The Midwife's Courage (Glenfallon)

by Lilian Darcy

  And he didn’t know what to do. He still had a heap of little packets strewn in the untidy drawer of his bedside table—leftovers from his marriage. Should he leave them there and forget about them? he wondered. Or reach across and pull one out? His need to keep from hurting her was so powerful that it paralysed him until Kit herself somehow sensed his distraction.

  ‘Hey!’ she said again, in that same soft, teasing tone she’d used before. She was smiling, displaying her need for him shamelessly. ‘Get with the programme, Gian.’

  Kit’s mouth shaped the words like a kiss, and he groaned. Her fingers rippled down the six-pack of muscles that webbed across his lower stomach. They trespassed even lower, and he was lost, forgot everything but his own body, and her.

  She reached for him, pulling him to the bed, and he let himself slide on top of her, stroking her breasts, supping stolen kisses from her mouth.

  ‘Gian,’ she breathed. ‘Oh, Gian.’

  Her eyes drifted shut, and he kissed her creamy lids, feeling the tickle of her lashes against his lips. She spread her limbs, ready for him, wanting him, and he surged into her, half his senses shutting down and the rest so powerful and sensitive that he and Kit were both caught at once, and didn’t come to earth again until their need was fully spent.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, after a lengthy, sleepy silence.

  ‘Hello,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Feeling nice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmm, yes,’ she agreed, and smiled.

  He kissed her, overwhelmed, and his foggy brain told him, I have to make this work. I have to. I can’t stuff it up. Or let her push me away.

  He could have lain there for another hour, replete and incredibly happy, and for a few minutes it seemed as if she wanted to as well. She looked dreamy, contented and still. It was a shock, jerking him to attention, when her muscles suddenly tightened.

  Tangled around her, he could feel it at once, but before he could speak she pulled away, twisted, sat up and said heavily, ‘I’m hungry. I never finished. There’s more Chinese, isn’t there?’

  ‘Plenty. Heat it up in the microwave. The plates won’t break.’ He added much more urgently, ‘Kit?’

  Too late.

  She grabbed a bundle of clothes—half of them his, he suspected—and walked out of the room, her body pale and curvy and graceful, even in her agitation, and he was left wondering, Did I miss something? What suddenly changed?

  In the kitchen, Kit heaped spicy sauce and chunks of meat onto a fresh pile of rice on a clean plate and stuck it in the microwave. She didn’t care what she was eating, and hadn’t turned on the kitchen light. The light from the microwave brightened the room, and the apparatus hummed as her supper circled around and around inside it.

  I remember, she thought. I remember all the nights when I lay in bed afterwards, hoping a miracle was happening inside my body. Too afraid even to move, in case I ruined it. Putting a pillow under my hips and lying still for an hour, just in case, just to give it the best chance.

  Her dates weren’t hard to track, and she knew she was mid-cycle. If there was any possibility that she was fertile, now would be the time. Which meant two weeks of that familiar, destructive waiting. Two weeks of helpless, exhausting battling against a hope that, despite everything, she could never quite kill.

  Maybe this time…

  She’d almost run from Gian’s room, fleeing that traitorous hope. Dressing quickly in the bathroom, she discovered that she’d brought his socks and his shirt with her by mistake, and had left her bra behind. Her long-sleeved knit top was too thin and too close-fitting. She knew even without looking down that her nipples were still hard from the moist, delectable friction of Gian’s mouth.

  A moment later, she felt rather than heard his footsteps behind her. She turned reluctantly. He was barefoot and bare-chested, wearing jeans which he’d zipped but hadn’t yet buttoned at the top. The waistband was peeling apart a little, so that the jeans rode low on his hips, showing the contrast of his olive skin against the black elastic of his briefs, and a fine line of dark hair that pointed downwards like an arrow.

  His semi-nakedness was almost brutally male, powerful, sensual and totally unapologetic. He wanted to remind her—wanted to confront her—with the reality of what they’d just shared. He wanted her to remember the way she’d touched him in the most intimate places, and the way his muscles had bound around her, tightening convulsively as his climax came. Awareness and need coiled inside her again.

