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He couldn't tell her any of those things. He had no right to destroy her fleeting enjoyment of her career. She was young and she would learn soon enough. 'It's interesting,' he lied. 'It's unpredictable,' he lied again.

'Exciting,' she breathed, obviously pleased with his answer. 'Albeit tiring,' she added, sounding delighted. She lay back again, but this time her head went to the other end of the couch. He heard her kick off her shoes and there were sounds suggestive of socks being removed, then two bare feet appeared on the armrest beside him and wiggled at him.

'My feet are so sore I can hardly walk,' she said dramatically. 'They feel like lead. Be a sweetie and massage them for me, will you?'

He blinked, certain he must have misunderstood. 'I'm sorry... ?'

'Just for a few minutes. Five, just five.' The feet were wiggling at him again.

Neil hesitated. She wanted him to massage her feet? 'I'm not sure I understand—'

'Oh, please,' she begged. 'Then I'll leave you alone, I promise. I can't do it properly myself but it's the only thing that'll make them feel any better.'

He heard her move and the feet, to his relief, disappeared, but she was only shifting further along on the couch. 'Sit beside me,' she said. 'And I can rest them on you. That'll make it easier. They're clean, I promise. If you like I'll do yours afterwards.'

'That won't be necessary.' Resigned, irritated with himself for allowing himself to be trapped into this and more than faintly bemused, Neil found himself being persuaded. He'd intended to lift her feet gingerly onto his legs close to his knees but it seemed she had her own ideas because
she plonked the appendages directly and unselfconsciously onto his lap.

'The sorest bits are the soles,' she told him, just her toes wiggling this time. 'And around where my shoes have been digging by my heels is a bit tender. Do it as hard or soft as you like—I don't mind. I'm not the slightest bit ticklish.'

He started with her right foot at its heel, circling her flesh gently then more firmly with his thumbs, moving steadily towards her toes. He lifted his eyes in half-exasperation at her immediate blissful-sounding sigh of relief and hoped that his registrar wouldn't choose that moment to appear.

But although what he was doing might look questionable, her manner was so reassuringly lacking in anything remotely suggestive or sexual that he felt weary more than wary. 'You're used to this,' he observed.

'I love it,' she breathed. 'You've got great hands. Oh, that's nice—they're feeling better already. I usually get one of my brothers to do this but they're always in too much of a hurry.'

'How many brothers do you have?'

'Four,' she told him, her reply revealing to him the probable reason for her being so relaxed with him. 'I'm the youngest in the family.'

Finished at her toes now, he swapped to her right foot. 'Are they all doctors?'

'One is. Two are architects and the other's a full-time father.' She spread her toes. 'That's lovely,' she said, sounding sleepy now. 'You're really good at this.'

Not through practice, he admitted. He'd never systematically massaged anyone's feet before. He'd caressed women's feet, kissed them as part of love-making, but nothing like this.

Hers were nice. Small. Evenly shaped and, apart from the fragile, tender area around where her shoes must have been rubbing, smoothly soft. He finished with her right foot then stilled, but she said nothing and didn't pull away so,
resigned, he started again on the left, more firmly this time, using the beds of his thumbs to balance the pressure from his fingers and doing his best to ease away the soreness in the fine muscles beneath his hands.

When he'd finished again he stopped. She still didn't move, but she was absolutely silent and finally, because he couldn't see well enough to make out her face, it occurred to him that she'd fallen asleep. He slowly lifted her legs and carefully eased himself out from beneath them, then hesitated.

Obviously very deeply asleep, she lay so quietly that he couldn't even hear her breathing, one arm flung across her face, the other under her head. He remembered she'd had only a few hours' sleep all weekend and felt sorry for her. Real life would hit her soon enough; he could do something to ease its impact tonight. Gently^ doing his best not to wake her, he crouched beside her and eased the bleeper from the side pocket of her white coat.

He might not remember a great deal of general medicine, he acknowledged, but he was still confident he had more knowledge than a first-year graduate. If there was a problem on the medical wards in the next four hours before fresh medical staff arrived then the nursing staff would have the novelty of seeing how a surgeon dealt with it.

