‘You can’t wear perfume on the children’s ward!’ Caroline’s voice had a familiar ring to it—one Ross had heard all his life.
‘What do you mean—you just didn’t want to go to school? You can’t wear an earring. You just have to, that’s all. You just don’t. You just can’t.’
‘Go and wash it off,’ Caroline said, and now Ross did look up. He saw her standing there, wary, tight-lipped, in that ridiculous apron. ‘There are children with allergies, asthma. You just can’t wear perfume, Annika—didn’t you think?’
Caroline was right, Ross conceded, there were children with allergies and, as much as he liked it, Kolovsky musk post-op might be a little bit too much, but he wanted to step in, wanted to grin at Annika and tell her she smelt divine, tell her not to wash it off, for her to tell Caroline that she wouldn’t.
And he knew that she was thinking it too!
It was a second, a mere split second, but he saw her waver—and Ross had a bizarre feeling that she was going to dive into her bag for the bottle and run around the ward, ripping off her apron and spraying perfume. The thought made him smile—at the wrong moment, though, because Annika saw him and, although Ross snapped his face to bland, she must have thought he was enjoying her discomfort.
Oh, but he wanted to correct her.
He wanted to follow her and tell her that wasn’t what he’d meant as she duly turned around and headed for the washroom.
He wanted to apologise when she came back unscented and sat at her stool while Caroline nit-picked her way through the nursing notes.
Instead he returned to his own notes.
DIAOR … He scrawled a line through it again.
Still her fragrance lingered.
He got up without a word and, unusually for Ross, closed his office door. Then he picked up his pen and forced himself to concentrate.
DIARREA.
He hurled his pen down. Who cared anyway? They knew what he meant!
He was not going to fancy her, nor, if he could help it, even talk much to her.
He was off women.
He had sworn off women.
And a student nurse on his ward—well, it couldn’t be without complications.
She was his friend’s little sister too.
No way!
Absolutely not.
He picked up his pen and resumed his notes.
‘The baby has,’ he wrote instead, ‘severe gastroenteritis.’
HE DID a very good job of ignoring her.
He did an excellent job at pulling rank and completely speaking over her head, or looking at a child or a chart or the wall when he had no choice but to address her. And at his student lecture on Monday he paid her no more attention than any of the others. He delivered a talk on gastroenteritis, and, though he hesitated as he went to spell diarrhoea, he wrote it up correctly on the whiteboard.
She, Ross noted, was ignoring him too. She asked no questions at the end of the lecture, but an annoying student called Cassie made up for that.
Once their eyes met, but she quickly flicked hers away, and he, though he tried to discount it, saw the flush of red on her neck and wished that he hadn’t.
Yes, he did a very good job at ignoring her and not talking to her till, chatting to the pathologist in the bowels of the hospital a few days later, he glanced up at the big mirror that gave a view around the corridor and there was Annika. She was yawning, holding some blood samples, completely unaware she was being watched.
‘I’ve been waiting for these …’ Ross said when she turned the corner, and she jumped slightly at the sight of him. He took the bloodwork and stared at the forms rather than at her.
‘The chute isn’t working,’ Annika explained. ‘I said I’d drop them in on my way home.’
‘I forgot to sign the form.’
‘Oh.’
He would rather have taken ages to sign the form, but the pathologist decided they had been talking for too long and hurried him along. Annika had stopped for a moment to put on her jacket, and as his legs were much longer than hers somehow, despite trying not to, he had almost caught her up as they approached the flapping black plastic doors. It would have been really rude had she not held it open—and just plain wrong for him not to thank her and fall into step beside her.
‘You look tired,’ Ross commented.
‘It’s been a long shift.’
This had got them halfway along the corridor, and now they should just walk along in silence, Ross reasoned. He was a consultant, and he could be as rude and as aloof as he liked—except he could hear his boots, her shoes, and an endless, awful silence. It was Ross who filled it.
‘I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you …’ He had—long before he had liked her.
‘Oh?’ She felt the adrenaline kick in, the effect of him close up far more devastating than his smile, and yet she liked it. She liked it so much that she slowed down her pace and looked over to him. ‘About what?’
She could almost smell the bonfire—all those smiles, all that guessing, all that waiting was to be put to rest now they were finally talking.
‘I know your brother Iosef,’ Ross said. ‘He asked me to keep an eye out for you when you started.’
‘Did he?’ Her cheeks were burning, the back of her nose was stinging, and she wanted to run, to kick up her heels and run from him—because all the time she’d thought it was her, not her family, that he saw.
‘I’ve always meant to introduce myself. Iosef is a good friend.’ It was her jacket’s fault, Ross decided. Her jacket smelt of the forbidden perfume. It smelt so much of her that he forgot, for a second, his newly laid-down rules. ‘We should catch up some time …’
‘Why?’ She turned very blue eyes to him. ‘So that you can report back to Iosef?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Tell him I’m doing fine,’ Annika snapped, and, no, she didn’t kick up her heels, and she didn’t run, but she did walk swiftly away from him.
A year.
For more than a year she’d carried a torch, had secretly hoped that his smile, those looks they had shared, had meant something. All that time she had thought it had been about her, and yet again it wasn’t.
Again, all she was was a Kolovsky.
It rankled. On the drive home it gnawed and burnt, but when she got there her mother had left a long message on the answer machine which rankled rather more.
They needed to go over details, she reminded her daughter.
It was the charity ball in just three weeks—as if Annika could ever forget.
When Annika had been a child it had been discovered that her father had an illegitimate son—one who was being raised in an orphanage in Russia.
Levander had been brought over to Australia. Her father had done everything to make up for the wretched years his son had suffered, and Levander’s appalling early life had been kept a closely guarded family secret.
Now, though, the truth was starting to seep out. And Nina, anticipating a public backlash, had moved into pre-emptive damage control.
Huge