white pinstriped business shirt with a silk tie. Everything about him said, ‘A doctor in charge of his department’.
Puffs of heat spiralled through her. How could one man look so devastatingly handsome perched casually on the edge of a desk?
‘I am, I’m here.’ Duh! Of course she was here. What happened to ‘lovely to be here’ or ‘looking forward to working with the team’? So much for wowing him and everyone else with scintillating conversation.
He glanced at her name tag, which snuggled into the indentation under her breasts. ‘Survived the admin orientation, I see?’
She laughed, remembering her long and excruciatingly dull morning. ‘As long as I remember to fill out every form in triplicate, I should be fine. I sometimes think Admin believes patients should be in triplicate as well.’ She glanced up at the patient board. It was pretty empty, only listing two patients in cubicles and no one in the resus room.
‘It looks like I’ve got a nice quiet afternoon to settle in on my first day.’
‘Of course. I especially arranged it to welcome you.’ His tanned face creased into a sparkling smile, which travelled rapidly up his cheekbones and into his eyes. Twinkling eyes, the same aqua green as the water around the coral cays of the Pacific Ocean.
She wanted to stretch out and float lazily in his gaze, revelling in the emphasis he put on the word ‘you’. But that was far too dangerous. Keep it all business. She flicked a recalcitrant curl out of her eye. ‘Especially for me? Yeah, right, I’ll remind you of that when it’s frantic and I still don’t know where everything is.’
He gave her a long, pensive look, which finished with one brow rising. ‘Ah, Emily, for a moment I forgot you don’t let me get away with anything.’
A trail of pain pricked her. Surely she hadn’t offended him? But there was no way she could flirt with him. He saw flirting as a game. As it was, she was gripping the last vestiges of her self-esteem when it came to Linton, and that was one game she couldn’t play.
Before she could speak he slid off the desk, rising to his feet, his height dwarfing her. ‘Now, I think you’ve met almost everyone except for the night staff. You know Karen and you’ve met Jason and Patti. Our students are with us for three months, and as you worked out the other Saturday, they’re in their first weeks. As well as you starting today, we have a new resident, Daniel, and an agency nurse, Jodie. She’s on a six-week contract but if she’s any good we’re hoping she can stay longer.’
‘That’s a lot of new staff.’ A flutter of panic vibrated in her stomach. ‘When do Michael and Cathy get back from their honeymoon?’
He drew in a long breath and sighed. ‘Another six weeks.’
She did the mental maths of the number of hours in the day over available staff. ‘So the roster’s still short?’
He grinned. ‘Not as short as it was a week ago.’
‘And that’s supposed to reassure me?’ She heard the rising inflection of her voice.
He gave her a playful thump on the shoulder, similar to the ones she received from her brothers on a regular basis. ‘I told you I needed you here.’ He turned away and started walking as if he knew she would follow.
Irritation at his highhandedness quelled her mounting panic. She cut off a quip and took three quick steps to catch up as he was already talking as if she was standing next to him.
‘If I’m out of the department when a patient comes in, I want to be notified. If it’s a straightforward case then you and Daniel can deal with it, but page me if you need me or if you believe Daniel needs me.’ He gave her a knowing look.
‘New resident-itis?’
His shoulders rose and fell. ‘It’s early days but I don’t want him taking on something he can’t handle.’ He stopped walking as he reached his office door, his face suddenly clearing of the usual fun and flirty expressions that defined him. ‘Emily, we’re a team. Don’t ever feel you have to cope on your own. I’m only ever a page or a phone call away.’
His sincerity washed through her, trickling under her defences like floodwaters squeezing through cracks in a levee. Her mind threatened to leap from work to studying how his eyelashes almost brushed his cheek when he blinked. Stop reading more into this than exists. He’s your boss and he’d be telling all new staff this.
She forced her attention back to the job. ‘What meetings are expected?’
He ushered her into his office and picked up a stack of folders from his desk. ‘We have a weekly meeting to discuss medical and nursing issues but I have an open-door policy so, please, don’t wait until Tuesdays at two to discuss something important. Honest and open communication is vital in a department like this.’
Honest and open. As long as it only pertained to work, she was off the hook. She couldn’t work at Warragurra Base if he knew how she really felt about him. She was embarrassed enough by it. She didn’t want to feel this way. She hated it that after everything she’d been through with Nathan, even though she knew she wasn’t ready for another relationship, she couldn’t control her body’s reaction to Linton.
‘Right, I promise I won’t let anything fester.’ She held out her arms. ‘Are they for me?’
He winked. ‘Just a bit of light reading. We’re in the middle of a policy review.’
‘Policy review?’ A vision of reading long into the night popped into her brain. Not that she slept that well, with Linton always hovering in her dreams. ‘Did you just happen to conveniently forget to tell me that when you were twisting my arm in the woolshed?’
His eyes widened in feigned outrage. ‘Twisting your arm? I don’t coerce my staff, Emily.’ He dumped the folders into her outstretched arms. ‘By the way, have you enrolled for your Master’s?’
‘That would be the arm-twisting Master’s?’ She clutched the folders to her chest.
His mouth twitched smugly. ‘All I did was provide you with an opportunity to do something you’ve wanted to do for a while.’ He lowered himself on the corner of his desk, his eyes full of curiosity, appraising her. ‘So, which subject are you starting off with?’
Surprise hit her so hard she swayed on her feet. She stared back at his face, so unexpectedly full of genuine interest. She hadn’t expected that. ‘I, um, I’m starting off with “Interpersonal Relationships in the Clinical Environment”.’
Otherwise known as how to survive working closely with a boss whose presence turns your mind to mush and your heart into a quivering mess.
He rubbed his chin in thought. ‘That sounds meaty. There’s lots of scope there on so many levels—patient-staff, staff-staff, patient-relative, relative-staff.’
His gaze settled back on her, unnerving her with its solicitude. The fun-loving charmer seemed to have taken a back seat. She’d never known him to take such an interest in her before. Her usual approach of friendly mockery didn’t seem right. She managed to stammer out, ‘I—I thought so.’
‘In a high-octane environment like A and E it can be pretty fraught at times, which is why staff
