by Fiona Lowe
Her lungs emptied of air and a shard of pain cramped her heart as all her unanswered questions about Nick lined up. She’d just solved the puzzle. She’d bet her last cent he was talking to Melinda not as a doctor but as a fellow traveller. Nick Dennison had experienced cancer.
The only question still needing an answer was what type of cancer. No, there’s one more. Has he won the battle?
The thought that he might not terrified her more than it should.
CHAPTER FOUR
NICK bit into the sweet nectarine, savouring the complex but delicious summer flavour on his tongue, and marvelling at the taste. Once he wouldn’t have given that a second thought.
‘That looks good.’ Kirby walked into the staffroom, her usual cheerful demeanour completely absent, dented by the morning’s work and Melinda’s diagnosis.
This woman confounded him. She lurched from being in charge and confident to needing more reassurance than he would have thought necessary. She reminded him of a junior resident, which was nonsense as she must have far more experience than that if she was doing her first GP rotation.
‘Catch.’ He tossed her a nectarine and pulled out a chair.
‘Thanks.’ She bit into the fruit she’d neatly caught and juice dribbled down her chin. Her pink tongue darted out, stroking her skin and licking at the sweet juice.
The image of her tongue against his chin, against his lips, in his mouth, beamed in 3D depth. Colours exploded in his head as blood drained to his groin. He silently started chanting the names of all the bones in the body and blood slowly and regretfully returned to his head.
Now fully back in control, he risked looking at Kirby with the eyes of a colleague. Right now she needed a mentor and that was his job. He sat down and gave her an encouraging smile. ‘If you’re going to take everyone’s problems on board like this then you’re not going to last very long as a GP.’
Her large doe-like eyes reflected sadness, and a sigh rolled over her plump bottom lip. ‘But it’s just so unfair.’
He took in a thoughtful breath and wondered if she was one of those people who had lived a charmed life untouched by misfortune. ‘Life isn’t fair, Kirby. Surely you’ve worked that out by now.’
Her sparkling eyes, always so fill of vibrant colours and movement, suddenly filled with pervading emptiness. The change both startled and disturbed him and something inside him ached.
A moment later she shook her head and gave him a tight smile. ‘I know I’m a hopeless case but when something happens outside the realm of what is expected in the circle of life, I find myself railing against it. If Melinda was seventy-eight I’d feel sad but she would have raised her kids and lived a full life.’
Memories of a parade of eyes filled with resignation and expressions of grief and fear hammered him. ‘She still can.’ His words sounded overly firm but he hated the way people assigned a death certificate to a diagnosis of cancer, which was why he refused to talk about what he’d been through.
A flash of understanding and purpose streaked across her face. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, of course she can and I hope she will, but I wouldn’t wish that struggle on anyone.’ Her gaze hovered on him for a moment, her expression intent. ‘Would you?’
The hairs on his arms rose for a moment as he met her unsettling stare. He leaned back casually and placed the pit of his nectarine on a plate that sat between them, striving not to give anything personal away. ‘Of course not. But although her treatment will be tough, she’ll appreciate parts of the process.’
‘Really?’ Her brow creased in lines of confusion. ‘How so?’
‘She’ll learn a lot about herself.’
‘More than if she wasn’t sick?’
He relaxed as the discussion stayed centred on Melinda. ‘Absolutely. In general, human beings don’t like change and most of us don’t put our hand up to experience it. Cancer barges in and railroads you so you have no choice but to meet it head on and change.’ He learned forward, warming to his topic. ‘You drop the non-essentials and you see things with a clarity not everyone gets the opportunity to have. It’s probably the only advantage of the disease.’
‘That’s an interesting perspective.’ Kirby put the pit of the nectarine down on the plate and then leaned forward on her elbows, her chin resting on the palms of her hands, her gaze fixed directly on him. ‘I’ve never heard it explained like that before but that’s because it’s happened to you, hasn’t it? That’s why you’re here in Port, growing vegetables, instead of slaying even bigger career dragons in Melbourne.’
His chest tightened at her soft-voiced but accurate assumption. Damn it, he’d walked right into her question and he didn’t want to answer it. He wanted his time in Port to be free of everything he associated with illness. He didn’t want to see sympathy for him shining from those large bluer-than-blue eyes, and he didn’t want her to start tiptoeing around him like people had in Melbourne. He just wanted things to be as they had been right up until this point. Shrugging, he bluffed. ‘Perhaps I just wanted a tree-change.’
She shook her head. ‘I might have believed that on Saturday. After all, growing veggies and living in the bush could have been because you’d burned out from years of fast-tracking up the professional ladder, but even then it was a stretch. Now too many things add up—your hair, your vice-less diet.’ Her fingers reached out toward his hand and with a feather-soft touch they traced a jagged white scar. ‘The marks of an infected IV.’
A fire-storm of sensation detonated under her touch, rolling through him fast and leaving smouldering desire in its wake. Desire he could no longer pretend didn’t exist. ‘Why is this so important to you, Sherlock?’ He trapped her hand with his free one, sandwiching hers between his.
