The Consultant's Italian Knight Read online

  ‘I guess not, but I know I’m not easy to live with. My ex…’ She picked up her knife and fork, then put them down again. ‘He said I was my own worst enemy. That I was too driven, that I didn’t always have to be a one woman crusader trying to change things, and…’

  ‘You should remember you were married to him, and being his wife was the most important role in your life,’ he finished for her, and she flushed.

  ‘Something like that,’ she admitted, and Mario shook his head.

  ‘You married the wrong man, Kate.’

  ‘Maybe. And you’re not eating,’ she said, deliberately changing the subject. ‘I go to all the trouble of—’

  ‘Putting some cold ham and salad on a plate,’ he said, his eyes crinkling, and she laughed.

  ‘OK, all right, so I didn’t cook any of this, but eat, will you?’ she said, and obediently he forked some salad into his mouth.

  ‘Hey, this is good,’ he declared.

  ‘The local deli’s finest,’ she replied. ‘What do you normally have for meals?’

  ‘Takeaways,’ he replied, and she shook her head at him.

  ‘If that’s what you normally live on then you’re heading for clogged arteries and a coronary in a few years’ time.’

  ‘Probably.’ He grinned. ‘But I like living dangerously.’

  Maybe that’s what I ought to do, Kate thought as their eyes met. Ever since she was a little girl she’d had her three-point plan. To become an A and E consultant, to marry somebody who loved her and to have a nice home. Well, she’d struck out on two of those things, so maybe she ought to give up on plans, throw caution to the winds and live dangerously for a while. Just a little while.

  ‘Kate…?’

  ‘You’re…you’re not eating,’ she said through a throat that was suddenly far too tight.

  ‘Neither are you.’

  His voice was husky, sending tiny shivers up the back of her spine and, as his eyes held hers, deep and blue and liquid, she felt her blood heat up, and her breath go. Oh, lord, but she wanted this man. Wanted him to hold her, to kiss her, to make love to her.

  Lust, her mind whispered, and she bit her lip, and saw Mario’s eyes darken. She didn’t give a damn if it was lust. She didn’t give a damn about anything. She just wanted him to make love to her. Now.

  ‘Kate…’

  She leant towards him, and he leant forwards, too, and then suddenly he stood up, his cheeks slightly flushed.

  ‘I…You were right,’ he muttered. ‘It is late, so maybe I should just turn in.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘The sofa—it’s actually a sofa bed. I don’t know how comfortable it will be—’

  ‘I can sleep anywhere.’

  His voice was brusque, dismissive, and she forced a bright and perky smile to her lips as she got to her feet, too.

  ‘Do you want me to help you make up the bed? There’s a spare duvet in the hall cupboard, and sheets—’

  ‘I can manage, thanks.’

  ‘Right. Good.’ Oh, hell, but how could she have been so crass, so stupid, so downright obvious? He was edging towards the kitchen door, not meeting her eyes, clearly as embarrassed as hell, and her cheeks were red, and she hated the fact that they were red. ‘I’ll…I’ll see you in the morning, then,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ he muttered.

  He also muttered something else, but she didn’t catch what it was, couldn’t have, not at the speed he was moving.

  Don’t think about it, she told herself, as she limply sat down again at the kitchen table. Forget about it. Pretend it never happened. Pretend you didn’t lean towards him, clearly inviting him to kiss you. Pretend you didn’t say all those dumb, obvious things, but all the pretending in the world wouldn’t have worked.

  ‘Oh, damn,’ she said, as she put her head down on the kitchen table with a groan. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘HELL, mate, but you look rough this evening,’ Ralph Evanton declared as he and Mario stood in Kate’s office. ‘Bad shift?’

  Bad shift, bad week, Mario thought, but he didn’t say that.

  ‘What have you got for me?’ he said instead. ‘And can you make it quick? It’s bedlam in the treatment room and I don’t want to be away for too long.’

  ‘That won’t be a problem because there’s precious little to tell,’ Ralph replied. ‘Faranelli and Di Angelis boarded a plane this morning to New York which means they’re either worried we might be getting closer to them or—as is more likely—their wives fancy doing a bit of shopping in the Big Apple.’

