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James didn’t once take his gaze from Sarah. He was watching her closely, as though he was mesmerised, taking in the warmth of her response, the soft flush of heat that flared in her cheeks.
The breath caught in her throat, and a familiar hunger surged inside her as she returned his gaze. There was a sudden dull ache in her chest—an ache that came from knowing her unbidden yearning could never be assuaged. He still had the power to melt her bones and fill her with that humiliating need that would forever be her downfall.
She closed her eyes briefly. How on earth would she be able to work with him over the weeks, months, that lay ahead?
Sarah looked out of the window. She had to keep things between them on a professional footing. That was the only way she could survive. From now on it would become her mantra …
Dear Reader
Once bitten, twice shy … So the old saying goes. It’s one that intrigues me … How, I wondered, would a young girl respond if the man she yearned for turned her away? Wouldn’t she do her utmost to steer clear of him in the future?
That’s exactly how it was for Sarah, after James Benson rejected her as a vulnerable teenager. Meeting him again, years later, she’s alarmed to discover that she still has feelings for him—but she can’t possibly act on them.
Besides, she has way too much going on in her life, with her young half-brother and half-sister to look after, as well as the responsibility of working as a doctor in a busy emergency department.
Add to the mix the tranquil setting of a picturesque Cornish fishing village—a favourite with me—and I think you’ll agree we have the perfect prescription for romance!
Love
Joanna
When JOANNA NEIL discovered Mills & Boon®, her lifelong addiction to reading crystallised into an exciting new career writing Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance. Her characters are probably the outcome of her varied lifestyle, which includes working as a clerk, typist, nurse and infant teacher. She enjoys dressmaking and cooking at her Leicestershire home. Her family includes a husband, son and daughter, an exuberant yellow Labrador and two slightly crazed cockatiels. She currently works with a team of tutors at her local education centre to provide creative writing workshops for people interested in exploring their own writing ambitions.
Recent titles by Joanna Neil:
DR RIGHT ALL ALONG
DR LANGLEY: PROTECTOR OR PLAYBOY?
A COTSWOLD CHRISTMAS BRIDE
THE TAMING OF DR ALEX DRAYCOTT
BECOMING DR BELLINI’S BRIDE
PLAYBOY UNDER THE MISTLETOE
These books are also available in eBook format from www.millsandboon.co.uk
Tamed by her Brooding Boss
Joanna Neil
www.millsandboon.co.uk
CHAPTER ONE
‘SO, ARE you both okay …? Do you have everything you need?’ Sarah’s glance trailed over her young half-brother and half-sister, while she tried to work out if there was anything she had forgotten. It was a cool spring morning, with the wind blowing in off the sea, but the children were well wrapped up in warm jackets and trousers.
‘Do you still have your money for the lunch break, Sam?’ she asked, pausing to tuck a flyaway strand of chestnut-coloured hair behind her ear. He was such a whirlwind, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he’d lost it somewhere between the front door of the house and the school gates.
Ten-year-old Sam was clearly feeling awkward in his brand-new school uniform, but he stopped wriggling long enough to dig his hand deep into his trouser pocket.
‘Yeah, it’s still there.’
‘Good. I’ll organise some sort of account for you both with the school as soon as I can, but for now make sure you get a decent meal with what you have.’ She gave Sam a wry smile. ‘I don’t want you to go spending it on crisps and junk food.’
His shoulders moved in brief acknowledgement and she turned her attention to Rosie. The little girl wasn’t saying very much—in fact, both children had been unusually quiet this morning. Perhaps she should have expected that, since it was their first day at a new school. They didn’t know this neighbourhood very well as yet, and they’d had to adjust to so many changes of late that it was understandable if they were struggling to take everything on board.
‘How about you, Rosie? Are you all right?’
Rosie nodded, her expression solemn, her grey eyes downcast. ‘I’m okay.’ She was two years younger than her brother, but in some ways she seemed a little more mature than him. It looked as though she was coping, but you could never tell.
