hours as Anna and Luke worked to free the blood vessels and remove a lobe of her lung. By the end of the procedure Anna was exhausted. It wasn’t until their patient was off bypass and her heart was beating again effectively that she could relax at all and it was then that she realised how Luke had ‘dealt’ with what he’d taken to be her supervision. He’d made her do the work and put so much pressure on her that she hadn’t had time to even think about how focused he had been.
If that was how he wanted to play this, it was fine by her. Brilliant, in fact. In order to watch her and challenge her to improve her own skills, he was having to focus just as intently as he would if he was doing the procedure alone. More so, in some ways, because he had to think ahead in several directions so that he could troubleshoot if she wasn’t on exactly the same wavelength.
Not that any major discrepancies in thinking had occurred. They had been amazingly in tune. So much so that Anna would have noticed instantly if Luke had lost focus. He hadn’t. She had been challenged. She’d learnt a lot. To outward appearances they had worked as a close, harmonious team. The initiative had been a huge success as far as Anna was concerned and not only from a personal perspective. The patient’s quality of life had been improved immensely and, if she was lucky, the length of it might be well beyond current expectations.
While Luke might not be prepared to recognise it yet, there had also been an additional, albeit secret bonus. He had done more than save face. Nobody watching—and there had been plenty of them—would have thought there were any undercurrents. They would have seen a head of department using exceptional skills in both surgery and teaching. His kudos had probably been raised by several degrees.
She might be exhausted now but she was also delighted. This could work.
And maybe it was a good thing that Luke was grumpy about it. Anna found she was frequently the recipient of glares over the next few days. Surprisingly often, and not just when she might have expected to cross paths with her senior colleague on ward rounds or in meetings.
It was getting so that she could sense that brooding, intense look from a considerable distance. From the end of a corridor, for instance, when she got out of a lift. Or from across the canteen when she joined a lunchtime queue. He seemed to be everywhere. All the time. It didn’t matter how late she stayed at work to catch up on paperwork or how early she arrived to get ahead with whatever her day held. He was always there. Or was it just that she was so much more aware of it?
Too aware.
So, yes, it was good that he was grumpy. It meant that he wasn’t thinking about that ill-advised distraction of kissing him. Or, if he did think about it, it didn’t make him happy. Either way, he wasn’t going to want a repetition of anything like that and that was exactly what Anna needed to push herself forward. To get over it and get on with her career and her life.
It was good.
It was. And if she reminded herself of that often enough, it would be true.
It should have been a relief to get Christmas and the start of the new year over with.
To get back to business as usual and away from all the forced cheerfulness of so many people trying to spread the joy of the season. Even patients were wishing him a happy new year, and there’d been far too many invitations to social events to find plausible excuses to avoid. So many smiles to produce.
Theatre had been the best place to be, of course. No tinsel allowed in there and nurses had to remove any silly seasonal earrings. He didn’t tolerate small talk either so he didn’t have to hear people talking about how excited their children had been as they had counted down the sleeps or what people were planning to do to see in the new year.
The only downside of being in Theatre had been that Anna had followed through her threat of supervising him. His response had been a form of attack in a way. If she wanted it to be like this and pretend she was there to improve her knowledge and skills then she could jolly well put the hard yards in instead of watching.
To his surprise, Anna had embraced the perspective and anyone in the gallery would have been convinced that that was the only reason she was in Theatre with him. Even more surprising was how much he enjoyed teaching her. At some point during that first operation on the woman with that nasty tumour threatening her cardiac function, Luke had stopped watching like a hawk to catalogue things he could be doing better than Anna and, instead, began channelling his knowledge and watching how quickly she understood what he was saying and how deftly the information was put into use.
He not only enjoyed the session, if he was really honest with himself, it had also been a relief to have her there.
Just in case.
Having watched Anna so closely during that surgery, Luke found himself continuing to watch her. He justified the scrutiny by telling himself he was watching her to see whether she was watching him. He watched her on ward rounds and in meetings. Even in the canteen. It was easy to create any number of opportunities to watch his assistant. He could find patients in the intensive care unit whose condition needed review. Departmental issues to discuss. Research projects to plan and monitor.
He discovered that Anna spent almost as much time in the hospital as he did. Way too many hours to have any kind of life away from a career. How did she find time to work on renovating that small cottage she lived in or to give her pet the attention it needed? Not that it was any of his business.
Or was it? At one point, he had to wonder if Anna’s willingness to put in so much extra time was purely due to her dedication to her career or whether it had something to do with him still being in some kind of probationary period. Was he just aware of it because he was trying to keep one step ahead of her?
Or … was he watching for a signal of some kind that she remembered that kiss?
That she might find herself thinking about it as often as he did? Sometimes he would catch her gaze and he’d feel an odd buzz. A hint that she might remember.
That she might be wondering if it would be as extraordinary if it happened again.
Wanting it to happen again.
On one of the first days of the new year, Anna was with Luke and one of her registrars in his office. They were discussing one of the new research projects due to get under way.
‘The main causes of prolonged hospital stay, morbidity and mortality following cardiac surgery are haemorrhage and infection,’ Luke was reminding the young doctor present. ‘And, quite often, infection is one of the sequelae of haemorrhage.’
Anna was listening quietly. This was an occasion when she was in Luke’s company but his attention was on someone else. Even when he involved her in the discussion, he would forget to glare at her and the simmering undercurrent that she was waiting on for further evidence that Luke was unfit for the position of responsibility he held vanished. She could interact with—and enjoy—the company of an intelligent and stimulating colleague.
Bask in it even.
The registrar was nodding. ‘Is that because they’re more susceptible to infection due to a low cardiac output?’
‘That’s one of the parameters we need to keep in mind. There’s also the issue of how long the chest has been open, whether they’ve been on bypass or whether hypothermia has been employed. There’s a lot of stuff that’s been written on aspects of this in other studies. What we’re aiming to do is possibly challenge their findings with more current information or testing methods and/or add in any other significant
