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Mikki gave her head a little toss as she faced him. ‘Nothing.’
One brow lifted in an arc. ‘So no one knows we were once engaged?’
‘Why should they?’ she said.
The corner of his mouth kicked up again. ‘Interesting.’
Mikki felt her lower back tingle as his gaze swept over her, lingering a little too long on her mouth. Again her lips began to fizz with sensation and she ached to send her tongue out to dampen down their sudden dryness, but it seemed to be too intimate an action, a signal of want and need she wasn’t prepared to reveal at any cost. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to be professional and mature about this situation, not fluttering with nerves and panic every time she ran into him. ‘Have you told anyone?’ She threw his question back.
‘Not yet.’
Mikki wasn’t sure what she felt about his ‘not yet’. It seemed to contain a threat that he might at some point reveal their past relationship. A couple of people at the hospital knew she had been engaged once but she had never told anyone Lewis’s name or occupation. She didn’t want anyone to connect the dots, and certainly not now with him here in the flesh. ‘What about your girlfriend?’ she asked. ‘Surely you’ve told her about your broken engagement?’
He folded his arms across the broad span of his chest, his eyes still holding hers in a lock-down that was as penetrating as it was unnerving. ‘Abby is not my girlfriend,’ he said.
Mikki only just managed to stop from rolling her eyes. ‘Well, whatever she is, she’s clearly smitten by you. She was hanging on every word that came out of your mouth.’
His eyes softened. ‘She’s rather sweet, isn’t she? I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you but we had a lot of catching up to do.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ Mikki said crisply.
There was a little beat of silence.
‘So how are we going to manage this situation?’ Lewis asked.
‘You mean working together?’
‘Yes. Are you going to be OK with it?’
‘I’m perfectly fine with it,’ Mikki said, but on the inside she was screaming, Of course I’m not OK with it!
‘That’s fine, then,’ he said, unfolding his arms.
Mikki pressed her lips together. ‘Um—what about the other stuff?’
His brow lifted again. ‘What other stuff?’
‘The we-were-once-engaged stuff,’ she said.
‘I don’t see that it has anything to do with anyone but us.’
Just to hear him say ‘us’ was enough to send a shock-wave of reaction through her whole body. To be bracketed with him in such a way was deeply disturbing. It suggested an intimacy between them that should no longer be there. Was it still there or was it just her imagination? It was hard to tell from his expression. Even when they had been together in the past he had revealed little of himself. He had been an island she had briefly visited before pulling up anchor and moving on.
But how soon before the hospital grapevine got its tentacles around their past? The medical world was small, the subset of the surgical world even smaller. It would only take one word out of place for people to make the connection. ‘Well, I’m not about to tell anyone,’ she said. ‘I make it a habit to keep my private life separate from my professional one.’
‘You’ve done well career-wise, from all accounts,’ Lewis said, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets as he crossed one ankle over the other. ‘No one works longer hours, or so I’m told. That can’t keep much time free for a private life.’
Mikki shifted her gaze out of the range of his. ‘I love my job.’
‘You say that as if you’re trying to convince yourself rather than me.’
She threw him a cutting look. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve cut back to working nine to five these days?’
His ice-blue eyes glittered like shards of ice. ‘I’ve been working on the work-life balance.’
Her expression showed her cynicism. ‘I’m sure you have.’
‘Are you seeing anyone?’
Mikki frowned at him. ‘What sort of question is that?’
He gave a light shrug. ‘I’m interested in what my successor is like. Or has there been more than one?’
‘It’s been seven years,’ Mikki said with a lift of her chin. ‘What do you think?’
Something moved in his eyes, a camera-shutter flick. ‘You’re not married.’
She arched her brow. ‘So?’
‘And you’re not living with anyone,’ he said.
Mikki folded her arms, the height of her chin challenging. ‘You seem to have done your homework. The question that begs to be asked is: why? Why are you so interested in my private life after all this time?’
Another beat of silence ticked past.
‘Was it worth it, Mikki?’ he asked. ‘Have you finally got what you want?’
Mikki dropped her arms from around her chest and moved to the other side of the office, her eyes averted from his. ‘Of course I’ve got what I want,’ she said.
