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'You'll probably see him on the ward over the next day or two. I've sent him to J because they had a couple of spare beds. He seems a nice lad. He's a chef. He was telling me all about it. Hard work by the sound of it. He's thin, though, so I don't know what that says about his cooking. You'd think chefs would be fat, wouldn't you, if their food was any good?'

'I don't think there's any correlation.' Annabel took a few quick gulps of her tea. 'I'm sure there are lots of thin top chefs just as there must be fat bad chefs.'

'Sounds like me,' he said mournfully.

'You're not fat.' Annabel smiled. Geoffrey loved his food and his work commitments left him little time for exercise, but he wasn't alarmingly overweight. 'Geoffrey, you're just...pleasantly rounded.'

'Rounded?'
He laughed then. 'Annabel, you're terrible for my ego. You know very well I was joking. All I meant was I can't cook. There's nothing wrong with my physique.'

'Of course there isn't,' she said quickly, too quickly perhaps because he promptly looked offended.

'I'm just short for my weight,' he protested.

'I'm leaving,' Annabel declared with a smile. She slid off his desk. 'I'm going to put my foot in it again if I say anything more.'

'Don't leave me.' His expression promptly turned back to mournful again and he made a playful grab for her arm and caught her wrist. 'Annabel, stay.' There was a brief knock at the door. Annabel heard it and stiffened, but Geoffrey seemed not to. 'You know I only eat to compensate for being lonely,' he teased. 'If you'd only agree to marry me—' He broke off, his expression dissolving into a grin as the door swung open to reveal Luke standing there.

Annabel froze but Geoffrey seemed unfazed. 'Ah, the great professor,' he said with a laugh. 'Come in. Come in. I was hoping to catch up with you this morning.' Geoffrey dropped Annabel's wrist and went to greet Luke. 'Geoffrey Clancy. If I hadn't seen you this morning I'd have come looking for you this afternoon to introduce myself. It's an honour to meet you. I've read so much of your Harvard work I almost feel as if I know you already.'

'Luke Geddes.' Annabel felt Luke's eyes briefly on her as he responded to the introduction. 'I'm interrupting.'

'You're not. You're not.' Annabel looked up in time to see Geoffrey make a slightly sheepish gesture towards her and she stood silently by as the two men shook hands. 'Come in. Annabel and I were just fooling around.'

'I did knock.' Luke's voice was calmly polite despite the cool green regard that swung to Annabel. 'You were preoccupied.'

'Annabel has that effect on me.' Geoffrey gave one of his wry shrugs. 'Welcome to St Peter's, Luke. We're all still astounded at our luck in coaxing you here, but I imagine you've been told that often enough already. I've been away in Bristol, otherwise I'd have been back in time for the reception last night. How are you settling in?'

'Well.' Luke's gaze tracked between the two of them in a way that left Annabel in no doubt about what he was thinking. 'Geoffrey, did I just overhear you asking Annabel—?'

'Out of work already?' Annabel interrupted abruptly, preventing him from finishing his question. Ignoring the startled look her bald interjection provoked from Geoffrey, she rushed on, 'If you have, I'm sure Geoffrey has plenty of referrals you could see. He won't mind up giving a few. Swapping between us all is probably the most efficient way of building up your own list.'

Geoffrey looked bemused. 'Well, I don't—' he began uncertainly, but Annabel cut him off, more gently this time than she'd cut off her ex-husband.

'Professor Geddes wanted to start right in at the deep end,' she explained. 'He's already seen some of the general referrals on my list. You don't mind him seeing some of yours, do you, Geoffrey?'

'Not at all,' Geoffrey blustered, beginning to look a little less confused now, although the look he sent Annabel was frankly questioning. 'I mean, if you just ask Wendy,' he said to Luke, his gaze swinging back to him, 'she'll pass on all you need. Help yourself. I'd appreciate the help.'

'Thanks. And thank you, Annabel.' Luke looked thoughtful and she saw her intervention had raised his curiosity. 'Obviously I'm going to be able to rely on you to smooth over my transition here.' But his steady gaze said something far less polite to her. 'However, I have a pre-lunch meeting now through until lunch.'

