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The rope had been formed largely due to the intrigue that the contrast between what this woman was like at home and at work had sparked. Appreciating the fact that she was an attractive woman had woven another strand into it. But this … this blinding demonstration of what physical passion she was capable of did more than thicken the rope. It had come alive. It was warm and soft and he could stay glued to it with no effort at all. He didn’t even need to touch it because a part of his mind could see it. Glowing.

‘It was the Christmas crackers, wasn’t it?’ Anna asked. ‘That sound like gunfire. You had some kind of flashback, like you did that day in surgery.’

‘Nonsense.’ It was. It had to be because if it wasn’t, it would mean he would lose his job and that was all he had to fill his future.

And if he lost his job, he would lose Anna.

‘I didn’t like the noise,’ he admitted stiffly. ‘I told you I didn’t like parties. I left because I’d had enough. The noise of the crackers was just the last straw.’

‘Do you actually remember leaving the canteen?’

‘Of course I do.’ And he did, in a vague, dream-like way. A background that had faded rapidly as he’d got sucked into the flashback. He remembered that Anna had been following him and … ‘I … bumped someone,’ he said aloud. ‘They spilled their drink.’

That surprised her. ‘You didn’t look like you were aware of what you were doing.’

‘I was … angry.’

‘Why?’

‘The party. The noise. All that food and drink and the silly costumes. It’s all such a waste of time and money.’

She wasn’t convinced. ‘You didn’t stop, Luke. You didn’t hear me calling you. I kissed you because I couldn’t think of anything else that might shock you enough to get you off whatever planet you were on.’

‘And I hope you plan to include that little gem in whatever report you’re obviously intending to make.’

A spark flashed in Anna’s eyes. ‘For God’s sake, Luke. This isn’t about reports or jobs or whether someone gets embarrassed. This is about the fact that if there’s any chance of you “losing focus” or having a flashback or whatever the hell that was really all about that you’re obviously not prepared to talk about, then you can’t operate on people.’

Luke watched the play of expression on Anna’s face. Her distress was all too easy to see in the frown lines framing her eyes. In the way her lips trembled.

‘I’m not out to get you,’ she said fiercely. ‘I want to help you.’

It was more than that, Anna realised as the words left her mouth. Had it been growing within her all the time she’d been watching Luke so carefully? Hoping to see him smile? Thinking so often about that short space of time when they’d been alone in her house and tumbling ever further into the confusion of her response to him. She could see the shadows that clouded his life and his eyes. There were things that haunted him and closed him off but she’d had a glimpse of the man he’d once been. Or could be.

She wanted, more than anything, to dispel those shadows. To get close enough to be allowed to help him.

She cared about him, Anna realised with something like dismay. She couldn’t pinpoint when it had happened. Maybe the evidence had been there for days and days. A sum of everything she had seen or imagined. Elements that had floated in an uncoordinated fashion until the fear she had felt in seeing Luke virtually run from the canteen.

Something else had been added in when she had felt him respond to her kiss. A confused medley of caring and attraction. Not something she wanted to try and analyse and she certainly couldn’t possibly tell him about any of it. Not when it was beyond the realms of possibility that he could feel anything like the same connection. Or that someone like him would want help from someone like her. He was more qualified than she was in so many ways. He was older. More skilled. He had seen and done things she would never want to do.

No wonder he was looking at her in a stony silence that took a little too long to be broken.

‘Help me?’ The words were bitten out scathingly. ‘How do you propose doing that, exactly, Anna? By spreading a rumour that I might be unfit to do my job?’

‘No.’ Anna tried to catch his gaze but Luke was looking at the blasted potted tree they were standing beside. ‘I think if you have the time, you’ll get on top of whatever it is or find the help you need from someone a lot more qualified than I am.’

The snort of sound was incredulous. ‘A shrink, you mean? Cheers, Anna.’

She ignored the rejection. She’d be angry, too, if someone suggested she couldn’t handle her own issues. ‘What I was going to suggest is that you don’t operate unless I’m assisting you. For the protection of everybody involved.’

