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CHAPTER ONE
IF TWELVE YEARS as an ER nurse had taught Kat Steel anything, it was that there were two things that travelled ridiculously fast around a hospital. One was a winter flu bug. The other was gossip. Right now, the latter was rife.
Even as Kat silently navigated her way around the small cluster of colleagues at the nurses’ station, all typing up notes or getting their next shout, the air was positively buzzing. The downtime was one of the pitfalls of cases coming into the ER in fits and starts on some days.
‘I mean, seriously, did you see the guy?’
‘Of course I saw him. How could anyone miss him?’
‘I missed it. I was with the woman in bay two. What happened?’
‘He was like some kind of superhero.’
‘Yeah, I’m calling him Comic Book God.’
‘For pity’s sake, Gemma, you’re such a nerd.’
But there was no malice in the last comment, and Kat couldn’t help but smile.
She might have only been at Seattle General for the past eight months, but she’d quickly discovered that Gemma was funny and kind, and a self-proclaimed comic nerd. She was also the closest thing Kat would describe as a real friend.
As if reading her thoughts, Gemma looked up and caught her eye.
‘Did you see him, Kat?’
There was no question who they were talking about. After all, it wasn’t every day that a gurney raced through the ER with one patient astride it, their knee rammed into the femoral artery of an older man who’d lain, unconscious, beneath him. Evidently the man—or indeed, superhero—had been doing all he could to plug the bleed and save the older man’s life.
At least until Dom di Rossi, their Head of ER, and the rest of his team could stabilise him enough to get him into Theatre.
‘Yeah, I saw him. But I was dealing with the female passenger who came in with them.’
‘Oh,’ Gemma moved slightly away from the group so that no one else could hear. ‘I saw her, she looked very...autocratic.’
‘Yeah, nice, though. Clearly more concerned about her fellow passengers than herself. She refused an X-ray. Insisted on seeing Lucas.’
‘Lucas Beaufort?’ Gemma named another ER doctor.
‘The same.’ Kat shrugged. ‘But don’t tell the hyenas. They’ll only read something into it.’
‘You know I won’t.’
Picking her way around the group to collect the notes for her next patient, Kat ignored the rumourmongers and pretended that she wasn’t interested. That the whole incident hadn’t looked like some incredible Hollywood action film.
It was irritating that she couldn’t seem to shake the man out of her head. Like he’d somehow locked himself in there. The intense focus on his face. And...something else. Something she couldn’t quite identify.
‘Admit it, Kat, even you can’t have failed to be impressed.’ Another nurse dragged her back to reality, and back to the conversation about the superhero patient.
‘It was certainly...unusual,’ she conceded, after a moment.
Because, after Kirk, if anyone should be immune to men—even those who looked like comic book gods—then surely it should be her?
‘Kat?’ The low voice of one of the hospital managers snagged her attention and Kat turned gratefully as a tablet was pressed quietly into her hands. Anything that could spare her from thoughts of her perfidious ex was to be welcomed.
‘Your next patient. I trust you’ll be discreet.’
‘Of course,’ Kat confirmed, glancing down at the electronic notes before the hospital managers summoned her along.
Logan Connors.
She was about to locate the patient in the main ER when the manager shook her head.
‘Not in there. This way...’
Making their way out of the general ER to the VIP patient area, they hurried along the wide corridors to the private rooms, right to the most restricted section.
Who were these people?
But there was no time to consider the question. The door to one of the rooms opened as someone went inside and, for the briefest moment, Kat glimpsed Emilia Featherstone, Seattle General’s Head of Orthopaedics, who had collected the elderly man from the gurney earlier. Then, as Kat hurried along, the door closed again and her attention was snagged by another figure standing on the other side of the corridor with his back to her, almost as if on g
uard. As he turned his head to talk to her approaching manager, Kat startled, and then something rolled low in her belly.
The guy from the gurney—Comic Book God. Surely he couldn’t possibly be her next patient?
She stood, rooted to the spot, as her manager bustled back down the corridor to her, the man clearly reluctant to follow.
As they neared, she realised that the name Comic Book God wasn’t nearly a lofty enough term to describe this hulk of a man, who was mouthwateringly tall, big and fit.