‘And yet you don’t seem happy.’
She swung back to face him angrily. ‘You’re overstepping the mark, Lewis.’
‘Am I?’
She tightened her mouth. ‘You know you are. My happiness or lack thereof should be of no concern to you.’
‘Is that the way you want to play this?’ he asked. ‘Just pretend we don’t have a history together? How long do you think it will be before someone finds out? Sooner or later someone’s going to make the connection, Mikki. We worked in the same hospital in London. You know how the system works. Everyone knows everyone in this profession.’
Mikki swallowed a knot of tension in her throat. ‘No one needs to find out if we maintain a professional distance.’
He gave a snort of mock amusement and drawled, ‘You’re fooling yourself, sweetheart.’
Mikki cast a nervous gaze around to see if anyone had overheard his casual endearment. ‘Don’t call me that.’
He stepped closer, his tall frame shrinking the space like an adult stepping into a child’s cubby house. ‘It’s still there, isn’t it?’ he said in velvet-smooth tone.
Mikki didn’t need to ask him to clarify what he meant. She could feel it in the air between them— the tension, the crackling, the energy, the temptation. ‘You’re deluding yourself, Lewis,’ she said. ‘I’ve moved on. We’ve both moved on with our lives.’
One of his hands picked up a strand of her hair that had worked its way out of the tight ponytail she had fashioned earlier that day. He coiled it around his finger in an action he had done so many times in the past. Mikki couldn’t have moved away if she had tried. She stood mesmerised by the tether of his touch, by the intense blue of his gaze as it held hers. It was as if the busy, bustling world of the hospital had faded into the background, leaving them isolated in a bubble that contained memories of private moments—intimate moments only they knew about. Her heart kicked against her breastbone as his finger drew closer to her scalp. She could smell his aftershave. It wasn’t one she recognised but it was underpinned with his all-too-familiar smell: musk and soap and healthy potent male.
‘Do you want to know why I came back after so long out of the country?’ he asked.
She drew in a breath that felt like it had thorns attached. ‘To further your career,’ she said. ‘That’s always been your priority. Nothing comes before that.’
He uncoiled the strand of hair and tucked it behind her ear. ‘A career is not everything, Mikki,’ he said as his hand dropped back down by his side. ‘It can’t keep you warm at night.’
Mikki stepped out of his force field. ‘I’m sure you have plenty of nubile companions to do that for you,’ she said.
He gave that almost-smile again. ‘You sound jealous.’
She sent him a gelid look. ‘I can assure you I’m not.’
‘All the same, it would be good if we can be friends as well as colleagues,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to add to the stress of the workplace by us being at war with one another.’
‘Friends, Lewis?’ Her expression was incredulous. ‘Isn’t that asking a little too much given the circumstances?’
His jaw grew tense as if he was trying to contain the anger that was there just under the surface of his civility. ‘You walked out on me, Mikki,’ he said. ‘You didn’t give our relationship a chance.’
Mikki glared at him. ‘Our relationship should never have occurred in the first place. It was a mistake from start to finish.’
‘I know it had a rough start but we could have worked at it,’ he said. ‘We could have tried to sort out the career commitments so that both of us could have had what we wanted.’
‘We didn’t want the same things,’ Mikki said. ‘You never wanted the ties of a family so early in your career. You told me that when we first met. But then, when I told you I was pregnant, you turned into someone else. You were obsessed with the baby, what school it would go to, what football team it would support, which of us it would look like. How could I know if you were truly enthusiastic or just making the best of a bad situation?’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Abandon my own flesh and blood? I couldn’t do that. There was no other choice but to get married. I got you pregnant. It was my fault. I accepted that then and I still accept responsibility for it now. I didn’t want any child of mine growing up without its father.’
Mikki felt perilously close to tears, tears she hadn’t shed in years. ‘You were glad when I lost the baby. I know you were. It left you free to get on with your life without the responsibility of parenthood to deal with.’
‘Why would I be glad that you had to go through that?’ he asked, frowning darkly. ‘What sort of jerk do you take me for? I was gutted when you lost the baby.’