‘You think I need supervising? By you?’

Anna flinched, biting back the observation that he had needed her during Colin Herbert’s surgery. Something told her that Luke was trying to turn this into a confrontation he could feel justified in dismissing. She had to find a way to rescue this discussion or she would lose him. For ever.

The lift suddenly pinged into life close by. The doors slid open.

‘Oops, wrong floor,’ a masculine voice said. ‘Hey … sounds like there’s a party going on.’

‘Yeah. Staff do, mate. Doctors and nurses. Security wasn’t invited.’

‘Shame. Wanna crash it?’

‘Nah. More than our jobs are worth. Come on. Push the damn button.’

The doors slid shut again but a single word of the exchange lingered in Anna’s ears.

Crash.

The kiss seemed a very long time ago. Hard to believe it had happened, even. But it had and for a brief time Anna had felt the same kind of connection she had that day he’d told her about his friend ‘Crash’. It was possible to find a chink in the armour he wore.

‘Actually,’ she told Luke quietly, ‘I was thinking of it more in terms of it being beneficial to both of us.’

‘So I get a supervisor. What do you get?’

‘A mentor,’ Anna said. ‘The chance to learn from someone whose work I already respect.’ She managed a smile as Luke finally made eye contact again. Had she also managed to placate him? ‘Think about it. I’m going to go back to that party for a bit. I need some food.’

Going back into the canteen was the last thing Luke wanted to do but he found himself following Anna after a brief hesitation. He needed to prove he could. To Anna and to anyone else who might have raised their eyebrows at the manner in which he’d left. Most of all, he needed to prove it to himself.

He could see Anna walking well ahead of him.

He didn’t need a babysitter. Or help.

He didn’t need somebody kissing him because they thought he was on ‘another planet’ either. Because they felt sorry for him?

No. Anna had said she could learn from him. That she respected his work. That didn’t suggest she felt sorry for him. That kiss hadn’t held any hint of unwillingness. Quite the opposite.

She’d kissed him because she’d wanted to kiss him. And what’s more she’d wanted to keep on kissing him. It wouldn’t have been difficult to pull away as soon as he’d responded. What she was saying was at odds with her behaviour. As much of a contradiction as her smart suits and paint-splattered old clothes. It was a puzzle and Luke liked that. He liked having Anna to think about. To ponder over. He was like a boat being tossed on a stormy ocean and Anna was his anchor. Maybe he could get to his future without her but it would be hard.

Lonely.

Luke was walking slowly. He could see the brightly lit interior of the canteen now, beyond the doors that were propped open by chairs. Anna had vanished into the crowd.

A couple stood on the shadowy side of the doors, partly screened because one of the chairs had shifted. A man and a woman. He wouldn’t have taken any particular notice of them except that he could feel the atmosphere as he got closer.

A palpable tension. Maybe he recognised it because the air had the same charged feeling as it had had in those stunned moments after kissing Anna.

Sexual tension.

The man raised a hand to shove his fingers through his hair and then rub his forehead with the palm of his hand.

It was Josh O’Hara, Luke realised with astonishment. The A and E consultant he’d met the day he’d accompanied Roger into the emergency department after his cardiac arrest. The man last seen going after his distressed wife when she’d fled the Christmas party.

This woman was definitely not his wife.

She was quite tall and very beautiful, with long dark brown hair tied loosely into a ponytail.

‘I saw her leave,’ the woman was saying. ‘She looked dreadful, Josh. You should go home. Talk to her.’

‘I know. I will. But she had gone by the time I got outside and I just had to … Oh, God, Megan …’

It was only a snatch of conversation that he overheard and Luke wished he hadn’t. There was something going on and he didn’t need to know about it. It was none of his business how difficult or miserable other people were making their lives.

He had more than enough to deal with in his own.

Something made him turn his head again, however, as he pushed himself back into the party.

