Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit: Bachelor of the Baby Ward / Fairytale on the Children's Ward
Meredith Webber
Bachelor of the Baby WardChildren’s surgeon and bachelor Angus McDowell is the undisputed expert at mending babies’ hearts – with a heartbreaking reputation when it comes to his endless admirers! New to Jimmie’s Children’s Unit, anaesthetist Kate Armstrong is desperate not to fall for the sexy doctor – because she knows he’ll be impossible to forget! But Angus’ son has other ideas… All he wants is Kate to be his mummy…!Fairytale on the Children’s Ward Dear Santa I’ve just learnt I have a daddy. He’s a very nice man called Oliver, who works with my mummy Clare at Jimmie’s Children’s Unit. I know they love each other, but they just don’t show it… And now all I want for Christmas is for my family to be together! Love Emily (aged 9¼)
The thing about Kate, he’d discovered, was that she refused to be beaten by what life threw at her. She kept going, kept smiling, always positive, always upbeat, seeing the best in situations, the best in people.
Angus was not sure where all this rational thinking was getting him, although he now had a much fuller picture of the woman he loved.
Loved?
He set the cup back carefully in its saucer, certain it had been about to slip from his grasp.
Loved?
How could he love her? He barely knew her. But even as this excuse sprang from his brain, another part of his mind was denying it. Of course he knew her.
He pictured her on the yellow sofa, an arm around his son, and remembered the stab of jealousy he’d felt. But what he should have felt was pleasure—that finally he’d found a woman who would make the ideal mother for his son…
Emily dropped a kiss on her mother’s cheek. ‘Isn’t it fun having Dad around?’ she whispered, and suddenly Clare’s spring of happiness wasn’t bubbling quite as high.
She knew it wasn’t jealousy she was feeling, but disappointment of some kind—disappointment that the life she’d been providing for her daughter hadn’t measured up…
‘You need my pearls—the ones Gran gave me,’ Emily declared as she inspected her mother for the last time. ‘Wait here.’
She ran off to her bedroom and returned with the pearls that had been her great-grandmother’s, making her mother sit on the bed so she, Emily, could fasten them.
‘There,’ she said, ‘you’re beautiful. Dad will surely want to marry you now.’
Clare knew the words were nothing more than childish enthusiasm, but once again the joy of the morning dimmed, and despair wormed its way into her heart.
How could she resist if it became a matter of two against one?
Bachelor of the Baby Ward
and
Fairytale on the Children’s Ward
by
Meredith Webber
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHRISTMAS AT JIMMIE’S
At Jimmie’s Children’s Unit, miracles don’t just happen at Christmas time—babies are saved every day!
But this year there are two children with some big wishes for Santa…
BACHELOR OF THE BABY WARD
—little Hamish McDowell wants a new mummy…
FAIRYTALE ON THE CHILDREN’S WARD
—all Emily Jackson longs for is to see her mum and dad reunited…
Will Hamish and Emily get the greatest Christmas gifts of all?
Find out in Meredith Webber’s heartwarming linked duet, out this month!
Bachelor of the Baby Ward
by
Meredith Webber
MEREDITH WEBBER says of herself, ‘Some ten years ago, I read an article which suggested that Mills and Boon were looking for new Medical
Romance authors. I had one of those “I can do that” moments, and gave it a try. What began as a challenge has become an obsession—though I do temper the “butt on seat” career of writing with dirty but healthy outdoor pursuits, fossicking through the Australian Outback in search of gold or opals. Having had some success in all of these endeavours, I now consider I’ve found the perfect lifestyle.’
Recent titles by the same author:
DESERT KING, DOCTOR DADDY
GREEK DOCTOR: ONE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS
CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, MEANT-TO-BE WIFE*
THE HEART SURGEON’S SECRET CHILD†
* Crocodile Creek
† Jimmie‘s Children’s Unit
Chapter One
‘BUT I’d assumed—’
A quick frown from her boss, Alex Attwood, failed to halt Kate Armstrong’s angry protest.
‘—that when Phil and Maggie left to go back to England, I’d take Maggie’s place as anaesthetist on your team, not be working with some total stranger.’
Alex’s frown turned to a sigh.
‘Have you any idea how hard it is to juggle so many new people on the two teams?’ he asked, only slight exasperation showing in his voice. ‘I’ve left you in the second team—and you know darned well that doesn’t mean second in importance—because you know the ropes and you’ll be a help to Angus, whom, by the way, you should meet!’
Alex paused to grin at her.
‘That way he won’t be a total stranger!’ He turned towards the door behind Kate and added, ‘Come on in, Angus. We were just discussing you.’
Kate was torn between wishing the floor would open up and swallow her, and wondering why a quick, embarrassed glance at a tall, dark-haired stranger should make her stomach feel uneasy.
Angus McDowell had more on his mind than some redheaded termagant—one of his mother’s favourite words—who obviously didn’t want to work with him. Hamish had thrown out a rash, the quarantine kennels had phoned to say McTavish was sick and, as he’d left the house, Juanita had given him a shopping list a mile long, telling him that as she didn’t know where the supermarket was—he’d have to find one.
But apparently the termagant was going to be working with him whether she liked it or not, so he offered her a practiced smile, and held out his hand, politely ignored the fiery blush that had swept into her cheeks.
‘Angus McDowell,’ he said as she slipped fine-boned fingers into his clasp, then quickly withdrew them, tucking her hand into the pocket of her jacket as if to save it further contamination.
‘Kate Armstrong,’ she said, her voice deeper than he would have expected in a small, slim woman. Slightly husky, too, the voice, although maybe that was a hangover from the argument she’d been having with Alex. ‘I’m to be your anaesthetist.’
It had to be jet lag that made Angus feel a splinter of ice run through his veins—she wasn’t talking about anaesthetising him! He pulled himself together and managed another smile.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Most important part of the team, the anaesthetist—well, alongside the perfusionist—’
‘And the second surgeon, and the surgical assistant, and the scrub nurse, and the circulating—’
He held up his hands in surrender.
‘You’re right, we’re a team, and every member of it is equally important, although your job carries a lot of pressure, because you have more pre- and post-op contact with the patient and his or her parents.’
She looked at him then—really looked—pale green eyes meeting his, offering a challenge.
‘Soft-soaping me?’ she said, softening the challenge with a slight smile. ‘You obviously heard the argument I was having with Alex.’
She shrugged, shoulders in a crisp white shirt lifting slightly.
‘It was nothing personal—not against you. I’d just been looking forward to working with Alex. Not that I haven’t done ops with him—we all switch around from time to time—but I find I learn different things from different surgeons.’
It sounded weak and Angus wondered if there was some other reason this woman wanted to be on Alex’s team—a personal reason. But he couldn’t be worrying about such things when he had enough personal problems of his own to sort out.
Hamish for one, even apart from the rash…
He shut off the dark cloud of the past, concentrating on the present. He said, ‘Then I hope you will find working with me as instructive.’
He moved away from her as other members of the team filtered into the room.
Kate looked around at the newcomers. She’d met Oliver Rankin, the new paediatric surgical fellow who would be working with both teams, a few months ago when he’d spent several weeks with the paediatric cardiac surgical unit at Jimmie’s—as the St James Hospital for Children was affectionately known. But this was the first time she’d seen Clare Jackson, the new perfusionist, and from the way every male eye in the room turned to Clare as she walked in, the perfusionist was going to cause a stir in the tight-knit unit.
Admittedly it wasn’t Clare’s fault that she was tall, dark-haired and strikingly beautiful. Kate tugged at her scraggly red locks which, no matter how she tried to tame them, were always breaking out of their confinement, and wondered what it would be like to be beautiful, to be so much the centre of attention…
Not that she’d like the attention part.
The talk had turned to patients, those who had been operated on and their progress, before moving to a rough plan for the operations for the week. Rough because no-one ever knew when some baby would be born with a congenital heart defect that would need immediate attention.
‘Angus, we’ve been advised of a baby with a TGA coming down from a regional hospital on the north coast hopefully tomorrow,’ Alex said. ‘They want to stabilise him before the airlift. I know you’ve made something of a speciality of transposition of the great arteries so I’d like your team to take him when he comes.’
The new surgeon nodded, though Kate noticed he looked worried at the same time. Surely he couldn’t be concerned about the operation, not if he specialised in it and when it was one that was performed successfully so often these days.
The little frown between his eyes made him more human somehow, Kate decided, studying the face that had at first appeared stern and unyielding to her. Was it the darkness of his hair and eyes that made him seem that way, or the strong bones beneath olive skin that stretched tightly over them so the long nose between broad cheekbones and the firm jawbone were accentuated?
‘Kate, you with us?’
She looked across at Alex and nodded, though she’d have liked to bite him for drawing attention to her momentary lapse in concentration.
‘Of course!’ she snapped.
‘Then off you go. Take Angus down to the childcare centre, and when you’ve finished there, give him a general tour of the area. Apparently he’s got some shopping to do.’
She looked from Alex to the stranger with whom she was going to be working, really regretting now that she’d missed the bit of the conversation where she’d been stuck with being his tour guide. Angus was on his feet and coming towards her, smiling again…
The smile, though it seemed practiced and didn’t quite reach his eyes, caused another weird sensation in the pit of her stomach. Although maybe that was the slightly mouldy bread she’d used for toast that morning. But just in case, she turned away from the smile and hurried out of the room, assuming he would follow.
‘You’ve children yourself that Alex appointed you to show me the childcare centre?’
If she’d been a sucker for accents this one would have won her over, a soft Scottish burr overlaid with a little bit of North American. The effect in the deep voice was totally enthralling.
‘Children?’ he repeated, and she knew she had to pull herself together.
‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘but I’d like to have a family and I’d also like to keep working, at least part-time, so somehow I became involved—’
She was used enough to this conversational subject to be able to keep her voice casually light, but they’d reached the elevator foyer and she could no longer pretend she had to look where she was going, so had to turn to face him.
‘—with a move to expand the hours of the centre. It made sense to me to have it open twenty-four hours a day, so people on night shifts, or staff called in unexpectedly at night as our team often is, have somewhere to leave their children.’
Definitely too much information but the uneasiness in her stomach—not to mention the disturbing shadows she now saw in his dark eyes—had her prattling on.
The elevator arrived and they crammed inside, the conversation, fortunately, ceasing as they rode down to the ground floor where most of the passengers exited.
‘It’s in the basement?’ Angus queried, wondering about the reasoning behind keeping children in a dingy, dark environment.
His reluctant guide—he’d seen her sigh when Alex suggested she take him around—smiled, small, even white teeth gleaming in her pale face.
‘Ah, but there are basements and basements?’
‘Mostly, in hospitals, used for the morgue,’ he reminded her, while he wondered why small, even teeth should have made such an impression on him.
Teeth?
Surely he wasn’t developing a tooth fetish.
‘Not here,’ she said cheerfully, leading him out of the elevator and along a wide corridor decorated with a bright mural depicting zoo animals.
She pushed open a door and they entered a small, fenced-off foyer, beyond which Angus could see a big, bright room, bright because the whole of one wall was glass, and beyond the glass was a playground—a sunlit playground!
‘We’re in a basement?’ he queried as he took in the children in groups around tables in the big room, and beyond it another room with a wide window so he could see cots set up within it.
‘The hospital is built on a hill. It wasn’t hard to excavate a little more on this side so the children had an outdoor area.’
A woman came towards them, greeting Kate with genuine delight.
‘You’ve been a stranger,’ she said. ‘After you did so much to help get the after-hours arrangement set up, we all felt you were part of our team.’
To Angus’s surprise, Kate Armstrong looked embarrassed by the praise, but she rallied and introduced him.
‘Mary is the director of the centre,’ Kate explained, ‘so if you want to get your children in, she’s the one you need to talk to.’
‘Of course, the children of hospital staff get priority but we do take in children from the local area, as well,’ Mary explained. ‘You’ll be looking for something—for how many children and what ages?’
‘Just the one,’ Angus replied. ‘Hamish is four and moving to Australia is a big change in his life. I feel if he can make some friends here, he’ll settle in more easily.’
‘Of course he will,’ Mary assured him. ‘And we can take another child in our four-year-old group. In fact, we’ll be particularly happy to have a boy, as we’re a bit top-heavy with girls in that group. Would you like to come in and look around now, or would some other time suit you? Perhaps a time when you can bring your wife?’
Angus closed his eyes briefly. There always came a moment! He shored up the defences he’d built around his heart and answered calmly.
‘I’m a single parent,’ he said, happy the phrase was so familiar these days that no questions followed it. ‘But as Kate’s been seconded to show me where the supermarket is, and I don’t want to take up too much of her time,’ he added to Mary, ‘perhaps I could come back this afternoon?’
‘Any time,’ she said. ‘And you’re in good hands with Kate. If anyone knows her way around a supermarket, it’s our Dr Armstrong.’
‘Why would she say that?’ he asked his guide as they walked back to the elevator.
The redhead shrugged, looking thoroughly embarrassed once again. He knew it must be her colouring but it was unusual—refreshing?—to see a woman blush these days. But as they waited for the elevator, she shook off her embarrassment and explained.
