Most of his contemporaries were married with children but she supposed it would take a brave—or more likely deluded—woman to risk all on him. The only thing Claire would risk on Alistair North was her brain. Despite what she thought of the man, she couldn’t deny the doctor was the best neurosurgeon in the country.
The little girl on Alistair North’s back was now waving enthusiastically at her. Claire blinked behind her glasses, suddenly realising it was Lacey—the little girl they were operating on in an hour’s time. Why wasn’t she tucked up in her bed quiet and calm?
‘Wave back, Kanga,’ Alistair North said, his clear and precise Oxford accent teasing her. ‘It won’t break your arm.’
Claire’s blood heated to boiling point. Did the man know that kangaroos boxed? The thought of bopping him on his fake nose was far too tempting. She felt the expectant gaze of the ward staff fixed firmly on her and suddenly she was thrown back in time. She was in Gundiwindi, standing in front of the class, with fifteen sets of eyes boring into her. She could see the red dust motes dancing in the starkly bright and uncompromising summer sunshine and the strained smile of her teacher slipping as his mouth turned down into a resigned and grumpy line. She could hear the shuffling and coughing of her peers—the sound that always preceded the one or two brutal comments that managed to escape from their mouths before Mr Phillips regained control.
Moron. Idiot.
Stop it. She hauled her mind back to the present, reminding herself sternly that she wasn’t either of those things. She’d spent two decades proving it. She was a woman in a difficult and male dominated speciality and she was eleven months away from sitting her final neurosurgery exams. She’d fought prejudice and sexism to get this far and she’d fought herself. She refused to allow anyone to make her feel diminished and she sure as hell wasn’t going to accept an order to wave from a man who needed to grow up. She would, however, do what she always did—she’d restore order.
In heels, Claire came close to matching Alistair North’s height, and although her preference had always been to wear ballet flats, she’d taken herself shoe shopping at the end of her first week of working with him. The added inches said, Don’t mess with me. She took a few steps forward until she was standing side on to him but facing Lacey. Ignoring Alistair North completely, and most definitely ignoring his scent of freshly laundered cotton with a piquant of sunshine that made her unexpectedly homesick, she opened her arms out wide towards the waving child.
‘Do you want to come for a hop with Kanga?’
‘Yes, please.’
Lacey, a ward of the state, transferred almost too easily into her arms, snuggling in against her chest and chanting, ‘Boing, boing, boing.’
Claire pulled her white coat over her charge, creating a makeshift pouch, and then she turned her back on Alistair North. She strode quickly down the ward carrying an overexcited Lacey back to her bed. As she lowered her down and tried to tuck her under the blankets, the little girl bounced on the mattress.
Thanks for nothing, Alistair, Claire muttered to herself. It was going to take twice as long as normal to do all the routine preoperative checks. Yet another day would run late before it had even started.
ALASTAIR NORTH MOVED his lower jaw sideways and then back again behind his surgical mask, mulling over the conundrum that was his incredibly perfectionist and frustratingly annoying speciality registrar. She’d more than competently created a skin pouch to hold the vagus nerve stimulator she was inserting into Lacey Clarke. Now she was delicately wrapping the wire around the left vagus nerve and hopefully its presence would effectively minimise Lacey’s seizures in a way medication had so far failed to achieve.
A bit of electricity, he mused, could kill or save a life. He knew all about that. Too much or too little of the stuff left a man dead for a very long time. What he didn’t know was why Claire Mitchell was permanently strung so tight a tune could be plucked on her tendons.
Based on her skills and glowing references from the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and the Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, she’d outranked twenty-five other talented applicants from the Commonwealth. With her small steady hands and deft strokes, she had the best clinical skills of all the trainees who’d applied to work with him. She’d beaten twenty-four men to win the scholarship and that alone should tell her she was the best. Surely she knew that?
Does she though?
In his speciality, he was used to fielding egos the size of Scotland. It wasn’t that Claire didn’t have an ego; she did. She knew her stuff and he’d seen her run through medical students and her junior house officer with a complete lack of sympathy for any whose insufficient preparedness caused them to give incorrect answers to her questions. But he was used to trainees of her calibre thinking of themselves as ‘cock of the walk’ and carrying themselves with an accompanying swagger.
Claire Mitchell didn’t swagger, despite the fact she had the best set of legs he’d seen on a woman in a very long time. And her shoes. Good God! Her acerbic personality was at odds with those shoes. Did she have any idea how her body moved in those heels? Her breasts tilted up, her hips swung and her calves said coquettishly, Caress me. I promise you there’s even better ahead.
Hell’s bells. He had a love-hate relationship with those shoes and her legs. Did they hint at a deeply buried wild side? Would those legs party the way he loved to party? Would he even want to party with them? No way. Gorgeous legs weren’t enough to overcome a major personality flaw. Claire had a gritty aura of steely determination and no sense of humour whatsoever.
Given what she’d achieved so far and the fact she had a ninety-nine per cent chance of passing her exams on the first attempt—an uncommon feat in neurosurgery—she should be enjoying her hard-earned position. He doubted she was enjoying anything. The bloody woman never looked happy and it drove him crazy.
As her boss, his duty of care extended only so far as making sure she was coping with the workload and her study for her fellowship exams. However, he’d spent two years living in Australia himself, and despite both countries speaking English, pretty much everything else was different. It had taken him a few months to find his feet at the Children’s Hospital and get established in a social set so he was very aware that Claire Mitchell might flounder at first. Ten days after she’d started working with him, he’d found her looking extremely downcast with what he’d assumed was a dose of homesickness. The woman looked like she needed to get out of the hospital for a bit and catch her breath.
On the spur of the moment, he’d asked, ‘Would you like to grab a pint at the Frog and Peach?’
Her response had been unexpected. Her eyes—a fascinating combination of both light and dark brown that reminded him of his favourite caramel swirl chocolate bar—had widened momentarily before suddenly narrowing into critical slits. In her distinctive diphthong-riddled accent—one he really didn’t want to admit to enjoying—she’d said briskly and succinctly, ‘I have reports.’
‘There’s always going to be reports to write,’ he’d said with a smile that invariably softened the sternest of wills.
‘Especially when you don’t appear to write many.’
He wasn’t sure who’d been more taken aback—him, because registrars knew better then to ever speak to their consultant like that, or her, because she’d actually spoken her thoughts out loud.
‘I’m sorry. That
