'Tis the Season

by Carole Mortimer, Alison Roberts

  Rory nodded, but the glance he sent Kate held a distinct edge of concern. ‘And Josie’s at home? All by herself?’

  ‘In the stable,’ the boy called Alex confirmed.

  ‘That’s where she lives,’ the other boy added.

  Kate could see Rory relax. She saw the beginnings of a smile that made her grip the small hands within hers a little more tightly.

  ‘And Josie is…?’

  ‘Our donkey,’ the children chorused.

  ‘Her real name’s Josephine,’ Lucy said. ‘Because of—you know—donkeys and Christmas and stuff. Mary was riding a donkey because—’

  ‘Not Aunty Mary,’ Alex interrupted. ‘The Mary in the story.’

  ‘Shut up, Alex,’ the other boy said.

  ‘No, you shut up, Rhys.’

  Lucy glared at them. ‘Mary was riding a donkey because she was too fat to walk to the stable.’

  ‘She was having a baby!’ Rhys crowed triumphantly.

  Alex leaned forward. He stared at Kate’s stomach and then up at her face.

  ‘You’re fat,’ he told her. ‘Are you having a baby?’

  Kate smiled. ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ah…’ Kate caught Rory’s gaze, still smiling. How huge was that question?

  She was having a baby because of one amazing night. A night when she’d been needed by the man she loved as much as she had ever wanted to be needed. It had been her gift and it could never be something she would regret.

  Especially now, knowing that he’d remembered it. That it had been important.

  To her amazement, Rory smiled back at her. A real smile. The kind she remembered, but hadn’t seen for so, so long. And something inside Kate melted.

  Alex bounced up and down, trying to catch Rory’s attention. ‘Why?’ he demanded again.

  Rory cleared his throat. He didn’t take his eyes off Kate. ‘Sometimes it just happens, mate,’ he said cautiously. ‘And it’s a surprise. A really big surprise.’

  ‘I like surprises,’ Alex nodded. ‘’Specially at Christmas.’

  ‘Are you having a baby because it’s Christmas?’ Rhys asked. ‘Like Josie?’

  Nicola’s eyes were wide. ‘Is it a present?’

  Kate’s smile wobbled. ‘Kind of,’ she said. She was holding Rory’s gaze, talking to him, her voice quiet and sure. ‘It’s certainly a gift as far as I’m concerned. Something very special.’

  ‘We’ve got presents,’ Alex told her.

  ‘Not any more,’ Rhys said sadly. ‘They’re in the bus, remember? They’ll be all mushed up.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ Nicola said in a small voice. ‘And I want to see the presents under our tree.’

  ‘We could ask that Santa.’ Alex was leaning around Kate so he could talk to Rhys. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘I didn’t like him,’ Rhys said worriedly. ‘He sounds cross.’

  Their anxiety level was increasing. Rory eased him self from the bed, gently disentangling the small arms that wound themselves around his neck.

  ‘He’s not the real Santa,’ he told the children. ‘He’s just dressing up like one. Kate and I are going to find out what’s happened to those presents,’ he promised. ‘And about Aunty Mary and everybody else. And then I’m going to find a nurse who can get you all something to eat. Who likes ice cream?’

  ‘Meee!’ The combination of several enthusiastic voices made the word into a verbal bomb.

  Judy appeared as if by magic. ‘What’s going on in here?’

  ‘We need ice cream,’ Rory told her seriously. ‘It’s an emergency.’

  Judy grinned. ‘I’ll see what I can find in the freezer. Are you going to see Florence?’

  ‘We’re almost there.’ Kate lifted the edge of the neighbouring curtain and was horrified to see the woman with the bandaged head sobbing silently.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she gasped, rushing to the head of the bed. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I was listening…’ Florence caught her breath and gave an enormous sniff. Then a tremulous smile. ‘What a lovely man that doctor is.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kate knew perfectly well that Rory had left his following with Judy and was now standing right behind her. ‘I think so, too.’

