Australian Affairs: Claimed: Dr Chandler's Sleeping Beauty / Countering His Claim / Australia's Maverick Millionaire

‘Is everything all right?’ the patient lying on the bed asked worriedly. ‘I’m not going to die, am I?’

Kitty forced a cool professional smile to her stiff features. ‘No, Mr Jenkins,’ she said. ‘You have a small haematoma that will take a day or two to subside. The skin isn’t broken, so there’s a slim to none chance of infection. You’re not showing any signs of a concussion, but you need to take things easy over the next day or so. Don’t drive, operate heavy machinery or consume alcohol for the next twenty-four hours.’

‘Thanks, Doctor,’ the man said. ‘The wife will kill me if I cark it now. We’ve got a cruise booked for next month. We’ve been saving up for it for five years.’

‘You’ll be fine by then,’ Kitty said, patting his arm before she left the cubicle.

During her lunch break Kitty went in search of Jake Chandler, but he wasn’t on the floor or in either of the doctors’ rooms. He was in his office. She felt every eye following her as she made her way through the unit. She had been the subject of hospital gossip before. Her break-up with Charles had done the rounds. It had been excruciating to know everyone was talking about her private life in such lurid detail. She had felt so exposed; so raw and vulnerable. She knew it would only have got worse after Charles’s wedding so she had decided to take herself out of the picture. But it seemed that even on the other side of the world people with pathetically small lives thought it sport to speculate on the lives of others. She didn’t have the option of running away this time. She would have to face it and deal with it.

She took a calming breath and rapped firmly on the door.

‘Come in, Dr Cargill.’

Kitty’s hand stilled where it rested on the doorknob. So he had been expecting her, had he? What was he playing at? Was this his idea of a joke? Did he have nothing better to do than make a laughing-stock out of her?

She pulled her shoulders back and kept her chin up, and turned the knob and entered the office, closing the door with a resounding click behind her. ‘I hate to interrupt you when you’re busy, but—’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve ordered the invitations, and I know a really cool florist who’ll do the flowers for mate’s rates, not retail.’

Kitty blinked. ‘Pardon?’

‘The wedding,’ he said indolently, swivelling his office chair from side to side.

‘Wedding?’ She frowned until her forehead ached. ‘What wedding?’

His blue eyes shone with amusement. ‘Ours,’ he said. ‘Apparently we’re engaged and expecting triplets.’

She felt her jaw drop. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

He smiled a breath-stealing smile. ‘Gossip,’ he said. ‘You only have to look at someone around here and people start planning the guest list for the wedding.’

Kitty opened and closed her mouth, totally lost for words.

‘Apparently we were caught canoodling,’ he said.

‘Canoodling?’

He gave her a been-there-asked-that look. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I looked it up in the dictionary. It means to kiss and cuddle amorously.’

‘But we didn’t do any such thing!’ she blurted.

He lifted one of his broad shoulders up and down in a casual shrug. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It looked like it. That’s enough to set the tongues wagging around here. No one believes me when I tell them I was actually saving your life.’

‘You weren’t saving my life,’ she said, sending him an affronted glare. ‘I wasn’t drowning.’

‘And I wasn’t kissing and cuddling you amorously, but there you go,’ he said. ‘What’s done is done.’

Kitty clenched her fists by her sides. ‘Then it will have to be undone,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t want people speculating on my private life.’

‘Relax,’ he said. ‘They’ll find someone else to talk about soon enough.’

She strode over and slammed her hands on the desk in front of him, leaning forward to drive home her point. ‘Relax?’ she said. ‘How can I relax? I heard two nurses talking about me in the next cubicle while I was with a patient. I was totally mortified. They called me a slut. They said I’d staged it the night I brought my cousin into A&E just to get your attention.’

His eyes took their merry time meeting hers, taking a sensual detour to the shadow of her cleavage, which she had inadvertently exposed to him. She quickly straightened, but it was too late. She could see the gleam of male appraisal in the depths of his dark blue gaze as it met with hers. The temperature of her skin went up to blistering hot and a hollow feeling opened up in her stomach.

‘I’ll have a word with them and put them straight,’ he said. ‘And if I hear any further gossip I’ll categorically deny we have anything going on.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, pressing her lips together for a moment. ‘I would appreciate it.’

He leaned back in his chair with a squeak of vinyl. ‘Just for the record, Dr Cargill,’ he said. ‘Next time you come in here you’d better not close the door.’

‘Pardon?’

He nodded towards the door behind her which she had clicked shut on her entry. ‘You know how people’s minds work,’ he said. ‘A man and a woman in an office together behind a closed door…Who knows what they might get up to.’

Kitty’s cheeks exploded with colour. ‘That might be how other people’s minds work but it’s certainly not the way mine operates,’ she said.

A lazy smile lurked around the edges of his mouth. ‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘Nice to know there’s still some innocence in this big, bad old world of ours.’

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You think I’m naive and inexperienced, don’t you?’ she asked.

He pushed back his chair and sauntered over to the office door, standing with a hand on the doorknob without turning it. ‘I think, Dr Cargill,’ he said, ‘that you should get back to work before someone comes looking for you. We don’t want any more gossip circulating about us, do we?’

Kitty snatched in a quick unsteady breath. She could smell his clean citrus and wood smell. She could see the individual pinpricks of his cleanly shaven jaw. She could see the sensual contours of his sinfully tempting mouth. She could see the flare of those ink-black pupils in the dark blue sea of his eyes. She was barely aware of sending her tongue out to moisten her lips until she saw those sapphire-blue eyes drop to her mouth to track the movement.

Something tightened in the air.

It was an invisible energy, a force Kitty could feel passing over the entire surface of her skin, disrupting the nerves inside and out, making them super-aware and super-sensitive.

She became aware of the deep thudding of her heart: a boom, boom, boom sensation inside her ribcage that was almost audible.

His eyes moved from her mouth to mesh with hers in a heart-stopping little lockdown that sent her senses into a tailspin. ‘You know, there is an alternative to handling this situation we find ourselves in,’ he said, in a deep and husky tone that sent a shower of reaction down her spine.

‘Th-there is?’ she said in an equally raspy voice.

His eyes went to her mouth again, resting there an infinitesimal moment before meeting her eyes once more. ‘Instead of denying it we could say it’s true,’ he said. ‘Then everyone will stop speculating about us.’

Kitty blinked. ‘But…but it’s not true.’

One side of his mouth tilted. ‘I know, but only we would know that.’

She frowned. ‘So you’re saying we should pretend we’re having a fling just to stop people gossiping about us?’ she asked.

‘It could work,’ he said. ‘It’ll stop the “are they?” or “aren’t they?” comments.’

Kitty made a little scoffing sound. ‘But you’re not my type. I would never in a million years date someone like you.’

‘Same goes.’