‘When the childcare centre first asked the hospital powers that be about extending hours, the usual objections were raised—costs, and where would the money come from, et cetera—so a few of us, mostly parents and childcare centre staff, began to fund-raise with the aim of getting enough money to trial the idea. We baked a lot of cakes over a couple of months, selling them within the hospital to patients, visitors and staff. We used the kindergarten kitchen after hours and as my hours were fairly erratic—and to be perfectly honest I’m not much of a biscuit or cake cook—I was the chief shopper.’
‘And you don’t have children?’
The elevator had arrived but she didn’t move, looking at him again, the defiance in her eyes echoed in the slight tilt of her chin.
‘No, but that’s not to say I won’t ever have them.’
Did she feel she’d been too adamant that she added quickly, ‘And a lot of the people involved in the fund-raising were my friends.’
They rode back up to the ground floor, the questions he’d have liked to ask—was she married, did her husband work at the hospital—were too personal when they’d just met. There was something about her—pale skin, delicate features and a slim dancer’s body, straight-backed, head held high—that reminded him of the delicate porcelain figurines his mother collected, so he kept sneaking looks at her.
At least, he thought that’s why he kept looking at her. It had to be; he didn’t look at women any other way these days—well, not often, and definitely not at women who were colleagues.
Yet he was intrigued enough to ask the questions anyway.
‘You seem positive about the children in your future. Are you already married to their father? Engaged?’
They were walking through a fairly crowded foyer so someone bumped into her when she stopped abruptly and he had to put out his hand to grab her shoulder and steady her. But the people around them didn’t seem to bother her as she studied him for a moment, then gave a rueful smile, cheeks pink again.
‘Not married, not even engaged, but all I’ve wanted to be since I was eleven is a grandmother, and, being a doctor, I do understand I’ll have to be a mother first.’
She’d made a joke of it, but underneath her light-hearted confession, Angus sensed a deeper emotion and wondered if this was a stock answer she gave to fend off further questions. It must have some basis in truth, so what had happened when she was eleven?
And why was he wondering?
Then she added, ‘Maybe,’ and the word had such sad undertones he wanted to hug her—a comforting hug, nothing more, but not something he made a habit of doing with colleagues.
It was strange that the man’s questions had Kate coming out with something she’d never told a soul, not even her best friend. And while it was true it had been an ambition since childhood, she’d blurted it out it because the pang she always felt when the question of children arose had surprised her today with its intensity.
Had he fallen for the grandmother excuse? Who would? A diversion—that’s what she needed.
‘There’s a coffee shop here that does good coffee and great friands, a sort of pastry. Let’s fortify ourselves for the shopping trip.’
She waved her hand in the direction of the coffee shop, then realised half the hospital could be taking a break there. Walking in with a man who’d immediately be established in the hospital’s top-ten most handsome could give rise to the kind of gossip she hated.
‘No, a better idea would be to show you the best little eating place around here. The breakfast crowd will have gone and the morning coffee crowd not arrived. It’s a bit of a walk but through a nice park. Come on.’
What was she doing? It had to be more than strangeness in her stomach from mouldy bread that had her confessing her grandmother obsession to the man one minute, then asking him to Scoozi for coffee the next.
Someone in the hospital coffee shop she didn’t want to see? Angus wondered, but he followed her out of the hospital, across a road and into the big park that stretched away for what seemed like miles.
‘I’ve a hospital house down that road,’ he said, pointing across the intersection where solid, old, two- and three-storeyed houses lined a tree-shaded street. ‘My house is opposite a park. Is this the same park?’
His guide turned towards him, a frown on her face—a face which, unlike his mother’s porcelain figurines, showed every emotion.
Right now it was a picture of dismayed disbelief.
‘You’re living in one of the hospital houses?’
Unable to see why it should worry her, he nodded.
‘I gather it’s the one Maggie and Phil left,’ he explained. ‘It’s actually two flats which is perfect for me as Juanita, my housekeeper-nanny, likes her own accommodation. She says she’s not my wife or mother and is entitled to her own space.’
He can’t be living in Maggie and Phil’s place! The wailing words raced through Kate’s brain, but she knew someone was—she’d seen a removal van there yesterday and wondered who could afford to pay for one on a Sunday.
She could move! It didn’t matter that she’d decided she had to face her ghosts. She could do that next year, or the year after. She’d had good tenants in the house before, and the renovations she wanted to do could wait.
Except that she’d already stripped the wallpaper off most of the living room walls—
‘Are you all right?’
The last word, with its rolled r only made her mad, panicky reaction worse, but she steeled herself to calm down. It was the man’s accent, that was all, the deep Scottish voice would make anyone shiver.
That and the shadows in his dark eyes.
‘I was thinking of coincidences,’ she said, aware of the lameness of this excuse. ‘I live next door.’
‘Next door towards the hospital?’ His eyebrows rose as he asked the question, and there was a puzzled look on his face, much like the one he’d worn when he’d asked her about her marital status—puzzled and a bit amused at the same time, though once again his eyes weren’t smiling.
‘Next door the other way,’ she corrected, then before he could make some polite remark about the state of her overgrown garden or the junk from the living room she’d been depositing in the front yard, she added, ‘It was my family home but it’s been rented out for the past few years. I’m doing a bit of renovating now that I’ve moved back in.’
She didn’t add, With the ghosts, although that was how it felt—just herself and the lonely ghosts in a house made for families, a house that should ring with children’s laughter. Her mind flashed back to that day when she was eleven, staying with her friend Beth and visiting Beth’s grandmother’s house for the seemingly old lady’s sixtieth birthday. That house had been filled with laughter while the children, all related in some way—connected and secure in the connections—had dashed around like restless puppies. This is a family, Kate had realised. This is what I want!
She shut the door on that memory, and fast-forwarded to years later and her adamant refusal to have a termination when Brian had suggested it. The baby would have been her family—would have been. She continued on her way. By now they were halfway across the corner of the park, and a short detour to the right took them to the road opposite Scoozi.
‘That’s the café,’ she said, pointing to a place that had seen so much drama played out among hospital personnel, the walls were probably impregnated with emotion.
In order to avoid any further asinine confessions, once they had coffee and carrot cake, which happened to be the cake of the day, in front of them, Kate introduced work topics, asking him why TGAs had become something of a specialty with him.
Serious, dark brown eyes studied her across the table and for a moment she thought he might not answer her question, but apparently he was only mustering his thoughts—not coming out with the first thing that came into his head, as she was wont to do!
‘My first operation—the first I did as lead surgeon in a team—was a TGA and things went wrong. The coronary arteries were twisted around the heart, one of them going through the heart walls, and although we got there in the end, it was enough to make me realise that TGAs weren’t the piece of cake I’d been considering them.’
Kate nodded, picturing the subdued panic in the theatre as the team fought to sort out the problems that tiny heart would have presented.
‘So you made a speciality of them?’
He smiled at her, a slow, lazy smile that made her stomach flip. Mouldy bread or something far more serious?
‘Well, I did a lot more study into previous TGA cases and the complications the team could encounter during the operation, and tried to work out the best way of handling them.’
‘Including coping with coronary arteries that wound through the heart wall?’ Kate teased, unable to stop herself smiling at this stranger.
Not that he’d be a stranger for long, because they were neighbours, as well as colleagues. The thought caused another quiver in her abdomen, although she knew they’d only be friends. A man as good-looking as Angus McDowell could have his pick of women—should he want a woman—and scraggly redheads were unlikely to be on the top of his list.
‘Including—in fact, especially—that,’ he was saying. ‘Now, you’re doing me a favour, showing me around, so I’ll pay for our coffee.’
He stood and walked towards the till, leaving Kate wondering what she’d said that had caused such an abrupt departure.
And such a shift in mood, which had been becoming, well, neighbourly!
Angus knew he’d spoken curtly, not to mention practically knocking over his chair in his haste to get away from the table, but the redhead’s smile—talking about coronary arteries of all things—had caused a physical reaction in his body, one he hadn’t felt in a long time, and didn’t want to dwell on now.
Jet lag might explain it.
Or concern about Hamish’s rash.
Hamish…
Better to think about Kate’s smile than the little boy he loved but knew he wasn’t bonding with the way he should—the little boy who was the image of his mother…
He paid for the coffees, but thinking of Kate’s smile had him wondering if he could politely ask directions to the supermarket so they could part company and he could sort out what was happening to him.
Hardly!
Nor was he going to be able to avoid her in the future, given they’d be working on the same team—working closely.
Kate took him to the local shopping mall, within walking distance, and pointed out the best places to shop for meat and fruit.
‘Stupid of me not to have thought of getting the car before we came here. Do you have a car?’ Although she needed to shop herself—fresh bread for one thing—she was too eager to get out of his company to do it now, so added quickly, ‘All the shops deliver, or you could get a cab. Will you be all right?’
Angus was forced to look at her now, although since the smile he’d been avoiding eye contact. The neat-fetured face was turned towards him and it seemed to him there was a shadow of anxiety in her pale green eyes.
For him?
Surely not! He was a grown man and quite capable of shopping and getting a cab home.
But it could hardly be for herself.
‘Thank you, yes, of course I’ll manage,’ he responded, but at the same time, contrary now, he wished she’d stay—shop with him, share the cab, maybe come in and meet Hamish and Juanita—neighbourly…
‘Stop kidding yourself,’ he muttered under his breath when, goodbyes said, he was striding down the refrigerator aisle in the supermarket. ‘One silly little smile across a coffee table and suddenly you’re attracted to the woman!’
Not that anything could happen! It was Sod’s Law once again. The one woman in the world he’d felt a physical response to in four years and she wanted children.
Well, she wanted to be a grandmother…
Why?
He recalled a depth of emotion in her voice and guessed the grandmother thing might be a cover for something else.
He shoved yoghurt and butter into his trolley, then had to go back for cheese, knowing it wasn’t quite true about the physical attraction. There’d been a couple of women but nothing serious, nothing he’d wanted to pursue.
So maybe an affair with this woman…
What was he thinking! He’d barely met her, didn’t know her at all, and just because she looked like one of his mother’s figurines, it didn’t mean he had to go loopy over her. Besides, there were a whole raft of reasons why he shouldn’t get involved. The effect it would have on his relationship—what there was of it—with Hamish for one. Two, she was a colleague. And three, well, he wasn’t certain about three, although he knew there must be a three—didn’t things always come in threes…?
Having worked the previous weekend, Kate had what was left of Monday off, but given the proximity of their houses and not wanting to run into Angus McDowell again, she chose instead to go back to work. There was always book work to be done, and reports to write up—work she was usually happy to ignore until the last possible moment.
It was almost dusk when she finally walked down the road to her house, dawdling until she reached the place where Angus McDowell now lived, then hurrying, looking busy, in case he happened to see her. But once past the boundary fence, she paused and surveyed the mess in her front yard. She should have hired a skip before she began moving the old furniture. She could have thrown things straight into it.
‘It’s a terrible mess.’ The young, accusatory voice came from somewhere behind an old yellow sofa and the rolled r‘s told her it must be the four-year-old from next door.
‘It is indeed,’ she agreed, walking towards the sofa and peering over the back to see the little boy with wide blue eyes beneath a tousled thatch of white-blond hair, crouched there, a tunnel through the hedge behind him revealing his access from the neighbouring yard. ‘Does your dad know you’re here?’
‘He’s out…’ It sounded like ‘oot’ to Kate, who had to smile, though if the child had been living in the U.S., surely his accent should be American rather than Scottish.
‘And Juanita told me to get out from under her feet,’ the small explorer finished. ‘I was looking for an adventure. Me and McTavish—he’s my dog but right now he’s quantined—we like adventures.’
Kate nodded. She’d liked adventures herself when she’d been four. Unexpected pain hit her as memories of Susie’s death flashed before her eyes. They’d shifted to this house soon after and here the family had fallen apart…
‘Adventures can be fun but you need to be careful where you have them,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps you and McTavish, when he’s back with you, should have your adventures in my backyard. Come on, I’ll show you.’
She opened the side gate and led the way around her house, pushing through the branching arms of the untrimmed camellia hedge, to where the bushes grew even more thickly in the backyard, although there were patches of rather dry lawn here and there.
‘See, you can come through the hedge here—’ she pointed out another little tunnel ‘—and play safely. With the gate shut, McTavish won’t be able to run on the road.’
‘Hamish!’
The thunderous roar startled both of them, but Kate was first to respond.
‘He’s here, in my backyard. You won’t fit through the tunnel so you’ll have to come around the side.’
There was some muttering from the other side of the hedge, then the sound of next door’s side gate opening.
Hamish, meanwhile, had read the situation well and disappeared through the hole in the hedge, back into his own yard and was even now calling out to Juanita, so when a scowling Angus McDowell appeared, Kate was the only one in his sights.
‘Didn’t you think to check that someone knew where he was?’ he demanded. ‘Surely if you’ve been involved with the childcare centre you’ve some notion of children’s behaviour! We’re going demented in there, looking for him and you’re here chatting to him in your own backyard.’
There was more than anger in his eyes, there was fear, as well, but his tone had tightened Kate’s nerves and she was in no mood to be conciliatory.
