He would prefer not to, however, and so far things were going smoothly. The staff were more than competent and he had no complaints about Dr Bartlett’s assistance. She was good. Somehow she had instantly tuned in with how he worked, and it was like having an extra pair of his own hands in action. Smaller hands, of course. More nimble ones. It was quite possible that Anna would be better suited to continue this when he got to the tight patches around the back.
The thought was embryonic. Barely registered, in fact, because Luke was so focused on what he was doing. Anna had the edge of the hardened pericardium caught in a pair of forceps, holding it up and helping to peel it away as he cut carefully beneath it.
He was using the scalpel with absolute precision. Tiny cuts as close to the hard casing as possible. There was less than a millimetre of space to work in. Luke was vaguely aware that the atmosphere around him was tense and that he could change it by relaxing a little and talking more, but he had no desire to do that.
He was being watched in this, his first surgery on returning to his role as head of department for cardiac surgery. Being watched and judged. They were wondering if his experience in the army had changed him—as a surgeon or as a person.
Of course it had. He had honed skills and one of them was the ability to focus no matter what kind of distractions were around. What anyone else, including Anna—no, especially Anna—might be thinking of him was irrelevant. What mattered here was a good outcome for his patient. His focus was on that scalpel. Right on its tip, which was the only part of the blade he was using.
The blood seemed to come from nowhere. There’d been small bleeders up to now that Anna had dealt with but this was a sudden gush that drowned his scalpel, washed over the fingertips of his gloves and began to form a pool. The beat of the heart made it appear briefly and then the blood washed over it again, totally obscuring his vision.
Red.
So red.
And warm. He could feel it on his fingers. Sticky life blood, ebbing rapidly from where it was supposed to be.
Someone was dying.
He could hear their screams. He could hear the sound of gunfire, too, and smell something burning. He had to do something. But he couldn’t move.
Anna saw the moment the small artery got nicked by the tip of the scalpel. It needed more than diathermy. Clamping and tying it off shouldn’t present more than a momentary delay. She picked up a clamp, ready to hand it to Luke, already eyeing up the suture material he would need.
But he didn’t request the clamp. The hand that was holding the scalpel was as still as stone. Frozen.
And then the surgeon looked up, straight at her, and Anna’s own heart missed a beat. He was looking at her but he was seeing something very different. Something that had absolutely nothing to do with this room or this patient or the surgery he was in the middle of performing.
He was seeing something … terrifying? Her heart missed only a single beat. With the next one she was moving smoothly. Using the clamp in her hand and then a suture. To those around them, it would look as though Luke had silently requested her control of the nuisance bleeding. Given his virtually silent technique up until now, it wouldn’t have surprised anyone. But Anna had been the only one to see the look in his eyes. Had felt the way he had frozen, and it had quite possibly been the most disturbing moment she had ever encountered in Theatre.
It took only moments to deal with the artery and a nurse used suction to clear the operating field again. Anna heard Luke’s indrawn breath and looked up to see the way he blinked with such deliberation it gave the impression of a switch being flicked off. And then normal service was resumed. The surgery carried on as though nothing awkward had happened.
But something had changed. Maybe it was an acknowledgment of the way Anna had rescued the situation. Or maybe it was the beginning of the kind of bond that could weld a tight team together.
‘If I tilt the heart,’ Luke said quietly a short time later, ‘you’re in a much better position to deal with that patch at the back. Are you happy with what you’ve seen of the technique?’
‘Yes.’ The increase in her own heart rate wasn’t trepidation. It was far more like excitement. The challenge of trying something new. The idea that she might be on a new journey to learn skills that nobody else could teach so well. There was something like relief mixed in there as well because her future here at St Piran’s looked a little less bleak. There was even a letting go of a little of that resentment towards the man who had reclaimed his job. The job she had desperately wanted to keep.
Thank goodness her hand was steady as she took hold of the scalpel. Even better was Luke’s quiet praise as he watched what she was doing.
‘That’s excellent. Keep going. The more of this we can remove, the better the outlook for this patient will be.’
By the time the surgery was complete, the outlook was good and Luke finally stood back from the table and stripped off his gloves, thanking everyone for their contribution to the successful procedure. As he turned to leave, he tugged at his mask, breaking the strings that held it in place, and for the first time Anna saw more than those intensely blue eyes.
She saw a rugged, unsmiling face, with deep furrows from his nose to the corners of a mouth wide enough to balance the size of his nose. He wasn’t what you’d call classically good-looking but it was hard to look away. The raw, unpolished masculinity was compelling. Those frown lines were still there at the top of his nose so maybe they were a permanent feature. When Luke started tugging off his bloodstained gown as he neared the swing doors of the theatre, Anna saw the lean muscles of deeply tanned arms. She could have sworn that those doors opened of their own accord, which was impossible but there was something about the commanding height and the way this man moved that made the notion perfectly feasible.
Luke Davenport was a soldier as much as—or possibly more than—he was a surgeon.
Every female in the room was watching as he made his exit, no doubt equally impressed, but Anna knew she would be the only one who found the image conflicting. Downright confusing, really.
Yes, Luke had lived up to his reputation as a gifted surgeon and he was apparently prepared to let her close enough to absorb valuable new skills but … what the heck had happened back when that bleeding had occurred?
Was Luke even aware of the way he had zoned out like that? He certainly hadn’t acknowledged her contribution to the situation. He’d been injured during his time on the front line. An injury that was serious enough to prevent his return to his army position. Maybe he’d received wounds to more than his leg? A head injury perhaps that had left him with a form of epilepsy? Absence seizures where the sufferer was unaware of their surroundings and could freeze for up to a minute or so would explain it, but if that was the case, there was no way he should be still holding a scalpel.
That explanation didn’t seem plausible, however. A seizure would have someone looking blank and Luke hadn’t looked blank at all. He’d looked … Haunted was the word that sprang to mind. As though he’d been sucked into a flashback that he hadn’t been able to escape from. This seemed far more likely but no less excusable.
What if he’d been close to the pulmonary artery? Or, worse, the aorta? Even a few seconds of delayed response in trying to control the kind of bleeding those vessels were capable of producing could have been disastrous. What really bothered Anna was knowing that she was probably the only person who had noticed the incident, which meant that saying anything might be seen as a form of professional sour grapes. Revenge, even, for the reprimand she’d received because of her late arrival for the case. Everyone knew that she’d missed out on the job as departmental head when she’d first applied. Now they’d be watching to see how she was handling her new role. To make an accusation that could have major repercussions on Luke’s career within the first few hours of them working together was unthinkable.