by Lilian Darcy
‘It could be,’ she admitted. ‘If we let it be.’
‘How hard shall I fight you on this?’ His tone was almost casual.
‘Don’t. Don’t fight me on it at all. Let it go.’
‘Then you should tell your aunt, and I should tell Freddie.’
‘No.’
‘You’re leaving us in limbo. I know my mother. She had a light in her eyes just now when she suggested this little expedition. She’s looking at the clock and timing how long we’ve been gone. She’s not going to let go of this. She’s not going to forget the vibe she picked up weeks ago—the vibe that’s there, Kit, palpably there, and real, and important—unless she thinks we really don’t like each other.’
‘Then let her think that. Make her, and Aunt Helen, think that.’
‘You honestly think that’s an answer?’
‘The best one we’ve got.’
He shook his head. ‘If you make me any angrier, maybe you’ll turn out to be right. Maybe it won’t be so hard. You’re wrong, Kit. I can’t do it this way.’
She met his brooding gaze, and told him in a hard, steady voice, ‘But I’m not offering you a choice.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOMEHOW, Kit and Gian made it back to the house.
Holding Bonnie’s hand, Freddie wandered out from her vegetable garden, an expectant look ill-concealed on her face. ‘Have you invited her to stay for dinner, Gian?’
‘Not yet,’ he growled. ‘Do you want to stay for dinner, Kit?’
‘Um, no, I should get home. I might walk. Just to make sure the headache doesn’t come back.’
‘There you are, Mum,’ Gian said. ‘She does this to everyone, Kit. No one ever escapes without the offer of a meal. It’s an Italian thing.’
‘It’s nice,’ she answered truthfully. ‘But I can’t, Freddie.’
‘She sounds as if she means it, Mum, don’t you think?’ He had a dangerous look in his dark eyes, and a dangerous firmness to his mouth.
‘You don’t have to interpret me to your mother, Gian.’ Kit’s polite tone was strained. ‘I think we speak the same language.’
Under the guise of walking her in the direction of the road, he murmured, ‘Yes, but she’s going to ask me, as soon as you’ve gone, why you’re upset.’ He brushed his knuckles softly against her neck and she couldn’t help holding him, just gripping a fistful of his shirt fabric at the waist. His arm was warm against hers.
‘I’m not upset,’ she told him.
‘Your cheeks have two spots of colour on them like pink coins. Your eyes are burning. And your top is crooked and not pulled down properly at the bottom…’ He adjusted it as he spoke, his fingers lingering with deliberate intent. ‘Which suggests I’ve been doing more than just upsetting you. What should I say?’
‘That you made me angry, and I’m going home and she’s not to get ideas.’
‘I doubt that will be particularly effective.’
Bonnie was running after them, with Freddie coming up behind. Gian let Kit go and stepped back a pace. ‘Do drawings?’ the little girl asked Kit hopefully. ‘Pincesses?’
‘It’s a conspiracy,’ Kit muttered, adding aloud, ‘Not today, love.’
‘Kit’s tired, sweetheart,’ Freddie explained helpfully. ‘She wants to be by herself. And I know how she feels.’
‘Nonna draw pincesses?’
‘Yes, Nonna can draw you some princesses.’ Freddie sounded even wearier than Kit felt.
‘Take a break tonight, Mum,’ Gian said quietly. ‘Go out.’
Freddie laughed. ‘I’m too tired to go out. I want to stay home.’
‘Then I’ll take Bonnie to my place and we’ll have a nice evening together. She’ll stay the night. I’ll even bring her to the office in the morning. Barb and Margaret will look after her until you can get into town to pick her up. Take it easy for once, and sleep in.’
‘She’ll wake in the night.’
‘I know. But I’m used to disrupted nights. And you need a night when you can go to bed knowing you won’t be disturbed.’
Freddie turned to Kit with a hesitant, hopeful expression. ‘Kit, maybe—’
‘If you’re planning to ask Kit to help me, please don’t,’ Gian said firmly.
