maybe her work could stop someone else losing half their family, the way she had when she’d been sixteen.
‘So what made you come to Northumbria?’ Joel asked.
‘I’d finished my stint at HEMS, so it was time to move on.’ She shrugged. Why Northumbria? ‘I came here on holiday with my parents when I was a kid.’ It had been her last holiday with both parents. She’d just finished her GCSE exams, and although all of her friends had been planning to go on holiday together, travelling by rail through Europe for a month before settling down to start their A levels, her parents had asked her to spend that one last holiday with them instead of taking her first steps into the big wide world with her friends.
She’d been torn. If she didn’t go to Europe with her friends, she’d miss out on swimming in St Tropez, eating the best ice cream in the world in Venice and being chatted up by gorgeous Greek waiters. And she’d feel that somehow she was a baby while all her friends had taken that extra step away from childhood.
But she adored her parents. And they weren’t stuffy like most of her friends’ parents. They talked to her as if she were an adult and her opinion mattered, that she wasn’t just some silly little teenage girl.
In the end she agreed to go with her family. And after what happened barely six months later, she was so glad she had. That she’d not done the stroppy teenager bit and refused to hang out with her parents. That she’d enjoyed a holiday of simple English pleasures—the gardens at Alnwick where every breath you took was filled with the scent of roses, so strong that you could actually taste the flowers; poking round ancient castles and second-hand bookshops; walking along part of Hadrian’s Wall and stopping off at little cafés to have stotties for lunch, the huge local bread rolls filled with cheese and ham.
Funny how memories so good could still hurt.
‘I remember the beaches being amazing,’ she said. ‘These huge stretches of sand underneath cliffs with enormous castles.’
‘The beach here is fabulous. And they sell the best fish and chips in the world on the harbour—you really have to try them.’
Was he offering…?
No. And she wouldn’t have accepted, even if he’d asked. She didn’t do relationships.
‘Well, welcome to Northumberland General.’ Joel held his hand out. Lisa took it, and was shocked to feel her fingers actually tingling. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d responded that strongly to anyone.
But no way would a man as good-looking as Joel Mortimer be unattached. From what he’d said to Julie, Lisa knew that there was someone called Beth in his life—girlfriend, fiancée, maybe even his wife. Even if she broke her personal no-relationships rule, she’d never break up someone else’s relationship to do that. She mentally hissed instructions to her libido to sit still.
‘Better get on. My guess is we’ll have a dozen Colles’ fractures in this morning.’ He shrugged. ‘Always do when it’s as icy as this.’
‘People slipping on the path and putting their hands out to save themselves,’ Lisa said. ‘The record in my department in London was forty in a day.’
Julie whistled. ‘Wow. Don’t think I’d like to beat that. Come on, let me show you around the rest of the department, and then you can meet the team.’
‘See you later,’ Joel said. ‘Enjoy your first day with us.’
‘Thanks.’ She smiled back, and let Julie lead her away from Joel.
Gorgeous. That was the only word to describe Lisa Richardson. In her car, her face white with fear, she’d looked beautiful but remote. There had been something almost other-worldly about her—an elfin face, huge blue-grey eyes and dark hair cut in a gamine, slightly spiky style that reminded Joel of Audrey Hepburn. Here, on the ward, she’d seemed warmer. Nearer. And when she’d shaken his hand, his skin had tingled at her touch. A tingle that had worked all the way down to the base of his spine. A tingle that had made him want to take her hand and trace a path with his mouth, starting at the pulse beating at her wrist up to her inner elbow and moving up to her shoulder, gliding along the sensitive cord at the side of her neck and then finally—
No. She might be the most attractive woman he’d met in a long, long time, but nothing was going to happen between them. There wasn’t an official hospital rule banning relationships between staff on the same ward, but everyone knew it was a bad idea—they’d all had to work on a team where a personal relationship had shattered and soured the working relationship, too. Besides, Joel had learned his lesson the hard way. Relationships weren’t his strong point.
She’d called him ‘Sir Galahad’; he winced inwardly at the memory. You couldn’t get much further from the truth than that. The gallant knight in shining armour who rescued maidens from peril. Ha. He hadn’t been able to rescue the one person he should’ve been able to rescue. As knights in shining armour went, he was an utter failure. If that was how she saw him, he’d only end up disappointing her.
And then there was Beth.
No, it would be much too complicated.
He shook himself and strode to the reception area to find his next patient.
THE next week flew by, and Lisa was too busy to say more than hello to Joel. They weren’t on the same shift pattern either: she’d seen him when she’d been on early shift and one of the lates, but not on the two nights she did in her first week.
Not that she asked why the registrar wasn’t doing night shifts. It wasn’t any of her business.
Particularly as she’d overheard a certain telephone call on the Thursday.
‘OK, honey. I’ll pick you up from Hannah’s as soon as I finish here. See you soon. Love you, too, Beth.’
She shouldn’t have listened. Or sneaked that look at Joel’s face. Seen the softness of his eyes and the sheer love in his smile—the same expression she’d seen on her mother’s face whenever she’d looked at Lisa’s father.
True love.
The One.
And then, when it was all over, what then?
Her mother had had years and years and years of loneliness. Sure, of course she’d needed time to mourn the love of her life. Of course she wouldn’t have wanted to find someone else straight away. But it had been so long—twelve years of being on her own, of nobody ever measuring up to The One. Lisa had promised herself she’d never, ever let herself fall in love with someone so deeply that he’d be her whole world and she’d never get over it if she lost him. And she’d kept that promise. She’d dated at med school, but she’d always kept things light. When her friends had started pairing off, she’d managed to avoid being set up with a suitable man by a shrug, a smile and the sweetly worded comment that you didn’t need to date someone to have fun and she was doing just fine, thanks.
In the week she’d been here, Mark, one of the paramedics, had asked her out; so had the registrar on the maternity ward, Jack Harrowven. Lisa had turned them both down—though
