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He's not trying to be intimidating or anything and he asked to see only new referrals so he's not going to muck up your routine with anyone. I was going to put him in with Geoffrey Clancy but you're very full already this morning and you do have your lecture today so I thought you wouldn't mind the help.'
    'That was thoughtful,' Annabel said carefully. 'Thank you.'
    'One smile and their brains turn to drooling mush.' Wendy, it seemed, was still preoccupied, worrying about her nurses. 'I even felt a few heart flutters myself,' the nurse added breathlessly, 'and I'm nearly fifty! He's a knock-out all right. Does he have the same effect on you?'
    'He hasn't smiled at me.' Annabel looked down at the notes she was holding. Rationally she knew Luke had never used his looks to the sort of advantage some other men might have, but emotionally she'd never been able to stay blasé about the way other women responded to him. It hadn't been easy, being married to a man who drew female attention so effortlessly. 'Are there many waiting?'
    'I'll get Mary to show your first one in,' Wendy agreed in a distracted way, before bustling out.
    At eleven it was customary for the team—doctors and nurses—to take a ten-minute break between patients to meet for morning tea. It was a chance to discuss cases they'd seen and bounce ideas off each other, but, her nerves on edge from her knowledge of Luke's proximity, Annabel checked with Hannah that there were no problems she wanted to discuss then carried her tea across to Geoffrey's team's side of the clinic.
    'Hey!' Her colleague greeted her arrival with an easy grin, toasting her with his own tea, but his smile faded as he scanned her expression. 'What's up? Trouble?'
    'I felt like a break with tradition,' she said smoothly, coming to sit on the corner of his desk. She looked down at the ECG he was studying. 'Busy?'
    'Frantic.' He passed her the trace. 'What do you think?'
    Annabel saw from the printed details at the top of the ECG that the tracing had come from a twenty-five-year-old male. 'Heart block in a young person,' she commented, referring to the fact that there was an obvious disruption between the electrical part of the heartbeat and the muscle's reaction. 'Sarcoid?'
    'Spot on.' Geoffrey threw his pen onto the desk and leaned back in his chair with a pleased air. 'He's had some palpitations and he's fainted twice, hence the referral here. I've organised for him to come in for an MRI to see if that gives us any more information,' he explained, referring to a type of scan which would give them good pictures of the structure of the heart. 'But his chest X-ray gave me the most likely answer this morning.'
    Annabel glanced up at the X-ray on the board beside him and nodded. Sarcoidosis was a condition where organs, usually the lung but sometimes including the heart among others, became infiltrated with a hard, grainy substance. The cause was unknown but the flared deposits she could see in his X-ray were a characteristic finding. It was a chronic condition and it wasn't easy to treat. 'When are you inserting his pacemaker?'
    'Tomorrow morning.' Insertion of a pacemaker could overcome problems with the heart rhythm—the most serious of which could lead to sudden death—caused by sarcoid in the heart. 'Obviously I've started steroids to try and prevent the heart becoming more involved,' Geoffrey added.
    'You'll probably see him on the ward over the next day or two. I've sent him to J because they had a couple of spare beds. He seems a nice lad. He's a chef. He was telling me all about it. Hard work by the sound of it. He's thin, though, so I don't know what that says about his cooking. You'd think chefs would be fat, wouldn't you, if their food was any good?'
    'I don't think there's any correlation.' Annabel took a few quick gulps of her tea. 'I'm sure there are lots of thin top chefs just as there must be fat bad chefs.'
    'Sounds like me,' he said mournfully.
    'You're not fat.' Annabel smiled.