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she missed male affection and attention.
    Thoughtfully she acknowledged that having been married to Peter, coping with his illness, had numbed her in a way that usually acted like an emotional anaesthetic when she was with men, so that she couldn't respond. Everything had been for Peter—all they had done had been for his illness, for his comfort. Somewhere along the line she had lost herself. Now she lived for the daughter she adored.
    Closing the door quietly behind her so that she wouldn't wake Mandy and her own mother, who was staying the night, she crept upstairs to check on them, which she did from long habit.
    As she lay in bed later, she thought of Clay's sarcastic words to her that time in the operating room: 'We all feel like falling asleep, Nurse, but, please, don't do it until we've finished the operation.' Those words had humiliated her, even though she'd fully understood the stress of his job. Probably he'd forgotten her name, as doctors didn't often call nurses 'Nurse' any more. She remembered how, from sheer exhaustion, her eyes had pricked with tears.
     
    Clay went straight for a shower when he got home, then to bed, gently shifting the cat from a central position on the wide bed. 'Move over, Victoria,' he said.
    On the answering machine beside his bed he played back his messages.
    'I'm so disappointed you're not there, Clay—' Dawn's seductive voice filled the silence of the room '—because I want to see you. Give me a call when you get in.'
    'Not tonight, baby,' he said aloud, clicking off the machine, then the light.
    An annoying image of a woman in a red dress superimposed itself on the more recent mental image of Dawn Renton, together with the sadness of her story. Sophie's thoughtful face, oddly vulnerable, her expressive eyes and full, beautifully shaped mouth seemed to haunt him as he hovered on the brink of sleep.
    He turned on his side, reaching out to touch the soft fur of the purring cat. Firmly he pushed the thoughts of Sophie Dunhill from his mind.
     

CHAPTER TWO
    Clay was at the hospital by 7 a.m. on the following Monday. His operating list was due to start at 8 a.m. sharp, so he wanted to be in the operating room by a quarter to eight. That would give him fifteen minutes to change into a scrub suit, have a few words with his waiting patient—the first on the list, who would be lying on a stretcher in the OR corridor outside his designated operating room—and scrub for the required number of minutes before putting on a sterile gown and gloves.
    Clay tried to have his life at the hospital organized almost down to each minute of the ten-hour day that he expected to put in there. That was just a routine day. Being a surgeon, it did not exactly allow for everything to be cut and dried—that was not in the nature of the job—yet he made the effort as though it were so. A surgeon had to be proactive, rather than reactive, ready to go at a moment's notice, ready to meet whatever challenge might present itself, knowledgeable and experienced enough to make the right decision at once. Most of those decisions were made under pressure. There were emergencies and unexpected happenings.
    That challenge was what he loved about the job, that was what kept him going. The adrenaline high was like a drug addiction—he never got tired of it, he always wanted more. Even when he knew that he had to pace himself, shouldn't push himself beyond a certain point to take on more and more work, he knew how difficult it was to say no, to admit that he had reached his limit, that it was time to refer to someone else or to another hospital.
    He also saw the burn-out, the physical and mental breakdowns in some of his colleagues who treated themselves as though they were super-human, not governed by the same laws of nature and common sense that directed the lives of other breeds of people—least of all those of their patients.
    Before his operating list began, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he would routinely