The Doctors' Christmas Reunion / Unwrapping The Neurosurgeon's Heart. Meredith Webber

       CHAPTER ONE

      ELLIE FRASER STUDIED her husband across the breakfast table.

      Rather stern profile, with a straight nose and high forehead—until he smiled, of course, when the crinkly lines fanning out from his eyes made you want to smile back at him.

      Brown, those eyes were, and she knew them both warm and soft as a cuddly blanket and hard as stones.

      Dark hair, cut stubble-short—a number one, but due for a cut, so nearly a number two at the moment. It would feel like the fuzz on her old teddy if she ran her hand across it, but it had been a while since that had happened.

      And that funny little whorl of hair, just on the hairline above his left eyebrow. A whorl she’d touched so often, twirled around her fingers, back when his hair was longer…

      Her heart ached, just from looking at him.

      She’d loved Andy. She knew that with the deep certainty that had been with her from the day he’d asked her to marry him.

      She loved him still—she knew that, too—but she had somehow lost him, and along with him the oneness of them as a couple that had seemed so normal for so long.

      Ellie and Andy. Andy and Ellie. All through university; through the almost soul-destroying work schedules of their internship; through their volunteer work in Africa—where they’d seen the worst that human beings could do to each other—their oneness had remained. Their goals, dreams and futures had been inextricably entwined in a way she’d thought would never fray, let alone be pulled apart.

      And yet right now they couldn’t have been further apart, for all that Andy had asked her up to his flat in the top section of the old house to discuss some idea he had about a soccer team that he was setting up, which seemed to be of far more interest to him than the split in their relationship.

      Or was it a useful diversion from it?

      She’d thrown herself into work, but still had far too much time to think of the past and what might have been…

      Andy had even cooked her breakfast, though she could have done without the pain that the pretend intimacy of eating together brought with it.

      ‘So I thought I’d have a barbecue here on Saturday—about lunchtime, before the game. Until we get a proper clubroom there’s nowhere else. I’ll ask some of the older team members to organise the food—just sausages and onions and bread, or bread rolls.’ He looked up at her and grinned. ‘And, yes, I’ll make sure the boys do some of the shopping, not just send the girls.’

       Heaven help me! We’ve barely spoken for months, apart from work stuff, and still that grin makes my stomach churn…

      Ellie swallowed a sigh along with the last of her toast, left