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Fortunately the porters arrived at the same time to help. Annabel left the baby in the care of the nurse who was remaining on the ward. Two nurses came with them, one taking charge of the resuscitation trolley with its defibrillator and drugs in case Tamsin arrested in the lift or in the corridor, the other supervising the intravenous fluid Luke had started to keep her drip open.

A radiographer and one of the cardiac catheter nurses were waiting for them in X-Ray, Angiography was always performed in one of the sterile theatres in the specialist cardiac catheter suite attached to the department. All normal theatre precautions, such as special clothing and sterile equipment, were used.

Luke went to change into theatre gear but as the changing facilities were unisex, offering little concession to shyness, and since Annabel had no intention of either embarrassing herself or entertaining Luke by retreating childishly into the cramped privacy of a toilet or shower cubicle to change her clothes, she stayed outside deliberately, using the time to organise the paperwork and Tamsin's consent form while they waited for him to return.

Luke emerged just as Tamsin was being wheeled through into the theatre. Despite the urgency of the situation he looked calm and disturbingly attractive in the baggy theatre-style pants and jerkin and Annabel felt her pulse jerk. The green of the outfit intensified the colour of his eyes and the lit of the pants accentuated the muscled power of his thighs. She despised herself for being immediately and overwhelmingly aware of him, but she avoided the enquiring look he sent her, murmured something about having organised the consent form and fled back the way he'd just come to change into her own gear.

A few minutes later she hurried into the theatre in regulation baggy blue theatre smock and tied-waist pants, an elasticised paper hat covering her red hair. She tied her paper face mask over her nose and face as she walked.

Luke was already scrubbing and he sent her a brief, assessing look but she veered self-consciously away from him and headed for the rack of plastic-covered, lead-lined aprons by the door. Lifting one of the heavy aprons over her head—the garments were uncomfortable but vital for shielding them from the X-rays they'd been using—she walked over to Tamsin who was lying quietly on a trolley in the centre of the room. 'How's the pain now?'

'It's there in the background but nothing like before,' the younger woman said weakly. 'Is this going to hurt, Doctor?'

Annabel shook her head firmly. 'I'm going to inject a sedative into this needle in your arm,' she explained. She nodded her thanks when one of the X-ray nurses wheeled over a steel trolley containing the swabs, needle, syringe and medication she'd need.

'Professor Geddes is going to put the needle I talked about before into your thigh here and then he'll push a catheter up to the arteries around your heart, but he'll use local anaesthetic first so that bit won't hurt at all. You'll feel quite sleepy. You'll be awake and you'll be able to watch the pictures of your heart on the television screen up here above your bed.' She indicated the monitor, one of three in the room. 'But you'll probably find you don't remember anything about this afterwards.'

Luke worked very fast. Catheterising the heart arteries wasn't one of Annabel's special areas of skill, although she was quite capable of carrying out the procedure in an emergency if required, as now when there was no radiology doctor immediately available, but Luke's obvious confidence and. the smooth fluency of his technique was impressive.

He threaded his catheter up from Tamsin's groin through her heart and injected dye through each of the arteries supplying her heart in turn. Annabel talked Tamsin through the procedure and the pictures on the monitor above her head. When the problem became clear she looked quickly at Luke, acknowledged his nod, then motioned for a nurse to come and sit in her place.

The surgeon answered his bleeper immediately. 'Simon, it's Annabel Stuart,' she said urgently. 'She's dissected her left anterior descending,' she explained, meaning that the lining of the artery supplying part of Tamsin's heart had torn so that blood was now flowing down uselessly inside the wall of the vessel rather than though its central lumen. The condition was critical because, firstly, it meant that insufficient blood was reaching the heart muscle to keep it alive, hence Tamsin's heart attack, and, secondly, because the vessel could rupture at any moment and that would be fatal.

'Two minutes,' Simon told her tightly.

He was quicker than that and as soon as he saw the pictures he agreed to take Tamsin immediately to Theatre. Tamsin was drowsy from her pain relief and sedation but she seemed to understand the surgeon's explanation. As soon as Luke had withdrawn his catheter and applied pressure to her wound, the theatre porters transferred her to a theatre trolley and began wheeling her away.

