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Annabel lowered her head. It was kind of him to tell her that but she didn't believe the timing of his arrival at the university had been so inconsequential. The thought that she'd been so tied up with her own petty grievances about how much time he'd allocated to her to even consider the importance of his work filled her with self-disgust.

Two of the nurses who'd been at the other end of the ward, checking their sleeping patients, came quietly up the ward towards them. 'Any news yet on which one of them's for the transplant?' asked one.

Annabel shook her head. 'Tony Grant's going to call as soon as he knows,' she told them. She looked quickly at Luke, then hastily back down at her watch. 'It's after midnight,' she said huskily. 'I'll check Daisy again and then I'll be waiting in my office. Goodnight, everyone.'

She'd assumed either the ward or Hannah would bleep her directly once a decision had been made about the transplant, but instead Luke came to her office a short while later. 'Daisy's the best match. They're taking her in ten minutes.'

'I'll come down.' Annabel had been too nervous to get any work done, and now she shoved her paperwork away, grabbed her coat and hurried towards him.

There wasn't much time. She spent a few minutes with Daisy, who was pale and trembling, before one of the anaesthetic registrars arrived with the theatre porters to take her away. John went with her but Annabel stayed behind to reassure Caroline, Daisy's aunt, who'd just arrived and was looking tense and anxious.

When one of Caroline's friends arrived to sit with her Annabel left them alone, promising to return immediately when she heard any news. To her surprise Luke was on the ward. Still in his dinner jacket, he was studying a chest X-ray on the board near the darkened nursing station when she approached. 'Who's that?' she asked, puzzled by the dramatic lung changes on the film.

'Mr Lockett in side room four,' he told her quietly, sounding distracted. 'A man I admitted on Tuesday with chest pain who was coughing up blood. He's got staph endocarditis on his tricuspid valve. We had managed to get his temperature under control but it spiked twice again tonight.'

Annabel frowned. Endocarditis meant inflammation of the heart valves and staph indicated that that particular type of bacteria was actually growing on the valve, in this case the tricuspid valve on the right side of the heart. Although the changes in the man's lungs, caused by material thrown off from the heart valve, looked dramatic, the condition wasn't as serious as other types of endocarditis, which were often fatal, but it was seen particularly in intravenous drug users.

Addicts were vulnerable both because of their general poor physical state and lowered immunity and because the contaminates like starch and powders and sugars in heroin could damage heart valves and leave the users susceptible to infection.

'Is he in withdrawal?'

Luke shook his head. 'We're maintaining him on methadone,' he admitted. 'He's sick enough, without having to go through detox.'

Annabel nodded. Maintaining addicts was not strictly accepted protocol at St Peter's but she agreed with him in this case. 'Hannah and I will see him, Luke. You're not on call. Go home. I'll ECHO him to check his heart.'

'I just did it,' he said absently. 'His valve hasn't changed in two days. Your SHO's taken blood for culturing and he's changing his lines now in case they've become contaminated. We'll wait and watch with him overnight. You don't need to see him, Annabel. He's under control now. The ward will call me if there are problems.'

Considering the way he'd practically forced her out of the hospital the night he'd admitted Daisy, when he'd been on call, she found his insistence now on looking after his own patients hypocritical, but she knew there was little point in arguing with him. 'Have it your way,' she agreed wearily. 'I'm going back to my office.'

He looked up. 'Not home?'

'I wouldn't sleep, worrying about Daisy.' There was a glassed-in viewing and teaching room above the transplant theatre so she could look in on the procedure if she wanted, but when the surgery was being performed on her own patients she invariably found the process too nerve-racking to watch. 'If I'm going to be up all night anyway I may as well use the time usefully to get some paperwork done.'

'It's too late. You Won't be able to concentrate.' Luke studied her steadily for long enough to make her feel nervous, then seemed to make up his mind about something. He put the X-ray away, then came towards her, took her elbow and turned her around. 'Come on. Let's go. You still owe me a dance.'

