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'Maybe that's why I like you so much. And you make me sound as innocent as a babe in arms almost,' he said, and they both laughed.

'No, you're not innocent. Because of what you wanted from her, you weren't as perceptive as you might have been about other things. She fitted into your life too well for a certain period.'

'You're right on, Sophie,' he said, after a hesitation. 'Perhaps I used her, and salved my conscience by buying her jewellery, and so on.' He picked up her hand and kissed it. 'You're a marvel. Thank you.'

'She wanted jewellery, I expect. That was part of the unspoken pact, as far as she was concerned,' Sophie said.

Clay stood up. 'Would you like another beer? And I see that they make great French fries here. Maybe we need to lighten up a bit.'

'Well, I'd love another beer, please,' she said, smiling up at him. 'And instead of the diamond necklace I really had in mind, I'll settle for the chips.'

Clay grinned. 'You must think me a hopeless case where women are concerned,' he said. 'But I feel much better, unashamedly uplifted.'

'Not frightened to be vulnerable. I like that,' she said.

He came back with the beer. 'They have salad and sautéed shrimps as well,' he said. 'I'm starving.'

'So am I,' Sophie said.

Sipping a second beer and waiting for the food to be served, they continued to talk. Clay felt his frustration and angst gradually lifting. It was so good to be with her.

'So you're definitely not going to be Chief of Surgery?' Sophie said.

'Not this time around,' he said. 'Maybe, if I'm lucky and still working in Gresham, it will be something I'll apply for ten years from now.'

'And what will you be doing otherwise, ten years from now?'

'God knows,' he said honestly. 'Right now, the future has become a sort of blank to me, after mulling over the job scene for so long. It's mainly a relief.'

The food came and they both began to eat hot chips with their fingers from a generous basket piled high with them. 'Mmm,' she said, 'these are delicious. This is a great payment for my counselling, Clay. Thank you.'

'It's inadequate for what you've done for me, Sophie,' he said quietly. 'Thank
you.'

'I really hope it's helped you in some way,' she said soberly. 'I know how important it is to have someone to listen when you're in trouble.'

They stayed in the pub for a long time, eating at a leisurely pace and talking about many things.

'This place feels like a second home,' Sophie said. 'I really like coming here. Now that I've been here several times with you, it feels even more so. It used to be a private house—Victorian, I guess.'

'Let's make a pact, Sophie, that if we need each other in a hurry, and can't make contact, we'll meet here. I like the idea of coming in here and finding you.'

'So do I. That sounds romantic, and very nice. We'll do it,' she agreed.

Clay leaned across the table and kissed her on the cheek. 'Thank you for listening, and being so...what? Vulnerable?'

'I'm glad that you trusted me,' she said quietly.

It was nearly midnight when he took her home. 'Is our dinner date still on for next Saturday? This time it won't be blind,' he said as they sat in the parked car.

'Yes, I'd love to come, Clay.'

'Could we make it a regular thing?' he said. 'I'm totally unencumbered now...free. Battered, but free.' He grinned ruefully. 'A lot of things are beginning to fall into place.'

'I'd like that, Clay...to get to know you better,' she said softly.

'What do you want from a man?'

'I want a man of integrity, someone I can trust implicitly... a man I can love,' she said. 'And I want the right chemistry. I didn't have that before, you see.'

'You've known me long enough to know whether the chemistry's there, Sophie,' he said. 'Hmm?' He wasn't sure why he was saying these things, only that he felt compelled to say them.

Taking a deep breath, she turned to him. 'It's definitely there,' she said.

They came together then, each making a move towards the other, in an embrace that was a release of all the holding back. 'Oh, Clay,' she whispered.

As his mouth possessed hers, Clay felt a pure joy as he lost himself in her. She put her arms around him, returning his kiss. For a long time they sat close, entwined, enjoying the physical pleasure of each other. Immediately the difference between her and Dawn was evident to Clay. There was a gentleness in the woman in his arms, a soft giving, as well as an evident delight at having him with her. For his own part, he felt a rare gentleness, a protectiveness. In the past he'd considered that he'd never really loved a woman—he'd liked them, had lusted after them, had indulged that lust. Now confusion reigned.

