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The anaesthetist walked in and went straight for the coffee. 'Neil, I'm leaving that chap's epidural in for pain relief on the ward,' he said. 'We've stuck him on a PCA pump. All right with you?'

'Fine. Good idea.' The Prof nodded.

Merrin looked up at the anaesthetist. 'What's a PCA pump?'

'Patient-controlled analgesia,' he told her, taking a few long swallows of his drink. 'He can press a button to give himself more pethidine, up to a pre-set level.'

'Does it work better than giving regular injections?'

'Patients seem to prefer it.' He tilted his head, looking at the name badge she'd pinned to her jerkin. 'Are you a student, Merrin, or one of the new house surgeons?'

'Merrin Ryan, Christopher Jennings.' The Prof glanced up from his journal. 'Merrin's my new house officer, Chris.'

Merrin shook the hand the anaesthetist held out to her, moving slightly to make room when the other doctor hitched up his theatre pants and sat beside her. 'How long do you leave the epidural in for?' she asked.

He lifted one shoulder. 'Usually somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six hours. Sometimes they don't tolerate it that long.'

'Because it falls out?' At his frown she added, 'I mean, might the needle fall out when he moves around in bed?'

'There's no needle,' he said, continuing at her puzzled nod, 'Just a plastic cannula, similar to a drip only more flexible. And don't worry. It's securely taped.'

'Oh, I see.' Merrin took a hasty, embarrassed sip of her coffee. 'Sorry. I suppose that was a stupid question.'

'Not remotely. Important to ask. We all know that the real learning doesn't start till after you leave medical school.' She saw that he was eyeing the professor's remaining chocolate biscuit. 'Are you going to eat that, Neil?'

The Prof looked up and seemed, she thought, about to deny it, but then he met Merrin's hard look and lifted his eyes briefly to the ceiling. 'Apparently I am,' he said slowly, taking a bite of the biscuit, meeting her regard with ill-concealed weariness over top of it. 'Sorry.'

'Is there anything I should know about it on the ward?' she asked the anaesthetist, pleased that she'd had at least some minor success in persuading her boss to take care of himself a little better. 'Since I'm on call tonight.'

'It won't be any more trouble than normal pain relief,' he told her. 'The anaesthetic staff basically look after it and the nurses will call them if there're any problems. I'll check him tonight and every day. The site occasionally gets sore, in which case we take it out, or he might experience some itching or nausea but I'll chart something for both those things.'

'It's so interesting,' she said enthusiastically.

'Is it?' Merrin saw him exchange an unreadable smile with the professor but neither of them said anything more.

'Why isn't it used more often?' she asked. 'I mean, it sounds like a great idea for pain relief after abdominal surgery.'

'Well, we do use it fairly often.' He finished his drink. 'Where did you train?'

'St Martin's,' she told him.

'I'm surprised you haven't seen it there.'

'I probably just wasn't aware of it,' she admitted.

The anaesthetist pushed his cup away then rose. 'I'll start getting the next case ready.' He looked at Merrin. 'Want to come and help?'

'Yes, please.' She gulped the last few mouthfuls of her coffee and dumped the mug into the sink. 'Is that all right, Prof? You don't mind if I spend some time doing that?'

'Off you go.' He didn't look up from his journal but one hand-waved her away. 'Enjoy.'

The anaesthetist sent one of the aides to fetch him a few minutes later once Merrin was ready to inject anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant into the Venflon she'd inserted into their patient's forearm. By the time their patient was asleep and connected to the anaesthetic machine, which controlled the flow of the breathing gases keeping her anaesthetised, the professor was already scrubbing.

At his invitation, Merrin joined him at the basin. She wet her hands and arms then pumped iodine solution into her palms. 'Isn't it amazing to see the vocal cords like that?' she said, still flushed with her success at intubating their patient. 'Dr Jennings let me put the tube down. Well, he helped me, of course, and he checked everything, but I did it.' She lathered down to her elbows. 'I never realised the cords were so perfect. They're just like they are in the books.'

Beside her, he bent to rinse the suds from his arms. 'Weren't you taught to intubate as a student?'

