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'No, you won't. You're too petrified someone will catch us together.' It was true, although she hadn't realised it until then, but she opened her mouth anyway to frighten him. To her utter and absolute outrage, Luke calmly put his hand over her mouth and lifted her off the floor, holding her effortlessly against him with his other arm despite her best attempts at furious resistance. 'And I promise you I'd make it look good,' he murmured, his mouth warm against her ear, his tone so smooth and reasonable she knew the threat was real.

'You're suffocating me,' she yelled fiercely, although against his hand it only came out as a muffled rumble. 'I can't breathe.'

'That's because you're hyperventilating,' he chided, rocking her slightly. 'You always hyperventilate when you're wild. Stop kicking me. You're not hurting and you'll only break your toes. I'm not going to touch you. Not unless you keep fighting.'

When she still, panicking, fought him, he brought his mouth so close to her ear that the heat of his breath on her skin sent shocks tingling across her cheeks to her own mouth.

'Annie, be calm or you
will
turn me on and, I promise you, neither of us wants that to happen. Breathe slowly and quietly. Prove to me you're going to be sensible and I'll let you go.'

Annabel went rigid. Disgust, she told herself. Appalled, sickened, disgust. But, given her stricken awareness of the powerful muscles of Luke's thighs and stomach against her lower back and legs, it was clear she had no choice but to give in to him. She wasn't a midget but Luke was a good six inches taller and many stones heavier and she'd been in his arms often enough to know she would never get away unless he allowed it.

The difference, of course, was that in the past she'd found the contrast in their sizes and strength sexually exciting so that her struggles had always been fake. Now, though, she held her body still and stiff and after a few heated, fiery seconds he put her down.

'Brute,' she accused, spinning about, her eyes narrowing to slits. 'Caveman. Some things never change—'

'Some things change far too much,' he said abruptly. 'But now at least you can satisfy my curiosity on one of your most memorable characteristics...' Before she could guess what he was going to do, he grabbed the bottom of her smock and jerked it, along with the vest she wore under it, up and completely over her head. 'Ah, Annie,' he said, his tone odd, almost despairing as he studied her sensibly covered breasts. 'Is this Clancy's doing? Is the man a lunatic?'

'Geoffrey,'
Annabel said through gritted teeth, retrieving the jerkin and vest from the floor where he'd discarded them and clutching them to her chest fiercely, 'doesn't choose my underwear.'

The Annie
Geddes
Luke had known might have loved daring, low-cut lace and silk, bought for her own sensual pleasure as much as to drive her husband out of his mind, but Annabel
Stuart's
life was too busy for hand-washing delicates, and she preferred beige, supportive, nylon, department-store styles because they were strong, comfortable and unlikely to fall to shreds the instant they saw the inside of a washing machine.

The fierce blush she felt at his critical inspection was nothing to do with remembering the erotic pleasure of choosing the fripperies then having him slowly uncover her again, and certainly nothing to do with the embarrassment she was conscious of about being caught wearing such an unflattering garment, but merely fury at him exposing her. 'Not all men are Neanderthals,' she informed him haughtily.

'If you believe that, you don't understand us,' Luke said softly, his eyes intent on the shape of her behind the protection of the clothes she clutched. 'Underneath, we all are.' Tugging the jerkin and vest away from her with no more effort than he'd taken it away from her minutes before, he fastened a thumb around the top of each thick beige cup and dragged the fabric down brutally so it bunched at her midriff, pushing up her rose-tipped breasts, leaving them high and bare and achingly, betrayingly aroused.

For one brief, shattering moment Luke's glittering gaze burned into her, but then he lowered his head. 'The Neanderthal in me has always preferred you like this,' he growled, lifting her up to him.

Wednesdays
were invariably busy for Annabel. Even on the one day of the month when she had administrative time instead of a clinic in the morning, she was on call for the hospital and for all emergency admissions for the twenty-four hours starting at nine in the morning.