Her pupils dilated into inky discs and a pulse fluttered in her throat as she took a long deep breath, making her breasts strain against the fitted bodice of her dress. ‘Because you’re a puzzle.’
He recognised her body’s response to him, the marks of desire matching those of his own. Their attraction for each other ran between them like a vibrating wire.
It had been months and months since he’d held a woman’s hand, hell, since he’d really held a woman. Like so many things in his life, he’d taken for granted the touch of a woman. He loved women. He loved their company, their scent, their curves—everything about them—and now his body craved to hold a woman in his arms again. He ached for it. These feelings he understood. Mutual attraction. Undiluted lust.
And he read them in Kirby’s pink cheeks, her slightly open mouth and in the lift of her breasts. He read enough to want the buzz of the chase.
But without warning the heat from her hand surprisingly morphed from scorching fire to cosy heat, warming him, swirling around in sweet tendrils, licking at his self-imposed silence.
‘And I can’t resist solving puzzles.’ She smiled a long, slow, knowing smile, which wound across her face, bringing it alive, the way colour invigorated a black and white canvas.
A smile that promised something good, something wonderful. A smile that called to him unlike any smile ever had. Right there and then, not telling her became harder than keeping his own counsel.
‘So you can’t resist me?’ He traced a circle on her hand with his thumb.
Kirby’s body shivered as his caress sent waves of delicious need pounding through her. Remember Anthony, remember the hurt. She forced out a laugh and pulled her hand out from under his, ignoring the chill that followed. ‘See, this is the puzzle. You’re known for flirting charm.’
‘But not for growing vegetables. Fair enough.’ His guarded expression unexpectedly melted. ‘I can see why me being in Port is a puzzle because for years I worked hard and played hard.’
‘So what changed?’ She tried not to sound as if she was interrogating him but she badly wanted to know what had happened more than she probably should.
‘Just under two years ago I couldn’t shake off a virus. I felt like I had treacle running through my veins
and I was constantly tired and my skin seemed to itch like mad. Then I discovered a pea-sized lump just behind my ear.’ He tilted his head, his deep green eyes questioning. ‘What do you think, Doctor?’
He’d just turned his story into a teaching session. She ran the symptoms through her mind. ‘A type of lymphoma?’
‘Well done, Dr Atherton. I had stage-one non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma so I stepped down from Melbourne City and started seven months of IV chemotherapy.’
She schooled her face not to show any emotion but to keep it focussed on a teaching session, as that was obviously the way he wanted to go. ‘How was that?’
‘What do you think it might be like?’
She spoke from the heart. ‘Bloody awful.’
He laughed a rich, body-shaking laugh. ‘That pretty much sums it up.’ He flattened his hands out against the table. ‘And you’re pretty observant, Sherlock. I did have problems with infections on my hands so I ended up with a chest tube and a natty scar.’
He raised his brows and shot her a look of pure, unadulterated flirtation—a classic Nick Dennison look. ‘But you didn’t know that because you’re yet to see me with my shirt off.’
Her mouth dried at the thought of all that exposed golden skin but despite the fog of lust that encircled her brain she managed to see through his ploy. She rolled her eyes. ‘You can’t derail me that easily.’ Liar! ‘I want to hear the whole story. Did you have radiation therapy as well?’
He ran his hand through his hair and frustration raced across his face. ‘Yeah, I did and losing my hair really sucked, not because I minded being bald for a while but because I realised that when things get to me I run my hand through my hair. When there is no hair to tug on there’s no satisfaction in it at all.’
‘You could have invented a new action.’
He smiled, his eyes sparkling and dimples scoring his cheeks. ‘Ah, but old habits are very hard to break.’
Just like flirting. It was second nature to him—see a woman and flick into flirting mode. ‘It won’t be long before you can really bury your fingers in your hair.’ Her fingers tingled, wanting to do that very thing, and she quickly laced them together. ‘But generally treatment takes about seven months. How come you didn’t go back to work?’
He pushed back his chair, walked to the water filter and flicked on the tap, pouring two glasses of water. ‘I went onto oral chemotherapy and I felt awful. If I’d worked at a desk job perhaps I could have managed it, but not A and E.’
She stood up and walked over to him, calculating the elapsed time since his diagnosis, still confused. ‘Are you still on chemo, still battling the lymphoma?’
He immediately stiffened. ‘No. The chemo is finished and I’m in remission. I’m not battling non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I’m surviving it.’
His words shot out harsh and uncompromising and at that moment she understood exactly why he hadn’t wanted to talk about being sick. He was focussed on his future, not his past. ‘And Port and growing vegetables is part of that?’
He passed her the glass of cold water and leaned back against the bench next to her. ‘When you spend a year feeling like death warmed up, you get sick of yourself and you get sick of the role of being a patient. You also get weary of well-intentioned people asking you how you are.’ His eyes narrowed slightly, as if willing her to understand and warning her at the same time. ‘I wanted some time out between being a patient and going back to work, time to just enjoy being well.’
‘But why did you decide to grow vegetables?’