‘You never said a word to me,’ Mikki said. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘You had been through a devastating experience,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it was fair to dump my stuff on you on top of what you’d gone through. Talking about it only makes it worse, or that’s what I thought at the time. I hated seeing you cry. I felt responsible. I was the one who got you pregnant. I felt like I had ruined your life.’
Mikki bit her lip. She was feeling shocked at hearing his side of things. She had been so focussed on what she had felt that she hadn’t factored in Lewis’s feelings at all. He had always been so composed and clinical. Had he hidden all that he was feeling behind that mask of professional composure? Had he truly felt as devastated as she had?
Lewis scraped a hand through his dark brown hair, leaving deep grooves in the strands. ‘I don’t do emotion well, Mikki,’ he said in a world-weary tone. ‘For work I have to shut off my feelings so they don’t cloud my judgement. It’s hard to switch them back on again in my private life.’
His private life was a sore point and it made her sound a lot more resentful than she would have liked. ‘You didn’t seem to have too much trouble accessing your feelings the other night with Gabby or Tabby or whatever her name was,’ Mikki said.
‘You really are spoiling for a fight, aren’t you, Mikki?’ he asked.
Mikki opened her mouth to send him a scathing retort but he had already swung away to walk out of the office, almost bumping into one of the registrars as he left the ward.
‘Gosh, Mr Beck seemed rather annoyed,’ Kylie Ingram commented as she came into the office. ‘Has one of his operating lists been cancelled or something?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Mikki mumbled by way of reply, before excusing herself to answer her mobile.
* * *
‘We have four patients scheduled to come in tomorrow for Mr Beck’s list,’ Jane Melrose, an ICU nurse, informed Mikki as she came in for her shift a couple of days later.
‘Have we got the beds?’ Mikki asked, frowning as her gaze swept over the already full unit.
‘Not unless someone is transferred, discharged to the ward or dies,’ Jane said flatly.
Mikki pressed her lips together. ‘Then Mr Beck’s list will have to be culled. We’re stretched to capacity as it is and that’s not leaving room for any A and E admissions.’
‘I’ll call the theatre supervisor,’ Jane said and sighed. ‘Remind me why I work here?’
‘You get paid,’ Mikki said.
‘There’s got to be more to it than that,’ Jane said. ‘Aren’t I supposed to feel fulfilled and get a sense I’m making a difference?’
Mikki smiled. ‘We’re all making a difference, Jane. I’ll call the theatre supervisor. You go and have your tea break.’
Jane instantly brightened. ‘I just remembered why I work here. You are such a nice person to work with.’
‘It’s very sweet of you to say so, Jane, but I have a feeling I’m not going to be popular once I’ve made this call,’ she said as she resignedly picked up the phone in the office.
* * *
‘What do you mean, half my list has been cancelled?’ Lewis snapped at the theatre supervisor who had delivered the news.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Beck, but there are no available beds in ICU,’ the nurse said. ‘Dr Landon was most insistent.’
Lewis frowned. ‘So this was Dr Landon’s decision?’
‘Well, sort of, I guess,’ she said. ‘This stuff happens all the time. ICU is always full to the brim and the op lists have to be shuffled around a fair bit. If there’s no ICU bed post-op, you can’t operate. Some of ICU is contracted out to the private hospital next door, but the unit is too small anyway.’
‘I know how a co-located hospital works,’ Lewis said curtly. ‘I just don’t like having decisions made over my head without consultation with me. Which patients were cancelled? I should be the one deciding which patients are put off, not someone who has never seen the patients. I know who is the most urgent, I’ve done the work-ups, organised the preparation. I will be the one making that decision.’
‘You’ll have to take up that with Dr Landon,’ the nurse said, giving a nervous grimace before she left.
Lewis scraped a hand through his hair in frustration. He didn’t like being the ogre with nursing staff but his first week and a half at St Benedict’s hadn’t gone as smoothly as he would have liked. His office and consultation room were still being painted and fitted out, even though he had been promised they would be ready by the time he arrived, and now half his operation list had been cancelled by his ex-fiancée. Was she deliberately putting him in his place or was there a genuine bed crisis?
