Free St Matthew's Passion: A Medical Romance by Sam Archer Page A

aisles, intending to surprise him. But as she drew nearer, she saw the girl behind the counter lift something glittering – a necklace, it looked like – into a box.
    Melissa stopped and watched.
    The girl’s hands were moving, out of sight, and Melissa guessed she was wrapping the box. She handed it to Fin with a smile and he slipped it into the pocket of his Burberry overcoat.
    Melissa took a step back, almost colliding with a portly lady who glared at her. All of a sudden it was vital that Fin not see her.
    Melissa stumbled away, muttering her apologies to people, heading towards the exit. Outside the cold air hit her in a blast. Her vision blurred, but not because of the wind.
    Fin had been buying jewellery. Gift-wrapped jewellery, as a present.
    For a woman. So there was someone else in his life.
    How could she have been so stupid?
    Melissa hurried through the darkening streets, the magic of the setting and the season destroyed for her. Now all she felt was the raw cold. She was a child, a naïve little girl with an adolescent crush on her handsome, powerful, charismatic boss. She despaired of such characters in romantic comedies. Why couldn’t she have seen that she was exactly the same? A silly stereotype?
    Fin felt nothing for her. She’d been projecting her own desires on him, seeing evidence of his interest in her where there’d been none. Deborah had been right all along. She –
    Melissa faltered in mid-stride.
    Deborah?
    Was she the one Fin was buying the necklace for?
    It made sense. Deborah had been warning her off almost from the word go. More recently, the nurse had sensed something developing between Melissa and Fin and had probably decided to show her hand. To confess her feelings for Fin to him. And he’d responded in kind.
    Or was Melissa spinning fantasies of another kind now? Were her anguished, tumultuous feelings overriding her reason once again?
    Feeling miserable to the point of wretchedness, Melissa allowed herself to be swept along by the crowd, down into the darkness of the Underground station.
     
    ***
     
    ‘Ms Havers, could I bother you for a minute?’
    Melissa blinked, looked round. She was on the post-op ward, it was eight in the morning, and she’d just come off a night shift. It had been a punishing one, an almost non-stop flow of injuries of every kind: stab wounds, head and torso damage from the inevitable car crashes, even a gunshot injury, which was relatively rare in Britain. Melissa had been in theatre virtually continuously from nine in the evening until five this morning, and she was staving off the tidal wave of sleep that threatened to engulf her by keeping on her feet and downing cup after cup of coffee interspersed with the odd can of diet cola for variety.
    The aftermath of a busy night in theatre always involved ward rounds to make sure the patients on whom the surgeon had operated were stable enough to be handed over to the day shift, and Melissa was coming to the end of her rounds, a fresh-faced nurse at her side. Despite the industrial quantities of caffeine she’d consumed, she realised she’d drifted off on her feet while studying a patient’s chart. 
    Deborah was holding a prescription pad. ‘I know it’s not really your job, but Dr Nelson is on the other ward at the moment, and I wondered if you could write up this patient’s discharge medications.’
    Dr Nelson was the junior doctor in the team and was normally tasked with the mundane duties like discharge prescriptions, but Melissa didn’t believe in being precious. The department ran only if everyone mucked in where necessary, and sometimes it was quicker to get a job sorted out even if it was strictly speaking someone else’s responsibility.
    ‘Sure. No problem,’ she said, taking the prescription.
    A week had passed since her encounter with Deborah in the locker room. Whatever the nurse’s opinion of her, and despite Melissa’s growing suspicion that Fin and Deborah were a secret item,