He saw Josh move his head. Tilting it further into the space behind the door that no one in here could see. Luke could sense the intent. Josh was planning to kiss this Megan. But almost at the same moment his head jerked backwards and he saw the shadowy figure ducking from reach as she emerged. She was shaking her head and she walked away without a backward glance.

Almost ran away, in fact.

That’s what he should have done when Anna had gone to kiss him. Ducked the gesture and gone.

So why did he feel relieved that he hadn’t even thought of doing so at the time?

Sleep proved elusive for Anna that night.

She couldn’t close her eyes without thinking about that kiss and thinking about it brought it unerringly back to life.

She could still feel it.

The way his lips had moved over hers. Exploring them. Claiming them.

The strength in his hands. Their sure grip when he had pulled her close.

That incredibly gentle touch of his thumbs on her breasts.

And every time she relived that particular moment, her nipples tingled and a shaft of desire pierced her belly. And every time it got stronger. Feeding on itself. Taking on a life of its own. Becoming so intense it was physically painful.

With a groan, Anna shifted her body, turning over in her bed yet again. She had to stop thinking about it before day broke and she found herself on duty having had no rest.

Becoming aware of an odd thumping sound a moment later, she dragged her eyes open to find another set of eyes disturbingly close to her own. A long, wet tongue emerged to lick her face and the thumping accelerated when Anna laughed and wiped her face on her pillow to dry it.

‘You’re supposed to be asleep, Crash. On your bed.’

The puppy wriggled with delight at hearing her voice. He obviously had no objection to being awake in the middle of the night.

‘It’s all right for you.’ Anna pulled her hand out from under her pillow and reached to stroke the dog. ‘You can sleep whenever you want to in the daytime. I need to sleep now and I can’t.’

Crash leaned against the side of the bed, his chin tilting up against the mattress.

‘He made out it was all my idea,’ Anna informed Crash indignantly. ‘And maybe it was, to start with, but you know what?’

Big ears twitched into their endearing sideways position and Anna smiled as she stroked them.

‘He liked it as much as I did, that’s what. He could have backed off and he didn’t. He kissed me back.’

And how!

Anna let her breath out in a long sigh. A release that was partly pure pleasure at the memory but it also held a good whisper of frustration and more than a hint of anxiety about the implications of it all.

Silence gathered around them both as Anna’s thoughts drifted on the breeze of that sigh. Her hand stilled and finally Crash heaved a sigh of his own, folding himself into a lumpy shape on the floor. He didn’t go back to his own bed. He was still there, right beside her, prepared to share any vigil.

But Anna’s eyes had drifted shut. One thing was certain. That kiss couldn’t be undone and it put her and Luke on new ground. Unexplored, potentially dangerous but undeniably exciting territory.

Was Luke awake right now?

Would he remember that kiss?

Oh, yes. Anna was as certain of that as she was about the fact that the kiss couldn’t be undone. Curiously, the knowledge was comforting and sleep finally came, but it didn’t quite erase the tiny smile curling her lips.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IF LOOKS could kill …

Anna had to bite back an ironic smile as she pressed her foot on the control to start the water flowing and reached for the small, soap-impregnated scrubbing brush.

She’d probably been glaring at Luke in a very similar fashion that first day they’d been in Theatre together. Resenting his presence. Resenting him. Knowing that she was perfectly capable of doing the job without him being there. Feeling demoted in some way.

Now it was his turn. This was his first theatre slot following that little talk they’d had after she’d chased after him out of the staff Christmas party. The issue had been ignored for the day or two since then. In fact, Anna had had the impression that Luke had been avoiding her and that had been fine because any embarrassment lingering from the kiss had been somehow watered down until it didn’t exist any more. Maybe he was hoping she would also forget her intention of scrubbing in with him for the safety of everyone involved but she hadn’t forgotten. She hadn’t waited for an invitation either, she had simply arrived.

Luke was apparently focused on scrubbing his hands and forearms with commendable thoroughness. Under his nails and between his fingers. Carefully angling the water flow so that it chased soap from the wrists up to his elbows and then dropping his hands to rinse from the wrists to his fingertips.