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine, both of you.’ Sarah tried to sound encouraging. ‘I know it’s not easy, starting at a new school mid-term, but I expect your teachers will introduce you to everybody and you’ll soon make friends.’ She hesitated for a moment, but when neither child said anything in response she put an arm around each of them and started down the path towards the classrooms. ‘Let’s get you settled in—remember, if I’m still at work by the time school finishes, Murray from next door will come and pick you up.’
A few minutes later, she kissed them goodbye and left them in their cloakrooms, anxiety weighing heavily on her, but there was relief, too, when she saw that the other children were curious about the newcomers and had begun to talk to them.
Sarah pulled in a deep breath as she walked back to her car, trying to gather sustenance from an inner well of strength. It was difficult to know who felt worse, she or the children, but somehow she had to push those concerns to one side for the moment and get on with the rest of what looked to be a difficult day ahead.
It wasn’t just the children who were suffering from first-day nerves—she would be starting out on a new job, riding along in the air ambulance with the immediate care doctor for the area. That would carry with it its own difficulties … but that wasn’t what was troubling her. As a doctor herself, she hoped she was well prepared to cope with any medical emergency.
She set the car in motion, driving away from the small Cornish fishing village and heading along the coast road towards the air ambulance base where she was to meet up with James Benson.
Her hands tightened on the steering-wheel. Now, there was the crux of the problem. Even recalling his name caused a flurry of sensation to well up inside her abdomen and every now and again her stomach was doing strange, uncomfortable kinds of flip-overs.
How long had it been since she’d last seen him? A good many years, for sure … She’d been a teenager back then, naïve, innocent and desperate to have his attention. Her whole body flushed with heat at the memory, and she shook her head, as though that would push it away.
She’d do anything rather than have to meet up with him once again, but the chances of avoiding him had been scuppered from the outset. Maybe if she’d known from the start that he was a consultant in the emergency department where she’d wanted to work, she would never have applied for the post as a member of the team.
And how could she have known that he was also on call with the air ambulance? It was a job she’d trained for, coveted, and once she’d been drawn in, hook, line and sinker, there was no way she could have backed out of the deal.
She drove swiftly, carefully, barely noticing that she had left the coast behind, with its spectacular cliffs and rugged inlets, and now she was passing through deeply wooded valleys with clusters of whitewashed stone cottages clinging to the hillsides here and there. The bluebells were in flower, presenting her with occasional glimpses of a soft carpet of blue amidst the undergrowth. Small, white pockets of wood sorrel peeped out from the hedges, vying for space with yellow vetch. It was beautiful, but she couldn’t appreciate any of it while her heart ached from leaving the children behind and her nerves were stretched to breaking point from anticipating the meeting ahead.
At the base, she drove into a slot in the staff car park and then made her way into the building, to where the air ambulance personnel had their office. Bracing herself, she knocked briskly on the door and then went inside.
The room was empty and she frowned. She couldn’t have missed a callout because the helicopter was standing outside on the helipad.
She took a moment to look around. There were various types of medical equipment on charge in here, a computer monitor displaying a log of the air ambulance’s last few missions, and a red phone rested in a prominent position on the polished wooden desk. To one side of the room there was a worktop, where a kettle was making a gentle hissing sound as the water inside heated up.
‘Ah, there you are.’ She turned as James Benson’s voice alerted her to his presence. Her heart began to race, pounding as those familiar, deep tones smoothed over her like melting, dark chocolate. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you,’ he added. ‘We’ve all been changing into our flight suits and generally getting ready for the off.’
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak just then. He was every bit as striking as she remembered, with that compelling presence that made you feel as though he dominated the room. Or perhaps it was just that she was unusually on edge today. He was tall, with a strong, muscular build, and he still had those dark good looks which, to her everlasting shame, had been her undoing all those years ago, the chiselled, angular bone structure and jet-black hair, and those penetrating grey eyes that homed in on you and missed nothing.
