‘Yes, but what was he like?’ The nurse gave a staged wink and snorted.
Clearly, feigning misunderstanding wasn’t going to work.
‘He had some whiplash, but he was more concerned about his friend.’ She smiled again but this time only enough to soften her words, and not enough to suggest that she was going to feed them the gossip Elsie so evidently wanted.
She didn’t miss the scowl the nurse threw in her direction, but she didn’t care. Logan Connors didn’t deserve to be the source of today’s rumour mill just because he looked...well, the way that he did.
And if she believed this uncharacteristic feeling inside her was a sort of protectiveness—of a complete stranger, no less—then she was more of an idiot that she’d realised. If only she could buy into her own cool, calm exterior, the way everybody else seemed to.
The truth
was, Logan had left her feeling...odd. Not herself. There was a strange sort of ringing in her ears, or maybe her head, that was drowning out everything else and leaving her focussing internally instead. On images of his impossibly, deliciously honed chest, from its strong, broad shoulders to a six-pack you could bounce a quarter off.
‘Seriously, Kat.’ Elsie sniffed disdainfully. ‘I don’t know how you can be so blasé. The guy was an absolute sex bomb.’
And the rest.
She could picture it in all too vivid detail, even now. Those ridges that curved so temptingly over his chest, making her fingers itch to reach out and touch them. The smattering of dark hair over hard pectorals that dropped lower, down the centre of his body, and slipped—as though teasing the onlooker—below the waistband of those low-slung tailored trousers.
God, how her fingers had itched to trace that line, too.
She had never, in her entire career, lusted after a patient—or anyone—like this. Not even Kirk—the man who had been her rock for ten years. The man who had understood exactly how it had felt to be in and out of hospitals week after week, month after month, year after year. Ever since they’d been fifteen, they’d been each other’s salvation. Each other’s hope.
And maybe after a decade, and so much sadness, it had been inevitable that they would ultimately grow apart. But had he really needed to cleave her very soul, right at the end? Had he needed to hurl that one, single accusation that he’d known, whatever she tried to argue, she could never dispute? Had he needed to highlight the one deficiency in herself that she knew she could never—no matter what good she ever did—overcome?
Kirk hadn’t merely betrayed her by those ugly, barbed, poisonous words that he’d sneered; he had destroyed her. He had poisoned every last, tiny, vaguely good thing she’d dared to think about herself, and he’d laid her out for the worthless, undesirable husk of a woman that she was.
And she’d let him do it.
Which only made it all the more preposterous that she was allowing herself to get caught up by another man. Even one who looked like Logan. Kat hated herself for such a weakness.
But that didn’t mean she could stop.
‘Actually, I have a bit of gossip,’ another of their colleagues said as she appeared suddenly, sliding into a chair and beginning to quickly tap in some notes onto the computer as she spoke. ‘Hottie hero is actually called Logan Connors.’
‘Is he?’ Elsie shot Kat a triumphant look.
‘There’s more,’ the nurse continued. ‘You know the new ER doc due to start next week? Well, apparently this Logan Connors is the guy.’
The revelation walloped into Kat. Surely that couldn’t be true? She’d barely survived half an hour in a room with the guy. How could she be expected to work alongside him? How could anyone be expected to work alongside him?
She edged away, trying to clear her head as her colleagues crowded in closer, as if to try to contain their fervour.
‘Mr Comic Book God?’ Elsie clapped her hands in glee.
‘Guess you’d better make it Dr Comic Book God.’ Their colleague sniggered. ‘I wouldn’t mind being examined by him.’
As the conversation continued, Kat took her leave, going to check on each of her patients before returning to check on the lab results. All the while telling herself that the churning sensation in her belly had nothing whatsoever to do with the idea of having to work with Logan Connors.
With any luck, they would be on different shifts.
So why didn’t she believe that was what she really hoped for?
Never, in over a decade of being an ER nurse, had Kat Steel ever felt quite so...disquieted by a patient.
In fact, the only other time she’d felt anything other than professional empathy for a patient had been almost five years ago, but under vastly different circumstances.
Back then, the patient had been Carrie, an eight-month-old baby who had fallen down a set of concrete stairs onto her head when her parents had been having yet another drunken brawl and failed to see her crawling to the steps.