It Started with No Strings...

He knew who Bailey was—the friend who’d been at the salsa club with her—but he really didn’t follow the rest of it. ‘Fine you? Why?’

‘For apologising when I don’t need to.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘You know how people sometimes have a swear jar if they’re trying to give up swearing, and they put money in it every time they swear? Well, I have a sorry jar. I’m banned from using the s-word more than once a day.’ She bit her lip. ‘And I bet I’ve apologised to you twice already today.’

‘Try three.’ He just about managed to hide a grin. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t,’ he said. ‘And, actually, that was what I was going to say. No telling. What happened at the weekend is just between us and has nothing to do with anyone else.’

‘Thank you.’ She looked relieved. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. I mean, in a city the size of London—what are the chances of even bumping into you again, let alone finding out that we’re working together?’

‘Pretty small,’ he agreed. ‘Though I guess, given what we both do for a living, we would’ve met again at some point—maybe through a friend of a friend of a friend.’

‘It’s not even as if infectious and tropical diseases is a common speciality,’ she protested.

‘True. But I bet you know everyone in the emergency department.’

‘I guess I do,’ she admitted. ‘If we haven’t worked together on a case, we’ve met at an inter-departmental do.’

‘As I said. Friend of a friend of a friend.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe we should start again, as if we’ve just met for the first time. Hello. I’m Aaron Hughes, tropical medical specialist. Pleased to meet you.’ He held out his hand.

She shook it, and his skin tingled where she’d touched him. Not good. He really didn’t want to react to her like this. He couldn’t afford any emotional ties.

‘I’m Joni Parker. Also a tropical medical specialist. Pleased to meet you,’ she said.

So she’d been telling the truth about her name on Saturday, then. But ‘Joni’ didn’t start with N, and he was curious. He glanced at her name tag. ‘What does the N stand for?’

‘Nizhoni,’ she said. ‘But my first name’s a bit of a mouthful, so people tend to call me Joni for short.’

‘It’s an unusual name,’ he remarked. Not one he’d ever heard before.

She nodded. ‘It’s a bit exotic.’

‘I guess it goes with your speciality. Also exotic,’ he said. ‘And now I’m going to shut up before I dig myself another hole.’

‘I can’t argue with that. And thank you. For not—well—making a big deal out of it.’ She rewarded him with a real smile. One that made those gorgeous dark eyes light up—and that, in turn, made his blood tingle. Which was a seriously bad idea. He couldn’t afford to let himself get emotionally involved with Joni Parker, no matter how attractive he found her. He’d learned at a young age that keeping his distance was the safe way. The way not to get hurt. Loving someone just led to loss and heartbreak. Keeping your distance was the only way to survive with your heart intact.

‘I guess we both acted out of character,’ he said. ‘And now we’re colleagues. Making a big deal out of what happened is going to make work awkward.’

‘Which is the last thing you need, especially in a new job.’

‘Exactly. And I’m sure you could do without it, too. So today’s the first time we met, OK?’

‘OK,’ she agreed.

‘I think the only difference between here and Manchester,’ he said, ‘is that everyone’s more formal here. I’m used to working on first-name terms with my colleagues.’

‘We do here, too,’ she said. ‘Except for Mr Flinders—he’s a bit of a stickler for formality.’

‘So it’s first-name terms most of the time, and formal around the head of department?’ Aaron asked.

‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘Nancy’s lovely—she’s the senior sister. Most of the team’s been here longer than I have, but we’ve got a couple of others just started—there’s Mikey, our F1 doctor, who’s not sure if he wants to do tropical medicine or emergency for his specialty, so he’s doing a six-month rotation with us to help him make his mind up, and two newly qualified nurses.’ She filled him in on the rest of the team. ‘Actually, we’re a fairly close bunch. We try to get a team night out at least once a month. We take turns in organising it, and there’s a bit of a competition about who can find the most unusual thing to do.’ She gave him the most mischievous grin. ‘I win, at the moment.’

