I stop and take a long look at the man I’ve just accidentally assaulted. My self-control, which I’m determined to improve, dissolves like sugar in boiling water. The drama of the recent weeks somehow fades away. I stare at the vision in front of me, and my pulse rate shoots up to about a hundred and fifty.

‘Oh my God!’ I exclaim. ‘Lucas!’

He starts laughing, and my heart beats even faster. The soundtrack of my life immediately starts playing the Grey’s Anatomy theme. I’m standing in an emergency department in scrubs stained with old blood and other unmentionable bodily fluids about to struggle through a painfully long shift, but I feel as if I’ve been instantly transported to Seattle Grace.

Dr Lucas Lang is without a doubt the sexiest, most charismatic, most charming man I’ve ever met. If Dr Prince is my Dr McDreamy, Lucas is Dr McSteamy. He’s a cardiothoracic surgeon, and I was under him (not in the fun way, sadly) when I was a medical student. It’s probably no surprise that I finished cardiothoracics thinking that I definitely wanted to be a heart surgeon. This was misguided—I soon realised that my true ambition was to sleep with the man wielding the scalpel. He’d let me come into the theatre to watch him operate a few times, and after every single encounter I left feeling I had been on a journey of sexual discovery without actually having sex.

Fast-forward to the present day and amazingly, I realise as I admire the very fine specimen standing in front of me, I still feel the same. Lucas Lang inspires feelings of raw sexual hunger in me, made even more tantalisingly painful because I know they’ll never be sated.

We walk into the emergency department together, chatting.

‘How come you’re not doing cardiothoracics?’ he asks.

‘I haven’t been given a term,’ I reply.

‘You were a great student,’ he says, smiling. ‘You should think about it.’

‘That’s very kind of you to say,’ I tell him, ‘but you don’t have to.’

He looks surprised. ‘I mean it.’

His eyes are a bright honey-brown, and I find myself growing rather lost in them.

‘Hey, look,’ he says, as I’m wondering how to respond, ‘the department is having a dinner this Friday night, for the registrars who are finishing up and for anyone else who might be interested in applying for cardiothoracics. Maybe you should come.’

I almost shout, ‘No!’, remembering how my last dinner with surgeons ended, but catch myself just in time.

‘Have you thought about what you want to do?’

I sigh. ‘No, not really … The only thing I really want to do is spend six months lying on a beach somewhere in the Mediterranean.’

He laughs. ‘You haven’t changed.’