  ‘And Mackay?’ Mario asked.

  ‘In Glasgow for his daughter’s wedding.’

  Which meant the big three knew they were getting no closer to nailing them, Mario thought with a sigh, and the longer they got nowhere the less likely it was that they would ever get a conviction.

  ‘Alert the NYPD that Faranelli and Di Angelis are on their patch, and keep the tail on Mackay. Apart from that…’ Mario shook his head. ‘We wait. That’s all we can do.’

  Ralph nodded, and slipped his notebook back into his pocket.

  ‘It’s a pity Kate has never been able to remember the other name that Hamilton gave her,’ he observed. ‘It might have been of someone lower down the chain—someone easier for us to nail.’

  ‘All she can remember is that it was the name of a town,’ Mario replied, rubbing his fingers wearily over his face. ‘Which isn’t exactly helpful.’

  ‘No. So, how’s it going, living with Kate?’

  ‘I am not living with Kate,’ Mario replied, trying and failing to keep the edge out of his voice. ‘I have simply moved in with her to protect her.’

  ‘Yes, but how’s it going?’ Ralph pressed, and Mario shot him a glance of irritation.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  But it wasn’t fine, Mario thought, as he walked slowly back to the treatment room. In fact, he could safely say that the past week had been one of the worst weeks of his life. Dio, but he couldn’t believe even now that he’d actually admitted to Kate that he had fantasies about her. OK, so at least he hadn’t confessed to the one where she was naked in his bed, and he was sliding hard into her round wet softness, but he should never have admitted to having any sort of fantasy about her.

  ‘Suspected hip fracture in cubicle 1,’ Terri declared the minute she saw him. ‘Eighty-two-year-old white female, name Eleanor Wallace, in a lot of pain but otherwise bright as a button. She tripped over in the street, and was brought in by ambulance about an hour and a half ago.’

  ‘An hour and a—’

  ‘No need to leap up onto your soap box, Mario,’ Terri interrupted with a smile, seeing his expression. ‘Kate asked for both AP pelvis and lateral hip X-rays so we shipped Mrs Wallace along to X-Ray, and this is her just back. Kate will be here in a couple of minutes, so could you take some blood samples from Mrs Wallace for glucose, FBC, and U and E?’

  In other words, he was going to be working with Kate again, Mario thought with a sinking heart.

  But that was what you wanted, his mind pointed out, to work alongside her, to make sure she was safe.

  Yes, but that was before I was spending twenty-four hours a day with her, he argued back. Twenty-four nerve-jangling, libido inflammatory hours.

  ‘Mario?’

  Terri was gazing at him expectantly and he nodded.

  ‘Blood samples. Got it. What about her IV line?’

  ‘I’ve just checked it, and it’s running smoothly with no sign of her developing shock.’

  ‘Won’t she also need an ECG reading to rule out the possibility of arrhythmias or MI?’ Mario said quickly as the sister turned to go, and she grinned at him.

  ‘Of course she will, but I knew I didn’t need to tell you that,’ she said and, with a wink, she sped off, leaving him gazing after her in confusion.

  Terri had been winking a lot at him recently, and it wasn’t that he objected to a woman winking at him but it was…weird. As though the sis
ter knew something he didn’t, and if he’d learned one thing during his eight years in the police force it was that being kept in the dark was bad news.

  ‘I thought that nice young lady doctor was coming back to see me?’ Mrs Wallace said when he opened the curtains around cubicle 1. ‘The one with the lovely hair.’

  ‘Dr Kennedy,’ Mario declared. ‘She’ll be along in a minute with the results of your X-rays, but first I need to take some blood samples from you, and link you to this little monitor to check your heart.’

  ‘Don’t nurses usually do that sort of thing?’ Mrs Wallace observed as she watched Mario place some adhesive suckers on her chest, then collect an array of sample bottles from the instrument trolley.

  ‘I am a nurse,’ Mario said, and waited for the snarky comment or disparaging observation that usually greeted his words, but to his surprise the elderly lady beamed up at him.

  ‘Good for you, Nurse…’ She peered at his name tag. ‘Nurse Volante. It’s way past time there were more male nurses in the profession, particularly…’ Her faded brown eyes twinkled. ‘…when they’re such very good-looking ones.’

