Heart Surgeon, Prince...Husband!. Kate Hardy

Apparently he’d trained in London and worked for some years at the Royal Hampstead Free Hospital; now one of the surgeons here was retiring, Luc was moving to Muswell Hill Memorial Hospital.

      Everyone had looked him up on the Internet, of course; it was hard to reconcile the idea of an upper-class playboy who didn’t take life too seriously with a man who’d spent years training to be a heart surgeon. So who was Luciano Bianchi—and would he be part of the team or would he be a royal pain in the backside?

      From the photographs, he was definitely nice-looking enough to make all the women in the department sigh and speculate why he hadn’t been snapped up years ago. Tall, with dark hair and dark eyes, Luciano looked more like a model for a high-end fragrance ad than a surgeon. But he didn’t seem to date that much—or, at least, there weren’t loads of paparazzi pictures of him with a princess or the daughter of some wealthy industrialist on his arm, on their way to some high society party or movie premiere. It looked as if he put his job before his position in society, which boded well for life at the hospital.

      Kelly wasn’t one for gossip, but one rumour that had caught her attention involved his work. He was allegedly going to set up a trial for a new surgical procedure to help patients suffering from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—a condition where the muscular wall of the heart thickened and made the heart stiff, making it harder to pump blood around the body.

      It was too late for a trial to help Simon; but it wasn’t too late to help his younger brother Jake or Jake’s daughter Summer.

      Kelly would never forgive herself for the fact that she hadn’t picked up on her late husband’s heart condition. How could a trained cardiologist have missed something that massive? Since then, she knew she’d become a workaholic—but she was determined that nobody’s symptoms would go unrecognised on her watch. She didn’t want other families to have to go through what her family had been through. And getting Jake and Summer onto the trial might help to blunt the edges of her guilt. If she explained the situation to Luciano Bianchi, then maybe she could persuade him to at least consider Jake and Summer as candidates for his trial.

      She kept an eye on the reception area from the office where she was catching up with paperwork, and twenty minutes later Luciano Bianchi walked through the doors. She pushed her chair back and went out into the reception area to greet him. ‘Mr Bianchi?’

      He turned to look at her. ‘Yes.’

      Oh, help. Maybe she should have called him ‘Your Highness’. But he was here in his capacity as a surgeon, not as a prince, so she’d used the convention that surgeons were called ‘Mr’ rather than ‘Dr’. She summoned up her best smile. ‘I’m Kelly Phillips, one of the cardiologists,’ she introduced herself. ‘Sanjay is stuck in meetings all day, so he’s given me a reprieve from paperwork to show you round and introduce you to everyone. And, if you don’t have any other plans, to take you to the canteen for lunch.’

      * * *

      Luc was used to people judging him first as a prince and secondly as a doctor, but maybe at last his reputation at work was starting to take precedence, because Kelly Phillips was definitely treating him as a surgeon and a colleague. He really liked the fact that she’d called him ‘Mr Bianchi’ rather than ‘Prince Luciano’. And, OK, there was an unobtrusive bodyguard with him, because of who he was, but his security detail was discreet. Luc didn’t want to be treated any differently from the other staff on the team. He was here to save lives, just like they were. A doctor first and a prince second: and he thought he could serve his country far better with his medical skills than by doing the job he’d been born to do but his older sister would do so much better.

      ‘Thank you. That would be good,’ he said, holding out his hand to shake hers. ‘Nice to meet you, Kelly. I’m Luc.’

      ‘Nice to meet you, too, Luc. Welcome to the department.’

      She shook his hand, and it felt as if he’d been galvanised. He really hadn’t expected to react so strongly to her, with his skin actually tingling at the contact with hers.

      Then he shook himself.

      Even if she wasn’t already involved with someone, Luc had no intention of letting his relationship with Kelly Phillips become anything other than professional. Until the situation with his father was resolved, it wouldn’t be fair to start dating anyone. He’d already learned the hard way that women who dated the prince didn’t want to date the doctor, and vice versa. The two sides of his life sat uneasily together, and all his relationships seemed to fall through the fault line.

      ‘Thanks for the warm welcome,’ he said.

      ‘It’s a Muswell Hill Memorial Hospital tradition. First stop, staff kitchen,’ she said. ‘Though I’m afraid it’s instant coffee and a kettle, here, rather than a posh coffee machine.’

      Uh-oh. It sounded as if she was starting to see the prince rather than the surgeon. ‘Which makes it much easier to add cold water so you can drink the lot down in one,’ he said with a smile. ‘Between the operating theatre, seeing my patients and drowning in paperwork, I’ll take my caffeine any way I can get it. Instant’s fine.’

      She looked relieved at the reminder that he was just like any other doctor. ‘And there’s a treat shelf. Patients and their families are always bringing in biscuits or cake for us.’

      ‘And then they wince and apologise for buying something so unhealthy, given that half of our patients have been given dietary advice to cut back on sugar and fat?’ Luc asked with a smile.

      ‘I suppose it’s like taking a big tin of chocolates to a gym at Christmas,’ she said with a grin. ‘Though we’re just as grateful for the goodies as the personal trainers are.’

      Because sometimes, after a rough shift, when you’d tried everything and it still wasn’t enough to save your patient, cake and a team hug were the only things that could help stop you falling into a black hole. However much professional detachment you had, losing a patient was always grim. ‘Yes,’ he said softly.

      ‘I assume you’ve already been given your computer login?’ she asked. ‘If not, I’ll ask Mandy to chase it up for you. She’s officially Sanjay’s secretary, but she keeps an eye out for the rest of us. She knows everyone and everything, so she’s the fount of all knowledge, and we keep her in flowers because she keeps us all sane.’

      ‘I’ll remember that,’ he said. ‘Yes, thanks, I’ve got my login, my staff ID and my lanyard.’

      ‘Pick up your locker key from Mandy, and you’re good to go.’ She smiled at him again. And he was going to have to ignore the way his pulse rate kicked up a notch when she smiled.

      The more he heard, the more he liked the sound of his new department. And all his new colleagues turned out to be as warm and friendly as Kelly, instantly accepting him as one of them rather than being slightly suspicious of Prince Luciano’s motives For working in a hospital rather than a palace.

      ‘I think we’re both due in clinic now,’ Kelly said when she’d finished introducing him to everyone, ‘but I’ll meet you back here in Reception at one for lunch. Patients permitting.’

      ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Thank you for showing me round.’

      That handshake had thrown her.

      Ever since Simon’s death, Kelly had kept all her relationships strictly platonic, and she hadn’t so much as looked at another man; she barely joined in with conversations in the staff kitchen about the latest gorgeous movie star. It was partly because she wasn’t ready to move on; and partly because the whole idea of starting over again with someone, falling deeply in love with them and then risking losing them, was too much for her.

      The sensible side of her knew that what had happened with Simon was rare—a life-threatening genetic condition that usually showed symptoms, but in his case it hadn’t. The chances of dating another man with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy were small; the chances of dating another man with HCM who had absolutely no symptoms of chest pain, light-headedness or breathlessness were even