Josie Metcalfe - Sheikh Surgeon, Surprise Bride

She didn’t even look like any of the other women in his life. His upbringing had conditioned him to appreciate the lush voluptuous woman who knew how to pleasure a man, while Lily…

She was so much like her name…tall, slender, elegant, cool, with her pale gold hair and even paler skin the colour of rich cream sprinkled with just a handful of cinnamon freckles. For a crazy moment he found himself speculating whether those sun-kissed spots were confined to her face and arms or whether they extended to the rest of her body. He was seized with the urge to explore beneath the camouflage of her neat professional clothes to find…

‘No!’ he growled, and winced when he heard the throaty tones of arousal in his voice. Was she some kind of witch that she’d tied his thoughts up in her, his body already in thrall?

It couldn’t be allowed, not if he was going to achieve his goal. He must be allowed to set up this programme if he was going to strengthen his claim in time for his return to his homeland. There were so many willing to point the finger and to whisper of nepotism. This was important to him. This was one thing that he needed to achieve on merit alone. He was so close to achieving his dream that he could almost touch it, and he couldn’t allow anything—or anyone—to stand in his way.

‘So, tomorrow you will watch Lily as she operates and you will do it with eyes as sharp as the scalpel in her hand,’ he told himself sternly. ‘You will assess her skills and her weaknesses and you will decide whether she is going to be an asset or…’

He shook his head. There could be no or. Failure was not an option. Lily Langley was his junior, for better or worse, and if he needed to retrain her himself in time for the start of the project, he would do it.

‘I just hope you’re up to it, pretty Lily,’ he growled. ‘If not, the next few months could be misery for both of us.’

LILY deliberately arrived early the next morning, nearly an hour before her shift was due to start, with a squadron of butterflies in her stomach.

She was determined to have one last check through the equipment she was going to be using for the first operation and wanted to do it before Razak arrived and began monitoring her every action, but she was too late. He was already there, as alert as if he always enjoyed a full eight hours’sleep a night, while she was so nervous that she felt as if she might fly apart at any second.

‘Keen and eager?’ he asked her, as he strode along beside her towards the theatre they’d been allocated that morning, but she was certain that somehow he knew that it was nerves that had brought her in this early.

‘Looking forward to getting on with the job,’ she agreed, wishing she dared cross her fingers for luck. Although she had a feeling that luck wouldn’t be enough to take her through this first operation. She was going to need to demonstrate every bit of the skills she’d learned so far, while learning everything she could from the man who had so much expertise to impart.

And the first thing she learned was a lesson in simple humanity.

Their patient had stuck in her mind from their meeting yesterday, soon after her admission to the orthopaedic ward.

Cicely Turner wasn’t a very tall woman, and she weighed hardly more than a sparrow, which was probably the only reason why she’d managed to keep going as long as she had on hips that were so damaged it was a wonder she was still able to stand, let alone lead a full and active life with dozens of grandchildren and children around her.

‘My mother’s hip replacement was a success but my father’s was a disaster,’she’d told them bluntly when the two of them had invited her into Razak’s office to review her case notes, the X-rays prominently displayed on a view box. The whole procedure had then been discussed with her in detail before she had been asked whether she had any questions.

‘Not really, no, thank you very much,’she’d said politely. ‘I’m certainly not expecting to be able to run a marathon when you’ve done it. I just want you to promise me that you’ll take the pain away so I can help my children out by doing a bit of babysitting now and again. I do love getting my hands on the babies,’ she confided in an aside to Lily. ‘Luckily, by the time I couldn’t have any more of my own, my children had started producing their own, so I’ve always had plenty to cuddle.’

Razak had pointed out, quite properly, that he couldn’t guarantee the success of any operation. ‘All I can guarantee is that we’ll both do our very best,’ he’d said seriously.

And that morning, before the anaesthetist had put her under, he’d made a point of going through to hold her hand and tell her that he hadn’t forgotten his promise.

The smile of relief on the woman’s face wasn’t something that Lily would forget in a hurry, neither was the fact that Razak had understood just how frightened Cicely would be in such an alien situation. It was proof of something special in the man that, despite the time constraints on their limited theatre hours, he had sacrificed a couple of those precious minutes to put her at ease.

The operation itself was textbook perfect, as was the meshing of their skills as the procedure unfolded.

The joint was badly worn, their first view of it once it had been disarticulated confirming Razak’s diagnosis that this patient would be requiring a complete prosthetic replacement for both components of the ball-and-socket joint.

‘I still think the Exeter will be the best choice for her,’ Razak murmured, with another long look from the open joint in front of them to the most recent X-rays displayed on the wall.

‘One of the earliest designs and still the best?’ Lily suggested, wondering if he could tell that she was smiling behind her mask. ‘I believe it got its name because the man who designed it worked at Exeter University in the engineering department.’

‘That’s probably why it has stood the test of time with so few modifications, then—because it was designed to stand up to the stresses to which it would be subjected, rather than to look pretty,’ he commented, even as she saw him checking his measurements to ensure the finished leg length would match its opposite number.

It was strange how, as soon as she’d touched the scalpel to the woman’s prepared flesh, all hint of nerves disappeared. She was still overwhelmingly aware of Razak standing just inches away from her as she dissected her way through the layers of skin and muscle but when his hands came into the operating field it wasn’t as an intrusion into what she was doing but rather as if she’d somehow grown another pair of hands to help her to complete the task.

‘Ready to close?’ he asked, when the cement that had been specially developed to hold the prosthesis to the bone had set properly and the smooth new ball of the joint had been relocated in the relined socket. Lily had been concentrating so hard that it seemed that just moments had passed since the initial incision. A quick glance up at the clock hung prominently on the theatre wall showed that, in fact, the patient had been under anaesthetic for nearly three hours. ‘Are you happy with everything?’ Razak added, almost as an afterthought.

For just a second she wondered if the question was some sort of test and she began to doubt herself, but a quick inspection of the operating site told her that all was exactly how it should be.

‘I’m happy,’ she confirmed, and held out her hand for the first of the absorbable sutures that would be buried deep inside the muscles of the thigh.

Her technique was flawless, Razak mused as he stood aside to watch Lily closing the final layers of the wound with the neatest row of stitches he’d seen in a long time.