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Daisy did look better. The day before her skin had been grey and bloated but this morning some of her colour was back and most of her swelling had resolved.

'And it's very important, Dr Stuart.' Daisy sent her a beseeching look when Annabel lifted her head from examining her neck and heart and listening to the back of her chest. 'I've been looking forward to it for ages. It's a premiere. There'll be movie stars there and everything. And it's only in Leicester Square. If I get sick or anything it'll only take me fifteen minutes or so to get back here in a cab.'

'I don't see that it'll do any harm,' said Annabel slowly. Daisy had improved overnight, and even if that improvement was, as they all knew, temporary, a few hours away would be a good test before she considered discharging her again. She smiled at her patient's delighted shriek. 'Promise me you won't do anything silly, or is that asking too much?'

'Silly?' Daisy, still grinning, rolled her eyes dramatically. 'It's only a movie.'

Annabel sent her juniors a dry look. 'Apparently your date has a body I would not believe.'

Daisy flicked her blonde curls back behind her shoulders with a giggle. 'I promise not to exhaust myself,' she vowed. 'I'll be back by midnight.'

'Make it eleven.' Annabel flicked through the folder containing the ward's drug charts until she came to Daisy's
prescription chart. She crossed off the intravenous diuretic she'd added to the regime the day before and replaced it with the oral version. 'I'll have a chat with Mr Grant and let him know you're here.' Tony Grant was the transplant surgeon directly involved in Daisy's care. 'Any news on that front?'

'Got my bleeper,' Daisy said cheerfully, indicating the small device on the bedside table beside her.

Daisy's heart, despite her brightness, was severely damaged, functioning poorly and in urgent need of replacement. She was near the top of the recipient list for a transplant at the hospital and she carried the bleeper so the transplant team could reach her any time a suitably matched organ became available. 'It never leaves my side.' Her face stilled momentarily.

'Mr Grant says things have been a bit quiet lately. It's funny the way that makes you feel, isn't it? I mean lately, now that I'm hoping it might not be too long before I have the surgery, and no matter how much I want the operation, I still feel a bit relieved there aren't any spare hearts because it means that other people aren't suffering too much.'

'That's a common feeling,' murmured Annabel. Waiting for a donor heart was never easy because hoping for one meant there was always an element of guilt about the fact that another person had first to die. The transplant team included specialist counsellors who were skilled at helping recipients explore such issues and she felt it was a sign of their good work that Daisy felt able to voice her confusion so fluently. 'Want me to ask one of the team to pop up and chat with you?'

Daisy shook her head. 'I'm fine,' she said firmly. 'Being in here, there's just less to keep me distracted, I think. I go to see them every month anyway.'

'I've got clinics all day but I'll be up to see you when
they finish before you go tonight,' Annabel told her. She quickly explained to the younger doctors the changes she'd made to Daisy's treatment. 'How many admissions is that, then, these past six months?' she asked her SHO outside Daisy's room.

'Four.' Mark ran back through Daisy's notes, checking. 'Four plus that one time she only needed to stay a couple of hours.'

Annabel nodded. 'Better ECHO her again this afternoon,' she told her registrar, referring to a type of heart scan, similar to the sort used during pregnancy to see the baby. An ECHO would provide valuable information on both the size of Daisy's heart and the way it was functioning. She'd scanned her personally in clinic the day before but it would be useful to have a further measurement of how she was coping after twenty-four hours' intensive treatment.

With the lecture and with her clinics so busy that afternoon, she wouldn't have time to do the scan herself, but Hannah was a relatively senior registrar with two years of specialist training in cardiology behind her and she was skilled at the procedure. 'Just remind me you need to leave early from clinic later on so you can fit it in,' she instructed.

The rest of her ward round—M and J were her main wards but she had patients scattered throughout the four main medical wards, as well as two currently on transplant wards and three in Intensive Care—progressed smoothly but her patient load was currently very high and both she and Hannah—leaving the ward work to Mark—were still late getting down to Outpatients.

