Forbidden Fling with Dr. Right
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JC Harroway
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CHAPTER ONE
DARCY WRIGHT FIRMLY believed in good impressions, which were never more important than on the first day in a new job. So where the hell was her pen when she needed it? She absently tapped the pocket of her navy-blue surgical scrubs and then scanned the nurses’ desk for a stray pen, but no luck. How could she show her new boss what a great surgeon she was when she didn’t even have a pen to sign a consent form?
The man would be here any minute and she wanted to wow him, present the sick patient she’d just finished examining, who urgently needed surgery.
Her career, helping people and easing suffering, was the most important thing in her life and her new boss, Joe Austin, was the last thing standing between Darcy and her career pinnacle: being a consultant, important enough to be ultimately responsible for the patients under her care.
‘Mr Clarke in room three will be going to Theatre today,’ she told Isha, the staff nurse behind the desk. ‘If I had something to write with, I’d consent him...’ Darcy blew the hair that had escaped her ponytail from her forehead, her flustered search for a pen amplifying her concern for the most seriously unwell of Mr Austin’s patients. Of her patients.
Isha nodded, took a pen from her uniform pocket and waved it in Darcy’s direction.
‘Thanks,’ Darcy said with a grateful smile.
‘Hold on,’ said Isha. ‘You’re adding a patient to Mr Austin’s theatre list without asking him first?’ Her wide-eyed, slightly impressed smile made Darcy’s surgeon senses flicker into high alert.
‘Of course... I’m his registrar. That’s part of my job.’ She added her signature to the operation consent form with a flourish and passed the pen back to Isha.
The other woman’s concerned expression fanned Darcy’s nerves. Until thirty minutes ago she’d never heard of Joe Austin. She’d expected the kindly older surgeon, Mr Fletcher, who’d interviewed her for this post at London’s City Hospital. Instead, she’d discovered that he’d recently retired and she’d been reassigned to Mr Austin’s team.
Unease now slithered down Darcy’s spine, her good impression under threat. ‘Why...what’s Mr Austin like?’ she asked the wary nurse, her defensive hackles rising. Surely her diligence in arriving early and identifying a patient with an acute abdomen from those admitted overnight would only earn his praise. Or would this boss replacement want to vet every decision she made, as if she were incompetent?
Darcy dismissed the suggestion with a shake of her head. She worked hard for her patients, worked hard to prove she was good at her job. Proving herself was something of a habit, a hangover from parts of her childhood...
Surely her boss would see her dedication the minute they met.
‘Hmm... All the patients love him,’ Isha said. ‘Even the married ones, if you know what I mean.’ She grinned and winked and then typed a flurry of words on the keyboard. ‘Haven’t you heard of him?’
Isha’s eyes sparkled with worrying mischief that tightened Darcy’s now frankly anxious stomach.
Heard of him...? How formidable could he be? Did he tear the arms off his registrars for fun?
‘No-o-o...’ She stretched out the word as her mind raced. ‘Until I arrived this morning, I assumed I’d be working for Mr Fletcher... Why would I have heard of him?’
‘Oh, my...’ said Isha with cryptic glee. ‘Are you in for a treat. He’s no Mr Fletcher looks-wise, that’s for sure. Plus, he’s an awesome surgeon and kind of famous.’
While Darcy stared with growing dread, Isha’s eyes darted sideways to the ward’s entrance. ‘And here he comes,’ she added under her breath.
Darcy’s body entered panic mode. She kept her eyes in front, battled the temptation to turn around and gawp at this fearsome creature who, it seemed, might be easy on the eye but might not find her enthusiasm all that impressive given her current state: floundering—no pen, no inkling as to the credentials of her famous boss and no time to probe Isha for more than the vague clues the nurse had already offered.
But surely all that mattered was the wellbeing of their patients, first and foremost Mr Clarke.
‘Don’t tell him that I’ve never heard of him,’ she hissed at Isha in a frantic whisper. Her first impression was not the time to make a professional faux pas. Isha winked and tapped the side of her nose reassuringly, as if to say she’d conceal Darcy’s ignorance.
She’d known the nurse for thirty minutes, long enough to discern a dry sense of humour she couldn’t help but warm to. Could she be winding Darcy up? Please let this be a joke. The last thing Darcy needed was for her new boss to be some sort of bad-tempered ogre who’d make her job, the one thing she took pride in, miserable.
Darcy’s fingers twitched to straighten her wayward ponytail, but she didn’t want to be seen to preen. Instead, she snatched the precious seconds to prepare, brace herself mentally for this unexpected man she’d be working closely alongside for the next three months.
