Knight on the Children's Ward. Carol Marinelli

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      ‘You smell much better,’ Annika settled for instead, and the shower must have drained Luke because he let Annika thread his T-shirt through his IV.

      ‘What are you looking so miserable about?’ Luke asked.

      ‘Stuff,’ Annika said.

      ‘Yeah,’ Luke said, and she was rewarded with a smile from him.

      ‘Oh, that’s much better!’ Lisa said, popping her head into the bathroom. ‘You’re looking very handsome.’ Annika caught Luke’s eyes and had to stop herself from rolling her own. She sort of understood him—she didn’t know how, she just did. ‘Your mum’s here, by the way!’ Lisa added.

      ‘Great,’ Luke muttered as Annika walked him back. ‘That’s all I need. You haven’t met her yet…’

      ‘You haven’t met mine!’ Annika said, and they both smiled this time—a real smile.

      Annika surprised herself, because rarely, if ever, did she speak about her family, and especially not to a patient. But they had a little giggle as they walked, and she was too busy concentrating on Luke and pushing his IV to notice Ross look up from the desk and watch the unlikely new friends go by.

      ‘Are you still here?’ Caroline frowned, quite a long time later, because, as pedantic as Ross was, consultants didn’t usually hang around all day.

      ‘I just thought I’d catch up on some paperwork.’

      ‘Haven’t you got an office to go to?’ she teased.

      He did, but for once he didn’t have that much paperwork to do.

      ‘Annika!’ Caroline called her over from where Annika was stacking the linen trolley after returning from her supper break. ‘Come and get started on your notes. I’ll show you how we do them. It’s different to the main wards.’

      He didn’t look up, but he smelt her as she came around the desk.

      A heavy, musky fragrance perfumed the air, and though he wrote it maybe twenty times a day, he had misspelled diarrhoea, and Ross frowned at his spiky black handwriting, because the familiar word looked completely wrong.

      ‘Are you wearing perfume, Annika?’ He didn’t look up at Caroline’s stern tone.

      ‘A little,’ Annika said, because she’d freshened up after her break.

      ‘You can’t wear perfume on the children’s ward!’ Caroline’s voice had a familiar ring to it—one Ross had heard all his life.

       ‘What do you mean—you just didn’t want to go to school? You can’t wear an earring. You just have to, that’s all. You just don’t. You just can’t.’

      ‘Go and wash it off,’ Caroline said, and now Ross did look up. He saw her standing there, wary, tight-lipped, in that ridiculous apron. ‘There are children with allergies, asthma. You just can’t wear perfume, Annika—didn’t you think?’

      Caroline was right, Ross conceded, there were children with allergies and, as much as he liked it, Kolovsky musk post-op might be a little bit too much, but he wanted to step in, wanted to grin at Annika and tell her she smelt divine, tell her not to wash it off, for her to tell Caroline that she wouldn’t.

      And he knew that she was thinking it too!

      It was a second, a mere split second, but he saw her waver—and Ross had a bizarre feeling that she was going to dive into her bag for the bottle and run around the ward, ripping off her apron and spraying perfume. The thought made him smile—at the wrong moment, though, because Annika saw him and, although Ross snapped his face to bland, she must have thought he was enjoying her discomfort.

      Oh, but he wanted to correct her.

      He wanted to follow her and tell her that wasn’t what he’d meant as she duly turned around and headed for the washroom.

      He wanted to apologise when she came back unscented and sat at her stool while Caroline nit-picked her way through the nursing notes.

      Instead he returned to his own notes.

      DIAOR…He scrawled a line through it again.

      Still her fragrance lingered.

      He got up without a word and, unusually for Ross, closed his office door. Then he picked up his pen and forced himself to concentrate.

      DIARREA.

      He hurled his pen down. Who cared anyway? They knew what he meant!

      He was not going to fancy her, nor, if he could help it, even talk much to her.

      He was off women.

      He had sworn off women.

      And a student nurse on his ward—well, it couldn’t be without complications.

      She was his friend’s little sister too.

      No way!

      Absolutely not.

      He picked up his pen and resumed his notes.

      ‘The baby has,’ he wrote instead, ‘severe gastroenteritis.’

      CHAPTER TWO

      HE DID a very good job of ignoring her.

      He did an excellent job at pulling rank and completely speaking over her head, or looking at a child or a chart or the wall when he had no choice but to address her. And at his student lecture on Monday he paid her no more attention than any of the others. He delivered a talk on gastroenteritis, and, though he hesitated as he went to spell diarrhoea, he wrote it up correctly on the whiteboard.

      She, Ross noted, was ignoring him too. She asked no questions at the end of the lecture, but an annoying student called Cassie made up for that.

      Once their eyes met, but she quickly flicked hers away, and he, though he tried to discount it, saw the flush of red on her neck and wished that he hadn’t.

      Yes, he did a very good job at ignoring her and not talking to her till, chatting to the pathologist in the bowels of the hospital a few days later, he glanced up at the big mirror that gave a view around the corridor and there was Annika. She was yawning, holding some blood samples, completely unaware she was being watched.

      ‘I’ve been waiting for these…’ Ross said when she turned the corner, and she jumped slightly at the sight of him. He took the bloodwork and stared at the forms rather than at her.

      ‘The chute isn’t working,’ Annika explained. ‘I said I’d drop them in on my way home.’

      ‘I forgot to sign the form.’

      ‘Oh.’

      He would rather have taken СКАЧАТЬ