‘Well, I’d hardly be chatting to him in your backyard, now would I?’ she demanded. ‘You were “oot,” he told me, and Juanita sent him to play. As it happens, I found him in my front yard, and because there’s only a low brick fence that a crawling infant could get over, and a front gate that doesn’t shut properly, I brought him around the back to suggest if he goes adventuring he should use the backyard.’
She considered setting her hands on her hips and giving him a good glare but the shadows she saw again in his eyes had killed her anger. This man had suffered pain. Was still suffering it? Was his move to Australia part of a healing process?
It’s none of your business, her head warned, but having known pain—strong emotional pain—she couldn’t help but wonder.
‘Adventures! It’s all he thinks about,’ Angus muttered, still angry in the aftermath of anxiety but not seething any more. ‘Some fool gave him a book that has a story about a boy and his dog that go on adventures and he’s been mad for them ever since.’
He looked at the woman he’d been yelling at only minutes earlier and caught a hint of a smile she’d tried to hide.
‘It isn’t funny,’ he snapped, not sure it was the smile or his reaction to it that had riled him.
She looked up at him, really smiling this time.
‘It’s a little bit funny,’ she pointed out. ‘Four years old and he’s trespassing on my property and telling me it’s a terrible mess. I’m sorry I didn’t call out to Juanita to tell her he was with me, but it was a matter of a minute or two to show him the backyard where I knew he’d be safe. Take a look—could you get a better place for an adventure? And wouldn’t you be more worried about him if he wasn’t off having adventures? If he did nothing but sit around in front of the television all day?’
Angus sighed. Of course he’d be worried if Hamish wasn’t always pushing himself to see more, do more, learn more. But did he want to admit it to this woman?
‘I guess so,’ he said, although reluctantly, ‘and I know he misses the dog. Apparently we can visit him in quarantine but I haven’t sorted out a vehicle yet so can’t get to the quarantine station.’
‘Well, that’s easily fixed,’ his neighbour replied. ‘I’m on call at the weekend, so feel free to take my car. I’ve got a sat nav you can use so you won’t get lost.’
Angus stared at her. Every cell in his body told him not to get more involved with this woman, but she wasn’t inviting him to dinner, nor showing any signs she felt the slightest interest in him as a man; she was simply being neighbourly.
So why was he so hesitant to accept her offer?
‘Or not,’ she added with a shrug that showed little concern over his rudeness in not replying. ‘Now, I’ve got to get inside, I’ve some stripping to do.’
Stripping?
It had to be jet lag that had his imagination working overtime, seeing that slight body slowly revealed as she eased off her clothes!
She started towards the back of the house, pausing to remove a key from under a lichen-covered Buddha, then as she straightened she turned back towards where he still stood, puzzled and disturbed, in her backyard.
‘I’ve just remembered,’ she said, ‘there’s a gate down the back between the two properties. Dad let the hedge grow over it when the house you’re in was sold for rentals years ago, but if you hack away at the hedge and free the gate, Juanita will be able to get in here more easily if she needs to find the adventurers.’
‘That’s the first place burglars would look for a spare key,’ he muttered, ignoring her advice about gates and hedges but finally getting his legs to work and moving towards her rather than the side gate.
Now she laughed.
‘No way. They look under the doormat first, then under the flowerpots—look at all of them.’ She waved her hands towards the mass of flowerpots clustered on mossy paving stones around the back door.
Angus did look. Looking at pot plants was infinitely preferable to the mental image lingering unwanted in his head.
Although she couldn’t have meant that kind of stripping…
He turned more of his attention to the pot plants—a lot more.
‘Herbs? I thought you said you couldn’t cook. Why all the herbs?’
‘I can cook, I just can’t bake. When it comes to things like cakes and biscuits—I’m hopeless at those.’
It was one of the most inane conversations Kate had ever been involved in, but somehow she couldn’t move away from the man who was now examining her herbs with an almost professional interest.
Or what seemed like one!
Why hadn’t he left?
Why walk towards her rather than the side gate?
Surely the strangeness she was feeling in his presence wasn’t reciprocated? Not just attraction as in physical awareness but attraction like iron filings to a magnet—a kind of inexorable pull…
‘I’ve got a wall to strip and someone’s calling you,’ she said as a shrill, ‘Daddy’ wafted across the hedge.
‘Yes,’ he said, but still he didn’t move, except to straighten up from his examination of the herbs and look directly at her, the shadows in his eyes not visible in the gathering dusk, so he was just a tall, dark and very handsome man!
‘Yes,’ he said again, then finally he turned away, calling back to Hamish, telling him he was coming, and disappearing around the side of the house.
Weird!
Chapter Two
KATE left early for the hospital, telling herself it had nothing to do with not wanting to accidentally run into her neighbour and so having to walk with him. But maybe he’d had the same idea of avoiding her, or he always arrived at work an hour early, for he was the first person she saw as she entered the unit.
‘The baby being transferred has arrived,’ he said, a slight frown furrowing his brow.
‘Bigger problem than you thought?’ she asked, sticking to professionalism mainly because the toast she’d had that morning hadn’t been made from mouldy bread but her stomach was still unsettled.
‘No, the scans show really good coronaries, as far as you can ever tell from scans, but he hasn’t got a name.’
Now Kate found herself frowning also.
‘Hasn’t got a name?’ she repeated. ‘But that’s ridiculous. Of course he must have a name.’
‘Baby Stamford,’ Angus replied, his frown deepening.
‘Oh, dear,’ Kate muttered, hoping the first thing that had entered her head was the wrong one. ‘But sometimes parents wait until their baby’s born to name him or her, thinking they’ll know a name that suits once they’ve seen the baby.’
Now Angus smiled, but it was a poor effort, telling Kate he knew as well as she did that sometimes the shock of having a baby with a problem affected the parents so badly they didn’t want to give the child a name—didn’t want to personalise the infant—in case he or she didn’t survive.
Her heart ached for them, but aching hearts didn’t fix babies.
‘You’re operating this morning?’ she asked Angus.
He nodded.
‘Good! That gives me an excuse to speak to the parents, to explain what my part will be, before, during and after.’
She looked up at him.
‘Shall we go together? A double act?’
Angus studied her for a moment, almost as if he was trying to place her in his life, then he nodded.
‘The mother came by air ambulance with the baby, and the husband is driving down. Somewhere called Port something, I think they come from.’
‘Port Macquarie,’ Kate told him, ‘and as far as I’m concerned, that’s in our favour, the mother being here on her own. We might find out more from her than we would from the two together.’
‘I prefer to speak to both parents,’ Angus said in the kind of voice that suggested he was coolly professional in his approach to his job, not someone who got involved with the parents of the infants on whom he operated.
Which was fine, Kate admitted to herself as they walked down the corridor towards the parents’ waiting room. A lot of paediatric surgeons were that way, finding a certain detachment necessary in a job that carried huge emotional burdens.
Although he was a single father himself—wouldn’t that make him more empathetic?
And why, pray tell, was she even thinking about his approach to his job when it was none of her business? All she needed to know was that he was a top surgeon!
The waiting room was empty.
‘The baby was born by Caesarean, so the mother is still a patient,’ Becky, the unit secretary, told them. ‘She’s one floor up, C Ward, room fifteen.’
‘Let’s take the stairs,’ Kate suggested, and when Angus grimaced she added, ‘Not keen on incidental exercise? Don’t you know that even the smallest amount of exercise every day can help keep you healthy?’
Far better to be talking exercise than thinking about empathy…
‘I lived in America for five years, where everyone drives, and already today I’ve walked to work—incidental exercise, but mainly because I don’t have a car.’
‘You lived there for five years?’ Kate queried, taking the second flight two steps at a time, only partly for the exercise. ‘Yet Hamish has a broad Scots accent?’
Angus caught up with her as she opened the door.
‘When my wife died, my mother came out to mind the baby, then my father took early retirement, so he and my mother were Hamish’s prime carers when he learned to talk. They stayed until Hamish was three, then found Juanita for me before they returned to Scotland, where my father’s old firm was only too happy to have him return to work.’
When his wife died?
There were plenty of single parents around, but most of them didn’t have partners who had died!
No wonder he had shadows in his eyes…
Kate tried to make sense of this—and make sense of why a casual answer to her question was having such an impact on her—as she led the way to C Ward, but once inside room fifteen, Angus’s marital state was the last thing on her mind.
‘I really don’t care what you do,’ the woman in the bed in room fifteen announced when they’d introduced themselves and explained the reason for their visit. ‘This is just not the kind of thing that happens to people like us. I mean, my husband has his own business and I’m a barrister—we’re both healthy, and we run in marathons. I keep telling people that the babies must have been mixed up. I held my baby when he was born and there was nothing wrong with him, and then suddenly people are saying his heart’s not right and flying me off to Sydney, even refusing to take my husband in the plane.’
The tirade left Kate so saddened she was speechless, but thankfully Angus was there. He sat down carefully by the side of the bed, and spoke quietly but firmly.
‘Mrs Stamford, I realise this is a terrible shock to you, but with this defect babies always seem perfectly healthy at first. It’s only when a little duct between the two arteries starts to close and oxygenated blood keeps circulating through the lungs rather than around the body that a blueness is noticed, usually in the nail beds and lips of the infant.’
Kate saw the woman’s fury mount, and expected further claims of baby-swapping, but to Kate’s surprise, Mrs Stamford’s anger was directed at Angus’s choice of words.
‘Defect? You’re saying my baby has a defect?’
Time to step in before she became hysterical, Kate decided.
‘It’s fixable, the problem he has,’ she said gently. ‘That’s why we’re here. We need to explain the operation to you and get your permission to perform it.’
‘And if I refuse?’
Oh, hell! Kate tried to think, but once again Angus took over.
‘There could well be legal precedents that would allow us to operate anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m new to Australia but in many of the states in the U.S.—’
‘Well, I very much doubt that,’ Mrs Stamford interrupted him, although she seemed to have calmed down somewhat. Kate sought to reassure the woman.
‘It’s an operation that’s frequently performed, and with excellent results,’ she told her, ‘and we’re lucky to have Dr McDowell here as he specialises in it.’
She looked at Angus, expecting him to begin his explanation, but he hesitated for a moment before taking a small notebook and pen out of his shirt pocket.
‘This might explain it best,’ he said to Mrs Stamford.
Kate wondered about the hesitation—was it to do with the detachment she’d sensed earlier?—although now he was drawing a small heart on a clean page of the notebook, carefully inking in the coronary arteries which clasped the heart like protective fingers, then showing the two major arteries coming out the top of the organ.
‘These coronary arteries which feed oxygenated blood to the heart muscle to keep it beating come off the aorta, the bigger of the two arteries coming out of the heart. The aorta is supposed to come out of the left ventricle while the pulmonary artery that divides in two and goes into the lungs comes out of the right. On rare occasions these two arteries are transposed and the aorta comes out of the right ventricle, with the pulmonary artery coming out of the left.’
Mrs Stamford was at least interested enough to look at Angus’s drawing, and as she was quiet, he continued.
‘What we have to do is first move the two coronary arteries, then we swap the major arteries, cutting the aorta and fixing it to the pulmonary artery where it comes out of the heart, and stitching the pulmonary artery to the aorta so the two arteries are now doing the jobs they’re supposed to be doing.’
‘For ever?’ Mrs Stamford demanded.
Angus hid a sigh. She was right to ask, and had every right to know the truth, but this was one of the reasons he hated getting too involved with parents, having to tell them that the future could hold more operations, having to tell them that, although their child could lead a normal life, there was no guarantee of a permanent fix. Every conversation led to more emotional involvement—and often more pain for the parents.
‘There’s a chance the baby will need another operation when he’s older.’ He spoke calmly and dispassionately—straight medical information. ‘The valves on the pulmonary artery are smaller than the aorta’s valves and as these valves are left in place they might sometimes need to be expanded.’
‘Leave the diagram,’ Mrs Stamford said. Ordered? ‘I’ll speak to my husband and then talk to you again.’
She was dismissing them, and Kate waited while Angus pulled the page from his notebook, then they both left the room.
‘Is there a legal precedent in some places to go ahead without permission?’ Kate asked him.
‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied, ‘but the woman was getting hysterical and I thought, as she’s a barrister, legal talk might calm her down.’
‘I think she’s entitled to a little hysteria,’ Kate muttered, wondering if Angus could really be as detached as he appeared.
She shrugged her shoulders, trying to ease the tension that had coiled in her body.
‘It must be terrible for the parents,’ she reminded him, ‘to learn that there’s something wrong with their child.’
Worse than losing an unborn child?
She thrust the thought away and turned her attention to what Angus was saying.
‘Particularly parents who are barristers and run marathons?’ he queried, the dryness in his voice suggesting he hadn’t taken to Mrs Stamford, not one little bit. ‘I wonder who she thinks do have children with heart defects? Common people like doctors and teachers? People who don’t run marathons? I’m glad the baby is our patient, not the mother.’
‘That’s if the baby is our patient,’ Kate reminded him, although she was wondering why Angus had chosen this specialty if he didn’t like dealing with parents. Surely that was as important as successfully completing a delicate operation? Or nearly as important…
‘He will be,’ Angus assured her, moving to avoid a passer-by and accidentally bumping against her shoulder. ‘I doubt any mother would deny her child a chance at life.’