'I'll explain to Tamsin's husband and bring him up to Theatres,' Annabel told Luke, leaving him and the nurses to accompany Tamsin. 'M ward's just rung to say he's waiting on the ward.'

Craig Winston, waiting in Tamsin's room on M, looked very young and obviously distraught. 'A heart attack?' he echoed thickly. '
A heart attack?
But Tamsin's twenty-three. No one in her family's ever had heart trouble. How could this happen?'

'It's rare but this sort of damage to a blood vessel can happen sometimes after having a baby.' Annabel hurried him ahead of her and towards the stairs, rather than waiting for the lift, in the hope that they'd be in time for him to see his wife for a few seconds before her surgery.

'But she was fine yesterday.'

Annabel sent him a sympathetic look as they rushed down the stairs. 'It's all happened very quickly. There's very rarely any warning with this condition. What's good is that she's made it to hospital in time to be treated.'

'This operation,' he said sickly as she opened the door and directed him out onto the lower floor. 'Is it open heart?'

Annabel nodded. 'Mr Rawlings will want to do bypass surgery and that's open-heart surgery, yes. He'll probably take a blood vessel from either Tamsin's arm, leg or chest and transplant it to replace the artery that's torn.'

She ushered him towards the main doors into Theatres. There were clean gowns on a hook outside and she grabbed one for herself and passed him one to cover his clothes. Tamsin and the nurse looking after her were just inside the main entrance, one of the theatre nurses still busy checking through the paperwork and confirming Tamsin's identity with the details on her hospital bracelet.

Craig rushed past Annabel to embrace his wife and the couple had a few moments together before Tamsin had to be transferred into the operating theatre. Annabel put her arm around Craig's back, showed him gently through to the waiting area and sat with him for a little while, answering his questions.

When he seemed marginally more settled she fetched him a pot of tea from the adjacent kitchen and arranged for one of the theatre receptionists to keep a check on him and let Simon Rawlings know he was waiting so he could talk to him at the end of the operation.

She ran back downstairs to X-Ray, intent now on exchanging her theatre clothes for her normal clothes again, intending to make good use of the hour she still had left by getting some of her paperwork done. She was almost back at the changing room when one of the department's radiologists called out to her from his office at the far end of the hall.

'Annabel, glad I caught you,' he said quickly. 'Have you still got those films you mentioned at the meeting last week? If you have, I wouldn't mind having a look at them. I wanted to make copies for teaching.'

'I'll drop them into your office in the morning,' Annabel promised, pausing with her hand on the door. 'The folder's on my desk at home.' The X-rays were copies of those from a baby she'd been asked to see a month earlier who had been born with
situs inversus
meaning his heart and abdominal organs were swapped around in his chest and abdomen so that his heart was on the right side of his chest instead of his left and his liver was on the left side instead of the right.

The other doctor lifted his hand in acknowledgement, before disappearing back into his office, and Annabel pushed the changing-room door open and kicked off the clogs she'd been wearing. Happily the baby with the
situs inversus
had appeared perfectly well, and was in no need of any treatment. The unusual switch had only been picked up when the delivering obstetrician had been worried that the baby's heart sounds were so indistinct—

'Oh.' She brought herself up sharply, meeting Luke's sanguine expression with shock. He was almost dressed, thank God, and buttoning his shirt with brisk haste, although not before she'd caught a glimpse of a disturbingly familiar broad chest, but still she registered the intimacy of catching him like this with startled dismay. 'I'll...wait outside. I was sure you'd be gone by now.'

'I was on call all night and I haven't had time to make it back to the hotel yet.' The sudden impatience of his regard suggested he found her shock irritating. 'I took a shower.' Only then did she register the damp darkness of his hair. 'For heaven's sake, Annabel, stop standing there like a nun and close the damn door. I'm decent. Even if I wasn't, you've seen me dressing often enough before.'

