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‘Not Maggie. She had the good sense to get out of town for the weekend. Alex has got some hospital anaesthetist—with paediatric experience—so we should be OK.’
‘And Kurt?’
‘Yes, he’ll be here. As a matter of fact, I think Kurt sleeps with his machine, and as it’s now fitted in Theatre here, he was probably asleep beside it when the call came.’
Phil was still grumbling when they moved to the little lecture room, where Alex had already drawn a diagram of Amy Carter’s heart on the whiteboard. With simple words, and an economy of description, he outlined what he intended doing, pointed to the spots where trouble could be expected then asked for questions.
‘I saw the X-rays,’ Phil said, surprising Annie, who thought he’d been mooching in her office since his arrival. ‘There seemed to be a lot of scarring on the heart—far more than there should be if the duct was inserted through a thoracotomy.’
Alex sighed.
‘You’re right. I looked at it with Annie, and hoped I was wrong, but I’ve just received another file—fortunately, her parents had kept a comprehensive one as they moved from hospital to hospital. She’s had two operations already. The first tube became compromised and they opened up her chest. We’re going to be going through a lot of scar tissue, both outside and inside.’
‘So we don’t really know what we’ll find in there,’ the registrar suggested, and Alex agreed.
‘Expect the worst in these situations,’ he said, ‘then if things aren’t as bad, you’re pleasantly surprised.’
‘And if it is the worst?’ Ned asked.
‘You have to remember that this little girl will die without the operation,’ Alex said carefully. ‘She may still die with it. I’ve just told her parents that. She could die on the table and we might not be able to save her. But we go into every operation confident of a positive outcome. If I didn’t feel that way, I wouldn’t do it.’
This operation was different. Annie felt it in the tension that vibrated around the room, and heard it in the quiet swear words Alex and Phil were both muttering into their masks.
She could see for herself the difference between Alexander Ross’s heart and the scarred, gristly organ little Amy was carrying inside her chest.
Alex, no doubt conscious of the registrar and his need to learn and understand, explained things as he went—explained what should be happening, and how little Amy’s tiny heart should be configured, cursing only when he found too many anomalies.
‘The problem is the heart has compensated for its weakness. The coronary arteries, feeding blood to the heart muscle, were compromised when the shunt was put in, so the body has grown new vessels and now we’ve this bizarre network and can’t be sure what we can safely touch.’
He bent his head to his work again, then added, ‘Touch none of them is the rule in these cases. If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it.’
Four hours later Alex thanked them all and left the theatre. Ned helped Annie down from her stool, and she followed Alex out, passing him as he packed away his loupe and light just outside the door.
‘Annie!’
She stopped and turned towards him. The equipment he’d been wearing had left parts of his face reddened and his cheeks were drawn. He looked exhausted.
‘Are you doing anything now?’
‘Right now? Going to my office.’
‘After that—are you busy?’
He paused and rubbed at the red marks on his face as if they bothered him.
‘I know you have a life, and you have no obligations to me, but…’ Another hesitation, then he said, ‘I don’t know the area. I have to shop or Phil and I will starve to death over the weekend. I need a guide to help me get my bearings.’
Annie’s turn to hesitate.
It wasn’t much to ask, but it would put her in his company for the rest of the day.
‘I’ve promised Henry a walk,’ she said, and saw Alex smile.
‘But that’s great. Minnie needs a walk as well, and though I’ve seen the park down the road, I don’t know where dogs can or can’t go. We’ll walk them both and then we’ll shop, grab some lunch somewhere along the way. I’ll change, see Amy’s parents, then collect you from the office and we can go home together.’
Go home together! The three words rang in Annie’s ears, prompting a surge of loneliness.
But she wasn’t going to be seduced by words or loneliness. This was a business proposition. They’d walk their dogs—presuming Minnie was a dog—then shop, and that was it.
‘I’m worried about that baby.’
Alex’s opening remark as they left the office reassured Annie. The business side of things had been confirmed.
‘She’s been through so much,’ he continued, putting his hand behind Annie’s back to steer her into the lift. ‘And she was really down when she came in. Can a child in such a debilitated state survive another major operation?’
‘But you must have seen so many children like Amy. There must be plenty of cases where you’ve been called in after a previous operation hasn’t worked.’
He nodded, and escorted her out of the lift.