‘I hope you’re right!’ Kate murmured, though fear for the tiny scrap of humanity fighting for his life right now made her feel cold and shivery.
Except for a patch of skin on her shoulder which was very, very hot!
‘Do you want to read his file? A paediatrician in the hospital where he was born gave him prostaglandin to keep the ductus arteriosus open and opened a hole between the atria to mix the oxygenated blood as much as possible but it won’t hold him for long.’
Kate sighed.
‘No, I’ll read the file later. Right now I should go back in and talk to her.’
‘Better you than me,’ Angus said, although even as he spoke he felt saddened by his reaction and wondered just when he’d lost the empathy he used to feel with parents.
Fool! No need to wonder when he knew the answer. It was back when Jenna died—
‘You make it sound as if I’m walking into an execution chamber,’ Kate teased, jerking him out of the past. He found himself wishing she wouldn’t do it—wouldn’t talk to him so casually, as if they were old friends, and smile at the same time. It was affecting him in a way he didn’t understand and certainly didn’t want to consider. He didn’t do emotion! Not any more…
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he told her.
‘No?’
Again the teasing smile, and again he felt a physical reaction to it, but before he could analyse it, Kate was speaking again.
‘I can understand her anguish. Not only fear for her little son, but that terrible “why me” feeling she must be experiencing.’
‘“Why me”?’ Angus repeated, then he shook his head as he admitted, ‘You’re right. There’s always a lot of “why me” isn’t there?’
He looked unhappy and Kate realised that’s exactly what he must have thought when his wife had died, as he tried to cope with his own grief and anguish, not to mention his son’s loss of a mother.
And she, Kate, foolish woman that she was, had caused him pain by bringing it up!
But the ‘why me’ feeling was familiar to her, and although she wouldn’t—couldn’t—think about the really bad times she’d felt that way, maybe a couple of her less traumatic ‘why me’s’ would cheer him up, chase the shadows from his eyes if only for a few minutes.
And lighten the atmosphere before she went back in to see Mrs Stamford!
‘For my part they’ve been totally minor.’ That was a lie but he’d never know. ‘Things like a date passing out in his soup in the most expensive restaurant in town—a diabetic coma not drunkenness—and as it was a first date, it wasn’t entirely surprising the relationship came to nothing. Then there was the one and only time I was persuaded to try skydiving. I got caught up in a tree and it took five hours to get me down, with full television coverage of a local drama. I know these are very trivial things compared to what Mrs Stamford is going through, but they do give me just some inkling of her “this can’t be happening to me” feelings.’
Angus smiled and Kate felt a little spurt of happiness that she’d been able to make him smile, but the happiness faded as she remembered the task she’d set herself. She returned to Mrs Stamford’s room.
‘I thought you might like someone to talk to,’ she said, giving the woman a quick professional once-over and not liking the pale, haggard face and red-rimmed eyes. ‘There are counsellors, of course, that we could bring to you, but they wouldn’t know the ins and outs of the op the baby needs. If you want to talk it out I’m willing to sit here and listen.’
‘You said you were a doctor,’ Mrs Stamford muttered in accusing tones. ‘Don’t you have other duties, people waiting for your services? We keep reading about the waiting lists for operations in hospitals, yet you’ve got time to sit and chat.’
Kate bit back a defensive retort. The woman was in terrible emotional pain; she was entitled to lash out.
‘My job this morning was to prepare your baby for surgery,’ Kate responded, speaking gently but firmly. ‘As the anaesthetist I’m in charge of everything that goes into his blood and lungs until he goes onto the bypass machine, then afterwards until he’s out of the post-op room. But I’m also a woman, and although I can’t imagine the depth of the pain you’re going through, I thought you might like a sounding board. Or to ask questions. Or just to have someone sitting with you for a while.’
Mrs Stamford’s stiff upper lip did a little wobble, as did her lower lip, then she sniffed deeply as if to control tears that longed to flow.
‘Will he die if he doesn’t have the operation?’ she asked, even paler now, if that was possible.
Kate hesitated.
‘We can keep him alive for a while, but because most of the oxygenated blood is circulating back through his lungs and not getting to his heart and brain, the answer’s yes. But we have kids that have had this op coming back to visit us years later, fine healthy young girls and boys.’
The only response was another sniff, although the way the woman was twisting her hands told of her terrible agitation.
Kate longed to help her but wasn’t sure how.
Maybe…
‘Have you thought what you’d have done if you’d known the baby had a problem early on in your pregnancy. Would you have had a termination?’
Now colour rose in Mrs Stamford’s cheeks.
‘You mean, an abortion? No, I’d never have done that. A life’s a life—my husband and I both agree on that.’
But now the baby’s here you’d let him die? Kate thought, but she couldn’t say it. Nor could she understand Mrs Stamford’s thinking now, until the woman sighed and said, ‘You’re right. Of course I can’t let him die. It was the shock! Give me whatever I have to sign, then go ahead and operate.’
Kate had won, so why did she feel as if she’d lost?
Because things were never that easy!
‘He could still die,’ she said, even more gently than she’d spoken earlier. ‘These operations are performed quite often and with great success, but with any operation at any age there’s a risk. You understand that.’
‘Scared you’ll be sued if you don’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t‘s?’ Mrs Stamford snapped, but Kate heard the pain in her voice and knew the woman was close to breaking.
‘I’m more afraid that having given permission if something does happen you’ll blame yourself,’ she said. ‘You’re already doing that, aren’t you? Somehow you’ve convinced yourself this is all your fault, but congenital abnormalities can happen anywhere, any time.’
She stood up and moved closer to Mrs Stamford, putting her arms around her and holding her as the woman wept and wept.
‘This is the damn problem with only having units like this in the capital cities,’ Kate ranted to Angus a little later, the signed permission form in her hand. ‘The patient, and usually the mother, are whisked away and end up miles from family support. She’s got no-one, that woman, until her husband gets here. I know we can’t have units like this in every hospital in Australia, but there should be a better way of doing things.’
Angus gave her shoulder a comforting pat, the physical effect of which jolted her out of her worry over Mrs Stamford’s isolation, especially as she’d written her colleague down as a man who remained detached—too detached, she’d thought, for comforting pats!
‘She’s got the baby,’ he reminded her, and Kate looked up at him.
‘You mean…?’
‘You’ve already achieved one miracle this morning,’ Angus told her, ‘so why not go for two. Go back in there and ask her if she’d like to go with him as he’s wheeled to Theatre. We can get a wheelchair and she could touch him, hold his hand. Although if she doesn’t want to bond with him in case he doesn’t live—’
‘She thinks she doesn’t want to bond with him.’ Kate interrupted his objection, excited now by the idea. ‘But maybe she’s changed her mind about that, as well.’
She’d sounded positive about it, but deep inside she had her doubts, even wondered if it was wise to push Mrs Stamford this little bit more. But Angus seemed to think it was a good idea and he was looking far happier now than he had been earlier, so the least Kate could do was try.
She returned to the room where Mrs Stamford was lying back against the pillows, her eyes closed and only a little more colour in her face than when Kate had first seen her.
‘We’ll be taking him to Theatre very soon, and I wondered if we arranged a wheelchair for you and a wardsman to push it, you’d like to come up to the PICU and go as far as the theatre with him.’
Mrs Stamford’s eyelids lifted and dark brown eyes stared fiercely at Kate.
‘What are you? Some kind of avenging angel, determined to push me further and further?’
‘I just wondered,’ Kate said lamely, ‘seeing as you’re here on your own until your husband arrives and he, the baby, is on his own, as well. Maybe you could support each other.’
Oh, boy! Wrong thing to say! Mrs Stamford was in tears again, flooding tears and great gulping sobs.
Kate held her again, and it was only because she was holding her, she heard the whispered instructions.
‘Get the bloody wheelchair, but I want a nurse not a wardsman wheeling me. Men don’t understand.’
Uh-oh! Was it Mr Stamford, not Mrs Stamford, who’d found it hard to accept a less-than-perfect child? Had she consulted him—phoned him—before she signed the permission-to-operate paper?
And while Kate could have argued that some men were far more understanding and supportive than some women, she held her tongue. She gave Mrs Stamford a final hug and darted off, not wanting to give the woman time to change her mind. She arranged the transportation, then raced back up to the floor above, knowing she had to be there to intubate Baby Stamford and prepare him for his lifesaving op.
‘So tiny, the veins.’
She didn’t have to glance up to know it was Angus hovering beside her in the treatment room as she put a peripheral line into the baby’s foot, already having secured one in his jugular and administered the first mild sedative.
‘So tiny we need to work out better ways of doing this—smaller, more flexible catheters. You’d think it would be easy but I’ve been working with technicians from one of the manufacturing companies for over a year now, and we’re no further advanced. Too fine and they block, or twist or kink—it’s so frustrating!’
Angus studied the back of her head—a coloured scarf now hiding the bright hair—as she concentrated fully on her task.
She’d been working with techies to improve catheters? Kate Armstrong was full of surprises, not least of which had been the way she’d talked Mrs Stamford out of her indignation and allowed the woman’s natural maternal instincts to come out.
The redhead’s body brushed against his as she straightened up and his body went into immediate response mode. Not good where Kate Armstrong was concerned. She wanted kids—well, grandkids, which meant, as she’d pointed out, having kids first.
She was not for him!
Even though the ‘grandmother’ thing intrigued him! Not to mention whatever lay behind it…
Was it because of the familiar noises in the operating theatre, the sizzle of the bovie as it cut and cauterised tiny vessels, the bleeps of the monitors as they kept Kate up-to-date on Baby Stamford’s condition, the subdued chatter of the staff, the music playing in the background, that Angus felt so at home? Although this was not only his first operation at Jimmie’s but the first time he’d worked with any of the team.
Oliver Rankin was assisting. He was quiet, neat and efficient, although Angus rather thought he was casting glances in Kate’s direction a little too often. Clare Jackson was operating the bypass machine, waiting for the order to use it to take over the work of Baby Stamford’s tiny heart. Clare Jackson might not want children, Angus thought, standing back so Oliver could lift the pericardium away from Baby Stamford’s heart.
The thought startled him, and he shut it down immediately, dismayed to find himself, for the first time in years, thinking of something other than the operation while in Theatre. He prided himself on his total concentration on the job, and although he often joined in the general chat and jokes, his mind never strayed far from the tiny patient on the table.
She was far better looking, beautiful, in fact—Clare Jackson—so why was he, too, glancing up at Kate from time to time.
Because she’s the anaesthetist, of course, and she’s the one who knows how the baby’s doing, down there, all but hidden with the cage to protect his head and wrappings covering all his little body except his chest.
‘Blood gases fine,’ the woman he was trying to block from his mind said. ‘Heartbeats 130 a minute.’
With the little heart fully exposed, Angus inserted cannulas into the aorta and an atrial vein; Oliver attached the tubes that would put Baby Stamford on bypass—the tubes connecting to the machine which would oxygenate his blood and pump it through his body.
‘Pressure’s up,’ Kate said, reassuring everyone, although Clare was now controlling what happened to the baby’s blood pressure.
‘Check blood gases and start cooling him.’ Angus gave the order, one hundred percent of his attention back on his patient, the information coming in from Kate and Clare clicking computerlike into his brain, his mind whirling as he worked, total concentration on what he was doing but thinking ahead, always anticipating any problem, at the same time.
‘Why do we cool them?’ the circulating nurse asked, her voice suggesting she’d often wondered but for some reason had never wanted to ask.
‘It cuts down the risk of organ damage when the flow of blood to the brain and other major organs stops—when we stop the heart to do the repair.’
Oliver explained, while Angus inserted a tiny tube into the aorta, where it was rising out of the heart. Through this he’d put the poison that would stop the heart beating and, once that went in, it was a matter of timing every second of the operation.
Kate watched him at work, waiting patiently until all the blood drained from Baby Stamford’s heart, then switching the coronary arteries so neatly and quickly she didn’t realise they were done until he stood and stretched.
Once straightened, he looked across at her, and she nodded and held up a thumb, but there’d been something in his dark eyes that had suggested he was looking at her, not at the anaesthetist. Ridiculous, of course, but she shivered in spite of herself, then turned all of her attention back to the patient on the table and the machines that told her what was happening.
Less than an hour later the baby’s heart was beating on its own, the little hole in his heart repaired, the arteries switched so they would now do the jobs they were intended to do. And though Angus had left a pacemaker in Baby Stamford’s chest to keep his heart rate stable, and various drainage tubes and measuring devices were still attached to him, he was doing well.
Kate had to smile as she accompanied her tiny comatose patient to the intensive-care room. He would be her responsibility until he regained consciousness, although Clare was in charge of the machine that was keeping him breathing.
‘Getting him off the ventilator is the next hurdle,’ Clare, who was walking beside Kate, said.
‘Only if he needs it for a long time, but he’s come through very well—all his blood values were good,’ Kate replied, and Clare smiled.
‘You’re a glass-half-full person, right?’ she said.
Was she?
‘I’ve never thought about it,’ Kate admitted honestly.
