that was the precise moment that the Hananis chose to emerge from the interview room.
Zayed led the way towards them, touched by the matched pairs of reddened eyes that were clear evidence that both parents had obviously given in to a bout of tears in his absence.
‘Dr Emily Livingston, these are Abir’s parents, Meera and…’
Further introductions seemed unnecessary as the newest member of his team stepped forward to take the young mother’s hands in hers.
‘You have a beautiful baby,’ Emily said simply, as though she’d guessed that neither of the child’s parents had a detailed command of English. ‘I will do everything I can to help make him well.’
Athar Hanani threw Zayed a puzzled frown, obviously needing some clarification of the situation.
‘Dr Livingston will be in the operating theatre with me, assisting me while I’m operating on Abir,’ he said, and when the young man switched to his own language to question the presence of a doctor who was a female, Zayed was glad that Emily couldn’t understand this clear evidence of his countryman’s chauvinism.
Before he could find the words to set the record straight, it was Meera who did the job for him, rounding on her husband and berating him for failing to see that the young woman doctor obviously cared about their son already.
‘I put my son, Abir Hanani, in your hands,’ she said to the green-eyed woman, reverting to English and wiping away the worried expression Zayed’s new junior had been wearing while the sharp-edged conversation had whirled incomprehensibly around her.
‘I am honoured by your trust,’ Emily said, and her smile almost seemed to light up the corridor.
An hour later, Emily’s concentration on the operative procedure was broken again by her conviction that Zayed Khalil was in pain.
The doctor in her had belatedly tallied the fact that there had been a slight hitch in his stride the first time he strode away from her along the corridor. At the time, she’d been full of a mixture of trepidation and excitement that she would shortly be assisting in a major surgical procedure; she’d also been slightly distracted by her sympathy for the terrified parents. It wasn’t until the first time she noticed that Zayed seemed to be shuffling constantly from one foot to the other that she deliberately started to take notice.
Even as she marvelled at the fact that a live human brain was only millimetres away, under the softly gleaming dura, she found herself speculating that the handsome surgeon probably maintained his impressively fit physique by some form of vigorous exercise. Had he overdone the exercise last time? Or was the marked hitch in his stride the result of an accident in his youth—perhaps the spur that had set him on course towards his career in orthopaedics?
Suddenly, she realised that this was a very similar train of thought to one that she’d had not so very long ago; that this was the second man with impaired gait she’d met since her return to Penhally…although she could hardly say that she’d met the man on the beach, only ogled him from her shadowy hideaway among the rocks. Whereas Zayed Khalil…
Well, she couldn’t really imagine this man standing on a beach as the last of the sunset faded around him while he pushed his body harder and harder to perform such a punishing workout. His preference would probably be some high-tech gym now that he was an important surgeon. And, besides, his position at St Piran’s meant that he would have to live within a relatively short distance of the hospital. The other man definitely had to live somewhere close to Penhally, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to turn up at the beach at roughly the same time each evening.
And if by some impossible fluke of coincidence they happened to be one and the same person…
Well, they aren’t, and that’s that, she told herself crossly as the surgeon shifted position yet again.
Afterwards, Emily told herself it was just her impatience with her silent speculation that took the brake off her tongue but, whatever it was, she couldn’t believe it when she heard herself saying, ‘If your back aches, you might try taking those clogs off for a while.’
There was an instant deathly hush in the operating theatre and she was certain that her mask was nowhere near large enough to hide the fiery blush that swept all the way up her throat and face until it reached her hairline under her disposable hat.
‘I beg your pardon?’ His eyes were almost black, as were the eyebrows that were raised so high that they nearly reached the hat covering his close-cropped hair.
In for a penny, in for a pound, she could hear her grandmother saying, and she tipped her chin up an inch before she repeated her suggestion.
‘I said, if your back aches, you might try taking off your clogs and going barefoot…you could put disposable hats over your feet if you’re worried about contamination.’
This time the silence seemed to stretch for ever, filled only by the rhythmic bleeps and hisses of the monitors and anaesthetic regulators.
When she was beginning to wonder if she was going to be thrown out of the theatre for breaking his concentration, he gave one swift nod.
‘It is worth trying,’ he said, and in an instant there was a nurse on her knees beside him, giving a nervous giggle as she pulled a bright blue plastic hat over each of his elegant long feet before she took his theatre clogs away.
Without another word, the operation continued as seamlessly as though the last couple of minutes had never happened, the second strip of misshapen bone carefully cut out of the skull so that the prematurely fused sutures were removed entirely.
Emily was utterly absorbed in the procedure, even more so now that she was assisting than when she had merely looked at a tape.
The brutal part was over and, hopefully, would never need repeating. Now it only remained to irrigate, check for leaks and close before he’d finished. She was quite looking forward to finding out if his suturing technique was as meticulous as every other one she’d observed when he suddenly stepped back from the table.
‘Taking the clogs off helped for a while,’ he announced in a slightly rough-edged voice as he stripped off first one glove and then the other, somehow managing to tuck one inside the other without getting any fluids on either hand. ‘But now I will watch while you complete the process.’
From the electric atmosphere in the theatre Emily knew that something momentous had just happened, but she couldn’t allow it to break her concentration, not if she was going to do herself and little Abir justice.
‘You might want to rest your best feature on an anaesthetist’s stool while I close,’ she said, as she positioned herself in his place at the table and held her hand out for the gently warmed saline, hoping her tone was matter-off-fact enough not to wound his ego. ‘I’ll probably take rather longer over this than you would.’
She almost chuckled when she heard Zayed murmur ‘rest your best feature’ in obvious amazement, and allowed herself just a couple of seconds to reflect on whether she’d spoken nothing less than the truth. The ubiquitous pale green scrubs he was wearing might be the most shapeless garments in existence, but when they were washed after every use, they soon became thin, and all it had needed was for the man to lean forward over his patient for every lean, tight curve of his muscular buttocks and thighs to be lovingly outlined.
Then it was time to switch her concentration up to full power as she thoroughly irrigated both operating fields to ensure that there were no bony fragments left inside the skull, then a minute inspection of the dura to check for any inadvertent tears. Of course, there weren’t any, and the way was clear for closing the initial incisions.
‘Clips or sutures?’ said the voice with a delicious hint of accent even in those few words.
‘I prefer sutures for areas that will be on constant show, even on a scalp where they will hopefully be covered by hair,’ she explained, pausing