Knight on the Children's Ward Read Free

her fellow students waved at her. Cassie was down for the children’s ward rotation too and, remembering to smile, Annika made her way over.
    â€˜Are you on a late shift?’ asked Cassie.
    â€˜I am,’ Annika said. ‘It’s my first, though. You’vealready done a couple of shifts there—how have you found it?’
    â€˜Awful,’ Cassie admitted. ‘I feel like an absolute beginner. Everything’s completely different—the drug doses, the way they do obs, and then there are the parents watching your every move.’
    It sounded awful, and they sat in glum silence for a moment till Cassie spoke again. ‘How was your assessment?’
    â€˜Fine,’ Annika responded, and then remembered she was going to make more of an effort to be open and friendly ‘Well, to tell the truth it wasn’t great.’
    â€˜Oh?’ Cassie blinked at the rare insight.
    â€˜My grades and things are okay; it is more to do with the way I am with my peers…’ She could feel her cheeks burning at the admission. ‘And with the patients too. I can be a bit stand-offish!’
    â€˜Oh!’ Cassie blinked again. ‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, I had my assessment on Monday. I’m to stop talking and listen more, apparently. Oh, and I’m to stop burning the candle at both ends!’
    And it did make her feel better—not that Cassie hadn’t fared well, more that she wasn’t the only one who was struggling. Annika smiled again, but it faded when she looked up, because there, handing over some money to the cashier, he was.
    Dr Ross Wyatt.
    He was impossible not to notice.
    Tall, with thick black slightly wavy hair, worn just a touch too long, he didn’t look like a paediatric consultant—well, whatever paediatric consultants were supposed to look like.
    Some days he would be wearing jeans and a T-shirt,finished off with dark leather cowboy boots, as if he’d just got off a horse. Other days—normally Mondays, Annika had noticed—it was a smart suit, but still with a hint of rebellion: his tie more than a little loosened, and with that silver earring he wore so well. There was just something that seemed to say his muscled, toned body wanted out of the tailored confines of his suit. And then again, but only rarely, given he wasn’t a surgeon, if he’d been on call he might be wearing scrubs. Well, it almost made her dizzy: the thin cotton that accentuated the outline of his body, the extra glimpse of olive skin and the clip of Cuban-heeled boots as she’d walked behind him in the corridor one morning….
    Ross Wyatt was her favourite diversion, and he was certainly diverting her now. Annika blushed as he pocketed his change, picked up his tray and caught her looking. She looked away, tried to listen to Cassie, but the slow, lazy smile he had treated her with danced before her eyes.
    Always he looked good—well, not in the conventional way: her mother, Nina, would faint at his choices. Fashion was one of the rules in her family, and Ross Wyatt broke them all.
    And today, on her first day on the paediatric ward, as if to welcome her, he was dressed in Annika’s personal favourite and he looked divine!
    Black jeans, with a thick leather belt, a black crewneck jumper that showed off to perfection his lean figure, black boots, and that silver earring. The colour was in his lips: wide, blood-red lips that curved into an easy smile. Annika hadn’t got close enough yet to see his eyes, but he looked like a Spanish gypsy—just the sort of man her mother would absolutely forbid. He looked wild and untamed and thrilling—as if at anyminute he would kick his heels and throw up his arms, stamp a flamenco on his way over to her. She could almost smell the smoke from the bonfire—he did that to her with a single smile…
    And it was madness, Annika told herself, utter madness to be sitting in the canteen