Then every tiny hair on her body prickled to attention as she caught a hint of delicious aftershave and sensed an impressively tall and compelling presence at her side.
‘Morning, Mr Austin,’ said Isha, smiling in welcome at the man in Darcy’s peripheral vision.
‘Good morning, Isha.’ His deep voice resonated with authority despite his personal question. ‘Is your daughter over her cold?’
As she could no longer avoid it, Darcy looked up at the formidable new arrival, his handsome profile doing little to settle her frayed nerves. Not an ogre after all. Smartly dressed in a navy three-piece suit, a dove-grey shirt and a burgundy tie, Joe Austin seemed reassuringly confident, with the sort of commanding air that made people hang on his every word. Tall, dark and chiselled, he could be a hotshot financial trader or a male model instead of a gastrointestinal surgeon. Perhaps that was why he was famous—he moonlighted for the top fashion houses...
A flicker of relief shot through Darcy. Despite Isha’s scaremongering, Darcy imagined they’d soon come to respect each other, develop a mutually appreciative working relationship.
As if finally noticing her, his gaze swooped over Darcy.
Caught off-guard, Darcy smiled—a twitching grimace generated by his impressive presence. Under his observation, Darcy revised her opinion.
Not handsome—hot.
She needn’t have bothered with the smile. Before she could open her mouth to introduce herself, he dismissed Darcy without acknowledgement and returned his attention to Isha.
Not a good sign.
All of Darcy’s hidden insecurities, honed during a lifetime of feeling not quite good enough, writhed in the pit of her stomach like a bad case of gastric flu while nurse and surgeon conversed for a few moments as if she didn’t exist. Darcy pulled herself upright; she was a thirty-one-year-old woman, for goodness’ sake. She’d give Joe Austin the benefit of the doubt this once. After all, as Isha had hinted, he was jaw-droppingly attractive.
Waiting for her chance to interrupt, she used the time to observe the man the way a dieter examined chocolate cake.
He was nothing like the genial, rugged-faced Mr Fletcher, who was the far side of sixty and more of a granddad type, that was for sure. Joe’s dark untamed hair sported just enough grey at the temples to promise future membership of the ‘silver fox’ club, and his decadent, almost sensual mouth looked as if the pinched scowl it wore when he’d glanced Darcy’s way was borrowed for the occasion.
A groan filled Darcy’s head. She had more pressing matters than finding the boss so good-looking that her ovaries bounced with unrestrained glee. She had an urgent case to present: Mr Clarke and his ruptured appendix. Seizing her moment during the briefest lull in his conversation with Isha, Darcy stuck out her hand in his direction.
‘Mr Austin...’ She was done being ignored.
Her boss turned his head and this time their eyes locked. His were conker-brown, sharp and intense.
Unease and fascination fought for control of Darcy’s racing pulse. Seriously... No wonder every female staff member and patient within head-swivelling distance had a smile on their face.
‘This is your new registrar,’ Isha said, because Darcy seemed to have forgotten that she was a qualified surgeon, not a starry-eyed medical student on her first day on the wards, drooling at the real doctor.
Darcy’s face ached with the effort of holding an expectant smile in place, the first impression stakes even higher now she knew that she’d be working for someone so renowned.
‘Ahh...’ he said, clearly unimpressed by what he saw, perhaps her wonky ponytail or her lack of a pen.
What...? She wasn’t expecting a fanfare of welcome or fireworks, but he could at least be civil. If it weren’t for her tendency to become overly defensive when uncomfortable or judged, she’d let him have a piece of her mind, famous brilliant surgeon or not.
He finally took her proffered hand. ‘Good to meet you.’ He made it sound anything but good.
Darcy’s smile offered a final uncertain wobble before dying altogether. How could she have possibly upset him this early into their working relationship? Unless he’d noticed the way she’d checked him out...
Years ago, Darcy had developed a firm and decisive handshake in order to encourage people to take her seriously. She employed it now; she’d never needed it more. ‘Darcy Wright. So pleased to meet you, too.’
She dragged in a preparatory breath, ready to bring him up to speed on Mr Clarke, to dazzle him with her diagnostic skills.
‘Welcome to my team.’ He returned the gesture with an equally firm touch, his conker-brown eyes both holding her captive and appraising as if she were a virus under a microscope. She pretended to ignore the fact that his words said Welcome but his tone asked, Which rock have you crawled from under? But she stiffened all the same, the delicious heat of his palm against hers no compensation for what felt like an unfair and hasty evaluation.
