She loved him, always had. Her feelings for him were like a pot that had once been on the boil and then been left to simmer for a long time, but now it was coming to the boil again, and she prayed that this time the right ingredients would be there.
‘Have you any idea how beautiful you are, Hannah Morgan?’ Kyle murmured.
She shrugged slender shoulders beneath the filmy robe and smiled across at him. ‘You’re quite spectacular yourself, Dr Templeton.’
This time she wasn’t conscious of him taking her in his arms. All she knew was that she was there and it was where she wanted to be…always.
But as she gave herself up to the delight of the moment Hannah was only too aware that it was only minutes ago that she’d discovered how she affected him. Or maybe he’d talked that way because he was jealous of the other men who lusted after her?
If she and Kyle carried on like this, they would surely go on to make love. But when that happened she wanted it to be under different circumstances, with complete trust and peace between them. Not because she was dressed in flimsy night attire…and available.
Unaware that he was falling into a pit of his own making Kyle said softly, ‘Shall we call a truce, Hannah?’
It would have been so easy to say yes but she couldn’t let it go at that.
‘Are you saying that you accept my version of what happened all that time ago with Paul as well?’
‘I’m saying that I was a jealous fool who was too burnt up to stay and stake my claim.’
With a swift movement Hannah uncurled herself from his arms. ‘But you’re still not taking my version of events as the truth. You can’t believe that my only interest in Paul was to offer comfort to someone at a time when they were weak and vulnerable!’
‘Does it matter?’ he asked bleakly as the magic began to disintegrate around him. The words he really wanted to say were sticking in his throat. It was just too painful to have to admit that his pride and stubbornness had been to blame for the wasted years.
‘Yes, it does,’ she cried. ‘From where I am it looks as if I’m good enough to get sexy with, but not up to scratch in the honesty stakes. If you look in the cupboard over there you’ll find a duvet and sheets for the spare bed. Goodnight, Kyle!’ And turning her back on him, she stalked into her bedroom.
After a moment’s silence he went to do as she suggested, with shoulders set and face shadowed in the light of the lamps.
So that was that, Hannah thought as she heard the spare room door close behind him with an angry click. She’d brought them both down from the clouds because she wasn’t prepared to be patronised. To be accepted for one thing, but not another.
It was unbelievable that Kyle still had doubts about her, but it seemed that he had. How could he think that she would respond to him as she had and yet still be prepared to lie?
At just gone six o’clock the next morning she heard him let himself quietly out of the flat, and when she looked in the spare room the bed linen was folded neatly on top of the mattress. If she hadn’t known differently she would have said that the room hadn’t been occupied.
So much for spending the night in his arms, she thought ruefully. She would be lucky if Kyle ever laid a finger on her again after the way she’d dismissed him in that hurtful moment of disillusionment.
As Hannah was leaving the apartment for another day’s work it seemed as if the embarrassments of her relationship with Kyle Templeton were still presenting themselves.
When she reached the foyer they were all there—Kyle, Ben and his parents—waiting for the taxi that would take them to the station.
Her step faltered when she saw them, but Ben came running across and pushed a crumpled piece of paper into her hands.
‘What’s this?’ she said gently as she knelt beside him.
‘It’s a “thank you” letter…for the helicopter. Daddy said he would give it to you, but now that you’re here I’m giving it to you myself.’
She smiled. ‘I see. Well, thank you, Ben. I’m so pleased to see that you’re well again. Are you off to Grandma and Grandad’s house now?’
He nodded. ‘Daddy’s coming to see us on Friday. Why don’t you come with him, Hannah?’
She was conscious of Kyle hovering and if she hadn’t been feeling so desolate the situation might have seemed amusing. His son inviting her to stay when she had just well and truly put the blight on their relationship…if it could be called that.