  The microwave pinged, and they both ignored it.

  ‘What happened?’ he said.

  She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t make it more real by putting it into words.

  I was running away from the stupid, impossible hope that I might be pregnant.

  ‘It’s OK now,’ she answered instead. ‘I just…panicked a bit.’

  ‘About what?’

  She closed her eyes. ‘Work it out.’ Opened them again. ‘Or don’t.’

  Actually, she didn’t want him to.

  ‘It’s not—I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,’ she said quickly. ‘I feel good. It’s OK.’

  ‘Hell, Kit.’ He leaned closer, put his arms around her, knitted his fingers together in the small of her back and pulled her to him. Her breasts in their thin covering of knit fabric pressed against his chest and she felt the instant hardening at their peaks. ‘Is it that hard for you to talk about?’

  She stiffened against him, looked up into his face and he read the astonished question in her eyes.

  ‘You told me to work it out,’ he reminded her, light and gentle. ‘We didn’t use contraception just now. I deal with this stuff, remember? You’re hoping. Or you’re trying not to hope. Or you’re just hating the fact that you’re thinking about it at all.’

  ‘Oh, Gian…’

  He just held her. She listened to his heartbeat with her ear against his chest, then lifted her fingers to trace the contours of his pectoral muscles and the texture of his skin and hair. His tiny nipple was hard. He drew in a hiss of breath when she touched it, and didn’t seem to breathe at all when she plunged her hand lower and let it hover and come to rest just inside the open waistband of his jeans.

  She felt his cheek press against her temple as he bent his head to search for her mouth, and she met him halfway. It was a sweet, tender kiss. Their mouths parted softly, joined more deeply.

  His fingers brushed her breasts through her top and she knew he could feel their hardened peaks. Without a bra beneath, the thin, stretchy fabric of the wool blend heightened her awareness of his touch and they both wanted more.

  ‘This time…’ he said. ‘This time, nothing’s going to hurt you. We’ll make sure this stays purely about us and about now.’

  And when, a little later, he reached to open the drawer beside his bed and pulled out a contraceptive, she didn’t try to stop him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NOPE.

  She wasn’t pregnant.

  There had been just that one time when Gian and Kit hadn’t used contraception, and yet she’d still not been able to kill the hope. She’d told herself that she had killed it, that she wasn’t hoping, but as soon as she saw the evidence of her body’s shift into the next phase of its cycle she knew she had been kidding herself. She’d been there before.

  Nope, no pregnancy this time. Yup, she was bleeding with all the familiar heaviness and pain.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  She had a lump in her throat and a stone in her gut.

  Stupid.

  Wanting a baby with a man she’d been fully involved with for so short a time, just because she was so in the habit of wanting a baby that she couldn’t stop.

  They were supposed to see each other tonight. She should have considered the fact that this phase would probably be happening by now, and shouldn’t have made the arrangement. She couldn’t see him when she was feeling like this. She didn’t want him to see, to try and talk her out of it, or to tell he
r that it shouldn’t hit her like this.

  Kit was at work, in the delivery suite bathroom, in the middle of a shift and due to go off at three. She hadn’t seen Gian here today, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have reason to show up at some point. She didn’t want to talk to him, not in person or on the phone, but if she phoned his office and left a message with his front desk, she could maximise her odds of avoiding both. Not stopping to rethink, she reached for the phone.

  ‘Just let him know, please, that Kit McConnell has had to cancel for today and will phone him next week,’ she told his receptionist, hiding behind a very business-like tone.

  She was working in the unit both days of the weekend, and in the hours when she was free, Aunt Helen always had plenty for her to help with around the farm. The remainder of the day, as well as Saturday and Sunday, passed as she’d hoped, with happy, problem-free deliveries at work and plenty of distractions on the home front.