‘Never thought about what?’ a deep voice asked, and she turned to see Angus had joined them in the small room.
‘Whether I’m a pessimist or an optimist,’ she said, thinking of the times when sadness and loss had threatened to overwhelm her and whether that was pessimism.
‘Oh, definitely an optimist, I’d say,’ Angus told her, almost smiling, almost teasing. ‘What else would you call a woman who organised childcare for children she doesn’t yet have?’
‘You what?’ Clare demanded, but Kate silenced Angus with a ‘don’t you dare’ look.
Bad enough she’d admitted her grandmother obsession to one person without the entire hospital knowing it.
‘What about you, Angus,’ she asked to divert the conversation. ‘Are you a glass-half-full or a glass-halfempty person?’
He studied her for a moment.
‘You know, I’ve never thought about it. Definitely half full as far as patients are concerned. I could never do an operation if I doubted I’d be improving a child’s quality of life.’
‘You’ve children yourself?’ Clare asked, and Kate felt a surge of something that couldn’t possibly be jealousy flood through her veins at the other woman’s interest.
‘One, Hamish—he’s four,’ Angus answered, while Kate wondered why Alex couldn’t have found a less beautiful perfusionist.
‘Probably ready for a little sister or brother,’ Clare suggested, and though Kate knew this was just idle talk as they all watched the monitors that told them Baby Stamford was doing well, she resented the other woman’s interest. Although Clare probably didn’t know Angus was a widower.
‘Not for Hamish, I’m afraid,’ Angus replied. ‘He’s going to be an only child for life.’
Poor kid, Kate thought, but before she could point out the disadvantages—the haunting loneliness she’d felt as an only child—Clare was talking again, talking and smiling.
Flirting?
‘Good for you!’ she said. ‘I’m one of four and the number of times I’ve wished I was an only child! You’ve no idea. Having to share toys, wearing hand-me-downs—not that we lived on bread and jam or the hand-me-downs were rags, but I think I was born to be an only child.’
Selfish! Kate muttered to herself, but there was something so open and honest about Clare that she found herself looking past the beauty to the woman within.
And liking her!
Damn!
Double damn if Angus were to fall for her, and why wouldn’t he?
Not that it was any of Kate’s business who he fell for, so why was she still thinking about Clare, thinking perhaps she was attached—surely she was attached; how could someone so beautiful be unattached?
‘Look, there’s no point in all three of us being here. Why don’t you two grab a coffee break—in fact, it’s past lunchtime. The canteen is good, and cheaper than the coffee shop on the ground floor. You know where to go?’
Was she pushing them together? Angus wondered. Then knew it was only because, for some indefinable reason, he was attracted to Kate Armstrong that he’d even consider she might be doing such a thing. This was work—two colleagues sharing lunch. He had to get his mind off Kate Armstrong and, having decided that, lunch with the beautiful Clare might be just what he needed.
Kate watched them depart, telling herself it was for the best, particularly now she’d heard Angus being so adamant about not producing siblings for Hamish. Given that fact, Angus McDowell was definitely not the man for her.
Not that he’d shown the slightest sign of wanting to be, so why she’d been idly fantasising about him she had no idea!
No idea apart from the attraction that had startled her body into life when she’d first met him. Her body, that was usually biddable and dependable and had rarely felt anything more than a lukewarm interest in any man since Brian and even he hadn’t provoked much physical reaction.
Enough of attraction; she’d think about something else. Like why was Angus so definite about not wanting more children? Perhaps it was another way of saying he’d never marry again?
Get your mind back on work!
She checked Baby Stamford, wishing he had a name, then was surprised to hear the whirr of a wheelchair coming towards her. Mrs Stamford, pushed by a man who definitely wasn’t a wardsman.
‘They said he’d come through very well.’ Mrs Stamford’s voice was back in accusatory mode, daring Kate to argue this piece of good news.
‘He’s a little champion,’ she assured the still-pale woman, then she held out her hand to the man. ‘I’m Kate Armstrong, the anaesthetist. I’ll be keeping an eye on him for the next few hours.’
‘Pete Stamford,’ the man responded, shaking Kate’s hand, although all his attention was on his baby son who was so dwarfed by wires and tubes it was hard to see much of him. ‘You keep a personal eye on him? Not just watch monitors?’
‘I like to be here most of the time,’ Kate told him, and was surprised when the man’s face darkened.
‘Then it’s obvious to me he’s not out of the woods yet,’ he said, his muted voice still managing to convey anger.
‘He’s been through a huge ordeal for such a tiny baby,’ Kate said gently. ‘Being on bypass takes a lot out of them, and we stop his heart while the switch happens, poor wee mite, but there’s no cause for anxiety. I stay because I like to watch until I’m certain he’s over the effect of the anaesthetic and sleeping naturally. I can’t always do it, because I’ve usually other ops scheduled, so today it’s a bit of a treat for me.’
Pete Stamford eyed her with great suspicion and Kate was glad he hadn’t come when all three of the specialists had been in the room. Then he would have been truly alarmed.
And she was even gladder—or should that be more glad, she wondered—when she realised that Mrs Stamford had wheeled herself closer to the cot, put her hand through the vent and was softly stroking her baby’s arm, talking quietly to him at the same time.
Kate felt her heart turn over at the sight, then realised Baby Stamford’s father was also looking at his wife, while tears streamed down his cheeks.
Unable to resist offering comfort, Kate put her arm around his shoulders and he turned to her and sobbed, his chin resting on her head.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, more or less to both of them. ‘You’ve been through such an ordeal and it isn’t over yet, but the worst part is behind him, so maybe, little champ that he is, he deserves a name.’
To Kate’s surprise, Pete straightened. He stepped towards his wife, taking her hand as they both chorused, ‘Bob.’
Bob?
They were going to call the baby Bob?
What about Jack and Tom and Sam, simple syllable names that were in vogue right now? What kind of a name for a baby was Bob?
It was Mrs Stamford who eventually explained.
‘We had a dog once, a border collie, who was the most faithful animal God ever put on earth. Even when he was dying of some terrible liver disease, he would drag himself to the doorway to greet Pete every night, and every morning he’d bring in the paper and drop it at my feet, right up to the day he died. He had more strength and courage than any human we’ve ever known, so it seems right to name this little fellow after him.’
Now Mrs Stamford was crying, too, and Kate quietly backed out of the room, wanting to leave the pair of them to comfort each other—and to get to know their little son.
Bob!
Angus returned as she was standing by the main monitors in the PICU. He peered into the room where the couple were, then turned to Kate, his eyebrows raised.
‘They’re okay,’ she told him. ‘They’ve called him Bob.’
‘Bob?’ Angus repeated. ‘Ah, after a grandfather no doubt.’
‘After their old dog,’ Kate corrected, then she laughed at the expression on Angus’s face. ‘Thinking how it would be to have a child called McTavish?’ she teased, and although he smiled, once again the smile didn’t reach his eyes.
‘I meant it when I said earlier there’d be no more children in my family,’ he said, and Kate sensed he was telling her something else.
Telling her he, too, felt an attraction between them but it couldn’t be?
She was not sure, but her body seemed to take it that way, disappointment forming a heavy lump in her chest.
Chapter Three
‘HIS name’s Pete—Mr Stamford, that is,’ she said to Angus, anxious to get him out of her company. ‘I’m sure he’d appreciate meeting you and talking to you about the op and Bob’s expected progress.’
Her tongue stumbled over ‘Bob,’ and Angus smiled at her, restarting all the sensations she didn’t want to feel. Surely if she ignored them they’d go away, and for all the fancy she’d had earlier, she doubted Angus would be attracted to her. Especially not with a beauty like Clare around.
Or perhaps he no longer felt attraction for anyone. Perhaps his adamant declaration that Hamish would be an only child was because he was still in love with his dead wife—that was a possibility.
In which case he should do something to dampen down his attractiveness, Kate thought gloomily.
He walked away and she looked through the window to where he stood, talking to Pete and Mrs Stamford, and though she couldn’t hear what they were saying, in her imagination she heard his seductive accent and knew ignoring the manifestations of attraction would be difficult to do.
Perhaps an affair—
He’s not interested in you!
One part of her head was yelling at the other part. She tried to remember back to lectures on the brain and which bits controlled what. She’d never been particularly interested in neurology and worked quite happily on the theory that half her brain did emotion while the other half did common sense. And while the common-sense half—maybe that part was more than half in her case—usually held sway, she knew once the emotion part was awoken, it could be difficult to ignore.
Double damn again.
‘You talking to yourself?’
The nurse sitting at the monitor looked up and Kate realised she’d sworn aloud.
‘Probably,’ she told the nurse. ‘Early dementia setting in.’
‘Not surprising, the work you do, anaesthetising tiny babies. I couldn’t do it. I find it hard enough to watch them on the monitor. I’m getting married next week and we want to have kids, but I’ll have to transfer out of the PICU before I can even think about it. Pregnancy’s scary enough without knowing all the things that could be going wrong with the baby!’
Kate watched the monitor and considered this. It was what she did, caring for babies during lifesaving operations, so she’d always seen the work as positive, but as Angus and the Stamfords left Bob’s room and she returned to it, she wondered if knowing the things that could happen would make pregnancy better or worse.
Better, surely, for there would be no unknowns.
But had she chosen it, subconsciously steered her career this way, because of the baby she’d lost?
No, that had been back in second year at university, before she’d begun her medical training, when medicine had still been only one of the options she’d been considering.
But her affinity for babies came from somewhere…
She shook her head, shaking away thoughts that had been safely locked in some dusty closet in her mind for many years.
‘You handled Mrs Stamford very well. Are you able to feel that empathy for all your patients’ parents?’
Angus appeared when Kate, some hours later, was in the surgeons’ lounge checking the operating list for the following day, baby Bob now in Clare’s care.
Kate turned towards him, but though looking at him usually produced a smile, this time it was forced.
‘That’s a strange question,’ she told him, still puzzling over the man who’d asked it. ‘I would think anyone would feel empathy for someone with a sick child.’
‘Perhaps!’ He shrugged off her assertion with that single word, as if to say he didn’t, but she’d seen glimpses of an empathetic man behind the cool detachment he wore like a suit.
Or maybe armour?
‘Not “perhaps” at all,’ she argued. ‘I bet you feel it or have felt it. In fact, I’d like to hazard a guess it’s because of the children you see with problems that you’ve decided not to have more children.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong.’
The blunt statement struck her like a slap and she felt the colour she hated rising in her cheeks. He must have seen it, for his next question was conciliatory, to say the least.
‘But on that subject, you see these infants yourself, yet you still want to have children. Why’s that?’
He’d asked the question to turn the conversation back on her, Kate knew that, but it was something she’d been thinking about since talking to the nurse earlier at the monitors. She’d locked the memory of her unborn child back into that dusty closet where it belonged, but the other issue was, and always had been, family.
How could she explain the loneliness she’d experienced as a child, and the ache for family, accentuated this time of year as Christmas drew near? Oh, she had friends who always welcomed her, but Christmas was for families, and since she was a child, she’d dreamed that one day she’d be the one cooking the turkey—she’d be the one with the children…
Pathetic, she knew, so she answered truthfully—well, partly truthfully.
‘It’s more a family thing,’ she admitted. ‘I was—I was an only child of parents who had no siblings living in Australia so I had no cousins or aunts or grandparents. Then one day—’
‘When you were eleven,’ he interrupted, and she nodded.
‘—I was staying with a friend and we went to her grandmother’s sixtieth birthday party and I saw a family in action and knew it was what I wanted.’
She kept her eyes on him as she spoke, daring him to laugh at her, wondering why the hell she was pouring out these things to a virtual stranger when she’d held them close inside her lonely heart for all these years!
He didn’t laugh, but nor did he respond, the silence tautening between them.
‘Besides,’ she said, determined to get back to easy ground, ‘why wouldn’t I want to pass on the genetic inheritance of pale skin and red hair—so suitable to a hot Australian climate.’
Now he did respond, even smiling at the fun she was poking at herself.
‘Ah, selective breeding. I do agree with that, but you could do that with one child—even be a grandmother with one child—so why children plural.’
Now Kate’s smile was the real deal, and she shook her head as she replied.
‘You’re a persistent cuss, aren’t you? We barely know each other and you’re asking questions even my best friends don’t ask. They just accept—Kate, yes, the one who wants kids. They usually emphasise the want and sigh and roll their eyes because they already have children and are often wondering why on earth they thought it was such a good idea.’
‘Which gets you very neatly out of answering my question,’ Angus said, but he didn’t persist and Kate was happy to let the subject drop, as memories of her father’s long illness and eventual death when her aloneness really struck home—no-one to share the caring, or share the pain and loss—came vividly to mind, bringing back the surging tide of grief she thought she’d conquered years ago.
Had her colleague seen something in her expression—a change of colour in her cheeks—that he held out his hand?
‘Come on, baby Bob is fine, and we’ve a full day tomorrow. I’ll walk you home.’
Kate considered arguing, making the excuse that she wanted to check the children on the next day’s operating list, but weariness was seeping through her bones and, dodging the hand he’d offered to guide her through the door, she led the way into the corridor.
