He clamped his jaw to prevent himself saying that he knew exactly where he wanted to put the camera at this precise moment.
‘OK, Riggs.’ He ran a hand along the back of his neck and exercised his temper control skills. ‘First of all, I know you’ve been struggling to cope but that’s because Dad has been limping along at half-pace for months. Now I’m here and I’m more than capable of picking up all his work and probably some of yours.’
‘I don’t need you to touch mine—’
‘I’m merely pointing out that I have the capacity to do so. The second point is that once we know what we’re doing, the filming is surprisingly unobtrusive. We’re filming normal, everyday surgeries. Despite what you think, nothing is staged for the cameras.’
‘It’ll probably take several takes to get your stitches straight.’
He wondered how many stitches it would take to sew her mouth up. He took a deep breath. ‘You think I’m going to undo a wound and do it up again?’
She shrugged. ‘How do I know to what lengths you’d go to make yourself look good?’
‘That’s why I’m inviting you to join this meeting.’ He kept his voice even. ‘Then you’ll know. You might even enjoy it.’
She looked at him and then nodded. ‘All right. I’ll listen in. But only because I don’t want things going on in my surgery that I don’t know about. And I have to do the house calls first.’
‘Fine. We’ll arrange some sandwiches for after that.’
‘I carry my mobile,’ she said crisply, ‘so if you need to consult on anything, you can call.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
Damn, the man was annoying!
The emergency surgery was a good idea. She’d suggested it herself, months ago, but David had been resistant to changing their current set-up. In fact, he was pretty reluctant to institute any changes at all. He and her father had run the practice a certain way and since she’d joined him as his partner, David had expected her to fit in.
Anna frowned. To begin with that had been fine. She’d been finding her feet as a new GP and had been only too grateful to fall into a familiar structure. But as she gained confidence she’d seen things—things that needed to be changed. Things that would have improved the care for their patients.
But she’d learned to sneak changes in gradually, and the emergency surgery wasn’t one that she’d tackled for a while. Unfortunately Sam was right about that one. She should have done it ages ago.
Then he wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of thinking that it was his idea. She hated it when he was right about anything.
But one thing he wasn’t right about was the filming, she told herself firmly. It would seriously disrupt the practice and make the patients feel uncomfortable.
She pondered the subject all the way through morning surgery, all the way through her house calls and all the way back to the surgery.
By the time she walked into the bright, airy reception area, she’d made up her mind that the whole thing was a mistake.
And leaving Sam alone had been a mistake, too. She should never have allowed him to finish his surgery without her there. What if something had happened? Something that he wasn’t qualified to handle? He was too arrogant to admit that he needed help and he’d probably got himself into serious difficulties. David had one or two tricky patients.
Preoccupied with th
ese thoughts, it came as a serious surprise to her to find Sam laughing with Glenda as the receptionist tidied up from the morning.
He didn’t look like a man who’d had a stressful morning.
Anna dropped her bag and looked at him expectantly. ‘So how was your surgery?’
‘Good. There were one or two cases that would have made interesting television.’
She shot him an impatient look. ‘Do you think of everything in terms of camera angles?’
‘Not everything, no.’ He winked at her suggestively. ‘Just my work.’
She chose to ignore that, just as she chose to ignore most of the things he said. ‘See anything interesting?’
‘Fiona Walker’s dog has been on the rampage again.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘One day she’ll learn that it isn’t the sweet little thing she thinks it is.’