  ‘Rick Steele dropped in today,’ Helen told her when she got home at three-thirty on Sunday afternoon. ‘He wanted to know if I’d be interested in renting him part of the farm.’

  ‘More vines?’

  ‘Yes. The winery’s doing so well he’s been buying grapes from other growers this season. He wants to plant some new varieties next year but he doesn’t have any acreage left.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him I’d have to talk to Jim Rowntree.’

  ‘Jim?’ The Rowntrees owned the land adjoining this farm on the opposite side from the Di Luzios. ‘What does he have to do with it?’

  ‘He’s been interested in the three westerly paddocks for a while, but he hasn’t wanted the land east of the house, and that was no use to me. I either have to farm on a proper scale, or not farm at all. I’m not running a handful of sheep on a quarter of a piece of land. It just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘But if Rick Steele wants the land to the east…’ Kit started to understand.

  ‘Exactly. It solves the problem. I’ve looked at the finances. The rental income, on top of what Brian had put away, will be enough. To be honest, Kit…’ She sighed. ‘It might be a relief to let go. Mike’s flat out, helping me whenever he can, and managing his own place at the same time. When Sarah and I see each other, there’s always too much to do. I’d like to be able to help her more with the children. And you’ve been doing so much, too. You won’t want to do it, or to live here, forever.’

  ‘I’ve been enjoying it. I’ve needed it.’

  ‘Not forever,’ Aunt Helen repeated. ‘I couldn’t give it up straight away, after Brian died. And I want to stay in the house for a good few years, yet. I didn’t want to turn my back on all we’d built together on our land, he and I, all the happiness…the joys and the sorrows…that we’d had. But I think I’m ready, now.’

  I’m not, Kit thought.

  She didn’t have the acceptance that her aunt had, and she could see and feel the difference. Aunt Helen showed a quiet certainty in her voice and in the look on her face. She’d been through the hell of losing her life partner, but she was over the worst of it and ready to seize hold of all the good things that remained—her bond with her daughter and her grandchildren, the chance to travel and to strengthen other family ties that were important to her. She was looking forward, not back.

  But I can’t.

  She couldn’t let go of wanting a baby. She couldn’t let go of mourning the loss of hope.

  Kit and Gian had spent a passionate two weeks since their first night together. Helen and Freddie must have suspected, even if they hadn’t known for certain what was happening. Kit never stayed the whole night at Gian’s unit in town, but several times she came home to the farm suspiciously late, having earlier told her aunt, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be getting in, so don’t wait up for me.’

  Their encounters, each time, had been intense. Snatching interludes out of every rare window in their busy days when they were both free, they’d focused purely on the present. Making love. Seeing a movie. Driving to some secluded spot. As if by unworded agreement, they hadn’t talked about those big, important words that ought to be written with a capital letter. Their Relationship. The Future. They’d talked a lot of nonsense, in fact, while Kit pretended to herself that she wasn’t keeping track of dates, and Gian pretended -

  Something.

  Kit didn’t know what, but there was something. There was a lot going on inside his head and he wasn’t talking about any of it. The pattern was too familiar—a surface of happiness and laughter, while underneath hidden cauldrons of emotion bubbled. This was how it had been with James, far too often.

  Their love-making was very different, though. Kit couldn’t even remember, now, if that area had once been a success in her relationship with James. It must have been, surely, at first! But for several years it had been so completely overshadowed by issues of timing and goals, overshadowed by the baby that never came. It hadn’t been a pleasure at all.

  She felt her heart give a sick-making lurch when she considered the prospect of herself and Gian quickly descending to that same point, and could find nothing with which to reassure herself that it wouldn’t happen.

  Meanwhile, every time the phone rang in the kitchen at the farm, she flinched, wondering if it would be Gian, and every time it wasn’t him, the knots in her stomach grew a little tighter and thicker. She’d expected a quicker and more impatient response, on his part, to her cancelling of last week’s plans.

