There was just something about the Kolovskys.
There was still half an hour till Annika’s late shift started and, rather than walk into an unfamiliar staffroom and kill time, unusually for Annika she decided to go to the canteen. She had made a sandwich at home, but bought a cup of coffee. She glanced at the tables on offer, and for perhaps the thousandth time rued her decision to work at Melbourne Bayside.
Her brother Iosef was an emergency doctor at Melbourne Central. His wife, Annie, was a nurse there too, but Iosef had been so discouraging, scathing almost, about Annika’s ability that she had applied to study and work here instead. How nice it would be now to have Annie wave and ask to join her. Perhaps too it would have been easier to work in a hospital where there were already two Kolovskys—to feel normal.
‘Annika!’
She felt a wash of relief as one of her fellow students waved at her. Cassie was down for the children’s ward rotation too and, remembering to smile, Annika made her way over.
‘Are you on a late shift?’ asked Cassie.
‘I am,’ Annika said. ‘It’s my first, though. You’ve already done a couple of shifts there—how have you found it?’
‘Awful,’ Cassie admitted. ‘I feel like an absolute beginner. Everything’s completely different—the drug doses, the way they do obs, and then there are the parents watching your every move.’
It sounded awful, and they sat in glum silence for a moment till Cassie spoke again. ‘How was your assessment?’
‘Fine,’ Annika responded, and then remembered she was going to make more of an effort to be open and friendly ‘Well, to tell the truth it wasn’t great.’
‘Oh?’ Cassie blinked at the rare insight.
‘My grades and things are okay; it is more to do with the way I am with my peers …’ She could feel her cheeks burning at the admission. ‘And with the patients too. I can be a bit stand-offish!’
‘Oh!’ Cassie blinked again. ‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I had my assessment on Monday. I’m to stop talking and listen more, apparently. Oh, and I’m to stop burning the candle at both ends!’
And it did make her feel better—not that Cassie hadn’t fared well, more that she wasn’t the only one who was struggling. Annika smiled again, but it faded when she looked up, because there, handing over some money to the cashier, he was.
Dr Ross Wyatt.
He was impossible not to notice.
Tall, with thick black slightly wavy hair, worn just a touch too long, he didn’t look like a paediatric consultant—well, whatever paediatric consultants were supposed to look like.
Some days he would be wearing jeans and a T-shirt, finished off with dark leather cowboy boots, as if he’d just got off a horse. Other days—normally Mondays, Annika had noticed—it was a smart suit, but still with a hint of rebellion: his tie more than a little loosened, and with that silver earring he wore so well. There was just something that seemed to say his muscled, toned body wanted out of the tailored confines of his suit. And then again, but only rarely, given he wasn’t a surgeon, if he’d been on call he might be wearing scrubs. Well, it almost made her dizzy: the thin cotton that accentuated the outline of his body, the extra glimpse of olive skin and the clip of Cuban-heeled boots as she’d walked behind him in the corridor one morning….
Ross Wyatt was her favourite diversion, and he was certainly diverting her now. Annika blushed as he pocketed his change, picked up his tray and caught her looking. She looked away, tried to listen to Cassie, but the slow, lazy smile he had treated her with danced before her eyes.
Always he looked good—well, not in the conventional way: her mother, Nina, would faint at his choices. Fashion was one of the rules in her family, and Ross Wyatt broke them all.
And today, on her first day on the paediatric ward, as if to welcome her, he was dressed in Annika’s personal favourite and he looked divine!
Black jeans, with a thick leather belt, a black crewneck jumper that showed off to perfection his lean figure, black boots, and that silver earring. The colour was in his lips: wide, blood-red lips that curved into an easy smile. Annika hadn’t got close enough yet to see his eyes, but he looked like a Spanish gypsy—just the sort of man her mother would absolutely forbid. He looked wild and untamed and thrilling—as if at any minute he would kick his heels and throw up his arms, stamp a flamenco on his way over to her. She could almost smell the smoke from the bonfire—he did that to her with a single smile …
And it was madness, Annika told herself, utter madness to be sitting in the canteen having such flights of fancy. Madness to be having such thoughts, full stop.
But just the sight of him did this.
And that smile had been aimed at her.
Again.
Maybe he smiled at everyone, Annika reasoned—only it didn’t feel like it. Sometimes they would pass in the corridor, or she’d see him walking out of ICU, or in the canteen like this, and for a second he would stop … stop and smile.
It was as if he was waiting to know her.
And that was the other reason she was dreading her paediatric rotation. She had once let a lift go simply because he was in it. She wanted this whole eight weeks to be over with, to be finished.
She didn’t need any more distractions in an already complicated life—and Ross Wyatt would be just that: a huge distraction.
They had never spoken, never even exchanged pleasantries. He had looked as if he was going to try a couple of times, but she had scuttled back into her burrow like a frightened rabbit. Oh, she knew a little about him—he was a friend of her brother’s, had been a medical student at the same time as Iosef. He still went to the orphanages in Russia, doing voluntary work during his annual leave—that was why he had been unable to attend Iosef and Annie’s wedding. She had paid little attention when his name had been mentioned at the time, but since last year, when she had put his face to his name, she had yearned for snippets from her brother.
Annika swallowed as she felt the weight of his eyes still on her. She had the craziest notion that he was going to walk over and finally speak to her, so she concentrated on stirring her coffee.
‘There are compensations, of course!’ Cassie dragged her back to the conversation, only to voice what was already on Annika’s mind. ‘He’s stunning, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’ Annika flushed, stirring her coffee, but Cassie just laughed.
‘Dr Drop-Dead Gorgeous Wyatt.’
‘I don’t know him.’ Annika shrugged.
‘Well, he’s looking right over at you!’ Cassie sighed. ‘He’s amazing, and the kids just love him—he really is great with them.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know …’ Cassie admitted. ‘He just …’ She gave a frustrated shrug. ‘He gets them, I guess. He just seems to understand kids, puts them at ease.’
Annika did not, would not, look over to where he sat, but sometimes she was sure he looked over to her—because every now and then she felt her skin warm. Every now and then it seemed too complicated to move the sandwich from her hand up to her mouth.
Ross Wyatt certainly didn’t put Annika at ease.
He made her awkward.
He made her aware.
Even walking over to empty out her tray and head to work she felt as if her movements were being noted, but, though it was acutely awkward, somehow she liked the feeling he evoked. Liked the thrill in the pit of her stomach,