Maybe it wasn’t a fling? Maybe it was a tumbling, stumbling, impossibly crazy love-at-first-sight situation with a woman from another world? After the night they’d shared, the rapport he’d found again, the attraction he felt for her despite his guilt, the thought of not having her body next to his when he went back to his hotel this morning had driven him to stand here. Waiting. In full view of everyone.

Where was the voice whispering hints that he was overreacting?

Where was the voice saying stop?

Nowhere.

The door from maternity opened and Ava’s chin lifted at the sight of him. A beam of mischievous promise swirled in those blue eyes as a tingle of recognition and reciprocation zinged along his not-so-tired-now limbs and down into his gut. With a look?

As she came closer, he held up his hand with a hint of apology. ‘Can we meet for breakfast? My hotel? Maybe talk?’

Her brows twitched. ‘Talk? As in, tell me we’re both going to work in the same ward and pretend we don’t know each other?’ He heard the scepticism, but he didn’t miss that her beautiful mouth lifted at the corner. He had to give her that one. It had been a shock. And there was the distinct possibility that talk might not happen at all if they spent time together.

But she hadn’t finished. ‘And promising me food again?’ She smiled.

He warmed under the promise of her curved lips and couldn’t help smiling back at her. ‘I guarantee I’ll supply breakfast this time. We both need the sustenance.’ And he needed to talk to her. Get to know her. Hell, he hadn’t asked any real questions about her family, her life. He promised himself they would eat before he took her back to his bed. If she’d come.

She’d crinkled her eyes at him in disbelief when he said ‘breakfast’. But she did say, ‘Sure. Your shout.’

His gut kicked with a different kind of hunger as she slid into place beside him, her hips swinging next to his as they walked a little too quickly towards his hire car. His heart pounded like a young jock’s, not like one belonging to a widower of thirty. Desperately, daringly, his fingers itched to take her hand. But he didn’t.

Ava was the opposite to Roslyn: sun-blonde hair, not black; thick, sensible ponytail holding the masses of unruly hair away from her face instead of sculptured helmet style; and blue eyes that soothed the world, which he could lose or find himself in.

So self-sufficient. Self-reliant. Self-everything. He’d never seen anybody so quietly, unobtrusively confident and competent regardless of the disasters being enacted around her. Even those disasters he set in place.