CHAPTER THREE

IF CLARA HAD hoped for a quiet moment the following day to analyse why she’d acted so completely out of character, flirting with and then kissing a gloriously naked stranger, she was to be sorely disappointed. No sooner had she met her newest patient at Nordic Care, a private hospital an hour’s drive from the palace, than the poor elderly man collapsed and went into cardiac arrest right before her eyes.

Shocked into action, Clara hit the alarm on the wall above the patient’s bed and instantly began chest compressions. The crash team arrived within seconds—two other nurses and a female registrar. The doctor began manually bagging the patient, inflating his lungs with air, while Clara gave the team a brief synopsis of the patient’s medical problems.

‘This is Mr Engman, a seventy-three-year-old diabetic admitted overnight with dizzy spells.’

Clara snatched a breath, the exertion of performing CPR talking all her energy. ‘We’d been monitoring him for cardiac arrhythmias. I’d just taken over his care when he collapsed and lost consciousness.’

She didn’t want to tell the doctor her job, but the heart monitor seemed to show ventricular fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm where the heart’s ventricles quivered in an irregular and uncoordinated manner. Other staff arrived, bodies jostling in the cramped space around the bed. Emergencies like this prompted a kind of controlled, co-ordinated chaos that ensured there were enough hands on board to do everything they could to revive their patient.

Clara focussed on timing the cardiac compressions, willing Mr Engman to respond. But her stomach tightened with fear, given his frail condition and multiple comorbidities.

‘Looks like ventricular fibrillation,’ a male voice said from behind Clara, confirming her diagnosis.

She was too focussed on the CPR to wonder where she’d heard the vaguely familiar voice before.

‘Check for a pulse, please,’ the commanding voice ordered.

There was a pause while they checked if Mr Engman’s heart had spontaneously restarted. Clara caught her breath, looking up at the man running the arrest protocol.

She froze, her jaw dropping.

It was him—from last night—the naked VIP. The man with the body of a Greek god and haunted eyes. And he was looking at her without a trace of surprise, as if he’d expected their paths to cross.

Last night, after they’d kissed as if competing for the Olympic gold medal in kissing, Clara had met others from the team of palace nursing staff who cared for Prince Henrik, praying she’d never need to see her sexy but confusing stranger again.

Except there he was—a sexy mountain-man in scrubs.

Clara snatched her gaze away from his, fury and humiliation turning her stomach. While she’d been high from the kiss and begging for her job, he’d secretively held on to some pretty pertinent information. So this was the business he’d vaguely referred to. He was a doctor. Why hadn’t he just come out and said that last night? She’d assumed he was a diplomat or a visiting ambassador, and he’d said nothing to the contrary. He’d commented on her uniform but had failed to declare that they worked in the same field. She’d even told him she had a second job at a nearby hospital, just before he’d lured her with his vulnerable stare and his talk of scars into that disastrous kiss which might have cost her a lucrative and prestigious job at the palace.

‘No pulse,’ Naked VIP said. ‘Are you okay to continue compressions, Nurse Lund?’

Mortified that she’d lusted after and kissed someone so apparently shifty, Clara nodded and restarted the chest compressions. This was why she couldn’t trust men. The last time she’d been intimate with a guy, he’d slept with her and then avoided her. Ever since, she’d resolutely refused to give anyone the power to hurt and humiliate her. Until last night...

She should have known better. After all, she’d learned to rely only on herself after her father, the one man who should have offered unconditional emotional and financial support, had repeatedly let her down. Growing up, she’d never known from one day to the next if Lars would come through the door at the end of the day, if the bills she knew worried her hard-working mother would be paid or if her father’s latest dodgy deal would topple, plunging the entire family into a deeper pit of debt and despair.

One of Clara’s nurse colleagues stuck gel pads to Mr Engman’s chest and Naked VIP—she really needed to discover his name—positioned the defibrillator paddles in place.

‘Stand clear. Defibrillating—two hundred joules,’ he said, delivering the shock to the man’s failing heart in line with the Advanced Cardiac Life Support protocol.

Clara couldn’t bear to look at him. He looked far too gorgeous in the hospital’s navy-blue scrubs, and being lured by his irrelevant good looks was how she’d found herself in this embarrassing situation in the first place.

‘Nothing,’ her stranger said, watching the erratic trace on the cardiac monitor.

‘It’s been three minutes,’ Clara told him, resuming the chest compressions, glad to have an excuse to look away from his annoyingly riveting lips.

He nodded, taking a vial of adrenaline from the trolley and administering it intravenously in an attempt to normalise the heart’s rhythm.