‘What did you do?’ he asked, intrigued.

‘Pizza night,’ she said.

‘And that’s unusual how exactly?’ he asked, not understanding in the slightest. There was practically a pizzeria on every street.

Her grin broadened. ‘It’s unusual if you have to walk through a rainstorm without getting wet first.’

He looked at her, understanding even less. ‘How does that work? You’re telling me you can predict the weather?’

She took pity on him. ‘No, it was an art installation. It’s finished now, or I’d suggest you go, because it was utterly brilliant and I went four times. Basically there were sensors that picked up your movements and stopped the “rain” falling on you. Though that depended on how you moved and how quickly you moved.’

‘That sounds like fun,’ he said.

‘It was. We were like a bunch of kids, trying to get the sensors to rain on us. We tried hopping through the room, waltzing, moonwalking, doing the samba …’ She laughed, and again Aaron felt his blood heat. Hell. Get with the programme, he reminded his head. She’s off limits.

‘We’ve done ice-skating, had a tango lesson—oh, and there’s always food afterwards, whether it’s fish and chips or pizza or a curry. And then there’s the quarterly quiz night with the emergency department. The losing team keeps the winners in chocolate biscuits for a week. I hope you’re good at general knowledge, because we lost the last three.’ She gave him another of those mischievous grins that made him want to pull her into his arms and kiss her. ‘We could really do with a win this time, just to stop them gloating quite so much.’

‘I’m reasonable at general knowledge, but don’t bet the biscuits on me,’ he said, returning the grin. ‘It’s nice that you’re close to other departments.’

‘We are.’ She sighed. ‘But the new hospital director doesn’t quite see it like that. He’s sending a group of us on a team-building exercise in a couple of weeks, to one of those outdoor course places.’

‘It sounds as if you don’t approve,’ he remarked.

‘I think we do a good enough job on our own. If we really need expert help in building a relationship with our colleagues in other departments, that’d make us a pretty sad bunch. And if we really have to have the experts in, then I’d rather get someone to come in for a morning to do a team-building thing in one of the hospital meeting rooms, and spend the rest of the money on the patients, rather than spend all that cash sending teams of staff out to some expensive place.’ She shrugged. ‘But it’s not my call and I guess we have to do what the hospital director says.’

‘I guess,’ he said. ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’

She looked wary. ‘Why?’

‘Just to say thank you for showing me around and telling me pretty much everything I need to know about how the department works,’ he added swiftly.

She smiled, looking relieved; Joni Parker really was an open book, Aaron thought. What you saw was exactly what you got. Clearly she wasn’t used to hiding her emotions, the way he was.

‘You really don’t have to—I’m always happy to show people round—but thank you, a coffee would be lovely. Cappuccino, please, but no chocolate on the top.’

Yeah. He remembered. And he was glad of the excuse to leave their table before he did something reckless. Like asking her out to dinner. Because that would be a really stupid thing to do. They were colleagues. They didn’t need complications like being attracted to each other. Even if she was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever met. He needed to resist these wild, utterly ridiculous urges.

He had to hide a grimace when he brought their coffee back to their table and took a sip of his espresso. And for once he clearly wasn’t that successful in hiding his thoughts because she said, ‘You hate it, don’t you?’

‘I’m a bit of a coffee geek,’ he said. ‘So I’m not answering that one.’

She smiled. ‘In that case, I should warn you that the stuff in the ward kitchen is instant, and it’s not that posh barista-style instant coffee either. It’s whatever happens to be on special offer in the supermarket when Nancy takes the kitty and tops us up on tea and coffee. And the tea’s usually worse than the coffee.’

‘Warning heeded,’ he said.

‘So how did you get to be a coffee geek?’

It was a personal question, but not an emotional one, so he didn’t mind answering. ‘I worked as a barista while I was a student. And it was at an indie coffee house, not a chain. My boss was a super-geek—the coffee equivalent of a wine buff. I learned a lot from him.’

