‘Gone.’
She fought to affect nonchalance.
‘Good. He didn’t deserve you anyway,’ Max murmured, his hand reaching slowly up to lower the cup from her lips.
‘You didn’t know him,’ she protested mildly.
‘I know if he lost you, he’s a loser.’
Evie swallowed hard, unable to tear her eyes away from his.
‘I’m going to check on your patient now. All I ask in return is that you join me for a drink in the bar across the way as soon as I can get away from this farewell party I’m supposed to be at right now.’
‘What about your business and pleasure rule?’ she whispered.
‘In a few days, I won’t even be in this country, let alone this hospital.’ He gave a lopsided grin, so sexy it made her toes curl. ‘I think we can bend the rules this once, don’t you?’
His head inched closer until his nose skimmed hers. It was like some kind of exquisite torture.
She knew she should be strong, back away. But didn’t she know only too well that life was short?
Stretching her neck, she closed the gap between them, a small sound of pleasure escaping her throat as her lips met his.
Max responded without hesitation. One hand slid around the back of her head as the other pulled her firmly to him. The reality of the feel of his solid body even more impressive than the eye had allowed the mind to imagine. His teeth grazed her lips as his tongue danced seductively. He might seem dedicated to his career and refuse to date within the hospital pool, but there was no doubting that Max had dated. He knew exactly what he was doing to her.
It was all Evie could do to raise her hands and grip his shoulders and she hung on for the ride.
‘Is that you?’
‘Is what me?’ she muttered, frustrated that he’d pulled away from her.
‘The beeper.’ His voice was laced with amusement.
Slowly a familiar sound filtered into her head.
‘Oh, that’s me,’ she gasped as her brain slowly clicked back into gear.
‘Yes...’ the corners of his lips twitched as she stood dazed and immobile ‘...Evangeline. You need to go now.’
‘I do,’ she murmured, muscle memory allowing her legs to start moving, backwards but in the right direction, even as her brain felt frazzled.
‘I’ll go and see your patient. When you’re done with whatever your message is you can come and find me. I’ll be back in my office.’
‘I... Okay, I’ll...see you later, Mr Van Berg.’
She watched Max turn smoothly and walk towards the double doors at the far end of the corridor, unable to stop him or say anything. It was only when her back slammed into something solid that she realised she’d reached the double doors at her own end.
She wanted to say something, but no words would come.
‘Oh, and, Evangeline?’ Max twisted his head to call over his shoulder. ‘For the rest of tonight shall we agree that it’s Max, and not Mr Van Berg?’
A slow grin spread over her face as he disappeared through the doors.
EVIE PACED THE hospital corridor.
The wait was excruciating. The squeak of her shoes sounded unusually distracting as she slowly turned on the polished floor. The ever-present smell of disinfectant pervaded her olfactory senses in a way it never had before, so strong that she could almost taste it. Once she’d been a doctor here, now she was a patient like anyone else. She could wait in the visitors’ room but there was already a woman in there who seemed to want to talk every time Evie was in there.
And anyway, out here she felt more in control, and closer to her sister-in-law, Annie. Beyond the double doors, Annie was going through yet another set of checks to confirm that she was still suitable to be Evie’s living donor for a new kidney. But after almost a year and a bombardment of test after test to confirm compatibility and eligibility, these final cross-matching and blood-pressure checks still had to be run.
She subconsciously touched her lower abdomen, more out of habit than pain since the cramps had already subsided after today’s dialysis session. Less than a week and this whole nightmare would hopefully be behind her.
Yet that wasn’t even what had her heart performing its real show-stopping drum solo, as it had every single visit she’d made to Silvertrees since that night with Max, almost one year ago to the day. The double doors clanged at the end of the corridor, causing her to whirl around, her heart in her throat, just as it had been every other hospital visit in the last four months since he’d returned from Gaza. But it was always just patients or hospital staff she didn’t know or barely recognised. Evie had no reason to think she would ever just bump into Max here. The transplant unit was in a dedicated wing set slightly apart from the main hospital. And yet every time she feared—and hoped—that the next person to walk through the doors would be him.
She could have chosen a different hospital, the one closer to where she now called home, but Evie’s referral to the state-of-the-art facility at Silvertrees was like gold dust and she’d have been a fool to turn it down for fear of bumping into a man who, for all intents and purposes, had been nothing more than a one—okay, five—night stand.
At least, that was the argument she told herself, and the one she was sticking with. After the two catastrophic attempts she’d made to contact him when he’d still been in Gaza, to tell him about the baby they had created together, she wasn’t about to admit out loud that some traitorous part of her secretly dreamed that Fate might intervene. That, in the silence of the night, a tiny, muffled voice challenged her to venture into the main hospital and find him.
Not that she had any idea what she would say to him. How she would even attempt to begin to explain the choices that she’d made. In her heart she knew everything she’d done had been for their baby—a miracle, given the deterioration in Evie’s kidney condition at the time of the pregnancy—but it didn’t make her feel good about herself.
And still.
She’d hardly been in a state to think clearly when she’d accepted the hush money. In a daze from her premature baby and her kidney failure, rushing between NICU and her dialysis sessions. So when Max’s parents—the people who should have their son’s best interests at heart—had told her that neither they, nor their son, would want anything to do with the baby, a fiercely protective new-mother instinct of her own had kicked in. She’d worked with enough troubled teens to know how damaging it could be when a child was unloved, unwanted. And she had her own painful experience of being left by her father, too.
Both she and Imogen deserved better than that. They deserved to be cherished, not made to feel like a burden. And so Evie had allowed herself to be persuaded it was in her precious baby’s best interests not to tell Max Van Berg he was a father.
But what if she’d been wrong? What if Max would have wanted to know about his daughter? Her head whirled with doubts, drowning out the sound of the double doors slamming open once again.
‘Evie?’
Goosebumps swept across her skin. She didn’t turn around; she couldn’t. The voice was painfully familiar and intensely masculine. It evoked a host of memories that Evie had spent a year trying unsuccessfully to bury. A prong of doubt speared her insides. Had she been