He muttered something under his breath as he reached for a sterile towel to dry his hands. It sounded like, ‘Blackmail’.

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing,’ Luke growled. He stepped towards a theatre nurse waiting to help him don his gown and tie it. He cleared his throat and raised his voice. ‘Good that you had the time to join us this morning, Anna.’

‘Wouldn’t have wanted to miss it,’ she responded calmly. ‘Pretty complicated case. I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot.’

The nurse made an approving sound. ‘We all are,’ she said admiringly. ‘The gallery’s a very popular place today. Full house.’

Anna looked up and smiled at Luke.

See? the smile said. Nobody’s going to blink an eye at me being in Theatre with you. We are the only two people who know the real reason I have to be here and we both know why it has to be this way. Her smile faded but she held his gaze. Get used to it, she advised silently. You don’t have to like it but you do have to deal with it.

Not that she expected him to deal with it in quite the way he did. By making her the lead surgeon. Talking her through the more complex aspects but only taking over for a few minutes at a time. It was a long and complicated surgery. The middle-aged female patient had a tumour in one lung that had spread to send tentacles around the major vessels that returned blood to the heart. The diagnosis had not been made until the reduction in blood flow due to the compression had given her heart failure. Swollen ankles and shortness of breath had finally made her seek medical help.

Fortunately, they found no cardiac involvement, but the dissection needed to remove as much of the tumour as possible was tricky. The patient was on bypass for nearly five hours as Anna and Luke worked to free the blood vessels and remove a lobe of her lung. By the end of the procedure Anna was exhausted. It wasn’t until their patient was off bypass and her heart was beating again effectively that she could relax at all and it was then that she realised how Luke had ‘dealt’ with what he’d taken to be her supervision. He’d made her do the work and put so much pressure on her that she hadn’t had time to even think about how focused he had been.

If that was how he wanted to play this, it was fine by her. Brilliant, in fact. In order to watch her and challenge her to improve her own skills, he was having to focus just as intently as he would if he was doing the procedure alone. More so, in some ways, because he had to think ahead in several directions so that he could troubleshoot if she wasn’t on exactly the same wavelength.

Not that any major discrepancies in thinking had occurred. They had been amazingly in tune. So much so that Anna would have noticed instantly if Luke had lost focus. He hadn’t. She had been challenged. She’d learnt a lot. To outward appearances they had worked as a close, harmonious team. The initiative had been a huge success as far as Anna was concerned and not only from a personal perspective. The patient’s quality of life had been improved immensely and, if she was lucky, the length of it might be well beyond current expectations.

While Luke might not be prepared to recognise it yet, there had also been an additional, albeit secret bonus. He had done more than save face. Nobody watching—and there had been plenty of them—would have thought there were any undercurrents. They would have seen a head of department using exceptional skills in both surgery and teaching. His kudos had probably been raised by several degrees.

She might be exhausted now but she was also delighted. This could work.

And maybe it was a good thing that Luke was grumpy about it. Anna found she was frequently the recipient of glares over the next few days. Surprisingly often, and not just when she might have expected to cross paths with her senior colleague on ward rounds or in meetings.

It was getting so that she could sense that brooding, intense look from a considerable distance. From the end of a corridor, for instance, when she got out of a lift. Or from across the canteen when she joined a lunchtime queue. He seemed to be everywhere. All the time. It didn’t matter how late she stayed at work to catch up on paperwork or how early she arrived to get ahead with whatever her day held. He was always there. Or was it just that she was so much more aware of it?

Too aware.

So, yes, it was good that he was grumpy. It meant that he wasn’t thinking about that ill-advised distraction of kissing him. Or, if he did think about it, it didn’t make him happy. Either way, he wasn’t going to want a repetition of anything like that and that was exactly what Anna needed to push herself forward. To get over it and get on with her career and her life.

It was good.

It was. And if she reminded herself of that often enough, it would be true.

It should have been a relief to get Christmas and the start of the new year over with.