‘When you’re faced with the possibility of dying, you make changes you never expected to have to make. Taking a break from work was one, changing what I ate was another. Until I got sick it was easy to dismiss the link between food and illness but I can feel the difference in myself. I couldn’t do “nothing” for nine months and I was growing my own veggies so I just extended it, and the markets are fun. I came out there because no one up here knew me—’ He gave a wry grin, resignation clinging to him. ‘Well, almost no one.’
She bit her lip, realising that by pushing him back to work she’d interrupted his plan. ‘Sorry.’
He leaned into her, his shoulder nudging hers in a friendly bump and his arm lingering against the length of her own. ‘No, don’t be sorry, it’s all good. I’m enjoying myself and in six months’ time when I go back to the city I won’t be rusty.’
His body warmth swam through her, making her dizzy. In six months’ time. At least he had a plan. She’d rushed to Port so fast she really couldn’t see past tomorrow. All she knew was that everything she’d expected to be happening in her life right now wasn’t. Every plan she and Anthony had made lay scattered in a million irreparable pieces and her love for him had been returned, stamped unacceptable.
Her world spun on an unsteady axis and the only thing about her future that she truly knew was that it would not be happening with Anthony. Not happening with any man.
‘You OK?’ Penetrating eyes bored into her.
She shoved her gloomy thoughts of heart-breaking loss back down where they belonged, plastered a smile on her face and spoke the first thing that came into her head. ‘I’m still having trouble seeing you as a farmer.’
‘Come see me in action, then.’ He pulled his keys out of his pocket and walked toward the door. ‘I’m working in the veggie patch every afternoon.’
The unexpected invitation was tantalisingly tempting. She strove for feigned interest and casualness. ‘I’ll keep that in mind if I’m ever out that way on rounds.’
He nodded. ‘You do that. Around three is a good time to drop by.’
‘Is that when you take a break?’
He stared straight at her, his eyes shimmering like sunshine on water, backlit with teasing intent. ‘It’s the hottest part of the day and usually the time I lose the shirt.’ He gave her a knowing wink and disappeared.
Indignation at his perceptive wink, the one that said he knew she enjoyed looking at him, floundered against the surge of hot, delicious longing that shook her to her toes and left her wanting more.
He’s your colleague and mentor. But the words sounded hollow. She dragged in a deep breath, determined to make the words count. They had to mean something. They had to protect her because, no matter how much she wanted to see where he lived, no matter how much her body craved to see him shirtless, she wouldn’t allow it to happen.
She couldn’t. She refused to allow herself to get close to another man again and have him find that her perfect body was so internally flawed. No way was she going to expose her faulty body to any more derision and heartache. She lived with the heartache every day already.
Nick took a long slug of water from his water bottle and then took off his hat and squirted some over his head, enjoying the coolness of the liquid against his hot skin. Turbo gave him a baleful look from under the tree. ‘Hot, mate, isn’t it? Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, eh?’
Turbo barked.
‘Sorry, I see what you mean. It’s three o’clock and you’re under the tree so you don’t qualify as mad.’ He jammed his hat back on his head and toyed with the idea of stopping but he needed to get this fertilising done now that his mornings were taken up with the clinic.
He caught himself glancing down the dirt track that doubled as his driveway. Heat haze hovered, making the metal of the closed gate look crooked. It had been four days since he’d issued his invitation to Kirby, suggesting she visit the farm.
Four days since she’d sat opposite him, her cheeks flushed, glistening lush lips and a sultry voice that rumbled through him every time he thought about it. She hadn’t been able to hide her attraction to him and he’d expected her to drive up the track the following day. But she hadn’t shown up and she hadn’t mentioned the invitation since he’d extended it.
It was probably a good thing. I don’t think so. He ignored the voice, overlaying it with reason. He’d been high on the joy of lust when he’d issued the invitation and h
ad broken his self-imposed requirement of keeping work and play separate. Two years of celibacy could do that to a bloke.
The professional colleague part of him was pleased that at least she was the one being sensible but despite knowing that he still glanced at the gate each afternoon. It niggled that he did that. It niggled even more that she hadn’t come. Two years ago he’d never been stood up and he wasn’t that sure he wanted to get used to the feeling.
Two years ago and for years before that he’d dated women—lots of women. He loved the chase, the variety, the conversations and the sex. Unlike his parents, who’d been high-school sweethearts and had married each other at twenty-two, he’d avoided anything that came close to a committed relationship.
And cancer hadn’t changed that. A committed relationship meant marriage and children. He didn’t particularly have anything against marriage per se, but children, well, no way was he going to be a parent. Not when he’d lived through his parents’ unresolved grief—he had no intention of reliving that same nightmare or exposing himself to that sort of loss again.
I just want a normal sister. His twelve-year-old self jetted up from the depths he normally kept sealed.
Plunging his shovel into the enormous pile of mushroom compost, he threw himself into the work and pushed his childhood back where it belonged. But he couldn’t get the usual buzz of satisfaction that hard labour gave him because Kirby kept dogging his thoughts. Kirby with a mouth designed for kissing and a body made for pleasure, but who’d been professionally friendly at work and had kept every conversation strictly about patients. No matter what topic he tried to bring up she always neatly brought the conversation back to work. The level of supervision she was demanding bothered him.