He went down to the unit but Mikki was nowhere in sight. He asked one of the registrars on duty, who informed him she had gone to the doctors’ room on the fifth floor for a coffee break.
Lewis took the stairs two at a time and shouldered open the doctors’ room door to find Mikki waiting for some fresh coffee to brew in the percolator on the bench next to a microwave and toaster. ‘Just the person I want to see,’ he said, pressing the door with the flat of his hand so it clicked shut.
Her tawny-brown eyes widened a fraction. ‘I take it this is about your list?’ she said.
‘I have four ill patients I need to operate on tomorrow,’ Lewis said. ‘What am I supposed to say to them now you’ve cancelled the surgery on half of them?’
‘We haven’t got the beds,’ she said. ‘The two we’ve given you don’t need ICU beds post-op. Didn’t Theatre Management tell you?’
‘Find the beds,’ he said, locking gazes with her, his mouth set in an intractable line. ‘I want those two operations to go ahead as planned.’
‘I can’t do that. The unit is full. We had two unexpected admissions from private overnight. That’s the two post-op beds gone. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.’
‘Mikki, this is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Surely there is a better way of managing this? Those two beds should have been earmarked for neurosurgical post-op. The private hospital should have sent their patients elsewhere. Aren’t there any patients you can transfer to another ICU somewhere else? Is there not one patient here you can wean off a ventilator?’
‘I can’t turn people’s ventilators off just because you need the beds,’ she said with a spark in her eyes.
‘I’m not asking you to do any such thing. There should just have been better communication over this, especially with me.’
‘Look, Lewis, the system is overstretched here. They should have told you that before you took on the position,’ she said. ‘It’s like this just about every week with every surgical speciality in need of high-dependency beds. There just aren’t enough ICU beds for every specialty. People have to be postponed, especially, it seems, public patients.’
‘Mikki, you know neurosurgical patients are nearly always high acuity,’ he said. ‘Surely I don’t have to bargain for beds every time I’m scheduled to do a list?’
Her eyes moved away from his as she poured her coffee. ‘Take it up with the hospital management,’ she said. ‘It’s not my problem.’
‘Have you even thought about a way to manage this better?’ Lewis asked.
She turned her defiant brown gaze on him. ‘It’s my job to keep critically ill patients alive. I don’t have the time to brainstorm on how to manage the hospital better. That’s Administration’s job.’
‘How many non-surgical patients do you currently have in ICU?’ Lewis asked.
‘Seven.’
‘How many of them are on ventilators?’
‘Two.’
‘Then why can’t those other five patients be transferred somewhere else and free up ventilated beds?’ he asked.
She appeared to think about it for a moment. ‘That would take a hell of a lot of organisation, transferring patients between ICU units in different hospitals. There would be issues, infection control for a start. But I doubt if Admin would come at the transfer costs, even if we could find other non-surgical ICUs willing to take patients.’
‘There are private hospital ICU beds elsewhere. Non-ventilated beds could be leased there to free up post-op beds here,’ he said.
She put her coffee cup down. ‘That’s something that would have to be dealt with by the powers that be. I can only do what I can to make room in my own department.’
‘Mikki, I would really appreciate if we could somehow just do this,’ Lewis said. ‘I have a thirty-five-year-old mother of three who has already had a subarachnoid bleed from an aneurysm. If she has another bleed, for which she’s got a worse than fifty per cent chance in the next day, she won’t make it—three kids with no mother. The other urgent patient has an astrocytoma on the verge of coning. If I don’t debulk the tumour asap it’s not going to be worth doing. And I think the new regime of intracranial chemo and radical radiotherapy has a real chance of eradicating this tumour. Twenty-one years old. Think about it, Mikki. This young guy hasn’t even started life and he’s staring down the barrel of it ending if I don’t do this operation. I’m not being difficult just for the heck of it. I really want those cases done. This is what I’ve spent the last decade training to do, and because of some dumb administrative lethargy I’m being told I can’t treat these people.’
Her slim throat rose and fell. ‘I understand the urgency. I always try and accommodate the high-priority cases. But I’m up against a limit here. I’m not the head of the department. Jack French is.’
‘But he’s currently on leave. Surely you can take charge here, can’t you? Someone has got to.’
