if they’re driving me crackers after twenty minutes then it’s a fair assumption that we’re not going to make twenty years,’ Lara said dryly. ‘The truth is I’d rather be happily single than unhappily married. Anyway, enough of my loveless life. What’s happening in Resus?’
‘Young woman with chest pains and shortness of breath. And, if Mr Right is waiting round the corner, I don’t think it’s a match made in heaven because he certainly isn’t strong or handsome. Last time I looked he was twenty-two stone, covered in tattoos and completely stoned. I’ve already called Security.’
‘You see what I mean? I always attract the good ones. It’s the reason I’m single.’ Lara pushed open the doors of Resus and stopped dead, her breath catching in her throat as her eyes settled on the doctor on the other side of the room.
Christian Blake.
He was standing by the trolley, his head angled slightly as he listened to the patient talk. His hair was glossy dark, his eyes a deep blue and his body strong and powerful. He wore the same regulation scrub suit that everyone wore in the ED, but on him the usually unflattering garment looked as though it had been designed specifically to display his superior masculine attributes.
Lara allowed herself the luxury of a brief glance at his athletic physique and then she looked away.
He was the senior consultant. A colleague.
And he was also—
‘Why does he have to be married?’ Jane muttered in an undertone, and Lara gave an exaggerated sigh of regret.
‘Because the world is a cruel, hard place,’ she muttered back. ‘And, anyway, it doesn’t make any difference in my case, because men like him always trample over me as they rush to embrace the tall, blonde stick with the perfect hair who just happens to be standing behind me. And, if by some strange chance he did happen to notice me, it would take me less than a minute to start finding his faults because that’s what I do.’ With a fatalistic shrug she let the door swing shut behind her and walked into the room.
A strong, handsome man who is sexier than sin.
For some reason, the psychic’s words played on her mind and Lara’s heart performed a series of strange rhythms. Well, they certainly didn’t come any sexier than Christian. Ever since he’d taken up his post as senior consultant in the ED two months earlier, all the women in the hospital had been hoping and dreaming.
Except her.
She was about to embark on the trip of a lifetime.
Even if Christian hadn’t been married, she wouldn’t have been interested. But that didn’t stop her admiring him.
‘If you’re looking for perfection, I think you’ve just found it,’ Jane murmured, and Lara frowned at her as she slid past her into the room.
‘He’s married. If I want pain, I’ll just go ahead and remove my heart with a blunt scalpel and have done with it.’ She walked briskly across the resuscitation room. ‘Good afternoon, Dr Blake.’
He looked up, his gaze cool and assessing. ‘Lara, this is Ellen Bates.’ He spoke with characteristic brevity, delivering the necessary facts and nothing more. ‘She’s thirty-two years of age and complaining of chest pain and shortness of breath.’
He never showed the slightest flicker of emotion, Lara mused as she smiled at the patient and reached for a blood-pressure cuff. He gave nothing away. He’d been working in the emergency department for two months and during that time he’d shown no inclination to socialise with the staff or reveal intimate facts about himself. On one occasion his daughter had phoned the department, and that had been how they’d discovered that he was married with children. Apart from that one incident, nothing. He worked. He went home—no doubt, to his beautiful wife. Because Lara had absolutely no doubt that a man this impossibly handsome would have an equally impossibly beautiful wife.
The patient’s eyes were fixed on Christian’s face. ‘I was at the office Christmas lunch and then all of a sudden I started to feel terrible. Typical. The first time for ages I actually get to eat lunch and I’m ill. Usually I’m too busy working to bother.’
‘Has anything like this ever happened before?’
‘I do get palpitations occasionally,’ Ellen murmured, her face screwed up as she rubbed the flat of her hand against her chest. ‘But I’ve always assumed they’re caused by the amount of coffee and diet cola I consume. I’m a lawyer. I spend whole days in boring meetings and caffeine is the only thing that keeps me conscious.’
Lara quickly attached her to the machine and checked her observations. Seeing that Ellen’s pulse was two hundred, she glanced at Christian and he nodded to indicate that he’d seen the reading.
‘I want to get a line in and take some bloods.’
Knowing that they needed to check the patient’s blood oxygen level, Lara swiftly attached the necessary probe to Ellen’s finger and then picked up the IV tray. ‘Is there anyone you’d like me to call, Ellen?’
‘No one.’ Ellen didn’t look in her direction. Her eyes were occupied with studying the dark stubble that shaded Christian’s hard, angular jaw.
‘Can we check her sats, please, Lara?’ Christian slid the venflon into the vein and released the tourniquet.
‘Just doing it now.’ Lara adjusted the probe and watched the machine. ‘Sats are ninety-eight per cent.’
‘Good. These can go to the lab.’ He dropped the blood bottles onto the tray. ‘I’ll do the forms in a minute.’
Lara handed him some tape so that he could secure the venflon, her eyes still watching the pulse and blood-pressure readings. ‘She’s still tachycardic.’
Christian’s gaze followed hers and he moved the IV tray, reached for his stethoscope and hooked it into his ears.
‘I’m just going to listen to your chest, Ellen.’
Ellen lowered her eyelashes in an unmistakably flirtatious gesture. ‘Anytime. I suppose the one good thing about all this is having you leaning over me. I thought doctors as good-looking and sexy as you only appeared on television. Are you real or have they flown you in from Hollywood to perk up everyone’s Christmas?’
In the process of labelling blood bottles, Lara winced slightly at the patient’s less than subtle approach and glanced towards Christian, anticipating a cool putdown.
But he chose not to respond to the comment. He was probably used to female adulation, Lara thought to herself as she dropped the bottles into the bag and handed them to another nurse to take to the lab. He was so impossibly attractive he had to have been fending off desperately hopeful women all of his adult life.
She pulled the ECG machine closer to the trolley and tried to ignore the fact that Ellen was still flirting with Christian.
‘Do you play poker?’ Her voice was husky. ‘I bet you do. You have one of those faces that gives nothing away. Inscrutable. You must win millions. Oh, dear.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I feel horribly, horribly dizzy. And sadly I don’t think it’s anything to do with the fact that a gorgeous man is listening to my chest.’
Wondering
