by Fiona Lowe
‘So you used me?’
Her head jerked up at the slight edge in his voice. ‘Oh, and you didn’t use me?’
A look of distaste and utter indignation slid across his face and two red spots appeared on his cheeks as if she’d slapped him. ‘No! I don’t use women. What the hell sort of a man do you think I am?’
A kernel of guilt burrowed into her that because of Trent’s role in her life she’d offended him, but she wasn’t about to explain to him why. ‘Look, we’re adults. You don’t need to appease your conscience by buying me dinner. What happened happened and now we can just forget about it and move on.’
‘I don’t want to forget about it,’ he said softly, as he moved towards her.
Panic had her pulling a linen skip between them but he put his hands on either side of it and leaned in close. ‘Do you?’
His soft words wound down into her, taunting her resolve. I have to forget.
He suddenly straightened up and opened his hands out palms upward in supplication. ‘Come to dinner, Lily. You never know, we might actually enjoy each other’s company.’
‘I really don’t think—’
‘I promise you it will just be dinner.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Sex is an optional extra and totally your choice. I’m not here to talk you into or out of it.’
She stared at him, trying desperately hard to read him and coming up blank. Why was he was doing this? Why was he being so nice? She sought signs of calculation but all she could see was genuineness. It clashed with everything she wanted to believe about him—about all men—only she got a sense that if she said no, she’d offend him. Again. ‘Okay, but I’m paying.’
His jaw stiffened. ‘I’m not an escort service. We’ll go Dutch.’
The memory of him stroking her until she’d come made her cheeks burn hotly. ‘I guess … um … that’s fair.’
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he said, ‘I’d offer to pick you up but that would probably upset your independent sensibilities. Emergencies and babies excepted, how does seven at Casuarina sound?’
She was so rusty at accepting invitations that her voice came out all scratchy. ‘Seven sounds good.’
He shot her a wary smile. ‘Cheer up. You never know, you might just enjoy yourself.’
Before she could say another word, he’d turned and left.
Please, let a baby be born tonight. Please.
But, given her luck with men, that was probably not going to happen.
CHAPTER SIX
NOAH FULLY EXPECTED Lily to cancel. Every email and text that had hit his phone during the afternoon he’d opened with that thought first and foremost in his mind. Now, as he sat alone in the small restaurant, he fingered his phone, turning it over and over, still waiting for the call to come. He caught sight of his countdown app and opened it. Four hundred and fifty-six hours left in Turraburra. Almost halfway.
Why are you even here in this restaurant? That thought had been running concurrently with She will cancel. He had no clue why he’d insisted they have dinner. It wasn’t like he’d never taken the gift of casual sex before and walked away without a second glance. Granted, he’d not actually hit the end zone last night, but watching Lilia shatter above him had brought him pretty damn close. And it had felt good in a way he hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Something about her—the wildness in the way she’d kissed him, the desperation in the way she’d come and then her rapid retreat into herself afterwards had kick-started something in him. A desire to get to know her more. A vague caring—something he’d put on ice years ago.
It confused him and dinner had seemed a way of exorcising both the confusion and the caring. Hell, her reaction to his dinner invitation had almost nuked the caring on the spot. He’d never had a woman so reluctant to accept his invitation and it had fast become a challenge to get her to accept. He refused to be relegated to the category of a mistake. He checked his watch. Seven-ten p.m.
‘Would you like a drink, Dr Jackson?’ Georgia Brady asked, as she extended the black-bound wine list towards him.
Noah had recently prescribed the contraceptive pill for the young woman and had conducted the examination that went along with that. He was slightly taken aback to find she was now his waitress. ‘I think I’ll wait, thanks.’
‘Who are you waiting for?’
‘Lilia Cartwright,’ he answered, before he realised the inappropriateness of the question. Small towns with their intense curiosity were so not his thing. ‘Aren’t there other customers needing your attention?’
Georgia laughed as she indicated the virtually empty restaurant. ‘Thursday nights in Turraburra are pretty quiet. Are you sure Lily’s coming? It’s just she never dates.’
