much ouch?’
‘Lots.’
‘You’ve certainly got a good bruise coming up. Good thing you missed a direct hit on your toes. Can you wiggle them all?’
Bella wiggled.
Kate watched. There was indeed a large bruise on the top of Bella’s foot and it probably hurt a great deal. How crazy was it to be feeling … what, envious of her niece right now? No. She was feeling frustrated, that’s what it was. She wanted Connor out of her kitchen. Out of her house. Preferably out of her life.
Connor had his hand under the foot. ‘Try and push my hand away.’ He rested his hand gently on the top. ‘Pull up against my hand.’ Then he began carefully but thoroughly to palpate all the tiny bones Kate knew a foot contained.
‘Don’t think anything’s broken,’ he said finally. ‘But the only way to know for sure is to get an X-ray. Maybe I should run Bella back to A and E.’
‘No need,’ Kate said crisply. ‘I can take her. I don’t think riding a bike with a potentially broken foot is the best idea, do you?’
She didn’t mean to sound like some prim school teacher but it certainly came out that way. She saw the look that Connor and Bella exchanged. Her niece was smiling.
‘Don’t take any notice,’ she told Connor. ‘She’s a sweetheart, really.’
‘I’m sure,’ Connor murmured, sounding anything but. He backed away. ‘Let me know how it goes,’ he said by way of farewell.
Kate flicked off the controls on her stove. Dinner could wait. Her appetite had deserted her in any case.
‘Come on.’ She helped Bella down from the bench. ‘You can sit a bit closer to floor level while I go and make myself presentable. Then we’ll go and see what the damage is.’
The rest of the damage maybe. Something felt very odd about her home right now. As though something indefinable had been broken. Connor was gone but she could still feel his presence in her house.
And she didn’t like the feeling one little bit.
CHAPTER THREE
‘CONNOR! What are you doing here?’
Good question.
Connor wasn’t quite sure of the answer, mind you. He should be playing squash with Mike the anaesthetist. Having a beer after the game and chewing the fat with the lads. He should, at least, be having his dinner.
But here he was in the emergency department of St Pat’s. In a cubicle where Bella was lounging on the bed and Kate was sitting beside her, ramrod straight against the back of the chair.
No. This was Dr Graham sitting here. Connor sighed inwardly, knowing that this was largely why he had found himself drawn in this direction.
It was nearly an hour and a half since he’d left Bella sitting on the kitchen bench and he’d been out on the motorway, with the night air rushing past, while he’d tried to sort out the puzzle in his head.
The puzzle that Kate Graham represented.
The split personality.
Dr Graham. Prim and buttoned up at work. Closed off.
The house fitted with that image of her. Tasteful and perfect and so damned tidy. Like she was now, with her hair scraped back again and her glasses back in place and wearing a skirt and jacket that looked like the female equivalent of a business suit.
But he’d seen Kate and she’d been in frayed jeans and … and bare feet, for God’s sake. And she’d had cute toes. With red nails.
Connor loved red toenails. He couldn’t look at this woman now without remembering those toenails. He knew he wouldn’t be able to pass her in the corridor of St Pat’s from now on without remembering them, and it was messing with his head.
Two women in one body.
Connor was intrigued.
Not that he was attracted to her or anything. Hell, no. It was simply a conundrum.
A challenge.
He’d only come back to St Pat’s because it was too late to jack up a game of squash and, if he was going to eat a microwaved dinner by himself, he wanted the distraction of the new journal he’d left on his desk. So why had he veered into the emergency department on his way out?
‘I just wanted to hear the verdict on the foot,’ he said aloud. ‘If something’s broken, I’ll have a mountain of paperwork on the way. The theatre was booked under my name, you know.’
The foot was propped up on pillows, with an ice pack on the top of it.
‘Look at this.’ Bella leaned forward and lifted the ice pack.
The bruise was starting to look really impressive now. The colour was much darker and the internal bleeding was tracking down the side of the foot to pool in the hollow beneath the ankle bone.
‘Hmm …’ Connor said in his most professional voice.
Bella giggled.
Kate’s voice was clipped. Clearly this was nothing to joke about. ‘We’ve only just got back from X-Ray,’ she said. ‘We’re waiting for the radiologist’s report to come through.’
‘I could pull up the X-ray and have a look myself if you like.’ Connor was surprised they hadn’t been fast-tracked in the first place. Staff were always given preferential treatment and that was fine by him. It was one of the only perks of a job that required far more commitment than any other career.
‘Bella’s a patient here,’ Kate said. ‘And I’m a relative. The department’s busy.’
She wasn’t about to bend any rules herself and didn’t want them bent for her.
Fine.
Connor smiled. He hitched one hip onto the end of Bella’s bed. ‘No worries,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing better to do. I’ll wait, too.’
The discomfort on Kate’s face was worth waiting a bit longer for some food. Man, she was regretting not bending a rule or two now.
Her voice sounded tight when she spoke. ‘I might go and give Jackie a call. She’ll want an update.’
Connor raised an eyebrow when Kate pulled a mobile phone from the pocket of her jacket. She gave him the kind of look only women seemed to be capable of. The one that made you feel about two inches shorter or something.
‘I’ll go outside,’ she told Bella. ‘I wouldn’t want to interfere with any electronic equipment being used in here.’
Connor grinned at Bella as Kate swept past. ‘She does know that doctors have their phones on all the time in here as back-up for their pagers, doesn’t she?’
Bella’s
