Not to show weakness. Any crack and she would turn it into a crevasse.
    ‘What the hell were you thinking? Seriously, staff nurse, tell me.’
    I kind of shrugged, sort of. There was no denying what she’d seen, but what I’d been thinking, well, that was a different matter. She saw Ted as a man who now relied on others from the minute he woke to the moment he went to sleep. But, of course, that hadn’t always been the case and after hearing his life story I felt I knew him. He’d loved and lost, had his ups and downs, he’d made mistakes and tried to fix them, but ultimately he was a fine and brave hero. He was also a man, a man with needs, one of them I’d been able to fulfil and make him happy on an evening where he would otherwise be staring at the TV immersed in worries for the future and trying to ignore the pain in his hands.
    ‘You were masturbating a patient,’ Iceberg said in a slow and deliberate voice, drawing out the word ‘masturbating’ into four long syllables. ‘Masturbating a sick, vulnerable patient when you were supposed to be caring for him. Helping him wash.’ She moved around to the side, rested her knuckles on the table, and stared at me.
    Now I knew she was pretending to be DC Iceberg. If she could have had a set of cuffs hanging on her belt next to the massive set of keys that swung there, I’m pretty sure she would have.
    What the hell does Javier see in her? Power-crazy cow.
    I gulped and willed myself to think of a solution to this enormous pile of crap I’d managed to land myself in.
    Lose my job. Lose my registration. That couldn’t happen. Since Michael had left two years ago I had a mortgage to pay on my own, a loan that required monthly deposits, not to mention the holiday to Ibiza that I was still paying off from last year.
    Damn. I needed the money like I needed to breathe. I could end up bankrupt just from doing a good deed? And I would if Iceberg got her way.
    ‘It was what you saw,’ I said, trying to hide the wobble in my voice. If she thought I was feeble she’d go for the jugular even quicker. ‘But not for the reasons you think. There’s no kind of relationship between us other than a professional one.’
    She straightened, folded her arms again and looked down her nose at me. ‘Go on.’
    ‘He’s a young guy and had a really terrible time lately after risking his life to save a pregnant woman, so let’s be honest about his needs.’
    ‘Honesty would be refreshing in this place.’ She moved back to her seat, sat and curled her fingers around the lip of the table in front of her. ‘Tell me more about these “needs”.’
    ‘I’d helped him wash, as you said, and he’d told me all about his wife and how she’d run off with his best friend when he found out he couldn’t have children. He’d lost his parents in a plane crash and his sister disowned him. He’s now a fireman and spends his days putting himself in danger to rescue others.’
    She clicked her tongue. ‘So you thought you’d cheer him up?’
    ‘Well yes, kind of, but it just happened. It wasn’t exactly planned. He got a stiffy, er, I mean an erection when I was washing him. It happens, doesn’t it? You must know.’
    She neither shook nor nodded her head, just glared.
    I steeled myself to stay strong. ‘And then suddenly, he was groaning and not in pain, but with pleasure. I stopped straight away, I was drying him then, and I was, naturally, completely shocked. So was he, but even so he asked me to go on. Well, I knew it was wrong, but …’ I leant forward, trying to appeal to any dormant scrap of humanity in her. ‘But how could I refuse a man who has no function with his hands? I just couldn’t. Not when I could tell it would only be a quick couple of strokes and then all