Why did she intrigue him? And why so suddenly was he attracted, he who didn’t believe in instant attraction? Angus pondered this as they walked down the leafy street towards their houses. The summer sun was still hot, although it was late afternoon, and sweat prickled beneath his shirt, but that was nothing to the prickling in his skin when he saw this woman unexpectedly, or an image of her flicked across his inner eye.
‘Does it get much hotter?’ he asked, thinking an innocuous conversation about the weather would distract him from considering his reactions to his companion.
‘Much,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s only late November. Summer doesn’t officially begin until December, and February can be a real killer, but at least you’ve got a nice olive skin. You can go to the beach to cool off and not risk turning as red as a lobster and coming out in freckles the size of dinner plates.’
‘Dinner plates?’ he queried, smiling, but more, he feared, because she’d said he had nice skin than at her gross exaggeration.
‘Well, very freckly,’ she countered.
‘Ah, the great genetic inheritance you want to pass on to your children!’
She sighed and ran a hand through her tangled red curls.
‘I’m very healthy—surely that’s important,’ she pointed out.
It was a silly conversation but the children thing nagged at Angus. He could accept that it was natural for a woman to want children, but Kate’s desire seemed slightly out of kilter—more like determination than desire.
And he was obsessing about this, why?
Because he was attracted to her, of course!
Stuff and nonsense, as his mother would say. It was jet lag, not attraction—attraction didn’t happen this fast.
‘Can Hamish swim? He’ll need to learn if he can’t. There are learn-to-swim classes for children in every suburb.’
Had Kate been talking the whole time he muddled over attraction or had she just come out with this totally unrelated question?
Either way, he’d better answer her.
‘Need to learn?’ he repeated.
Her easy strides hesitated and she looked towards him.
‘I think so! There are far too many drowning fatalities of small children in Australia each year. No matter what safety measures are put in place, and what warnings are issued, the statistics are appalling.’
Something in her voice sent a shiver down his spine and he hurried to reassure her.
‘He can swim. Loves the water but has no fear, which is always a bit of a worry.’
She was standing looking at him, and he almost felt her shrugging off whatever it was that had bothered her earlier, although when he really looked at her, he saw the pain in her eyes.
‘Someone you knew drowned?’ he guessed, then regretted the casual question when all the colour left her face.
But she didn’t flinch, tilting her chin so she could look him in the eyes.
‘My sister—she was only two. It was a long time ago, but you don’t forget.’
He reached out and touched her arm.
‘I’m so sorry, I really am. I shouldn’t have persisted.’
She rallied now, shrugging off the memories.
‘That’s okay, you weren’t to know. Things happen. But you can understand why I’m a wee bit obsessive about children learning to swim.’
‘Of course you are.’ He squeezed her arm where he was holding it, feeling her bones beneath the flesh. ‘Well, be assured Hamish will be fine in the water. We’re quite near the beach, I believe.’
Her smile caught him by surprise, as did his gut’s reaction to it.
‘Quite near the beach? You really were thrown straight in the deep end,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had time to work out your surroundings at all.’
Then, as if their previous conversation had never happened, she looked up at the sky, where the sun was heading slowly towards the west.
‘With daylight saving, it’ll still be light for a while. What if I pile you and Hamish and Juanita into my car and we do a quick tour of the neighbourhood. We can have a swim and finish with fish and chips at the beach—if Hamish is allowed to eat fish and chips.’
She was being neighbourly, possibly to banish memories his careless question had provoked, but the offer told him more about Kate Armstrong than she’d probably intended it to. She was the kind of person who would always put herself out for others. She’d had no need to go back into Mrs Stamford’s room that morning, but had known the other woman was in deep emotional pain and had decided to make one more attempt to help her.
Now she was offering to drive his little family to the beach.
She should have children! A giving person like Kate would be a wonderful mother. Angus remembered a book he’d read on parenting that explained no matter how hard a father tried he could never fully replace a mother. Something to do with wiring…
If Hamish had a mother, would that let Angus off the hook? Allow him to feel less, not exactly guilty, but disquieted about his interaction with his son?
He shook his head as if to shake away the notion. He was fine as a father, spent time with Hamish, did whatever he could for him…
‘Well?’ Kate demanded, and Angus pulled himself together.
‘We’d be delighted, and thanks to his early upbringing Hamish loves fish and chips. It’s practically a staple diet back home in Scotland.’
What was she doing? Was she mad, getting more involved with her neighbours instead of less? Kate left him at his gate and strode ahead, then found Hamish and a woman who must be Juanita sitting on her yellow sofa.
‘I thought I told you the backyard was for adventures,’ she scolded Hamish, although she softened the words with a smile.
‘This isna an adventure,’ he told her, four-year-old scorn scorching the words. ‘I’m with Juanita. We’re waiting for you to come home so I can—’
‘Introduce me,’ the woman said, standing and holding out her hand to Kate. ‘I am Juanita Cortez.’
She was a solid, olive-skinned woman of about fifty, Kate guessed as she introduced herself, and asked Juanita how she was settling in.
‘We are nearly there,’ Juanita replied. ‘Angus has sorted a kindergarten for Hamish and I’ve found an organisation for ex-pat Americans that meets once a month, and another place where I can go to play bridge, so I will soon meet plenty of people.’
‘Well done you,’ Kate responded, admiring the other woman’s nous in getting organised, but she was watching Hamish as she spoke, watching Angus swing his son into the air before depositing him on his shoulders, normal father stuff but somehow Angus was never looking at the little boy.
Not directly.
Seeing them together, so unalike, Kate wondered if Hamish looked like his mother, and therefore was too painful a reminder…
Oh, dear!
‘Come on,’ Angus said, ‘let’s get changed. Kate’s taking us to the beach.’
‘Are you, Kate? Are you really?’ the little boy perched on Angus’s shoulders demanded.
Stupid, this is stupid getting more involved with them, but something in the anxious young eyes made her reply immediately.
‘Of course. Get your swimmers, or whatever you Yanks and Scots call swimming costumes and meet me at the shed in my backyard in half an hour.’ Kate turned back to Juanita. ‘You’ll join us.’
Juanita looked far less interested in a trip to the beach than Hamish had been.
‘If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to stay at home. I need to send some emails to my family to let them know we’ve arrived and are settling in, then I must make some phone calls about the ex-pat organisation and bridge club.’
As Angus and Hamish had disappeared into their house, Kate assumed this would be okay with him, so she nodded to Juanita and hurried inside herself, worrying again because a swim was just what she needed to wash away the tension of the day. But on the other hand, letting Angus McDowell see her lily-white body in a swimsuit, especially on a beach full of bronzed bathing beauties, was a very embarrassing idea.
As if he cared what she looked like in a swimming costume, the common-sense half of her brain told her, though the sensible admonition wasn’t strong enough to stop a rather wistful sigh.
She changed into her swimming costume, pulled shorts and a T-shirt over it, then dug through the kitchen junk drawer in search of the car keys. She used the car so rarely, the keys got buried under spare change, receipts and reminder notices from the library—even an apple core, today, although how that had got in there, Kate had no idea.
Then out the back door, locking it, and casting a quick glance at her pots to check if they needed watering. Later—she’d do that later, because excited voices from the far end of her backyard told her Angus and Hamish had arrived.
‘We came down the lane,’ Angus explained, ‘although I’ve found the gate between the properties. I just haven’t had time to hack through the jungle to release it.’
It’s because he’s got this outer carapace of an easygoing man that I feel as if I’ve known him for ever, Kate decided as she unlocked the shed and turned on a light, revealing her father’s ancient old car. But all he lets people see is the outside…
‘That’s your car?’
Two voices chorused the question, the younger one excited, the older one full of disbelief.
‘It goes,’ Kate said defensively.
‘I think it’s super,’ Hamish announced. ‘Like something out of a storybook. Has it got a name?’
As a person who thought giving names to inanimate objects was stupid, Kate longed to say no, but if she did, the car would probably hear her and refuse to start.
‘My father called it Molly,’ she admitted, hoping maybe Angus, who was walking around it, examining it the way one would an antique, hadn’t heard, but just in case he hadn’t, Hamish made sure he knew.
‘Did you hear that, Dad? We’re going for a ride in Molly.’
He was patting the car’s pale blue paintwork, his little hands leaving prints in the dust, so Kate was squirming with embarrassment before she’d even opened the doors. She did that now, helping Hamish into the back seat, pulling down the booster seat and fastening the seatbelt around him, then getting in the car herself.
‘Molly?’ Angus queried softly as he slid into the passenger seat beside her.
‘My father named her.’ Defensive didn’t begin to describe how Kate felt, until she remembered—‘And if you want to borrow the car to visit your dog at the weekend, then I don’t want to hear another comment, thank you.’
Before Angus could reply, Hamish began chattering about McTavish and how much he would like a car called Molly, and the child’s innocent delight in the situation eased Kate’s tension, so by the time they’d driven around the immediate neighbourhood and arrived at the beach at Coogee, she’d even stopped worrying about Angus seeing her in a swimming costume.
He’d have been better not having seen her in a swimming costume, Angus decided as their chauffeur slipped out of her shorts and shirt, revealing a pale but perfect body. All of his mother’s figurines were decorously covered, so it wasn’t a similarity to one of them that sent his heartbeat into overdrive.
It must be the prolonged period of celibacy his libido had been suffering. His last female friend had fallen out with him six months ago over the amount of time he spent with Hamish. The argument had been fierce, mainly because Angus knew he spent the time with Hamish in an attempt to make up for what he didn’t give the child. Not love, exactly, for he loved him deeply, just…He didn’t know what the ‘just’ was, except that it was there—a missing link.
But the outcome of that argument had been that he’d decided it was easier to stay out of relationships for a while, especially as by that time he’d been offered the job in Sydney and had known he’d be moving on.
So, have a swim and settle down, he told himself, shucking off his own shorts and polo shirt, then following his son and Kate down to where green waves curled, then broke into foaming swirls that slid quietly up the beach.
‘These are big waves.’ The awe in Hamish’s voice made Kate smile. ‘In Scotland we have little waves and in America there aren’t any beaches.’
‘Not where you lived,’ Kate reminded him, forbearing to point out America had thousands of miles of coastline on two oceans. He was jumping the waves as they washed towards him, shrieking with glee, and Kate’s heart ached with wanting. To have a child, her own child—any child, she was beginning to think.
Although it was a baby her arms ached for…
‘Want to go out deeper?’
Angus scooped up his son and strode towards the curling waves.
Presumably Angus could swim.
Kate watched them go, the ache still there—stronger if anything. It was all to do with family. Were Angus and Hamish a family? Was the base of family solid beneath the little boy? Had it not been solid in her case, even before Susie drowned? Had her family been doomed to disintegrate like so many families did these days, even before Susie died?
She could see the pair in the deeper water, ducking under waves, and remembered times, after her mother died, when she and her father had come to the beach. He would take her out into deep water and throw her over the waves. He’d loved her, Kate had no doubt of that, but it had been a detached, distracted kind of love, the kind one might give to a specially favoured pet, the concept of family perhaps as unfamiliar to him, another only child, as it was to Kate.
Enough! She dived beneath the next wave, surfaced for a breath, then dived again, coming up beyond the breakers, feeling the water wrap around her body, cooling and soothing her, reminding her of all the wonderful things in her life, counterbalancing the aches.
A good wave was coming, rising up above the others, curling early. Swimming hard she caught it and rode it to the beach, aware of passing Angus and Hamish on her way. She lay where the wave had left her on the sand until an excited little boy joined her.
‘Will you teach me to do that, will you, Kate, will you?’
Kate rolled over and smiled up at him.
‘I surely will, champ,’ she said. ‘Next time I’m at the shops I’ll get you a little boogie board. It’s easiest to practise on that in the shallows, then I can take you out in front of me on my bigger board. One day when you’re older, if your Dad decides to stay in Sydney, you might learn to surf. See the people at the far end of the beach, standing up on their surfboards?’
‘Can you do that? Can you teach me that?’
His excitement had him hopping up and down, splashing her with water.
‘There are better teachers than me, for board surfing,’ she told him, sitting up and looking around for Angus. Perhaps she should have asked if he could swim! Then his body, sleek as a seal’s, slipped onto the beach beside her.
Angus sat up and shook the water from his hair.
‘I didn’t catch it way out where you did,’ he said to the woman he’d been watching since she was deposited on the sand, a slim white mermaid in a green bathing suit. ‘I just surfed the broken bit. It’s been a long time since I caught a wave—student days at St Ives in England, an annual summer pilgrimage.’
He’d flopped onto the tail end of the wave to stop thinking about her, but now, this close, not thinking of her was impossible. The beautiful skin, so fine and pale he could see the blue veins in her temples, and in the slender lines of her neck, then the fiery red hair, darker now, wet and bedraggled, framing her face like a pre-Raphaelite painting.
‘Kate is going to teach me how to ride on the waves,’ Hamish announced, and now colour swept into her cheeks.
‘I wasn’t sure if you knew how. He asked me, but of course, you’re a surfer, you can teach him.’
‘Maybe we could both teach him.’
