She had him worked out. ‘Then I might offer to help you with Sam and Matt and Ruby?’
‘That’s the one.’ He beamed. ‘Two days ago there was only one doctor in Bay Beach. Now there’s two doctors, but with four kids and a dog between them. Surely we can manage.’
‘And your childminding skills would be…?’
‘I can build sandcastles,’ he said virtuously, and she had to grin.
‘How about changing nappies?’
He sniffed at that. And then he sniffed again. ‘Uh-oh…’
‘Nappies aren’t your forte, then, Dr Lunn?’
‘That’s why we’re waiting on the station for you,’ he told her generously. ‘So you can share.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ he told her and handed over Robby with a promptness that made her chuckle. ‘Here’s your baby.’
Your baby.
That got to her.
She looked down at Robby, and then she looked up at Jonas. This was dangerous territory they were getting into, she thought-and she wondered if Jonas knew exactly how dangerous it really was.
He had it all worked out.
Back at the house, Em’s sometime receptionist, Amy, was waiting for them. The teenager had lunch on the table, and she smiled her welcome as Jonas ushered his brood indoors.
It was some brood. One partner and four children.
And one dog. Bernard made straight for his place under the sink and lay down. Immediately, he had two children tugging him up again.
And Amy was smiling at them all, making Em even more confused. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi, Amy. What are you doing here?’
‘Lou’s flu is better.’ Amy beamed as if that fact alone was little short of miraculous. The teenager really hadn’t enjoyed her short stint as medical rececptionist. ‘So Lou’s back at Reception and Dr Lunn knew I was out of work. To be honest, I’m happier childminding than I am waiting for someone to vomit all over the waiting-room floor. So when Dr Lunn suggested I be your short-term nanny I thought it’d be cool.’
Cool…
‘It fitted perfectly.’ Jonas beamed with the satisfaction of a man who’d just put in the final piece of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. ‘Isn’t it perfect, Dr Mainwaring?’
‘Perfect,’ she said faintly, and his smile faded.
‘It is. It will work, Em. It must.’
‘I can see that.’ That it must.
‘Amy will be here during the day, and at night only one of us needs to be on call. So the kids can be settled.’
But Em was still holding Robby close. Robby, who had such a hold on her heart…
‘Why are you looking afraid?’ Jonas asked gently, and she knew that he saw way too much for her liking. He knew her too well. Instinctively he knew what she was thinking, and she found the sensation almost frightening.
‘I’m just trying to figure how I can let go of Robby-again,’ she murmured, and he looked at her for a long time.
‘Maybe you don’t want to,’ he said at last.
‘But-’
‘And maybe there’s no need.’ He reached forward and touched her very lightly on the nose-a feather touch that sent electric currents straight through her. ‘Have a think about that. With Amy’s help, you don’t need to. Meanwhile, if I can leave you with Amy and the kids, I really need to go to Blairglen and see Anna.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘This is going to work,’ he told her strongly. ‘If we make it.’ He looked at her for a long, long moment, in his eyes a question, but what he saw seemed to satisfy him. He gave a decisive nod.
‘OK, kids,’ he told his niece and nephews. ‘You know what’s happening. I’m leaving you to get settled with Dr Em and Amy, but I’ll be back tonight to tell you how Mummy is. OK?’
‘OK,’ they quavered, and Em knew they were as scared as she was.
But, like them, she had no choice.
‘Jonas,’ she said as he turned away, and he turned straight back to face her.
‘Yes?’ Their eyes met, and once again that intangible thing passed between them. That thing that scared Em so much…
‘Stay as long as you need to tonight,’ she told him. ‘Amy and I will be fine. Give our love to Anna. And…’
‘And?’
‘And I have all my fingers and toes crossed for her,’ she said simply. ‘And anything else I can think of.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. Their eyes locked above the heads of the four children and once again that silent message was passed.
They may as well have kissed…
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS midnight before Jonas returned.
Em was wide awake when his car pulled in-not because she needed to be, but because she simply couldn’t sleep.
Everyone else was sleeping. There was no reason not to be asleep herself, and no reason why she should be nervous about having the children on her own. Jonas, she discovered, had even provided for night-shift child care.
Amy went home at six but if both doctors were called out, the arrangement was to open the connecting door to the hospital, alert the night staff, and the house could be treated as an extra kids’ ward, to be checked by the nurses at need.
It was so simple, Em thought. She just wished her feelings about Jonas were as straight forward.
Not so simple either were her feelings for the little boy in the crib beside her bed. Her bedroom was the logical place for him to be, she’d decided, a decision made even easier by the boys’ insistence that Bernard sleep in their bedroom, but the reason why her heart turned over at every movement Robby made wasn’t logical in the least.
She didn’t intend to have babies, she told herself for maybe the thousandth time in her life. So…she couldn’t attach herself to Robby. She couldn’t!
Just like she was never going to marry. There simply wasn’t room in her life for a family.
But she loved-loved-the baby sleeping beside her. She could no longer ignore it. And part of her loved the fact that her too-big house was now full of kids and dogs and…
And Jonas.
This was all far, far too complicated!
