The Surgeon's Marriage Demand. Maggie Kingsley

wrong?’ Babs asked curiously, seeing him frown as she passed, and he shook his head.

      ‘Nothing I can’t fix,’ he replied lightly, but who was he kidding? It was going to take a lot more than one of his smiles to smooth down Olivia’s ruffled feathers. But what?

      Nothing occurred to him as he treated the elderly woman with the worst case of haemorrhoids he’d ever seen. No solution presented itself when he patched up the victim of a horrific car crash, and because he couldn’t think of anything his temper grew shorter and shorter and it was a relief to everyone when their shift finally ended.

      ‘Boy, but Seth’s been a little ray of sunshine today, hasn’t he?’ Jerry observed when Olivia helped him to gather up the notes on the patients they’d seen that day.

      ‘What do you mean, “today”?’ she replied. The specialist registrar chuckled, but his laughter faded as he saw Seth striding towards them with a look of grim determination plain on his face.

      ‘Want me to stick around, act as a referee?’ he murmured. ‘Or, then again, perhaps not,’ he added, his smile returning as Olivia shot him a look that spoke volumes. ‘OK, I’m out of here.’

      Lucky you, Olivia thought with a deep sigh, but if Seth thought he was going to bend her ear for the next half-hour he was very much mistaken.

      ‘Five minutes,’ she said as soon as he came to a halt in front of her. ‘You’ve got exactly five minutes, and then I’m going home.’

      ‘Five minutes is all I need,’ he replied, shouldering open the examination-room door then standing back so she could walk out into the corridor ahead of him.

      It had better be, she thought grimly.

      ‘OK, what’s so important that it won’t wait until tomorrow?’ she demanded, once they were both standing outside in the corridor.

      ‘I just wanted to say how much I admired the way you dealt with Tony this morning—not ripping into him when the lab confirmed Mrs Carter’s malaria.’

      Praise from Seth Hardcastle? That had to be a first, and he also looked uncomfortable. He never looked uncomfortable. He was up to something.

      ‘I’m glad you approve,’ she said. ‘Now, if there’s nothing else—’

      ‘I also think you were right when you said we needed to talk. We do need to talk, Olivia.’

      He’d called her by her first name. He’d praised her, and he’d called her by her first name. He was definitely up to something.

      ‘What kind of talking?’ she said warily.

      ‘I think we need to talk about us.’

      Us? As in him and her? His blue eyes were fixed on her, dark, and liquid and fathomless, and she swallowed—hard. Surely he wasn’t going to hit on her? He must know she’d knock him back. She was his boss, and relationships between staff members never worked, and she didn’t want to get involved with him anyway, and…

      ‘Seth—’

      ‘We always seem to be arguing, and I don’t want us to argue.’

      Neither did she but, oh, lord, now he was smiling at her. That heart-stopping smile she hadn’t seen since last week. The smile which did odd things to her stomach and made her toes curl.

      She took a steadying breath. ‘I don’t want to argue with you either, but—’

      ‘So I think there’s only one thing we can do.’

      Oh, cripes, he was going to hit on her, and it wouldn’t work, she knew it wouldn’t. OK, so he was jaw-droppingly attractive but she didn’t do casual relationships, and he didn’t do permanence, and though a fling with him might be fun—hell, of course it would be fun—the repercussions didn’t bear thinking about.

      ‘What…?’ Her voice had come out way too high, and she cleared her throat and started again. ‘What—exactly—did you have in mind?’

      ‘A truce.’

      A truce. Not ‘Why don’t we have a wild passionate affair?’ but a truce. Well, of course she’d known deep down that he wasn’t going to suggest an affair. Good grief, they’d only known each other a week, and she wasn’t his type, but…

      ‘Sounds good to me,’ she said, suddenly realising he was waiting for a reply. ‘What sort of a truce did you have in mind?’

      He leant back against the corridor wall. ‘That you agree I might occasionally be right because of the length of time I’ve worked here, and I agree you might occasionally be right because you’re seeing everything with fresh eyes.’

      It made sense. It made a lot of sense. A niggling voice at the back of her head pointed out that he could still be up to something, but she decided to meet him halfway.

      ‘Agreed,’ she said.

      He stuck out his hand. ‘Shake on it?’

      Try as she may, she couldn’t prevent a chuckle springing to her lips. ‘Shake on it,’ she agreed, and put her hand in his.

      It was a mistake. She knew the minute their fingers touched that it was a mistake. Her hand felt so safe in his. Safe, and warm, and protected, and any woman who thought she was safe with Seth Hardcastle needed her head examined. He was breath-taking sex on legs, and trouble and heartache, and she’d had more than enough trouble and heartache to last her a lifetime.

      But not enough breath-taking sex, her body whispered. Sex with Phil had been dull and unsatisfying, whereas sex with Seth…No, she wasn’t even going to speculate about what sex with Seth would be like, and quickly she eased her fingers free from his, praying her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt.

      ‘I have to go. George—’

      ‘Ah, yes. I’d forgotten about George.’

      His voice sounded oddly flat, and she wondered if he didn’t like dogs. Phil hadn’t. He’d pretended to like George, and George had pretended to like him, and then she’d discovered Phil had only been pretending to love her and her marriage had ended.

      ‘I really must go,’ she said, backing up a step.

      ‘I must, too,’ he replied, not moving at all.

      ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then,’ she mumbled, and he nodded, and she walked briskly down the corridor.

      I am not going to look back, she told herself. Looking back is what teenagers do when they’re desperate to know whether the boy they’re interested in might be interested in them so I’m not going to look back.

      But she did.

      Just as she pushed open the door leading to the car park she glanced over her shoulder, and he was still there, still watching her, and his face creased into a smile. A smile that had her smiling back like some dippy, moonstruck, sixteen-year-old. A smile that had her heart doing a happy quick-step. As she stepped out into the open air, she muttered out loud to nobody in particular, ‘Oh, damn.’