He realized that there had been that hard edge of calculation in Dawn, even when she'd seemed at her most abandoned with him. It was a revelation.

At last they pulled apart, looking at each other, smiling like two teenagers who had just found each other. Much as Clay wanted to ask Sophie if he could spend the remainder of the night with her, he held back. Too soon, he told himself. Anyway, what was his agenda with her? Maybe she would be wise to find out, as she had counselled him to do. The trouble was, he didn't know himself.

'Goodnight, sweetheart,' he said. 'I'll see you in the OR on Monday.'

As she was half out of the car, she turned back to him. 'Clay, there's something you have to understand... I'm definitely vulnerable,' she said. 'Seriously.'

'I didn't doubt that,' he said, smiling.

When she had gone in, the door closed behind her, he sat thinking for a few minutes. It had been a long, eventful day. Sophie was clearly telling him that she was very different from Dawn, that if he wanted a relationship with her he .had to know what she was all about and act accordingly.

He let out a deep breath, feeling himself relax for the first time in a long time. He felt that his world was taking on a certain normalcy again. It seemed to him that Sophie, in her unassuming, understated way, had accepted something that he'd implicitly offered of himself, and had issued a challenge to him. It was something that he was definitely going to take up...

Smiling, he drove away.

Later as he lay in bed, the telephone rang. When he picked it up the person on the other end of the line hung up after a moment of silence. Feeling an odd certainty, he got up and went into the sitting room to check his call-display unit attached to the other telephone there. As he suspected, it was Sophie's number that was displayed when he pressed the button.

Pleasure and longing assailed him as he sat down heavily on the sofa beside the telephone. His first instinct was to dress quickly and go to her house. It would be easy, as she would be alone for the night.

Instead, he forced himself to remain seated, to wait for five minutes before picking up the receiver and punching in Sophie's number, his heart thumping deeply with anticipation. No woman had been in his bed here at his home. Now he wanted this woman to be there...wanted her desperately.

The line was busy. In frustrated disbelief he listened to the repeated burr of the engaged signal. Slowly he disconnected. One thing was very clear: she had let him know that she wanted him. Or so it seemed to him. Perhaps this was the initiative he'd been waiting for from her.

He closed his eyes and sank back against the cushions, restless with frustration. With certainty he knew that he wanted her, no doubt about that.

Later, in bed, he dialled Sophie's number again. The line was still busy. Having made the initial move, she was probably now frightened to take the next step and had taken the phone off the hook. After all, she was a mother, she had been through a lot of angst. The stakes were high for her.

He smiled into the darkness. He could wait. Some things were worth waiting for...

'Clay
, can you spare a few minutes?' Jerry Claibourne accosted Clay as he was about to leave the surgeons' locker room, having just changed into a green scrub suit, ready for his day of operating in the OR. Jerry himself had already changed.

'Sure, Jerry,' Clay agreed, standing in the doorway, 'I guess you must be pretty puzzled.' They moved out to the corridor. 'It's simple, really. I thought about the job over the holiday and decided that it's not really for me at this time. Applying for it maybe ten years from now would be more sensible. It took the reality of the application to make me see that. Sorry if I've taken up your time and energy backing me, Jerry.' He elaborated a little on what he'd already said, hastily, by telephone from his cottage while on holiday.

'That's all right,' Jerry said with surprising equanimity, lounging against the wall. 'Better that you should do it now than after the job was yours, as I don't doubt it would have been.'

'If I take it now, I pretty well rule out other things— like marriage and a family,' Clay said.

Jerry's interest was piqued. 'Have you got anyone in mind?' He raised his grizzled grey eyebrows which framed his permanently tired blue eyes effectively to give him a very distinguished 'professor' look. 'Er...not Dawn?'

'No, not Dawn.' Clay gave a rueful grin, finding himself suddenly light-hearted, able to almost joke
about his erstwhile dilemma with Jerry's personal assistant.

