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'You wouldn't veto my appointment?'

'Of course not.' To her relief, the look he sent her was surprised. 'That's an odd question.'

'I thought that perhaps you might begin to find me too embarrassing to have around,' she admitted wanly.

She heard a sound that might have been a sigh. 'Look, Merrin—'

'I'm sorry.' She sighed, too. 'Again. I'm very sorry about everything, Prof. I didn't mean to fall in love with you.'

'You haven't fallen in love with me.'

'I'm afraid I have. I told you—'

'I'm afraid you haven't,' he said tightly, and she saw that his mood had changed. The grey glare that met what she knew must be her defensive green one was coldly impatient now. 'Be sensible.'

'Mostly I am sensible,' she told him huskily. 'I realise I probably sound silly but I'm not at all. You probably think this sort of thing happens to me all the time but it doesn't. It's never happened. Never like this. I'm not sure what's best to do.'

'You've only been here a few days—'

'Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have made any difference.'

'You're very young.'

'So you keep saying.'

'The first few weeks as a doctor are extremely stressful,' he told her. 'It's not surprising you're finding yourself reacting strangely.'

'I don't think I'm reacting strangely.'

'In a week or two this will all be forgotten.' He shut his journal with a slap. 'You'll be back to normal and neither of us will ever mention this time again. And I will be very glad—'

'I'm normal now,' she interjected.

'And I will be very glad when you're finally back to your normal, no doubt more rational self,' he continued, clearly determined to ignore her. 'Merrin, you're not normal. You're still tired from last weekend and from your time on call. You're emotional. You're in a new, demanding job at the beginning of your career and you're under stress.'

'And I'm in love with you,' she reminded him, beginning to find his patronising denial of her feelings irritating. 'Professor McAlister, I know my own emotions. I'm not a child. I'm an adult woman. I didn't want this to happen but it did and I'm simply going to live with it. I'm quite sane and, however convenient it might seem for you to think so, I'm not suffering from nervous exhaustion.'

'Then I must be,' he grated. He stood, towering above her even more than usual because she was still seated. 'Because this seems insane to me.'

She joined him in the scrub area a few minutes later. 'Where's Lindsay?'

'Helping Douglas with his sigmoid resection.' His eyes above his mask were cool now. 'I'll manage here if you want to go and watch.'

'I'll stay,' she told him, rinsing her hands and arms. The chance to be first assistant to him was too exciting a one to pass up, even if his operation would virtually be a duplicate of the last one.

'You know, Prof, I'm sorry if you feel that I'm making things difficult for you here.' She spoke quietly, determined that Shirley, fussing with the packets containing their gowns behind them, wouldn't overhear. 'But you don't need to fret. Being in love with you—that's my problem, not yours.'

She met his exasperated look earnestly. 'I told you I know you'll never return my feelings. I know that there's no future. I only told you how I felt because I knew I'd never be able to hide it, and saying anything else would have been a lie. I promise I'll never embarrass you in front of anyone else.'

'Merrin, this is ludicrous,' he said heavily.

'Why are you so surprised?' she countered. 'This must happen to you all the time.'

'It has never happened—'

'It's happened hundreds of times,' she insisted. 'I know it must have. You're too...well, believe me, it has. Clearly the women have been too timid to say anything to you.'

She pumped the dispenser with her elbow to give herself more solution. 'Well, I'm not timid. But now we both know exactly where we stand I'm going to stop apologising,' she told him quietly. 'Naturally, in an ideal world I'd like to marry you, bear your children and live happily ever after...'

She caught his outraged look, and looked away, faltering. 'Well...this isn't an ideal world. If you ever change your mind about wanting to go to bed with me, you know where to find me,' she finished quickly.

She heard a soft swear word before he shoved the water off abruptly, but he turned away to the trolley without another word.

He was very good with her during the operation. She'd thought he might be impatient with her inexperience or harried but he was neither and she learned a lot. Afterwards, though, he sent her away.

'We're stopping for lunch and we don't need you to assist this afternoon,' he told her coolly. 'See what needs doing on the
wards. No doubt Douglas will bleep you if there's anyone to see in Casualty.'