‘It’s a work dinner,’ he said quickly, as a crazy need to protect Lilia from small-town gossip slugged him.
Georgia nodded. ‘That makes more sense. Oh, here she is. Hi, Lily.’
Lily stood in the entrance of the restaurant and slipped off her coat, wondering for the thousandth time why she was there. Why she hadn’t created an excuse to cancel. That was the one drawback of a small town. Without a cast-iron reason it was, oh, so easy to be caught out in a lie because everybody knew what everyone was doing and when they were doing it. So, here she was. She’d eat and leave. An hour, max.
Plastering on a smile, she walked forward and said, ‘Hi, Georgia,’ as she took her seat opposite Noah, who’d jumped to his feet on her arrival. ‘Noah.’
He gave her a nod and she thought he looked as nervous as she felt.
‘If this is a work dinner, will you want wine?’ Georgia asked.
‘Yes.’
Noah spoke at exactly the same moment as she did, his deep ‘Yes’ rolling over hers.
They both laughed tightly and Georgia gave them an odd look before going to fetch the bottle of Pinot Gris Noah ordered.
Lily fiddled with her napkin. ‘This is a work dinner?’
Noah grimaced. ‘Georgia was giving me the third degree about my date and as the town believes you’re married to your job, I thought it best not to disabuse them.’
She stared at him, stunned. ‘How do you know the town thinks I’m married to my job?’
‘Linda Sampson told me on my first day,’ he said matter-of-factly, before sipping some water. ‘So are you?’
She didn’t reply until Georgia had finished pouring the wine, placed the bottle in an ice bucket by the side of the table and left. ‘I love my job but I also love Gramps, Chippy and bushwalking. Plus, I’m involved as a volunteer with Coastcare so I live a very balanced life,’ she said, almost too emphatically. ‘It’s just that Linda wants to marry off every single woman in town.’
‘And man,’ Noah said, with a shake of his head. ‘The first day I was here she ran through a list of possible candidates for me, despite the fact I’d told her I wasn’t looking.’
‘Why aren’t you looking?’ The question came out before she’d censored it.
His perceptive gaze hooked hers. ‘Why aren’t you?’
So not going there. She dropped her gaze and sipped the wine, savouring the flavours of pear and apple as they zipped along her tongue. ‘This is lovely.’
‘I like it. The Bellarine Peninsula has some great wineries.’
‘You mean there are times you actually leave Melbourne voluntarily?’ she teased.
He grinned. ‘I’ve been known to when wine’s involved.’
‘There’s a winery an hour away from here.’
‘This far south?’
She smiled at his scepticism. ‘They only make reds but the flavours are really intense. You should visit. You get great wine, amazing views across Wilson’s Prom and wedge-tailed eagles.’
His eyes, always so serious, lightened in self-deprecation. ‘I guess I should have read the tourist information they sent me after all.’
She raised her glass. ‘To the hidden gems of Turraburra.’
‘And to finding them.’ He clinked her glas
s with his, his gaze skimming her from the top of her forehead, across her face and down to her breasts and back again.
A shiver of need thundered through her and she hastily crossed her legs against the intense throb, trying to quash it. She gulped her wine, quickly draining the glass and then regretting it as the alcohol hit her veins.
Stick to pleasantries. ‘The eye fillet here is locally grown and so tender it melts in your mouth.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ he said, as he instructed Georgia that he wanted his with the blood stopped. When the waitress had refilled their glasses, removed the menus and departed for the kitchen, he said, ‘I saw your grandfather this morning for his check-up. He’s a new man.’
‘He is. Thanks.’
He gave a wry smile. ‘Don’t thank me. Thank the surgeon who inserted the pacemaker and fixed the problem.’
‘A typical surgeon’s response. Noah, you made the diagnosis so please accept the thanks.’ She fiddled with the base of her glass and sought desperately for something to say that was neutral. ‘So you know I grew up in Turraburra, what about you?’