‘Well…’
‘You’re too old-fashioned, Mum. Just because I have a Y chromosome, that doesn’t mean I can’t handle a toddler on my own. Bonnie and I will be fine, and we’ll do this more often in future. It’s not enough for me just to come out to the farm for an hour or two, here and there. You need a complete break. I’m going to talk to Marco, too, about other solutions, long term.’
‘Toddlers are always difficult.’
‘Which is why nature usually arranges it so that women in their mid-sixties don’t have to handle them full time.’
‘Kit…’ Freddie began again. This time Gian let her finish. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re treating you like family, dealing with all this in front of you.’
‘It’s nice to be treated like family,’ Kit answered without thinking, and knew at once that she’d just deepened the hole she was so determined not to fall into.
‘It’s really over this time,’ Pete Croft told Gian.
His surgery was in the same building as Gian’s—part of a two-storey complex of professional offices and small shops a couple of blocks behind Glenfallon’s main shopping streets. The two of them were on opposite sides of an open stairwell, and Pete had become a quasi-friend over the past couple of years, and not only due to the proximity of their offices.
It was the kind of friendship that men tended to create—cordial and supportive, even though they rarely touched on personal issues and mostly stuck to sport and politics and professional matters, over the occasional drink.
It had been hard to avoid the personal issues today, however. Claire had shown up while Pete was seeing his last patient of the day, gunning her car engine and jumping the kerb outside his office. She’d narrowly escaped mowing down a young tree, then had parked illegally with the car’s nose jutting onto the tiled walkway that led to the stairs.
She’d unloaded several boxes of files, papers and journals which Pete must have had at home, and she’d banged the car boot lid, and the passenger door, and the door to Pete’s waiting room so emphatically each time that Gian couldn’t concentrate on the notes he was dictating into his tiny hand-held recorder. He’d given up and sat in his chair, watching Claire go back and forth until she was done.
She was an attractive woman, with a good figure and a bell of dark, glossy and well-cut hair swinging around her face. It was a tight face, though, with a mouth that was usually folded in at the corners, and she rarely smiled.
Pete had come over several minutes later to apologise for the whole scene, and Gian had suggested, ‘You might appreciate a beer.’
‘Not in public, thanks. I’d kill for a quiet one in here.’
Gian’s receptionist, Barb, had still been in the file room, finishing up for the day. She’d heard Claire’s activity as well. Gian had sent her down the block to the nearest bottle shop for a six-pack of chilled cans. Pete had drunk half of one can before speaking anything more than the odd terse word.
‘What are you going to do?’ Gian asked him now.
‘I’m in a motel for the moment. I’ve got a real-estate agent who thinks he has a place that would suit me until I can get things sorted out more permanently.’ He took another gulp of his beer. ‘I wanted to make this work. For the girls’ sake, really.’
‘Is that a good enough reason?’
‘No. It isn’t. It wasn’t. It might have been, if Claire had met me halfway. But when a woman is, to all intents and purposes, standing there with her arms folded, saying in a dozen different ways each day, Prove to me why I should love you, or even why she should like me, and chalking up every tiny fault and mistake and habit as damning reasons why she shouldn’t…’ He trailed off and shook his head. ‘You just can’t win in that situation.’
<
br /> Gian didn’t know what to say. Didn’t want to bring up his own divorce as proof that life went on after it was all over, because he wasn’t particularly happy with his life in that area at the moment. Kit McConnell was well and truly stuck under his skin, and he saw her at just the right tantalising frequency to keep his feelings frozen in a state of simmering limbo.
The tension was building, however. The balance between hope and hopelessness was shifting. If he went on feeling this way for much longer, he knew he was going to confront her again, but he still didn’t know how it would resolve itself. He was already afraid that her doubts ran too deep, and that he’d say something he would later regret.
Didn’t want to make the same mistake with Pete.
‘It sounds as if you’ve done the right thing,’ he said to the other man cautiously. ‘Sounds as if you should give yourself some time before you commit yourself to any big decisions.’
‘My main concern is the girls. I just want to keep things as smooth as possible for their sake.’
‘Kids are a bit of a compass, I guess.’
