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FEMALE SURGEON TAKES BAMPTON AWARD

Ms Stanfield’s meteoric rise in the male-dominated field of surgery was recognised last week. Journal’s ‘on the ground’ photographer snapped Ms Stanfield wearing last season’s black suit (right), and we’re left wondering if rather than taking the ‘Old Boys’ Club’ by storm she’s actually joined it. Rumour has it she’s in negotiations with two prestigious hospitals for Chief of Surgery.

POPPY STANFIELD’S 6:00 a.m. sip of Saturday coffee turned bitter in her mouth as she read the five-line article on the back page of the Perth newspaper. She didn’t give a damn about the bitchy comment on her cinch-waisted black suit but how the hell had the gossip columnist found out about the job interviews? One job interview especially—the one she’d very carefully and deliberately kept quiet because it was hard enough being female in this business, let alone having the temerity to want a top job. A top job she was determined to get one way or another, which was why she’d applied for the post of Chief of Surgery at Southgate as well as Perth City, the hospital she currently worked for.

And now ‘one way’ was her only remaining option.

Her disappointed gaze caught sight of the envelope with the Southgate crest that had arrived yesterday containing a letter with the words ‘unsuccessful candidate’. She hadn’t read past them because there’d been no point. Poppy Stanfield didn’t lose, she just regrouped and planned a new strategy. It would have been a huge coup to land the Southgate job ahead of the Perth City one, but the interview panel had been hostile from the moment she’d walked in.

The Bampton win had ruffled more than a few feathers in surgical ranks, and the media attention had been unexpected. The memory of the ditzy and pen-less journalist, with hair flying, who’d arrived late to interview her, sent a sliver of irritation down her spine. Poppy reread the article and the bald, incriminating words. Hell, why hadn’t she spent more time with the journalist instead of rushing through the interview?

The faint echo of mocking laughter sounded deep down inside her. You spend all your time at work and when have you ever really spent time with anyone?

Steven.

Her phone chirped loudly, making her jump. Given it was 6:00 a.m., the call was most likely the hospital needing her for an urgent consult and absolutely nothing to do with this tiny article buried in the centre of the paper. Yes, an emergency consult would be the best scenario. The worst scenario would be—Stop right there. She refused to contemplate the worst scenario, but still she checked the screen before answering it.

She groaned into her hand. The name of the hospital’s executive medical officer and her current boss blinked at her in inky and unforgiving black. Damage control. Tilting her head back and bringing her chin up, she answered the call with a firm, crisp greeting. ‘Hello, William.’

‘Poppy.’ The professor spoke her name as if it pained his tongue to roll over the combination of letters. ‘I’ve just seen the paper.’

Show no weakness. ‘You must be pleased.’ She ignored the vividly clear picture of him in her mind—tight face and stern mouth—the way he always looked when he believed a staff member had let him down. She infused her voice with enthusiasm. ‘It was an excellent article about your groundbreaking in utero surgery.’

‘It was, and surprisingly accurate, but that’s not the article I’m referring to.’

No way was she admitting to anything so she let the deliberate silence ride, biting her lip not to say a word.

William continued. ‘In your thank-you speech at the Bampton awards you said you were committed to Perth City.’

She pushed the Southgate envelope under the paper and out of sight. ‘Absolutely. City’s given me every opportunity.’ The words of her speech flowed out smoothly, in stark contrast to the reality, which had involved her fighting to get into the surgery programme, working harder and longer hours than her male counterparts and ignoring the advice that surgery took beautiful young women and turned them into ugly old ones. She’d stopped thinking of herself as a woman long ago and with it had gone the dream of marriage and a family of her own. ‘Should the board see fit, it would be an honour to serve as the Chief of Surgery.’

‘An honour?’

His tone bristled with sarcasm, which Poppy ignored. ‘Yes, indeed, and as I outlined in my interview with the board, I can start immediately and provide a seamless transition period before Gareth leaves for Brisbane.’

‘The board’s still deliberating on the best person for the position.’ His voice dripped with disapproval. ‘But I’m reassured by your commitment to the hospital, and by knowing how much of an honour you consider it to be working for the WA Healthcare Network.’

She let go of a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. ‘Excellent.’

‘So it stands to reason that you were the first person we thought of when Bundallagong Hospital requested a visiting surgeon.’

‘Excuse me?’ Of all the possible things she might have anticipated him saying, that wasn’t one of them.