Why had she kissed him? She’d allowed him to get under her skin, weakened by desire stronger than anything she’d ever known. Flirting with him had felt carefree, whereas growing up with her unreliable father and having to care for her mother had given Clara an over-inflated sense of responsibility. They’d talked about scars and he’d seemed momentarily lost, a feeling she’d understood well as a bewildered teenager.

Until that unexpected interlude in the palace’s guest suite, she hadn’t realised that Lars Lund’s selfish actions meant that she’d missed out on a wild and misspent youth. But with him, a sexy, naked stranger, she’d felt young and vibrantly alive.

She’d have to stop thinking of him naked. It was foolish to think about him in any state given that he was just another man she couldn’t trust.

‘Pause please,’ the man in question said. All eyes settled on the heart monitor, every member of staff awaiting Naked VIP’s next instruction with bated breath.

‘He’s still in VF,’ he said. ‘Stand clear—defibrillating again.’

With the second shock delivered, Mr Engman’s heart stuttered back into sinus rhythm, the patient breathing again of his own accord. There was a collective sigh of relief. Clara sagged, her head woozy from the physical exertion and the adrenaline rush.

‘Okay, we’ll be moving Mr Engman around to ICU,’ her midnight mystery man said. ‘Nurse Lund, can you please call Mr Engman’s next of kin?’

‘Of course.’ Clara nodded and placed a high-flow oxygen mask on their still groggy patient. This necessitated stepping closer to Dr Naked VIP.

Big mistake. He smelled delicious, reminding her of how it had felt to be held in those strong arms last night: safe, protected, desired.

The wild desperation of that kiss—his big body engulfing hers, each of their lips chasing the other’s, demanding and sensual—had surely ruined her for all future kisses. For a second, before she’d pushed him away, Clara hadn’t been able to come up with a single reason she shouldn’t sleep with him right there and then.

Swallowing hard, Clara fought off visions of him naked and proud, a spectacular specimen of manhood. The magnificence of his manhood was of no consequence whatsoever. And, more importantly, Clara wasn’t interested in kissing, naked or otherwise. His deception made her realise just how out of her depth she was when it came to relationships.

She reattached an electrode that had come loose during CPR to Mr Engman’s chest. The mystery doctor drew some blood from the patient’s arm, thrusting the vials at the registrar.

‘Check his cardiac enzymes and do an ECG, please. We need to exclude a myocardial infarction or cardiomyopathy.’

‘I can do the ECG, if you want,’ Clara said to the harassed-looking registrar, who gave a grateful nod and hurried away to order the blood work, leaving Clara alone with the patient and him.

An awkward silence descended.

Clara felt his observation like sun on her face as she tucked in the blanket on Mr Engman’s bed. The patient was obliviously out of it, but this wasn’t the time or the place for a personal conversation.

She looked up, their stares locking. ‘Any other tests you’d like, doctor?’

She emphasised his title, showing him, and more importantly herself, that whatever had happened during last night’s moment of insanity wouldn’t be happening again. She couldn’t trust one glorious hair on his devious head.

An image of Alma Lund, weary, sick and scared, flashed behind her eyes. Her mother had been through so much, and had always worked hard to provide a stable and comfortable home for Clara and her younger sister Freja, latterly with no help from her husband.

Clara wanted to slap herself; she knew better than to risk anything for a man, especially the income that kept them in their family home.

‘No thank you, Nurse Lund.’ Curiosity flickered over his expression, his blue eyes impressed and carrying the same hint of vulnerability that, last night, had made her lose her mind.

Well, in the cold light of day, her head was back in charge. She didn’t need his admiration. She didn’t need to know his name. She didn’t need him at all, not even for phenomenal naked kissing. What she needed were her two jobs, her peace of mind and her self-reliance.

‘We need to talk,’ he said, pausing at the gap in the curtains around Mr Engman’s bed.

‘Didn’t we have that opportunity last night?’ she shot back, feeling decidedly uncharitable, given that she’d allowed herself to be duped by a charming smile, some witty repartee and a hot body.

‘Last night, I was...distracted,’ he admitted, pressing his lips together grimly as he continued to stare.

And just like that Clara’s body returned to the scene of the crime—her pulse going crazy, her blood so hot she must surely have given off steam and the taste of him fresh on her lips.

A wave of fear and foolishness whipped through her chest. Even now—with every reason in the world not to; when last night’s rash and unprecedented impulse to kiss a fellow lost soul might have cost her the job at the palace; when he held all of the power—she craved another kiss.

‘Well, today I have my head screwed on correctly,’ she said, willing it to be true.

It was only when he’d finally exited the ward moments later that Clara could finally breathe easy. Whatever he had to say, whatever his real name and his reasons for being secretive, he was just another man showing her the only person she could truly rely on was herself.