‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting,’ she said as she reached for her evening bag on the sofa, sending a soft waft of her light perfume his way. ‘I’m not usually so disorganised.’
‘It’s been a hectic day,’ he said. ‘I had to rush at the last minute as well.’
Allegra followed him out to his car. ‘Do you live close to the hospital?’ she asked, once they were on their way.
‘I’m just renting a place in South Yarra at the moment,’ he answered. ‘I’m still trying to work out what sort of place I want to buy.’
‘You mean an apartment or a house?’
‘Yes. Both have their advantages but with the hours I work it doesn’t make sense to rush in and buy a house with a big garden when I haven’t even got the time to sit in it, much less maintain it.’
‘That’s what gardeners are for,’ she said. ‘I’m even thinking about getting some help in to water my pot plants. I just don’t seem to have the time.’
He glanced across at her and smiled. ‘You could always get plastic ones.’
‘Now, that would really send my mother into a tailspin,’ she answered with a dancing gleam in her eyes. ‘Fake plants are not good for positive energy flow.’
He turned back to the traffic, a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘You know something? I’m beginning to suspect you’re not quite as alternative as you make out, Allegra Tallis.’
‘And you’re not quite the overbearing ogre you want everyone to think you are, are you, Joel Addison?’
His warm brown eyes held hers for a moment before shifting away to concentrate on locating a parking spot. ‘I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.’
The restaurant he’d booked was in Toorak Road and after they were shown to their table and left with menus and the wine list, Allegra felt herself begin to relax a little. She sank into the comfortable chair and examined the menu.
Phew! Not a pizza in sight.
‘What’s that little smile for?’ Joel asked.
She met his gaze across the table. ‘I was just checking for pizzas.’
He handed her the wine list. ‘Maybe you should choose the red wine. I don’t want to be accused of picking a cheap one.’
‘You don’t strike me as the cheap red wine type,’ she said, handing it back to him.
He gave her a teasing look. ‘You can tell that from my aura?’
She pursed her mouth at him but ended up releasing it on a reluctant smile. ‘I hope you’re not trying to pick a fight with me, Dr Addison.’
‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘We’re just too overworked, tired people having dinner, OK?’
‘Now who’s reading auras?’ she asked. ‘And here I was, positive I’d managed to conceal the shadows underneath my eyes.’
‘I don’t know anything about auras but I can tell you work hard, harder than most.’
‘Now, I am really going to ask for a refund on that eye cream,’ she said with a rueful grimace.
He smiled at her but just then the waiter approached to take their drinks order and to advise them on the daily specials.
Allegra studied Joel covertly as he asked the waiter about the menu, the low, deep timbre of his voice and gentle respectful manner as he listened to the young man telling her more about him as a person than anything else she’d seen so far. She inwardly cringed as she recalled her date with Patrick, who’d practically abused the young inexperienced waitress for not bringing the garlic bread out on time.
After the waiter returned with their wine and took their order for meals, Joel sat back in his seat and surveyed her features in silence for a moment or two.
‘So what made you choose coma recovery as a project?’ he finally asked.
Allegra met his dark gaze guardedly. ‘Is this what this dinner is about—me having to justify my project to you all over again? If that’s the case, I might as well leave now and save the chef the hassle of cooking a meal I won’t be able to eat.’
‘No, I’m just interested in what motivated you to choose that particular study over any number of other topics you could have chosen instead. There are a lot of people who would feel it’s unlikely to produce anything of scientific significance.’
‘It’s pretty clear which camp you’d be in.’
‘Come on, Allegra,’ he reasoned. ‘Everything in our profession is data-driven now—if you can’t measure it, it probably doesn’t exist. Anecdotes and expert opinion are no longer good enough.’
She sent him a hardened glare. ‘Can we talk about something else?’
‘OK, but there are two deeply comatose patients in ICTU right now but I don’t want you to do anything that would draw unnecessary attention to the unit at this time.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked with rising anger. ‘What do you think I’m going to do? Cast a spell or something?’
‘I just want you to tread very carefully. I’m just concerned that if Mr Lowe’s son dies, you could be an easy target to blame.’
‘Me? What about his wife? She’s the one who drove the car!’
‘I know, but you know how people are when they’re under a lot of stress. The whole spectrum of emotion gets played out in ICU. The very best and worst of human behaviour comes out. In my opinion, Keith Lowe is a litigation time bomb waiting to go off.’
Allegra couldn’t help agreeing with him, although it pained her to admit it. ‘He does seem the type, I guess,’ she said, lowering her gaze a fraction.
‘I’m not trying to sabotage your project, Allegra, nothing like that. If anything, I would actually be delighted if you were able to deliver some measurable and repeatable results. But is this the right time to do it, the right case to start with?’
She raised her eyes back to his. ‘Are you expressly forbidding me to do anything or just asking me to be discreet?’