‘That’s a good way to put it. They keep you pointed in the right direction.’
Pete finished his beer a few minutes later. Gian gave him the rest of the six-pack to take back to his solitary motel room, but he himself took away a less concrete yet potentially more valuable remnant from their conversation—the image of children as a compass ‘keeping you pointed in the right direction’.
He sat for several minutes at his desk, then reached for the phone and keyed a long series of numbers. After one ring, his call was picked up at the other end, and he said, ‘Could I speak to Marco Di Luzio, please? This is his brother phoning from Australia.’
When the call was put through, he didn’t spend more than a minute on the niceties of greetings and enquiries as to health. Instead, he got to the point of his call as quickly as he could. ‘We need to make a better arrangement about Bonnie,’ he told his younger brother. ‘I really think you should come home, to see her and to talk, as soon as you can. If you’re ever going to have her with you, then you have to do it soon.’
‘Gian—’
‘And if you’re not, then we need to talk about the alternatives.’
Emma went to Paris.
Bringing Kit and Nell and Caroline together for a final coffee at the Glenfallon Bakery two days before she left, she told them that her tenant, for the next three months, was Pete Croft. His reconciliation with Claire hadn’t lasted, and he was on his own again.
He’d jumped at Emma’s house, apparently, because the short lease gave him the right window in which to make long-term plans for his future. All indications were that this time the separation from his wife was final, and should perhaps have happened long before. Emma’s place was close to the house he owned with Claire, which would allow him easy and frequent contact with his four-year-old twin daughters.
‘I hope it works out for him,’ Emma said. ‘For me, of course, he’s an ideal tenant. Responsible and steady. I was a little concerned about renting the house out, right after all the work I’ve done on it, but I really needed to. As it is, I’m not sure what Dad would have thought of me spending so much of what I’ve saved over the years on a jaunt like this.’
‘I envy you, Emma,’ Nell said. ‘Don’t give another thought to the money. Seriously. You need this. And we don’t all get what we need, when we need it. I’m sorry, that’s too profound for today.’ She smiled her complicated smile. ‘Just…have fun.’
Kit missed Emma when she had gone. They’d had a lot in common, not just in terms of where they each found themselves in life—at a crossroads, ready for change—but in terms of their outlook as well.
Caroline and Nell could have become friends with Emma’s presence to smooth the way, but Kit felt that she didn’t know them well enough yet to cement a friendship with them on her own. She was a little daunted, too, by Nell’s senior position at the hospital, which Nell herself tended to hide behind when she wanted to. She’d only nodded curtly at Kit during the few times they’d encountered each other at work since the wine-tasting afternoon.
Jane Cameron, Emma’s replacement, was competent and friendly, and still a little torn between wanting to work and wanting to spend time with her little son, aged nine months.
‘I hope I’m doing the right thing, coming back,’ she said. ‘I need to, financially, or we won’t be able to afford to have another one, but I wonder if I’m short-changing him. At least we don’t depend on full-time child-care. Len has him for a lot of my hours, and so does Mum. Take notes, you guys,’ she lectured Kit and Maree and Alison. They were gathered for the hand-over report. ‘Because your turn will come, and it isn’t easy!’
Kit smiled and nodded, just like the other two, and was glad that Gian wasn’t in the unit right now. He would have known too much about what she was hiding.
He arrived five minutes later, to check on a private patient—a first-time mother—whose labour was progressing very slowly. Kit was re-equipping a resus trolley, since its previous occupant had graduated to breathing room air and was now snuggling safely in his mother’s arms.
She didn’t hear Gian behind her, but he was still in her thoughts and she jumped when she heard his voice. ‘Kit, which room is Jodie Bambridge in?’
She rounded on him, her hand fisted over her heart, and spoke bluntly. ‘Do you have to do that? Some people say hello first.’
‘Sorry, I’m in a hurry.’ Even such a brief, casual sentence seemed to pour sensation down her spine like someone pouring a cup of warm cream.
‘Room Three,’ she answered. ‘It’s on the board.’
‘Next time, I’ll check the board.’
‘That’s why it’s there.’