Angus heard the words come out and wished there was some way he could unsay them. How could he include someone else in his family before he’d made sure it was a family? It had obviously embarrassed her, as well, for the colour in her cheeks had darkened, and she stood and headed back into the water.
‘I’ll just catch another wave.’ The words floated back over her shoulder before she dived beneath the breakers.
‘Can I do that? Can I?’ Hamish demanded, so Angus put thoughts of pale-skinned mermaids right out of his mind and concentrated on teaching his son to dive beneath the waves.
‘Time for a shower and something to eat?’
Angus and Hamish, the diving lessons over, were sitting on the beach, making sandcastles, when the mermaid surfed right to their feet, lifting her head to ask the question.
‘We can shower up on the esplanade,’ she added, pointing towards the road, then, as if that was all the information he would need to realise the swim was over, she stood and walked back to where they’d left their towels and clothes. Angus hoisted Hamish onto his back and followed, thanking Kate as she picked up their clothes and handed them to him.
‘There are changing rooms if you don’t want to put your clothes on over your swimmers,’ she said, ‘but I find it’s cooler to stay wet underneath, and as we can eat our fish and chips in the park, it doesn’t really matter.’
Very matter-of-fact, yet that was what this outing was, a neighbourly gesture.
So why did he feel disappointed?
Feel as if something had changed between them?
For the worse!
She held their clothes while he showered with Hamish, then dried the little boy with her towel while Angus dried himself.
Being busy with Hamish meant Kate didn’t have to look at Angus’s sleek, wet body. She’d always considered herself immune to hormonal surges of attraction but the man next door was definitely setting her hormones in a twitch. What to do about it was the problem.
Keeping her distance from him would be one answer, but that was impossible when she not only worked with the man on a daily basis but also lived next door to him.
So she’d have to fake it—pretend to a platonic neigh-bourliness she was far from feeling.
‘The Frisky Fish is the best for fish and chips, or it was last time I bought any.’ She finished dressing Hamish and straightened up as Angus, his body now suitably covered, came to join them.
‘That one just across the road?’
Such a simple question but his accent really was to die for! She was thinking accents when she should have been answering but now it was too late, for he was speaking again.
‘I’ll buy our dinner,’ he announced. ‘I know what Hamish eats, what about you—a serve of fish and chips?’
The dark eyes were fixed on her face and Kate found it hard to pretend when just this casual regard made her feel warm inside.
‘I’m more a calamari person—not into fish at all—and could I have a battered sav, as well?’
‘Battered sav?’ Again man and boy made a chorus of the question, though Hamish added, ‘Oh, I want one of those, as well.’
‘Just ask for it, you’ll see,’ Kate told Angus, smiling at his bewildered frown. ‘Hamish and I will bag us a table.’
She took the excited little boy by the hand and they walked through the park until they found a vacant table.
‘I’m going to kindy tomorrow—Dad’s taking me,’ Hamish told her, and though he sounded excited there was a hint of anxiety in his blue eyes.
‘That will be such fun for you,’ Kate said. ‘Meeting lots of new friends, finding people to play with at the weekends. Maybe we can bring some of your friends to the beach one day.’
‘When I can ride the waves so I can show them,’ Hamish told her, and Kate wondered at what age children developed a competitive streak.
She asked about his friends back in America and laughed at the adventures he and McTavish had shared, so she was surprised to see nearly an hour had passed and Angus hadn’t returned. The Frisky Fish was popular and you usually had a wait while your meal was cooked, but this long?
‘Here’s Dad! He’s remembered drinks even though we didn’t tell him.’
Kate turned to see Angus approaching, holding white-wrapped parcels of food in one hand, a soft drink and a long green bottle in the other. He reached the table and put down the white parcels, gave Hamish his drink, then deposited the bottle on the table.
‘I haven’t a clue about Australian wines. I drank a fair bit of it in the U.S., but none of the names were familiar so I asked the chap behind the counter what went with battered savs.’
He was pulling two wineglasses from his pocket as he spoke, then he looked apologetically at Kate.
‘I do hope you drink wine. I didn’t think—should I have got you a soda, as well?’
‘I’d love a glass of wine,’ Kate assured him. ‘Especially a glass of this wine. The bloke at the wine shop saw you coming, and sold you something really special—really expensive, I would think!’
Angus smiled at her, destroying most of her resolution to pretend she felt no attraction.
‘Phooey to the price, as long as you enjoy it. We can both have a glass now and you can take the rest home to enjoy another time—it’s a screw-top.’
He poured the wine, then busied himself unwrapping Hamish’s dinner, showing him the battered sav.
‘It’s a kind of sausage called a saveloy that’s fried in batter,’ he explained to Hamish, who was squeezing tomato sauce onto it with the ease of an expert in takeaway food.
‘And don’t think you’ll get one too often,’ Angus added. ‘Full of nitrates, then the batter and the frying in oil—just about every dietary and digestive no-no.’
‘You’re just jealous you didn’t get one,’ Kate told him, biting into hers with relish, then she laughed as Angus delved into his white package and came up with one.
‘Well, I had to try it, didn’t I?’ he said defensively, but as he bit into it, he pulled a face and set it back down, deciding to eat his fish—grilled not fried, Kate noticed—instead.
‘They’re not to everyone’s taste,’ she said, ‘but my father was the food police like you and I never got to taste one as a child, so I became obsessed later on in life.’
‘Obsessed by battered savs?’ Angus teased.
‘Better than being obsessed by some other things I could think of,’ Kate retorted.
Her next-door neighbour for one!
Chapter Four
KATE stopped the car in the back lane outside their gate and watched the two males walk into their yard, the taller one looking straight ahead, although Hamish was chattering at him.
He was a good father, Angus, Kate told herself as she pulled into the shed that did service as a garage for Molly, but she sensed that something was amiss in his relationship with his son. Back when she was young, she’d felt guilt—blamed herself—for her family’s disintegration, thinking that if somehow she had managed to save Susie, everything would have been all right. It was this, she knew, that had led her to accept that, although her father loved her, there would always be a wall between them, so even when he was dying they couldn’t talk about the past.
Had his wife’s death built the same kind of wall between Angus and Hamish, or had Angus simply shut himself off from all emotion to shield himself from further pain?
And just what did she think she was doing, pondering such things? she asked herself as she closed the double doors of the shed. Why was she considering the convoluted emotional state of someone she barely knew?
Because you’re interested in him.
The answer was immediate and so obvious she felt a blush rising in her cheeks and was glad that Angus wasn’t around to see it. A dead giveaway, her blushes.
She thought of Clare instead, of the dark-haired beauty, and reminded herself that if Angus McDowell decided to be interested in a woman on their team, then Clare would surely be the number-one choice.
Kate grumped her way inside, a depression she rarely felt dogging her footsteps, but as she showered she thought of baby Bob and realised how little she really had to complain about.
Refreshed, she opted not for lounging-at-home clothes—in her case a singlet top and boxer shorts, her pyjamas of choice—but for respectable clothes—long shorts and a T-shirt, reasonable hospital visiting clothes. She’d just pop up and check not only on Bob but on Mr and Mrs Stamford, as well, to see how they were coping.
‘There’s something wrong? You’ve been called in?’
The panic she’d felt when she saw Angus by Bob’s crib was evident in her voice, but when he turned and smiled at her she realised she’d overreacted.
‘Did you think you were the only one who likes to check on patients, even when there’s no reason for alarm?’ he said.
Damn the blush.
‘Of course not,’ she managed stoutly. ‘It was just that seeing you there with him gave me a shock. Mr and Mrs Stamford?’
‘Gone to get a bite to eat. I said I’d stay.’
Was there an edge of strain in his voice that the statement pinged some memory in Kate’s head?
‘I got the impression you didn’t like getting too involved with patients and their parents?’
He frowned at her but she was getting used to that.
‘I think a certain degree of emotional detachment is necessary in our job.’
But even as Angus said the words he knew it hadn’t always been that way. He also knew that it was seeing Kate Armstrong’s empathy with Mrs Stamford that had broken through a little of his own detachment, enough to lead him to suggest he stayed with Bob while the couple ate together.
Was this good or bad, the breakthrough?
He was so caught up in his own thoughts it took him a moment to realise Kate was talking to him, pointing out the oxygen level in Bob’s blood, suggesting they might be able to take him off the ventilator sooner, rather than later.
Dragging his mind back to his patient, he nodded his agreement.
‘The operation is so much simpler when the coronary arteries are good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking the same thing about the ventilator when you came in. Maybe tomorrow morning we’ll try him off it.’
They stood together beside the crib, Angus so conscious of the woman by his side he knew he had to be very, very wary of any contact with her outside working hours. Admittedly, her taking them to the beach, her offer to lend her car at the weekend, were nothing more than neighbourly gestures, and he wouldn’t want to rebuff her or offend her, but every cell in his body was shouting a warning at him—danger, keep clear, problems ahead.
Kate felt him closing off from her and wondered if he’d been offended by her comment earlier—the one about detachment. But if he was closing off from her, well, that was good. It would be easier for her to pretend that’s all they were, neighbourly colleagues, in spite of how her body felt whenever she was in his company.
She felt hot and excited and trembly somehow, physical manifestations she couldn’t remember feeling since she was fifteen and had had a crush on the captain of the school’s football team. Not that he’d ever looked at her, nor even stood close to her.
She stepped away from the crib, turning to greet the Stamfords, who’d returned from their dinner.
Pete Stamford eyed her with suspicion, and she wondered if he was worrying again, thinking the presence of two doctors by his son’s crib meant there were problems.
‘It’s a habit,’ Kate was quick to assure him. ‘I find I sleep better if I do a final check of my patients before I go to bed.’
Pete nodded and Mrs Stamford, who still hadn’t offered them the use of her first name, shook her head.
‘Maybe all the horror stories we hear about health care are exaggerated,’ she said, and Kate knew it was an apology for her anger of the morning.
‘I don’t think the news channels would attract an audience if they didn’t exaggerate a bit,’ she said, then she said goodnight to the couple, including Angus in the farewell, and left the PICU.
Angus caught up with her in the elevator foyer, and though he’d told himself he should linger with the Stamfords until Kate was well away from the hospital, he felt uncomfortable about her walking home on her own this late at night.
‘Oh, I do it all the time,’ she said when he mentioned the folly of a woman walking the streets on her own. ‘There are always people around near the hospital. Cars and ambulances coming and going, police vehicles—we’re not quite in the middle of the city, but we’re close enough and the streets are well-lit.’
‘There’s that dark park across the road,’ he told her, stepping into the elevator beside her and wondering if it was the enclosed space, or her presence within it, that was making him feel edgy.
‘The park’s well-lit, as well,’ she told him, smiling up at him. ‘I’m not totally stupid, you know. I wouldn’t take any risks with my personal safety, but around here, well, you’ll see.’
And see he did, for there were plenty of people around as they walked down the street towards their houses. People, cars, ambulances and, yes, police vehicles.
Too many people really.
Far too many!
The thought jolted him—hadn’t he just decided that Kate was nothing more than a neighbourly colleague? But the light steps of the slim woman by his side, the upright carriage and slight tilt of her head when she turned towards him…something about her presence was physically disturbing. So much so he wanted to touch her, to feel her skin and the bones beneath it, to tilt her head just a little bit more, run his fingers into the tangled red hair and drop a kiss on lips so full and pink they drew him like a magnet.
Attraction, that’s all it was. He could cope with it, ignore it. And tomorrow he had a full day of appointments, no operations, so he wouldn’t see her. All he had to do was walk her home, say goodnight and that was that.
Except that Hamish was sitting in her front yard on the discarded yellow couch!
Admittedly Juanita was beside him, but still Angus felt the anger rise inside him.
‘You should be in bed,’ he told his son, his voice stern enough to make the child slide closer to his nanny.
‘McTavish is sick,’ Hamish whispered, and the woman Angus was ignoring reacted far more quickly than he did. She knelt in front of his child and took him in her arms.
‘It’s probably just the water here in Sydney,’ she assured him. ‘I get sick when I go to different cities and drink different water. But the sickness doesn’t last. It’s always over in a day or two.’
Was this why children needed a mother?
Because women reacted more instantly—instinctively perhaps—to a child’s misery?
His mind had gone to McTavish’s health, to wondering what could be wrong with the dog. And to the other puzzle Hamish’s presence presented. He went with that because it was useless to speculate about the dog’s illness.
‘And just why does that mean you’re sitting in Dr Armstrong’s yard, not at home in our living room?’
‘Because Kate has a car and she said I could call her Kate!’
For a very biddable little boy there was a touch of defiance in the words and Angus found himself frowning, though at Juanita this time.
‘What exactly is going on?’ he demanded.
She shrugged her thick shoulders.
‘It’s as he says. The quarantine office phoned to say McTavish wasn’t eating and there was nothing for it, but Hamish had to visit him, although I told him we couldn’t see him tonight. He insisted he come and wait for his friend, sure she’d take him to see the dog.’
Angus could imagine what had happened, and understood that if Juanita had tried to insist on Hamish going to bed, the little boy would only have grown more upset, and with the move, and missing his dog, he was already emotionally out of balance.