‘Hannah has to work, you know, Ben. It wouldn’t be easy for us both to be off at the same time,’ he said stiffly, and then with the same tightness in his manner he went on, ‘Let me introduce you to my parents. My mother, Grace Templeton, and my father, Howard,’ he said. He turned to the older couple who were observing her with some surprise. ‘Mum, Dad, meet Dr Hannah Morgan.’
‘Delighted to meet you Dr Morgan,’ Grace Templeton beamed. ‘And our thanks for looking after our precious boy so well. It must have been very traumatic for you when he was taken ill so suddenly.’
Hannah smiled back at her. ‘Just a bit.’ She glanced at Kyle’s sombre face. ‘I know how much he means to you all, which isn’t surprising. Ben is a delightful child.’
‘He certainly is,’ his grandfather agreed gruffly, and sent a quizzical look in his son’s direction. ‘The only thing he lacks is a mother.’
‘Yes, well, if you’ll excuse me I have to get moving,’ she said quickly. ‘The underground at this time of day is like the sardine special.’ And with a quick kiss for Ben and another smile for his grandparents she was off.
‘What a beautiful young woman,’ Grace said when Hannah had gone. ‘How long have you known her?’
Kyle’s face was devoid of expression. What would she say if he were to tell her just how long? He wasn’t going to, needless to say, but he could imagine the spate of questions that would follow if he did.
So he evaded the issue. ‘Hannah is doing six months on the emergency unit before going into A and E consultancy.’
The big glass doors of the foyer opened at that moment to admit a taxi driver and he breathed a sigh of relief at being rescued from any further variations of the truth.
When the train had pulled out, with Ben waving vigorously through the window, Kyle walked towards the station exit with his shoulders hunched.
After last night’s fiasco it had been an ordeal, seeing Hannah in the foyer of the apartments. He had done it again. Pride hadn’t let him admit that he could have been wrong and now he was paying the price.
He loved the job, but today he had never felt less like presenting himself. But as he hailed a taxi his mouth softened. The helicopter emergency unit meant Hannah Morgan. She would be there as would he, and if they were once again at odds with each other, at least he could view her from afar.
The desire and tenderness she was arousing in him was spellbinding. But it would seem that after one step forward, they always took two steps back.
When he arrived at the unit all the medics were out, and as Kyle gazed around him in surprise the operations officer looked up from his control keyboard.
‘There’s been an explosion in a Chinese restaurant near Hammersmith Bridge and there are casualties.’
‘How bad?’ he asked.
‘Serious,’ the other man replied briefly. ‘Smitty was on first call today and as soon as air traffic control had given us priority clearance they were off. The others followed by ambulance.’
Meeting Kyle and his family before she’d had a chance to get her mind round the happenings of the night before hadn’t been the best start to Hannah’s day. Not because she hadn’t wanted to meet his parents or see Ben again. Both occurrences would normally have given her much pleasure. It was the man who’d stood by awkwardly as his son had innocently made matters worse by inviting her to visit them that had been the problem, and she was in no hurry to see him again.
For one thing, every time she saw him now there would be the memory of throwing away the chance to get closer to him be
cause of her stupid pride. And of how Kyle hadn’t been blameless either as he’d blighted the precious moment with his uncompromising remarks.
What was the matter with them both?
With regard to her brother-in-law, what else could she do to convince him, other than drag Paul here by the scruff of the neck and make him tell Kyle how she’d had no part in the big clinch he’d found them in?
Her smile was wry as she fought her way through the commuter crush. She could just see Paul’s face if she did. Her ex-brother-in-law was lightweight in the extreme. He wouldn’t have given a second thought to the time when he’d tried to use his dead wife’s twin as a buffer to his misery, and had caused problems in her relationship with some other guy.
But in any case she wouldn’t know how to find him. As she’d told Kyle, the last she’d heard of him he’d been living in the Midlands with a new wife.
It had been quiet for the first half hour of the day and then the call came through from the ambulance service centre. Explosion in a Chinese take-away. Serious injuries to staff and customers.
