Sydney Harbour Hospital: Lily's Scandal. Marion Lennox

at all.

      His glance had unnerved her.

      Luke Williams was a womanising surgeon, she told herself. She was here as a temporary nurse, knowing no one, wanting to know no one.

      But his gaze …

      It did something to her insides. Twisted …

      She didn’t have time for anything to twist.

      Work. Anonymity. Just do what comes next.

      At five in the morning she was totally drained.

      ‘Go home,’ Dr Lockheart told her. ‘We’ve thrown you in at the deep end tonight. I know you’re not off duty until six but no one’s expecting anything more of you now.

      ‘And if you’d like to change agency nursing for permanent nursing at the Harbour, you’d be very, very welcome,’ Elaine said warmly. ‘Dr Williams is already asking that you be made a permanent member of the plastics team.’

      ‘I don’t want to be a permanent member of anything,’ she said wearily, and went to change and fetch her gear from her locker.

      Home.

      Problem. She didn’t actually have a home. Not until ten o’clock.

      She’d arrived in Sydney yesterday, fresh from her mother’s dramas, wanting only to escape.

      Her mother was, even by Lily’s dutiful daughter standards, an impossible woman. She drifted from drama to drama, and the small town they lived in had labelled her as trash, for good reason. She wasn’t trash, Lily thought. She was … needy. She needed men. And in between needing men, she needed Lily.

      This last fling, though, had pushed the townspeople to the limit. It had pushed Lily to the limit. Two days ago—had it really been only two days ago?—the wife of the local vicar, a woman who was also the head of the hospital board, had stormed into Lighthouse Cove hospital and slapped her. As if her mother’s actions were Lily’s fault.

      ‘Get your mother away from my husband. You and your mother … She’s a slut and you’re no better. She needs a leash! You think you can be a respectable nurse in this town while your mother acts as the town’s whore?’ She’d slapped Lily again. A couple of patients’ relatives had had to pull her away and she’d collapsed in shock and in fury. Lily had caught her as she’d fallen, stopped her from hurting herself, but there had been no gratitude. No softening of the vitriol.

      Why would there be?

      ‘Get out of my sight,’ the woman had hissed as she’d recovered. ‘Get out of our hospital. Get out of our town.’

      She’d had no right to sack her. It was her mother who’d played the scarlet woman, not her.

      But in a tiny town distinctions blurred.

      She’d sat in the nurses’ station with her stomach cramping, feeling sick, knowing she couldn’t live with this stress a moment longer. She was being unfairly tarred with the same brush as her mother, and she knew she didn’t deserve it. But it was a small town and so far she’d always stuck up for her mother … that couldn’t go on.

      On the way home she’d stopped to buy groceries. Walking into the general store had been a nightmare. Shocked, judgmental faces had been everywhere.

      The Ellis women.

      Then she’d tried to use her card to pay for groceries. ‘Declined: Limit exceeded.’

       Her mother had been using her credit card?

      Speechless, she’d gone home and there was the vicar, pudgy, weak and shamefaced, but totally besotted with her mother.

      ‘Make yourself scarce for a while, there’s a good girl,’ her mother had said. ‘We need time to ourselves. It’ll be okay, dear,’ she’d cooed as Lily had tried to figure what to do, what to say. ‘We were going to go to Paris but we’ve run out of money. It doesn’t matter. If Harold can just borrow a little bit more from his relatives we’ll leave. We’re in love and everyone just needs time to accept it.’

      Enough. What had followed had been the world’s fastest pack. She’d driven eight hundred and fifty miles from Adelaide to Sydney. A seventeen-hour drive, her stomach cramping all the way. She’d had cat naps at the side of the road, or she’d tried to, but sleep had refused to come. She’d arrived in Sydney late in the afternoon, trying to figure how she could survive on what little money she had.

      She’d walked into the nursing agency before it had closed and they’d fallen on her neck.

      ‘All your documents and references are in order. There’s a job tonight, if you’re available. Sydney Harbour Hospital is desperate.’

      She’d found a cheap boarding house, dumped her luggage and booked accommodation for the next night. That was tonight, she thought, glancing at her watch. She could have the room from ten.

      But it was five hours until ten o’clock, and she was so tired she was asleep on her feet.

      Her stomach hurt.

      She stared at her locker, trying to make her mind think. The thought of finding an all-hours café until then made her feel ill. There’d be an on-call room somewhere for medical staff, she thought. Probably there’d be a few. There’d be rooms for obstetricians waiting for babies. Rooms for surgeons waiting for their turn in complex multi-specialist procedures.

      Rooms to sleep?

      Just for a couple of hours, she thought. Just until it was a reasonable time to find breakfast and book into her boarding house.

      Just for now.

      He had a whole hour of thinking he’d done it right. One lousy hour and then the phone went off beside his bed.

      ‘Problem.’ It was Finn. Of course it was Finn—when did the man ever sleep?

      When did Finn ever wake him when it wasn’t a full-blown emergency? Luke was hauling his pants on before Finn’s next words.

      ‘It’s Jessie,’ Finn snapped. ‘It seems he has a congenital heart problem. No one thought to tell us, not that it would have made a difference to what you did anyway. His heart’s failing. You want to come in or you want me to deal?’

      ‘I’m on my way.’

      She woke and he was right beside her. Luke Williams, plastic surgeon. He looked like he’d just seen death.

      The on-call room was tiny, one big squishy settee, a television, a coffee table with ancient magazines and nothing else. She’d curled into a corner of the couch and fallen asleep. Until now.

      The man beside her wasn’t seeing her. He was staring at the blank television screen, gaze unfocused.

      She’d never seen a man look so bleak.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ she breathed, and touched his arm.

      He flinched.

      ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was harsh. Breaking. It was emotion that had woken her, she thought. Raw grief, filling the room like a tangible thing.

      ‘I don’t get into my boarding house until ten,’ she told him. ‘So I’m camped out, waiting. But what is it? Jessie?’

      ‘He died,’ he said, and all the bleakness in the world was in those two words. ‘Cardiac arrest. He had a congenital heart problem and no one thought to tell us. As if we had time to look for records. The admission officer didn’t even read the form, she was too upset. We patched him up, we made him look like he might even be okay, and all the time his heart was like a time bomb.’

      ‘There was no choice,’ she managed, appalled.

      ‘There was a choice. If I’d known … I could have taken the flap off, thought about grafts later, concentrated on getting his heart stable first.’

      She took a deep breath.