He took a long drink of his wine.
Her curiosity ramped up three notches. ‘Is it a secret?’
‘No. It’s just not very interesting.’
‘Try me.’
‘West of Sydney.’
She thought about his reaction to Turraburra and wondered if he’d grown up in a small town. ‘How west? Orange? Cowra?’
‘Thankfully, not that far west.’ He ran his hand through his curls as if her questions hurt. ‘I grew up in a poverty-stricken, gossip-ridden town on the edge of Sydney. Not really country but too far away to be city. I hated it and I spent most of my teenage years plotting to get out and stay out.’
She thought about her own childhood—of the freedom of the beach, of the love of her grandfather and the circle of care from the town—and she felt sad for him. ‘Do your parents still live there?’
He shook his head. ‘I was a change-of-life baby. Totally unexpected and my mother was forty-four when she had me. They’re both dead now.’
She knew all about that. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
The harshness of his reply shocked her. ‘You’re glad your parents are dead?’
A long sigh shuddered out of him and he suddenly looked haggard and tired. ‘Of course not, but I’m glad they’re no longer suffering.’
‘So they didn’t die from old age?’
‘Not exactly.’ He cut through the steak Georgia had quietly placed in front of him. ‘My father died breathless and drowning in heart failure and my mother …’ He bit harshly into the meat.
His pain washed over Lily and she silently reached out her hand, resting it on top of his. He stared at it for a moment before swallowing. ‘She died a long and protracted death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.’
Motor neurone disease. ‘Oh, God, that must have been awful.’ She caught a flash of gratitude in his eyes that she understood. ‘Did you have a good nursing home?’
‘At the very end we did but for the bulk of two years I cared for her at home.’ His thumb moved slowly against her hand, almost unconsciously, caressing her skin in small circular motions.
Delicious sensations wove through her, making her mind cloud at the edges. She forced herself to concentrate, working hard to hear him rather than allowing herself to follow the bliss. ‘That’s … that’s a long time to care for someone.’
His mouth flattened into a grim line as he nodded his agreement. ‘It is and, to be honest, when I took the job on we didn’t have a diagnosis. I just assumed she’d need a bit of help for a while until she got stronger. I had no clue it would play out like it did, and had I known I might have …’
She waited a beat but he didn’t say anything so she waded right on in. ‘When did she get sick?’
‘When I was nineteen. With illness, no timing is ever good but this totally sucked. I was living in Coo-gee by the beach, doing first-year medicine at UNSW and loving my life. It was step one of my plan to get out and stay out of Penrington.’
She thought of what he’d said about growing up in a poverty-stricken town. ‘Because doctors are rarely unemployed?’
‘That and the fact I was sixteen when my father died. I guess it’s an impressionable age and I used to daydream that if I’d been a doctor I could have saved him.’ He gave a snort of harsh laughter. ‘Of course, I now know that no doctor could have changed the outcome, but at the time it was a driving force for me to choose medicine as a career.’
A stab of guilt pierced her under the ribs. She’d so easily assigned him the role of arrogant surgeon—a guy who’d chosen the prestigious speciality for the money—that she’d missed his altruism. ‘You must have needed a lot of help to balance the demands of your study with helping your mum.’
He shook his head. ‘My parents never had a lot of money and Mum gave up work to care for Dad in his last weeks of life. By the time she got sick, there wasn’t any spare cash for a paid carer and there wasn’t a lot of choice.’
‘What did you do?’
He pulled his hand away from hers and ripped open the bread roll, jerkily applying butter. ‘I deferred uni at the end of first year and took care of her.’
She thought about her own egocentric student days. ‘That would have been a huge life change.’
His breath came out in a hiss. ‘Tell me about it. I went from the freedom of uni where life consisted of lectures and parties to being stuck back in Penrington, which I’d thought I’d escaped. Only this time I was basically confined to the house. I spent a lot of time being angry and the rest of it feeling hellishly guilty as I watched my strong and capable mother fade in front of me.’
