Sydney Harbour Hospital: Lexi's Secret

He frowned up at her. ‘It has nothing to do with my career. I wasn’t sure if your sister knew about us. I’d not met her before. I was playing it safe for your sake.’

‘She wasn’t at the dinner where we met,’ Lexi said. ‘But she remembered the dreadful fallout after my father found out we were seeing each other.’

Sam’s frown deepened. It had niggled at him a bit that he had never actually seen or spoken to her after her father had approached him with that ultimatum. For the last five years he had just assumed she had run back to the family fortress at her father’s bidding. Her little show of rebellion had achieved its aim. She had got her father’s attention back solely on her. Back then, Lexi had struck Sam as the type of girl who would never do anything to permanently jeopardise her prized position as Daddy’s Little Girl. She would go so far and no further. It was her way of working things to her advantage, or so he had thought.

But what if things hadn’t been quite the way her father had said? Lexi had implied on his first day at SHH that she’d had no idea he had gone to the States. Why hadn’t she been told where he had gone? Why hadn’t she asked? Or had her father deliberately kept her in the dark, perhaps forbidding her to mention Sam’s name in his presence, like some sort of overbearing aristocrat father from the past? Was it deluded of him to hope she had invested more in their relationship than her father had suggested? Was it his male pride that wanted it that way instead of feeling like some sort of cheap gigolo who had served his purpose and now meant nothing to her? Had never meant anything to her?

‘Your father is well-known for his temper,’ he said. ‘I hope it wasn’t too rough a time for you back then.’

A flicker of something moved over her face but within a blink it was gone, making him wonder if he had imagined it. She gave her head a little toss and turned and continued walking up the fire escape. ‘I know how to handle my father,’ she said.

Sam followed her up another few steps. ‘Why didn’t you ask him where I’d gone?’ he asked.

He saw her back tighten like a rod of steel before she slowly turned to face him at the fire-escape door. ‘Here’s the fourth floor,’ she announced like a lift operator.

‘Why didn’t you ask your father, Lexi?’ he asked again.

Her blue eyes clashed with his, a spark of cynicism making them appear hard and worldly. ‘Why would I do that?’ she asked. ‘I had a new boyfriend within a few days. Did you really think I was pining after you? Give me a break, country boy. You were fun but not that much fun.’

Sam ground his teeth as he joined her on the landing, conscious of the tight space and the warmth coming off both of their bodies from the exercise. Lexi’s breathing rate had increased slightly, making her beautiful breasts rise and fall behind her camisole. He allowed himself a brief little eye-lock but then wished he hadn’t. She was temptation personified. He had never wanted to kiss someone more in his life. Did she know she was having this effect on him? How could she not? He was doing his best to disguise it but there was only so much he could do. He was a red-blooded male after all, and she was all sexy, nubile woman.

He thrust the door open out of the fire escape and nodded for her to go through. She walked past him, this time not touching him. He felt the loss keenly. His body ached to feel her, to touch her, to bring her close against him, to feel every part of her respond to him as she had in the past. It frustrated him that she still had that power over him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this now.

Engaged.

Lexi was engaged.

For heaven’s sake, why wasn’t his body getting the message?

‘Is this your office?’ she asked as she came to a frosted glass door halfway along the corridor.

‘Yes.’ He stood at the door, pointedly waiting for her to leave.

She peered past his shoulder. ‘Aren’t you going to show me around?’ she asked.

‘Alexis,’ he began. ‘I don’t think—’

‘I want your shirt,’ she said with a determined look in her blue gaze.

Iwant your body, Sam thought. He let out a ragged breath. ‘I guess I can hardly see patients wearing this,’ he said. ‘I’ll put on some scrubs.’

Lexi followed him into the suite of rooms he had been assigned. He wondered for a moment if she was going to follow him all the way into his office but she perched her neat bottom on one of the seats in the currently unattended reception area and idly leafed through a magazine.