'Only latex dummies,' she said, still soaping. 'The same way we learned CPR. Never real people. We watched a few times in Theatres but most of us weren't lucky enough to actually see things close up.'

'Chris won't mind you spending time with him between cases if you're keen to learn more,' he told her. 'He enjoys teaching and he doesn't seem to have any students or SHOs around this week.'

Merrin nodded. 'I'd life that.' He was turning his taps off now with his elbows, holding his hands up in the air and shaking them to rid them of water while she soaped herself for the second time. 'This is such an exciting time for me,' she said happily. 'There's so much to learn. I guess it's the same for all of us in the beginning. I just hope I can keep up. I feel like time's going so fast.'

'Hold on to that, Merrin.' Puzzled by the seriousness of his tone, she looked up at him, and as their eyes met she felt as if the rest of the world but them had vanished, but his expression was unreadable. 'That enthusiasm,' he qualified. 'It's precious. Keep it if you can. It won't be easy.'

She felt herself frowning. 'But you still have it,' she said huskily. She'd seen—
felt
—his passion and his energy for his work these past days. 'You still love what you're doing, don't you?'

'"Love" is a strong word.'

'But you must still feel an...enthusiasm?' she questioned, using the word he'd applied to her.

Water still dripped from the elbows he held raised, but he was very still. 'A mild degree of... satisfaction, I suppose,' he conceded. 'Enthusiasm sounds too extreme.'

'I don't believe you.' Under his heavy regard she felt herself briefly faltering but she was an open, sincere person, used to being honest and direct and she couldn't help herself. 'I don't believe that any person could be the way you are here and yet not love what you're doing. I think you must be deceiving yourself. I think you must have become very used to feeling sad and I think that you've allowed that sadness to muffle your understanding of your other emotions.'

His grey eyes had narrowed, but he still studied her through them. 'You're very young, Merrin Ryan.'

The comment stung, and she dropped her eyes, her lashes fluttering. 'That's not a crime,' she said quietly. 'You're not so very much older. And I wasn't meaning to be impolite or presumptuous. I was just saying what I think. That's what we're supposed to do, isn't it?'

'Perhaps.' She thought that he sounded very tired. 'These days I'm more accustomed to carefully mouthed platitudes.'

'I'm afraid I'm not very good at platitudes.' He was close to her and with an awareness which had been growing throughout their conversation she realised that she was violently conscious of him.

She wasn't an innocent, she knew what desire felt like, but now something stronger and more powerful hit her, an abrupt, devastating heat that started somewhere around her chest then quickly flooded her body.

Her legs weakened. Disregarding the soap that still dripped from her arms, she gripped the edge of the steel basin to support herself. 'I'm sorry,' she said unevenly. 'I didn't mean to offend you.'

'You've contaminated yourself.' At her dazed, upward look, he said merely, 'Your hands, Merrin. You're touching the sink. It's not sterile. You'll have to scrub again.'

'How stupid.' She stared down at herself, bemused, amazed that she could have done anything so idiotic. 'I'm sorry.' Her mouth was so dry she found it hard to force out the words. 'I wasn't thinking. I won't do it again.'

But instead of the impatience she'd automatically begun steeling herself for, his eyes were curiously gentle. 'Take your time.' He turned away to the trolley Shirley must have set Up and out of the corner of her eyes she saw him start to towel his arms, and then Shirley fluttered in to help him by tying his gown. 'We'll start without you,' he told her. 'Come through when you're ready.'

As Merrin started to soap herself again she realised that the hands she'd always prized for their steadiness were shaking uncontrollably.

She'd never been in love before—had even assumed herself too down-to-earth and practical to ever fall into such a state—so she didn't know for sure if that was what this feeling was, but she thought that it might be. Her awareness was sexual, yes, but she felt very sure that it wasn't the
sort of awareness that sex would diminish. She ached. He was out of her reach but still she wanted to know him, talk to him, share herself with him.

If it was love then it had happened fast but that in itself wasn't so surprising. Given his appeal and Lindsay's comments the day before about the tragic loss of his wife and how that had touched her and how much it had affected her to see him sad and brooding the night before, she acknowledged that it wasn't a particularly difficult or mysterious happening to understand.

