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  ‘Well, then. No introduction needed,’ John said.

  Gabe saw a slight hint of pink adorn Beth’s high cheekbones. Definitely no introduction needed. He wondered if John Winters would have been so welcoming had he known just how well acquainted he was with Beth.

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure working with you,’ Gabe said.

  Beth nodded, unable to speak, trying not to focus on the word ‘pleasure’. Was it just her hyperactive imagination or had he emphasised it slightly? Her body was still tingling in places from the pleasures they had shared.

  No! This couldn’t be happening. If she’d known she was going to have to work with him, she would never have thrown common sense and a lifetime of caution to the winds and slept with him. The one thing, the only thing, she’d managed to comfort herself with over the weekend had been she’d never have to see him again.

  ‘Well, we’d better be getting on,’ John said. ‘I believe Dr Fallon has an afternoon list, Beth?’

  Beth looked at John and nodded. She forced herself to concentrate on only him, ignoring both Gabe’s and her sister’s speculative. ‘Starts at one.’ She leafed through some papers on her desk and handed one to Gabe.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said softly as he took the theatre list. He watched her intently as she avoided his gaze. ‘I guess I’ll see you after lunch.’

  Beth gave him a quick smile, which she hoped appeared friendly, and made a show of straightening the papers on her desk. Rilla and Hailey were shrewd. Too shrewd. If she ignored him, started acting weirdly, they’d be onto her. She could tell they were already bursting to get her alone.

  John gestured for Gabe to exit first. ‘See you later, girls.’ John smiled at his daughters as they left the office.

  Beth sat, her shaky legs dubiously supportive. She adjusted a few things on her desk and then risked a look at her sisters. They were looking at her with grins on their faces.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You didn’t mention that Gabe was so gorgeous,’ Rilla stated.

  ‘Very sexy,’ Hailey concurred. ‘Slip your mind?’

  ‘He’s OK, I guess.’ she shrugged.

  ‘You guess?’ Hailey laughed. ‘That man is so damn cute I thought about slipping into a diabetic coma just to grab his attention.’

  Beth grinned at the image and then sobered. ‘Well that man is now apparently a colleague so the rest of it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Thought you said he was a teacher?’ Hailey said.

  Beth shrugged. ‘That’s what he told me.’

  A great start to their working relationship. Not only had they slept together but he’d lied to her. Had the flirting and flattery been lies too? To get her into bed? He had confessed to her, as they’d eaten from room service at three in the morning, that he’d never done anything so spontaneous before. Had that been another lie?

  She had suppressed the impulse to question him further at the time knowing that a few hours in bed with a stranger did not permit her access to the intimate details of his life, and now wished she hadn’t. She’d known what had driven her to act so outrageously—what had been his excuse?

  Beth groaned inwardly. What did his reasons matter? The more important question was how she was going to work with him. The next six months stretched before her interminably and she wished they were over already.

  ‘Well.’ Rilla grinned and winked at Hailey. ‘Looks like Gabe’s going to be around for a while. You never know what could happen in that time.’

  Beth looked from one to the other. Their brown eyes sparkled mischievously at her. ‘No.’

  Rilla and Hailey’s grins widened.

  ‘No,’ Beth repeated, more emphatically this time.

  ‘Oh, come on, Beth,’ Hailey cajoled. ‘I think he fancies you.’

  Beth tried not to remember just how much he’d fancied her on Friday night. ‘I’m not interested.’

  ‘Liar, liar pants on fire,’ Rilla teased.

  ‘I 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 had 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 distrustf
ul 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. Forget Friday night happened.’ She looked at him for confirmation.

  He nodded.

  ‘Two. No references to Friday night—ever.’

  Gabe nodded again.

  ‘Three. Be professional at all times. I will call you Dr Fallon and you will call me Sister Rogers. Four—’

  ‘Rogers?’ Gabe interrupted, frowning. ‘I thought John said you were his daughter? Oh, God…you’re not married, are you?’ She hadn’t mentioned a husband and she hadn’t been wearing a ring. Maybe that’s why she’d looked so panicked?

  ‘No!’ Beth said indignantly. Did he really think she would have slept with him had she been married? ‘John is my foster-father. I’ve been with them since I was fifteen.’

  Gabe struggled with relief and curiosity. ‘Ah. I see,’ he said, even though he didn’t really.

  Beth pressed on. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Number four, I believe.’

  Beth nodded. ‘Four. No fraternising outside work—’

  ‘Look, Beth, let me spare you the rest of the list,’ Gabe interrupted. ‘I happen to agree. Relationships at work should be avoided.’

