LITMIR.BIZ

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still not worn off and she inhaled the fresh, clean smell of the shirt as she pulled it down over her head like it was the latest from Versace.

      The last few months had been a steep learning curve and she was excited today to be starting her anaesthetics rotation. This was where she was hoping to specialise eventually. Scrubbing in on operations and being a surgeon’s right hand was all well and good but she missed the patient contact. At least anaesthetics gave her an opportunity to talk to the people undergoing surgery, even if they were worried and anxious.

      Miranda shoved her socked feet into the theatre clogs she’d been issued and grabbed a paper cap from the stash in her locker. She tied it at the back of her head, pleased that she’d decided to cut her hair short rather than have to manage long hair in a theatre cap all day.

      The door burst open and two of the more experienced scrub nurses entered, filling the silence. ‘I tell you he’s hot,’ Lilly Martin said. ‘The man wears pink scrubs, pink, for crying out loud and still manages to look like a sex god.’

      ‘Isn’t he married?’ Denise Grady queried, nodding at Miranda as she went past.

      ‘Ah, but there’s married, then there’s married, isn’t that right, Miranda?’

      Miranda was a little intimidated by Lilly’s brashness. She’d learned a lot about being a scrub nurse under Lilly’s tutelage but she was uncomfortable around the other woman’s forceful personality. Lilly was only a couple of years older than her but Miranda felt like a gauche seventeen-year-old again in comparison.

      ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she murmured, not wanting to get into a debate with Lilly, who could be very opinionated. Married was married as far as she was concerned. No qualifiers. It certainly made people off limits in her books.

      Not that she spent all her spare time on the prowl, as Lilly seemed to do. Or even had any spare time. Between shift work and a five-year-old, her hours were well and truly occupied.

      Except for that one night.

      Her mind drifted to Patrick. A very naked Patrick sprawled in her hotel bed, smiling that satisfied smile. Her cheeks warmed and her stomach rolled over. It had been everything she could ever have hoped for—she had no regrets.

      ‘Edna said she’d be in Theatre one when you’re done here,’ Lilly said, breaking into her delicious thoughts of a truly wonderful morning glory.

      ‘Oh, right.’ Miranda gave herself a mental shake, dragging her brain back to the present. ‘Thanks.’

      She left Lilly and Denise to their gossip session and headed down the long corridor that separated the theatres on one side from the storerooms, staffrooms and offices on the other. St Benny’s had eight operating theatres. Six were running today with the morning procedures all about to get under way.

      Goose-bumps pricked her bare arms as the frigid environment caused her to shiver. The theatres seemed to have only two temperatures—freezing cold or, if you were scrubbed and gowned under huge operating lights, boiling hot.

      Miranda pushed open the swing doors to theatre one’s anaesthetic room. Edna, an ex-army nurse, who had been at St Benny’s since Eve had been a child, looked up from a trolley and smiled.

      ‘Miranda, my dear, how are you?’

      Miranda smiled. ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

      Edna was the stereotypical mother figure, round and jolly and protective of her brood of new grads, though it had taken Miranda only a few days to figure out that you could take the woman out of the army but not the army out of the woman. Edna ran whichever theatre she was in charge of like a military operation and did not suffer fools gladly.

      Including prima donna surgeons.

      ‘Right.’ Edna smiled. ‘Let’s get started. All this week will be spent familiarising yourself with machinery and drugs and some theory,’ she said, waving a thick booklet in the air, ‘then you’ll have a couple of shifts teamed up with a mentor and next week you’ll be on your own. How does that sound?’

      ‘Terrifying?’ Miranda admitted.

      Edna chuckled. ‘You’ll be fine, dear. Just remember, if in doubt, ask. The anaesthetists won’t bite.’

      Miranda nodded. Sage advice she fully intended to take.

      The anaesthetists at Benny’s were experienced and very open to teaching and formed part of the great team atmosphere Miranda loved so much. Patients always raved about their surgeons and took the poor old anaesthetist for granted. If only they understood it was the anaesthetists who had the most important job—they were the ones keeping the patients alive during the operation!

      Miranda absently hoped that the new guy—the god in pink scrubs—was also a team player. It only took one rotten apple to make a workplace insufferable.

      Half an hour into her orientation the swing doors opened and Genevieve Cowan, the director of anaesthetics, entered, chatting to a man in pink scrubs.

      A very familiar man in pink scrubs.

      Patrick?

      Even with his hair hidden by his blue theatre cap, she recognised him instantly. And even if she’d been suddenly blinded her traitorous cells would have whispered his presence to her anyway. Every single oxygen molecule inside Miranda’s lungs seemed to burst in unison and for a moment she struggled to catch her breath.

      ‘This is Edna,’ Genevieve was saying. ‘I don’t think you’ve met her yet.’

      Miranda watched as Patrick extended his hand and shook Edna’s saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’

      Patrick was the sex god in pink scrubs? It was all falling into place now. And then a truly horrifying thought fell into place.

       He was married?

      ‘Edna has been here for ever and she knows where every single thing in this place lives. If you need something, she’s the woman for the job.’

      Miranda barely heard Genevieve as her gaze flew to Patrick’s left hand. The macaroni bracelet that had adorned his wrist six months ago was gone. But a plain gold band on his ring finger was out and proud.

      ‘She’s also,’ Genevieve continued, unaware of Miranda’s complete turmoil, ‘the best anaesthetic nurse you’ll ever meet.’

      Married.

      He was married.

      She’d slept with a married man.

      Her throat constricted. Nausea threatened.

      Edna folded her arms across her ample bosom. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere, Dr Cowan.’

      And then she laughed her giant honking laugh, yanking Miranda out of her escalating panic just in time to hear her own introduction.

      ‘And this is Miranda Dean,’ Genevieve said. ‘She’s new to our team here at Benny’s and I believe this is her first day on anaesthetic rotation?’

      Miranda looked at the floor, wishing it would swallow her whole, desperate to disappear into thin air. She wanted to go. To run. To run and not stop. To never have to face Patrick and what they’d done.

      What she’d done.

      Patrick frowned at the familiar name as his gaze swung towards the other occupant of the room, who seemed to be finding the floor utterly fascinating. Miranda Dean?

       His Miranda Dean?

      The woman he’d thought about every day, dreamed about every night for the last six months?

      Surely not?

      ‘Miranda?’

      He watched as the woman slowly raised her head to look at him. Smoky green eyes peered out from a familiar heart-shaped face and he smiled as his body took a walk down memory lane, reacting to her presence

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