In fact, his hasty assumption that she hadn’t broken up with Freddie was yet another indication of Jago’s jaundiced view of her sex. He was assuming that, despite the kiss they’d shared, she was still going ahead and marrying another man.

She wondered what had happened in his life that made him so cynical about women.

It showed that he still knew very little about her. She would never do a thing like that.

She would never kiss one man and then marry another.

And that was the reason she’d ended her engagement to Freddie the evening before.

She felt slightly guilty about not telling Jago but she hadn’t actually lied, she reassured herself. She just hadn’t told the whole truth.

And why should she?

Jago didn’t love her. All he wanted was a physical affair and she knew that pursuing a relationship with Jago would be a quick route to another broken heart. They just didn’t want the same things in life. So surely she was right to protect herself?

She walked out of the staffroom, reflecting that breaking up with Freddie had been surprisingly painless. Even though initially he’d seemed a little startled by her announcement that she couldn’t marry him, he’d accepted it with a readiness that suggested that he’d been having second thoughts about the wedding himself. She just wished that telling her parents would prove as easy.

She needed to pick the right time to do it but it had to be soon, otherwise they’d hear from other sources.

The morning was incredibly busy but she successfully avoided Jago until lunchtime when the doors to the ambulance bay crashed open and the paramedics rushed in with a small girl on the stretcher.

‘This is Molly Churchman. She’s two years old and she fell out of the bedroom window,’ the paramedic told them, his expression tense and anxious. ‘Bedroom on the first floor—the mother is hysterical.’

Jago reached for the oxygen mask and positioned it carefully over the child’s mouth and nose. He watched carefully, nodding with satisfaction as he saw the mask fog.

‘Her airway is patent and she’s breathing by herself,’ he growled. ‘I want two lines in and I need an estimation of her weight.’

Katy wondered whether it was the sick child or their earlier confrontation that was responsible for the grim expression on his handsome face and the tension in his broad shoulders.

It was probably the child, she decided. Their relationship couldn’t possibly be that important to him.

Charlotte looked up. ‘I asked the mother about her weight but she was too upset to give me a lucid answer.’

‘In that case, use the Oakley Paediatric Resuscitation chart on the wall,’ Jago instructed, and one of the other nurses hurried to do that while he carried on assessing the child. ‘Cervical spine injury is rare in a child of this age but we’ll keep the spine immobilised until we’ve ruled it out.’

There was a flurry of action and Annie came back from examining the chart on the wall. ‘Estimated weight is about 12 kilograms.’