  Not that it was a strict rule for him. He’d had relationships with colleagues before but they’d always known the score. Relationships with women who didn’t, women like Beth, were to be avoided at all costs.

  ‘I have no intention of continuing where we left off. I live on the other side of the world. I’m here for seven months only. There would be very little point.’ Except for the pretty amazing sex, of course. ‘You have no need to fear. I will be nothing but professional.’

  ‘Good.’ Beth held her arms up under the tap and let the water run down them from her fingertips to her elbows, sluicing the soap off. ‘We’re both on the same page, then.’

  She shut off the taps with her elbow and waited for the excess water to drip off her arms squashing the traitorous flutter of disappointment at his easy capitulation. She flapped her arms, briskly to dispel it altogether, keeping her arms bent. And then she turned on her heel, her now sterile arms held out in front of her.

  Gabe watched her go, pushing open the theatre doors with her shoulder, her green theatre scrubs accentuating the length of her thighs and the slimness of her hips and bottom. He shook his head as he watched the last drips of water fall from his elbows.

  That morning Beth had been thrown but this afternoon she’d been back in control. All business. Where was the woman who had struck such a chord with her sad eyes on Friday night? Who had come apart in his arms? Who had wept as she had come down from the heights they’d climbed?

  Something had been up with Beth Rogers on Friday night. Maybe it had been his own recent grief that had made him sensitive to her inner turmoil but something had made her act completely out of character. Impulsively. As had he.

  He’d known after about five minutes in her company that she wasn’t the type to sleep with a virtual stranger. And yet after her initial shock she had followed him willingly—surprised the hell out of him—and given him everything she had.

  He could still hear the gut-wrenching quality of her sobs as she had curled herself into a ball beside him. There had been such misery in her outpouring. Heartbreak and sorrow and grief. It had come from something buried deep inside. And, with his own emotions still a little raw, it had affected him more than he wanted to admit.

  Beth Rogers was certainly a conundrum. Not that he had the time or the inclination to find out what made her tick. She was right. They were colleagues and he didn’t need any complications messing with his burgeoning career. Separating conjoined twins was complicated enough.

  He flicked off the taps and drew a mental shutter on their one-night stand. He had an aneurysm to clip.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TWO weeks later, Gabe was staring down at the eight-month-old Fisher twins, lying back to back in their pram, fused occipitally. He was still amazed at the rare phenomenon. One in two hundred thousand live births. And craniopagus? Only two per cent of Siamese twins were joined at the head.

  Most doctors could go a whole lifetime and never see this condition but in his relatively young career he’d now seen three sets of craniopagus-conjoined twins and had successfully separated two of them. Consequently, he was one of the world’s foremost experts.

  As the late, great Harlan Fallon’s son, the world had expected big things of him, and fate, it seemed, had intervened to ensure that Gabe’s career was just as stellar as his father’s had
been. A tremor of excitement ran through him. In approximately four months he could give these precious babies separate lives.

  He hoped. Gabe was aware, more than anyone, of the pressures that were being put on him to ensure a third successful operation. With two positive outcomes under his belt and the Fallon reputation at stake, failure wasn’t an option—despite the enormous odds against him. But he’d faced long odds twice already and won. Looking down at the girls now, he hoped his luck wasn’t about to run out.

  Bridie babbled away while her sister slept. She smiled a dribbly smile at him and he offered her his finger, which she grasped willingly.

  ‘She likes you,’ June Fisher commented.

  ‘Well, I do have a way with women,’ he joked as he allowed Bridie to suck his finger.

  ‘Oh, yeah, you’re real big with the babes.’ Scott Fisher grinned.

  Gabe laughed and they chatted some more about the op. ‘As I explained earlier, the most important thing we can have on our side is time. We’d like to wait until Bridie and Brooke are at least ten kilos before we operate. It’s a big operation and we want them to be as strong as possible. Brooke is almost there but her sister…’ He stopped and smiled down at Bridie ‘…is still lagging behind. We’ll get the dietician involved and hopefully she should be bang on target for her first birthday.’

  ‘That’d be a great birthday present for them,’ a teary June said. ‘To be able to see each other for the first time.’

  Gabe repeated his warning that while they would do everything they could, it was a long, risky operation and there were no guarantees. They could lose one or both of the girls. Or even if they both survived the rigours of the operation, one or both of them could have brain damage. He was particularly worried about Bridie. Her sluggish weight gain indicated she wasn’t as strong as her twin.

  ‘The team’s going to be spending these next four months practising every step of the operation. I have all the scans, the MRIs and the angiography, and we have 3D images as well as several plastic models of the girls’ heads we’re working with so when we come to operate, every step will have been rehearsed.’