She didn’t care that she’d angered him, or slighted his rank. All their exchanges contained this underlying vein of tension, the pull of fiery awareness and unresolved conflict, and she hated the fact that he dominated her thoughts so much. Stripping the resus trolley’s tiny, plastic-covered mattress, she fitted a clean sheet, muttering, ‘Go away, Gian. Just go away.’
‘Hell, Kit!’ His voice came from just a few feet away, and it was obvious that he’d heard.
‘I—I didn’t mean you,’ she said.
‘You said my name.’
She looked up at him, and her heart flipped as usual. He was wearing snug-fitting green surgical gear. There was no stretch in the fabric, and it sat closely against his strong, olive-brown chest. He was like a magnet to her senses, unravelling them strand by strand and reeling them in. ‘I was telling you to get out of my thoughts,’ she said.
A dangerous light had appeared in his dark eyes, screened just a little by his thick lashes. ‘And will I listen?’ he asked.
‘You don’t generally. You’re very persistent. And slow to take a hint. You hang round where you’re not wanted and just refuse to leave. In my thoughts, I mean.’
‘Maybe there’s a reason for that, which you’re not admitting to.’ He left her no time to even consider the comment, let alone reply to it. ‘Now, Jodie Bambridge.’
‘Room Three,’ she reminded him.
‘Yes. Has she been walking around?’
‘No, we’ve tried—suggested it and pushed a little—but she didn’t want to.’
‘Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know.’
This time, she watched to make sure he’d really gone to his patient’s room, and when he disappeared, she muttered once more, ‘Go away, Gian.’
He didn’t. Or at any rate, not for long. Hardly his fault tonight. They had a new admission who was consigned to Kit’s care at eight o’clock. Although the patient was only twenty-seven, this was her fifth baby and her seventh pregnancy, and her history was a litany of obstetric problems. Kit knew from the beginning that this new baby was going to continue the pattern.
Sandy blonde Belinda Carter was very slight around the hips. She was in established labour, but the baby was two weeks early, was lying sidewa
ys and didn’t feel as if it was intending to move. Belinda had come in alone—‘My sister dropped me off’—and she looked tense, with red-rimmed eyes.
‘I’d like to get you to walk around,’ Kit suggested, ‘because that might help shift the baby into a better position. Can you do that?’
‘Sure. It’s not hurting that much. And I need to make some calls.’ She dragged a mobile phone from the back pocket of her maternity jeans and flipped it open.
‘We have a public phone at the end of the corridor,’ Kit told her. ‘You can’t use your mobile in the hospital, because the signal can interfere with our equipment.’
‘Oh, is that right? OK.’ She shrugged. ‘Just as long as I can call. My husband got arrested tonight, the silly galah, and I need to get him bailed out so he can come and hold my hand!’
She laughed. It was a rich, warm sound which invited Kit to share in her unlikely source of amusement, and her freckle-dappled nose wrinkled, making her look like a mischievous little boy.
Then she caught sight of Kit’s face.
‘Oh, it’s all right!’ she said. ‘He just got into a fight outside the pub. They’re best mates, really. I was standing right there, trying to pull them apart, when the police showed up, and Travis got a bloody nose, and my waters broke, boom, boom, boom, just like that, everything at once.’
‘Is that why you looked a bit upset when you came in?’
‘Well, yes, I was mad at him. Wouldn’t anyone be? But I’m OK now. Travis and Brett are both going to feel sorry for themselves in the morning, and I won’t spare either of them any sympathy!’ She laughed again. ‘Meanwhile, Travis can come and hold my hand, even if he’d rather be holding his own head. Only I need to ring around and see who’s got the bail money to lend us!’
She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting out a contraction with stoical patience. All she did was mutter, ‘Ouch! I remember now. I don’t like this part, do I?’
When the pain had ebbed, she went along the corridor to the phone and made her calls. She returned, smiling. ‘I love my brother! He’s meeting Travis at the cop shop with the cash. Contractions aren’t speeding up nearly as fast as they did last time. Feels funny. I think the baby’s still sideways.’