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“But you were cleared?” Alex asked, unconsciously holding her breath.

He gave her a twisted smile but there was no humor in it. “Yes but not until I had my name and reputation ruined by the press.”

“What happened?”

He released a sigh. “A three year old boy was brought in to me with vomiting and hematuria. I found an abdominal mass and suspected a nephroblastoma, and wrote a referral to see a paediatric oncologist. I stressed to the parents the urgency and they seemed to understand. I made the appointment for them, even pulling a few strings to get them in as soon as possible. But apparently they decided to treat their son with alternative therapies instead. A letter never came back from the specialist, and after two weeks I tried to ring the parents, but they’d apparently moved, and left no forwarding address with anyone. I rang the specialist, but they had never turned up for their appointment. Six months later, after they had apparently tried a stack of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, the child died. The paternal grandparents decided to sue me for not ensuring the child was properly followed up and treated. They felt I should have done more to ensure the parents of the child followed my instructions.”

“But that’s hardly your fault!” Alex insisted. “You followed the normal procedure. Doctors can’t chase up every single patient otherwise they’d never get through the normal workload. And besides, it sounds as though you went out of your way to expedite specialist care.”

“Yes and that’s what the court finally decided. But you know what the press can do with these sorts of cases, and once mud starts getting thrown around, some of it sticks. It’s a litigious climate, Alex. Some people see a chance to make a small fortune out of an adverse outcome and they don’t care what it does to the professionals involved, or their families for that matter.”

Alex chewed on her lip. “There are those few cases where there is real incompetence.” she said, thinking about a recent case in Mack’s home state involving a doctor whose surgical qualifications were not properly vetted, resulting in several patients dying from incompetent surgery before a courageous nurse went over the heads of hospital management to state authorities to expose him.

“Mud sticks all right. Even after I was completely exonerated from any negligence, about a third of the patients dropped out of the practice. I even got hate mail. A lot of people just weren’t interested in the actual facts—they’d just heard that I was embroiled in a case involving the death of a child and concluded there must be something to it, and I was best avoided.”

“So your fiancée broke off your engagement because of the case?” she asked with an incredulous frown.

Mack suddenly realized he was still touching Alex”s hand and pulled his away.

“Yes. She worked in the same city practice. But I think if I was to be honest with myself it wasn’t just about the case.”

“What do you mean?”

He let out a sigh and looked down at her again, the soft bow of her mouth and the melting warmth of her browner than brown eyes picking the lock on his hardened heart. “We had drifted into the relationship. I don’t even remember officially asking her to marry me. It was just something we assumed was going to happen but I realize now something was missing.”

“What was missing?” she asked, her breath a soft caress dancing on his lips.

“I think this is perhaps what was missing,” Mack said huskily and bending his head brought his mouth back to hers.