France—India,’ he said, far too abruptly, then caught her arm as the flush faded from beneath her skin and she seemed to stagger. She steadied herself, withdrew a little so he was no longer touching her, and her dark hazel eyes met his with a mix of apprehension and entreaty.
‘You were in India? You met me at St Catherine’s?’
The words were little more than a hushed whisper, but the desperation he heard in them was reflected in her eyes.
Why?
Was the memory of India—whatever memory she did have—so horrific? Of course it would be! His own memory of the typhoon was confused, disjointed, then blurred by pain, but she, who’d been buried alive…
‘Did you—?’
The whispered words had barely left her lips when Alex strode back into the room.
‘Coffee’s on the way and the first patient is in fifteen minutes so we’ll skip quickly through these files while we drink it.’ He dropped the files on his desk, and pulled two chairs close to it so they could all see the records as he leafed through them.
‘Alex, I—’ Lauren began, then she shook her head and added, ‘The files, of course. Let’s get on with them.’
But she shot another look in Jean-Luc’s direction, a searching look that turned to despair before she shook her head again and dropped into one of the chairs by Alex’s desk.
Jean-Luc took the other chair, too close to Lauren, so he was conscious of the tension in her body and of her attempts to relax, breathing deeply, holding her hands clasped tightly in her lap to still their trembling.
Once she had trembled in his arms, but this reaction—this was pain or fear or something else he couldn’t understand.
He cursed himself for upsetting her so badly at the beginning of a working day, but why was she so upset?
‘Sorry, Alex, I know I’ve got to stop blaming jet-lag but I was distracted again. Would you please tell me the child’s name once more?’
Jean-Luc forced himself to set all thoughts of the past aside and concentrate on what Alex was saying—after all, these would be his patients very shortly. An operation was only the beginning of some children’s relationship with their cardiac surgeon—follow-up visits might go on for years.
‘Cain Cardella. He was brought to the hospital with aortic stenosis. A balloon catheterisation at the regional hospital failed and we did an open-heart op to repair the aortic valve. There were complications with his coronary artery as well, but he came through the op well and now he’s back for a twelve-month check-up.’
Alex passed the file to Jean-Luc, who opened it and began to read, surprised to see that the ‘complications’ Alex had spoken of so casually had been quite complex, with the left coronary artery having to be repositioned.
‘It was quite a long operation,’ Alex said, apparently reading Jean-Luc’s surprise. ‘Very tricky, but as you will see, Cain’s done surprisingly well.’
Coffee arrived and the three of them continued to work through the patient files, Alex giving Jean-Luc a précis of each patient’s problem while Lauren added information about the families of the children.
‘Now, this one,’ Alex said, when they’d reached the final file, ‘will be yours. Unless Annie has the baby early, I’ll still be here, but I’ve been reading of your success with the latest septal occluder. We’ve never used this particular device so we’d all like to see how you use it and to learn why you prefer it. We’ll discuss it further at a full unit meeting prior to the op, but for now the patient, Jeremy Willis, is four years old. The specialist who was seeing him over at the Children’s Hospital had already decided he’d need to do a closure, then he heard you were coming and contacted us to ask if we’d get you to do it.’
Alex passed the file to Jean-Luc and as the new unit member took it in his long, slender fingers and began to read through the information, Lauren seized the opportunity to study this man who had, so suddenly and surprisingly, announced he’d known her in India.
Not that she hadn’t studied him—surreptitiously—earlier. Her reaction to his smile—his touch—had been so extreme, she’d taken every opportunity she’d had to have a good look at him, trying to work out why he affected her as he did.
Was it the scarring here and there on his cheeks—an accident at some time, which would explain his limp—that added an extra something to the man’s appeal? Made him look more attractive?
Fascinating!
Manly!
She shook her head. Theo was a manly man—gorgeous, in fact—but he didn’t raise goose-bumps on Lauren’s arms when she brushed past him, or make her stomach feel squirmy and uneasy just sitting next to him.
Perhaps it was some fragment of memory in the bit of the past that had never come back to her that made Jean-Luc so appealing.
Had he known her well, or simply met her in passing? Surely it must be the latter, or he would have said more when they’d met the previous day.
Had he been, perhaps, one of the backpackers she’d written about in her emails home—young people who’d sometimes called in and spent a night at the mission, doing jobs around the place in return for shelter and food?
Or had he been something more?
Fear, apprehension and despair all gripped her heart, squeezing it hard enough to cause physical pain in her chest.
Though, doing the maths, Jean-Luc Fournier would have been in his late twenties ten years ago and there was no way such a man—a worldly, handsome, French man—would have looked twice at the lanky, freckly, immature twenty-one-year-old she’d been.
The fear subsided though apprehension remained, useless anger building from despair that she couldn’t remember!
‘So, are we ready? Can I buzz Becky and ask her to send the Cardella family in?’
Alex’s question interrupted Lauren’s tortured thoughts, and she thrust away the nightmare of a past that was a total blank to concentrate on the present.
‘I’ll go out and bring them in,’ she said, hoping movement would ease the tension in her body and help her mind focus on her work. Even better, she could show them in then take an unobtrusive seat at the back of the office, away from Jean-Luc and his disturbing physical presence.
Jean-Luc watched Lauren leave the room, surprised that the way she moved, treading lightly and lithely, should still be so familiar to him. Surprised that his body could still react to that movement.
‘She’s a first-class nurse.’
Startled out of his reverie, Jean-Luc turned back to Alex, trying to read what lay behind the casual comment. Had Alex seen something more than casual interest in Jean-Luc’s observation of Lauren? Or was Alex, as word in the paediatric cardiac surgical world had it, omnipotent?
Alex’s face revealed nothing—in fact, he was no longer looking at Jean-Luc, but at Cain Cardella’s file.
Zut! You must forget Lauren and concentrate on what you are here for, Jean-Luc reminded himself, pulling Jeremy Willis’s file from the bottom of the pile and opening it, needing something on which he could focus his full attention.
Then Lauren was back with the patient and his parents and the consultation fell into such a familiar pattern Jean-Luc was swept along, listening, talking, asking questions, learning all he could of each and every patient and the problems the team had been called upon to fix.
‘Jean-Luc will be the major surgeon for Jeremy’s operation,’ Alex explained to Rosemary Willis two hours later when the consultations were drawing to a close. ‘I will be assisting but Jean-Luc has more experience with the new type of closure we are anxious to try.’
Rosemary frowned as she looked from Alex to