LITMIR.BIZ

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DID a very good job of ignoring her.

      He did an excellent job at pulling rank and completely speaking over her head, or looking at a child or a chart or the wall when he had no choice but to address her. And at his student lecture on Monday he paid her no more attention than any of the others. He delivered a talk on gastroenteritis, and, though he hesitated as he went to spell diarrhoea, he wrote it up correctly on the whiteboard.

      She, Ross noted, was ignoring him too. She asked no questions at the end of the lecture, but an annoying student called Cassie made up for that.

      Once their eyes met, but she quickly flicked hers away, and he, though he tried to discount it, saw the flush of red on her neck and wished that he hadn’t.

      Yes, he did a very good job at ignoring her and not talking to her till, chatting to the pathologist in the bowels of the hospital a few days later, he glanced up at the big mirror that gave a view around the corridor and there was Annika. She was yawning, holding some blood samples, completely unaware she was being watched.

      ‘I’ve been waiting for these…’ Ross said when she turned the corner, and she jumped slightly at the sight of him. He took the bloodwork and stared at the forms rather than at her.

      ‘The chute isn’t working,’ Annika explained. ‘I said I’d drop them in on my way home.’

      ‘I forgot to sign the form.’

      ‘Oh.’

      He would rather have taken ages to sign the form, but the pathologist decided they had been talking for too long and hurried him along. Annika had stopped for a moment to put on her jacket, and as his legs were much longer than hers somehow, despite trying not to, he had almost caught her up as they approached the flapping black plastic doors. It would have been really rude had she not held it open—and just plain wrong for him not to thank her and fall into step beside her.

      ‘You look tired,’ Ross commented.

      ‘It’s been a long shift.’

      This had got them halfway along the corridor, and now they should just walk along in silence, Ross reasoned. He was a consultant, and he could be as rude and as aloof as he liked—except he could hear his boots, her shoes, and an endless, awful silence. It was Ross who filled it.

      ‘I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you…’ He had—long before he had liked her.

      ‘Oh?’ She felt the adrenaline kick in, the effect of him close up far more devastating than his smile, and yet she liked it. She liked it so much that she slowed down her pace and looked over to him. ‘About what?’

      She could almost smell the bonfire—all those smiles, all that guessing, all that waiting was to be put to rest now they were finally talking.

      ‘I know your brother Iosef,’ Ross said. ‘He asked me to keep an eye out for you when you started.’

      ‘Did he?’ Her cheeks were burning, the back of her nose was stinging, and she wanted to run, to kick up her heels and run from him—because all the time she’d thought it was her, not her family, that he saw.

      ‘I’ve always meant to introduce myself. Iosef is a good friend.’ It was her jacket’s fault, Ross decided. Her jacket smelt of the forbidden perfume. It smelt so much of her that he forgot, for a second, his newly laid-down rules. ‘We should catch up some time…’

      ‘Why?’ She turned very blue eyes to him. ‘So that you can report back to Iosef?’

      ‘Of course not.’

      ‘Tell him I’m doing fine,’ Annika snapped, and, no, she didn’t kick up her heels, and she didn’t run, but she did walk swiftly away from him.

      A year.

      For more than a year she’d carried a torch, had secretly hoped that his smile, those looks they had shared, had meant something. All that time she had thought it had been about her, and yet again it wasn’t.

      Again, all she was was a Kolovsky.

      It rankled. On the drive home it gnawed and burnt, but when she got there her mother had left a long message on the answer machine which rankled rather more.

      They needed to go over details, she reminded her daughter.

      It was the charity ball in just three weeks—as if Annika could ever forget.

      When Annika had been a child it had been discovered that her father had an illegitimate son—one who was being raised in an orphanage in Russia.

      Levander had been brought over to Australia. Her father had done everything to make up for the wretched years his son had suffered, and Levander’s appalling early life had been kept a closely guarded family secret.

      Now, though, the truth was starting to seep out. And Nina, anticipating a public backlash, had moved into pre-emptive damage control.

      Huge donations had been sent to several orphanages, and to a couple of street-kid programmes too.

      And then there was The Ball.

      It was to be a dazzling, glitzy affair they would all attend. Levander was to be excused because he was in England, but the rest of the family would be there. Iosef and his wife, her brother Aleksi, and of course Annika. They would all look glossy and beautiful and be photographed to the max, so that when the truth inevitably came out the spin doctors would be ready.

      Already were ready.

      Annika had read the draft of the waiting press release.

      The revelation of his son Levander’s suffering sent Ivan Kolovsky to an early grave. He was thrilled when his second-born, Iosef, on qualifying as a doctor, chose to work amongst the poor in Russia, and Ivan would be proud to know that his daughter, Annika, is now studying nursing. On Ivan’s deathbed he begged his wife to set up the Kolovsky Foundation, which has gone on to raise huge amounts (insert current figure).

      Lies.

      Lies based on twisted truths. And only since her father’s death had Annika started to question them.

      And now she had, everything had fallen apart.

      Her mother had never hit her before—oh, maybe a slap on the leg when she was little and had refused to converse in Russian, and once as a teenager, when her mother had found out she was eating burgers on her morning jog, Annika had nursed a red cheek and a swollen eye…but hardly anything major…

      Until she had asked about Levander.

      They had been sorting out her father’s things, a painful task at the best of times, and Annika had come across some letters. She hadn’t read them—she hadn’t had a chance to. Nina had snatched them out of her hands, but Annika had asked her mother a question that had been nagging. It was a question her brothers had refused to answer when she had approached them with it. She asked whether Ivan and Nina had known that Levander was in an orphanage all those years.

      Her mother had slapped her with a viciousness that had left Annika reeling—not at the pain but with shock.

      She had then discovered that when she started to think, to suggest, to question, to find her own path in life, the love and support Annika had thought was unconditional had been pulled up like a drawbridge.

      And the money had been taken away too.

      Annika deleted her mother’s message and prepared a light supper. She showered, and then, because she hadn’t had time to this morning, ironed her white agency nurse’s uniform and dressed. Tying her hair back, she clipped on her name badge.

       Annika Kolovsky.

      No matter how she resisted, it was who she was—and all she was to others.

      She should surely be used to it by now.

      Except she’d thought Ross had seen something else—thought for a foolish moment that Ross Wyatt had seen her for herself. Yet

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