back.
How much did Alice know? Not much, presumably, because she’d lost her job before it had started. Unfair dismissal, as it had turned out. And he’d been responsible. He had had every intention of telling her, but when he’d gone to the address the woman in Personnel had given, he’d found an empty house with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside that had a cheerful ‘Sold’ sticker planted in the centre. It had been six months after the event, in any case, and someone in Emergency had suggested that Alice had left the country.
He couldn’t tell her now. It was ancient history and here she was, working in a senior position so it hadn’t affected her career. And if he did tell her, she’d want to know how he knew and that was what had had to be left behind.
For Emmy’s sake.
He held her gaze and kept his tone carefully neutral as his brain worked overtime, tossing up whether to acknowledge the fact that they knew each other.
‘I’d like some morphine drawn up, please,’ he said.
No. He couldn’t acknowledge her. That would bring a flurry of interest from others. Questions he didn’t want to hear, let alone answer. His next words emerged before he’d had a chance to even think them through. A form of attack as a defensive shield.
‘If you have keys to the drug cabinet, that is.’
Heat scorched Alice’s cheeks.
She dragged her eyes away from his face. An olderlooking face. Thinner and far more distant. Had he changed so much from the man she remembered or was this coolness due to a determination to hide recognition? So this was how it was going to be. They were not going to acknowledge having worked together, let alone knowing what they did know about each other.
A warning shot had been fired. If she said anything about the rumours she’d been hearing before she left London, he would warn her superiors that allowing her access to restricted drugs might be inadvisable.
The unfairness of it added a new element to the emotional turmoil Alice was dealing with. Despite the traitorous reaction of her body earlier, she knew she wasn’t in love with the man any more. She’d got over that a very long time ago. About when she’d been standing in front of his desk and he’d said he couldn’t trust her enough to let her keep the job she loved.
She’d tried to hate him for that but hadn’t succeeded. Her heart had been incapable of flipping the coin to embrace the dark side of love. Especially when her head, coupled with an innate sense of fairness, had forced her to acknowledge that he’d only been doing what he had to do as head of department. Quite generously, really, when he’d offered her the opportunity to resign instead of launching an official investigation and a paper trail that would have haunted the rest of her working life.
What was really unfair was that she’d never believed the rumours about him. Even now, with the dark emotions sparked by seeing the poor battered woman they were treating at the moment and the cool distance he had placed between himself and an old colleague, she knew he was as incapable of hurting someone deliberately as she was of stealing and taking drugs. If Andrew had been interested enough to actually get to know her properly, he would have had—would still have—the same kind of faith in her.
Clearly, he didn’t. The implication beneath his request for morphine had been a deliberate reminder of the humiliating rumours she’d been unable to disprove. That he hadn’t trusted her. That he’d never really seen who she was. That hurt.
Quite apart from being an intimately personal slight, mud had a habit of sticking. Enough to ruin lives. Alice actually felt sick to her stomach as she pulled an ampoule of morphine from the cabinet and signed the register. She could feel Andrew watching her.
Jo did the drug check with her. The name of the drug. The dose. The expiry date. She watched as Alice snapped the top of the ampoule and slid a needle in to draw it up. Try as she might, Alice couldn’t disguise the subtle trembling of her hands.
‘You still need toast,’ Jo whispered.
Alice needed something a lot more than food. She needed to be a long way away from their new consultant. How could she possibly work with him when he was watching every move she made? Knowing that, despite the best of intentions and for very different reasons, she would have to fight the desire to watch every move he made? Looking for a reminder of the man she remembered. Hoping not to find one, possibly, so she could decide it had been a lucky escape and move on, once and for all.
She could switch departments, she thought wildly. Go into Cardiology. Or Paediatrics. Or Theatre. No. This was where she loved to work. Where she got a taste of everything and the adrenaline rush of helping to deal with major, life-threatening situations. This department was a big part of why her life was on track again.
She drew up the saline to dilute the morphine. She taped the ampoule to the barrel of the syringe to identify its contents and then she walked back to the bed to hand it to Andrew.
Watching Janine relax as the effect of the narcotic took the edge off her pain had a curiously similar effect on Alice. She eyed the bruised and swollen face of the woman again. The marks of brutality on the woman’s ribs and the misshapen arm now resting in a splint. The thought of someone enduring a beating like this was horrific. Sickening. Alice raised her gaze, knowing that her reaction would be evident in her eyes.
Deliberately capturing the gaze of Andrew Barrett before that reaction dimmed.
Maybe she hadn’t believed any of it but allowing Andrew to think she might have was possibly the only defence she had.
They both had something they didn’t want their colleagues to know. Things they didn’t want to lose. Alice was more vulnerable. She had something she didn’t want Andrew to know, as well. It was good that he’d chosen not to acknowledge her. Distance was safe and, if it stopped being safe, then she was prepared to fight, if that was what it would take to protect herself.
Andrew’s gaze was steady. So was he, it told her.
For the moment at least, this appeared to be a standoff.
This was a disaster.
Alice clearly knew a lot more than he would have expected. Was she still in touch with old friends in London? People who would be only too happy to gossip about a police investigation involving a consultant emergency physician? That she knew too much was as unfortunate as knowing he was perpetuating a lie by letting her think he still believed the worst of her. But what else could he do?
He’d come this far and had found what appeared to be the perfect place for himself and Emmy. They’d only been here for a little over a week but he’d never seen his daughter so happy. He knew he’d made the right decision despite how hard leaving had been. Running away from it all had gone against the grain so hard it had been painful. An admission of defeat that some would probably interpret as guilt, but he’d done it for his daughter. He wasn’t going to let his little girl grow up anywhere within reach of a tainted past.
He couldn’t keep running. The world of medicine was surprisingly small and, no matter where you went, someone always knew someone else. Look at the way Dave had contacted him about the possibility of this position when they hadn’t seen each other since a short stint in an American hospital together ten years ago.
Andrew was between a rock and a hard place, here. Damned by his conscience whichever way he turned. The unwanted distraction filled his mind as he waited for Janine’s X-ray views to appear on the
