Free Sydney Harbour Hospital: Lexi's Secret by Melanie Milburne Page B

in families and how other siblings can feel left out or isolated as a result.’
    ‘Fine,’ Lexi said. ‘Can I go now?’
    Sam frowned. ‘You’re not making this easy on me.’
    Her eyes hit his like blue diamonds. ‘Why should I?’
    ‘You’re right,’ Sam said, letting his shoulders down on a sigh. ‘Why should you?’
    He was still trying to get his head around this new Lexi. Not the party girl but the young woman who loved her sister so much that she put her own interests to one side. It went against everything she had told him about herself back then. During their short fling she had laughed off his comments about her lack of ambition. She had said how much she loved the social circuit, how all she had time for was fun, not boring old stuffy studying. Those had been her exact words. He had thought at the time it was such a waste given that he’d had to work so hard to get to medical school.
    Unlike Lexi, he hadn’t gone to a fee-paying school with the best resources on hand. He had toughed it out in the bush in between helping his father run their drought-ravaged sheep property. He had missed days, sometimes weeks of school to help nurse his mother through the last stages of her kidney disease. Catching up with his studies had been an added burden eclipsedby worry about his mother’s declining health and the quiet desperation he’d seen in his father’s sun-weathered face whenever he’d looked at his wife lying listlessly in the bedroom of the rundown homestead.
    Hearing Lexi say she had deliberately sabotaged her educational achievements to protect her sister was something that had touched Sam deeply. It had made him take pause. He had not realised what a compassionate person she was. Her shallow party-girl persona was a clever artifice for a sensitive young woman who clearly suffered a lot of survival guilt. She had thrown herself into fundraising for SHH, but what else would she have secretly loved to have done? What dreams and aspirations had she put to one side in order to protect her sister from feeling inadequate?
    It was part of his job to deal with the families of transplant patients. He understood the dynamics, the sometimes tricky family situations that fed into the patients’ outcomes, whether they liked it or not. He wanted to do a good job on Bella, not just because she was Lexi’s older sister but because she was a deserving recipient of a lung donation. But even more than that he wanted to make sure Lexi got her chance to shine. Operating on her sister could well be the most important transplant he had ever performed.
    Sam looked at her standing there with a mutinous expression on her beautiful face. Anyone seeing her now would assume she was a sulky spoilt brat but he felt like the scales had been removed from his eyes. He could see the hint of vulnerability in her ocean-blue gaze and the almost imperceptible quiver of her bottom lip, as if she was holding back a storm of emotions. ‘Why did you get involved with me?’ he asked. ‘Why me and not someone else?’
    ‘It wasn’t an act of rebellion,’ she said. ‘It was nothing like that.’
    ‘Then what was it?’
    She unfolded her arms and used one of her hands to brush back her hair. ‘I can’t explain why,’ she said. ‘It just … it just happened.’
    Sam watched as she moved restlessly to the other side of the room, her arms folded protectively across her body. Her cheeks were a delicate shade of pink as if the memory of their time together unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. Her saw her beautiful white teeth sink into the soft fullness of her bottom lip. It was one of her most engaging habits, one he suspected she was largely unaware of. It gave her a look of innocence and guilelessness; the potent mix of sexy woman and innocent girl was totally captivating.
    ‘At the pub the other night you said something that’s been niggling at me ever since,’ he said. ‘What was it you thought I’d always known about