Hot-Shot Surgeon, Cinderella Bride

But he didn’t look back. He barely broke his stride as he pulled fresh gloves from the slot on the box and followed his patient towards Theatre.

Maybe he hadn’t seen her. She was unimportant.

Invisible.

‘Wow,’ came a voice beside her. ‘I saw it, but I still don’t believe it.’

‘I don’t believe the mess they’ve left behind. Kelly, would you mind helping clear this up?’

‘Better head back to work myself.’ The first nurse sighed. ‘Guess the excitement’s over.’

Kelly tore her gaze away from the open door that had swallowed the figure of Tony Grimshaw.

Yes. The excitement was definitely over.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’ve checked three times since you rang this morning, Mr Grimshaw. I’m sorry, but there’s no C. Riley to be found on either the permanent or the casual nursing staff databases.’

‘But…’

‘Are you sure she’s a nurse?’ The woman from Personnel was beginning to sound impatient on the other end of the line. ‘St Patrick’s employs hundreds of people, you know. This Miss Riley you’re trying to locate might be a physiotherapist or a dietician or a social worker—or any number of other things.’

‘But she said…’ Tony paused. She hadn’t actually said she was a nurse, had she? She’d said she worked in a lot of different areas and that her favourite places were Emergency and Theatre. He was standing in the theatre suite right now, and there were people everywhere. Nurses, orderlies, technicians. Even a girl polishing the taps on the handbasins.

There were also two registrars waiting for him at a discreet distance from this wall phone. They were running late for a departmental meeting.

‘Never mind.’ He’d probably started some sort of a rumour by making these enquiries in the first place, but the staff in Personnel weren’t to know why he was trying to locate the woman. It could be to reprimand her or something. ‘Thank you for your help,’ he added.

‘A pleasure. If I hear anything that might be helpful I’ll contact you, shall I?’

Tony could squash any embryonic rumours by saying it really didn’t matter.

But it did, didn’t it?

Since he’d woken up on Sunday morning to reach out and find his bed empty, he’d been unable to get rid of that sense of…loss.

It should have been easy. He’d thought he had it sorted when anger had kicked in briefly. When he’d started feeling as though he’d been used and discarded. But then the doubts had crept in. Excuses his brain was only too willing to come up with on her behalf.

Maybe she’d had a good reason to leave without saying anything. Mind you, there’d have to be a good reason to justify not wanting to repeat that experience. He knew it had been just as good for her as it had been for him. Nobody could fake that kind of responsiveness. Or sincerity. The princess had been genuine and he wanted to find her.

Maybe she was married?

If that was the case, fine. Tony wasn’t about to break up anyone’s marriage. It was this not knowing that was frustrating him. That and the peculiar dream-like quality the whole night had taken on.

But it had been real. Utterly different from anything he’d ever experienced before, but there was no denying it had happened. Or that the impression it had left made it impossible to forget. Perhaps what was really pushing his buttons was the need to prove it had been real. So that he would know what he needed to aim for in his personal life and never allow himself to settle for what had been on offer so far.

Mediocrity. Interest that always became infected with an urge to escape.

‘Thank you,’ Tony said finally, preparing to hang up the receiver. ‘I’d appreciate that.’

His registrar had an armful of paperwork, and there would be a lot more by the end of the usual late Monday afternoon meeting where the cardiologists presented their cases. They would listen to histories, view footage of angiograms showing coronary arteries in various stages of blockage, grade people to score the urgency of intervention and draw up the Theatre list for bypass surgery for the next week.

There would be cases left over from last week who hadn’t made it to Theatre because of emergency procedures taking precedence, and there would be debate over issues such as age and lifestyle and circumstances.

A tedious meeting in many ways. Tony was tempted to leave it to his registrar and attend to something more important. Like yet another check on this morning’s trauma case. Seventeen-year-old Michael was in the intensive care unit, and he was still a sick lad but he was alive. Tony knew his save was the talk of the hospital, but what concerned him was whether the boy would make it through the next critical day or two. Whether he would recover without sequelae that could ruin his quality of life.

The two men he was leading into the meeting room now had been the other musketeers at the ball. Funny how it seemed such a long time ago already. As they sat down around the long table, Tony impulsively turned his head.

‘Josh, you know a lot of the nurses around here, don’t you?’

His registrar grinned. ‘I’m working on it.’

‘Ever come across a Cindy?’

The grin stretched. ‘No. No Barbies, either.’

Tony’s smile felt strained. This should feel like a joke but it didn’t. He nodded at colleagues entering the room, noted that the audiovisual gear wasn’t ready yet, and lowered his voice.

‘Cindy Riley,’ he told Josh. ‘Tall. Long, black hair.’

‘Not the woman you spent most of Saturday night dancing with? Blue dress with a lacey thing down the front?’

Tony gave a slow nod, hopefully not overdoing the effort to appear casual. It wasn’t easy. The memory of that ‘lacey thing’ almost exploded in his head. The way her fingers had assisted him to undo it. The way her breasts had felt when he’d finally got to touch them…

‘Won’t be a moment,’ one of the cardiologists called. ‘We just need another extension cord.’

‘She told you her name was Cindy Riley?’

‘Yes.’

Josh exchanged a glance with the other registrar. ‘And you’re trying to find her?’

‘Ah…yes.’

Josh grinned. ‘Did it occur to you that she might not want to be found?’ he ventured.

‘What on earth makes you say that?’

Josh didn’t respond immediately. Computer printouts were being passed around, listing the cases up for discussion. Tony took his copy but ignored it. He frowned at Josh.

‘It just seems a bit of a coincidence.’ Josh shrugged.

‘What does?’

‘A Cindy Riley. At a ball.’

‘Thanks for coming,’ the head of the cardiology department said, then cleared his throat. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through today, so let’s get started. Case one. Sixty-eight-year-old man with angina occurring with minimal exertion. Investigations so far reveal reduced ventricular function estimated at thirty-eight percent. He has moderate mitral regurgitation. A blocked anterior descending, almost blocked posterior descending, and fifty percent occlusion on his left main.’

The screen flickered into life, and views of dye being injected into coronary arteries were shown from various angles.

Tony was having trouble concentrating. A combination of words had made a loop that went round and round in his head.

Cindy Riley. At a ball.

Again and again the name echoed and merged, and finally morphed into something else.

‘Good grief!’

‘Problem, Tony?’

His soft exclamation had unintentionally reached the presenting cardiologist.

‘Not at all. Ah…could you just rerun that last shot of the left main?’

Josh caught his gaze for a second, the quirk of his lips revealing that he knew exactly why Tony had been surprised.

Cindy Riley.

Cinderella.

No wonder this felt so different. He’d stumbled into a fairytale!

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