St Matthew's Passion - By Sam Archer Page 0,37

she explained how the young man was coming to finish what had been started on the other boy she’d operated on. Fin listened, still holding her. When she’d finished he pressed his lips on to the top of her head.

‘You kept you cool,’ he said. ‘If you’d panicked form the word go, there’s no telling what he could have done.’

She pulled her head away and gazed up at him again. ‘But you came to the rescue,’ she said. ‘He was going to cut me.’

Something passed through his eyes, a flicker of what Melissa had seen there in his office that night, moments before they kissed for the first time. A smouldering heat that threatened to ignite into full flame at any second. Quickly she reached up a hand to grip the back of his head and pulled his face towards her, arching up against him, her mouth seeking his. She felt his body respond down below, where his hips pressed against hers.

Fin bent his neck so that his mouth hovered inches from hers. He lowered so that his lips brushed hers, the tip of his tongue finding her own, gently probing.

Then he drew back, releasing his grip on her. Melissa felt as if a lifebelt was being loosened from around her in the middle of the ocean.

His eyes burned, the passion overwhelmed by something much darker and more agonised.

‘We can’t,’ he whispered.

Melissa straightened and, in doing so, glimpsed two of the nurses who had emerged through the theatre doors behind find. They stood and stared.

Still trembling, but now from a violent maelstrom of emotion that was more than simple delayed shock, Melissa tore off her surgical gown and flung it into the laundry hamper and strode out of the scrub room, not caring if the man with the knife was somehow lurking beyond.

***

By the following afternoon Melissa was tired of everyone asking her if she was all right.

The young man with the knife had been apprehended near the exit by the hospital’s security staff, who’d wrestled the knife away from him and kept him still until the police arrived. They’d taken a statement from Melissa, of course, and at the end had commended her on keeping her cool as she had. Melissa didn’t think there was anything to be applauded in what she’d done.

Fin had met her later with a couple of the hospital managers and they had asked her carefully if she was hurt. No, she’d replied; but she’d thought, not physically, anyway. Nothing in Fin’s expression gave a hint of what had passed between them earlier in the scrub room. The managers had asked if she wanted to go home early. Melissa declined.

Today, the nurses and the doctors alike had been tiptoeing around her as if she was some delicate piece of porcelain that could be easily broken by something as minor as a sudden noise. When she learned that a patient with a complicated laceration was being kept in Accident & Emergency for Mr Finmore-Gage rather than trouble Ms Havers with it, she’d had enough. Melissa stalked down to the A&E Department and took charge of the case.

She needed work, needed to keep busy with something that both was physically demanding and engaged her mind. It was the only way she could keep her thoughts from returning to Fin, and to the way passions had flared up between them again so suddenly yesterday, despite her resolve, and apparently his too, that they would put their feelings behind them and get on with their jobs.

She took her time in theatre with the leg laceration, performing a careful decontamination and debridement – removing the tags of soiled skin and fragments of foreign material – before deciding to leave the surface open and unsutured to promote healing. The patient would need a skin graft at a later date. Afterwards Melissa visited the patient on the post-op ward, sitting with him and reassuring him that he wasn’t going to lose his leg, despite the messiness of the wound.

Deborah appeared by the patient’s bed just as Melissa was saying her goodbyes. ‘How are you feeling, Mr Rogers?’

‘Better since Dr Havers here sorted me out,’ the man grinned. He wagged a finger at Melissa. ‘Hang on to this one, Sister. She’s good.’

Deborah smiled tightly, not looking at Melissa, and Melissa thought: oh, no. What now?

She found out a few minutes later when she was sitting alone in the registrars’ office she shared with Emma, writing up some notes. Deborah put her head in