She neither expected nor wanted, and she certainly hadn't asked for, Luke's help with the session, and when she saw him ensconced in the examination room she usually used herself, she drew herself up sharply, thrown momentarily off balance by her body's sudden nervous, heart-skipping reaction to seeing him. 'What are you doing here?'

'Harry,' he responded blandly, meeting her shocked regard with frustrating equanimity. 'He thinks I should get my feet wet. He decided Outpatients would be a good place to start.'

Annabel felt like asking when he had started taking orders from anyone but himself, but, of course, that would have been deliberately provocative and since she was determined to avoid arguing with him she held her tongue. 'Fine,' she replied stiffly instead. 'Is there anything you'd like to tell me about any of my patients or have you taken them out of my hands completely?'

'Don't turn territorial on me, Annie.' The tightening around his mouth suggested he'd sensed her reaction even if she was doing her best to mask it. 'You're not under threat. The two men I've looked at so far have been general referrals to the hospital, not personal ones to your clinic or follow-ups. Believe me, I am aware of the basic principles of ethical medical practice.'

'Oh, I'm sure you know a list of them by heart,' she retorted with what she felt was creditable pleasantness, considering he'd just called her Annie again, taken over her office and, probably, at least a third of her clinic as well.

New referrals to the hospital for advice on management of both private and public system patients with heart dis
ease
made up a significant portion of their clinic workload. Those intended for particular consultants were allocated to them, of course, but patients with general referrals tended to be distributed evenly among the teams by the administrative staff.

Her own clinics were invariably overloaded, and in normal circumstances she'd have been grateful for help, but, knowing that help was coming from Luke, it made it more difficult for her to appreciate it.

Nevertheless, she managed a small smile. 'I'll just take the office next door,' she said sweetly, collecting herself, along with the stack of notes on the table nearest the door. The other room was smaller and, being internal with no windows to the outside, darker, but at least it wasn't opposite where she'd be able to see him whenever their doors were opened between patients. Besides, she refused to add to his entertainment by asserting her right to the room they were in now. 'If you've any questions, please, don't hesitate...'

He seemed to find the way she let the words trail off amusing. His mouth quirked. 'I won't,' he said quietly.

'Then I'll leave you to it.' The door behind her was still half-open but now she pulled it wide.

'When did you cut off your hair?'

She froze momentarily, then turned slowly back to him, one hand lifting self-consciously to the now almost brutally short, silky red strands behind her ear. Luke had liked her hair long. He'd loved grabbing great fiery handfuls and twisting their bodies in it until they were bound together.

The memory of the way he'd liked to make love to her like that brought hot colour surging up from her chest to her face.

She was used to herself with short hair now. She still had a photograph at the house of herself with it long, but these days the sight of her hair falling below her waist, the way she'd worn it in her years with Luke, invariably startled her. 'Six years ago,' she said thickly, meeting the calculating regard with which he watched her flush with as much insouciance as she could manage.

'Interesting.' Despite that, he sounded bored. 'And do
you dress like this regularly now, Annie, or is the big cover-up routine strictly for my benefit?'

Annabel, still flushing, pulled the lapels of her white coat together clumsily over her dress. It wasn't worth it, she decided numbly. It wasn't worth it, protesting about her name. Even if hearing him say 'Annie' grated across her nerves like slow sandpaper. 'I'm older,' she stated nervously, referring to his comment about her clothes. 'I prefer a more suitable hairstyle and clothes—'

'Not that much older.'

'When I was young I wore young clothes. Now I'm old—'

'You're still a young woman.'

She swallowed heavily. 'What I choose to wear is none of your business.'

He lifted one broad shoulder in a careless movement that seemed to her intensely male and very Luke. 'I didn't say it was,' he said coolly. 'I was simply curious about why a woman who loved cosmetics, tight sweaters and short skirts now turns up two days in a row with a bare face and wearing a shapeless dress down to her ankles.'

'I've work to do.' Her hands shaking now, she walked out quickly, and pulled the door shut behind her.

It was deliberate, she thought sickly, stumbling into the office next door. Either for his own...sadistic amusement or out of some belated need for revenge for past sins, he was deliberately trying to unsettle her.