Sam came out wearing theatre scrubs and handed her his shirt. Lexi took it from him and tried to ignore the fact that it was still warm from his body. She wanted to hold it up to her nose to smell his particular male smell but she could hardly do that in front of him. It was perhaps a little foolish of her, sentimental perhaps, but she had never forgotten his wonderful male smell. He hadn’t been one for using expensive aftershaves. He had smelt of good clean soap and a supermarket-brand shampoo that had reminded her of cold, crisp apples.

Lexi put the magazine down. ‘Look, all other things aside, I just wanted to say thank you for all that you’re doing for my sister.’

‘It’s fine,’ he said, his granite face back on. ‘It’s what I do.’

The silence stretched and stretched like an elastic band pulled to its capacity.

Lexi couldn’t stop looking at him. It was as if her gaze was drawn by a force she had no control over. She longed to know what was going on behind the unreadable screen of his dark eyes. Was he thinking of the time they had spent together? Did he ever think of it? Did he regret walking away from her without saying goodbye? Why had he gone so abruptly? She had thought he was different from other men. He had seemed deeper and more sensitive, more emotionally available. Or had that all been a ploy on his part to get her into his bed as quickly and as often as he could? It had certainly worked. She had held nothing back from him physically. Emotionally she had been a little more guarded because she’d been worried about revealing how insecure she’d felt as a person. She’d known how unattractive that was for most men. He, like all the other men she had met, had been attracted to her as Lexi the confident and outgoing party-loving social butterfly. She hadn’t felt comfortable revealing how much of an act it had been to compensate for the deep insecurities that had plagued her. How being surrounded by people had stopped her thinking about how lonely she’d felt deep inside. She had wanted to wait until she was a little more confident that their relationship had a future before she revealed that side of herself. But he clearly hadn’t been thinking about their future. His sights had been solely focussed on his own.

‘Alexis.’ There was a note of warning in his voice.

‘Please don’t call me that,’ she said. ‘I know why you’re doing it but please don’t.’

He turned and walked behind the reception desk, the action reminding Lexi of a soldier going back into the trenches. He fiddled with the computer for a moment before he spoke in a casual tone that belied the tension she could see in the square set of his broad shoulders. ‘I didn’t realise you hated your name so much.’

‘I don’t hate my name,’ she said. ‘It’s just I can’t get used to you calling me anything but Lexi.’

He stopped fiddling and turned, his gaze colliding with hers. ‘Will you stop it, for pity’s sake?’

‘Stop what?’ she asked.

‘You know damn well what.’

‘I don’t know what.’

His hands went into fists by his sides. ‘Yes, you do.’

‘You mean acknowledging you?’ she asked, coming to stand in front of him. ‘Stopping to talk to you in the corridor or on the fire escape? Treating you like a person, that sort of thing?’

‘You probably staged the coffee thing to get me alone,’ he bit out.

Lexi glared at him in affront. ‘You think I would waste a perfectly good double-strength soy latte on you?’ she asked.

His frown closed the gap between his chocolate-brown eyes. ‘That shirt cost me seventy US dollars,’ he said through clenched teeth.

She put her hands on her hips. ‘If that’s so then you need some serious help when you go shopping, country boy,’ she tossed back.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She gave her head a toss. ‘Call me if you want a style advisor,’ she said. ‘I have connections.’

He glared at her broodingly. ‘You think I need help dressing?’

No, but I would love to undress you right now, Lexi thought. She reared back from her traitorous thoughts like a bolting horse suddenly facing a precipitous drop. What on earth was the matter with her? Her fiancé was working hard in a remote and dangerous part of a foreign country and here she was betraying him with her wayward thoughts about a man she should have put out of her mind years ago. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You need to buy quality, not quantity. That shirt is not stain-resistant. For just fifty dollars more you could have bought a stain- and crease-resistant one.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he said as he rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation.’

Lexi headed for the door. ‘I’ll get this non-stain-resistant, non-crease-resistant shirt back to you as soon as I can but if the stain doesn’t come out don’t blame me.’

‘Careful not to break a fingernail doing it,’ he muttered.

Lexi stomped back behind the reception desk, right into his body space, eyes glaring, cheeks hot with anger. ‘What did you say?’ she asked.

He looked down at her from his height advantage, dark eyes glittering, jaw clenched, mouth flat. ‘You heard.’