Annabel's mouth dried. 'I'm not going back to the dinner,' she protested, but she let him propel her out of the ward to the lifts. 'Even if it isn't finished it's too far away. I want to be here for when Tony bleeps me. And what if Hannah needs me?'

'She can bleep you,' he murmured. 'I'm not taking you far.'

'I shouldn't be letting you take me anywhere at all,' she said quietly, but she was weak and she loved him so she let him propel her down and out of the side door of the hospital into the car park and towards the expensive-looking dark sedan parked in the CEO's spot just outside. 'Is this yours?'

He shook his head but didn't explain, and she was left to draw her own conclusions from the yellow rental-car sticker on the rear window as she swung herself into the luxurious and new-smelling interior.

He waited quietly for her to settle herself then closed the passenger door. Annabel trembled as she watched him walk around the front of the car to his side.

His hotel was only a short distance from the hospital and most of the time was taken up waiting for a green light to turn out of the car park. If she needed to, she calculated, she'd be able to run back in less than five minutes.

She'd taken her white coat off in the car and folded it over her arm, but the knowing smile followed by the carefully bland expression of the hotel doorman's gaze as he opened the car door for her and looked at Luke made her flush and wish she'd kept her coat on. The assessing sideways look the receptionist sent her when Luke approached the desk came as confirmation of what the hotel staff probably thought.

Given the lateness of the hour and the fact that they must be used to Luke normally arriving alone, Annabel couldn't exactly blame them, but still she was offended and she glared back at the woman.

The amused look Luke sent her as they walked into the lift he'd summoned a few seconds later told her he'd noted her expression. 'In that dress you'd have to be a very high-class one,' he observed mildly. 'You look beautiful tonight, Annie. I could almost believe you're your old self again.'

'I'm only going to your room to leave my coat,' she warned huskily, flushing again. 'Then it's one dance at the nightclub and I'm leaving again straight away.'

'Is there a nightclub here?'

'Well, I assumed...' Annabel blinked. 'Isn't there?'

'Not that I know of.'

'Oh.' She lowered her eyes, her thoughts churning. She should be protesting, she knew. She should be angry with him for tricking her into coming with him, because he
had
tricked her. Only she wasn't. She wasn't angry at all. She was just...nervous. When the lift stopped and the doors opened she walked out mechanically, her heels sinking into the thickly carpeted floor along the corridor as she allowed his outstretched arm to guide her to the door at the end.

She saw she'd been wrong to assume he'd called at Reception to collect a key because what he actually produced was a plastic strip resembling a credit card, and when he slid it through a groove beside the door a green light came on and the door clicked open.

She walked in quietly and looked around. To her relief, instead of being confronted immediately with a bed, she found herself in a sitting room with three armchairs, a moderately large table with a set of upholstered seats and a wide desk near the window which was strewn with paperwork and journals, suggesting Luke spent a considerable amount of his time there working. Through a door on the left she glimpsed the bedroom and further through she could see lights reflecting off what looked like marble tiles in his bathroom.

He moved the table and chairs away from the centre of the room and against the wall. 'Room to dance,' he explained when she sent him a questioning look. He smiled. 'Shame on you, Annie. Did you think I'd brought you here to seduce you?'

Annabel's face turned hot again immediately but thankfully a discreet tap at the door saved her from needing to come up with an answer.

The door was ajar, and in response to Luke's command it swung open to reveal a waiter, bearing a portable sound system and a selection of mini-discs. He connected the equipment, inserted the disc Luke chose and withdrew with a smile of thanks for the note Luke had smoothly passed him, closing the door behind him.

Luke came to her and drew her unresisting body into his arms, held one of her hands and slid his other low around her hips as the low strains of one of her favourite jazz artists swelled sleepily out of the system's small speakers. 'You're trembling,' he murmured against her ear. 'Are you still frightened for Daisy?'

'A little, but there's nothing I can do for her now,' she admitted. 'Mostly I'm terrified of you. I know you didn't bring me here just for a dance, Luke.'

'Don't you think you have a say in what happens?'

'I know I don't.' She laid her face against his chest and breathed in the warm, clean, Luke scent of him, dizzy with longing for him. 'But I couldn't bear it if it's because you feel sorry for me.'