‘Bundallagong Hospital.’ William repeated the name slowly, a hint of humour skating along the cool steel of his voice, as if he was party to a private joke.

Her brain stalled, trying to think why the name of the town was vaguely familiar, and with a start she frantically flicked the pages of the paper open until she found the weather map. Her gasp of surprise was too quick for her mouth to stifle. ‘But that’s fifteen hundred kilometres away!’

‘Or nine hundred and thirty-two miles, which is why they need a visiting surgeon for three months.’

Years of well-honed control started to unravel. ‘William, this is ridiculous. Sending me out into the boonies is only going to make the day-to-day running at City even tighter than it is.’ ‘We’ve allowed for that.’

Her stomach clenched at his terse tone. ‘We’ve been chasing staff for over a year and what? Now you’ve just pulled a surgeon out of a hat?’

‘One of the east coast applicants will fill your position while you’re away.’

The staccato delivery of his words shot down the line like gunfire and she rocked back as if she’d been hit. The board was deliberately sending her away so they could observe her opposition in action without her being around to counteract any fallout. Incandescent fury flowed through her. ‘And let me guess, that surgeon would be male.’

A sharp intake of breath sounded down the line. ‘Poppy, you know I can’t disclose information like that. Besides, as you’ve always pointed out, gender is irrelevant and it’s all about expertise.’

He’d used her words against her to suit his own ends.

‘Let’s just be totally honest, shall we, William? You’re seriously ticked off that I applied to Southgate and now you’re punishing me for doing what any other surgeon in my position would have done.’

‘Now you’re being irrational, which isn’t like you at all. Go to Bundallagong, Poppy, do your job and let the board do theirs. My secretary will be in touch about flight details but start packing because you’re leaving tomorrow.’

The phone line suddenly buzzed and she realised he’d hung up on her. Blind anger tore through her and she shredded the newspaper, venting unprintable expletives at the journalist, William, the hospital and the system in general. Who the hell was this interloper from the east coast? She had contacts and she’d find out because learning about the enemy was a vital part of the strategy of winning.

But as the final strips of paper floated to the floor, her anger faded almost as fast as it had come and uncharacteristic tears of frustration and devastation pricked her eyes. Suddenly she was whipped back in time to when she had been a gangly ten-year-old girl valiantly trying to hold back tears after a drubbing in the first set of a tennis final, one of the few matches her father had actually turned up to watch.

He’d crossed his arms and stared down at her, his expression filled with derision. ‘Don’t be such a girl. Do you think boys cry? They don’t. They just go out there and win.’

Shaking her head as if that would get rid of the memory, she stomped into her bedroom and hauled a suitcase out of the wardrobe. If Bundallagong Hospital needed a surgeon then, by God, they were getting one, and the staff there wouldn’t know what had hit them. She’d clear the waiting list, reorganise the department, overhaul the budget, meet every target and make William and the board sit up and take notice. Nobody put Poppy Stanfield in a corner.

Dr Matt Albright was on an island beach. The balmy tropical breeze skimmed over his sun-warmed skin and a book lay face-down on his naked chest, resting in the same position it had been for the last half-hour. ‘Daddy, watch me!’

He waved to his daughter as she played in the shallow and virtually waveless water, then he rolled onto his side towards his wife, who lay next to him, reading. At that precise moment he knew his life was perfect in every way.

She glanced up and smiled in her quiet and unassuming way.

He grinned. ‘You do realise I’ve loved you from the moment you hit me with play dough at kinder.’

Her tinkling laughter circled him and he leaned in to kiss her, knowing her mouth as intimately as his own. He reached out to curve his hand around her shoulder, trying to pull her closer, but his fingers closed in on themselves, digging into his palm. He tried again, this time cupping her cheeks, but they vanished the moment he tried to touch them.

‘Daddy!’

He turned towards his daughter’s voice and saw her evaporating, along with the water that tore all the sand from the beach. Panic bubbled hot and hard in his veins and he sat up fast, hearing the sound of his voice screaming ‘No!’

His eyes flew open into darkness, his heart thundering against his ribs and sweat pouring down his face. His hands gripped something so hard they ached and he realised his fingers were digging deep into the edge of the mattress. He wasn’t on a beach.

He was in a bed.

Slowly his eyes focused and he recognised the silhouette of his wardrobe, and he heard the thumping and scratching of the goanna that had at some point in the last few months, without any protest from him, moved into the roof.

Bundallagong. He was in Bundallagong.