  ‘Why, Mrs Wallace, I do believe you’re flirting with me.’ He laughed, and she dimpled up at him.

  ‘You know something, Nurse Volante,’ she said. ‘I do believe you’re right.’

  He laughed again, and he was still laughing when Kate stepped through the curtains.

  ‘Sounds like somebody’s having a good time,’ she said, and Mrs Wallace nodded.

  ‘I’m thinking of tripping over every week from now on!’ the elderly woman exclaimed. ‘Meeting this handsome young man has been a real tonic.’

  ‘Well, he’s certainly different,’ Kate said lightly as she squeezed past Mario to clip Mrs Wallace’s X-rays up onto the display panel.

  Dio mio, but did these damn cubicles have to be quite so small? Mario thought, sucking in his breath sharply as he felt Kate’s hip brush the top of his thigh. It was bad enough living with her in such a small flat without her invading his work space, too.

  Not that he believed for one moment that Kate was deliberately crowding him. In fact, ever since he’d moved into her flat, it had been quite the opposite. Whenever his gaze met hers she seemed to find something else incredibly interesting. If he appeared in the sitting room or the kitchen she immediately found a pressing reason to be somewhere else. It was almost as though she sensed what he was thinking, and he hoped to heaven she didn’t. Not when most of his thoughts consisted of an overwhelming desire to drag her into his arms and make love to her until they were both senseless.

  ‘It looks like a Garden 11 to me,’ Kate murmured as she flicked the switch on the display monitor then moved from plate to plate. ‘It’s not obvious in this one,’ she continued, pointing to the X-ray, ‘but if you look at numbers 4 and 5 you can just see a fracture line from the superior to inferior cortex.’

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything else,’ she said, scanning the plates intently. ‘What do you think?’

  Twelve feet, he thought as she tilted her head and her perfume filled his senses. Twelve feet was all that separated them both when they went to bed at night, him on his narrow sofa bed, and her in her big, roomy double bed, and he knew it was a big, roomy double bed because he’d seen it one morning when she’d forgotten to shut her bedroom door. Twelve tiny little feet between him and all her lush roundness, and he knew he was going to go crazy if he didn’t have her soon, just as he also knew that he couldn’t have her. Mustn’t. Not ever.

  ‘Mario,’ she repeated, a slight frown creasing her forehead. ‘I said, what do you think?’

  That I’m going insane, he thought. That I’m losing it completely, and if I don’t somehow regain control of my rampant libido I’m going to do something really, really stupid.

  ‘I don’t see anything else either,’ he forced himself to reply, and Kate turned back to Mrs Wallace with a regretful smile.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve definitely fractured your hip, Mrs Wallace,’ she declared. ‘It’s not a bad fracture, but it’s not something I can treat. I’ll arrange for you to be transferred to Orthopaedics—’

  ‘You mean, I’m going to have to stay in hospital?’ the elderly woman exclaimed with clear dismay. ‘But what about my dog—Trixie? There’s only me to look after her.’

  ‘Haven’t you any relatives we can phone?’ Kate suggested. ‘Or a neighbour who might be prepared to look after Trixie for you?’

  ‘My son’s on holiday in France and he won’t be back for a fortnight,’ Mrs Wallace replied, ‘and I wouldn’t let my next door neighbour look after a stick insect. The man’s an idiot.’

  ‘Perhaps the RSPCA might be able to help?’ Mario suggested. ‘If it’s only for a fortnight until your son returns…?’

  Mrs Wallace shook her head violently.

  ‘The RSPCA will put her in a kennel, and Trixie—she’s family, and you don’t put family in a kennel. No, I’m sorry, but we’ll just have to forget about the hip. It’s not that painful—honestly it isn’t.’

  ‘Mrs Wallace, you can’t leave,’ Kate insisted with dismay, as the elderly lady attempted to sit up, only to suddenly become very white in the face. ‘That hip won’t heal on its own, and if you don’t have treatment you’ll end up in a wheelchair.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t understand, Doctor,’ the elderly lady declared, tears flooding her eyes. ‘Trixie…My husband bought her for me as a birthday present when she was just a puppy. She’s all I have left of him since he died four years ago, and to put her in a kennel…What if anything happened to her—what if she pined away before my son came back from France?’

