The Consultant's Italian Knight. Maggie Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ a friend of mine from…from med school,’ Kate replied, improvising wildly. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

      ‘So, you two aren’t an item, then?’

      ‘No, we’re not,’ Kate said firmly, and Terri looked disappointed.

      ‘Pity,’ she murmured.

      Not from where I’m standing, it isn’t, Kate thought as her pager went off, and she reached into her white coat to answer it. OK, so she couldn’t deny that every time Mario Volante had smiled that particular smile she’d felt odd, and hot, and totally unlike herself, but he was also rude, opinionated and arrogant, and any one of those three traits was a complete turn-off. Plus, he was also probably married, which made him a complete louse for chatting up strange women in cupboards.

      ‘You’ll never see him again, Kate,’ she murmured as she walked down the treatment room, ‘and you should thank your lucky stars you won’t.’

      ‘Did you manage to get anything out of the receptionist?’ Mario asked, pulling the parking ticket off his car windscreen, and tossing it indifferently onto the road.

      ‘Just the standard you’re-not-next-of-kin garbage,’ Ralph replied as he got into the car. ‘The one thing I did find out, though, was that your auburn-haired doctor is the consultant.’

      ‘Kate Kennedy’s head of A and E?’ Mario frowned. ‘Bright lady.’

      ‘Pretty, too,’ Ralph declared, shooting Mario a meaningful glance, but Mario ignored him.

      ‘Take a look at this,’ he said instead, extracting his notebook from his pocket and throwing it into Ralph’s lap. ‘Hamilton died before I could speak to him, but he told Dr Kennedy some very interesting things.’

      ‘Interesting?’ Ralph repeated as he read through the pages. ‘Mario, this is dynamite. Did you tell Dr Kennedy that what she heard could send down three of the biggest drug dealers in Aberdeen for a very long stretch, plus identify possible drug outlets?’

      ‘It’s better she doesn’t know,’ Mario said. ‘It’s better nobody knows for the moment.’

      ‘You think she’ll keep her mouth shut?’

      ‘I told her to, so we can but hope.’

      ‘Then, if your conversation with her was private—and I’m sure it was,’ Ralph declared, ‘we should be OK.’

      Mario had a flashback recollection of himself crushed up against Kate Kennedy in the store cupboard, of her hair smelling of flowers and hot summer evenings, and her full breasts gently rising and falling against his arm, and stamped on the image immediately.

      ‘The trouble is, her conversation with Hamilton wasn’t private,’ he observed. ‘Hospital cubicle curtains are notoriously thin, and you know as well as I do that the fixers have their spies everywhere which means I’m going to have to keep an eye on Dr Kennedy.’

      ‘Purely professionally, of course,’ Ralph said slyly, and Mario gave him a hard stare.

      For sure, it had been fun to keep wrong-footing Kate Kennedy, and to watch her large grey eyes grow more and more flustered by the minute, but it had just been a bit of fun at the end of a long and tiring day. He had no intention of taking it further. Not personally at any rate.

      ‘Ralph, all I want from Kate Kennedy is facts, and I want them while she’s still alive to give them to me.’

      ‘You think our lady doctor could be in trouble?’ Ralph asked as they pulled away from the kerb.

      Mario executed a fast U-turn in front of the hospital, completely ignoring the angry cacophony of car horns that greeted his manoeuvre, and nodded.

      ‘Yup, I do.’

       CHAPTER TWO

      ‘HE’S’ back,’ Terri said.

      ‘That’s nice,’ Kate murmured vaguely, more intent on inserting the final suture into the badly cut hand of the young woman sitting in front of her than on what the sister had just said. ‘OK,’ she continued, straightening up, ‘I think that should do it.’

      ‘Will my hand be scarred?’ the young woman asked. ‘Not that it matters, of course, but…’

      ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be left with a couple of faint white lines once those cuts heal,’ Kate admitted, ‘but, considering what you fell on, it could have been a lot worse. A few centimetres higher, and you would have cut an artery.’

      ‘That’ll teach me to pay proper attention when I’m carrying bottles of wine out to a barbecue,’ the young woman said with feeling, and Kate chuckled.

      ‘Get some brawny man to do it for you in future. They like looking macho.’

      The young woman laughed. ‘I’ll remember that. Do you want me to come back to get the stitches out?’ she added, and Kate shook her head.

      ‘Your own GP can remove them for you, but don’t forget to call in at the hospital pharmacy before you leave to collect some painkillers. Once the anaesthetic wears off, I’m afraid your hand is going to feel as though somebody’s been inserting red hot needles into it.’

      The woman rolled her eyes. ‘I’m definitely going to get some brawny man to carry the wine in future,’ she declared but, the minute she had gone, Terri cleared her throat discreetly.

      ‘I said, your friend’s back.’

      ‘What friend?’ Kate asked, rotating her neck wearily, then pulling off her bloodstained surgical gloves and binning them.

      ‘Mario Volante.’

      He was back? But she still hadn’t remembered the fourth name that Duncan Hamilton had given her on Saturday night, and Mario Volante must know she wasn’t likely to remember it two days later. Plus, she’d had a long afternoon. A very long afternoon.

      Not to mention the fact that you never wanted to see him again, a little voice whispered at the back of her head.

      Too darned right, I don’t, she thought. He’s too unsettling, too aggravating, too everything.

      ‘Tell him I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to talk to him right now,’ she declared. ‘If he’d like to phone—’

      ‘He said you’d say that,’ Terri interrupted, ‘so he also said to tell you…’ The sister’s eyes danced. ‘That the strip search offer was still on.’

      ‘Oh, did he,’ Kate said grimly. ‘Well, we’ll see about that. Where is he?’

      ‘The waiting room.’

      But he wasn’t. When Kate marched out of the treatment room, fully intending to give Mario Volante a very large piece of her mind, he was walking down the corridor towards her looking every bit as scruffy and unkempt as he had on Saturday СКАЧАТЬ