‘Which means that at times we’ll disagree.’
‘I’m aware of that too.’ Her face was starting to burn again, but from embarrassment this time. ‘Look, thank you for stepping in with Mr Douglas, it was much appreciated. I’m not as familiar as I would like to be with renal patients so I’m very pleased that you were there. We do seem to have our wires crossed, though.’ She gave tight smile. ‘I wasn’t cross or upset.’ She saw his incredulous look.
‘You walked off.’
Penny said nothing, just stared at this huge, very masculine man. She didn’t know how to tell him and she didn’t really want to try, except her silence invited him to continue speaking.
‘I wasn’t trying to take over. You seem to have formed an opinion that I’m—’
‘Formed an opinion?’ Penny stopped him right there. ‘I’m actually a bit busy in my life right now. I haven’t had time to think, let alone form an opinion of you.’
His lips twitched almost into a smile at her not-too-subtle putdown. ‘Oh, but I think that you have,’ Ethan said, and there and then he took the gloves off. He’d tried niceness, he’d tried politeness, he’d accepted that the situation might be a little difficult for her, but at the end of the day Penny needed to get over it and accept that he had been given the job. ‘Do you know what, Penny? I’m starting to form an opinion of you, and your behaviour this afternoon is leading me to think it might be the right one.’
‘Whatever!’ Penny hadn’t got this far in her career on charm. To do her job you needed to be tough and she certainly wasn’t there to make friends. ‘You carry right on forming your opinion of me and, while you do, I’ll get back to my patients.’ Penny stood. ‘Or is there anything else you want to discuss?’
‘Nothing that won’t keep.’
She brushed past him and he was terribly tempted to catch her as she walked past, to turn her round and just have the row that was so clearly needed. Perhaps it was wiser to just let it go, Ethan thought, letting out a rare angry breath as he heard her heels clip down the corridor, but he turned at the sound of Lisa’s voice. ‘There he is.’
‘Kate?’ Ethan smiled when he saw that Lisa was with his sister, wondered, albeit briefly, what on earth she was doing at his workplace, and then properly read her face. ‘One of the kids …’
‘The kids are fine, Ethan.’ She took a breath and he knew what was coming. ‘It’s Phil—we need to get to the hospital.’ And still his brain tried to process things kindly. He waited for her to smile, to hold up crossed fingers and to say ‘this is it,’ that a heart had been found for their cousin, but she just looked at him. ‘Carl’s watching the kids. We need to hurry and get there.’
No, it would seem that Phil wasn’t going to get that heart.
Ethan was glad that Kate hadn’t told him by phone, realised that had he not stopped to talk to Penny he could have been sitting in his car, stuck on the packed Beach Road and finding out that Phil was about to die.
‘I’ll meet you there.’ He was already heading to his office to grab his car keys but Kate shook her head. She knew how close Ethan and Phil were.
‘I’ll drive.’
It was just as well that she did, because the rush-hour traffic didn’t care that there was somewhere they needed to be. Ethan could feel his temper building as they inched towards the hospital, could sense the mounting urgency, especially when his mother called to see how far away they were.
‘A couple of minutes,’ Ethan said.
‘Get here,’ came his mother’s response.
They were pulling into Melbourne Central and again Ethan was very glad that Kate had been driving. He was grateful that there was no competition in the grief stakes between him and his twin—she knew that he and Phil were like brothers. Kate dropped him off at the main entrance and then went to find a place to park the car as Ethan ran through the hospital building, desperate to get to his cousin in time, still holding a small flame of hope that something could yet be done.
It was extinguished even before he got to Phil’s room.
Because standing outside was Phil’s ex-wife, Gina, and unless he was dying she’d never be there otherwise. She’d be sitting outside in the canteen as she usually did when she brought Justin in to visit. It had been a wretched divorce and Phil’s parents hadn’t exactly been kind in their summing up of Gina—and not just behind her back. There had been some terrible arguments too.
‘Gina,’ he said, but she just flashed him a look that said he was a part of the Lewis family and could he please just stay back.
‘I’m here for Justin,’ Gina said, and Ethan nodded and went in the room. His eyes didn’t first go to Phil but to Justin. Ethan could see the bewilderment and fear on the little boy’s face as Vera and Jack, Phil’s parents, told him to be brave. Ethan felt his head tighten, wanted to tell them to stop, but then his eyes moved to the bed and to his cousin and there wasn’t even time to say to Phil all he wanted to.
It was all over by the time Kate arrived.
PENNY PARKED HER car and took a couple of moments to sort out her make-up and hair. She wondered, not for the first time, how she was going to get through this. It was eight a.m. and she had just come from having a blood test and vaginal ultrasound. If the results were as expected, she would be starting her injections this evening.
She collected her handbag and the little cool bag holding the medication and told herself that lots of women worked while they went through this.
And she told herself something else, something she had decided last night—at the very first opportunity she would apologise properly to Ethan. Penny had come up with a plan. She wouldn’t tell him everything, just explain to him that she was on some medication and that yesterday she hadn’t felt very well. If he probed, she might hint that it was a feminine issue.
Her lips twitched into a smile as she pictured Ethan’s reaction—that would soon silence him.
Walking towards Emergency, Penny saw a dark blue car pull up in the entrance bay, where the ambulances did, and she watched as a security guard walked towards it to warn the occupants that they couldn’t park there.
Except the woman wasn’t parking her car.
Instead, she was dropping Ethan Lewis off.
Penny tried not to look as they shared a brief embrace and then a thoroughly seedy-looking Ethan climbed out. He was unshaven and unkempt, dressed in yesterday’s rumpled scrubs. She tried to turn her attention away from him, but her gaze went straight to the car he had just come from. And it was then that Penny felt it—the red-hot poker that jabbed into her stomach as she glanced at the woman, a red-hot poker that temporarily nudged aside her loudly ticking biological clock. And at six minutes past eight and a few months later than most women at Peninsula Hospital, Penny realised that Ethan Lewis really was an incredibly sexy man and it wasn’t a hot flash that was causing her to blush as they walked into the department together.
‘Ethan.’ She tried to keep to the script she had planned. ‘I was wondering if I could speak to you about yesterday. I realise that I—’
‘Just leave it.’ He completely dismissed her, so much so that he strode ahead of her and into the male changing rooms.
Charming!
Ethan ignored her all day and Penny decided that she wasn’t about to try apologising again.
She took her lunch break in her office, waiting for the IVF nurse to ring, which she did right on time. Penny took a deep breath as she found out that, as expected, she was