‘Of course, but I still worry every time. It’s one of the reasons I’d like to see more trained paediatric cardiac surgeries, and units set up specifically to handle congenital heart disease. CHD is the most common of all congenital conditions and the long-term survival rate of children who have surgery is excellent. It’s not a question of allocating blame in an operation that’s gone wrong. I understand the difficulties a cardiac surgeon who operates on adults ninety-nine per cent of the time must face when he sees a neonatal heart. But it needn’t happen—he wouldn’t be forced to operate—if there was a paediatric cardiac surgeon within reach.’
‘But would that have made a difference to Amy? Having someone more skilled to do the op?’
They were outside the hospital now, walking towards the crossing, and Alex paused and looked down at Annie.
‘Are you really interested or just making conversation?’ His voice made a demand of the question and she frowned at him.
‘Of course I’m interested. What are you thinking? That I’m asking questions so I’ll sound interested in your job? That it’s a way of showing interest in you? As if!’ Scorn poured like hot oil over the words. ‘I’d like to remind you that it’s my unit, too, but I can’t run it effectively if I don’t know as much as I possibly can about it.’
Alex saw her anger reflected in her eyes, and wondered how an intelligent man like himself could always find the wrong thing to say to a woman.
But walking with Annie—talking about work—had made him feel great—comfortable, relaxed and at ease with the world. Then his pessimism had surfaced, and with it memories of women who’d shown interest in his work early on in a relationship, then had blamed his job for the breakdown of the same relationship.
Not that this was a relationship. Other than purely work-related…
Not yet, hope suggested.
Maybe not ever, pessimism reminded him, giving an extra nudge with a reminder that she’d lied about not having met him before.
Unless she really didn’t remember…
Damn his pessimism! Right now he had to make amends to his colleague.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. Of course you’re interested.’
They resumed their walk, but he’d lost the conversation. It was being with Annie that was the problem—being with his ghost. The kiss, if it had done nothing else, had confirmed that.
But it had done something else. It had stirred his blood and not a little lust, so he’d walked home determined to get to know her better. Actually, he’d walked home with phrases like ‘woo her and win her’ running through his mind, but in the sober light of day he had modified these aims.
In the sober light of day he’d also found his tattered list of the delegates at the congress, and had gone through it once again, searching among delegates and partners for an Anne, or Annie, even Joanna and Annabel—any name that might conceivably be shortened to Annie.
He hadn’t found one, and couldn’t help but wonder just who she was.
Get to know her first, he’d decided, yet now here he was, treating a simple question with suspicion.
‘So, are you going to answer me, or shall we continue this walk in silence?’
‘What was the question?’
‘I asked about Amy. Would it have made a difference if she’d had a paediatric cardiac surgeon do the first two ops?’
Alex set aside thoughts of stirred blood and lust and concentrated on his reply.
‘I couldn’t say that. So much can go wrong. There are risks involved in all operations. But I firmly believe we can cut down on the percentage of risks with more specialists and specialist units.’
They’d reached his gate and Annie stopped.
‘I want a shower, and need time to write a shopping list if we’re shopping straight after we drop off the dogs. Say half an hour? You’ll be going past my gate to get to the park so I’ll wait for you there.’
‘You’ll wait for me?’ he teased, eager to rebuild the relaxed atmosphere they’d shared early in the walk.
‘Yes, I’ll wait for you. I don’t subscribe to the “women are always late” theory. I find, in fact, that women are more likely to be on time than men.’
She walked away from him, leaving him wondering just where things stood between them.
Not relaxed and easy, that was for sure! Her pert retort had underscored that point.
CHAPTER FIVE
ANNIE managed to stay angry with Alex until she saw him emerge from his front gate twenty-five minutes later. Though it wasn’t Alex emerging from the gate that made her laugh, but the little black bundle of curls trailing along behind him on the end of a lead.
Alex Attwood had a spoodle! A designer-bred spaniel-poodle cross, clearly still a puppy as it was the size of a large guineapig. The little thing cavorted along behind him like a curly black wig caught up on a rat on speed.
‘I hope you’re not laughing at my dog,’ Alex said, though the corners of his mouth were twitching as if he understood her mirth. ‘And you know the old joke about a little dog killing a big dog. Tell your Henry he’ll choke to death if he tries to swallow Minnie.’
But Annie didn’t have to tell Henry anything. He was sitting at her feet, forty kilograms of Rottweiler muscle and bone, gazing at the little spoodle with love-struck eyes, while she yipped and yapped about his feet, and explored him as if he were a new kind of doggie toy.
‘She’s gorgeous,’ Annie said, kneeling down to pat the excitable little creature. She covered Henry’s ears with her hands and added, ‘I fell in love with these dogs at the pet shop, but really needed something big and fierce.’
Loyalty made her add, ‘Not that Henry’s all that fierce, it’s just his size that frightens people.’
