Chapter 2 #2
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 poker had 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 tightened his 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.
Even in a city that regularly sweltered each summer, the temperatures were extreme. But this was spring and totally ironic when the other side of the world battled the looming threat of a horrible new strain of influenza and unseasonal snow was causing general havoc.
In this weather, Nat actually looked forward to stepping through the doors of St Auburn’s and being enveloped in a cool blast of air.
Anywhere was better than her hot little box the estate agent euphemistically called a townhouse, in a breezeless suburb blistering beneath the sun’s relentless rays.
Not that it would matter soon, seeing that it looked like she was going to be evicted by the end of the month.
Nat stepped into the crowded lift on the eighth floor, pondering this conundrum yet again.
She’d just transferred another heat-stroke victim to the medical ward and was returning to the department.
She squeezed in and, noting the ground-floor button had already been pushed, let her mind wander to the phone call she was expecting from the agent any time now.
She would find out today whether she could get an extension on her lease.
It wasn’t until the lift emptied out over the next few floors and she had some more room to move that she was even aware of her fellow travellers.
Two more people got out at the fourth floor and she was suddenly conscious of there being only one other person left.
Big and looming behind her. A strange sixth sense, or possibly foreboding, settled around her and she glanced quickly over her shoulder.
Alessandro Lombardi. Shit.
She had only seen him very briefly and at a distance in the couple of weeks since she’d basically accused him of being a terrible father. He was wearing a pale lemon shirt and a classy orange tie. A stethoscope was slung casually around his neck.
In short, he was looking damn fine and her hormones roared to life despite the lift of one dark, sardonic eyebrow.
Nat turned back to the panel, pressing ‘G’ several times as the door slowly shut. Her heart beat double time as he moved forward in the lift, to stand next to her, ready for his exit she presumed. ‘Good afternoon, Nat.’
She took a steadying breath. ‘Dr Lombardi.’ Refusing to turn and face him, Nat jabbed at the ‘G’ several more times – why was this lift so damn slow?
‘Be careful. You’ll break it.’
She could detect a faint trace of amusement in his voice but today, with the heat and the eviction hanging over her head, she really wasn’t in the mood. She hit it one more time for good measure, which was when the lift came to a grinding halt, causing her to stumble against him.
She heard him mutter ‘Porca vacca’ as they were jostled together by the abrupt cessation of movement and she supposed, absently, a profanity was better than an I told you so.
His hand cupped her elbow as if to steady her, which was when the lights flickered out. Of course. His long fingers were warm on her arm and, for a crazy second, she leaned into him, her pulse skipping madly in her chest as her body tried to figure out what was the bigger problem.
Being stuck in a lift. Or being stuck in a lift with Alessandro Lombardi.