But knowing how this had come about didn’t help him in deciding what to do, although now Kate Armstrong seemed to have taken things into her own hands. She was sitting on the couch beside Juanita, holding Hamish on her lap.
‘Juanita’s right,’ she was telling Hamish, ‘we can’t visit McTavish at this time of night because if we did all the other dogs and cats and birds and horses there would be disturbed and upset and they would want their owners to be visiting them, as well. But your father can phone them and ask them how McTavish is now. Perhaps he can tell them what McTavish’s favourite food is, and the people who are minding him can try to coax him to eat a little of it. They have vets—animal doctors—at the quarantine centre who will be looking after him, just as your Dad looks after the babies at the hospital.’
‘My mother died.’
Angus’s heart stopped beating for an instant and a chill ran through his body. He’d never heard Hamish mention his mother, but it was obvious the little boy assumed Jenna had been ill before she died, and now he was thinking McTavish could also die. He knelt in front of his son and lifted him from Kate’s knee.
‘McTavish won’t die,’ he promised, knowing the assurance was needed, although he also knew he couldn’t guarantee such a thing. ‘Kate’s right, let’s go inside and phone the quarantine centre and tell them that he really likes—’
What did the dog really like?
‘Biscuits,’ Hamish told him, his fears forgotten in this new excitement.
‘Not exactly a dietary imperative,’ Angus muttered, but if biscuits could coax McTavish to eat, then he’d certainly suggest them.
He carried his son towards the house, pausing for Juanita to catch up with them and to nod goodnight to Kate. But the image of her sitting on the old yellow couch, his son in her arms, remained with him long after his conversation with the quarantine office and the reassuring return phone call that, yes, McTavish had eaten some biscuits and even eaten some of the dried dog food the carers had mixed in with the broken biscuits.
The image of her accompanied him to bed, aware of her in the house next door, so close, too close.
Any woman would have comforted Hamish in that situation, he told himself, but some instinct deep inside was telling him she wasn’t just any woman, this Kate Armstrong. She was special—special in a way no woman had been since Jenna.
Which was another reason he had to avoid her…
It proved, as he’d known it would, impossible, for the teams met regularly. He operated with her, and discussion of patients was inevitable. But he managed to avoid her out of work hours until the day he came home early enough to attack the hedge around the garden gate.
Kate had been sensible in suggesting that if Hamish wanted to adventure he do it in her backyard, so freeing the gate had become a necessity. He’d bought a pair of hedge trimmers at the local hardware store and, some three-quarters of an hour of reasonably hard labour later, had cleared his side enough to push the gate open. Now all he had to do was trim her side.
Should he phone her first to ask if it was okay to come in and do it?
Phone her when she lived next door?
Well, he wasn’t going to go over and ask; just seeing her each day at work was enough to tell him the attraction was going to take a long time to die.
He was debating this when Hamish returned from his job of stacking all the cut-off hedge branches in a pile near the back fence.
‘Oh, look, we can get into Kate’s garden.’
He ran through the gate before Angus could stop him, calling back to his father in even greater excitement, ‘And here’s Kate, she’s right up a ladder!’
Right up a ladder?
A child suddenly calling out?
She could be startled!
Fall!
Angus dashed through the open gate to find his son confidently climbing up a very long ladder, at the top of which stood the team anaesthetist, a measuring tape, a pen and a notebook clamped in her hand.
She was peering down uncertainly, no doubt partly because Hamish’s enthusiastic attack on the ladder rungs was making it wobble.
‘No, Hamish dear,’ she said gently. ‘You can’t have two people on a ladder at once. It might tip over.’
Once again the first thought, beyond the anger fear had wrought in his chest, was that this woman would make a wonderful mother. She was always fair. She always explained in a common-sense way that a child would understand.
Although, Angus realised a little belatedly, the child in question hadn’t taken much notice and was still six rungs up the ladder and teetering there a little uncertainly.
Angus rescued him, set him on the ground, then looked up at the woman above him.
‘And just what are you doing up there?’
He’d meant it as a neighbourly question, but it came out as a demand because the ladder seemed old and highly unstable and she was at the roof level of a two-storey house.
‘Possums,’ she replied, apparently not taking exception to his tone. ‘I wouldn’t mind the little beggars living in the roof if they’d just stay in one place, but it seems they live on one side and feed on the other so they’re galloping across my ceiling in what sound like hobnail boots all night.’
‘Possums?’
He realised there’d been a lot of conversation after that, but his mind had stuck on the word.
‘Little furry animals, big eyes and long tails, cute as all get out but not much fun if they’re living in your ceiling.’
‘Oh!’
The word was obviously inadequate but Angus wasn’t certain where to take the conversation next, and the uncertainty was only partly to do with the fact that Kate appeared to be wearing very short shorts, so from where he stood her pale legs went on forever and he found it hard to focus on anything else.
Fortunately Hamish was less inhibited.
‘Possums!’ he shrieked. ‘Can I see them? Can I, Kate, can I?’
‘Later,’ she said. ‘Just let me finish here and I’ll come down and explain.’
Angus found himself wanting to order her down right away—wanting to tell her he’d do whatever it was she was doing—but having no notion of possums’ habits, nor of what she could be arranging for them, he knew he’d be making a fool of himself if he said anything at all. So he stood and held the ladder steady, and not, he told himself, so he could watch her as she climbed down it. In fact, he turned resolutely away, determined not to have his resolve weakened by long pale legs in short shorts.
Kate told herself that of course she could climb down a ladder that Angus was holding; after all, hadn’t she been successful in avoiding him these past few days, limiting their encounters to purely work contact? But her legs trembled as she came closer to where he stood and it took an effort of supreme will not to climb back up the ladder and perch on the roof until he grew tired of standing there.
‘What exactly were you doing?’ he asked as she passed him, very close—close enough to see a beard shadow on his cheeks and lines of tiredness around his eyes.
Wasn’t he sleeping well?
She wasn’t exactly enjoying night-times herself, finding it hard to sleep when images of him kept flitting through her mind.
He was so close…
‘There’s a hole,’ she said, reaching the ground and backing away from him, lifting a hand to stop him moving the ladder. ‘That’s how they’re getting in and out. I had to measure it.’
‘So you could make a door for them?’ Hamish asked, dancing around with excitement at the thought of a possum door.
‘Not exactly,’ Kate admitted, ‘although I suppose you could call it a door, but I intend to keep it locked.’
‘You want to lock them in?’ Angus asked. It must be something to do with the air in Australia that so many of the conversations he had with Kate had a feeling of unreality about them. Battered savs came to mind…
‘So I can keep them out,’ she replied, speaking to him but squatting down so her face was level with Hamish’s. ‘There are plenty of other places the possums can live, think of all the trees here and in the park. That’s where possums should live—in holes in the trunks and thick branches of trees. Once I fix my hole, they’ll find somewhere else very easily.’
Hamish nodded his understanding, then asked the obvious question.
‘But how will you get them out?’
Kate smiled at him, though Angus imagined there was sadness in the smile. Was she hurting for her own lack of children? Were they so very important to her?
Maybe one child would do her?
Hamish—
The thought shocked him so much he straightened his spine and clamped down on his wandering mind, thinking he’d go and cut the hedge on this side, departing forthwith, but she was talking again, explaining to Hamish, and Angus couldn’t help but listen.
‘I’ve been feeding them every night since I came back here to live,’ she told Hamish. ‘Are you allowed to stay up until eight o’clock because that’s when it starts to get dark and they come out of the roof and down here to the garden to eat the fruit I put out. There’s a whole possum family—a mother and a father and two little ones that sometimes ride on their mother’s back but who are learning to climb themselves now.’
‘Can I come and see, can I, Dad?’
The excitement in his son’s voice meant Angus had to look at him, really look at him, something he usually avoided as Hamish’s resemblance to Jenna was like a knife blade going through his skin.
And the excitement in Hamish’s voice was mirrored in his little face. Seeing it, Angus could only nod. He even found himself smiling.
‘You’ll come and see them, too?’ Hamish persisted, and Angus lost his smile, knowing for sure he’d have suggested Juanita take the little boy to see the possums. It wasn’t that he didn’t love Hamish dearly, but with the move and settling in to a new routine, the bond between himself and Hamish had seemed to weaken rather than strengthen. Besides which, more out-of-work hours’ proximity to Kate Armstrong was something he needed to avoid.
‘Of course,’ he responded, suddenly aware that it was selfish to refuse—a kind of self-protection because Hamish looked so like Jenna.
Angus didn’t sound overly excited by the idea, Kate decided, but then she wasn’t so chuffed, either. She wanted to see less of Angus McDowell, not more.
‘Eight o’clock, then,’ she said, and headed for the shed where she hoped she’d find a piece of timber the size she wanted. Unfortunately the gate was in that direction so Angus fell in beside her, while Hamish raced excitedly back to his place to tell Juanita about the possums.
‘Just what do you intend doing about the hole?’ Angus asked.
Ah, easy question!
‘I’ll cut a piece of timber to fit over it and nail it in place. From the look of it, someone’s tried to fix it before using some kind of magic glue to stick fibro over the hole but the possums were too cunning for that. They just ate the glue, or got rid of it some other way.’
She realised Angus had stopped walking and turned back to check on him. He was standing stock-still, staring at her with an unreadable expression on his face.
‘What’s up?’ she asked, although she knew what was wrong with her. Just looking at the man raised her heart rate.
‘The way I figure it, you wait until the possums come out, then you go and cover their hole, that right?’
Kate nodded.
‘Up that rickety old ladder, and in the dark because they won’t come out ‘til dusk? You were going to do that yourself, telling no-one who’d go looking for you if you fell, asking no-one for help?’
Kate nodded again, although she was starting to feel peeved. It was none of his damn business what she did, yet he was sounding like a father admonishing a wayward teen.
‘Didn’t it occur to you how dangerous that was?’ he demanded, and she forgot peeved and smiled.
‘Angus,’ she said gently, ‘this is the twenty-first century. Women do these things. They take care of themselves, and if that includes minor repairs to their homes, then that’s part of it. Actually,’ she added after a momentary pause, ‘they’ve been doing it for centuries. I bet it was often the woman who climbed on top of the cave to move dirt and stones over places where the rain got in. The men would have been off chasing bears and wouldn’t have considered a bit of water over the fire an inconvenience.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about sexism or what women can or can’t do. There’s a safety issue,’ he countered, but something in the way he said it didn’t ring true.
Kate, however, went along with him.
‘The ladder might look rickety but it’s perfectly safe,’ she assured him, but he didn’t look any happier than he had when the whole stupid conversation had begun.
They parted, Kate leaving Angus hacking at the hedge while she continued on to the shed, not thinking about oddments of timber at all, but about a little warm place inside her that seemed to think Angus’s concern might have been personal.
Fortunately it turned out to be one of those afternoons when the sensible part of her brain held sway. It seemed to laugh so loudly at the thoughts of the emotional part that she knew she’d got it wrong.
Which was just as well, she told herself, although a heaviness in her chest told her she did not believe that at all!
Chapter Five
THEY came, the tall man and the child, as dusk was falling, filling Kate’s backyard with shadows. Urging Hamish to talk softly, she led them into her kitchen and lifted him onto the bench beneath the window.
‘See,’ she said quietly, ‘just there under the lemon tree, I’ve a little table with cut-up apple and banana and some cherries on it.’
She had the outside light on, knowing its soft yellow glow didn’t disturb the nocturnal animals.
Holding Hamish steady on the bench, she was aware of Angus moving up behind her, aware of the warmth of his body close, and even the scent of him, citrusy yet still male. It was some primordial instinct that had her body responding, she told herself, trying hard to concentrate on Hamish in order to blot out the effect Angus was having on her hormones.
‘Listen,’ she whispered to Hamish, ‘can you hear them scrabbling down the tree?’
Hamish nodded, his little body rigid in her hands, though she could feel excitement thrumming through him. The longing for a child—her child, family—zapped through her like an electric current, shocking her with its intensity. It had to be because she was holding Hamish, because normally the longing was no more than a vaguely felt dull ache.
Well, at least it had shocked her out of focusing on the man behind her.
‘Look, Dad, look!’ Hamish said excitedly, and Kate was happy to yield her place to Angus so he could hold his son and share the excitement as the small furry animals with their pointed noses and big bright brown eyes landed on the fruit table, the older pair looking around, checking their safety, while the two youngsters began to eat.
‘Oh, they’ve got little hands!’ Hamish cried as one of the possums turned towards them, a piece of apple in its paws, sharp white teeth nibbling at it.
‘They’ve got wonderfully expressive faces,’ Angus said, a note of genuine delight in his voice as he turned to smile at Kate.
‘I know,’ she agreed, ‘and I love them to bits, but they are not going to continue living in my ceiling!’
They watched in silence, broken only now and then by Hamish’s exclamations of wonder and delight. Then, the feast finished, the possums leapt into the branches of the lemon tree and, from there, scrambled into a jacaranda, scurrying up the trunk, then out along one of the top branches, from which they leapt into a eucalypt.
‘There’s a hole in the trunk of that tree where they can live,’ Kate told Hamish. ‘They could go and live in the park but they probably won’t because they know they get fresh fruit here every night.’
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