Perhaps she’d only imagined the way his eyes seemed to swoop from her head to her toes, forcing her feet to shuffle and her body to shudder as if she’d never been this close to a man before? She dragged her stare from his lush lips, which ridiculously brought to mind desperate kisses. She wasn’t here to swoon. So he was hot. Big deal. It was just that it had been a long time, over a year, since she’d found a member of the opposite sex attractive...
Since splitting from her ex, Dean, she’d spent a year in a self-imposed dating hiatus in order to focus on the career she loved. The harder she worked to make a difference to her patients, the greater the personal reward.
She’d always needed to be good at something. She’d embraced her belief that she was the odd one out in her family and learned to stand out. The karate she’d only endured at twelve because her sisters had started ballet class. Or riding her first boyfriend’s motorbike during a very brief rebellious teenager phase when even her teachers had written her off. They couldn’t see past the make-up and the bad boy boyfriend to bright studious Darcy beneath, who was hurting from the latest slap of rejection from her biological father.
But that had changed as soon as she’d started pushing her pain away and pushing herself instead. Luckily for Joe Austin and Mr Clarke, her drive had brought her here.
Now she had his attention it was time to focus on the patient. ‘Can I present Mr Clarke, whom I’ve added to your urgent theatre list for today?’
Joe raised a sceptical eyebrow, waiting in a loaded silence. His dark stare lacked warmth, or even respect, but its penetrating quality, the length of his sooty lashes and the pounding adrenaline it evoked in Darcy made her so aware of her breathing and the whoosh of her heated blood around her body that she almost lost hold of her determination.
Typical of Darcy that the object of her lust was completely off-limits for a whole raft of reasons...
Her boss.
Probably married.
Seemed to dislike her on sight.
Inside, her hopes for a favourable first impression were rattled. Clearly Isha was right; she should have asked first. They weren’t going to be chums, but he was too hot for sense anyway. She would not find him attractive. Working for such a guarded man would throw up many challenges she hadn’t anticipated without her body reacting every time he looked her way. She needed to show him just how capable she was, not flush every time he addressed her.
‘I’ve acquainted myself with all of your patients,’ she said, pushing on regardless. ‘Mr Clarke is a thirty-five-year-old man in room three with a perforated appendix who needs surgery. Today.’ She handed him the tablet bearing the patient’s file, her desire to schmooze her way into his good books dwindling fast. Now she prayed she’d get through her first day without telling him exactly what she thought of him and his hard to please attitude.
Stony-faced, he scrolled through the information. ‘Tell me, where did you work before you arrived at City?’ His tone implied that he fully expected her answer to be, Nowhere, I just hung out at the job centre, as if she wasn’t good enough to be his registrar.
She opened her mouth to answer, gaping like a goldfish while her insecurities flared to life from the glowing embers she carried inside. Everyone had vulnerabilities, deep-seated fears. Hers stemmed from the childhood belief that she was somehow defective or fundamentally unlovable after her biological father walked out before her first birthday, only reappearing sporadically throughout her childhood, raising and then dashing her hopes that he’d always be a reliable part of her family, of her life.
Darcy was lucky. She had other, more constant family. She loved her half-sisters—Lily, a solicitor, and Stella, the youngest, a doctor too, with whom Darcy shared a flat. She’d had the benefit of equal adoration from her mother and stepfather, Grant, who was a wonderful man. He’d adopted Darcy and treated her just like his biological daughters.
But at times throughout her young life even that hadn’t been enough to negate Darcy’s feelings of rejection. She’d assumed it must have been something she’d done that drove her father away. If she was well behaved or worked harder at school then she could win back her father’s love. Thus began the competitive drive that still pushed her today.
How did this man seem to detect all those insecurities with a single glance? His apparent and unfounded scorn made her blood simmer.
His dismissal was unfair.
In her haughtiest tone, she reeled off a truncated version of her impressive curriculum vitae, her stomach sinking at the tenacity of his blank expression. What would it take to impress this man?
‘...and before moving to City I worked the surgical rotation at Hanes Hospital with Mr Clough.’ She finished with a defiant tilt of her chin, trying to keep the tumult of emotions from her face.
‘I know you’ve inherited rather than chosen me, but Mr Fletcher was delighted to offer me this post,’ she said, trying to claw back some outward semblance of the mutually respectful professional relationship she craved, but instead subtly suggesting that the fault lay solely with him and his misplaced prejudices.
‘Hmm...’ Joe Austin muttered noncommittally as he read Mr Clarke’s notes in painstaking detail, as if checking for the mistake that would prove she wasn’t a real doctor after all.
