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Their separation, a little over two years later, devastated her father. She'd let him down, she knew, but the stony finality of Luke leaving in the way he had that night meant she'd always known there could never be any apologies or reconciliations or returning to the past.

Her father's disappointment about her marriage and his pointed and pained resignation to life without grandchildren still made her feel terrible every time the subject was raised, but with time she'd grown a little more sanguine. She knew now that she had to live her life the way that was best for her and that was what she was trying to do.

She had no photographs of Luke in the house. Between him leaving and the week following the divorce she'd cleaned them out at the same time as she'd organised to have the interior completely redecorated. She hadn't wanted to give up her home but the reminders of him and of what they'd once had had been too painful for her to cope with. She'd destroyed most of her photos but the few she'd kept, along with her wedding album, were in boxes in storage in her father's attic. If she'd remembered before now Luke's connection to the picture he was holding, that would have gone there with the rest of them.

'I thought I was hallucinating when I saw this address on your file this afternoon,' Luke said slowly, almost absently, as if his attention was divided between the photograph and her in person. 'As far as I knew, you sold this place years ago. How did your father feel about paying out the money to me?'

'I've never told Daddy anything about our agreement over the house or the money,' Annabel told him quietly. She understood why he might think that was what she'd done, but she hadn't.

Luke had paid off the original loan on the house a few months prior to their separation and the property settlement negotiated between their solicitors had involved her paying a percentage of the value of the house back to him. He was right that her father would have given her the money if she'd asked—her mother had died before Annabel was old enough to remember her properly and until the advent of Luke she and her father had been very close—but by the time she'd had to come up with the sum itself it had felt important to her to do that on her own. 'My solicitor helped me arrange another mortgage so I could make the payment.'

Luke's brows rose fractionally as if her revelation surprised him. 'You didn't have to go that far. It never occurred to me you'd want to keep this place. If you'd told me we could have come to some arrangement about the money.'

'I didn't have a problem with the way we did it.' She shifted her bare feet and curled her toes into the thick beige carpet. She didn't like him being here. He was too big and too painfully familiar in her home. Changing the carpets and curtains and furniture and wallpaper, it hadn't altogether erased the memories of the deliriously happy first six months of their marriage. Seeing him standing in this room now made her chest hurt.

She was glad he'd come because it had felt important for her to voice her apology for hitting him, but now she'd done that she wanted him to go. She met his regard unblinkingly, hoping he'd take the hint. 'At the time it seemed important to have all debts between us settled as quickly as possible.'

He lifted his head, his eyes narrowing fractionally. 'Something's burning.'

'Oh, my soup!' Annabel whirled around and raced out to the kitchen, switched off the gas, plunged the smoking pan into the sink and filled it with water. The remains of the tomato liquid had thickened to a caramel-like syrup pool in the bottom and the rest of the pan was burnt and blackened. 'I can't believe I forgot,' she choked, struggling with the sash window above the taps to let out the smoke. 'I was about to eat but then I took a bath instead.'

She jumped out of the way as Luke came forward and wordlessly reached over her and jerked up the window. 'What if it'd caught fire?' he demanded. 'If you'd gone straight to bed you could have been killed.' He sent a scathing look towards the open cover of the smoke alarm he'd installed years earlier above the door. 'Why is that disabled?'

'It always goes off when I'm doing bacon so I took the battery out,' Annabel admitted guiltily. She registered the stone-cold sogginess of the toast she'd made earlier and grimaced. 'The one upstairs still works, I think.'

'You
think?'
Luke looked disgusted. He stalked past her towards the door. 'You're supposed to test it regularly.'

She hurried after him up the stairs. 'Luke, you can't just march about as if you still live here—'

'The battery's flat,' he interrupted, turning to scowl at her, tall enough to reach the tester button effortlessly without need of the chair she had to use.

'It was working a few months ago,' she protested defensively. 'It kept letting out beeps.'

'As it does when the battery's low,' he told her gratingly. 'How could you be so irresponsible? Have you checked this at all in the past six years?'