She had, just as she'd seen several of her colleagues in similar situations—they all invariably dressed after showering in the cubicle but such things as ties and jackets and shoes were generally left until the main room—but she was still, with Luke, finding the experience distressingly disconcerting. He lifted the collar of his shirt and threaded his tie around it, tied it immaculately, then ran a towel through his hair again, not even glancing her way, but still she stood, frozen, tensely aware of him.

'I'm supposed to be in a meeting with someone at Medical Staffing in ten minutes,' he said crisply. He balled the towel he'd been using then lobbed it effortlessly into the appropriate linen bag at the end of the room. 'Remind me again where the department is.'

'Just behind Rehabilitation,' she told him sharply.

His mouth compressed and she could sense his abrupt annoyance like a tangible haze around him. 'What have I done now?'

'Nothing.' She looked away. 'Nothing. I'm sorry.' She took in a quick, steadying breath. 'I'm just a bit...tense about Tamsin, I suppose. She's so...young. But I think she'll be all right now, don't you?'

'Simon Rawlings seems confident,' he affirmed, still looking impatient. 'The surgery should be fairly straightforward. Annabel—'

'Medical Staffing is in a separate small prefab building just behind Rehab,' she interrupted quickly. 'It's well labelled. You can't miss it.' She lowered her hands to the bulky hem of her jerkin then stopped. 'Don't let me delay you.'

He merely sent her a grim look and crouched to fasten his shoes, forcing her to acknowledge she'd been wrong about him being ready to leave. When he'd finished he simply stood slowly, folding his arms and looking at her without making any move towards leaving, and in the end, still foolishly holding onto her top yet unable to ignore him, Annabel was forced to look directly at him. 'What?'

'Do you have a problem?'

'You're not the only one who has to be somewhere in a hurry,' she replied stiffly. 'I would prefer it if I had a little privacy while I change into my clothes.'

His regard turned abruptly incredulous. 'You think I'm dallying so I can
peek
at you?'

'Of course not.' The suggestion was as absurd as he made it sound. He'd seen her naked hundreds of times, thousands possibly. She knew the shape of her body could hold no fascination for him.

'Because frankly, Annabel, I'm not that desperate—'

'I believe you,' she interrupted. A man like Luke would never have been desperate. A man who only had to walk into a room to have every woman in the place turn to look at him didn't even know the meaning of the word. The thought had never occurred to her. If she had suspected him of lingering, his motivation would have been clear to her. To make her self-conscious, certainly. Embarrassed, of course. Unbalanced, definitely.

Just as he was doing all those things by not leaving now. Turning her back on him, she stalked in her stockinged feet to her locker and, when he still didn't budge, hauled the metal door open.

'This is ridiculous,' she pointed out stiffly, gathering up her long skirt, blouse, jacket and shoes, her annoyance making her careless—despite the hours she spent ironing— of creasing. 'This whole situation is completely ridiculous. Why is it impossible to have a normal, simple conversation with you without it turning into an argument? Why does my making a simple little request for a little bit of privacy have to turn into some grand drama?'

She hugged her clothes against her and made for the shower cubicle herself. Regardless of how foolish scrambling around dressing in there was going to make her feel, it felt, right then, like a far lesser evil than trying to dress in front of him.

But he caught her arm as she stalked past him and sheer shock, as much as force, brought her swinging around to face him, the clothes she'd been clutching dropping soundlessly away from her to the tiled floor.

'Why are you getting so uptight about something as trivial as me maybe catching you in a bra?' he demanded. 'Have you turned just plain irrational, Annie, or do you think the sight of you in whatever sexy little scrap you've got on under that thing will drive me wild? Is that what you think? You think that after a divorce and six years you can still turn me on?'

'I'd slit my throat rather than try,' she snapped, hateful awareness of his strength and of the warm, freshly showered scent of his body sending her senses spinning and her temper flaring. 'I don't think anything, I just want you out of here.' But her struggles were just bringing her closer against the hardness of his body. 'How dare you...
manhandle
me, you madman? If you don't let me go right now, and I mean right,
right
now, I swear I'll scream the entire roof of this hospital down.'