her sister’s wedding, remember?’
She turned to Kate, trying to hold her desperation in check. ‘How about you, Kate? As a birthday gift to me?’
‘Sorry, Chloe, I’ve got a family thing on. You know how it is.’
She didn’t know at all. Apart from meals with Nick, she hadn’t had a family thing in fourteen years.
A sigh of frustration hissed from Luke’s thinned lips and it bounced around the room, loud in its disapproval. He zeroed his glare onto her. The ominous, dark look made his high cheekbones sharp and stark, which emphasised the charcoal shadows under his eyes. ‘I’m sorry if my plans are inconveniencing you.’
His sarcasm—so far removed from the friendly, smiling man she’d met a year ago—bit hard, ruffling her usually calm demeanour. Her chin shot up. ‘Your plans are not inconveniencing me in the slightest, Mr Stanley. However, my expertise lies in nursing adults and therefore I may well inconvenience your patient.’
‘For heaven’s sake, I’m not asking you to play games with him.’ He shoved his hand through his hair, the thick curls snagging at his fingers. ‘Look, I need a plastics nurse who’s good at her job. Either you fit the bill or you don’t.’
‘She definitely fits the bill,’ Keri interrupted, her voice full of soothing tones as she threw Chloe a look that said, What on earth is the matter with you? ‘Chloe will head up a team of three nurses to cover each block of twenty-four hours for as long as the child needs that level of care.’
Chloe gulped in a steadying breath to stop the simmer of panic that was threatening to take off into a full-blown boil. Nursing children wasn’t something she did. Even as a student nurse she’d minimised her exposure with a bit of dumb luck. Rostered onto the children’s ward during a flu epidemic, she’d ended up nursing more adults under the bright, owl-covered bedspreads than children. This time, however, her luck had run out.
Keri took Luke’s arm and steered him towards the door. ‘How are Anna and Amber? Happy to be back home in sunny Australia?’
Luke blanched, the little colour he had in his face completely draining away. ‘You don’t know?’
His quiet words sent a chill through Chloe.
‘I don’t think I do,’ Keri said warily.
He looked out towards the ward, avoiding eye contact with the three of them. ‘Anna died thirteen months ago.’
His pain jerked through Chloe and her fingers closed around her cup so hard it crumpled in her hand. The successful surgeon who’d once had everything had lost it.
Keri sagged against the doorjamb. ‘I’m so sorry, Luke, none of us had any idea…’
‘Now you do.’ His words scorched the air like the summer sun—harsh, burning and devoid of any compassion that he’d just delivered shocking news. He turned abruptly to face Chloe, his emotions masked by tight control. ‘Don’t be late on Thursday.’ Just as abruptly, he strode out of the ward.
At that moment Chloe would have given anything to avoid Thursday. As she absently listened to Kate and Keri express their stunned sorrow for Luke, the ramifications of the next few days—weeks even—hit her. The man with the reputation of being fun, forgiving and easy to work with had totally vanished. In his place was a tortured and grieving soul with a personality as black as his jet hair.
It was a hell of a way to start her thirty-first year.
‘HOW WAS SHE today?’ Luke asked, sitting at his sister’s outdoor table under the protective shadow of a huge shade sail and watching Amber running around the yard with her older cousins. He tried not to think about the fact he had to take her home to a quiet and empty house.
‘The kids ran her ragged and she napped for three hours straight,’ Steph said with an apologetic shrug. ‘I guess that means she’ll be hard to settle tonight. Sorry.’
He thought about the hard-fought routine he’d established with his toddler daughter, all of which was about to change now he was returning to full-time work. ‘Hopefully, she’s running off more energy now and will snuggle down at seven.’
His sister gave him a contemplative glance. ‘So, how was it?’
‘What?’ He was being deliberately obtuse just in case his perceptive sister was having an off day.
‘Being back at Gold Coast City?’
The memory of the shocked expression of the nurses slugged him. ‘They didn’t know.’
‘Hell.’ Her hand touched his arm.
‘Yeah.’ He stirred the ice at the bottom of his glass. ‘I thought someone would have told them. I mean, hospitals are usually seething with gossip, rumour and innuendo, but just when I needed my personal life to be part of that mill, it wasn’t.’
‘I guess because it happened in France…’
‘Maybe.’ He drained his glass, trying not to think of that night when the gendarmes had told him his car had drifted onto the wrong side of the road. ‘I had to tell them, Steph. I had to watch their horror and then their sympathy. God, I thought by now I was over having to tell people. I thought at least that part would be done.’
‘It’ll get easier.’
‘Don’t say that.’ He glared at her, hating platitudes. He’d heard enough of them to know they only made the speaker feel better. Nothing was ever going to make him feel better. Nothing could erase the bald fact that he’d unwittingly killed his darling wife.
Steph’s usually smiling mouth flattened. ‘We’ll always miss Anna. You know I meant walking into the hospital and talking with the staff will get easier. Try to look on the plus side. By the time you return on Thursday they’ll have digested the news and be onto something else. Besides, given the turnover of staff, half of them probably don’t even know you.’
The image of a pair of hazel eyes framed by black-rimmed glasses, followed by a mane of glossy, chestnut hair, pinged into his mind. Eyes that seemed familiar and yet he felt sure that he’d never met the nurse before. If they’d met, he’d have remembered that particular combination of khaki-green flecked with brown. He knew that grief screwed with memory and his had been bad lately but, even so, she hadn’t shown any spark of recognition either. Hell, he really didn’t know why he was even thinking about her.
He tried to stop the picture of her at those eyes but, like a movie reel, his brain recalled way more. In vivid detail, it rolled over her round, smiling face, her ruby-red lips that peaked in a delectable bow and her lush curves that no uniform could hide. Natural curves that in a bygone era women had embraced but which today so many tried to dominate into submission. Curves that said, I am all woman.
His mouth dried as the same short, sharp kick of arousal he’d experienced the first time he’d seen her stirred again. He rubbed the back of his neck. God, what was wrong with him? Anna had only been dead just over a year and he missed her every single day. He didn’t want to look at other women, let alone lust after them.