But its predictability didn't make it any easier to bear. Two days into her first job as a doctor and she, feet-on-the-ground and supposedly sensible Merrin, was possibly already in love with her boss. Which meant that she had five months, three weeks and three days working for him to go. The thought of spending all that time hiding her emotions and concealing her thoughts from him was abhorrent to her—she was too intrinsically honest a person to be able to live her life that way—so inevitably she'd either have to tell him how she felt or he'd guess anyway.

She grimaced. How was she going to deal with that? How would
he
deal with that?

Professor McAlister
had their patient swabbed with iodine solution and surrounded by guards when Merrin took the place he signalled her to take opposite him. She stood on the box Shirley pushed in for her and under her boss's direction helped him to stretch an adhesive plastic strip over the patient's abdomen, patting it so that it stuck to the green sterile guards.

'What we're doing here is a right hemicolectomy,' he told her quietly, the eyes that met hers over their masks firmly neutral. 'Which means excising the colon from the small bowel around to the midpoint in the transverse colon.'

'The tumour's in the caecum?' she ventured, referring to the first part of the large bowel, murmuring her thanks for the large white swab the scrub nurse passed her.

'Higher. Just into the ascending colon.' He was spreading the skin near the top of their patient's abdomen, then he took a scalpel and made a single, long, confident cut down the skin, around to the right of the umbilicus and just below it. 'We take the rest of the right side of the colon because we want to make sure that we get the lymph nodes where any tumour might have drained as well.'

He deepened the incision. 'Swab, Merrin,' he instructed, and obediently she pressed her swab into the wound, catching the blood that welled up. He took forceps and a diathermy rod and held a vessel. 'Shirls, the diathermy's sick.'

'It's on fifty,' the nurse said promptly.

'Up to seventy,' he ordered, buzzing a vessel and nodding his satisfaction when the equipment worked appropriately.

When he'd cleared and deepened the wound he caught the peritoneum, the membrane enclosing the abdominal contents, in forceps and passed them to Merrin. 'Lift them while I open,' he said quietly, simultaneously puncturing the membrane with a scalpel as she did it then moving it smoothly to extend his incision.

At his command, she disconnected the forceps, struggling a little with the one in her left hand, although her right worked more dextrously. The scrub nurse retrieved them from her hands and passed her a broad metal retractor, but the surgeon took it out of Merrin's hands.

'Self-retaining,' the Prof instructed, giving the nurse back the other one before fastening the self-retainer into position. 'Merrin, your job is to keep the field clear for me. Suction's beside you when I want it. Everything else I'll tell you as we go along. Damp swabs, please.'

He worked very fast. Anatomically the operation was a straightforward one and Merrin understood most of what she was seeing. When she didn't, he explained, but the speed and fluency with which he worked left her breathless.

'Can you knot?' he asked her, as he tied a succession of deep knots so quickly that his fingers almost seemed to blur.

'Not like that,' she confessed, watching, entranced, as he guided another knot effortlessly into place deep within the abdomen with his extended index finger. She knew how to suture, using a needle holder and forceps, and as a student she'd been shown how to tie the knots by hand as well, but it wasn't easy and she knew that her efforts would appear grotesquely clumsy and laboured in comparison with his.

'Now's not the time to practise,' he told her, flicking around the scissors he'd kept palmed in his right hand as he cut again. 'There's a teaching kit in my office which you can borrow. When you're confident come and show me, then I'll let you do them for real.'

He let her close the wound, though. He talked her through it and although she was nervous that she might be taking too long he didn't seem impatient. She sutured the peritoneum, together with the other layers, but he wanted to staple the skin rather than sew it.

'Relax,' he said evenly, obviously interpreting the worried look she sent him as the scrub nurse passed her the stapler. 'It's easier than sewing and the risk of infection's lower.' He showed her how to hold it and how to stretch the skin slightly and press the gun into place, his hands firm and cool through his gloves against hers. 'Squeeze now,' he instructed. 'Fine. Now go a centimetre down.'

Merrin finished with a flourish, barely able to contain her excitement. 'It's beautiful,' she whispered, thrilled with how neatly the wound had closed. 'I did that.'