Desert Doctor, Secret Sheikh. Meredith Webber

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      The patient’s name, they learned, was Akbar, and his blood group was B.

      ‘Mine’s B,’ Jenny told Kam, who was sitting, cross-legged, by their patient, talking quietly to Lia, Akbar’s wife. ‘Let’s do a cross-match and see if it’s OK for him to have mine.’

      Kam studied her for a moment, wondering about this woman he’d found on the border of his country. Wondering if she was the first fair-haired Westerner to ever tread these particular desert sands.

      Wondering if he should take her blood…

      Take her, as his ancestors might have…

      The sudden heat in his body shocked him back to the matter in hand. Of all the times to be distracted by a woman…

      ‘You need your strength for your job,’ he objected.

      It was a token protest and she took it that way.

      ‘The loss of a couple of pints of blood won’t hurt me,’ she insisted, handing him a syringe with a needle attached so he could draw blood from her forearm for cross-matching. She had pulled off her soiled tunic and now rolled up the sleeve of her shirt so he could access a vein, yet he felt strangely reluctant to move closer to her—to touch her.

      He had to move closer—how else could he withdraw some blood?—and if their patient was bleeding internally, and his blood pressure drop suggested he was, he would need blood.

      Kam crossed the distance between them in one long stride and took her arm, seeing as he did so pale scars like snail tracks, paler than the lightly tanned skin and puckered here and there.

      Without regard to the intrusiveness of the gesture, he ran his forefinger lightly down the longest of them, then looked up into her eyes, knowing she’d read the question in his own.

      Defiance was his answer, as clear as if it was written on a whiteboard. Ask me if you dare, she was saying, and though Kam knew he shouldn’t, he couldn’t help himself.

      ‘Accident?’

      She nodded briefly then swabbed the spot where a vein showed blue beneath the fine skin of her inner elbow.

      Take the blood, she was saying with the gesture—take the blood and mind your own business. But Kam’s mind was already racing off along a tangent—did the scars explain why such a beautiful woman, and she was beautiful in her golden, glowing way, would hide herself away in a refugee camp on the edge of a little-known country?

      Was she hiding only these surface scars or were there deeper ones?

      Had she lost someone she loved, leaving scars on her heart?

      ‘Was it bad?’

      She stared at him as if she didn’t understand his question, but a shadow had crossed her face and he had his answer.

      Very bad, that shadow told him, while the set of her lips again warned him off further questions.

      But his sympathy for her made him gentle as he held her arm and eased the needle into the vein. He watched the vial fill with dark blood, trying to keep his mind on the job—on their patient and what might lie ahead for him, and for himself and Jenny as his doctors—not on snail-track-like scars on a woman’s arm, or the dark shadow that had crossed her face.

      Fortunately, the woman—Jenny—recovered her composure and her sensible conversation brought him back to the present.

      ‘If it works in a cross-match, you can take it directly from me to him, although you’ll have to keep an eye on him for any transfusion reaction because I’ll be lying beside him.’

      She smiled as if this were a little joke at her expense, but Kam couldn’t return the smile, his thoughts veering back to the puzzle of why this woman was willing to do so much for people she didn’t know, in an inhospitable place, and with no friends or family to support her.

      Had she come to escape her memories?

      Her pain?

      ‘Well?’ she prompted. ‘Are you going to do a cross-match or should I?’

      With his mind back on the job, Kam took another vial and drew a little blood from their patient, Jenny acting as nurse, tightening the tourniquet on the man’s arm to bring up a vein then taping a dressing over the small wound. Kam mixed the contents of the two vials, watching anxiously for any sign of clotting, which would tell them the blood samples were not compatible. But the blood didn’t clot and the intrepid woman who puzzled him now produced a cannula and loop of tubing.

      ‘Let’s go,’ she said, sitting down beside Akbar while one of the nurses who worked with her explained to Akbar’s wife what was happening.

      Lia shifted to sit beside Jenny and hold her hand, babbling her thanks for the gift of blood—the gift of life.

      ‘You need to be higher,’ Kam told the unexpected donor. ‘Are you all right to sit up if we stack pillows behind you?’

      ‘I’ve two bedrolls behind the partition,’ Jenny told him. ‘I can sit with those behind me to prop me up and that way my arm is higher than Akbar’s and it will feed down into him.’

      She half smiled, while the nurse, Aisha, fetched the bedrolls.

      ‘It will be up to you to check the blood’s going the right way. I don’t want to be taking more of it from the poor man.’