And now here was Jonas, returning to make her heart do things that were completely foreign to her. Complicating her life still further.
She should stick her head under her pillow and force herself to sleep, she told herself crossly, but she could do no such thing.
Instead, as Jonas’s key turned in the lock, she padded through to the living room to meet him.
He was exhausted.
She’d left the wall lamp on in case one of the children wandered in the night. It threw enough light on Jonas’s face to show his facial features harshly etched, as if he was deeply exhausted. His eyes were dark and shadowed, and the expression on his face was grim.
‘Jonas?’ Her heart lurched in fear. Dear heaven, Anna… What had happened?
But he saw her in the shadows, and his face cleared like magic. ‘Em.’
‘How is it with Anna?’
He’d taken a step toward her-for a moment she thought he was going to reach for her-but the tone of her voice stopped him.
It was meant to. She was getting far too emotionally involved here. She had to stand back a bit.
She couldn’t take his proffered hands.
So she made her voice clinical-doctor enquiring of colleague about a mutual patient-and she waited until he pulled himself into order.
‘I… She’s fine.’
She relented, just a little. ‘But you’re not fine,’ she told him. ‘I can see that. Come and have a cup of tea and tell me about it.’
‘You couldn’t make that a brandy?’
‘It went as badly as that?’
‘No.’ His face twisted into a grimace of a smile. ‘Hell, no. It’s just that I’m exhausted.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night.’
Of course he hadn’t-and at least she’d had the train journey for sleep. Once more, her
heart twisted. Somehow she managed to keep her voice dispassionate, but there were still these darned undercurrents running through her. Undercurrents she didn’t know what on earth to do with.
She took refuge in practicalities, crossing to the dresser, finding the brandy and pouring him a drink.
Handing it to him was tricky. She had to cross her emotional barrier. Her closeness limit. But then she backed away and hitched herself up onto the dresser, to watch him from a safe distance.
‘I won’t bite, you know,’ he said conversationally, and she managed a smile at that.
‘Nope. But I like it here.’ She motioned to the armchair. ‘Sit down and tell me all.’
He sat, but his eyes didn’t leave hers. ‘You look like a pale blue, very odd sort of garden gnome,’ he complained. ‘A garden gnome after a spray-paint job. You don’t look doctor-like at all.’
She thought about that, looked down at her jogging suit and smiled. ‘Hmm. Don’t you approve of the night-time me? Would you like to come through to my surgery while I put on a white coat?’
He grinned. ‘That’s kinky, Dr Mainwaring. I think I’ll leave it like it is. In fact, I kind of like it. Gnome-like instead of doctor-like.’
She smiled again, but then there was silence. Things settled between them. Almost. Em was still achingly aware of the closeness of him. He was eight feet away. Or, if you looked at it another way, he was three short steps away…
‘Tell me about Anna,’ she managed, and waited some more.
He looked at her, with that strange, questioning look that told her he only half believed she wanted to know. He wasn’t accustomed to professional caring, she thought. He wasn’t used to country doctors who worried about their patients on a personal as well as a professional level.
‘It’s gone as well as it could have,’ he told her.
‘Which means?’ Once more, she waited.
‘Small tumour. As the X-rays showed, it’s less than a centimetre across. It was all contained in the soft tissue under the breast, and it doesn’t look like there’s any spread at all. They’ve taken a fair margin, but there’s no sign of dispersion. They haven’t had to touch the nipple, so she’ll be left with one breast just slightly smaller than the other. If the pathology shows the margins are clear, I doubt Anna will even need a prosthesis.’
‘That’s great. And the nodes?’
‘They’ve done a complete node clearance. It looks good.’ Jonas’s face cleared then, but he looked down into the brandy as if he was trying desperately to see into the future. ‘One node was slightly enlarged, but we have to wait until late tomorrow or the next day for the pathology results.’
‘Oh, Jonas…’
‘It’s a bloody long wait,’ he said.
‘Longer for Anna than for you.’ But still it was hard for him. Suddenly she could bear it no longer. Slipping off her perch, she took the steps to cross the barrier between them. She placed her hands on the back of his neck and started to massage, slowly, expertly easing the knots of tension across his shoulder blades.
He sighed at her touch, and leaned back into her, but she knew his mind was still on Anna.
‘You know, even if it has spread to the nodes, at stage two the prognosis is still positive.’
‘I know that.’ He shook his head. ‘There was someone else there,’ he said slowly, and Em thought this through. He sounded so weary it was as if conversation was an effort.
‘Waiting to hear how Anna went, do you mean?’
‘Yes. Just sitting, like me, waiting to know she’d come out of Theatre.’
Her brow wrinkled. ‘Was it Kevin?’ She’d thought Anna’s de facto husband had long gone.
He shook his head at that. ‘No chance. If it had been, I reckon I’d have strangled him with my bare hands. This guy’s name is Jim Bainbridge. Big guy. In his late thirties.’
‘I know Jim.’ Em’s hands were still doing their gentle massage and she could feel the knots of tension in Jonas’s shoulders slowly unravel. ‘Jim’s the local fire chief. He’s a really nice man. Almost pathologically shy, though.’ She thought about it and saw the connection. ‘He’s Anna’s nearest neighbour. They share a back fence.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You think he’s fond of her?’
