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CHAPTER ONE

      FRIDAY MORNING IN Casualty was the last place Senior Registrar Dan Rossi wanted to be.

      And not with this patient—a seventeen-year-old drug-addicted youth. He’d arrested. And now the fight had begun to save his life. A life this skinny kid had valued so cheaply. How dared he?

      Dan’s thoughts turned dark. ‘Start CPR!’ He bit the words out as the team began the familiar routine, working in concert around the senior doctor, responding to his clipped orders.

      Expectations rose and fell as they treated the patient. Rose and fell again. Dan glanced at the clock. They’d done all they could but he didn’t want to call it. Not yet. Not today of all days. And not with this patient. What a waste of a young life. ‘Ramp it up!’

      He felt the sweat crawl down his back, his heart like a jackhammer against his ribs. He shouldn’t be here. He’d lost his mental filter. Lost it.

      Lost it. Lost it...

      ‘OK, he’s back.’

      Thank God. Immediately, Dan’s chest felt lighter as if a valve had just released the pressure building inside him. He woke as if from a nightmare.

      ‘Pulse rate sixty,’ Nurse Manager Lindsey Stewart relayed evenly. ‘He’s waking up.’

      Yanking off his gloves, Dan aimed them at the bin, missing by a mile. ‘Do what you have to do,’ he said, his voice flat.

      And walked out. Fast.

      Lindsey’s eyebrows hitched, her green gaze puzzled as she watched his exit.

      * * *

      ‘That was a bit odd back there,’ Vanessa Cole, Lindsey’s colleague, said, as they watched their patient being wheeled out to ICU. ‘What’s biting Rossi?’

      ‘Something’s certainly got him upset,’ Lindsey agreed. ‘Dan’s usually very cool under pressure.’

      ‘He hasn’t been here long.’ Vanessa shrugged. ‘And we don’t know much about him yet. Perhaps it’s personal—girlfriend trouble?’

      ‘Does he have a girlfriend?’

      ‘Please!’ Vanessa, who seemed to be at the sharp end of all the hospital gossip, gave an exaggerated eye-roll. ‘With that dark, smouldering thing happening?’

      ‘That’s a bit simplistic,’ Lindsey refuted. ‘Dan Rossi is a senior doctor. He wouldn’t bring that kind of stuff to work with him. I’d better try to speak to him. If it’s a work-related matter, it’ll need sorting.’

      ‘Oh, Lins.’ Vanessa’s voice held exasperation as she pushed the privacy screen open. ‘Don’t start taking the flak for Rossi’s dummy spit. We run—that is, you run an extremely efficient casualty department. It’s my guess he’ll take a long lunch and snap out of whatever’s bugging him.’

      Lindsey’s instincts were not quite buying that scenario. She recognised mental stress when she saw it, and Dan Rossi had been far from his usual self since the beginning of the shift. She frowned a bit, wondering just where he’d fled to.

      ‘Dan’s usually pretty good to work with.’

      * * *

      Dan knew he’d been discourteous to the team but today, for very personal reasons, he’d had to get out.

      Had to.

      In a secluded part of the grounds he sank into a garden seat, taking a deep breath and letting it go. Every sensible cell in his brain told him he shouldn’t have brought his personal problems to work today. In fact, he shouldn’t have come to work at all. If he’d thought it through, he’d have taken a mental health day available to all staff. Instead, he’d come to work in an environment where emotions went from high to low in seconds.

      He made a dismissive sound in his throat. Having to treat that last patient had been the trigger that had shot his ability to be objective all to hell.

      Addiction. And a foolish boy, abusing his body with no conception of the amazing gift of life. A gift Dan’s own babies had never had. No chance to draw one tiny life-saving breath. Two perfect little girls.

      It was two years ago today since he’d lost them.

      At the memory, something inside him rose up then flattened out again, like a lone wave on the sea. The grief he felt was still all too real. Grief with nowhere to go.

      A shiver went right through him and he realised he’d rushed outside without a jacket. Lifting his hands, he linked them at the back of his neck. He needed to get a grip. Once he’d got through today, he’d regroup again.

      Flipping his mobile out of his pocket, he checked for messages and found one from his colleague and closest friend, Nathan Lyons. The text simply said: Grub?

      In seconds, Dan had texted back.

      Leo’s in ten.

      * * *

      With things in Casualty more or less under control, Lindsey decided to take the early lunch. She needed to get her head together. In the staffroom she collected the minestrone she’d brought from home and reheated it in the microwave. Ignoring the chat going on around her, she took her soup to a table near the window and buried her head in a magazine.

      Halfway through her meal she stopped and raised her head to look out of the window. She’d have to say something to Dan. She couldn’t just pretend nothing had happened. But how to handle it?

      It wasn’t as though they had any kind of relationship outside the hospital. What did she really know about him anyway? She knew he’d worked in New York and, more recently, he’d left one of the big teaching hospitals in Sydney to come on staff here in this rural city of Hopeton. But beyond that? Except for the fact that Dan Rossi kept very much to himself—and that alone was an achievement in an environment where you were thrown together all the time—she knew next to nothing about his personal life. But she remembered his first day vividly.

      She’d sneaked a quick peek at him as the team had assembled for the start of the shift. Her quick inventory had noted his hair was dark, very dark and cut short, his eyes holding a moody blueness, the shadows beneath so deep they might have been painted on. His shoulders under his pinstriped shirt were broad. She had taken a deep breath and let it go, realising as she’d done so that she’d been close enough to smell he’d been shower-fresh. In the close confines where they worked that mattered to Lindsey.

      Then he’d caught her looking. And it was as if they’d shared a moment of honesty, a heartbeat of intimacy. His mouth had pulled tight then relaxed. He’d almost smiled. Almost but not quite.

      And for what it was worth the vibe was still there between them. But it seemed to Lindsey that for every tiny bit of headway she made with Dan Rossi on a personal level, he took off like a world-class sprinter in the opposite direction.

      She blew out a long breath of frustration, slamming her magazine shut as she got to her feet. Why was she even bothering to try to find out what made Dan Rossi tick? After her last boyfriend had cheated on her so spectacularly, she’d questioned her judgement about men. How did you work out which of them to trust and recognise those who were into game-playing? And right now, after the rotten morning they’d had, it was all too heavy to think about.

      * * *

      Leo’s was five minutes away from the hospital, the unpretentious little café drawing the hospital staff like bees to puffy blossoms. Chef Leo Carroll kept his menu simple. And he’d done his market research, opening at six in the morning to accommodate the early shift who just wanted a coffee and a bacon roll. Lunch began at noon and lasted until three. Then Leo closed his doors, cleaned up and went to play guitar at a blues bar in town.

      Dan settled into one of the comfortable side booths and stretched out his legs. Already he could feel the tension draining from him. Nathan’s continued support had steadied