'Once or twice,' she said self-consciously.

'It's supposed to be done six-monthly.'

'I'll remember in future.'

'I can't believe Clancy hasn't—'

'Leave Geoffrey out of this. Don't you dare say anything to him.' She wouldn't put it past him to try, and the embarrassment of Luke haranguing poor Geoffrey about domestic responsibilities the other man knew nothing about didn't bear thinking about. 'He doesn't have anything to do with this.'

'Then it's time he realised—'

'It's not time for anything,' she cried over him. 'It really is nothing to do with Geoffrey, Luke. He's never even been here.'

'What?' Luke tilted his head, his expression instantly alert. 'What's going on, Annie?'

'Annabel,' she protested weakly. 'What you overheard yesterday in Outpatients was just Geoffrey being silly. We're not lovers. There's never been another man here. I prefer to live alone.'

'You deliberately let me think you were involved.'

'It felt as if you were prying.' She lifted her shoulders in an uncertain gesture. 'I resented it.'

For a few taut seconds their gazes held, his unreadable, Annabel's, she knew, nervous, then Luke closed his eyes briefly. 'I didn't come here to argue with you.'

She let her breath out slowly. 'Well, that's novel at least.'

His mouth tightened but he let the remark pass. 'What have you done in here?'

The door to the bedroom they'd once shared was ajar and before she could stop him Luke pushed it the rest of the way. He stopped in the doorway and inspected the room wordlessly.

'I just changed the wallpaper and curtains and I bought a new suite and wardrobe,' she said stiltedly, minimising the alterations a little because the reality was that she'd sold or given away everything he'd have been familiar with.

The paper, cream with a cool, delicate floral print, was a distinctly feminine design and she'd chosen it deliberately. This was her room now, the room where it was most important for there to be no reminder of the time she'd shared it with Luke. The Roman blinds bore a similar pale print and she'd replaced the solid antique furniture they'd both loved with a lighter, inexpensive, cream pine collection with brass fittings and ceramic floral decorations.

'Bit extreme, isn't it?' She felt his eyes on her face but kept her gaze firmly averted. 'Was it that important to wipe every trace of me away? You wouldn't know it for the same room.'

'I decided I preferred the bed by the window,' she told him shakily. 'And the wardrobe always looked a bit cramped over in that corner. I don't think the changes are extreme at all. I think they're a big improvement. I expect you don't like it because it seems too feminine now. But it suits me. Would you like some tea before you leave?' She wanted him gone now but she especially wanted him away from this room and, knowing him, she knew she'd achieve more by trying for that gently.

'I haven't done what I came for and that was to apologise properly to you for what happened this morning.' He spoke quietly, musingly, as if to himself, except his gaze, hard on her tight, flushing face, was directed entirely now at her. 'I had no right touching you the way I did but...I wasn't ready for how turned on I could still be by you, Annie. I thought I was over that a long time ago. What happened this morning, what I...wanted, was as much of a shock to me as it must have been for you.'

Annabel could hear the pulse of her blood throbbing thickly through her ears. She swallowed heavily. 'There was a time when we were very close,' she said huskily. 'It's not surprising we're both having a little trouble adjusting to our new situation.'

Unable to sustain the intensity of his gaze, she dropped her head. She knew he knew he hadn't been the only one who'd been aroused by the way he'd touched her, but that didn't mean she had the poise to cope with openly acknowledging it in front of him. Her recognition of her own
appalling
excitement was part of the reason she'd reacted so angrily to him.

Her sex drive had disappeared right along with Luke. In six years there'd been no other men, no thoughts even of other men, no fantasies and no arousal. She'd read somewhere that not just men but women, too, if they were deprived of sexual pleasure long enough, developed vividly erotic dream lives, but it wasn't true. Since the end of her marriage her dreams had never been anything other than unremarkable and chaste. She avoided sex on television, and in books and magazines it bored her and sent her page-flicking.