‘I think he looked almost as strained as me. He definitely cares.’
‘Well, Jim’s not a loser or an alcoholic,’ Em said softly, seeing where his thoughts were heading and allaying his fears before he voiced them. ‘He’s gentle, he’s steadily employed and, to my knowledge, he’s a one-can-of-beer-after-a-major-bushfire man.’
‘Well, that’d be a change.’ Jonas sighed again. ‘It’d be a big man to take on Anna, though. Three kids and breast cancer…’
That made Em pause. Her hands stilled. ‘You mean you don’t think Anna has anything left to offer?’ she asked quietly. ‘Just because she’s lost a piece of her breast?’
‘I didn’t mean that. Of course I didn’t mean that.’ Jonas’s face creased into a weary smile, and his hands came up and caught hers over his shoulders. ‘I only meant…well, three kids are a handful, and on top of that she’s running scared.’
‘Just like you.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘Of relationships?’ Her hands broke away from his and went back to kneading. ‘Of needing people? Pull the other leg, Jonas Lunn.’
Silence.
‘I’m not, you know,’ he said conversationally, as though it had only just occurred to him.
‘Scared of relationships?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So you’re aching to fall in love, right at this minute.’
‘I could be tempted,’ he said, and the warmth in his voice gave her pause. ‘For instance, if you said right now that you’d come to bed with me…’
‘You’d have your packet of condoms out quicker than I could say wedding ring,’ she said bluntly, and she couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘That’d be right. Only it’s not going to happen. Neither of us will say bed, you won’t say condoms, and I won’t say wedding ring. Because it’s not what either of us wants.’
‘You don’t necessarily,’ he said carefully, ‘have to take bed, condoms and wedding ring as a job lot. They can be separated.’
‘What, go to bed with you without a condom?’ She raised her eyebrows in mock indignation. Still she kept on massaging. It was a link she didn’t want broken, condoms or not. ‘Gee, thanks very much. We have four kids here already. You’re saying let’s make it five?’
‘I meant the marriage thing,’ he told her. He put her hands away, rose and twisted to face her, his eyes suddenly serious. He placed his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to meet his gaze. ‘Enough.’ His eyes were locked on hers, and they were suddenly deadly serious. ‘Em, you need to know that I’d like to make love to you. Very, very much.’
And she didn’t?
She wanted to make love with Jonas more than anything in the world, she thought wildly. She wanted him to wrap her in those strong arms, to hold her against his chest, to lift her into bed and make her believe…
Make her believe for a few magic minutes that she was young and desirable, and free to make any choice she wanted in life.
But that was the way of madness.
Because at the end of all this, when Anna no longer needed him, he’d walk away without a backward glance.
And his next words confirmed it.
‘Em, there’s no need for you to look like you’re being asked to commit for life here,’ he told her. ‘For heaven’s sake, how old are you?’
‘Twenty-nine.’
‘And I’m thirty-three. That’s old enough to know we can take pleasure where we find it.’
‘And walk away afterwards.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Except it doesn’t work like that,’ she told him sadly, reality crashing back where it belonged. ‘Like me and Robby.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I thought I could just love Robby for a little bit,’ she said, and her voice was bleak. ‘So I let myself become…involved. And now I’ve got it hard. The full bit. Because, as well as Robby needing me, I need him. I love him, Jonas. That’s what love is. Needing, and being needed in return. So now here he is, sleeping in the cot beside me, and the longer it goes on the more it’ll tear my heart out when he leaves.’
‘I didn’t know you felt like that.’ He frowned. ‘Where’s your professional detachment, Dr Mainwaring?’
‘I don’t have any.’ She took a deep breath and pulled back from him. ‘You seem to have it in spades but I don’t have my share. And it’s not fair. Because for you it’s no problem.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He was frowning.
‘You could have a wife and a family any time you want,’ she said, and his brow snapped down again.
‘I don’t want.’
‘Exactly.’ She dug her hands into the pockets of her capacious sleeping trousers and met his look full on. ‘But I do. I always have. A family would be…wonderful. But I also want to be Bay Beach’s doctor. The two together are impossible.’
‘You could marry a local,’ he said, thinking it through. ‘And adopt Robby.’
‘Oh, yes?’ She jeered. ‘How could I do that? What man would take me on, when he’d know I’m on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? You might be able to find a wife who’d live with you on those terms, but male-female roles haven’t changed so much that I could find a husband who’d live with it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in a bushfire of me forming a long-term relationship.’
‘Are things here so tough?’
‘They are,’ she said bluntly. ‘This town’s big enough for two doctors, and there aren’t enough doctors in the neighbouring towns. So I’m it. I’m overworked, I love my job but it allows me no time at all for anything else.’
‘Even for Robby?’
She tilted her chin at that. ‘There is nothing in the world I’d like more than to adopt Robby,’ she told him, and the words confirmed it even to herself. ‘For some reason I’ve fallen for him in a big way. I want him so badly I ache with it. But what sort of mother would I make?’
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