He fell back onto the pillow and stared blindly up at the ceiling. His heart rate slowed and the tightness in his chest eased and for one brief and blessed moment he felt nothing at all. Then the ever-present emptiness, which the dream had momentarily absorbed, rushed back in. It expanded wide and long, filling every crevice, every cell and tainting every single breath.

Sleep was over. He swung his legs out of bed, walked into the lounge room, stared out into the night, and waited for the dawn.

‘And how long have you had this pain, Sam?’ Poppy pulled the modesty sheet back over the young man’s abdomen.

He shrugged. ‘Dunno. I think I saw Dr Albright about a month ago but then it just went away.’ ‘And is today’s pain worse than a month ago?’

‘A lot.’

‘The nurse tells me you’ve been vomiting?’ ‘Yeah, sorry about that.’

Poppy tried not to smile. Dressed in tough mining workwear, and looking like not even a bullet could take him down, Sam’s politeness and air of bewilderment reminded her of a young boy rather than a strapping and fit man of twenty.

‘I’ll be back in a bit, Sam.’ Poppy pulled the screen curtains shut behind her as she stepped out into the compact emergency department, running the symptoms through her head—fever, high white blood cell count, rebound tenderness and an ultrasound that showed nothing unusual, although that in itself wasn’t unusual. The process of diagnosis soothed her like the action of a soothing balm and she relaxed into the feeling.

The shock of landing two hours ago on the Marsscape that was Bundallagong still had her reeling. The green of the river-hugging suburbs of Perth had not prepared her for the barrenness of the Pilbara. When she’d exited the plane, her feet had stuck mutinously to the roll-away airport stairs as her gaze had taken in the flat, red dust plains that stretched to the horizon in three directions. Then the ferocious dripping heat had hit her like an impenetrable wall and it had been like walking into a raging furnace with an aftershock of wet, cloying steam. The irony wasn’t lost on her—William had sent her to hell.

The only way to reduce her ‘sentence’ was to start work so she’d asked the taxi driver to take her directly to the hospital. The fact it was a Sunday afternoon mattered little because the sooner she started her rotation, the sooner she could finish. She’d planned to spend a couple of hours studying medical histories and drawing up her first week’s surgical list but as she’d arrived, so had Sam. The nurse on duty had happily accepted her offer of help with a smile, saying, ‘Thanks heaps. It’ll give the on-call doctor a break.’

Now Poppy walked briskly to the nurses’ station and dropped the history in front of Jen Smithers, whose badge read ‘Nursing Administrator’. ‘Sam’s got appendicitis so if you can arrange everything, I’ll meet him in Theatre in an hour.’

The nurse, who Poppy guessed was of a similar age to her, looked up, a startled expression on her face. ‘So it’s an emergency case?’

‘Not strictly, but he’ll be better off without his appendix and there’s no time like the present.’

‘Ah.’ Jen spun a pen through her fingers, as if considering her thoughts.

Poppy rarely took no for an answer and the ‘Ah’ sounded ominous. She made a snap decision: she needed the nursing staff on her side but she also needed to show she was the one in charge of the team. ‘Jen, I call a spade a spade and I don’t play games. I’ll be straight with you and you need to be straight with me. I want to operate on Sam this afternoon and I expect you to do your job so I can do mine.’

Jen nodded, her demeanour friendly yet professional. ‘Fair enough. I can get nursing staff in to staff Theatre and Recovery, but that isn’t going to be enough. It’s the anaesthetic registrar’s weekend off and he’s not due back from Bali until this evening’s flight.’

Gobsmacked, Poppy stared at her, not knowing whether to be more stunned that a person could fly direct to Bali from the middle of nowhere or the fact that it left the town without an anaesthetist. ‘Surely there’s someone else?’

‘Well, yes, technically there is, but …’

A tight band of tension burned behind Poppy’s eyes. Hell, she really had come to Mars. She didn’t have time for staff politics, especially if they got in the way of her doing her job and proving to William that she deserved the chief of surgery position back in Perth. ‘Just ring the doctor and get him or her here, and leave the rest to me.’

Jen gave a wry smile. ‘If you’re sure, I can do that.’

‘Of course, I’m sure.’ Poppy headed back to her patient, shaking her head. It seemed a very odd thing to say but, then again, she was a long way from Perth. She busied herself inserting an IV into Sam’s arm, administered Maxolon for his nausea and pethidine for the pain.

‘This will have you feeling better soon.’ ‘Thanks, Doc.’ ‘No problem.’