Merrin's
eyes snapped open one minute before eight. A second horrified glance at her wristwatch confirmed the awful truth and within seconds she was pulling on her socks and shoes. Then she was up and out of the mess, braiding her long hair viciously and trying to ignore the urgent de
mands
from her bladder. She rubbed the sleepy creases from her face and tore through the hospital, up eight short flights of stairs and along the corridor to the surgical ward where she was supposed to be attending her first ever ward round as a qualified doctor.

The gathering of about twenty people in white coats around an X-ray display cabinet in the seminar room at the far end of the ward told her the round had already started, and she skidded as discreetly as she could manage up to the back of the group, exchanging a harried smile with the young doctor she found herself next to.

'Merrin Ryan,' she puffed. 'I'm one of the new house officers. Hi.'

'Hi.' He had a round, pleasant face and he smiled at her and whispered, 'I'm new today, too. Have you got any idea what's going on?'

'None,' she confided breathlessly, craning her neck. 'But I've been on call for the weekend. I'm working for Professor McAlister. The one with the fair hair is Douglas,' she told him quietly. 'He's Prof McAlister's registrar. And his senior house officer is Lindsay—she's the one standing beside him in the brown dress.' Lindsay and Douglas were presenting one of the cases that had been admitted over the weekend, and they were displaying the man's X-rays for general discussion.

'I don't know for sure which one's Professor McAlister himself because he was away when I was interviewed and he's been busy all weekend in Theatres and I was too frantic on the wards to have time to go and introduce myself.'

'My consultant's Mr Sanderson, the one with the glasses at the front,' the other doctor whispered, pointing out an elderly surgeon who stood beside another kindly looking man with equally white hair—a doctor Merrin decided was probably her new boss, Professor McAlister. 'But he's the only one I know.'

Douglas started presenting another patient they'd admitted over the weekend. 'Twenty-year-old with blunt abdominal trauma from seat-belt injury,' he recited, putting up abdominal X-rays taken from both lying and sitting positions. 'Shocked on admission with positive tap,' he went on, and from watching him at work over the weekend Merrin now knew that meant he'd found blood inside the abdomen when he'd threaded a small needle with a plastic cannula down through a stab made just below the man's umbilicus.

'Taken straight to laparotomy,' he continued, meaning they'd operated and opened his abdomen. 'We found a partially ruptured spleen which we elected to glue together rather than remove. He's doing well this morning. His blood count's been stable for twenty-four hours.'

'You glued it, Neil?' The man she now knew was Mr Sanderson, the other doctor's consultant, looked up at a dark-haired man who was sitting half-propped against the table that bore the X-rays.

Merrin went up on tiptoe, then leaned sideways to peer between the doctors immediately in front of her, trying to see him better. It occurred to her briefly that as they were talking about one of the weekend admissions this just might be her new consultant, but as soon as she saw the doctor properly she dismissed the idea because the man who sat, arms crossed and regarding the proceedings with impatient, if resigned, intolerance, was far too young to be anyone's professor.

As a surgeon, Professor McAlister's reputation placed him high among London's top practitioners of the craft, but the cropped dark hair of the man in front of her was unmarred by grey and the tautness of his face and the athletic ease of his body, while not youthful, still suggested he was at least twenty—perhaps twenty-five—years younger than the man who questioned him.

'I didn't realise you were doing that yet,' the other consultant added questioningly.

'The
organ
was cleanly severed,' the younger man answered briskly. 'He's young. It made sense to try.'

'But if it hadn't worked... ?'

'It did.'

'But if it hadn't...?'

'I was on site all weekend.' The younger man sounded genuinely weary. 'I didn't consider I was putting him in any danger, Harry, so give it a break. He's come out of it well.'

'Luckily.'

'There was no luck involved. It isn't the first time I've done it.'

'It's still an experimental technique—'

'Up to eight per cent of post-splenectomy patients will subsequently have an episode of life-threatening sepsis,' the younger man said crisply. 'By gluing salvageable spleens together rather than taking them out we reduce morbidity and mortality. It's sound treatment.'