‘Yes, I know.’ She gave a sigh of resignation. ‘I’ll see who I can possibly move but I’m not making any promises.’
‘That’s my girl,’ Lewis said.
‘Not any more,’ she said with a little hoist of her chin as she moved past him. The door closed behind her, the click of the lock adding a measure of finality to her statement.
Lewis had to fight his primal response to go after her. His reaction to seeing her again was something he had been preparing himself for ever since he had been approached about the position at St Benedict’s. It had been one of the reasons he had taken the post. He wanted to prove to himself he had moved on. He had known it would be difficult, seeing her. He had known it would stir up old hurts and disappointments. But he hadn’t expected to feel the same level of attraction after all this time. It had caught him totally off guard, which was foolish of him now that he thought about it. Over the last seven years, whenever he had thought of Mikki and their short and passionate time together he had felt a deep aching sense of loss at how it had ended. He had been in and out of other relationships before and since but he had never felt anything when he thought about them or even when he occasionally ran into them. But with Mikki it was like a punch to his gut, a deep, cruel punch that ached and throbbed for hours afterwards. This posting was supposed to change all that. To desensitise him, but so far it was doing the opposite.
Normally he was good at locking away his feelings. Since his brother’s death twenty years ago, feelings had been off limits. Feelings equalled vulnerability. And the one thing he hated to show was any sign of vulnerability. Mikki had walked out on him, so showing any sign of hurt, betrayal or disappointment had been the last thing he had been prepared to do. But somehow seeing her again had triggered something deep inside him and he couldn’t seem to turn it off. It niggled at him, like an annoying itch he couldn’t reach to scratch. She evoked feelings in him he had never expected to feel for anyone again. He didn’t want to need her. He didn’t want to want her. He had never wanted to want or need her or anyone. But just as she had come into his life in the past she had changed his black and white to vivid vibrant colour with her sparkly personality and endless cheerfulness. He had seen very little of that vibrant personality since he had come back. Had he done that to her with his clumsy handling of their relationship?
He felt the bone-deep ache of desire when he was with her, a physical need that no other woman incited in him. Somehow standing within touching distance of Mikki made him want to pull her into his arms the way he had had all those years ago and feel her body nestle up against his as if she had finally found her way home. He had not felt that with anyone else. It annoyed him that he hadn’t moved on as far as he had thought. Was it the fact that she had ended their relationship and not him? Hadn’t she just reminded him of it with her pert response?
She was no longer his girl.
She was no longer his lover.
She was no longer his fiancée.
He didn’t matter to her any more. That was what hurt the most. It was the one thing he couldn’t move on from. He was a part of her past she clearly wanted to forget. The fact that she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone suggested she was ashamed of it. That hurt. That really, really bugged him. What they’d had together had been good, better than good. They’d had the chance to have a wonderful partnership and she had thrown it all away. How could she have professed to have loved him so passionately way back then but feel nothing for him now?
It shouldn’t matter what she felt now, but it did. And that was perhaps the thing that annoyed him most. He wanted her to still feel something for him, anything but that cool professional show-no-emotion ice-princess thing she had going. He was determined to break through it. He would chip away at that icy barrier until he found the warm-hearted, spontaneous girl he had fallen in love with seven years ago.
He just hoped she was still there…
CHAPTER THREE
‘WOW, Mr Beck must have really laid down the law with you,’ Jane Melrose said as she saw the orderlies in the process of transferring two patients to other hospitals.
Mikki gave her a speaking glance. ‘He can be very persuasive. But to tell you the truth, he has a point. This place could be better managed.’
‘Jack French won’t want to hear you say that,’ Jane said. ‘He thinks he’s the best director this unit’s ever had.’
‘He does the best he can,’ Mikki said. ‘But it’s always complicated. Look at poor Mrs Yates, for instance. Eighty-seven years old, on a ventilator with no sign of improvement after her bile-duct injury. Her daughters want us to withdraw support but her son is refusing to allow it.’
‘I think it’s about her will.’ Jane said. ‘I heard one of the relatives talking about it. Apparently she changed it recently and the son wants it changed back. Fat chance of that happening. Greedy vultures, some people.’