Was this the punchline of the joke?

There was nobody close enough to help but the fear that should have swamped and immobilised Beth simply wasn’t there.

‘Don’t even think about it!’ she snapped.

Beth drew herself up to her full height of a not very impressive five feet four inches. Her lack of height was irrelevant because the misery over the personal disaster she had engineered for herself in coming here had just morphed into pure fury.

‘You!’ She jabbed her finger at the leather-clad chest of the man whose progress towards Resus 1 she had just blocked. He was at least six feet tall and his bearded, tattooed face was bleeding heavily from a jagged laceration. ‘Go and sit down and behave yourself.’

Whirling to confront Jackal’s mate, Beth was dimly aware that the police officers rushing to her assistance had slowed involuntarily, their jaws drooping.

‘Drop the knife,’ she commanded.

‘No!’ she yelled as both men made a move to close her further into the middle of the potentially very dangerous human sandwich. Her voice remained at a furious shout. ‘Do as you’re bloody well told! I am just so not in the mood for this.’

Amazingly, the gang members froze. The hand holding the lethal-looking knife began to drop and suddenly the police were right there. As fast as the incident had occurred, it was defused and the space cleared.

Beth was aware of a curious shaking sensation in her knees. She turned her head slowly to see the occupants of Resus 2 staring at her.

‘Woo-hoo!’ Chelsea called softly. ‘You go, girl!’

Mike had an astonished grin on his face but it was Luke who drew Beth’s gaze. He was staring at her as well, of course. Who wouldn’t be? He wasn’t looking shocked any more. He was looking as though Beth were a complete stranger.

A rather impressive stranger, in fact.

Straightening her back made that weak-kneed sensation subside almost completely. The calm, confident smile Beth was aiming for probably came out more like an embarrassed grin, but it didn’t seem to dull the respect she could detect from her small audience.

An audience that included Luke Savage.

How cool was that?

CHAPTER TWO

GOOD grief!

Luke was still shaking his head in disbelief as he scrubbed up for Jackal’s emergency laparotomy ten minutes later.

Seeing Beth again after all these years was unbelievable enough. Seeing her doing that warrior princess act with the gang members had been…

The sexiest damn thing Luke had ever seen in his life.

He scrubbed beneath his nails hard enough to cause real pain.

Beth was the only woman who had ever made him seriously consider marriage.

And she was the only woman who had ever dumped him.

The hurt and the ensuing anger that had caused should have been rendered inconsequential by the blows life had meted out since then, so it was incredibly disturbing to find how easily the years could be peeled back.

One good look into those bright blue eyes and there he was again. Not measuring up. Just not being good enough, no matter how much love he had to offer.

What the hell was Beth doing in Hereford of all places?

Luke took his foot off the water control and reached for a sterile towel. She’d probably come here to give her kids a nice, healthy rural upbringing or something. Snapping on gloves, Luke turned abruptly to let the scrub nurse tie up his gown. That flash of something astonishingly like jealousy at the thought of the father of those children was ridiculous.

So she was still an attractive woman. So what?

So she had grown up a bit and become brave about confronting things she didn’t like. Again, so what?

Luke had more than enough to deal with in his life right now, without complicating things by renewing any kind of relationship with Beth. The last thing he needed was to try poking an old scarred area when the potential to find a tender spot was so clearly possible.

A deep breath was called for here. And rational thinking. This disturbance was probably just part of the surprise factor of seeing Beth again. All he needed to do was ride it through and there would be no shortage of distractions if that proved in any way difficult. It was a relief to use the one immediately available.

‘Let’s get this show on the road, shall we?’

With his hands held carefully crossed in front of his chest, Luke used his shoulder to push open the swing doors into Theatre.

At just after 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, Ocean View’s emergency department was stretched to slightly over its full capacity.

One of the high-tech resuscitation areas was still occupied by a seriously injured patient, the other one having just been vacated by the hit-and-run victim, who had gone up to Theatre 2 for the attention of an orthopaedic surgeon. All the beds in the cubicled area were also full and half of those patients were still waiting to have bones X-rayed or lacerations sutured. The treatment rooms were full and there were no spare seats in the waiting area either.

A few people with minor injuries were in Reception but most of them were simply there to offer solidarity to their mates, and they included some of the loudest and most unpleasant women Beth had ever encountered.

They were all unkempt, tattooed, pierced in multiple places and inebriated, and only too happy to demonstrate their contempt of any authority figures or lack of appreciation for any medical assistance. But the police presence was strong enough to ensure the safety of staff and the background noise of obscene language and shouting was so constant Beth could tune it out now.

It had already become automatic to seek the company of a police officer before approaching or treating a patient, and all the nurses remembered to wait until a member of one gang had left the X-ray department before escorting a member from the rival gang down the corridor.

Hopefully, the stab victim who was currently in Resus 1 would also be sent up to Theatre soon. When the doctors could be freed from attending the critically injured patients they should be able to deal with the minor injuries rapidly. They would be able to clear the department and then they could all have a well-deserved break.

Oddly enough, the chaos and unpleasantness of her current environment had been quite enjoyable over the last hour or so. Not the patients, of course, but their uniform lack of co-operation or appreciation had provided a bond of camaraderie amongst the staff members that had only increased under pressure.

And Beth was very firmly one of them. Thanks to that inadvertent episode of venting her tension, having stepped into the path of the converging gang members, Beth had not only been welcomed into the ranks of Ocean View’s emergency department staff, she was currently being used as a lynchpin.

Even though it had only taken a few seconds and could quite easily have been a huge mistake, the fact that Beth had taken control had become a kind of emotional bank in which snippets of humour or stamina were being deposited and could be withdrawn whenever someone needed the lift of a shared smile or a pat on the back.

‘I’m just so not in the mood for this’ had become the catch-phrase of the night and never failed to produce a smile.

Dennis, the local cop, had claimed Beth as one of their own with a hint of pride.

‘Keep your eyes open,’ he had told one of the Nelson police officers about to accompany Beth when she needed an escort to Radiology. ‘You might learn something from our Beth they never thought to teach you at police college.’

How ironic that Beth could feel so at home in a new place so quickly when she was still having serious doubts about the wisdom of having come here at all. She even knew her way around the storeroom now, having gone in there so often to fetch new supplies, and she was there again now, checking the fridge, as requested, to see how much O-negative blood they had on hand. Then she moved towards the shelves supporting boxes of dressings.