  ‘Trying to trick myself again,’ Kit realised. ‘Trying to pretend I’m feeling one thing when really I’m eaten up with feeling the exact opposite. I’ve done this before…’

  Kit wouldn’t know how many times he’d reached for the phone intending to call her, Gian knew. She wouldn’t know how many times he’d had to coach himself out of it.

  Wait. Give her a few days, then handle it in the Sicilian way and make her an offer she couldn’t refuse. He had a lot on his plate at the moment. Marco would be in New Zealand for two days on a business trip at the end of the week, and Gian had finally persuaded him to take a detour on the way back to Hong Kong in order to spend a few days at the farm.

  ‘We need to talk about this face to face,’ he’d told his younger brother, after another unsatisfactory conversation by phone. ‘And you need to see Bonnie. I won’t handle it at a distance. I won’t let you make a decision that affects all of us so deeply without your having spent at least a bit of time with her. I’m not going to bulldoze you into anything, either. It’s all too important.’

  The prospect of Marco’s visit put Gian on edge. The two of them got on well, but Marco needed a little prodding at times. Professionally, he was hard-headed, imaginative and forward-looking, but in his personal life he tended not to see the consequences of his actions as perceptively as he might. There could be some tension and some awkward moments when they talked about Bonnie’s future face to face.

  Meanwhile, Megan Ciancio’s theoretical due date would arrive early next week, and he’d scheduled her for a Caesarean this coming Friday. Appearing in his office in her wheel-chair for a final pre-natal appointment, she seemed as relaxed and confident as could be expected, and so did her husband Joe.

  Gian was grateful for their faith in him, although somewhat paradoxically, he didn’t want to tell them so, in case this hinted at the fact that he was well aware of potential problems, and thus knocked their faith on the head. Megan’s lower torso had been thoroughly messed up by her accident, and he couldn’t be sure that even a scheduled Caesarean would go smoothly.

  ‘I want you to check in on Thursday evening so we can keep a good eye on you overnight,’ he told Megan. ‘And we’ll deliver the baby first thing in the morning.’

  ‘We’re getting pretty excited about it, aren’t we, Joe?’ she smiled. ‘Thursday’s just three days away!’

  Gian had arranged to take Tuesday off. Since Pete Croft’s return to Glenfallon, after the time he’d spent in Sydney gaining extra diplomas in Obstetr
ics and Neonatology, he had more opportunities to adjust his schedule. He was confident of Pete’s abilities, and he and Pete had agreed that they were an asset to each other, as well as to the town.

  Gian had held his breath in the weeks following Pete and Claire’s second separation. Would Pete crack and agree to move permanently to Sydney? This was one of the things that Claire insisted she wanted, having claimed at one stage that it would solve all their problems. Gian was certain, however, that the issues between them ran much deeper than that. A move wouldn’t solve anything, particularly when Pete himself didn’t want it. Selfishly, Gian didn’t want it, either.

  Pete had settled in at Emma Burns’ house during her absence. He had the girls to visit on a regular basis, while Claire dithered over her own future, and he was looking a lot happier.

  Gian recognised an increasing need for a similar resolution in his own life, and had to curb the destructive impatience that he recognised in himself.

  Wait. Don’t confront Kit yet.

  He hadn’t phoned her on the weekend. It was Monday afternoon, and he wasn’t going to phone her now. He would ambush her tomorrow, instead, in front of his mother and Kit’s aunt so that she wouldn’t dare to say no, and they’d spend some of those jewel-like hours together in which neither of them had time to wonder how possible any of this was, because it was happening, vivid and tactile and dazzling between them, then and there, and therefore it had to be possible.

  ‘Kit!’ Aunt Helen called along the corridor.

  Having just brushed her teeth, Kit turned off the tap and called back, ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘Gian and Freddie and Bonnie are here.’

  ‘Oh. OK. I’ll be out in a minute.’

  Emerging from the bathroom, she encountered her aunt and they both said at the same time, ‘You didn’t tell me they were coming.’

  They laughed, and Aunt Helen said, ‘All right. Then it’s clear. They didn’t tell either of us that they were coming.’