To get back to business as usual and away from all the forced cheerfulness of so many people trying to spread the joy of the season. Even patients were wishing him a happy new year, and there’d been far too many invitations to social events to find plausible excuses to avoid. So many smiles to produce.

Theatre had been the best place to be, of course. No tinsel allowed in there and nurses had to remove any silly seasonal earrings. He didn’t tolerate small talk either so he didn’t have to hear people talking about how excited their children had been as they had counted down the sleeps or what people were planning to do to see in the new year.

The only downside of being in Theatre had been that Anna had followed through her threat of supervising him. His response had been a form of attack in a way. If she wanted it to be like this and pretend she was there to improve her knowledge and skills then she could jolly well put the hard yards in instead of watching.

To his surprise, Anna had embraced the perspective and anyone in the gallery would have been convinced that that was the only reason she was in Theatre with him. Even more surprising was how much he enjoyed teaching her. At some point during that first operation on the woman with that nasty tumour threatening her cardiac function, Luke had stopped watching like a hawk to catalogue things he could be doing better than Anna and, instead, began channelling his knowledge and watching how quickly she understood what he was saying and how deftly the information was put into use.

He not only enjoyed the session, if he was really honest with himself, it had also been a relief to have her there.

Just in case.

Having watched Anna so closely during that surgery, Luke found himself continuing to watch her. He justified the scrutiny by telling himself he was watching her to see whether she was watching him. He watched her on ward rounds and in meetings. Even in the canteen. It was easy to create any number of opportunities to watch his assistant. He could find patients in the intensive care unit whose condition needed review. Departmental issues to discuss. Research projects to plan and monitor.

He discovered that Anna spent almost as much time in the hospital as he did. Way too many hours to have any kind of life away from a career. How did she find time to work on renovating that small cottage she lived in or to give her pet the attention it needed? Not that it was any of his business.

Or was it? At one point, he had to wonder if Anna’s willingness to put in so much extra time was purely due to her dedication to her career or whether it had something to do with him still being in some kind of probationary period. Was he just aware of it because he was trying to keep one step ahead of her?

Or … was he watching for a signal of some kind that she remembered that kiss?

That she might find herself thinking about it as often as he did? Sometimes he would catch her gaze and he’d feel an odd buzz. A hint that she might remember.

That she might be wondering if it would be as extraordinary if it happened again.

Wanting it to happen again.

On one of the first days of the new year, Anna was with Luke and one of her registrars in his office. They were discussing one of the new research projects due to get under way.

‘The main causes of prolonged hospital stay, morbidity and mortality following cardiac surgery are haemorrhage and infection,’ Luke was reminding the young doctor present. ‘And, quite often, infection is one of the sequelae of haemorrhage.’

Anna was listening quietly. This was an occasion when she was in Luke’s company but his attention was on someone else. Even when he involved her in the discussion, he would forget to glare at her and the simmering undercurrent that she was waiting on for further evidence that Luke was unfit for the position of responsibility he held vanished. She could interact with—and enjoy—the company of an intelligent and stimulating colleague.

Bask in it even.

The registrar was nodding. ‘Is that because they’re more susceptible to infection due to a low cardiac output?’

‘That’s one of the parameters we need to keep in mind. There’s also the issue of how long the chest has been open, whether they’ve been on bypass or whether hypothermia has been employed. There’s a lot of stuff that’s been written on aspects of this in other studies. What we’re aiming to do is possibly challenge their findings with more current information or testing methods and/or add in any other significant parameters. Here, I’ve printed off some of the articles for you.’

The registrar’s eyes widened. So did Anna’s.

How long had Luke been in here already today to search out and print off this stack of material? And this was supposed to be a day off for him. Didn’t he have other places he wanted to be? Or other people he wanted to be with?

And why was the thought that he’d rather be here, having a meeting with her, a cause for a rather pleasant internal glow? Not that Anna was going to analyse her reaction. She didn’t get a chance to, anyway, because her pager sounded.