Smitty and his team were on their way in minutes and the rest of them followed by slower means to a scene of carnage.
‘Looks like some kind of incendiary device,’ the fire chief told them, ‘but it’s too early to say for certain. We’ve checked the premises and it appears to have been just the one. You can go in, but take care. There were a few minor fires but we’ve put them out.’
Hannah nodded and followed Pete inside. The place was still full of black smoke created by the blast, and as they groped their way past the counter, swaying drunkenly above a blackened carpet littered with glass, Hannah saw that there were still people inside.
The helicopter had been and gone and one of the ambulance crews who had called for the assistance of the fast response team told them, ‘Your guy said he would come back once he’d seen the first casualty into A and E. The fellow was bleeding to death with an almost severed leg and the doctor was still trying to halt the blood loss as they took off.’
Pete was bending over an elderly Chinese woman and he said flatly, ‘Life extinct. She must have taken the full force of the blast.’
‘I’ve got a man here with head injuries and lacerations,’ she told him urgently with a sombre glance at the old woman’s still form. ‘How long do you think Graham will be?’
‘As long as it takes, I’m afraid,’ he said grimly as he went over to where a teenage boy was sobbing uncontrollably with blood from a gaping cut running down his face.
‘Shush, laddie. We’re going to sort you out,’ Pete told the youth gently as he stemmed the bleeding from the cut. He turned to the hovering paramedics. ‘Take this young fellow to Casualty and we’ll hang on for the chopper coming back. The other guy’s head injuries will get seen to more quickly if we do it that way.’
‘Where are we going to take him?’ Hannah asked. ‘King’s?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. King’s or the Royal London. They’re well organised for this kind of thing. But we’ll see what Smitty says when he gets back.’
‘What’s the score here, then?’ a familiar voice asked as she gave the injured man an injection to kill the pain. Hannah looked up to find Kyle there.
‘One serious casualty has already been lifted off and we’re waiting for the helicopter to come back for this one,’ she said with cold brevity. ‘We also have a fatality, and a teenage boy has just been taken to hospital with shock and cuts.’
If he felt the chill he didn’t show it, but his face was grim as he informed her, ‘The police say that they can’t comment at this stage, but there’s some sort of protection racket in this area and if the owner of this place wasn’t prepared to pay up…’
Pete had joined them and he shook his head. ‘Whatever the reason, I’ll be glad to see the back of this place.’
Kyle nodded his agreement and with his dark gaze on Hannah said, ‘I know that it’s part and parcel of the job, but I’m not happy when any of you are in this kind of situation.’
It was on the tip of Hannah’s tongue to tell him that she wasn’t happy no matter what, but the noisy approach of the Eurocopter put paid to that, and perhaps it was just as well. Why should she humble herself by letting him see how much she cared, when all Kyle wanted was to use her when the mood took him?
When the second victim had been airlifted and an ambulance crew had taken the deceased woman to hospital for the official death certificate to be issued, Kyle said, ‘I’ll take Dr Morgan back with me, Pete.’
As the lanky medic eyed him questioningly he went on, ‘Your wife rang just before I left base to say that she’s developed some kind of bug since you left this morning and is feeling pretty rough. So I suggest that you take the rest of the day off.’
‘Thanks. I will,’ the other man said in quick concern. ‘Is it all right if I use the car I came in instead of going back for my own jalopy?’
‘Sure,’ Kyle agreed easily. ‘Be on your way. Our own are just as important when they’re sick or injured as the rest of the population.’
Hannah sighed. She sympathised with Pete’s problem entirely, but it meant that she would be in Kyle’s company once again. Not in the sweet abandonment of the previous night, but alone with him nevertheless, and at the moment it was the last thing she wanted.
As she eased herself reluctantly into the seat beside Kyle he said drily, ‘I’m not going to bite, you know. If you move any farther away from me you’ll be falling out onto the pavement.’