'It's never been that, Annie.' His arms tightened around her. 'You must know it isn't that.'

'But you don't really want me—'

'You're not that stupid,' he said huskily. 'I've never stopped wanting you.' She felt the vibration of him lowering the zipper of her dress and the soft loosening at her bodice as he started to draw the fabric firmly away. 'Are you going to stop me this time?'

Stop him?
She knew she should but she also knew she couldn't. 'No.'

'I'm glad.' The twist of his mouth frankly sensual, Luke lowered his head and captured her mouth, his hands sliding intimately from her shoulders to her thighs as he dispensed with her dress. When he lifted his head she was breathing as hard as he was and she felt her skin stain hot red as his eyes lowered to the silk covering her breasts and lower abdomen and then lifted to her face again.

'They're new,' she said faintly. 'I bought them today.'

He brought one hand up and outlined the scalloped lace edge of her bra, the soft, slow movement of his fingers against her skin making her tighten in his arms. 'Because you wanted me to see you like this?'

'I don't know.' She dropped her eyes, mesmerised by the movement of his hand as it slid deliberately inside one cup and held her. She gasped. 'Perhaps.'

The ground shifted beneath her then disappeared as he lifted her into his arms and carried her into his bedroom and to his bed. He put her down then shrugged out of his jacket and came after her. She couldn't stop shaking. She was embarrassed in case he noticed but he just smiled and kissed her again.

Unhurriedly, as if she were a doll he was playing with, he rolled her over, unclipped the fastening of her bra and brought her back around, but when he brought his hand up to cup her again she saw his hand was trembling as much as hers and her doubts evaporated.

'I've missed you so much,' she whispered. She lifted her fingers and struggled clumsily with the fastenings of his shirt. 'I'm so nervous I can't stop shaking. You missed me too, a little bit, didn't you, Luke? You wouldn't be like this if you hadn't missed me.'

'I missed you,' he confirmed thickly, lowering his mouth to hers again with a murmur of approval when she parted her lips urgently. 'I missed you like crazy.'

Annabel wanted him, wanted everything, wanted everything to be perfect the way it had always been perfect, but it had been years and she was out of practice. She couldn't get his shirt undone and he had to help her, and then she fumbled awkwardly with his belt, her fingers impatient but stiff, and in the end he rolled off the bed and stripped off his own clothes quickly then came back to her and gathered her in his arms again.

Despite the care he took with his caresses, she couldn't stop feeling tense for he was big and her body had grown tight again over the years. When his hands slid beneath her buttocks and he entered her she stiffened and cried out.

Luke stilled immediately, his features strained and harsh. 'Annie...?'

Annabel squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the discomfort and her own embarrassment. 'Finish it,' she whispered. 'Please, just finish. I'll be all right.'

'You'll be
all right?'

She could feel he was trying to be gentle but she felt stretched and uncomfortable. The pain of him withdrawing was almost as bad as his entrance, and she gasped again.

Luke rolled away from her and off the bed. '
All right?'
he repeated strongly. 'What the hell does that mean?'

'Don't.' Annabel hauled the far side of the quilt miserably over her naked body, rolled over and buried her face in the pillows. 'I'm sorry.' Her voice came out muffled. 'I didn't mean to put you off. It's just...it's been a long time for me.'

'Annie, I'm not criticising you.' His voice softened. She felt the dip in the bed as he knelt beside her, and through the thickness of the quilt she felt him stroke her back. 'It's not supposed to be
all right,'
he murmured. 'It's supposed to be great. I didn't want you to do this for me. I want you to want it, too.'

She peeked out of the quilt, meaning to explain that she had, that she still wanted him, that if he could just bear to try again she thought they'd be able to work through her discomfort, but the sound of her bleeper from her coat in the other room sent him moving to get it for her.

Annabel struggled around and was sitting up, wide-eyed and still encased in her quilt, when he came back. 'If it's about Daisy already it must be bad news,' she said apprehensively. 'They could have only just begun.'