As the taxi dropped them off at the hospital gates, Nick turned to her.
‘I don’t think I’d better come to your room with you tonight. I made you a promise — somehow I have a feeling I’ll end up breaking it.’
She slid her hand up his arm and on to his chest, feeling the heavy beating of his heart against her palm. Her own heart was beating faster, too, racing against her ribs and making it hard to breath. Her voice was soft, deep, a little husky.
‘What if I release you from that promise?’
He swallowed convulsively. ‘Cassie…’
‘Come on.’
She slid her hand back down his arm and threaded her fingers through his. They tightened protectively, and she felt a wave of tenderness wash over her.
It would be wonderful. He would be gentle, and caring, and the heat would flare between them, melting away any last reservations and leaving them complete …
‘I have to get something from my room,’ he said softly, and they walked swiftly down the corridor, impatient to be alone.
He paused at his door, a frown of consternation on his face as he read the note pinned to it.
Oh, damn…’
‘What?’
‘I’m needed in Theatre for some reason. I’ll have to go.’
‘Trevor,’ she said heavily. ‘Again.’
He turned to her, his eyes still dark with passion. ‘Cassie, I’m sorry…’
She swallowed her disappointment. ‘There’ll be another day.’
‘I must go…’
She watched him stride away, his legs eating up the corridor, until he turned at the end and was gone.
Because New Year’s Day had been a Saturday, the following Monday was a bank holiday and so the hospital didn’t get back to its normal routine until Tuesday, and it was Tuesday morning in Theatre before she saw Nick again.
As he walked in, her heart stopped in its tracks and then crashed back to life again, and he headed straight for her, a smile lighting up his eyes.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi, yourself. How’ve you been getting on?’
He laughed shortly. ‘Busy. I seem to have alienated Trevor — whenever he’s supposed to be on call, he shoves off and tells them to get me.’
‘Doesn’t that make you sick? Just because his father’s a big shot he thinks he can do whatever he likes.’
‘Who is his father?’ Nick asked curiously.
‘Old man Armitage? He’s the top cardio-thoracic surgeon — and he’s a big wheel in the trust, as well.’
Nick groaned. ‘That’ll teach me to open my mouth.’
‘What?’
He laughed softly. ‘He threatened me the other day — told me not to make waves about him being drunk. I told him I didn’t frighten easily, and ever since then he’s gone AWOL. Maybe I ought to report him.’
Cassie snorted. ‘Not if you want to survive. You’ll find your contract abbreviated or your budget cut or your beds disappearing if you do that.’
Nick looked incredulous. ‘Are you joking? The guy’s a total waste of space.’
‘He’s also Daddy’s golden boy, and nothing and nobody gets away with anything.’
Nick snorted in disgust. ‘We’ll see. Right, let’s get down to work. We’ve got a nice, steady list this morning — a hip, an arthroscopy and a thumb.’
‘How boring!’
‘And amen to that! Frankly, after the weekend I could do with being bored. I’ll see you in there.’
He left for the men’s changing-room, and Cassie finished scrubbing and went into the operating-room.
The first patient was a woman of thirty-seven, who was having a hip replacement following deterioration of her joint with recent pregnancies. She had had Perthes’ disease as a child, and after she had slipped and fallen out of a tree at the age of eleven the subsequent displacement of the head of the femur had been corrected with surgery.
Now, twenty-six years later, the joint had finally and literally ground to a halt and was to be replaced.
Nick and Cassie were looking at the X-rays when Miles Richardson, the consultant in charge, popped his head round the door and grinned.
‘OK? How’s the new boy? I gather young Armitage has been under the weather and you’ve had to take over the weekend. Sorry about that — went to the wife’s parents’ for a night or two, or I would have done it myself.’
Nick’s smile was rueful. That’s all right, sir. No problem. Might as well start with a bang.’
‘Good chap — happy on this one? Nasty mess on the radiograph — need to be a bit ruthless, I feel. Left it rather long. Ah, well, off to the wards. See you later.’
The door swooshed shut behind him, and Nick turned to Cassie and smiled.
‘Shall we?’
It was, as Richardson had predicted, a nasty mess, and it taxed all Nick’s skill to position the joint to his satisfaction.
Once again, working with him was a joy. They were perfectly in tune, their minds and bodies in total harmony, and, when he shifted against her, as well as the thrill of awareness, there was a wash of familiarity and happiness.
They exchanged glances over their masks, and she knew he felt it, too. And somehow acknowledging it made it easier to ignore, to subdue and dismiss, so that it just became a part of working with him, like the smell of his soap and the deeper, more natural smell of his skin, warm and faintly musky.
They finished that hip, and then the arthroscopy on the knee of a young amateur footballer with meniscal tears.
The last job, the thumb, was an untreated fracture of the scaphoid that had resulted in non-union of the detached fragment and consequent loss of movement in the thumb. It took time to sort out, but Nick took the time, and only finished when he was satisfied.
‘Sorry about that, it was rather trickier than I’d anticipated,’ he said to everyone there, and they murmured an acknowledgement and disappeared.
Cassie laughed softly.
‘What?’
‘Trevor would have said there wasn’t time and gone to lunch. The patient would have had to have waited, possibly till tomorrow. Actually, no, he would have finished quicker than you because he wouldn’t have bothered about the first hip to such an extent, and the thumb he would have hardly bothered with at all!’
‘I can’t believe he gets away with it,’ Nick murmured.
‘He gets away with anything he chooses. Did you hear Richardson? “Under the weather” indeed! We’re all under the weather — difficult to be above it unless you’re in a rocket!’
Nick chuckled. ‘Lunch?’
‘Have we got time?’
He shrugged. ‘A sandwich?’
‘Done. Give me two ticks to change.’
They went down to the canteen and got a sandwich and a cup of coffee each from the snack bar, then slumped in the corner with their feet propped on each other’s chairs and munched in contented silence. Then Cassie looked up.
That’s Trevor’s old man over there — grey hair, navy suit, paunchy, balding.’
Nick