The older man bristled, and Merrin sensed from the speculative looks being exchanged between other doctors in the groups that such confrontations between the two surgeons were not unusual. 'Only if the spleens are properly selected,' the other man began, but the other consultant interrupted.

'This one was,' he said flatly. 'Douglas, move on,' he added, his attention switching abruptly to the registrar by his side. 'We've wasted enough time on this. Are there any other cases to discuss?'

There obviously were because Douglas promptly shuffled some X-rays around and started talking.

The younger doctor beside Merrin pulled a face. 'We know who won that round,' he said in an undertone. 'And it wasn't my boss. Do you think they go on like that all the time?'

'I imagine so,' Merrin whispered, fascinated both by the younger surgeon and by the interplay between him and the other doctors. In her years of training she'd witnessed polite disagreements between doctors but they'd always been muffled by gesticulations of mutual respect and she'd never seen outright confrontation before. 'We're the only two who seemed to be surprised,' she added softly.

There were brief discussions over the following cases, the beginnings of mild disagreements over management of several of them, but the man who'd argued with the elderly consultant rode over anyone who seemed inclined to delay proceedings with practised ease. Merrin watched him wide-eyed, spellbound.

When they'd finished going over the medical details of the cases in an academic way, rather than them all going out onto the ward together to see the patients, as she'd expected, the younger surgeon's bleeper shrilled and he simply stood up and stalked out. As if his departure was the signal they'd been waiting for, the doctors in the group then quickly dispersed, leaving her alone with Douglas and Lindsay.

'Whew!' Lindsay, busy gathering up the discarded X-rays and notes, laughed. 'That was fun. He's in good form today. I could practically see poor old Mr Sanderson's blood pressure shoot through the roof when he was talking about that spleen. The boss virtually called him a fossil to his face.'

Douglas grinned. 'What about when he wouldn't let poor Mr Ludlum argue with him? At one stage I was worried the old man was going to have a heart attack.'

The registrar chucked a bundle of blue X-ray envelopes and some loose X-rays towards Merrin. 'Make yourself useful and sort these out,' he told her easily. 'How did you get on last night, Merrin? Get any sleep after you left here?'

'A few hours,' she admitted, squinting to make out the names on the X-rays before finding their appropriate envelopes and sliding them in. 'I fell asleep in the mess and I didn't get bleeped the rest of the night. That's why I was late getting here this morning. I promise I'm never usually late for anything.'

'Don't worry about it—it's been a hard weekend,' Lindsay told her kindly. 'With any luck we'll be able to get away fairly early this afternoon. After a weekend on call we aim to leave by four if there's nothing urgent outstanding.'

'Are we going to do a proper ward round?' Merrin asked.

'When Prof gets back,' Douglas confirmed, crouching to retrieve a sheaf of notes he'd dropped. 'Monday mornings we start with the academic round with all the general-surgical staff, then we just see our own patients.'

Merrin nodded. Finished sorting the X-rays now, she added them to the pile Lindsay had created.

The other woman thanked her. 'So what did you think of the boss this morning, Merrin? Wasn't he great?'

'Great...?' Merrin blinked. 'You mean
he's
Prof McAlister?' she exclaimed, paling as she understood that he was. Much as he'd excited her and much as she admired the professor's reputation, the thought of ever being in the line of that abrasive, biting impatience was terrifying. 'But he's too young.'

Douglas grinned at her. 'Don't let that fool you.'

'And fierce,' she added hollowly.

'True,' he conceded. But he didn't seem particularly concerned about it. 'He doesn't suffer fools.'

'But as none of us are fools that's not a problem,' Lindsay said brightly. 'Don't fret, Merrin. His bark is worse, believe me, and you still have to do something pretty awful to see it. He's a brilliant surgeon and a good boss. You'll like it here. He gets a bit grim at times but...well, he hasn't had an easy time of it these last years—'

'And considering what he's up against here you can understand a little grimness,' Douglas interjected quickly.

'What is he up against?' Merrin asked, puzzled by the quick interplay of looks between the two doctors.