Cat lifted her face, the smile frozen there into a ghastly grimace. Please no, she thought. Dear God, no.

Dark brown long-lashed eyes looked into gold-flecked green. She saw incredulous recognition become a tight anger, and with a resounding clatter she dropped the forcep she was holding on to the floor.

CHAPTER THREE

THERE was confusion for approximately three seconds. Morgan stared at her in stupefaction. ‘Are you OK, Cat?’ he queried.

She could understand his surprise. After all, why should someone who was famous for her sleight of hand and her unflappability suddenly behave like the most nervous and inadequate junior?

‘Cat?’ repeated Morgan anxiously.

At the repeated sounding of her name she heard Nico’s sharp intake of breath, and she met his eyes steadily. There was denial there, a question, and then they looked just exactly like cold chips of ice.

Morgan was speaking again. ‘Professor Rossi—this is Catriona—absolutely our best scrub nurse.’

The dark brows were raised imperiously, the voice was chilly. ‘Indeed? I’m afraid that I must beg to differ—or perhaps standards are different over here. In my experience good scrub nurses are not those who drop the instruments, and then stand there shaking, obviously not in control of themselves.’

With a sinking feeling of regret she knew that his words had a deeper, more insidious meaning. She had not been in control then, either. In Rome.

‘Perhaps you’d like someone to relieve you, as you’re obviously not up to it?’ he suggested.

She drew her shoulders up. ‘I’m fine,’ she said with a surprising firmness in her voice that she was eternally grateful for. ‘Are you ready to commence the operation—sir?’

‘Indeed.’

Things went on automatic pilot then. She forced herself to put every thought of him out of her mind—she had to. He was just a surgeon. Any surgeon. And she was assisting him. She watched as the long fingers gradually exposed the heart. Watched as he performed the breath-takingly dramatic act of stopping the heart with ice-cold water.

She did her best, but it was not her best. She was adequate, and that was about all that could be said. The qualities that separated her from the run-of-the-mill theatre nurses were sadly missing today. Oh, she didn’t commit another sin so grave as dropping an instrument, or anything so inept as forgetting to register a newly opened packet of swabs. She handed him every instrument that he needed, but that extra dimension was missing. Even though it was the first time she had worked for him, she normally would have anticipated his needs, rather than having to wait to be asked. Watching the motion between a good surgeon—and she could see that he was a very good surgeon, there was no doubt about that—and a good scrub nurse was like watching a perfectly choreographed ballet—the whole painstakingly intricate operation looking absolutely effortless. Today she felt worse than useless, and she was miserably aware that his barely concealed impatience with her performance had affected everyone around them. Even Morgan looked slightly miffed.

At the end he defibrillated the heart to get it started, and contemptuously peeled off his gloves to throw them in the bin by her feet. As a gesture of utter disdain, it could hardly have been bettered.

He marched out of the theatre without another word, leaving the rest of the team to finish up, Morgan and Phil both looking disgruntled.

‘What the hell’s eating him?’ demanded Phil. ‘He was fairly reasonable yesterday. Well,’ gloomily, ‘as reasonable as any of these flaming experts are.’

‘There, but for the grace of God, go you!’ said Morgan.

Dr Crone regarded Cat speculatively. ‘Something tells me that our Cat might just responsible for his temper,’ he mused.

Every pair of eyes was turned in her direction, but she set her face in its most glacial Ice-Queen expression, and no one dared speak to her, save when necessary, for the rest of the operation.

She was longing to just escape, to be alone with her thoughts, to try to make sense of this nightmare situation. Why the hell was he here? But there was to be no escape. As soon as she walked through the swing doors she saw Sister Henderson, a serious expression on her face, and knew exactly what had happend.

‘Sister——’ she began, but the older woman uncharacteristically interrupted her.

‘Would you please come into my office?’

Miserably Cat followed her, and once there the older woman turned to her, an anxious look on her face. ‘Catriona—if you’re not fit to come back to work then you simply shouldn’t be here.’

‘But I am fit, Sister, honestly I am.’

Sister Henderson shook her head. ‘I have just had Professor Rossi in my office. To say he was angry would be a mild understatement. He was absolutely furious. He said that you were incompetent and substandard. He said that your performance today was not what he expected at all—he called it an insult to provide him with a nurse who was simply not up to scratch. Do you deny that what he said is true?’

Cat bit her bottom lip. ‘No, Sister.’

‘I explained to him that you’d been ill recently, but he soon gave me short shrift. I told him that you were the best nurse I had, but he didn’t seem to be listening.’ The older woman’s eyes were creased with anxiety. ‘Don’t you see, my dear, that if we subject visiting and very eminent professors to situations like that it makes us all look very foolish. It whittles away at our reputation. We are the finest cardio-thoracic centre in the country. Surgeons come here, knowing that. They expect—and they have a right to expect—the very best, and today Professor Rossi did not get it. I’d like to know whether you can offer me a satisfactory explanation for what happened in Theatre today.’

Cat hung her head, shame staining her cheeks. She had never received such a blunt dressing-down in all the time she’d been nursing. It was justified, she knew that, but it didn’t make it any easier to bear.

‘He wants to see you in his office, Catriona. I shouldn’t dawdle, if I were you.’

Cat felt as though she were going to the gallows, and not just because she was about to get a professional scorching—she would have withstood a million of those, anything rather than have to face him, to have to stand alone in the same room with him.

She tapped on the door of his room. The visiting professor was awarded a room that reflected his status, and consequently was very large, well-appointed, and right to the back of theatres. Cat had only been in there once before, when a very amiable American professor had invited them all for drinks on the eve of his departure. An enjoyable occasion, and anything less like the encounter she now anticipated she couldn’t imagine.

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