'If you don't mind my saying so,' Jerry said, 'I'm relieved. Dawn's a great personal assistant, but from any other point of view she would eat you alive. Definitely not your sort of woman, Clay.'

'So I've realized,' Clay said dryly. 'Perhaps Jeff would appreciate her talents.'

'Mmm,' Jerry agreed. 'Maybe I'll effect an introduction.'

'You do that, Jerry.' Clay grinned. 'I'd be eternally grateful. Jeff might be, too. He can't seem to make it on his own.'

Jerry chuckled. 'I'll see what I can do. Well, I appreciate your honesty, Clay, even though I'm disappointed. See you later.'

Clay sought out Sophie, to find her designated as the circulating nurse for his first case. 'Morning, Sophie,' he said.

'Morning.' She smiled, her face flushed a slightly brighter shade of pink than it usually was at that time of the day. They were alone in the room.

'Did you call me late on Saturday night, and then hang up?' he asked wickedly, giving her a chance to deny it and perhaps save face if she wanted to. Her colour deepened.

'Yes,' she said. 'I wanted to speak to you...and I wanted to, um...'

'Spend the night with me?' he finished the sentence for her softly.

'Well, yes. Then I lost my nerve.' She wasn't looking at him, busy inserting the sharp end of a plastic intravenous set into a bag of transfusion fluid, Ringer's lactate, ready for the doctor who would give the anaesthetic.

'That's like the proverbial red flag to the bull,' he said.

'I thought it might be,' she said, 'although I understand that bulls are colour-blind.'

He laughed. 'Not this bull,' he said.

The atmosphere between them was electric. Clay wanted to touch her, to slide his hand round the nape of her slender neck, which made her look so vulnerable as she bent to her task, to kiss her. He made no move. This wasn't the time or place. A swift surge of desire passed through him as he watched her fingers become clumsy as she hung up the bag of fluid on an IV pole, betraying her acute physical awareness of him.

'Why did you lose your nerve?' he murmured, very aware that at any moment someone else would come into the room.

The eyes she turned on him were dark with awareness. 'As I said on Saturday,' she replied carefully, 'I'm vulnerable.'

He nodded in understanding. 'There will be other times,' he said softly. 'I'm looking forward to it.'

There was a murmur of voices and the sound of running water from the adjoining scrub room, so Clay smiled at Sophie and then went to join them to prepare for his first case. He wasn't sure what was happening to him that he was so tinglingly aware of Sophie all the time, that she was always in his thoughts these days. Maybe, at last, he was falling in love...

As it turned out, that was the only private exchange he was able to have with her for the better part of the day, as it became 'one of those days', when emergencies took precedence over the booked elective surgical cases he had on his list. When it was time for the changeover of the nursing shift, from the day shift to the evening shift at half past three in the afternoon, he found himself still operating on his second to last case, knowing that it would be six o'clock before he was finally finished. Already he'd called his secretary to cancel all his office appointments.

Some of the nurses, Sophie included, had been asked to stay behind to help the evening staff to cope with all the work. Those nurses, having put in a full day from half past seven that morning, took on the extra work resignedly and, for the most part, uncomplainingly. Clay noted Sophie's presence among them.

'Can I give you a ride home?' he said at last, when they were in the scrub room after the end of the list.

'Please,' she said, smiling as she washed her hands. 'It's been a long day.'

Clay took off his surgical cap, face mask and plastic protective goggles, before running a hand through his hair. Then he splashed cold water over his head and neck. 'Ah, that's better,' he said appreciatively. 'I have to go to my office to pick up some charts that my secretary left out for me. Shall I meet you there?' He gave her details of how to get to his office in the adjoining Medical Arts Building. He would have a quick shower, change into his outdoor clothes and go straight there.

Later, in the office, where all the other staff had gone home, he waited for her, feeling an unfamiliar tension as he went through the papers and charts that had been left out for him. The tension came from a certain knowledge that he'd reached a crisis point with Sophie, when the awareness between them crowded out everything else when they were together. Instinct told him that it was the same for her.

Now he could think of little in relation to her other than the vision of holding her in his arms, of making love to her. There were complications, of course. She had been married before, she had a child...