  RORY LEFT KATE TO in filtrate the impressive laceration on Florence’s forehead with local anaesthetic and then clean the wound thoroughly.

  ‘I want to check on my mother,’ he’d said.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Kate assured him. ‘I’ll let you know when we’re ready for suturing.’

  He’d only been telling half the truth. Of course he wanted to check on his mother, but he also needed the comparatively private space of her cubicle.

  Amazingly, given the noise level, with only the curtain for a screen, Marcella was fast asleep. Her face had lost some of the redness that had been due to her high fever and her skin felt much cooler and drier. Her pulse, while still erratic, felt stronger beneath his fingertips.

  Rory’s fingers trailed up from his mother’s wrist to touch the heavily bandaged splint that was protecting her IV line. She needed fluids to correct the dehydration her fever had brought, and antibiotics to fight the cause, but how sad was it that she had to be treated like a baby who might pull the line free at any time?

  Would she still be so distressingly agitated when she woke? Hopefully she would be back to her normal level of confusion, where she recognised nobody—including himself. Not that calling him by his twin’s name was due to recognition. How could it be, when Jamie had died at the age of seven?

  Michael’s age.

  The cry for her lost child was coming from her heart. It was a cry that had always been there, but it had been silent for twenty years. Until the anchor his father had provided had been lost with his death and his mother had simply allowed oblivion to take his place.

  She was—most of the time—in a peaceful state, and Rory prayed that she would be again when this illness was dealt with.

  Could he find such a state for himself?

  He thought he had. In a far corner of the world where no one knew him, where physical strength and sheer determination and guts were the only things a man was judged on.

  He hadn’t bar gained on revisiting the past like this.

  It was tempting to stay by Marcella’s side for longer than the time needed to check her condition. This was his first chance to get his head around what was happening tonight. Too manythings to know where to start, in fact.

  His conviction that he would never again put himself in a position where a child’s life was dependent on him had just been blown out of the water. And it had happened in the wake of being pulled back to the origin of his fear, thanks to both his mother’s presence and her confusion. But he’d done it. He’d coped. And part of him knew that he would have coped even if the outcome had not been a success—because Kate had been there.

  His touchstone.

  His angel.

  Who would have thought that the idea of her being pregnant by another man could have been so intensely painful? Had he really thought that she was some kind of saint? That she hadn’t had—or wouldn’t have—a relationship with another man? It wasn’t as if she’d had anything like a relationship with him anyway. It had been a one-off. Because she’d felt sorry for him.

  But she was carrying his baby.

  Babies, he corrected himself.

  And there was another conviction he’d had no intention of overturning. He’d never wanted to be a father. Why would he, when he’d lived through the dark side of what parental love could do? He’d always taken great care to ensure an accident would never happen, but he hadn’t taken care that night, had he? He’d been offered something he’d needed so badly he hadn’t stopped to think at all.

  Comfort.

  Kate hadn’t even known what she was comforting him for, which was a testament to his lifelong ability to disguise his demons no matter how much influence they might have in every choice he’d made. But Kate had foun
d him at a point when he’d been as vulnerable and afraid as he’d been when he was seven years old.

  When he’d had to watch his brother die and know that it had been his fault.

  Rory drew in a breath that felt as if it was inflating his lungs for the first time. Painfully. He touched his mother’s forehead with a gentle finger and then turned away.

  Kate hadn’t known, but it hadn’t mattered because of who she was. She had given him the only thing that could have made a difference—her touch. The feeling of being loved. An affirmation of life. And she had done so with a sweetness and generosity that made his heartache every time he remembered it.

  She deserved better than what he’d given her in return. A shameful exit from her life. He hadn’t even said goodbye because he hadn’t been able to begin to explain where he was going. Or why.

  She should hate him, but clearly she didn’t. She had agreed with Florence, who thought he was ‘a lovely man’.