At twelve she had either journal club or a junior doctor teaching session, each held fortnightly on a rotating basis, immediately followed by her busiest clinic of the week. Since that, despite her best efforts to eliminate waiting times for her patients, invariably ran over time, it was generally after seven before she made it to the wards for her usual evening ward round.

Tonight, thankfully, given the distracted state of her mind and the fact that she was on call for emergencies and medical admissions to the hospital all night, the wards seemed relatively quiet.

Tamsin Winston was transferred directly from Theatres to the surgical intensive care unit. The operation had gone well, Simon Rawlings had told her when he'd bleeped her afterwards, and he'd seemed very pleased with the results. From the unit Tamsin would be transferred to one of the surgical wards in a day or two under Simon's care so, although Annabel intended keeping in contact with Tamsin to see how she was getting on, she was no longer her patient.

Hannah told Annabel that apart from what sounded like a relatively straightforward transfer from another hospital of one of her own patients who'd been admitted in heart failure they weren't expecting any other admissions. 'Hopefully, I won't have to call you in again,' the registrar said ruefully with a grimace. 'Remember last week?'

Annabel made a casual gesture. The last night they'd been on call had been extraordinarily busy and they'd both been up all night, looking after two acute admissions and one very ill inpatient, Danny McEanor, the young boy who'd just had his heart transplant.

'I'm going to visit Tamsin then Danny in the unit before I leave. After that I'll be at home if you need me,' she told the registrar. At St Peter's on-call registrars stayed at the hospital while consultants made themselves available, if needed, from home. 'Tony Grant says Danny's looking marginally better this evening. He's haying his first post-op heart biopsy tomorrow to check for rejection but they're much happier with his progress now.'

They were lucky at St Peter's in that on-call duties weren't usually arduous. In her years as a junior doctor at the Free she'd grown used to chronically disturbed nights and getting by with little or no sleep, but these days it was unusual for her to need to return to the hospital after hours.

Not that she lived so far away that it was a trial to come back. The house she and Luke had moved into after their wedding was in a leafy part of Maida Vale, not far from St Peter's, so out of peak traffic times she could generally count on getting from her living room to her office door in less than ten minutes.

Fortunately, tonight, since she was having trouble concentrating, traffic was light and she made it home without incident. Still feeling strangely vague, as if her body and mind were operating on autopilot, she let herself in. She emptied a can of tomato soup into a pan and turned on the heat to low, put bread in the electric toaster, then went upstairs and absently put water on for a bath.

In her bedroom she undressed slowly, letting her clothes slide to the floor in thoughtless disorder. Deliberately avoiding looking at the reflection of her face in the mirror, she meandered into the bathroom and climbed into the steaming water, slid down into it and tipped her head back so the warmth of the water lapped her forehead, submerging her hair and ears until she bent her knees and allowed her head to slide completely under.

Shock, she supposed when she came up again a few seconds later blinking and wet. That was what this dull, empty, strange feeling had to be. She was shocked.

Not that Luke had touched her—she'd never resisted him before and she understood that her attempts to do so today had inadvertently thrown him a challenge he hadn't been able to stand back from—and although she didn't like it she understood why her body had responded—simply because it always had—but what shocked her had been what had happened after that.

She'd never, in rage or calm, lashed out at anyone or anything before, and the fact that she could physically and violently strike Luke the way she had appalled her.

Not that her relationship with Luke—her
old
relationship with Luke—hadn't been physical. Because it had been passionately, sometimes primitively, physical. There'd even been nights, long, dizzying nights, when they'd deliberately driven each other to the edge of pain simply to increase the intensity of their pleasure. But he'd never, even by accident of his sheer size compared with hers, inside or outside bed, hurt her and she, too, had always been aware of boundaries she never breached, boundaries where they might have caused each other real harm.

Today, for the first time, she'd lost that control. When he'd lifted her, intent on her breasts, she'd swung her arm back then slammed her spread palm flat and hard with all her force across his face.

She'd seen the imprint of her fingers red against the abrupt pallor of his skin but Luke had barely flinched. He'd still held her but when she'd sworn at him to let her go he'd released her and stepped away from her, his expression stunned, his movements abruptly jerky and unnatural in contrast to his normal careless grace.

