do not date colleagues.’
‘Oh, Beth,’ Rilla chided. ‘You do not date, full stop.’ She made a chicken noise and flapped her arms a couple of times. Hailey giggled.
Beth fixed her sister with a glare. ‘Rilla, you of all people should know how disastrous relationships at work can be.’
Rilla’s smile died and Hailey’s laughter cut off abruptly. Her sisters looked at her as if she’d slapped them, and Beth knew she’d stepped over the line. Damn Gabe Fallon! She’d done nothing but mother and dote on them since she’d entered their lives twenty-three years ago. Rilla ha been seven at the time and Hailey five.
‘I’m sorry, Ril,’ she said immediately, getting up from behind the desk and crouching beside her sister’s chair. ‘I spoke without thinking.’
Rilla blinked and smiled weakly. ‘It’s OK, Beth. I know you didn’t mean it that way. Just because it didn’t work out for me, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a bad thing. You have to stop punishing yourself. It’s been twenty-three years…’
It was both incredible and daunting to have two other human beings who knew everything about you and loved you anyway. Who knew what kind of ice cream you liked or what you wished for when a falling star crossed your path or how you’d cried yourself to sleep for a year. Despite their physical differences, despite their different surnames, Hailey and Rilla were her family. She didn’t know what she’d do without them.
Beth looked into Rilla’s earnest brown eyes. She took her sister’s hand and gave it a squeeze. She reached for Hailey’s and did the same.
‘Listen, guys. I love you both but I don’t need fixing up. I like my life. I have a great job and my own place and I can do what I like, when I like. I’m happy.’
Beth knew it was hard for her younger sisters to grasp. They were both still at an age when marriage and children were possible. Two years off forty, she’d given up on the often desperate need to hold a baby in her arms and her dreams of becoming a mother again. And she’d mourned that for a while but in the last couple of years had found some peace with it.
‘Now, come on, you two,’ Beth said, breaking away and standing up. ‘Thanks for coming but go away now. I have work to do.’
Rilla and Hailey stood and they all huddled together for a group hug, their foreheads touching.
‘You could just use him for sex,’ Hailey suggested. ‘He looks like he’d know some pretty slick moves.’
Rilla burst out laughing and Beth joined in despite shaking her head at Hailey. You have no idea, sister, dearest!
‘Goodbye you two.’ Beth kissed both her sisters and returned to her desk, pleased to be alone again.
She put her head on the desk and groaned. Now what? How was she supposed to see Gabe every day and act like she hadn’t seen him naked?
The day got worse. Kerry Matthews, her second in charge and the scrub nurse rostered to work in Theatre Four with the new neurosurgeon, went home at lunchtime with a migraine. The other two nurses allocated to the theatre were junior and as such had had little experience in neurology cases.
Beth had cut her teeth in neurosurgery. She’d worked for two years at the internationally renowned Radcliffe in Oxford when she’d first gone traveling, and had been working there again when she’d come home for Rilla’s wedding eight years ago and decided not to go back.
So, with the other theatres staffed and running smoothly, Beth resigned herself to having to scrub in. She stood at the washbasins outside Theatre Four and put her mask on. She could do this, she thought briskly as she tied the paper straps. Just hand him the instruments as he asks for them and try and anticipate his needs. Nothing she hadn’t done for any other surgeon in the past eighteen years.
Except she’d never slept with any of the surgeons she’d worked with. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t had her share of opportunities. Because she had. But she didn’t do that. She didn’t sleep around. At all. And certainly not with colleagues.
Sure, there had been some relationships. But her past had made her very reserved and distrustful so nothing had been successful for long. And no one had got past the detached veneer to the softness beneath.
Letting that go long enough to let someone in was a big step for Beth. Too big. It meant giving up some hard-won control and that terrified her. Too many things had happened in her younger years that she hadn’t been able to control. Being fostered by the Winters had put her back in charge of her life and it had been the gift she’d treasured most from her new family.
Beth flicked the taps and pushed the surgical scrub dispenser with her elbow. Green liquid squirted into her hand and she began the three-minute routine she could perform in her sleep, trying not to think about having to stand close to Gabriel Fallon for the next few hours.
‘You ran out on me.’
Beth started. She hadn’t heard him approach. The hairs on the back of her neck stood to attention as his presence loomed beside her. She turned her head to see him lounging against the sink, applying his mask. Looking at her.
‘Yes.’ What else could she say?
‘I was hoping to…have a late breakfast. Maybe make a weekend of it.’
Beth faltered in mid-scrub. A whole weekend in bed with Gabriel Fallon. The mind boggled.
‘You lied to me. You said you were a teacher.’
Gabe turned to face the sink and flicked the tap on. ‘I do a little lecturing.’
Beth glared at him over the top of her mask.
Gabe chuckled. ‘Look. I’m sorry. I don’t usually tell people I’m a neurosurgeon. I’m good at my job but it takes up so much of my life. I have a killer schedule and I so rarely get the chance to socialise. When I do, I like to keep my work at work. And it can get weird. People know you’re a doctor and they always want a consultation.’ He scrubbed at his soapy hands for a few moments. ‘Would you have stayed if I’d told you I was a neurosurgeon?’
She could hear the smile in his voice and she didn’t have to look at his peridot eyes to know they’d be laughing. Beth snorted. ‘I wouldn’t have gone to bed with you if I’d known you were a neurosurgeon.’
He nodded as he scrubbed at his wrists. ‘I’m glad I was…economical with the truth, then.’
Beth worked the soap down towards her elbows, ignoring the way the mask muted his voice, accentuating the accent, making it sound husky as hell.
Time for a few home truths. ‘I don’t do one-night stands.’
He’d known that the minute he’d suggested she go back to his room. He could still recall how totally shocked she’d looked for those seconds before something had changed in her eyes and she had taken his hand. ‘I never intended it to be a one-night stand.’
‘I don’t do two-night stands either,’ she said primly, horrified by the leap her pulse took at his statement.
He laughed and the noise caused a flutter inside her and she scrubbed harder at her arms. ‘This is not funny. This is a disaster.’
Gabe frowned. ‘No, a disaster would have been if we’d slept together and it had been awful. And it wasn’t.’ He looked down at her and their gazes clashed. ‘It was good. It was very, very good.’
Beth heard her breathing go all funny. She couldn’t refute it, no matter how much she knew she had to get this conversation back on an impersonal level.
She cleared her throat and turned back to concentrate on her scrub technique. ‘Be that as it may, we have to work together for the next seven months so I think we need to establish some ground rules.’
Gabe smiled behind the mask. ‘This should be good.’
‘One.