  And she thought her pregnancy was a gift.

  And it was twins. Why hadn’t that thought occurred to him when he was judging the duration of her pregnancy by her size?

  Because it was just too ironic?

  Fate had brought him in a very neat circle, here. Back to a place where he had to face his past and his future.

  And right in the middle was Kate.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘IT WASN’T HER FAULT, you know.’

  ‘What wasn’t, Florence?’ Kate lifted the dressing she had put over the wound on Florence’s head until Rory came back.

  ‘The accident. We came round a bend and there was this car stuck in the road. It had skidded into a truck coming the other way. Nobody was hurt, and they’d got out and were all walking around. Some children had started a snowball fight. Mary had to swerve or she would have hit one of those children.’

  ‘When did you last have a tetanus booster, Florence?’ Rory didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘Oh, heavens—I can’t remember.’

  ‘We’ll need to give you another one, then. Kate?’

  ‘I’ve got one here.’

  His smile was brief but approving. The nod that followed was thoughtful. ‘Of course you have. You always were the best.’

  Kate tried to suppress the glow his words gave her. She had to remind herself that he’d always treated everybody like that. Made them feel special. Brought out the best in their performance. It didn’t mean anything. Or rather it didn’t mean what she’d like it to mean.

  ‘We weren’t even going fast.’ Florence was apparently distracting herself from the way Rory was probing at her wound. ‘Mary had been worried about the weather before we even left the Castle. She wouldn’t have gone out at all if it hadn’t been for the Christmas party, and she made us leave early. She knew she could handle the road if we took it slowly, and she drives that bus like a professional. Well, she would, wouldn’t she, when she’s been doing it for nearly forty years?’

  ‘What made her start?’ Kate was happy to let Florence cope by talking. ‘Looking after children, I mean?’

  ‘She lost her own.’ Florence clicked her tongue and sighed sympathetically. ‘Her whole family. Husband and two little girls. He’d taken them up for a ride in his new plane. He ran into trouble and then got tangled up in power lines when he tried to make an emergency landing.’

  ‘Mary must have been devastated.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Nearly destroyed her, I think. Though she never says much about it. I know it took years for her to want to face the world again, and she decided she would never marry or have any more children of her own. She says it was because there were too many out there already who needed help, but I reckon she just needed to fill a dreadful gap in her heart.’

  ‘She must be a very strong woman.’

  Something in Rory’s tone made Kate look up from where he was pushing a curved needle through one side of Florence’s impressive cut. She had always loved watching him when he was focussed like this, with that furrow in his forehead, the way his dark hair flopped down on one side—a perfect match for the tangle of unfairly luxuriant eyelashes. He’d often had that shadowing of stubble late at night, too.

  This was the first time she’d noticed it with the knowledge of how it felt against the smoothness of her own skin, however. Just as well her hands were occupied holding Florence’s head still, because the urge to reach out and touch that rough ened skin was almost irresistible.

  Was it the movement of one of her babies that sent such a delicious tingle right down to her toes? Kate sucked in a breath and dragged her gaze away from Rory’s chin. Back to that furrow in his brow which made her recall the note in his voice that had caught her attention in the first place.

  His mother had lost a child, as Mary had. Had she not been strong? Had she never been able to face the world with positive determination again? It was possible that such a tragedy could have caused a depression severe enough to contribute to the deterioration of her mental function.

  How old had Rory been?

  He’d said they would talk later. Kate was going to have a raft of questions by then. Was she way off beam thinking that he might be of Mary’s ilk—had devoted his life to medicine in order to help people who were at risk of suffering the same kind of loss he had?

  Except it didn’t quite fit.

  It was lucky that Rory was concentrating on his task of trying to bring the edges of the cut together neatly enough to leave Florence with very little scarring. He wouldn’t notice how intently Kate was staring at him as she supported the older woman’s head to keep it perfectly still, unaware of the deep furrow on her own forehead.