He was looking at her now, his thoughtful gaze moving over her, lighting on the long, burnished chestnut of her hair and coming to rest on the pale oval of her face.
‘I wasn’t sure if it really would be you,’ he said. ‘When I saw your name on the acceptance letter I wondered for a minute or two whether it might be some other Sarah Franklyn, but the chances of there being two doctors in the neighbourhood with the same name was pretty remote. I know you went to medical school and worked in Devon.’ His glance meshed with hers, and she steeled herself not to look away. He’d obviously heard, from time to time, about what she was doing. She straightened her shoulders. She would get through this. Of course she would. How bad could it be?
‘I expect my taking up a medical career seems a strange choice to you, knowing me from back then.’ Her voice was husky, and she cleared her throat and tried again, aiming to sound more confident this time. ‘You weren’t in on the interviews, so it didn’t occur to me that we would be working together.’
He inclined his head briefly. ‘I was away, attending a conference—it was important and couldn’t be avoided or delegated, so the head of Emergency made the final decision.’ His mouth twisted in a way that suggested he wasn’t too pleased about that, and Sarah felt a sudden surge of panic rise up to constrict her throat. So he didn’t want her here. That was something she hadn’t reckoned on.
His glance shifted slowly over her taut features and she lifted her chin in a brash attempt at keeping her poise.
His grey eyes darkened, but his voice remained steady and even toned. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and change into your flight suit, and then I’ll show you around and introduce you to the rest of the crew. We’ll have coffee. The kettle should have boiled by the time you’re ready.’
‘Yes. That sounds good.’
At least he was accepting her presence here as a done thing. That was a small mercy. And it looked as though he wasn’t going to comment on what had happened all those years ago. Just the thought of him doing that was enough to twist her stomach into knots, but for now perhaps she was safe. After all, she’d been a vulnerable seventeen-year-old back then, and now, some nine years later, she was a grown woman who ought to be in full control of herself. Why, then, did she feel so ill at ease, so uncertain about everything?
But she knew the answer, didn’t she? It was because, sooner or later, the past was bound to come up and haunt her.
He showed her to a room where she could change into her high-visibility, orange flight suit, and she took those few minutes of privacy to try and get herself together. She’d keep things on a professional level between them, nothing more, no private stuff to mess things up. That way, she could keep a tight grip on her emotions and show him that she was a totally different person now, calm and up to the mark, and nothing like she’d been as a teenager.
She cringed as she thought back to some of the things she had done in her early teen years. Had she really driven Ben Huxley’s tractor around the village on that late summer evening? He’d forever regretted leaving the keys in the ignition, and his shock at discovering his beloved tractor stranded at a precarious angle in a ditch an hour later had been nothing to the concern he’d felt at finding a thirteen-year-old girl slumped over the wheel.
And what had been James’s reaction when she’d broken into the stables on his father’s estate one evening and saddled up one of the horses? It had been her fourteenth birthday and she hadn’t cared a jot about what might happen or considered that what she had been doing was wrong. She had loved the horses, had been used to being around them, and on that day she’d felt an overwhelming need to ride through the meadows and somehow leave her troubles behind. She had been wild, reckless, completely out of control, and James had recognised that.
‘None of this will bring your mother back,’ he’d said to her, and she’d stared at him, her green eyes wide with defiance, her jaw lifted in challenge.
‘What would you know about it?’ she’d responded in a dismissive, careless tone.
She’d been extremely lucky. No one had reported her to the police. She’d got away with things, and yet the more she’d avoided paying for her misdemeanours, the more she’d played up. ‘Mayhem in such a small package,’ was the way James had put it. No wonder he didn’t want her around now.
He made coffee for her when she went back into the main room a short time later. ‘Is it still cream with one sugar?’ he asked, and she gave him a bemused look, her mouth dropping open a little in surprise. He remembered that?
