so she perched there on her stool, pretending she was still working so that she didn’t have to turn to him and withstand the full weight of her inconvenient attraction. The fact that he didn’t seem to date much only enhanced his appeal—and his mystique.
Finally—mercifully—she found her tongue again. ‘What on earth makes you think I want a fake date?’ She flushed. ‘Or indeed any kind of date.’
She studiously ignored the little voice in her head taunting her for engaging with him. Telling her that had it been anyone else she would already have declined politely before walking away.
‘Isn’t that rather the point?’ His mouth curved slightly in what could only be described as a sinful smile. ‘If it’s a fake date, then it isn’t really any kind of date.’
‘Semantics.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Or riddles. In any case, I’ve never really cared for either. Just as I really don’t need a date—fake or otherwise.’
Still she didn’t make herself walk away. Why was that?
‘I don’t understand how I...how a fake date...concerns me.’
And she wanted to understand. Perhaps a little bit too much. Even if he was eyeing her as though to him she rated as about as intelligent as the average sponge in the animal kingdom. She could take offense, but that really wasn’t her style. Who had time in a job like her?
‘Hetti suggested otherwise.’
‘Hetti?’
‘Yes, Hetti. The other Dr Basu.’ He jerked his head towards where his sister and her team were focussed on the cyclist. ‘Hemavati.’
Something clicked. How had she missed it before? Probably something to do with the stress of moving house, moving town, moving halfway across the country. And at every step fighting with her thirteen-going-on-thirty-year-old daughter, who hadn’t wanted to leave everything she knew.
‘Hetti? Yes, I know who Hetti is. I just don’t understand why she would have mentioned me to you.’
She and Hetti had worked together for a couple of years back at Allport Infirmary’s A&E. They’d even been friends. Well, as close to being friends as two rather guarded individuals could be. Probably that was one of their shared traits, which had drawn them to each other.
‘She mentioned that you were caught on the horns of a dilemma—not wanting a date for the charity gala on one side and risking being hit on all night if you’re without a date on the other. Apparently you’ve swiftly shut down any man who has asked you.’
Nothing about Nell, then. That was good. The last thing she wanted was people gossiping about her having been a teenage mum, or privately questioning whether she was really up to the job of being an air ambulance doctor. It was such a demanding, limited environment, and lives literally depended on her and her two paramedics.
No one else. Just the three of them. Not like in the A&E, where she’d been a doctor up until now, where she could call on a colleague for a consult if she needed to.
So she was still new to the air ambulance team—still in her probationary period. Her employers might have liked her CV and her references, and the way she’d come across in her many interviews, but they didn’t know the first thing about her. Mainly because she kept her private life just that. Utterly private.
If they’d known the truth about her would they still have hired her? Would she have been good enough for them? Or even enough?
A jolt of something that felt altogether too much like insecurity bolted through Effie before she could stop it. Before she could shove it back into the distant shadows of her brain where it belonged.
The only person who had never made her feel she had something to prove was Eleanor. The one woman who had seen through Effie’s tough, angry exterior to the frightened, lonely kid beneath. The woman who had loved her so much that she’d been willing to fight Effie’s sorry excuse for a mum and to adopt her. The woman who had seen Effie’s potential and encouraged her to really do something with her life—starting by going to university. And not just any university, either.
But Eleanor had been gone from her life for so many years now that it was getting harder and harder for Effie to remember how it had felt to have someone to lean on.
It would hardly have been surprising if her bosses and colleagues had panicked about hiring a single mum with a young daughter. If Nell was ill she couldn’t just call in sick herself, like other parents. There was no one to cover her. Her team depended on her being there every single time she was supposed to be. On never being distracted.
Including right now.
Effie jutted out her chin and met his gaze. ‘And so you stepped up to save me from myself? How chivalrous.’
Her tone was a little tighter, a little sharper than she might have preferred, but that was better than giving in to this absurd heat trapped low in her belly. The kind which threatened to melt a girl from the inside out.
Surely she was past all that nonsense? Hadn’t having a baby at eighteen taught her that much, at least?
‘You could call it chivalrous. Or you could call it selfish. I’d prefer the term mutually beneficial.’
‘Really?’ Even as she asked, she knew it was a bad sign that it made a difference to her. Made her a little bit too eager for an excuse to break her usual no dating code. ‘So what do I gain from it?’
‘Hetti mentioned you were too career-focussed to have time to date, and that your move here has invited attention. Fresh blood and all that. We both know that attending this function alone would be tantamount to inviting people to hit on you all night. Going with me should make anyone else leave you alone.’
She could point out that it sounded arrogant for him to say that other men would naturally back away if Tak was her date. The problem was she could imagine that was exactly what would happen.
‘Fine. So what about you? Is this your way of ensuring no-strings sex for the night? Because I have to say it’s a pretty pathetic way of—’
‘No sex,’ he cut in definitively.
‘Sorry?’
‘If I want sex I can get sex. The point is that I don’t.’
‘A single man in his thirties who doesn’t want sex?’ Incredibly she found herself raising an eyebrow at him as though she was actually...flirting?
‘I don’t want sex with you,’ he corrected.
How was it possible to feel suddenly deflated when she didn’t want complications herself?
‘Oh. Right.’ She sounded so stiff, so wooden. ‘Well, good. Glad that’s cleared up.’
He raked his hand through his hair and she found the unexpectedly boyish gesture all the more disarming.
‘I didn’t mean it to sound that way.’ Clearly this was as close as she was going to get to an apology. ‘My point is that I want a date as a buffer. I don’t want complications from it. My extended family have it