  Kate gazed impotently at Mario, and he cleared his throat.

  ‘Mrs Wallace, would you let Dr Kennedy transfer you to Orthopaedics if I arranged for a friend of mine to look after your dog?’

  The elderly lady gazed back at him uncertainly. ‘Is he trustworthy, this friend of yours?’

  ‘He’s in the police force,’ Mario declared, ‘and I don’t think you can get more trustworthy than that, do you?’

  ‘Well, in that case—if you’re sure it can be arranged…?’ Mrs Wallace said hesitantly, and Mario smiled at her.

  ‘Consider it done,’ he said, but after Mrs Wallace had been transferred to the orthopaedics ward Kate turned to him with a half smile.

  ‘Do you often volunteer friends for dog-sitting duties without asking them first?’

  ‘Tom won’t mind,’ Mario replied. ‘He loves dogs, and so does his wife. They’ll be more than happy to oblige.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, her smile widening, and he looked embarrassed.

  ‘Let’s just say he owes me a favour, and I’m collecting.’

  ‘You know, you really are a big softie under that tough exterior, aren’t you?’ She laughed, but he didn’t.

  In fact, he backed up a step.

  ‘Is it OK, if I use the unit phone to call Tom?’ he said. ‘I’d better give him Mrs Wallace’s address and tell him to pick up her dog.’

  ‘Of course it’s OK!’ she exclaimed, but she heaved a heavy sigh when he sped down the treatment room without as much as a backward glance.

  A week. Mario had only been living with her for a week and it had been—without doubt—the worst week of her life. Not that he had done anything to induce the lustful, lascivious thoughts that kept plaguing both her waking and her sleeping hours. In fact, he’d behaved like a perfect gentleman. Not crowding her, keeping everything light and casual, and she was the one who was continually flustered, the one who kept inventing reasons to get away from him, and it was driving her crazy.

  Look, when are you going to wake up and face reality? her mind whispered. He’s not interested. OK, so he flirted with you before he moved into your home but he’s half Italian, for God’s sake, and Italian men can’t resist chatting up women—all women. And if he was looking for a relationship it would be with a twenty-two-year-old, size
4 model, whereas you…You’re an overweight, workaholic, cranky woman with attitude who will be thirty-five in a week so why in the world would he ever be interested in you?

  George was, she thought as she reached for the whiteboard eraser and saw the replacement porter watching her from outside cubicle 6. In fact, if she was honest, she was beginning to find his constant scrutiny unnerving. So unnerving that she’d actually seriously considered telling Mario about it, but what would she say?

  ‘The new porter keeps staring at me.’

  It sounded so wimpy, so pathetic.

  So was Paul, she thought with irritation, as the specialist registrar strode past her without a word.

  ‘He loved ruling the roost when you were off sick.’ Terri laughed when she’d talked to her about him. ‘And now you’ve come back, and taken all his power away. No wonder he’s put you in the dog house.’

  Maybe that’s what she ought to do, Kate thought, as she saw Terri answering their emergency phone, and knew that an ambulance was on its way. Buy a dog, and give up on trying to understand men completely.

  ‘Burns victim on the way,’ Terri exclaimed. ‘ETA five minutes.’

  Kate nodded, but her heart sank. If there was one thing she hated it was burns cases. It was the look, and the sickly sweet smell, she couldn’t stand, had never been able to.

  Please let another case come in first, she prayed. Please let Paul have to deal with the burns case, and I get an accidental poisoning or another fractured leg, but of course she didn’t.

  As though on cue, the door of the treatment room banged open and two paramedics appeared.

  ‘Burns case, Doc,’ one of the paramedics announced. ‘Homeless guy who seems to have fallen asleep in the park while drinking and smoking, and set himself alight. A passing bus driver called it.’

  ‘Do we know his name, his age?’ she asked, trying hard not to breathe in too deeply as Mario helped the paramedics lever the man onto the examination trolley.

  ‘No ID, Doc, and as for his age—your guess is as good as mine,’ the paramedic replied. ‘He could be anywhere between fifty and seventy. Living rough ages them fast.’