‘Yes … please,’ she said, and he waved her to a seat by the table.
‘Tom is our pilot,’ he said, nodding towards the man who sat beside her. Tom was in his forties, she guessed, black haired, with a smattering of grey streaks starting at his temples.
‘Pleased to meet you, Sarah,’ Tom said, smiling and pushing forward a platter filled with a selection of toasted sandwiches, which she guessed had been heated up in the mini-grill that stood on the worktop next to the coffee-maker. ‘Help yourself. You never know if you’re going to get a lunch break in this line of work, so you may as well eat while you get the chance.’
‘Thanks.’ She chose a bacon and cheese baguette and thought back to breakfast-time when she’d grabbed a slice of toast for herself while the children had tucked into their morning cereal. It seemed a long while ago now.
‘And this is Alex, the co-pilot,’ James said, turning to introduce the man opposite. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, with wavy brown hair and friendly hazel eyes.
‘Have you been up in a helicopter before?’ Alex asked, and Sarah nodded.
‘I worked with the air ambulance in Devon for a short time,’ she answered. ‘This is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, so when this job came up it looked like the ideal thing for me.’
He nodded. ‘James told us you’ll be working part time—is that by choice? It suits us, because our paramedic is employed on a part-time basis, too.’
‘Yes. I’ll just be doing one day a week here, and the rest of the time I’ll be working at the hospital in the A and E department.’
‘Sounds good. You’ll get the best of both worlds, so to speak. It’s unusual to do that, though, in A and E, I imagine?’
‘Not so much these days,’ Sarah murmured. ‘And it suits me to do things this way.’ She bit into her baguette and savoured the taste of melted cheese.
‘Sarah supplements her income by doing internet work,’ James put in. ‘She writes a medical advice column for a website, and one for a newspaper, too.’
How had he known that? She looked up at him in surprise, and his mouth made a wry shape. ‘I came across your advice column when I was browsing one day, and there was mention there of your work for the newspaper.’ He frowned. ‘I’m not sure it’s wise to make diagnoses without seeing the patient.’
‘That isn’t what I do, as I’m sure you’re aware if you’ve read my columns.’ Perhaps he was testing her, playing devil’s advocate, to see what kind of a doctor she really was, but she wasn’t going to let him get away with implying she might not be up to the job. Neither was she going to tell him about her personal circumstances and give him further reason for doubting her suitability for the post. She needed to work part time so that she could be there for Sam and Rosie whenever possible, and the writing had provided an excellent solution in that respect. Working from home was a good compromise.
‘I mostly work with a team of doctors,’ she said, ‘and we pick out letters from people who have conditions that would be of interest to a lot of others. We give the best advice we can in the circumstances, and point out other possible diagnoses and remedies.’
‘Hmm. You don’t think the best advice would be for your correspondents to go and see their own GP, or ask to see a specialist?’
‘I think a good many people have already done that and are still confused. Besides, patients are much better informed these days. They like to visit the doctor with some inkling of what his responses might be, or what treatment options might be available to them,’ she responded calmly.
He nodded. ‘I guess you could be right.’ He might have said more, but the red phone started to ring and he lifted the receiver without hesitation. He listened for a while and then said, ‘What’s the location? And his condition? Okay. We’re on our way.’
Food and coffee were abandoned as they hurried out to the helicopter. ‘A young man has been injured in a multiple-collision road-traffic accident,’ James told them. ‘He has a broken leg, but he’s some thirty miles away from here, and the paramedics on scene feel they need a doctor present. He needs to go to hospital as soon as possible.’
They were airborne within a minute or two, and soon Sarah was gazing down at lush green fields bordering a sparse network of ribbon-like roads. James sat next to her, commenting briefly on the landmarks they flew over.
‘There’s the hospital,’ he said, pointing out the helipad on top of the building. ‘We’ll be landing there when we have our patient secured.’
