hoped that Mr Breyley had explained the special circumstances that had led him to absolve her from staying within easy reach of the hospital while her grandmother was so ill, but she certainly hadn’t felt up to discussing the matter with her new boss—at least, not until she’d sorted her head out and relegated her crazy awareness of the man to its proper place.
A blush heated her cheeks at the realisation that she’d actually been…what was the current term?…checking her new boss out while he’d been bending over Abir’s head on the operating table.
That was something she’d never done before, never been interested in doing, if the truth be told, but when Zayed Khalil had leant forward over Abir and the V of his top had gaped forward…
‘Well, I could hardly help seeing, unless I closed my eyes,’ she muttered defensively, and even that wouldn’t have erased the image once it had been imprinted on her retinas.
She’d wondered about his chest when she’d seen the hint of dark hair at the opening of his shirt, and had speculated about the amount of body hair he would display if she were ever to see him naked.
‘Well, it certainly isn’t a mean scattering of wiry hairs,’ she said with a strange sense of satisfaction, even as her body sizzled with heat at the idea of seeing the man totally naked. Mean was the last word she would use to describe the thick, dark pelt that had covered him as far as she could see down the front of his scrub top. As for whether it was wiry… She snorted aloud at the thought that she might ever have the opportunity to find out.
‘As if!’ she scoffed at the idea of ever becoming familiar enough with the man to run her fingers over the dark swells of his pectorals, trailing them through the thick silky-looking strands until she found the flat coppery discs of his male nipples and—
‘Enough!’ she snapped into the privacy of her little car, and leant forward to flick the radio on, loudly. ‘The last thing I need is to arrive at the home looking all hot and bothered.’ Her grandmother may be just weeks away from the end of her life but she certainly hadn’t lost her keen eyesight or her unfailing instinct for when there was something on Emily’s mind.
‘So, how’s the job going?’ Beabea asked, almost before Emily had settled into the chair beside her bed. ‘Are you still enjoying it as much as you thought you would?’
Emily smiled wryly at the fact that her grandmother had picked the one topic that she would rather not have talked about, at least until she’d banished those strange new feelings of awareness that were plaguing her.
‘By the time I got to work this morning, Mr Breyley was on his way to New Zealand,’ she announced, hoping that the ramifications of her side-tracked job would fill the time until Beabea’s next round of medication made her too drowsy to pick up anything untoward.
The story of the consultant’s concerned dash to the other side of the world so that he and his wife could be there for their daughter and new grandchild was like meat and drink to a woman who knew almost everything that happened within a fifty-mile radius of Penhally. It was testimony to the fogging effect of the analgesics that it was some time later before she suddenly realised what a disastrous effect it might have on her granddaughter’s employment.
‘But your job!’ she exclaimed breathlessly. ‘If he’s gone away, does this mean that you’re going to have to move away? Oh, Emily! And you’ve only just moved back, and I was so enjoying being able to see you each day…’
‘Hush, Beabea, it’s not a problem,’ she soothed, squeezing her grandmother’s hand gently, almost afraid that she might shatter the delicate bones. ‘Before he left, Mr Breyley organised another job for me in the interim, until he comes back.’
‘What sort of job? There can’t be two posts for the same work, surely?’ She was still fretting.
‘Not exactly the same, no,’ Emily conceded. ‘But I’ve certainly fallen on my feet with the new post. It’s paediatric orthopaedics and I went into Theatre this morning and the consultant actually let me assist.’
‘On your first day in the job?’ Beabea was understandably amazed. She’d had to listen patiently at the beginning of Emily’s time on Mr Breyley’s firm while she had moaned about wanting to do more than observe and do endless paperwork and legwork.
‘On my very first day,’ she agreed with a triumphant grin. ‘It was an operation on a little boy. The bones of his skull had fused too soon and we had to—’
‘Don’t tell me any of the gory stuff,’ Beabea warned with a grimace. ‘I don’t like thinking about it when it’s happening to little ones. It’s bad enough when it’s adults. At least they can understand what’s happening and why.’
‘Softy,’ Emily teased. ‘But I know what you mean. I hate the idea that they’ll be in pain so I always double- check their medication.’
‘But you say this new man let you assist. Does that mean passing the tools or instruments or whatever they’re called, or—’
‘No. There’s a member of theatre staff who does that. I was allowed to irrigate the incision—’
‘Irrigate? That sounds like something I’d do in the garden,’ Beabea teased, and Emily’s heart lifted that she was in good enough spirits to joke.
‘Then I stitched everything up and put the dressings on before he was transferred to Intensive Care.’
‘And what did the consultant think of your work?’ Beabea quizzed, and Emily felt the swift tide of heat flood into her cheeks. She was so grateful that there was a knock at the door before she could find an answer that wouldn’t reveal her own thoughts about the consultant.
‘Am I intruding?’ said an unexpected male voice, and a greying head appeared round the edge of the door.
‘Dr Tremayne!’ Beabea exclaimed, and Emily was amused that her grandmother sounded almost flustered. Well, for an older man he wasn’t bad looking, she supposed, and for a woman of her grandmother’s generation, the idea of a good-looking younger man seeing her in her bed was probably plenty of reason for embarrassment.
‘I was just visiting a couple of patients and thought I’d call in on one of my favourite ladies—unless it’s inconvenient. I can always come back another time.’
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