'Lucky you,' Annabel replied evenly, holding herself stiffly to stop herself flinching from him when, with a brief nod to Geoffrey, Luke spun on his heel and walked out.

'Annabel...?' Geoffrey still looked puzzled. 'What was that all about? Am I missing something?'

'I was angry with him for eavesdropping,' she said defensively.

'Eavesdropping?' Geoffrey's spectacles had slipped down his nose and he pushed them up with his forefinger. 'But I don't think he was. He was only asking about what he must have heard me saying when he opened the door.'

'He had no right to ask about it.'

'But he's head of staff now. It makes sense he might be curious about us.'

'He has no right to be,' she said.

'I think he got the message.' Geoffrey blinked at her again. 'In fact, the poor man probably didn't know what hit him. You spoke right over him. You seemed to be determined to go out of your way to make him look foolish.'

That was too much. 'And did he?'

He looked blank. 'What?'

'Look foolish?'

'Well, not really,' Geoffrey conceded. 'In fact, I thought he handled it rather well, considering—'

'How rude I was,' Annabel finished. 'Yes, I know.' She sighed. Despite her colleague's worry on behalf of Luke, she had the advantage of knowing that Luke had never in his entire charmed life ever looked, or been made to look, foolish. 'I'm sorry,' she said quietly. 'Please, forget that. He rubs me the wrong way.' She made clumsily for the door. 'Fingernails on a blackboard stuff. I have to get back to work.'

Hannah was both senior enough and skilled enough to be able to see and assess patients and arrange investigations and treatment independently, in line with what she knew to be Annabel's own preferences, but when she wanted advice she always asked and at the end of each clinic they held a short session where they discussed the cases she'd seen.

This time, since Annabel had spent longer at morning tea than she'd intended and, despite Luke's earlier help, her clinic ran over time. As soon as she'd finished going over Hannah's case load she had to run to make it to the postgraduate seminar room in time to start her lecture.

The talk was a regular weekly session and was generally well attended by the hospital's medical, nursing and general staff, as well as medical students visiting St Peter's from the Free. The consultants tended to take it in turns with outside experts to deliver the lectures, which were carefully tailored to be of interest to all health professionals, rather than being aimed strictly at doctors.

Harry normally acted as the master of proceedings but when Annabel rushed into the hall it wasn't Harry's reassuring face she saw, waiting for her down the front, ready to introduce her, but Luke's distinctly unreassuring one.

'I see six years haven't been long enough for you to learn the simple courtesy of punctuality,' he murmured.

Annabel, despite conceding that she had once had a problem with getting anywhere on time, now considered herself an extremely punctual person, and she found his observation offensive. She drew herself up stiffly, determined not to let him guess her reaction. 'What have you done with Harry?'

'I haven't eaten him, if that's what you're worried about,' he said neutrally. 'Does this speech of yours have a title?'

'Current thinking on the role of infection in cardiac disease,' she said jerkily. 'Shouldn't you have read the title, before usurping poor Harry?'

'Just keep it short.' He sent her an impatient look on his way to the lectern. 'And to the point, if that's at all possible.'

As soon as he'd said that, Annabel began steeling herself for a terse introduction, and as he turned on the microphone and moved to speak she caught her breath, wondering what she was in for.

'Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this afternoon's Dean's lecture, where you'll hear about current thinking in the role of infection in heart disease.' He spent a few moments introducing himself and explaining his new role as head of medicine, and then he turned slightly towards her. 'I have the pleasure today of introducing St Peter's youngest, yet also one of its most distinguished, widely admired and well-regarded physicians, Dr Annabel Stuart.'

Annabel, enormously startled by the unexpected generosity of his introduction and the applause his words provoked, managed a weak smile on her way to change places with him at the lectern. 'You didn't have to go overboard,' she murmured, waiting for the applause to die.

'Live up to it,' he commanded softly, before leaving her to her speech.

Annabel had no fears about public speaking. She was accustomed to teaching as her years of medical training and her job here at St Peter's involved lecturing to both junior doctors and medical students. But knowing Luke was there, knowing he'd be critically appraising her every word and movement, it made her nervous where normally she'd have been briskly confident, and for once she had to work hard at her presentation.