There weren’t many nineteen-year-olds who’d take on full-time care like that and this was Noah. Noah, who seemed so detached and closed off from people. She struggled to wrap her head around it. ‘But surely you had some help?’
He shrugged. ‘The council sent a cleaner every couple of weeks and a nurse would visit three times a week, you know the drill, but the bulk of her care fell to me.’ He took a gulp of the wine before looking at her, his eyes filled with anguish. ‘Every day I was haunted by a thousand thoughts. Would she choke on dinner? Would she aspirate food into her lungs? Would she fall? Would she wake up in the morning?’
Lily heard the misery and grief in his voice and her heart wept. This brisk, no-nonsense, shoot-from-the-hip doctor—the man who seemed to have great difficulty empathising with patients—had nursed his mother. ‘I … That’s … It …’
‘Shocks you, doesn’t it?’ he said drily, accurately gauging her reaction. ‘Part of it shocks me too but life has a way of taking you to places you never expected to go.’
He returned to eating his meal and she ate some of hers, giving him a chance to take a break from his harrowing story. She was certain he’d use the opportunity to change the subject and she knew she’d let him. She was familiar with how hard it was to revisit traumatic memories, so it came as a surprise when he continued.
‘You really don’t learn a lot more than anatomy and some physiology in first-year medicine and I truly believed we’d find a doctor who could help Mum.’ His hand sneaked back to hers, covering it with his warmth. ‘We went from clinic to clinic, saw specialist after specialist, tried three different drug trials and nothing changed except that Mum continued to deteriorate. In all those months, not one person ever said it was hopeless and that there was no cure.’ His mouth curled. ‘I’ve never forgiven them for that.’
‘And yet you still had enough faith to return to your studies and qualify as a doctor?’
‘I became a surgeon,’ he said quietly but vehemently. ‘Surgery’s black and white. I see a problem and I can either fix it or I can’t. And that’s what I tell my patients. I give it to them straight and I never give them false hope.’
And there it was—the reason he was so direct. She’d been totally wrong about him. It
wasn’t deliberate rudeness—it came from a heartfelt place, only the message got lost in translation and came out harsh and uncaring. ‘There’s a middle line between false hope and stark truth, Noah,’ she said quietly, hoping he’d actually hear her message.
He pulled his hand away. ‘Apparently so.’
Her hand felt sadly cool and she struggled not to acknowledge how much she missed his touch.
Noah helped Lily into her coat, taking advantage of the moment to breathe in deeply and inhale her perfume. All too soon, her coat was on and it was time for him to open the front door of Casuarina and follow her outside onto the esplanade. The rhythmic boom of the waves against the sand enveloped them and he had to admit it had a soothing quality. He glanced along the street. ‘Where’s your car?’
She thrust her hands into her coat pockets, protecting them against the spring chill. ‘I walked.’
‘I’ve got mine. I can drive you home.’
Her eyes widened for a second and he caught the moment she recalled exactly what had happened the last time they had been in his car. Sex. The topic they’d both gone to great lengths to avoid talking about tonight. The one thing he’d told her was her choice.
He didn’t want her to bolt home alone so he hastily amended his offer. ‘Or I can walk you home, if you prefer.’
She tilted her head and studied him as if she couldn’t quite work him out and then she gave him a smile full of gratitude. ‘Thanks. A walk would be great.’
‘A walk it is, then.’ She could go from guardedly cautious to sexy in a heartbeat and it disarmed him, leaving him wondering and confused. With one of her hands on her hip, he took advantage of an opportunity to touch her and slid his arm through hers. ‘Which way?’
She glanced at his arm as if she was considering if she should allow it to remain there but she didn’t pull away. ‘Straight ahead.’
The darkness enveloped them as they strolled out of the pool of light cast by the streetlamp. Unlike Melbourne, there weren’t streetlights every few houses—in fact, once you left the main street and the cluster of shops on the esplanade there were very few lights. He glanced up into the bright and cluttered Milky Way. ‘The stars are amazing here.’