He held her gaze for a lengthy period. ‘I said I’d give you a month and I’ll stick by that. But if you’re going to use this case, I want you to keep a low profile. Things are much more tense than usual because of the question mark hanging over Kate Lowe. One press leak and public emotion will be running high. The notion of a mother trying to kill her own child in her own suicide attempt is bizarre—the press would play it from every angle for all it’s worth, every day either of them survives. And if, on top of that, they got wind that they were being used in a research project, especially using not-strictly-medical methods, they’d have a field day—none of us might survive it.’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘But I’d still like to try with the little boy. I’ll ask the father for his permission, of course.’
He held her direct look for a moment. ‘Fine, but all I’m saying is that emotion runs high when children are involved. Just keep that in mind.’
Allegra thought back to her earlier conversation with Susie but decided against mentioning it. The nursing staff were well used to dealing with all sorts of people and could be relied on to remain professional at all times.
After a short pause she released a heartfelt sigh. ‘I often wonder how they get on—you know, once they leave ICU. We patch them up and send them on their way, but we get very little long-term feedback. Don’t you wonder how they manage to adjust, especially the ones with permanent disability?’
Joel examined the contents of his wineglass, a shadow of something coming and going in his dark eyes. ‘I try not to think about it too much.’
She looked at him, her expression softening. ‘But you do, don’t you?’
He gave her a twisted, humourless smile. ‘Well, it’s part of the job, isn’t it? You go home exhausted after long shifts, then you can’t sleep, worrying you could have done more.’
‘I know…It’s a wonder we don’t all end up on stress leave.’
‘It’s why doctors’ marriages have a higher than average failure rate,’ he said, reaching for his wine and taking a sip.
The waiter arrived with their meals and once he’d left, Allegra said into the little silence t
hat had fallen, ‘You never told me what your parents do for a living.’
Joel put his glass back on the table before answering. ‘My father is a teacher and my mother hasn’t worked outside the home since my brother and I were born.’
‘That must have been nice for you and your brother,’ she said, ‘having a full-time mum at home.’
‘It certainly had its advantages.’ He reached for his cutlery and asked, ‘What about your early childhood? Did your mother choose to work or stay at home?’
‘My mother wasn’t the stay-at-home type. My father did a lot of the child care in the early days, but I seem to remember a few child-care centres along the way.’
‘But you had a happy childhood?’
‘Of course. My parents were a bit “out there” at times, but I can’t remember ever being unhappy. Even when they went their separate ways, they did it so wonderfully well that I was the envy of all my friends for having such trendy, cool parents.’
Joel looked at her in silent envy. His childhood had been marked with tragedy, a tragedy relentless and ongoing. The last time he’d visited, just two days ago, his mother had aged and visibly shrunk even further, and his father’s face had become a mask of pain from their situation, each line more deeply etched, each shadow a darker curtain.
Allegra became aware of his silence and wondered if she was boring him. ‘I’m sorry…’ She pushed her glass out of her reach. ‘I tend to talk too much about myself when I drink wine.’
He gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Truth serum?’
‘Next I’ll be telling you all my innermost secrets.’
‘You seem to be pretty much an open book to me. You wear your heart on your sleeve, which is unusual in a medico. It usually gets hammered out of you at medical school.’
She lowered her gaze to the small flickering candle on the table, a small frown bringing her finely arched brows together for a moment. ‘Well I must have been absent that day at medical school.’
‘What happened?’
Allegra brought her eyes back to his, surprised yet again at the warmth she could see reflected there. ‘I lost my best friend during second year.’
‘An accident?’
She shook her head. ‘Suicide.’
‘I’m sorry. That must have been a tough time.’
‘It was…I blamed myself for not seeing the signs.’
‘Most people who know a suicide victim suffer the same guilt. Look at Mr Lowe today. I’m sure that’s why he’s unable to cope. He probably thinks it’s his fault.’
‘Yes…but in Julie’s case I should have known. I was her best friend. We’d shared everything since the first day we met during orientation week at university.’
‘You can’t always read people’s minds,’ he pointed out.
‘My mother would totally disagree with you,’ she said, trying to lighten the conversation. She gave him a little smile and added, ‘She insists she can infallibly detect what people are thinking just by looking deeply into their eyes.’
‘Oh, really?’ He didn’t bother disguising his scepticism but this time it was tempered with a smile. ‘And have you perhaps inherited this little gift?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t really put it to the test.’ She leaned forward to look into his eyes. ‘Let me see now…Hmm—you definitely have sleep on your mind. I can see you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks if not months.’
‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘There might be something in this after all.’
She leaned closer to peer even more, her hair falling forward to brush the back of his hand where it rested on the table near his glass in a soft-as-air caress that sent a charge of electricity straight to his groin as her greener-than-green gaze meshed with his.
‘What do you see in my eyes now?’ he asked, his voice sounding a little rough around the edges.