Wordlessly she'd pulled up her bra with trembling hands to cover herself. She'd retrieved her theatre top and hauled it on, but had left her clothes scattered across the floor where they'd fallen when he'd first grabbed her. Then she'd snatched her white coat and pulled open the main door to the room and run away from him.

She hadn't—thank God—seen him since. Harry had seemed to be expecting him at the journal club meeting but he hadn't come. In the afternoon she'd crept back down to the angio suite and retrieved her clothes—she'd been mortified to find them neatly folded on a chair rather than strewn across the room where she'd left them—and dressed again.

Now she didn't know what to do.

The sound of tapping at the glass panel in the front door downstairs as she was dressing after her bath didn't worry her. Her neighbours on both sides were elderly widows who occasionally called in on her in the evenings to invite her for cups of tea or to deliver mail they'd collected for her during the day as several of the medical journals she subscribed to were too large for the small mail vent in her door. Genuine visitors tended to ring the electric doorbell.

But, then, Luke knew how discordant the jangling of the bell sounded from inside. She knew as soon as she saw the broadness of the shape through the central patterned glass of the door that it was him, and when she swallowed jerkily and opened the door her eyes rose immediately, anxiously, to his cheek.

In her mind she'd expected to see redness or bruising at least the size of her hand, but there was nothing.

'It barely hurt,' he said quietly. 'You'd need a hammer to bruise me.'

'I was still expecting to see marks,' she answered dully. She stood back automatically to let him into the hall behind her. 'Luke, I'm sorry—'

'Don't be.' He barely looked at her, instead wandering about the neatly furnished living room to their right. 'I asked for it. You've redecorated.' He sounded tired. 'Tell me, does Clancy live here now?'

'No.' She lingered in the doorway, watching uneasily as he scanned the collection of framed photographs on the oak shelf above the gas fire. 'Geoffrey likes living south of the river,' she said huskily, when Luke picked up one of the photos. 'You're right, you did ask for it, but hitting you like that was still unforgivable.'

'I'm surprised Clancy hasn't adapted by now.' He made no comment on her apology. 'How long have you known him? It's eighteen months since you started at St Peter's, isn't it? Or did you know him before?'

'I met him during my registrar days at the hospital but we didn't become Mends until I started this job.'

She was finding it hard to tear her gaze away from the photograph he still held of her and her father together after her graduation ceremony. Luke had taken the picture, she remembered. He'd probably picked it up because he'd recognised it. There'd been professional photographs taken, too, that day, photographs she hadn't been able to look at for a long time, but this was a snapshot of her father and her both looking so happy she hadn't been able to let it go.

It had been a beautiful, unseasonably warm London afternoon and after the formal part of the ceremony her father had taken her and Luke out to celebrate. She'd drunk too much champagne and she'd been dizzy and laughing, intoxicated as much with joy that after weeks of her pleading Luke had agreed to come with them as with the occasion and the alcohol itself.

But the afternoon didn't end there. After calmly taking that photograph of them together in the hotel grounds where they'd gone for a meal, then seeing her father into a cab, Luke finally—after almost a year of treating her fevered declarations of love and desire and her clumsy attempts to seduce him with brutal and detached amusement—gave in to her. He booked a room at the hotel, took her upstairs and quietly tore off her gown and dress.

When she eventually woke she was flushed and still dazed from the unexpected passion of his love-making and the disturbing, sweetly savage response he'd been able to draw from her previously untutored body. She knew herself to be utterly in love with him, yet she expected him to send her away. Instead, he covered her face with kisses and her body with roses and stunned her by telling her he wanted to marry her.

Nine weeks later, they were husband and wife. Her father, she knew, wasn't happy about the haste. He worried that she was too young, too new to her career and too obsessed with Luke, but at the same time he liked and trusted his future son-in-law, admired his academic achievements and desperately wanted grandchildren, so his objections had been slight and muted and—unhappily for all of them—easily ignored.