Her Consultant Boss. Joanna Neil

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СКАЧАТЬ couldn’t tell whether he approved or not. He said in a deep, gravelly voice, ‘You must be Dr Llewellyn.’

      Megan nodded, all too conscious of several pairs of eyes watching her. ‘That’s right. I’m so sorry that I’m late, but I got a little lost.’

      The slant of his mouth didn’t soften by a fraction. ‘I’m relieved that you managed to join us in the end.’

      He waved a hand to one side of the table. ‘Take a seat. We’ve already made a start, so I’ll update you when the meeting finishes.’

      She attempted a weak smile, but said nothing, fearful of disturbing the proceedings any further. She edged her way into the vacant chair.

      Dr Benedict continued as if there had been no disruption. ‘You will each have your own quota of patients,’ he told them, ‘and you will report back to me at some point during each day. If there are any queries that you want to raise at that time, just let me know and we’ll discuss any problems that you have.’

      ‘How will the patients be allocated?’ the blonde woman doctor enquired in a lilting voice. ‘Are we allowed to choose which ones will be on our list?’

      ‘To some extent,’ Dr Benedict agreed. ‘For the moment, though, I think it might work out for the best if you start with patients that I have chosen for you. After a week or so you’ll have some say in which cases you want to handle, although I may decide that certain patients would benefit from being with a particular doctor. I’m afraid you’ll have to leave that to my judgement for the time being.’

      The woman gave him a beautiful smile. ‘Of course.’

      Megan watched as Dr Benedict responded with a brief curve of his mouth. His whole face changed, lightened. He was a very good-looking man, and younger than she had expected. She guessed he was in his mid-thirties, and if that was the case, he had done very well to reach the position of consultant at such an early age.

      He clearly got on well with the young woman seated next to him. From what she had observed so far, he listened to her and appeared to respect her point of view.

      It wasn’t very likely that he would give her the same treatment, Megan mused dully. His manner had been polite enough on the surface, but there had been a hint of censure in his tone and she had the unhappy feeling that she had well and truly blotted her copybook. Turning up late, albeit only by a few minutes, had definitely been a bad move.

      The meeting continued, with Sam Benedict outlining the way the psychiatric unit operated. Patients were referred here by their GPs for initial assessment, and the team, working with Dr Benedict, would decide what treatment would help them best.

      ‘We deal with people who might sometimes have what appear to be obscure symptoms,’ he said, ‘but it’s vital that you always take a full medical history—and try to remember that one of your best diagnostic tools is simply to listen.’

      That was very much what Megan had always believed. So much could be missed by not giving the patient a chance to talk. She had come across examples herself, several times, when she had been working through her six-month house officer placings.

      There had been the woman who had complained of an odd assortment of aches and pains and headaches, and she might have been treated for a simple viral infection until she’d happened to add that she worked with chemical substances. It had turned out that it had been those that had been affecting her.

      Then there was the man who—

      A sardonic, dark-edged voice broke into her errant thoughts. ‘Are we boring you, Dr Llewellyn?’

      Megan came back to the present with a start. She stared wide-eyed at Dr Benedict and said in a flustered tone, ‘I—I’m sorry… Did I miss something?’

      ‘I was asking,’ he said in a low drawl, ‘whether there were any questions you wanted to ask.’

      ‘Er—um…none that I can think of at the moment,’ she managed weakly. She didn’t doubt there were bound to be a whole load of things she wanted to know once she got her brain back together again, by which time it would be way too late.

      His mouth made a taut line. He turned back to the group. ‘Then I think that’s all I want say for the moment,’ he said briskly. ‘I suggest that you take the next hour or so to glance through your patients’ files and familiarise yourself with them. This afternoon we’ll do a ward round and you can help each other out with possible diagnoses. Tomorrow we shall be running a clinic and you will be assigned to work with either myself or Dr Sanderson.’

      He gave a brief smile. ‘Thank you, everyone, for your time and your…attention.’ He flicked a glance towards Megan. ‘Perhaps you’ll be good enough to stay behind for a few moments, Dr Llewellyn.’

      ‘Of course.’ She winced inwardly. Was she in trouble? She hadn’t exactly made a good start.

      The others filed slowly out of the room, picking up folders of case notes that had been allocated to them as they went.

      Megan waited until the room was empty before she said in a halting tone, ‘I must apologise again for arriving late. It’s just that I’ve only been here once before and everything seemed so strange. It’s such a huge building and the signs aren’t all that easy to follow.’

      His grey eyes narrowed. ‘Lucky for us, then, that the patients seem to know where to come,’ he remarked dismissively, and instantly Megan felt chastened.

      She cleared her throat. ‘You said that you wanted to see me?’ she queried, lifting her chin and deciding that she had done enough apologising for one day. Flyaway strands of her hair, defying her attempts to tame it with pins, drifted with the movement, and he shot her a dark glance. Perhaps the sun, filtering in through the window blinds, had caught the tawny strands and condemned her even more in his eyes. That auburn, fiery tint often reflected the underlying obstinacy of her nature that could one day be her undoing.

      ‘That’s right. I do.’ He came to half sit, half lean on the table by her side, and his proximity alarmed her momentarily. She felt dwarfed by him. He was tall, just as she’d expected. His legs were long, and as he stretched them out beside her she could see the fabric of his trousers stretching against taut thighs. She blinked and tried to clear the sudden heat haze that fogged her mind. Get a grip, Megan, she told herself. He already thinks you’re an idiot, without you giving him any more cause for complaint.

      ‘We haven’t had a chance to meet before today,’ he was saying, ‘because, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to interview you myself.’

      She noted that he put a faint emphasis on the word ‘unfortunately’. He was obviously regretting that omission already.

      ‘I had to go to an emergency meeting that afternoon,’ he went on, ‘and I had to ask a colleague to take my place. As I recall, you weren’t able to make the journey a second time.’ He studied her. ‘All of which means, of course, that I know very little about you except what is in your references and my colleague’s report.’

      ‘What is it that you want to know?’ Megan asked.

      His eyes lanced into her, but revealed nothing of what he was thinking. They were as dark and unfathomable as the North Sea. ‘You were doing a house officer job in the Midlands—what was it that made you want come up here? And why did you choose psychiatry? СКАЧАТЬ