She'd felt nothing for years. Nothing. Not one, remote, tiny flicker of interest. Until Monday night, when she'd walked into Harry's drinks party and one look at Luke had set her paralysed senses reeling.

'I know I've said this before,' Annabel ventured huskily, 'but I still think the best thing we can do is put today behind us and start again afresh tomorrow.'

'Coward,' he said flatly. But to her relief he shifted away from her and moved towards the stairs. 'You used to have courage, Annie. You used to be strong and forthright and brave. When did you lose that?'

'The night you left me.'

The tightening of his face as he opened her front door told her that her barb had hit home, but it had simply been another lie, she registered wearily, despising herself for needing to hurt him like that. But telling the truth would have meant telling him she'd been brave until he'd touched her that morning. Telling the whole truth would have meant telling him her courage had lasted until his touch had forced her to acknowledge to herself how much she still wanted him.

And giving her ex-husband that sort of information, Annabel decided sickly, would have been nothing short of dangerous.

Hannah
called in sick with a cold on Monday morning so that Annabel's ward round took longer than usual. Then one of her surgical colleagues bleeped her to ask for urgent advice on a patient on one of the surgical wards. By the time she'd assessed him and arranged a change in his medication she was twenty minutes late for her morning clinic.

'There're a dozen waiting already,' Wendy, the nurse supervising her clinic, warned with a distracted smile when she brought in yet another set of notes to add to the thick pile the bench in Annabel's examining room.

'I'm sorry, Annabel, but, looking at this lot, you're going to be here till after dark. You know they're cracking down on all the consultants' numbers at the moment. There've been arguments upstairs about how much nursing overtime has been costing these past two quarters down here. Geoffrey Clancy's already had Professor Geddes warning him this week that he has to finish on time from now on. If you don't watch out you'll be the next one called up to the big office.'

'I'm looking forward to it already.' Annabel's hands had curled into tight fists at the mention of her ex-husband and she forced herself to uncurl them again. She hadn't seen Luke since Wednesday night but how
typically
him, she thought savagely. A week in the job and he was already throwing orders around. If he tried sending one her way he'd be in for a shock.

'We're only seeing people who need to be seen and most of our clinic waiting lists are far too long already,' she muttered sourly. 'They need to allocate more money, not less care. We're not running a supermarket. What do they want us to do? Spend ten seconds with patients who've often waited months to see us then chuck them out the door?'

'I believe the official preferred time is five seconds,' Wendy said briskly, rolling her eyes as she bustled towards the door. 'But I'm glad to hear you complaining at last. You mustn't be a mouse, Annabel. If we all make a fuss maybe we'll get a bit of sense out of them upstairs. We need more staff, not patient cuts. I've put your Mrs Di Bella in room one and Mr Hill in three. Will your SHO be down to help, or are you on your own today?'

'Mark will come down if he can get away from the wards,' replied Annabel absently, studying her first patient's ECG tracing from that morning with a frown. Normally she began the clinic with follow-up appointments, before getting into new referrals, but she didn't remember this cardiogram. And this was clearly not going to be a five second consultation. 'Have I seen Mrs Di Bella before?'

'She's new.' Wendy-opened the door. 'I put her first because the poor thing was so nervous she turned up an hour and a half early. The letter from her GP is just inside the notes.'

Annabel scanned the letter, before going into the next room. It seemed her patient was a forty-five-year-old woman who'd presented to the other doctor two weeks earlier with a history of breathlessness and intermittent heart palpitations.

'They're not there all the time, Doctor,' Mrs Di Bella told her once introductions were over and Annabel had begun to probe into her symptoms. 'Hardly at all sometimes.' She waved her arms about in a dismissive way, but beneath her superficial ebullience Annabel could see her face was pale and her expression strained.

'I've been rushing too much. My eldest daughter's getting married in six weeks and there are relatives coming to stay from all over the world and I've been crazy busy. She doesn't understand, you see, how much there is to do. You know these young girls, they think it's just a white dress and some pretty flowers. They don't understand how much there is to arrange.