The last thing Darcy needed this close to her career’s finish line was an arrogant, demanding and ruthless tyrant bossing her around when she’d developed her own way of doing things. Her self-beliefs were constructed on shaky ground as it was without him questioning her professional autonomy. Her career, helping people, fulfilled her and gave her pride.
Clearing her throat, she pushed her agenda, the only real thing that mattered: her patient. ‘Mr Austin, I believe Mr Clarke needs an emergency laparotomy.’ She kept her tone calm but assertive, her desire to make a good impression buffeted by mounting waves of irritation caused by his impenetrable expression. ‘As you can see from his notes, he has obvious signs of an acute abdomen—’
‘Have you excluded non-surgical causes for his symptoms?’ he interrupted, his gaze still on the screen.
‘Of course.’ Darcy all but spluttered at his insinuation. Did he think her totally incompetent? It was becoming increasingly difficult to extend him the benefit of the doubt and believe his unwarranted scepticism wasn’t personal. She assumed that he must have had lazy trainees in the past. Or perhaps he’d lost a patient recently and had reacted with overbearing distrust. Clearly Joe Austin was unlike any other consultant she’d experienced.
No, he was hotter, but also rude and infuriating.
Darcy dug deep into her reserves of patience. All consultants had their own rules and routines. She’d never before taken it personally. So why now?
Because his attitude made her feel small, inconsequential, an afterthought, the sting too reminiscent of what she’d experienced with her father and, more recently, her ex.
Belatedly, she shot a glance at his left hand, wondering how his wife put up with him, and found his ring finger to be bare. Damn...that didn’t help with the demarcation she was desperately trying to establish between his physical effect on her sad and lonely libido and the way he emotionally seemed to both press all of her soft spots and rile her up until she acted like someone she barely recognised.
She hardened her voice to the authoritative tone she reserved for inebriated relatives in Accident and Emergency on a Saturday night. ‘When you examine Mr Clarke, you will see that he has guarding and rebound tenderness in the right iliac fossa.’ She reeled off a list of typical signs and symptoms, her defences so high she’d forgotten that she’d set out to impress her superior. She wasn’t used to explaining herself this much, not since she was a junior doctor.
Trust her to land the difficult boss. Was it too much to ask, knowing how hard the journey from naïve medical student to veteran consultant was, that he’d show her a modicum of respect and acceptance?
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her white coat with finality in answer to the blank assessing expression he wore as well as his suit. This was about what was best for the patient.
‘He has textbook peritonitis,’ she continued, her tone now as frosty as his, all expectations abandoned. ‘My diagnosis is a ruptured appendix, so I’ve commenced intravenous antibiotics and consented him for Theatre.’ She imagined the satisfying image of Joe Austin’s grovelling expression when she proved that her diagnosis was correct in the operating theatre. ‘I’m happy to operate if you have a full list.’
Something like momentary respect flashed in Joe’s dark eyes, gone as soon as it appeared. Darcy winced at the way that second of recognition lit up her nervous system like a zap of forty thousand volts of electricity.
His lips tightened. ‘Ms Wright...’ He said her name with that bite of command, only instead of riling her up it made her breath catch and her heart race with the same excitement and anticipation she experienced with a scalpel in her hand.
‘If and when,’ he added pointedly, ‘I’m happy for you to operate on my patients, I’ll let you know.’
Darcy spluttered, dumbfounded. ‘But I’ve done this procedure many times in the past.’ The brush-off stung, even as she respected his dedication to ensure the care of his patients. Yes, she was new and yet to demonstrate her talents, but she hadn’t printed a fake medical diploma from the internet and walked in off the street. She’d trained hard for the past ten years. Made personal sacrifices in order to achieve her goals. While most of her school friends were married, some of them with children, some of them bosses or running their own companies, she still had her training wheels on, both professionally and definitely in her drab private life.
‘Let’s start the ward round with Mr Clarke, shall we,’ Joe said briskly to Isha without acknowledging Darcy’s comments and set off down the ward.
Isha, who looked as if she’d won the hospital gossip lottery, shot Darcy a sympathetic but encouraging smile and hurried after the great man.
Insufferable man, more like.
What the hell just happened? Would she have to prove herself worthy over and over again?
Darcy scurried to catch up, feeling like an imposter. Excluded. Maligned. It had been a while since she’d allowed anyone to make her feel that way.
Only the memory of Mr Clarke’s pain-induced pallor and clinical signs of peritonitis stiffened Darcy’s resolve. Her diagnosis was correct. Joe Austin would soon discover that for himself when he examined the patient. Then he’d have to apologise—publicly, profusely and preferably on his knees.
