worst at the end of a gruelling shift.
She and her handsome new colleague had quickly discovered that they worked well together, but as for their personal relationship, that was still in the fragile early stages, barely beyond the point where she and Dan had admitted that they enjoyed each other’s company outside work, too, and wanted to see whether it could develop into something lasting.
Well, that had been as much as Dan had been willing to admit, so far. On her part, she’d known from their first meeting that he was special; that he could very well be the man she’d been waiting for her whole life. There had been something about the gentleness and compassion with which he treated his patients allied with the aura of strength and dependability that surrounded him … to say nothing of the fact that he was probably the sexiest man she’d ever met …
Those weeks of tentatively getting to know each other might just as well not have existed the day Zara walked into the department wafting her signature perfume and demanding to be introduced to all her sister’s dedicated colleagues.
‘Of course, the whole family is so proud of Sara for taking all those exams,’ she gushed with a wide smile. ‘I certainly couldn’t do her job … all that blood and pus and …’ She shook her head so that her artfully dishevelled locks tumbled over one shoulder and shuddered delicately.
Sara could have predicted exactly how the ensuing scene would play. From the day that puberty had given her sister that spectacular set of curves, she’d seen it so often before. She didn’t need to watch to know that every male in the vicinity was about to make a complete fool of himself as they all vied for one of Zara’s smiles, or, better yet, one of the sultry come-hither looks she sent them from under impossibly long dark lashes.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a twin,’ Dan complained as he distractedly delivered the mug of coffee he’d been making for her before Zara’s arrival. His eyes were flicking from one to the other and Sara suppressed a wince, knowing just how badly she would come out in the comparison. There was no way that she could compare with such a polished image of perfection while she stood there in crumpled scrubs without a scrap of make-up on her face, especially with her hair dragged back into an elastic band with only a few straggly tendrils to camouflage the worst of the puckered scar that drew her eyebrow into a permanently quizzical arch.
‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’ she said with a tired smile. ‘Have you met her yet?’
She needn’t have bothered offering, knowing deep inside that this introduction was the sole reason why her sister was here. In fact, Zara was already undulating her way across the room towards them in her best catwalk strut, her slender legs seeming endless atop heels high enough to induce vertigo. Sara felt sick when she saw the intense way her sister’s eyes focused on Dan as she drew nearer, almost devouring him piece by piece from his slightly tousled dark hair and broad shoulders to his lithe hips and long powerful legs.
‘So, this is the handsomest man in the department, is it?’ she purred, all but rubbing herself against him and blinking coquettishly as she gazed up into his amazing green eyes. ‘Sara was telling me I just had to come and meet you.’
It was far too late to wish that she’d kept her mouth shut.
What can’t be cured must be endured, her grandmother’s voice said inside her head, and Sara felt an almost physical wrench as any lasting relationship she might have had with Dan was torn out of her reach for ever. She shut the pain away with all the rest she kept in the box in a dark corner of her soul, and summoned up the appropriate words.
‘Daniel, this is my sister, Zara,’ she said formally, unable to conjure up even a pretence of a smile. ‘Zara, this is Daniel Lomax. He’s one of the senior …’ She fell silent, realising that she may as well have saved her breath because neither of them was listening to her.
‘Hi, Danny,’ Zara breathed, and Sara winced, knowing that he hated that diminutive … only this time there was no automatic correction. Well, why would he object now that her sister had both hands wrapped around his arm, blatantly testing his muscles?
She knew how those muscles felt, the taut resilience overlaid with warm skin and silky dark hair. She’d been holding that arm on the way out of the hospital just last night at the end of their shift, delighting in the way his free hand had covered hers to reinforce the fact that he had been enjoying the contact, too.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and have a shower and change out of these scrubs,’ Sara said, abandoning her untasted coffee as she made a strategic retreat, unable to bear the thought that he might give Zara’s hands that same warm caress.
The last glance she threw over her shoulder as she reached the door left her certain that neither of them had even noticed that she’d gone.
Sara woke to a world of pain and noise and eye-searingly bright light. Slamming her lids shut against the unbearable glare, she groaned, unable to decide which part of her hurt the most.
Her hip was agony, but so was her shoulder … and as for her head …
What on earth had happened to her? Had she fallen out of bed in the night? With nothing more than polished floorboards around the new divan it would certainly account for the feeling that she was bruised from head to foot.
‘Sara?’ said an urgent female voice right beside her ear, but she tried hard to ignore it. It wasn’t until she felt the familiar sensation of disposable gloves against her skin as a gentle hand awkwardly stroked the side of her face that she realised that she had an oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose. She tried to turn her head towards the voice but discovered that she was unable to move because of the padded blocks positioned on either side.
She had seen the situation far too many times not to recognise what those sensations meant. She was strapped to a backboard with her head and neck restrained because of the fear of exacerbating a spinal injury.
‘Sara, can you hear me?’ the voice said over the cacophony of bleeping monitors and voices snapping out orders. ‘Sara, love, you’ve had a bit of an accident and you’re in the hospital …’ And with those few words terror gripped her. Suddenly she remembered everything that had happened to her in excruciating detail.
The car appearing in the narrow road just as she started to cross it on her way back to her flat … the brightness of the headlights as it came straight towards her … as it hit her and sent her tumbling to the ground … deliberately?
Then she remembered something even more important.
‘My baby …!’ she keened, her voice muffled behind the oxygen mask, panicking when she was unable to move her hand to her belly, so desperate to know by the familiar feel of the gentle swell that it was still safely inside her.
Then she heard the echo of what she’d said and guilt hit her hard. ‘The baby,’ she said, deliberately damping the forbidden emotions the way she’d been forced to right from the first day she’d had the pregnancy confirmed. ‘Is it all right? Has anything happened to the baby?’
‘Stay still, Sara,’ ordered the familiar voice of the senior orthopaedic consultant. ‘You know better than to move until we’ve taken spinal X-rays and checked them.’
‘No! No X-rays!’ she gasped,