‘I can see he’s not that fierce,’ Alex said gravely, and she looked down to see Henry was now lying down, so the little dog could lick his face and climb across his back.
‘He’s supposed to frighten people, not other dogs,’ Annie said defensively, then realised this conversation was veering dangerously close to places she did not want to go, so she called to Henry and started walking towards the park.
‘There’s a dog-walker who walks Henry and other dogs in this area every weekday,’ she told Alex, pleased they had the dogs to talk about. ‘Mayarma, her name is. If Minnie stays inside while you’re at work, you’d have to leave a key. She collects Henry and his lead from my dad, but other dogs she picks up straight from the yard. Are you interested?’
‘Very,’ Alex told her. ‘If someone could walk Minnie during the week, I wouldn’t feel guilty about not walking her at weekends, and as perfect strangers react to seeing me walking her as you did—with hysterical laughter—I’d as soon skip the park sessions. At least with you beside me, people might assume she’s yours and we’ve just swapped leads.’
Annie listened to the grumble but guessed he was far too self-assured to care what other people thought about his dog. But the conversation did raise a question.
‘If you’re embarrassed walking a wig on legs, why buy a spoodle?’ she asked.
‘Buy a spoodle? Do you seriously think a man my height would buy a dog this size? That I wouldn’t have considered the aesthetics of the situation?’
‘A girlfriend’s dog?’ Annie guessed, although the idea of a girlfriend brought a stab of jealousy in its train.
‘My sister’s idea of an ideal companion for me,’ Alex told her, gloom deepening his voice. ‘My sister has despaired of me ever having a long-term relationship with a woman, so when she was visiting me in Melbourne a month or so ago she bought me the most curly, frilly, impossible sort of dog she could find. To keep me in touch with my feminine side, would you believe?’
Annie was laughing so hard she had to stop walking, although Henry, determined to stay close to his new friend, was dragging on his lead.
‘She is all woman,’ she conceded. ‘That’s if dogs can be classed that way. Look at how she’s vamping Henry.’
They were entering the park, and as dogs were allowed off their leads in this part of it, she bent to unclip Henry’s.
‘Will she come when you call?’
Alex looked at his small responsibility.
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘She’s been to puppy school, but seemed to think it was a place she went to flirt and play with other dogs. How seriously she took the lessons I don’t know, because sometimes she’ll obey all the commands she knows, but at others she’s totally deaf.’
‘Maybe Henry will teach her some sense,’ Annie suggested, although the way he was behaving made her wonder.
But Alex unclipped Minnie’s lead anyway, and the two dogs, so absurd together, gambolled across the grass, Henry using his huge paws with gentle insistence to guide the smaller dog around the trees and bushes.
‘I usually sit over there,’ Annie said, pointing to a comfortable seat beneath a shady tree. Since meeting Minnie and laughing at Alex’s story of her advent into his life, she’d relaxed. He’d made no move that could be indicative that she was anything other than a colleague, so she could put the kiss down to him wanting to prove something to himself.
Or to both of them.
And from now on, colleagues were all they’d be, so when he said things like ‘walk home together’ and she felt prickles of excitement, or when he put his hand on her back to guide her into a lift and she felt tremors of attraction, she had to pretend it hadn’t happened, and act like the efficient, dedicated, focussed unit manager he wanted her to be.
It’s what you want to be as well, she reminded herself.
Alex could feel the woman’s presence on the bench beside him—feel it like a magnet drawing him towards her. But he didn’t move.
He thought instead about the conversation they’d had earlier—about one snippet of it. About her needing a dog that was big and fierce.
Because she was a woman living alone?
But she wasn’t—her father lived with her.
He remembered the bruised shadows under her eyes, the vulnerability he’d sensed in her five years ago. He thought about her change of name, and anger coiled like a waking serpent in his gut.
No, he was letting his imagination run away with him. There could be any number of reasons for a woman to change her name. Marriage was the obvious one. Attractive woman—she could easily have been separated and married and separated again in five years.
He glanced towards her, doubting that scenario. It didn’t fit with the sensible woman he was coming to know—a sensible woman now smiling at the antics of the dogs, then laughing as Henry toppled Minnie with his paw, then rolled around on the grass so the little dog could climb all over him.
Once again Alex heard the joy and light-heartedness in the sound and saw a glimpse of the warm and vibrant woman inside her efficient, work-focussed fac¸ade. But she’d laughed earlier, when he’d told her about Minnie coming into his life, then she’d shut that woman away and become a colleague again, as if that was all she wanted to be to him.