Allegra looked deeply into his darker-than-night eyes, an unexpected pulse of desire beginning to beat a steady tattoo low and deep in her body. Her chest felt as if it had shrunk to half its size, the air she tried to breathe into her lungs catching on its way down. She moistened her lips, her skin lifting in awareness in a way that had never happened to her before. Her breasts felt full and heavy, her nipples puckering beneath her black lace bra as she felt the searing burn of his dark gaze as it held hers.
She sat back in her chair and tucked her hair behind her ear as she gave a little self-conscious laugh. ‘I’ve definitely had way too much wine to drink.’
‘The eyes are supposed to be the window to the soul,’ he said as he signalled to the waiter for the bill. ‘But what if you don’t have one?’
‘Everyone has a soul,’ she protested.
He gave her one of his cynical smiles. ‘Don’t go looking for one in me, Allegra, for you won’t find one. It died a long time ago.’
Allegra followed him out of the restaurant a short time later, her heart contracting painfully at the thought of what he had seen and experienced out in the field to have hardened him in such a way. She’d seen shadows of pain in his eyes that she knew no amount of sleep would ever erase. And she knew if he’d looked deeply into her own he would have found the very same shadows lurking there…
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘THANK you for dinner,’ Allegra said once he’d walked her to the door of her apartment block. ‘I had a good time. It was a nice restaurant. Not a pizza in sight.’
‘Aren’t you going to ask me in for coffee?’
‘I was going to but I wasn’t sure if you would take it the wrong way.’
‘I take it the same way you do—black.’
She gave him a quelling look. ‘I meant…well, you know what I meant.’
He smiled at her flustered expression and before he could stop himself lifted a finger to her cheek, trailing his knuckle over the creamy curve where a spot of heightened colour had pooled.
Allegra ran her tongue over her lips in a nervous gesture. ‘I’d better go in. It’s getting late and I’m on early and…’ She stopped when she saw the dark glitter in his eyes as they caught and held hers, her stomach hollowing in anticipation.
His head came down slowly, his warm breath brushing over her lips before he placed his mouth on hers in a soft, hardly touching kiss.
She looked up at him, her heart increasing its pace as he ran his tongue over his lips as if tasting her sweetness.
‘I probably shouldn’t have done that,’ he said.
She swallowed the restriction in her throat and croaked, ‘Why?’
‘Because now I know what it feels like, I want to do it again.’
‘Oh…’
‘It could cause all sorts of problems,’ he said, taking her by the shoulders and bringing her one tiny step closer, her breasts brushing against his chest.
‘You think so?’ she asked, leaning into his hardness instinctively.
‘I know so.’
‘Too bad…’
He held her gaze for several pulsing seconds. ‘The gossip would be unbearable.’
‘Totally…’
‘And then there’s the problem of shifts.’
‘Yes…’ She moistened her lips again. ‘That’s always a downside.’
‘And then there’s the issue of your place or mine.’
‘Tricky.’
He smiled and tipped up her chin. ‘You are one hell of a temptation, Allegra Tallis, but I’m going to be the strong one here and step back before we drift into dangerous territory.’
‘OK…’ She swallowed again as she felt the hard ridge of his growing erection against her. ‘That would be wise, I guess.’
‘Very wise.’
A full thirty seconds passed.
‘So…so why aren’t you doing it?’ she asked.
‘Doing what?’
‘Stepping back,’ she said. ‘You said you were going to be the strong one and step back.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, his gaze dipping to her mouth. ‘Now would be a good time.’
> ‘A very good time…’
Her stomach did a complete somersault as his hands slid down the length of her bare arms to encircle her wrists.
‘Why don’t we do it on the count of three?’ he suggested, after another heart-stopping pause.
Allegra’s fingers curled around the length and strength of his. ‘Right…let’s do that. On the count of three.’ She took a breath and began the countdown, ‘One…’
‘Two…’ he said, and released her wrists to place his hands on her hips.
Another deep throb of silence passed. Allegra knew it was her turn to say the last number but somehow she couldn’t get the one word past the trembling shield of her lips. Her gaze locked with his as the time beat on, his hands on her hips feeling like a slow burn as his heat passed from his body to hers.
‘Aren’t you going to say it?’ he asked, his breath caressing the surface of her mouth as his head came inexorably closer.
‘I was getting to it…’
She felt the imprint of his lazy smile on her lips before he gradually increased the pressure, each slow drugging movement of his mouth on hers sending her senses into overload. The sexual charge of his tongue probing for entry made her legs buckle with instant uncontrollable need and she pressed herself against him, relishing in the feel of his body’s instant reaction to hers. She wasn’t without experience but never had she felt the energy and force of such fierce attraction before. It was like her body had been storing up its need for this moment when his mouth scorched its timeless message on hers.
Her tongue played with his boldly, each movement inciting her desire to a higher level, moving even further out of her control. Her mind swam with images of how they would be together, his strong leanly muscled body pinning her beneath him.
A passing car’s headlights brought her back to earth with a shaft of exposing light that she knew would do her no credit with her overly conservative neighbours.
In Her Boss's Special Care Page 6