What was it he wanted from her? Did he want them to fight? Surely there'd been more than enough arguments during their marriage to mean he should be welcoming with relief her desperate attempts at a mature, professional coexistence?

'You don't mind, Annabel, about me putting Professor Geddes next door?' Wendy Dogherty, the charge nurse in Outpatients, came racing into Annabel's room before she'd even had a chance to sit down. 'I am sorry, I know you do like to work in there, only...well, we weren't expecting him.'

'It's all right, Wendy. I don't mind.' Annabel excused herself the lie because to admit anything else would have worried Wendy even more, and it already looked as if Luke's arrival had sent the normally composed nurse into something of a tail-spin. She could understand that. Luke had done something similar to her for years. He was still doing it now. 'He is the new big chief, after all. He should have the best room.'

'Well, that's what I thought—' But Wendy broke off, her pale complexion flushing. 'Well, the truth is, Annabel, we didn't know what to do with him. The girls are in a tizzy over him turning up. But he has been very good. He's not trying to be intimidating or anything and he asked to see only new referrals so he's not going to muck up your routine with anyone. I was going to put him in with Geoffrey Clancy but you're very full already this morning and you do have your lecture today so I thought you wouldn't mind the help.'

'That was thoughtful,' Annabel said carefully. 'Thank you.'

'One smile and their brains turn to drooling mush.' Wendy, it seemed, was still preoccupied, worrying about
her nurses. 'I even felt a few heart flutters myself,' the nurse added breathlessly, 'and I'm nearly fifty! He's a knock-out all right. Does he have the same effect on you?'

'He hasn't smiled at me.' Annabel looked down at the notes she was holding. Rationally she knew Luke had never used his looks to the sort of advantage some other men might have, but emotionally she'd never been able to stay blasé about the way other women responded to him. It hadn't been easy, being married to a man who drew female attention so effortlessly. 'Are there many waiting?'

'I'll get Mary to show your first one in,' Wendy agreed in a distracted way, before bustling out.

At eleven it was customary for the team—doctors and nurses—to take a ten-minute break between patients to meet for morning tea. It was a chance to discuss cases they'd seen and bounce ideas off each other, but, her nerves on edge from her knowledge of Luke's proximity, Annabel checked with Hannah that there were no problems she wanted to discuss then carried her tea across to Geoffrey's team's side of the clinic.

'Hey!' Her colleague greeted her arrival with an easy grin, toasting her with his own tea, but his smile faded as he scanned her expression. 'What's up? Trouble?'

'I felt like a break with tradition,' she said smoothly, coming to sit on the corner of his desk. She looked down at the ECG he was studying. 'Busy?'

'Frantic.' He passed her the trace. 'What do you think?'

Annabel saw from the printed details at the top of the ECG that the tracing had come from a twenty-five-year-old male. 'Heart block in a young person,' she commented, referring to the fact that there was an obvious disruption between the electrical part of the heartbeat and the muscle's reaction. 'Sarcoid?'

'Spot on.' Geoffrey threw his pen onto the desk and
leaned back in his chair with a pleased air. 'He's had some palpitations and he's fainted twice, hence the referral here. I've organised for him to come in for an MRI to see if that gives us any more information,' he explained, referring to a type of scan which would give them good pictures of the structure of the heart. 'But his chest X-ray gave me the most likely answer this morning.'

Annabel glanced up at the X-ray on the board beside him and nodded. Sarcoidosis was a condition where organs, usually the lung but sometimes including the heart among others, became infiltrated with a hard, grainy substance. The cause was unknown but the flared deposits she could see in his X-ray were a characteristic finding. It was a chronic condition and it wasn't easy to treat. 'When are you inserting his pacemaker?'

'Tomorrow morning.' Insertion of a pacemaker could overcome problems with the heart rhythm—the most serious of which could lead to sudden death—caused by sarcoid in the heart. 'Obviously I've started steroids to try and prevent the heart becoming more involved,' Geoffrey added.