But he’d come so close to kissing Elene. Too damned close. Driven by the need to blank out images of young Joe on the table, his heart stopping, his smashed bones, his innocence—yeah, damn it, falling into a kiss with a beautiful woman, even an out-of-bounds one, seemed the perfect distraction. Except it wasn’t. She was right to pull away.
‘Forget the coffee. I’m heading to PICU.’ Hopefully the lad who had his mind going off track was now in there.
‘No problem,’ Elene answered in a tone that suggested it very much was.
He paused at the door. ‘I apologise for my actions. I’m involved with your friend. It was wrong of me.’ Playing the field didn’t mean being callous and uncaring. He understood too well how that hurt others. Not that his ex-fiancée had done that to him. No, she’d found another way to decimate him, but despite the anger he’d never taken up deliberately hurting other women to ease his own pain. At the moment, Danielle was his latest conquest so other women were off-limits. Unfortunately. Because that near kiss—He’d never know. Yet now he understood why Elene had subconsciously been plaguing him on and off over the past months. She was hot, therefore dangerous to his equilibrium. But he was not about to change his thinking on women and relationships, not because this one set his heart racing as if it were being chased by a greyhound.
‘I—’ Her throat rose around another swallow. ‘If you’re apologising then I owe you one too. That shouldn’t have happened. It certainly won’t again. I can’t believe I nearly let you kiss me.’ She paused, drew a breath. ‘I can only put it down to wanting to get as far away from the last two hours as possible.’
The two women were close, probably had an agreement not to look at each other’s men, let alone kiss them. He stepped through the door, keen to get away and put this behind him. ‘Elene, it’s okay. Best we forget it ever happened though.’ Like how? ‘Believe it or not, I don’t want to hurt Danielle any more than you do.’
Her head dipped. ‘So we’ll go back to being thoroughly professional around each other and no one will be any the wiser.’
He couldn’t tell if that was relief or disappointment flooding her eyes, and he wasn’t hanging around to find out. They had to work together for another month. The idea of maintaining their usual aloof, sometimes argumentative façade was curdling in his stomach, despite being the right thing to do. Because it was a façade. On his part anyway. He wanted to know Elene—intimately.
But that’s the last thing you’re going to do, man.
Copyright © 2019 by Sue MacKay
ISBN-13: 9781488047886
A Wife for the Surgeon Sheikh
First North American Publication 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Meredith Webber
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