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‘I’m sorry.’ His apology stopped her in her tracks and slowly she turned around. ‘I forgot. Normally, I am meticulous about this sort of thing, but when I found his ECG I decided to bring it around—and the mess just slipped my mind.’
‘Why didn’t you just say so?’ Annie frowned. ‘You sat there, letting me rant.’
‘You are very easy to goad... to wind up.’ A glimmer of a smile twisted at the edge of his sulky mouth and he gave a small shrug as he returned to his notes. ‘I couldn’t resist. Again—I am sorry for the mess.’
‘That’s fine.’ Disarmed by his niceness, she made the stupid mistake of giving him the benefit of the doubt, of thinking maybe she could have a normal conversation with him. ‘What’s going on with Mickey?’
‘I don’t know yet—I haven’t examined him.’
‘But did he say what—?’
‘That’s men’s business,’ he answered, effectively dismissing her.
‘Fine,’ Annie bristled. ‘I’ll just wait to read it in his notes.’
‘Oh, and by the way, Nurse... ’ Her back stiffened as again he halted her, her rigid face turning as again he failed to use either her name or title. ‘Your top...’ He pointed to his own chest, made a tiny little gesture up and down with his finger before returning to his notes. Annie glanced down, aghast to see the top of her blouse gaping open. Worse, the ugliest, tattiest sports bra in the world was smiling up at her.
She refused to jump. If it had been any other of her colleagues they’d both have roared with laughter— but Iosef Kolovsky wasn’t like anyone she’d ever worked with. So instead, excruciatingly embarrassed, she walked as slowly and as calmly as she could towards the change rooms, holding her top together with one hand and grabbing a theatre top off the linen trolley. Only when she was safely inside and the door was closed did she let loose—a full afternoon and evening of humiliation and frustration hissing out in one single word.
‘Bastard!’
Stunning to look at he might be, but he was quite simply the most pompous, arrogant, loathsome person she had ever met. Why on earth hadn’t Beth warned her about that?
Yet all her colleagues seemed utterly smitten with him—and most confusing to Annie as the shift wore on, the more horrible he was to her, the nicer he seemed to them. And the patients didn’t seem to mind his rather austere bedside manner a single bit. He was so commanding, so utterly confident that it actually put them at ease. And he did listen to them, which was somewhat of a rarity among doctors—without interruption, too, that haughty face listening intently then quietly processing the information along with his findings and coming up with a swift diagnosis and course of action.
And, who, Annie seethed late in the evening, among her colleagues could she complain to about a doctor that actually lightened their workload? He was completely autonomous, worked completely independently, and neither asked nor needed anyone’s opinion or findings. In fact, apart from the sharps incident, they really had little to say to each other—he just seemed to take every possible opportunity to wind her up.
Almost as if he’d singled her out to be horrible to.
‘How’s Mickey?’ Annie asked Jess on the way to her break.
‘Good.’ Jess looked up from the desk. ‘Iosef saw him and said to carry on with hourly neuro obs.’
‘What was wrong?’ Annie asked, reaching for his notes.
‘He didn’t say.’
He hadn’t written it down either. Just a neat little entry giving the time of examination, and even though he didn’t have to write it up straight away, Annie knew, just knew, that it had been a deliberate omission, that the meticulous Dr Kolovsky hadn’t just forgotten... he was once again goading her.
Well, he could goad her all he liked, Annie decided, still seething at the end of her supper break as she headed back to the locker room. Splashing her red cheeks with cold water, she dragged a comb through her wild hair.
He could wind her up as much as he jolly well liked and the more he did so, the more she’d smile!
‘How are you going?’ Realizing she hadn’t been in for a while and aware there were a couple of cardiac patients in Resus, Annie popped in to give Beth a hand. Given the serious nature of the patients in Resus, frequently there were controlled drugs to check, requiring two signatures, which the student who was helping out today wasn’t qualified to check, and invariably there was something in a kidney dish awaiting a second pair of trained eyes. ‘Need anything?’
‘Everything is pretty much under control.’ Beth popped her head around the drug cupboard. ‘Iosef just checked the drugs with me.’
‘Great!’
‘Told you he was, didn’t I?’ Beth grinned. ‘He’s just so on the ball. Oh, actually, there is something you could do for me.’
‘Sure!’
‘Mr Evans, the anterior MI. Coronary Care just called down and they’re ready for him. I don’t want to send a student up with him in case he goes offen route.'
‘No problem.’
Her face ached from smiling, her feet actually hurt from trudging up and down to the ward, and the absolutely last place Annie wanted to be at nine-thirty that night was pounding the treadmill at the gym, but Melanie had taken it upon herself to become her personal trainer, arriving at the end of Annie’s shift, jangling her keys and waiting for her at the nurses’ station, flirting blatantly with George and chatting amicably to a smiling Iosef, who was bouncing a very grubby two-year-old on his knee.