‘Which might be preferable to sitting next to you,’ she snapped, irritated that he saw something to joke about in her manner.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said levelly. ‘I know that once again I’ve upset you. It’s as if there’s a devil on my shoulder when I’m with you. Maybe it’s because you’re such a disrupting influence.’
‘Huh! Not so disrupting that you ever tried to find me during all the time we were apart,’ she said tightly. ‘I searched for you everywhere. I even tried the hospital network in America, as that was where we were both planning to go for work experience. But you’d gone somewhere else, hadn’t you? Australia!’
‘The reason I never came back until now was because I did something very stupid during my first few months in Queensland and it altered the course of my life. I became a father to a child whose mother would have had him adopted if I hadn’t promised to bring him up myself. After that I was no longer a free agent.’
‘Did you love her?’ Hannah asked painfully.
‘I’m ashamed to say I didn’t. She was a nurse at the hospital who made a play for me.’
‘And you let her?’
He sighed. ‘Yes. I let her, and I didn’t like myself for it afterwards.’
So was she happy that Kyle hadn’t loved this woman? Hannah wondered. It didn’t alter the fact that he’d sought comfort elsewhere. But could she blame him for that, in the light of what he’d seen as her betrayal?
‘Was it the job with the helicopter medical service that brought you back…or something else?’ she asked with a change of subject. ‘Because whatever the reason you’re still as proud and unbending as you were then!’
They were stopped at traffic lights and he gave her a quick sideways glance. ‘Me proud and unbending! That’s a good one. All I ever wanted in those days was the job and the girl. But one of them let me down and it wasn’t the job.’
‘Oh! For goodness’ sake! Don’t you like to play the role of the persecuted,’ she hooted. ‘The only thing I did wrong was to give Paul all the support I could. I realised afterwards that he’d been using me.’
Her voice thickened. ‘And it was easy for him to do that because we were both grieving over the same person.’
‘Which left me on the sidelines,’ he said evenly, ‘doing my damnedest to be supportive and understanding about a situation that seemed to be going on for ever.’
As she observed his grim profile Hannah thought, I can’t believe this. Everything is coming out into the ope
n. We’re going to clear the air at last.
‘And because you were so strung up about it you jumped to the wrong conclusions,’ she told him. ‘You obviously aren’t aware of it, but Paul made it clear that he no longer needed a shoulder to cry on the moment he found a new love. I was left to pick up the pieces of my life, with you gone off in high dudgeon and my sister buried in a churchyard not far from where we lived. Some years before I’d coped with the death of first my mother and then shortly afterwards my father, and so I was well and truly alone, and if you think I’m begging for sympathy, Kyle, you’re wrong.
‘It’s a strange thing about twins,’ Hannah went on, with the fire gone out of her. ‘So often they aren’t seen as two separate beings, with their own hopes, dreams and feelings. Paul saw Janine and I as if we were one and expected me to take her place, which made it very hard to be supportive and yet keep him at arm’s length.’
‘And so that’s how you’re saying it was,’ Kyle said flatly.
‘Yes. I am.’
He sighed. ‘So do I need to have a rethink?’
‘You’re the only person who knows the answer to that question,’ she told him as he stopped the car on the forecourt way down below the operations room.
As they got out and faced each other across the bonnet Kyle said, as if the previous conversation had never taken place, ‘I’m going home to see Ben at the weekend and I’ve promised him that I’ll take you with me.’
Hannah’s eyes widened. ‘Wha-at?’ she gasped. ‘You might have asked me first!’
‘If I’d done that you might have refused.’
‘We can’t both be off at the same time,’ she protested weakly as the prospect of what he was suggesting took her breath away.
‘I have a new doctor starting tomorrow,’ he said blandly. ‘He’s had a lot of experience in A and E and will be my second in command. His name is Charles Conran. So you see, you can be spared.’
‘Yes, I do see.’
‘I don’t think you do, but what about it, Hannah? You can’t disappoint Ben.’
Emergency Reunion Page 8