PROLOGUE
‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you can’t find her?’
Jed paced the floor angrily, his hands thrust into the pockets of his white coat as he glowered at his brother. ‘Think, man! It’s your hospital, for goodness’ sake. You trained there, you know everyone. You must know who she is. Concentrate!’
‘It’s not concentration I need, it’s information,’ Tom pointed out mildly. ‘Jed, be reasonable. What have you given me to go on? All you can say is that you don’t think she’s a doctor. No name, no age, no nothing! You don’t even know she works in my hospital!’
‘Of course she works in your hospital.’ Jed stopped pacing and frowned impatiently. ‘Why else would she have been at the Christmas Ball?’
‘She could have been someone’s guest. Did you think of that? You were my guest, remember? You don’t work there…’ Tom watched his brother’s face and then shook his head slowly. ‘How on earth did you get the highest marks ever recorded at your medical school? For someone of supposed exceptional intelligence, you’re being remarkably slow in your thinking.’
‘She wasn’t anyone’s guest.’ Jed stared out of the ward office window to the bustling London street twenty-eight floors below.
‘How do you know?’
Jed shrugged and shook his head slowly. ‘Something she said…’
‘Oh, you did manage some sort of conversation, then.’ Tom’s lazy drawl was loaded with sarcasm and Jed turned, his handsome face set as he glared at his brother.
‘This is a joke to you, isn’t it?’
‘Well, no, not a joke exactly.’ Tom shifted uncomfortably under his brother’s penetrating stare. ‘But even you have to appreciate the irony of the situation.’
Jed gritted his teeth and his eyes narrowed. ‘I do?’
‘Oh, come on, Jed!’ Tom leaned back in his chair and risked a grin. ‘All your life you’ve had women tripping over each other to get to you. Now, at last, we discover that there is, in fact, at least one woman in the world who can resist your charms. It gives the rest of us poor mortals some hope. Maybe she doesn’t go for the tough, macho sort. You could loosen up a little, you know—’
‘Unless you want to find out just how macho and tough I can be, you should give it a rest,’ his brother said dryly, turning back to stare out of the window. ‘I thought you knew everyone in this hospital.’
‘I know everyone worth knowing,’ Tom agreed, helping himself to the last biscuit from a packet abandoned on the low coffee-table. ‘And, believe me, your mystery woman doesn’t work here.’
Jed made an impatient sound. ‘You don’t know—’
‘Hear me out, will you?’ Tom lobbed the empty biscuit packet into the bin and gave his brother an injured look. ‘I’ve made discreet enquiries and turned up nothing, but that’s hardly surprising, considering the dearth of information you gave me to go on. I tell you this, if I ever give up medicine I will not be setting up as a private detective.’
He rummaged in his pocket and retrieved a crumpled piece of paper. ‘Here we are. This was the doctors’ ball, remember, and according to my sources there were only eight tickets sold to non-medical staff—the tickets were like gold dust. Because I’m the best brother in the world and I’m intrigued to see you seriously smitten for the first time in your life, I’ve tracked down each one of those eight individuals and had a good look at them. Three of them were blonde and three of them had short hair so that rules them out. No way did they match the description of your girl.’
Jed was watching him intently. ‘What about the other two?’
‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ His brother shook his head dolefully. ‘One of them is Annie Foster, that gorgeous sister on ITU who I went out with for two months, so we know it’s not her. And the last one doesn’t even remotely match the description you gave me, so unless you were seeing her through rose-tinted glasses your girl doesn’t exist.’
Jed stiffened and a muscle worked in his jaw, ‘She definitely exists and you know I don’t wear glasses, rose-tinted or otherwise.’
‘Well, there’s your answer!’ Tom grinned cheekily and tossed the paper at his brother. ‘You’re eyesight’s going and you couldn’t see her properly. She probably wasn’t dark and stunning with legs like a gazelle at all, she was dumpy, mousy and plain. So she could be number eight.’
Jed leaned broad shoulders against the wall, his tone deceptively mild. ‘Have I ever warned you that your sense of humour is life-threatening?’
‘My life or yours?’ Tom caught the look in his brother’s eye and subsided rapidly. ‘Sorry, sorry. Look, are you sure she wasn’t a doctor?’
Jed pulled a face. ‘No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything at all. I just got the impression that she did something else.’
‘Well, that narrows it down,’ Tom drawled sarcastically. ‘Nurse, cleaner, radiographer, physiotherapist—the options are truly limited. Can’t you give me anything else to go on? I mean, why on earth didn’t you get her name? How could you whisper sweet nothings if you didn’t know her name?’
Jed turned away again, his eyes scanning the streetlights glowing far below as he remembered that night.
He’d noticed her almost straight away, leaning against one of the pillars in the ballroom, her black hair bubbling down her bare back, her eyes fixed on the people dancing. He’d watched curiously as man after man had approached her and been turned away. And then she’d moved her head and had seen him, those beautiful coal black eyes widening as they’d fixed on his, her chin lifting slightly as if daring him to approach her. Which he had, of course, partly because she’d been the most stunning woman he’d ever seen, and partly because her aloofness had represented a challenge and he’d never been able to resist a challenge.
And after that—
He sighed. ‘We didn’t bother with names.’
‘I see.’ Tom rubbed his chin to hide the smile and shook his head in disbelief. ‘It must have been some night…’
Jed’s shoulders tensed. It had been incredible, but he didn’t expect his playboy brother to begin to understand that. Even he didn’t understand the way he felt so how could he expect his brother to? ‘I suppose it never occurred to me that she’d run.’
‘Yeah, that must have been a first.’ Tom’s voice was dry and Jed turned with a frown.
‘Meaning?’
Tom rolled his eyes and lounged back in his chair. ‘Has anyone run from you before? No. Normally they’re beating your door down. So maybe you scared her or something. Or maybe she just found you repulsive.’
‘I didn’t scare her.’ Or maybe he had. He frowned. The intensity of feeling between them had been so overwhelming it had knocked him for six. Maybe it had frightened her, too. After all, she’d never— ‘She certainly didn’t find me repulsive.’
‘Well, she didn’t stick around for more, did she?’ Tom hesitated, his dark eyes fixed on his brother. ‘I ha
te to be the one to point out the obvious, but if she’d wanted you to find her, she would have left her number. Women don’t just disappear if they want to be found. Maybe she wasn’t really interested.’
There was a long silence and then Jed took a deep breath, still not looking at his brother. ‘She was interested.’
‘Then why did she sneak off?’
‘Dammit, I don’t know.’ Jed thumped his fist on the glass and closed his eyes briefly. ‘I don’t know. But it wasn’t anything to do with us. It was something else. She was very secretive and wary—’
‘She was probably married.’ Tom’s voice was dry but a strange look crossed Jed’s handsome face and he shook his head.
‘No. Definitely not that.’
Tom watched him curiously and then shrugged. ‘How do you know? She might have been leading you a dance and—’
‘She wasn’t married.’ Jed’s voice was steady and his eyes glittered with a strange light. There was no way she could have been married. That was one of the few things he did know about her.