He did. They had four admissions during the afternoon, each one needing clerking and blood tests and X-rays, and Merrin was still busy collating the results when the other three came up after Theatre for the ward round shortly before six. 'Mrs Becham's haemoglobin from an hour ago is eight point two,' she told Douglas urgently, while she worked at the computer to find her biochemistry results. 'Her blood clotting is normal. I've started another unit of blood and there's one more ready. Should I order another two?'

'Another four,' the registrar answered. 'Make that six. She's bleeding heavily.'

'Mrs Becham?' the Prof asked.

'Seventy-year-old woman with dark PR bleeding since lunchtime,' Douglas told him. 'The medical team have just seen her in Casualty. They looked down with a 'scope but there was no sign of an ulcer and no history of pain, although she's had some cramping this afternoon. Otherwise very fit and well. No history suggestive of tumour. A routine blood count taken by her GP less than a month ago showed a haemoglobin of fourteen. My guess is that if there isn't a tumour then we're looking at diverticular bleed from high up.'

Merrin knew that meant a bleeding blood vessel at the base of a bowel diverticulum—diverticulosis was a relatively common condition where the bowel wall folded into little pouches off to the side of the main lumen—but she didn't understand how to diagnose or treat the condition when there was heavy bleeding.

'Angiography?' the Prof asked, his question telling her that the diagnosis must be made by injecting dye into the blood vessels supplying the bowel to tell where the bleeding was coming from.

'An urgent one booked for six,' Douglas confirmed.

The Professor was looking at Merrin and she realised he must have noted her puzzlement. 'Merrin...?'

'If the angiography shows which vessel is bleeding, do you then have to operate to repair it?' she asked.

'The radiologist will feed a catheter up from the groin to the mesenteric arteries through to the feeding artery and then probably try pushing a vasopressin injection down it,' he explained, referring to an agent that, Merrin knew, caused blood vessels to constrict. 'If he or she can't stop the bleeding then usually we operate.'

'Couldn't you try and clamp the vessel off through the colonoscope?'

'She'd have to still be bleeding for me to find the right diverticulum, but if she's still bleeding the blood obscures the 'scope,' he answered. 'It's quicker and easier to operate.'

'Porters are here now to take her to X-ray,' Celia announced, nodding towards the two men who'd arrived with a trolley. 'I'd better go and help.'

'I'll go down with them,' Douglas said crisply.

'Merrin, go down, too,' the professor ordered. 'This'll be interesting for you. Lindsay and I will finish here. Doug, have you talked to Theatre?'

'Provisionally booked for seven,' Douglas told him. The registrar signalled for Merrin to precede him as the porters wheeled their patient past. 'I'll talk with the duty anaesthetist,' he continued. 'There's no significant history apart from diet-controlled diabetes. Her sugar level currently is fine.'

The angiography confirmed that blood was still leaking into the gut and it showed from which area, but the radiologist didn't have any luck blocking off the vessel and an injection of vasopressin didn't constrict the blood vessel enough to control the bleeding.

'The best news is that it's not a cancer that's bleeding,' Douglas explained to Mrs Becham and her daughter and son-in-law, and Merrin saw from the looks the younger pair exchanged and the way that their patient sank weakly back into the pillows that that had been their unspoken fear.

'The bad news is that we're going to have to operate to remove the little bit of bowel and the blood vessels around where you're bleeding. But it's a quick, straightforward procedure and you'll be fine.'

'Not cancer, then?' Mrs Becham asked shakily, hesitating over the operation consent form Merrin had passed her to sign. 'It's really not cancer. My husband died of cancer. It spread to his liver. You're sure it's not that?'

'I'm very sure,' Douglas said firmly. He squeezed the pale hand she'd lifted to clasp at his arm. 'You'll be in hospital a week to ten days and then you'll be going home.'

'Will she...will she need to have a bag like Dad did?' Mrs Becham's daughter asked weakly.

'Not at all,' Douglas said reassuringly. 'We'll only take a little piece of bowel out. You'll have a scar down the middle of your tummy and you'll need to make sure you get plenty of fibre in your diet from now on, but that's all.'