  Surely such a tragedy in his past would have left a mark? The Rory she remembered had always been so upbeat. Not so much ‘eat dessert first’ as ‘why bother with vegetables at all?’

  And life’s ‘vegetables’ had been things like commitment. Marriage and mortgages.

  And babies.

  Maybe she wasn’t so far off beam. His tragedy might have affected him in a similar way as Mary’s had affected her. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that he had also made a conscious decision not to have children of his own.

  If that was the case, Kate was not only presenting him with the certainty of unwanted parenthood, she was unwittingly twisting the knife because it was twins.

  The heaviness pulling at her spirits was sympathy for Rory.

  Or was it? Maybe Kate was feeling sorry for herself.

  How could she have forgotten the way Rory had neatly sidestepped any hint of a long-term relationship?

  ‘You’ll be feeling a bit of tugging,’ Rory was telling Florence as he tied off a stitch. ‘Not painful at all, is it?’

  ‘No, lad. You keep going. I need to get out of here and help with the children. Lucy’s probably got her hands full with those little scamps.’

  ‘I think most of them are in the staffroom at the moment,’ Kate reassured her. ‘Probably being stuffed full of toasted sandwiches and ice cream.’

  ‘And they’re all right?’

  ‘Mostly. There’s a few bumps and bruises. Michael got the worst of it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t stay sitting down. He fell down the aisle as the bus tipped and there was nothing to break his fall. And the seat at the front broke. He was still trapped beneath it when I got out. How’s he doing now—do you know?’

  ‘We haven’t had a progress report from Theatre,’ Rory said. ‘I’ll go and check when we’ve got your head sorted. You don’t have a headache, do you?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain and ten being unbearable, what score would you give it?’

  ‘Oh, a three, I guess.’

  ‘I’ll get Kate to give you some paracetamol in a minute.’

  The mention of that medication took Kate back again to the last time she had worked with Rory. With its action of reducing inflammation and fever, paracetamol had masked the early symptoms of meningitis. And those
bright red spots on the lower legs could have been fleabites. Kate had been there when Rory had quizzed the younger doctor on his management of the case. She had seen the dawning alarm on his face and been as astonished as everyone else when Rory had actually run from the department to try and catch the family. It had been a desperate struggle to save that child, but they’d succeeded. Not that Rory would know how he’d been discharged a week or so later, with remarkably few lingering effects from the deadly disease, because he hadn’t hung around to find out.

  Not that day, he’d said. As though something much worse had happened. What could have been bad enough to have negated his triumph at saving that child?

  They hadn’t dealt with anything out of the ordinary. Broken bones and cuts that needed suturing. Abdominal pains and chest pains and difficulty breathing from one cause or another. Headaches. A man with a fish-hook in his finger. Someone who’d been kicked by a pony. A heart attack. There had been a DOA, but Rory had been in the middle of cutting out that fish-hook at the time, and Kate had been assisting. The patient hadn’t even made it inside the department, and it had been Braden who’d gone out to the bay to do the paperwork required before the ambulance could move on to the morgue.

  Kate could remember pretty much the entire day, because she’d been over and over it in her head so many times. It had been business as usual, and that had meant Rory knowing everything that was happening in his depart ment. Taking charge of anything serious. Smoothing over any bumps.

  Always interested. Always smiling. Always flirting a little because it came as naturally as breathing. It was his way of making women feel special. From an elderly female patient to a nervous new nurse aide.

  ‘Nearly there, Florence,’ Rory was saying now. ‘We’ll get a dressing on this, then I reckon it’s going to heal and you’ll be just as gorgeous as ever.’

  ‘Get away with you!’ Florence scoffed, but Kate could feel the cheek muscles under her fingers bunching as the older woman smiled broadly.

  Kate wasn’t smiling. He hadn’t changed at all, and right now, the Rory McCulloch they all knew and loved was about as far as she could get from the image of a family man.