A little further on, they passed over a sprawling country estate, which had at its centre a large house built from grey, Cornish stone. It was an imposing, rectangular building, with lots of narrow, Georgian windows.
‘Your family’s place,’ Sarah mused. ‘Do you still live there?’ It was large enough for him to have the whole of the north wing to himself. That’s how things had been when she’d lived in the area, though he’d been away at medical school a good deal of the time, or working away at the hospital in Penzance. His younger brother had taken over the east wing, leaving the rest of the house to their parents.
He shook his head. ‘I have my own place now. It seemed for the best once I settled for working permanently in Truro. It’s closer to the hospital. Jonathan still lives on the estate, though he has a family of his own now. He has a boy and a girl.’
‘I wondered if he might stay on. He was always happy to live and work on the family farm, wasn’t he?’
James nodded. ‘So you decided to come back to your roots. What persuaded you to leave Devon? I have friends who worked there from time to time and, from what I heard on the grapevine, you were pretty much settled there. Rumour had it your mind was set on staying with the trauma unit.’
‘That’s pretty much the way it was to begin with … I was hoping I might get a permanent staff job but then I was passed over for promotion—a young male doctor pipped me at the post, and after that I started to look around for something else.’
He winced. ‘That must have hurt.’ He studied her briefly. ‘Knowing you, I guess his appointment must have made you restless. You wouldn’t have let the grass grow under your feet after that.’
‘No, I wouldn’t, that’s true.’ She wasn’t going to tell him about her situation—although it hadn’t been voiced at the time, she was fairly certain that she’d lost the promotion because of her family ties, and now she had to do everything she could to find secure, permanent work. This job promised all of that, but she was on three months’ probation to see how things worked out on both sides, and she didn’t need him to go looking for excuses to be rid of her before she signed a final contract.
By now they had reached their destination, and as the pilot came in to land, she could see the wreckage below. It looked as though a couple of motorcyclists had been involved in a collision with a saloon and a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and there were a number of casualties. A fire crew was in attendance, and from the blackened appearance of the saloon, it seemed that a blaze had erupted at some point. She could only hope the occupants of the car had escaped before the fire had taken hold.
‘You’ll be shadowing me,’ James said, unclipping his seat belt as the helicopter came to a standstill, ‘so don’t worry about getting involved with the other patients. We’ll take them in strict order of triage.’
Sarah bit her lip. She had no objection to following his lead and learning the ins and outs of this particular job, but surely she’d be of more use helping with the other victims of the crash?
‘Okay, whatever you say. Though I do feel I could be of help with the rest of the injured.’
He was already on his way to the door of the helicopter, his medical kit strapped to his back in readiness. ‘Let’s see how it goes, shall we? According to the paramedics, our primary patient is in a bad way. He needs to be our main concern right now.’
Sarah followed him to the side of the road where a paramedic was tending an injured youth. There were police vehicles nearby and a young officer was directing traffic while another was setting up a road block.
She knelt down beside the casualty. He couldn’t be much more than eighteen years old. He lay on the grass verge, well away from the traffic, and his face was white, blanched by shock and loss of blood. The paramedic was giving him oxygen through a mask.
‘There are two people suffering from whiplash and sprains,’ the paramedic told them. ‘They’re being looked after by my colleague, along with another man who has chest injuries—broken ribs and collarbone, from what we can tell so far. This lad is Daniel Henderson, motorcyclist. He and his friend were on their way to the coast when they ran into trouble. The two motor vehicles crashed at a road junction and the lads had no way of avoiding them.’
James was already assessing the extent of the boy’s injuries. ‘His lower leg’s grossly deformed,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘It looks like a fracture of both the tibia and fibula. That degree of distortion has to be affecting the blood supply.’
The paramedic nodded. ‘He’s in severe pain, he’s very cold and his circulation is shutting down. We can’t give him pain relief because we can’t find a vein.’