Mrs Becham signed the consent form and Merrin filed it into the notes. Celia stayed with them while Merrin and Doug went back into the main radiology area.

'Theatre's got space now and I've spoken with the anaesthetic registrar who says to bring her straight up.' Beside Merrin, Douglas had bleeped the professor and now he spoke to him on the telephone. 'Do you want to come to Theatre or shall I do this?'

Merrin couldn't hear the consultant's reply, but Douglas's grin suggested that he was pleased with whatever it was. 'Give us fifteen minutes,' he said. 'Thanks.'

'I'm operating, you and Prof are assisting. Lindsay's covering Casualty and our bleepers,' he explained when the call finished. 'Let's get upstairs.'

Merrin had assumed that the operation would be dramatic, with blood squirting everywhere and nurses and anaesthetic staff flying about, but, happily for their patient, it was the straightforward procedure Douglas had promised. The only decent amount of blood about was the stuff in the bags being transfused into the central line the registrar had threaded earlier into Mrs Becham's neck.

Douglas was good, she realised, watching him from her vantage point tucked into Mrs Becham's side. He didn't operate anywhere near as quickly as the professor, nor was his technique so flawlessly fluid, but he was calm and confident and he obviously knew what he was doing.

And having someone like the Prof assisting couldn't be easy, she decided as their boss murmured another quiet suggestion to Douglas. She was breathless herself merely from the proximity their respective roles had forced them into, even without worrying about the pressure of having to perform surgically to his expectations. As second assistant she stood balanced on a step in the space between the table's outstretched arm and the first assistant, who here was her consultant.

He leaned forward to suction, then adjusted the Deaver retractor she held. 'Bring the tip back,' he instructed quietly.

Merrin reacted automatically to change the angle of her grip, although her pulse was thudding from the brush of his gown-covered arm against hers—a touch he was clearly unaware of because he barely glanced at her and his attention was already back on Douglas.

'Good, Doug,' he added, breaking the contact of his arm against Merrin by moving the diathermy to the forceps the registrar held to buzz the vessel the younger man had gripped. 'Tie that next one.'

He left them towards the end of the operation and under Douglas's instructions Merrin closed the wound in a single layer then stapled the skin.

'We're going to take her to ICU overnight,' the anaesthetic registrar told them as they finished. 'She's been OK and there's no need to ventilate her but she lost a lot of blood pre-op and she's not young. For once we've got spare beds.'

'That seems wise,' Douglas agreed. 'I'll let the Prof know.'

As soon as they'd finished Merrin went to find Lindsay. 'Casualty's chaos and the wards sound really busy, but I haven't had a chance to get up there yet,' the other doctor told her. She tore a list of tasks out of her notebook and passed it to Merrin.

'There doesn't seem to be anything urgent, just Venflons needing replacement, charts to be rewritten and a few sleeping tablets needing to be prescribed. Plus there's a man on Red Ward with what sounds like indigestion and another man on Lilac who probably just needs his catheter flushed.

'I'll stay down here and admit the ones who need to come in. Tell the operator you're out of Theatre so she can switch your bleepers back to you. Call me if you get too swamped.'

But Merrin could tell that Lindsay would be too busy to help with anything and so she didn't call her, even though she was more than swamped. Just after eleven the SHO called her to say that she and Doug were taking two children with appendicitis to Theatre but Merrin still had too much to do to join them.

It was one in the morning before the flow of tasks slowed long enough for her to be able to catch her breath and put her aching feet up for a few minutes, and almost two before the grumbling protests from her stomach reminded her that she'd still not had time to consider getting herself supper or a drink.

The cafeteria was long closed and since she had no instantly edible food back in the doctors' quarters she went to the mess, hoping that there'd be some bread about to make toast with.

But instead of the place being dark and empty, as she'd expected, she found Douglas and Lindsay in there, happily eating their way through the last of the day's bread supplies. 'We thought you'd have been in bed ages ago,' Lindsay called.

'I haven't stopped.' Merrin bought a can of lemonade from the machine in the kitchen then came into the main part of the mess and pinched a slice from the pile of toast they'd made. 'Is there any blackcurrant?'