Nat didn’t think for a moment this was his first time giving this kind of news, but if he was as emotionally disconnected with this family as he was with his son, it could be disastrous for them. As a nurse, she was used to being involved in these conversations but, too often, she’d been left to pick up the pieces after a doctor, ill equipped for this sort of situation, swept out of the room.
She contemplated saying something as she tried to keep up with his impossibly long stride but his tersethis is none of your businessfrom yesterday still rang in her ears and she didn’t want to annoy him before this heart-wrenching job. Telling someone their loved one had died was always dreadful – Nat would rather clean bedpans than witness the devastating effects of those awful few words – but if Alessandro botched it, Ernie’s family were going to need someone with a little more compassion to sit with them afterwards and she couldn’t back away from that.
No matter how much she wanted to.
Much to her surprise, Alessandro was, again, totally confounding. He spoke softly, his accent more apparent as he gently outlined what had happened and how they’d tried but, in the end, there had been nothing they could do to bring Ernie back. The family cried and got angry and asked questions and Alessandro was calm and gentle and patient.
He was compassion personified.
And at the end, when Ernie’s wife tentatively put out her hand to bridge the short distance between Alessandro and herself and then thought better of it and withdrew it, it was he who reached out and took her hand.
It should have melted Nat’s marshmallow heart in an instant. But it didn’t. It just made her furious. Thinking about yesterday. About his lack of emotion with Julian. It felt like a red-hot pokerhad been shoved through her heart. She wasn’t sure if it was the lack of food or the lack of sleep but she felt irrationally angry.
Was this man schizophrenic? Was he some sort of Jekyll and Hyde? How could he offer Ernie’s wife, a relative stranger, the comfort of touch he seemed to deny his own child?
He’d shown this family, this previously unknown collection of people, more sensitivity, more emotion, than he’d displayed for his four-year-old son. Yesterday she’d thought he was emotionally crippled. Grieving for his wife. Today, as they’d walked to do this, she’d worried about it again. Worried about his ability to empathise when he was buried under the weight of his own grief.
But it wasn’t the case. He was obviously a brilliant emergency physician with a fabulous bedside manner. He just didn’t take it home with him. To the most important person in the world.
To his own child. To his son.
They left Ernie’s family after about twenty minutes and Nat had never been more pleased to be shed of a person in her life. She steamed ahead, knowing if she didn’t get away from him she would say something she would regret.
Annoyingly, with that long, purposeful stride, he caught her up. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine.’
His bronzed hand slid gently on to her elbow. ‘I don’t think you are.’
Nat glanced at how pale her arm looked beneath the wrap of his fingers. She glared at him.Oh, Signor, you really don’t want to mess with me now.She pulled her arm away but he tightenedhis grip, heat radiating from his hand, spreading to her arm to her breasts and belly.
Damn it, she did not want to feel like this. Not now. She was mad.Furious. She sucked in a breath, ragged from her brisk walk and the rage bubbling beneath the surface.
They were standing in the corridor facing each other and it was as if time stood still around them and they were the only two people on the planet. Nat couldn’t believe how it was possible to want to shake someone and kiss the living daylights out of them at the same time.
‘I’m fine,’ she repeated.
His gaze drifted to the agitated rise and fall of her chest, then to her mouth, her lips suddenly feeling parched as three-day-old toast. He didn’t seem so cold and distant now. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he murmured. ‘I know these cases can be difficult?—’
Nat’s snort ripped through his words, pleased to have given her mouth something else to do other than yearn to have his mouth pressed to hers. ‘You think this is about Ernie?’ She stared into his handsome face, at his peppered jawline. How could she be so insanely attracted to someone she didn’t even like? Someone so bloody obtuse?
‘It’s not?’
She snorted again, her anger slipping loose of its moorings. ‘Tell me, how is it that you can reach out and hold a stranger’s hand and yet you can’t offer your own son the same comfort?’
He froze at the accusation in her words. His hand dropped away, his eyes chilly as black ice as he paled beneath his magnificent bronze complexion. But she was on a roll now and she’d come this far. ‘Nothing to say?’ she taunted.
‘Oh, I think you’ve said enough for both of us. Don’t you?’
And before she knew it, he’d turned on his heel, his rapidly departing figure storming along the corridor ahead.
Nat sucked in a breath, her body quivering from anger and something else even more primitive. She guessed she should feel chastised but she couldn’t. If he could show this level of compassion at work, even if it was just an act, he sure as hell could show it at home.
If she could save Julian from the emotional wasteland she’d trodden, trying to please her father throughout her childhood, then she would. Attraction or no attraction.
So, no. She hadn’t said enough. Not nearly enough. Not by a long shot.
Two weeks later Brisbane was in the throes of an unremitting heatwave. The power grid couldn’t keep up with consumer demand for ceiling fans and twenty-four-hour-a-day air conditioning. Tempers were short. Road rage, heat stroke and dehydration were rampant.