‘Hence your posh coffee machine.’ Joni blushed. ‘Um. The one I’m only guessing about, that is. I wouldn’t know anything about your kitchen.’

He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Of course.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘We’d better go. Clinic’s in fifteen minutes.’

A convenient excuse, he thought. And one that suited him, too. Because he’d discovered that the more time he spent with Joni Parker, the more he liked her. Which wasn’t what was supposed to happen. And it could be seriously dangerous to his peace of mind.

Bailey had called Aaron ‘Hot Guy’ at the salsa club. But at the hospital Aaron was even more gorgeous, Joni thought. She’d always had a soft spot for geeky guys—she would’ve picked Clark Kent over Superman any day—and, in his white coat and with those narrow-rimmed glasses, Aaron would definitely count as geeky.

Though he was also way, way out of her league.

So remembering the way he’d made her feel on Saturday night was totally stupid. He’d been the one to bring up the subject in the hospital cafeteria, and he’d made it very clear that he had no intention of repeating what had happened between them. And she knew he was making the right call: any kind of relationship between colleagues who worked together, apart from a professional one, could make life way too awkward for the rest of the team.

It would be much more sensible to keep her distance.

And she’d focus on being professional.

Their third patient in the TB clinic that afternoon was a nineteen-year-old girl who’d taken a gap year before starting university and had worked at a school in Borneo.

‘I’ve been home a couple of months,’ Cara said, ‘but for the last month I’ve been coughing a lot. I’ve tried about ten different sorts of cough mixture but none of them works and I just can’t get rid of it.’ She bit her lip. ‘Then last week I started coughing up icky stuff, and there was blood in it. I panicked a bit and Mum dragged me off to the family doctor. He …’ She caught her breath. ‘Mum looked it up on the Internet. It’s a sign of cancer. And so’s losing weight without trying. And I’ve been really hot and sweaty at night.’

‘Have you been eating normally?’ Joni asked, thinking about the weight loss.

‘I haven’t been feeling that hungry,’ Cara admitted. ‘And I’m tired all the time. Mum says that’s a symptom of cancer, too.’

‘Losing your appetite and being tired can be symptoms of a lot of other things, not just cancer,’ Aaron said gently, reaching out to take her hand. ‘It’s good that the Internet is making people aware of their health, but sometimes you can really scare yourself with what you read, so it’s always a good idea to go and check with your doctor to stop yourself worrying unnecessarily.’

‘The doctor sent me for an X-ray. I think he thought it might be cancer, too.’ She shivered. ‘I’m nineteen. I’m too young for this.’

‘As Mr Hughes said, there could be lots of things causing your symptoms,’ Joni said gently. ‘Your family doctor sent you for that X-ray so he could start to rule things out, not because he was sure it was cancer. And I can tell you that as a doctor I normally start by ruling out the nasty stuff, because I don’t want my patients worrying any longer than they need to.’

Cara nodded. ‘The guy who did the X-ray said there weren’t any signs of a tumour. But he said there were white patches on my lungs and it might be TB.’

‘That’s why he sent you to us for the next lot of tests—TB comes under tropical medicine and infectious diseases,’ Joni explained.

Aaron brought up the X-ray file and turned the screen so Cara could see it, too. ‘There is some scarring on your lungs, here and here, and those white patches are a classic symptom of TB. Plus you mentioned those other symptoms—night sweats, loss of appetite and losing weight. That’s all adding up to a picture for me.’ He looked at the screen. ‘I see that your family doctor also sent you for a skin test.’

‘Last week.’ She frowned. ‘But I don’t see how it can be TB. I don’t even know anyone who’s ever had TB. I mean, I didn’t think people even got it any more. How could I get it?’

