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always been aware of boundaries she never breached, boundaries where they might have caused each other real harm.
    Today, for the first time, she'd lost that control. When he'd lifted her, intent on her breasts, she'd swung her arm back then slammed her spread palm flat and hard with all her force across his face.
    She'd seen the imprint of her fingers red against the abrupt pallor of his skin but Luke had barely flinched. He'd still held her but when she'd sworn at him to let her go he'd released her and stepped away from her, his expression stunned, his movements abruptly jerky and unnatural in contrast to his normal careless grace.
    Wordlessly she'd pulled up her bra with trembling hands to cover herself. She'd retrieved her theatre top and hauled it on, but had left her clothes scattered across the floor where they'd fallen when he'd first grabbed her. Then she'd snatched her white coat and pulled open the main door to the room and run away from him.
    She hadn't—thank God—seen him since. Harry had seemed to be expecting him at the journal club meeting but he hadn't come. In the afternoon she'd crept back down to the angio suite and retrieved her clothes—she'd been mortified to find them neatly folded on a chair rather than strewn across the room where she'd left them—and dressed again.
    Now she didn't know what to do.
    The sound of tapping at the glass panel in the front door downstairs as she was dressing after her bath didn't worry her. Her neighbours on both sides were elderly widows who occasionally called in on her in the evenings to invite her for cups of tea or to deliver mail they'd collected for her during the day as several of the medical journals she subscribed to were too large for the small mail vent in her door. Genuine visitors tended to ring the electric doorbell.
    But, then, Luke knew how discordant the jangling of the bell sounded from inside. She knew as soon as she saw the broadness of the shape through the central patterned glass of the door that it was him, and when she swallowed jerkily and opened the door her eyes rose immediately, anxiously, to his cheek.
    In her mind she'd expected to see redness or bruising at least the size of her hand, but there was nothing.
    'It barely hurt,' he said quietly. 'You'd need a hammer to bruise me.'
    'I was still expecting to see marks,' she answered dully. She stood back automatically to let him into the hall behind her. 'Luke, I'm sorry—'
    'Don't be.' He barely looked at her, instead wandering about the neatly furnished living room to their right. 'I asked for it. You've redecorated.' He sounded tired. 'Tell me, does Clancy live here now?'
    'No.' She lingered in the doorway, watching uneasily as he scanned the collection of framed photographs on the oak shelf above the gas fire. 'Geoffrey likes living south of the river,' she said huskily, when Luke picked up one of the photos. 'You're right, you did ask for it, but hitting you like that was still unforgivable.'
    'I'm surprised Clancy hasn't adapted by now.' He made no comment on her apology. 'How long have you known him? It's eighteen months since you started at St Peter's, isn't it? Or did you know him before?'
    'I met him during my registrar days at the hospital but we didn't become Mends until I started this job.'
    She was finding it hard to tear her gaze away from the photograph he still held of her and her father together after her graduation ceremony. Luke had taken the picture, she remembered. He'd probably picked it up because he'd recognised it. There'd been professional photographs taken, too, that day, photographs she hadn't been able to look at for a long time, but this was a snapshot of her father and her both looking so happy she hadn't been able to let it go.
    It had been a beautiful, unseasonably warm London afternoon and after the formal part of the ceremony her father had taken her and Luke out to celebrate. She'd drunk too much champagne and she'd been dizzy and laughing, intoxicated