CHAPTER ONE

      ‘YES! I think we’ve found her.’

      Dylan McKenzie straightened in his chair, his heart beating a little faster as he recognised the figure. The bundle in his arms squirmed at the soft sound of his voice but Sophie didn’t wake, bless her. She had been as patient as he’d had to be, waiting for this Jane Walters to answer her pager.

      Not that it had been a problem. You couldn’t just walk into an emergency department and demand that a surgeon be summoned from Theatre. Even for something as important as this.

      He couldn’t cross the busy department and introduce himself either. He had to leave that up to the cute triage nurse, Mandy, who had been kind enough to let him sit in this empty cubicle while he waited. He tried to catch Mandy’s attention now, to alert her to the brisk arrival of the woman in surgical scrubs who had entered through the double doors leading further into this big city hospital.

      But Mandy was bending over an ambulance stretcher, talking to an elderly woman.

      ‘Are you having any chest pain now?’

      ‘Just a little, dear. Nothing to bother about. It’s much better than it was.’

      ‘She’s had five milligrams of morphine,’ a paramedic told Mandy.

      Dylan took a second look at the latest arrival to the department. Was it her? She looked to be in her mid-thirties and a wisp or two of dark blonde hair had escaped the disposable hat she was wearing, but she didn’t look exactly like the photograph he had currently tucked away in his pocket next to his passport and a crumpled boarding pass.

      The baggy scrub suit was a good disguise but it was more the way this woman held herself that prompted the doubt. Dylan had the feeling that when she got changed, her civvies would be very smart. A slim-fitting black skirt, perhaps, with a tailored jacket to match. And boots. Definitely boots. Black, with spiky heels.

      ‘Let’s get her into Resus 2. I think it’s free.’ Mandy turned to check the availability of a space with cardiac monitoring facilities and must have seen the surgeon, because her head swung around to look for Dylan and her quick smile and nod suggested she would be able to attend to his request as soon as this patient was sorted.

      So it was her. Even though the woman in his photograph was wearing jeans rolled up to her knees with her toes covered by soft white sand and had hair that kind of flowed to rest on her shoulders and—maybe the biggest difference—she was smiling.

      This woman, now being intercepted by Mandy, was not smiling.

      ‘Dr Walters?’ Mandy’s call sounded faintly through the hum of the activity around them.

      It was inconvenient the way many female surgeons preferred to be called ‘Doctor’. Now that Dylan had confirmation of her identity, it would have been useful to add her marital status to the information he was gathering. Was there a husband in the picture? Children?

      He hoped not. Why hadn’t he thought to ask Josh about details like that? Because it hadn’t seemed important at the time, that’s why. Dylan’s breath escaped in a sigh as he shut away memories fresh enough to have the potential to derail him.

      It was impossible to hear what Mandy was saying now but it was obvious she was informing Dr Walters that he had asked to see her. Maybe that he’d been waiting a long time. He felt the intensity of the glance that came his way and saw how her eyes widened just enough to advertise surprise.

      OK, it had been a slight exaggeration to say he knew her. That he was a friend. But they would hardly have paged her otherwise, would they?

      She was frowning now. Quite possibly displeased at having her busy schedule interrupted by something this random. She would be trying to make sense of it. Wondering whether she had, in fact, ever met him before.

      Dylan could sense imminent