Then, before she realised it, she found herself opening her mouth to tell him. To talk about her fostering.
What on earth was she thinking?
Snapping her mouth closed, Kat watched him pour the wine for them both, then took the proffered glass and reminded herself to take only one small sip.
She’d never felt so much like needing to down it in one.
But, then, she’d never met a man quite like Logan Connors before.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHAT THE HELL was he doing?
She was the nurse who had tended to him in the ER. The woman who had brought his son’s toy around. In a matter of days she would be his colleague. And he never mixed business and pleasure.
And yet here he was, pouring wine and striking up a conversation with her because there was something about Kat Steel that drew him in. Even before that little revelation about the child she’d called Carrie. He hadn’t believed her attempt to cover up for a moment.
With anyone else, he might have found it interesting. With Kat, he found he was intrigued. A score of questions tumbled around his brain, all vying to be asked first. Since when had anyone got under his skin quite like this?
Not even Sophia.
He wanted to know more about her. A lot more.
‘Have you lived in Seattle long?’
He noticed how she dipped her head to take another sip of wine, her eyes sliding away momentarily.
‘I moved here this year. I was in Philadelphia before that.’
‘Long way to move.’ He kept his tone casual, but filed away each nugget of information.
Something fairly significant must have happened to make her move practically across the country. Something that had affected her so badly that she didn’t like to talk about it.
‘How about you?’ she asked. ‘Where were you living before you chose to come to Seattle General?’
Clearly she still didn’t know who he was. Or, at least, who Roberto was. Which meant she still didn’t know that Dom di Rossi, her head of ER, was also Domenico Baresi, next in line to the throne of Isola Verde.
He needed to choose his words carefully.
So what did it mean that he already hated the idea of lying to a woman he barely knew?
‘I originally grew up here, but in the last fifteen years I’ve travelled a lot,’ Logan began slowly. ‘I used to be an army doc, but since I left a few years ago I’ve been doing a slightly different role.’
‘Ah, you’re ex-military.’ She eyed him curiously and he felt that awareness fizzle around them even as they both pretended it wasn’t. ‘That explains it.’
‘Explains what?’
‘The knee in the femoral artery. I thought I’d read somewhere that it was something military physicians were taught. Something about body armour, right?’
‘Yeah.’ An unexpected wave of nausea threatened to wash over him, but he pushed it back. ‘Femoral artery wounds are more and more common as the guys are increasingly using body armour. In the event of an IED, the armour protects the body from the blast but the weak points are where the armour ends.’
‘Ah, where the leg meets the trunk.’ Kat considered. ‘So the armour creates the need for more amputations, by virtue of the fact that it saves the soldier’s life?’
‘Pretty much.’
She eyed him again, and it was all he could not to shift uncomfortably. He got the oddest sense that she was reading him.
He wondered what she saw.