‘TB is a bacterial infection, and it’s still pretty prevalent in parts of the world,’ Aaron explained. ‘It’s spread by droplets—coughs, sneezes, that sort of thing. It can affect the lungs, which is why it makes people cough and why your doctor sent you for an X-ray to check your lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. That’s why we need to check you out here. Not everyone who has TB is infectious, so you won’t catch it by just sitting next to someone on a train—but if you share a room with someone who has TB then there’s much more of a chance of you picking it up. And you said you’ve spent a few months in Borneo, yes?’

She nodded. ‘Three months, working as a teacher.’

‘Borneo has quite a high rate of infection, so if your skin test is positive then I’d guess that’s where you picked it up.’

Cara looked worried. ‘I shared a room with some of the other students working out there. Does that mean they might be infected, too?’

‘Either one of them infected you, or if you picked it up from somewhere else then you might have infected them,’ Joni said. ‘So it would be a good idea to get in touch with them and ask them to go and see their doctor to get themselves checked out.’

‘I don’t have everyone’s number,’ Cara said. ‘But I can call the agency that did the placements and ask them to pass on an urgent message to everyone.’ She bit her lip. ‘Oh, God. I feel so bad that I might’ve passed this on to other people.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Joni said. ‘You didn’t know you were ill, and TB takes a while to show up.’

‘So you had the skin test on Friday?’ Aaron asked, double-checking her notes. At Cara’s nod, he examined her lower arm. ‘There’s definitely a hard red lump there, so the skin test is positive.’ He measured the lump and Joni updated Cara’s notes with the details. ‘I’ll need you to do a sputum test for me as well, but we have to culture the bacteria so it’ll take a couple of weeks to get the results back.’

‘So what happens while we wait for the results?’ Cara asked.

‘I’m pretty sure from the results of the skin test, plus what I can see on the X-ray and the symptoms you’ve described, that you have TB. So I’d like to start treatment now,’ Aaron said.

‘The good news is that you can be treated at home—you don’t have to stay in hospital,’ Joni added, seeing the flicker of dread on Cara’s face. ‘We’ll give you a course of antibiotics. You need to take two different types to make sure the infection clears up.’

‘You’ll start to feel better after a couple of weeks,’ Aaron said, ‘but it’s really important for you to keep taking the medication for the next six months and don’t stop taking it just because you’re feeling better.’

‘Six months?’ Cara looked shocked.

‘Six months,’ Aaron confirmed. ‘Otherwise the infection won’t clear up and the bacteria might become resistant to the antibiotics we give you. If that happens, it will take even longer to clear up.’

‘OK. I promise I’ll take the medication, even after I feel better,’ Cara said.

‘Good. Sometimes people get side effects from the antibiotics,’ Joni told her. ‘If you do, you need to come back and see us so we can change the medication you’re on to something that will deal with the TB but won’t give you the side effects.’

‘So that’s if you feel nauseous or you’re actually sick, if you get a rash or itching, or you have any numbness or tingling in your hands or feet,’ Aaron said. ‘And I’d want you to come straight back and see us if your skin goes a bit yellow and your urine’s dark, or you start getting blurred vision.’

Cara looked worried. ‘Blurred vision?’

‘It’s one side effect, but we can sort it out. I know it’s a lot to take in, but we’ll give you a leaflet with all this information so you can talk it over with your mum,’ Joni said. ‘As well as a leaflet with advice on how to stop TB spreading to your family, friends or anyone you’re in contact with at work or college. You need to cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze or laugh, and put any used tissues in a sealed plastic bag. And don’t sleep in the same room as anyone else, as you might cough or sneeze in your sleep.’

‘Because that’s how it spreads,’ Cara said.

‘Exactly. For now, you need to stay at home—we’ll see you once a fortnight and keep an eye on you, and we’ll tell you when it’s safe to go back to work or college,’ Aaron said. ‘If you’re worried at any time, just come and see us or give us a call.’ He wrote the prescription while Joni printed off the patient information notes for Cara.

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