'When I was a doctor in training we treated peptic ulcers with either acid-reducing medication or complicated surgery,' she began, shakily at first but more strongly once her fascination for the topic came to dominate her anxiety about Luke's presence. 'These days, since the discovery that most ulcers are caused by an infection, the vast majority of sufferers are treated with antibiotics. Could it be that in ten years from now we'll be treating coronary artery diseases the same way?'

The topic was fascinating. Recent studies had led to interest in the possible dramatic role that bacteria, including the same organism implicated in causing stomach ulcers, might play in the development of coronary vessel disease or hardening of the arteries. If the results were confirmed in more thorough, extensive studies, there had to be a possibility that future treatment of heart disease might involve antibiotics rather than the powerful drugs and invasive surgery they used now.

'Although obviously these are very early days,' she reminded her audience as she drew her talk to a close. 'But I think you'll agree that the potential, if this work is proved, is awe-inspiring.'

She smiled her thanks at the round of applause which concluded her speech, then stood back, flushing slightly at the brief, approving look Luke sent her before he came forward to field what looked like dozens of questions from the floor.

'I'm going to take shameless advantage of my role as convenor to slip in one question of my own, Annabel,' he said mildly. 'I'm concerned that if this research is proved it might mean we cardiologists have no job to come to.' The observation provoked a murmur of amusement from the audience. 'Will the patients of the future with heart disease simply pick up a prescription from a GP, without ever needing further referral?'

'You may be right about our jobs disappearing.' Conscious both of their audience and her body's nervously heated reaction as she was forced to move closer to him to reach the microphone, Annabel lifted her shoulders, taking care not to look at him directly lest he saw how he was flustering her. 'But I don't expect many cardiologists will object to retiring a few years earlier than we might otherwise if it's for the greater good of humanity.'

The question-and-answer session continued up until the end of the hour when Luke smoothly thanked her for her talk and drew the lecture to a close.

'I have another session in Outpatients now,' Annabel told him as they drew away from the lectern. 'It's my fortnightly specialist cardiomyopathy clinic so you might find it interesting.' The diagnosis,
treatment and
understanding of diseases of the heart muscle was one of her own—as well as Luke's—special areas of interest and expertise. True, she hadn't welcomed his assistance that morning but after his professionalism this past hour she found herself in a more peaceable state of mind. 'You're welcome to join me if you're interested.'

'What's this, Annie?' Her ex-husband's very green eyes narrowed at her. 'This morning spitting and now smiling? You are a contrary girl. Or have you decided to call a truce?'

'We don't need a truce, Luke.' She let his taunting pass, determined not to allow him to provoke her again. 'I bear no ill feeling towards you,' she revealed evenly. 'Perhaps we'll never be able to be friends, but we can both be adult about this. There needn't be any impediment to us working well together.'

'You bear no ill feelings towards me.' Her ex-husband's regard turned thoughtful. 'That's an intriguing way of putting it, considering I've always assumed our separation was entirely mutually agreed.'

Annabel felt her face heat. 'Just because you assumed that, it doesn't mean it was true,' she said huskily. 'And what I meant was that I bear no ill feeling about you coming back. You have a perfect right to work wherever you want in the world.'

His brows drew together. 'I don't need your permission, Annabel.'

'I didn't say you did,' she retorted. She forced a faint smile in an attempt to take some of the sharpness out of her tone. 'I'm just trying to reassure you that I can put aside the pain of the past if you meet me halfway and stop bringing it up.'

Luke still frowned at her. 'Are you talking metaphorically or are you actually saying you found our divorce painful?'

'Of course I found it painful.' Unlike him, clearly. Until the actual moment he'd walked out on her, despite the arguments they'd been having, it had never occurred to her that he might leave. She'd—ludicrously—assumed their vows would hold them together for ever, regardless of what she'd thought of as their temporary difficulties. She hadn't properly realised then that love, outside the unconditional love a parent gave, rarely lasted. She hadn't known that it could be destroyed or so easily driven away.

But that night, when he'd packed a case then walked out to his car, she'd known, shockingly and immediately, that their marriage had been over. Luke hadn't been a man who'd made idle threats. When he'd quietly wished her well with her life and closed the door behind himself, the finality of the gesture had been absolute.