Annie O'Neil - A Return, A Reunion, A Wedding

Note to Readers

Dedication This book goes, without reservation, to my new editor Sheila. I asked her to help make me a better writer and she took me at my word. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the results! May it be the first in a long list of HEAs we craft together xo

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Extract

About the Publisher

JAYNE SHOULD HAVE been getting fist-bumps right now. High-fives. A group hug. Not watching a mass exodus from her operating theatre.

What on earth was going on?

She pulled off her surgical gown, gave her face a quick scrub, and deposited it into the laundry bin.

‘All right there, Dr Sinclair?’

The hospital’s favourite surgical nurse, Sana, didn’t body-block her, exactly, but... Why was the rest of the surgical team high-tailing it out of there?

Peculiar.

Maybe they all had hot dates. Or on-call rooms to collapse in.

Ten hours of heart transplant surgery was tiring. For most people, anyway. Sana looked as energetic as ever. Maybe it was the dancing unicorns on her scrubs.

Sana fixed Jayne with her bright smile. ‘Somebody’s frown is upside down. And we don’t do that here at the London Merryweather Children’s Hospital. Not after a successful surgery.’

‘I’m not frowning.’ Jayne fought to smooth the furrow between her eyes.

Okay, fine. The surgery had been tough...but it wasn’t as if she wanted to talk about it.

‘The Jayne Sinclair I know doesn’t frown. So...’ Sana popped her hands on to her hips. ‘Are you going to explain to me what’s broken your smiley face or am I going to have to start pulling teeth?’

Jayne tried to look away and couldn’t.

Oh, crumbs. So this was The Sana Look .

Five years at the Merryweather and she’d never once seen it. If the rumour mill was anything to go by it was pointless to resist.

The Sana Look , as it was known in hospital parlance, was something to actively avoid. It was responsible for all sorts of madness. The Head of Paediatric Surgery had buckled under its strength, finally fulfilling a lifelong dream to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Registrars fled to cosy cottages in Devon to tackle long-neglected ‘To Read’ piles. Nurses skipped around theme parks in Florida. Even the aptly named Dr Stayer, who was rumoured never to have once taken a day of holiday in his thirty years of practice, had handed in his notice and was learning how to surf in Bali at this very moment.

No one was immune.

When Sana gave The Look , the HR department listened. As did the hospital’s Chief Executive. It was that powerful. It meant one thing and one thing only: someone needed to take a holiday.

Jayne shuddered. Already she could see her six weeks of unused holiday waiting to pounce and attack.

Nooo!

She didn’t do breaks. Or downtime. She certainly didn’t casually hand in holiday requests. She did surgery. And extra shifts. And proactively offered a helping hand wherever she could in the hospital so that she could become the best paediatric cardiologist possible. This was her happy place. Here she could fix things. Out there she... Well, she and London had never exactly bonded.

She swept her hands across her face and turned her frown into a smile. ‘Nothing to worry about on this front, Sana. See?’ She struck a jaunty pose. ‘Happy face!’

Sana gave her one of those slow head-to-toe scans that said, Girlfriend...try telling that to the judge .

Jayne shifted uncomfortably.

‘You did a great job...’ Sana said, in a way that had a big fat ‘but’ lying in wait.

‘Always a good day when I can fix a heart.’ If only she could fix her own.

Sana arched an eyebrow as if she’d heard the silent plea.

It had been one tear. Just the one! A tear that had been shed well after the critical part of the surgery had been finished. Jayne’s hands had been clear of the patient. The other surgeons had been closing under her supervision. Nothing for Sana to get all Looky over.

Sana crossed her arms over her chest and started humming. She was patient. More than that... She was well-versed in cocky young surgeons lying about their feelings after particularly tough surgeries.

If only she knew just how tough this one had been...

Jayne’s patient—a gorgeous, bright and very funny fourteen-year-old called Stella—had been on a mechanical heart for five months now. An epic stretch of time for anyone to endure that level of heart failure, let alone a kid. Her family was exhausted from putting on a brave face. Not to mention bearing the weight of constant fear that came with the simple fact that one day Stella’s body simply might not be able to handle being put through the mill any more.

When a donor heart had become available early that morning Jayne and her team had been elated. They’d pulled in every favour in the book to get it to London and into the patient’s chest, where it was now beating away all on its own.

It should have been a landmark moment. For Stella, obviously. But for Jayne, too.

She’d spent over ten years of her life training, studying, and fine-tuning herself to become a paediatric cardiologist—just as her twin sister Jules had imagined she would be one day.

Her heart seized so hard and tight she could hardly breathe. She needed to get out of here.

Her eyes darted to the doors of the operating theatre and once again Sana’s brown eyes appeared in front of her. Looking.

This wasn’t how she’d pictured this moment. Completing a full heart transplant surgery was meant to have been an epically happy day for her. The day that she finally fulfilled her sister’s dream.

As she shrank under Sana’s unblinking gaze she felt her blood begin to chill in her veins. Maybe fulfilling someone else’s destiny didn’t work that way.

If she were Jules she’d be leading a parade to the pub right now. Buying the first round. Toasting her team of fellow surgeons, nurses, nephrologists, immunologists and all the other medical professionals who’d helped make this critical surgery a reality. Daring everyone to join her in a charity skydive.

Not being stared down by Sana.

Okay, fine! Blubbing over a patient wasn’t the done thing in transplant surgery. Which was why there were rules in place. And yet the one rule...the only rule...of her operating theatre when she was about to place one person’s vital organ into another person? Oh, that rule had been well and truly broken.

No. Unnecessary. Details.

A good heart was a good heart. Origin stories weren’t necessary. They made her emotional. There wasn’t a person on earth who was served well by an emotional surgeon.

Committed? Passionate? Intense?

Absolutely. Jayne admitted to all those things. Proudly.

Sure, it was important to know some things about donor organs. Suitability. Viability. Accessibility. Jayne always checked the facts. She also ran a slew of tests. Bloods, X-rays, tomography, MRIs, ultrasounds. Not to mention the coronary angiography and the cardiac catheterisation. She’d done each and every one of them with the exacting scientific precision they had required. And then asked for the flow of information to stop there.

One of the junior surgeons on her team simply hadn’t got it. Just as she’d lifted the heart into her hands he’d blurted out the origin story of the donor.