She clicked her pen and started scrawling a drug order onto the chart when she heard voices coming from the direction of the nurses’ station. She couldn’t make out Jen’s words but could hear her soft and conciliatory tone, followed quickly by a very terse, deep voice asking, ‘Why didn’t you call me first?’

‘Because Ms Stanfield was here and I thought I could save you—’

As Poppy hung the chart on the end of the trolley, Jen’s voice was cut off by the male voice. The anger was unmistakable and his words hit painfully hard. ‘Save me? I don’t need you or anyone else in this town making decisions for me, do you understand? I’m the on-call doctor today and that means I get called.’

Sam’s head swung towards the raised voices, his expression full of interest.

Staff politics. She’d asked Jen to call in this guy so she needed to be the one to deal with him. ‘Back in a minute, Sam.’ Poppy grabbed the cubicle curtains and deliberately pulled them open with a jerk, making the hangers swish against the metal with a rushing ping to remind Jen and the unknown doctor that there was a patient in the department. She marched briskly to the desk.

‘Oh, Ms Stanfield.’ Jen glanced around the man standing with his back to Poppy. Her organised demeanour had slipped slightly but instead of looking angry or crushed at being spoken to as if she was a child, her expression was one of resignation tinged with sadness and regret. ‘Poppy Stanfield, meet Dr. Matt Albright, Head of ED.’

The tall, broad-shouldered man turned slowly, his sun-streaked chestnut hair moving with him. It was longer than the average male doctor’s and the style was either deliberately messy-chic or overdue for a cut. A few strands fell forward, masking his left cheek, but his right side was fully exposed, and olive skin hollowed slightly under a fine but high cheekbone before stretching over a perfectly chiselled nose. A dark five-o’clock shadow circled tightly compressed lips, leaving Poppy in no doubt of his masculinity.

With a jolting shock she realised he wasn’t handsome—he was disconcertingly beautiful in a way that put everyone else into shadow. In ancient times he would have been sculpted in marble and raised onto a pedestal as the epitome of beauty. Poppy found herself staring as if she was in a gallery admiring a painting where the artist had created impossibly stunning good looks that didn’t belong on battle-scarred earth.

He was heart-stoppingly gorgeous and she’d bet anything women fell at his feet. Once she would have too but thankfully, due to years of practice, she was now immune and not even a quiver of attraction moved inside her.

Nothing ever does any more.

Shut up. Work excites me. She extended her hand towards him. ‘Matt.’

His hand gripped hers with a firm, brisk shake, and a faint tingling rush started, intensifying as it shot along her arm. Immune, are you?

Compressed nerve from a too-firm grip, that’s all.

‘Poppy.’ He raised his espresso-brown eyes to meet her gaze. She expected to see at least a flicker of interest in a new colleague, almost certainly a calculating professional sizing-up, and, at worst, a derisive flare at the fact she was a surgeon and a woman. None of it worried her because she knew exactly how to handle the men she worked with—she’d had years of experience.

But what she saw was so unexpected that it sucked the air from her lungs, almost pulling her with it. A short, sharp flame flickered in his eyes for a split second, illuminating hunger, but as it faded almost as fast as it had flared, she caught deep and dark swirling shadows before clouds rolled in briskly, masking all emotion.

She swayed on her heels as his hunger called up a blast of her own heat but as she glimpsed the misery in his eyes, she shivered and a jet of arctic cold scudded through her. Fire and ice collided; lust and pain coiling together before spiralling down to touch a place that had been firmly closed off and abandoned since—

She abruptly pulled her hand out of his, breaking his touch and moving her gaze to his left shoulder. There you go, simple solution: no eye contact. She didn’t want to care about what hid behind that flawless face and now that his heat wasn’t flowing through her, she marshalled her wayward thoughts and valiantly recomposed herself. This was no time to be discomfited. She needed to be in control and in charge, her future depended on it.

‘As Jen will have explained, I need you to anaesthetise Sam Dennison.’

Long, lean fingers on his right hand crossed his wide and casually clad chest, flicking at the sleeve band of his white T-shirt. ‘This is my department and I need to examine my patient before any decisions are made.’ He turned and walked towards the cubicle.

Poppy matched his stride. ‘And as Bundallagong’s resident surgeon for the next ninety days or less, it’s my considered opinion that—’

‘You’ve had time to examine Sam and now you need to extend that courtesy to me.’

He didn’t alter his pace and before she could reply, Matt Albright stepped through the curtains and closed them in her face.