The Rebel Doc. Susan Carlisle

      The all-too-familiar anger rippled through her. ‘Drunk. On whisky and power.’

      ‘Oh.’ He started to stroke over the scars that snaked round her foot, her ankle, her calf, the knobbly, mottled skin more sensitive to his touch. And again she tried to pull away. How many men had flinched at the sight of it? How many had laughed at her? How long had she endured the teasing at school and beyond? The revulsion? His eyes widened. ‘That’s a real shame. I’m so sorry.’

      ‘Don’t be. It’s in the past.’

      He let her foot down then settled himself on the other end of the couch. Lifted her foot again and continued to stroke it as if it was the most normal thing he’d ever done. He smelt of dark brown Betadine, that distinctive hospital smell, but over-laced with his own particular scent of spice and pure raw man. ‘But you are still affected by it, Ivy, I can see.’

      ‘Plenty of people have worse than this, you only have to spend a day in this hospital to see that. It doesn’t hurt much.’ Actually, it did. Not a day or an hour went by without pain, but talking about it made it worse. What had hurt much more had been the reaction from everyone else. Cripple. Ugly. Time-waster. Her own mother hadn’t been bothered enough to listen, to care, to fight.

      ‘But that’s why you’re here, doing this job.’

      ‘Yes.’ She twisted round and leant back on the arm of the sofa to get comfortable. As if having a man like Matteo touching her skin would ever be a comfortable experience. It was terrifying. It was lovely. ‘Sure, that’s my calling. Righting the wrongs. Capturing the evildoers and taking them to task. Saving the world. Maybe I should get a cape too. Super-Lawyer.’

      ‘Sure, you’d look cute in Lycra. We could be a dynamic duo. But now I understand a lot more about you.’ He paused, waited until the smile had faded. ‘And he apologised, this man?’

      ‘The surgeon? Never. But he was eventually struck off after he got caught doing a similar thing—maybe six years later. Turns out he was a serial drunk and had hurt a lot of people over the years.’

      ‘And the man who was swinging you round and round?’ His face darkened. ‘You went through too much because of him.’

      She thought about how much to say. Did it matter? Was she breaking any of her own cardinal rules by just talking to Matteo? It was only words. She could do words easily. She just didn’t have such a great handle on emotions. Especially not these new ones—desire, lust, need.

      ‘My mum married him. They all said it was my fault for wriggling while he was swinging me. Said he thought my screams were because I was having fun, not because I was frightened. And Mum was so bowled over by him she believed anything he said. She wasn’t interested in my version of events, or in seeking any recompense from the surgeon, or to try make sure he didn’t maim anyone else’s kid.’ It was all too much trouble.

      ‘So that’s why you distrust people too. Ah, you are textbook.’ He raised his eyebrows and wagged a finger at her.

      She grabbed it and twisted slightly. ‘Glad I’m so transparent when I thought I was much more complex.’

      ‘And twelve more surgeries?’

      She shrugged, trying at the same time to shrug off the memory and the pain she’d endured time after time after time. And learning to walk. Over and over. ‘Yep. Internal fixations, pins, plates. Infected wound debriding … You could say I was more of an in-patient than an out-patient for a lot of my growing up. It got to the point that I used to take myself to my out-patient appointments on the bus on my own.’

      ‘As a child?’

      ‘As a young girl. A teenager. Mum wasn’t very good at the parenting details of being a mother. There were always too many other things for her to do …’ Or, rather, men to pursue. Relationships to sort out. Dramas. Lots and lots of dramas. Unfortunately, not one of them had involved looking after the only child she’d ever had. ‘It was just easier to do it on my own than try to rely on her. Although, obviously, she had to come to sign the consent forms for the surgeries, but she didn’t tend to hang around much.’

      It had always felt as if it had been just too much of a hassle for her. That her needs had been a hindrance to her mother’s social life. Until, that was, every time her mother’s life had imploded, and then she’d clung to Ivy the way she’d clung to her husbands—with the desperate, all-consuming need that they all learned to despise in the end. The need that Ivy had seen once too often in her friends—the need for a man that overwhelmed them.

      So she’d vowed never to be like that. Ever. Never to let a man take over, to take so much of her that there was too little left. But she didn’t feel in any danger of that happening with Dr Delicious here—she knew exactly the score with him. He was the kind of guy who didn’t offer any promises, and that was just fine, because she didn’t want any.

      The stroking of his hands had become more intense, the sensation he instilled reaching more than just her leg. It was travelling through her, heating every part of her. He nodded. ‘So this is why you’re so independent and argumentative? Because you want justice. And because you need to be heard. Because your mum let you down.’

      She thought about it, and, yes, he was probably right, but she didn’t want him to know that. Like a lot of things, it was easier to shove them deep down than face them. ‘I suppose you could say that my relationship with my mother is as broken as my foot.’ In fact, the thought of even discussing anything other than the weather with her mum brought Ivy out in hives. As far as she was concerned, it was better to be on her own than risk her heart again. A girl could only take so much emotional fallout.

      ‘Thanks for the psychology lecture. But I’m just who I am, Poison Ivy, who won’t tolerate defective people thinking they’re immune to the law or to recrimination. Or surgeons who think they’re God. Or people who don’t take me seriously. Okay, so I’ve learnt to be like this, but I’m not ashamed of it.’

      ‘You are Ivy. Yes. And you are stronger for your experiences.’

      ‘And do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about them before.’ Not in so much detail. So God only knew what the hell that meant. That she’d exposed her weakness, not only allowed him to see her scars but discussed them too.

      Suddenly she felt a little vulnerable. She shrugged her foot from out of his hand and scuttled her feet under her bum as she sat up, inadvertently shuffling closer to him as she resettled herself. ‘So, please, please, don’t say anything to anyone, I don’t really want this to be hospital gossip. Every surgeon’s going to think I’m on some kind of witch hunt and I’m not at all. I just want to do my job to the best of my ability, and scuttling out dodgy surgeons is only a tiny part of it. The rest is to put systems in place to prevent these things happening again.’

      He frowned. ‘Of course. But the scarring and the injury are hardly something you should be ashamed of.’

      ‘If you’d seen the cruel reaction of the kids I grew up with, and then the men I dated who wanted tabloid perfect, you wouldn’t be saying that.’

      ‘Then they are all idiots.’

      Yes. Maybe they were. And so was she for being taken in by his words. By his touch. By the way he sounded so unlike every man she’d ever dated—his words like a salve to her wounds. By the little dimple in the cleft of his chin. And by that tiny frozen part of her that had started to thaw, just a little, leaving her open and vulnerable.

      She did not want this. Did not have space in her life for this. And, really, she should have stood up and left, but she reached to him anyway, placed her hand over his. Because it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. ‘Thank you. That was a nice thing to say.’

      ‘My pleasure.’ His hand cupped her face and he looked at her with such intensity that her heart beat a wild staccato against her ribcage. ‘So don’t be so hard on yourself.’

      He was just being kind in that Italian way of his.