He should turn away, she thought. He should get out of the car.
He didn’t. They were somehow…locked?
It was a strange sensation. Stupid. Senseless. He had things to do. She was a married woman and they had no link.
They did have a link. They were just looking at each other. Seeing…
Seeing past the façade. Seeing what was really behind it.
She stared into his face and she could see the battering this man had suffered over the years. The loneliness. The wanting.
How could she see that? She didn’t know. But see it she did, and if she could read so much in his face, how much more could he read in hers?
This was ridiculous. She had things to do. Dogs to walk. Hours to fill before she saw him again.
Ridiculous!
Somehow Rachel managed to break the moment-break the link. She climbed from the car and slammed the door with more force than was needed. The slam was a statement.
‘I’m going to take a shower,’ she told him, and if her voice wasn’t quite steady there wasn’t a darned thing she could do about it. ‘I’ll see you later.’
She walked away, leaving Hugo staring after her.
CHAPTER SIX
HE DIDN’T have a clue what was going on.
Hugo worked his way through half a dozen patients and maybe it was just as well there was nothing serious, because his attention was definitely elsewhere. Or maybe it’d be better if there was something serious, he decided. Maybe his thoughts needed to be hauled right back to work. Not on some slip of a doctor whose eyes made him smile. Whose smile made him chuckle…
Whose smile made him twist inside.
How long had it been since someone had made him feel like this? Some woman?
Never, he thought as he carefully wound wet bandage around Tom Harris’s arm. Tom had fallen and broken his forearm while clearing undergrowth around his house when the fires had started four days ago. Hugo had put the initial plaster on loosely because of inflammation but the arm had settled now and it could be fixed more securely into its casing.
Tom, though, was a man of few words. He didn’t want to chat, so Hugo’s attention stayed right where it was. On Rachel.
Why was it on Rachel?
She was married, he told himself. Happily married for all he knew. Sure, the man she’d been with at the dog show had seemed a creep, but the nicest of women found partners in the strangest of places. She hadn’t said a word about her marriage being unhappy.
Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe the man was violent. 106
No.
He thought back to his medical training, to the one question he’d been told could predict violence in marriages in almost every case. He’d used it time and again with sometimes astonishing results.
‘Is there any time in the last couple of years where you’ve felt afraid of your husband?’
He thought of Rachel and he knew instinctively that she’d shake her head if he directed his question at her. She’d been angry at Michael at the dog show but she hadn’t been afraid of him. She’d flung those car keys at him with such force that the memory still made him smile.
‘You thinking of the new lady doctor?’ Tom asked, and Hugo nearly dropped his bandages.
‘No. I was thinking how good this arm is looking.’
‘People don’t smile like that thinking about a sixty-year-old fisherman’s broken arm,’ Tom said dourly, though there was the hint of laughter in his eyes.
‘Why not? You have a very nice arm,’ Hugo tossed back, and Tom’s face creased into reluctant laughter.
‘Yeah, and yours is sexy and all as well,’ he retorted. ‘But I bet our Rachel has a sexier one.’
Our Rachel… How quickly had the community taken her as one of its own?
‘The lady’s married,’ Hugo snapped before he could stop himself, and Tom’s grin broadened.
‘So I’m on the right track, then.’
‘Look-’
‘It’s nothing to do with me, mate,’ Tom told him. ‘I’m just here to get an arm fixed. You’re the one who has to go home tonight and sleep in the same house. Married or not.’
Hugo shook his head, thoroughly confused. ‘I can’t…’
‘Yeah, you can,’ Tom said encouragingly, knowing exactly what he was thinking. Like it or not. ‘Or you can at least try.’
It was well past dinnertime when a weary Hugo arrived home. What a day, and there was still a ward round to do before he could sleep. Even so, he was aware of a lifting of his spirits as he walked from the hospital across the lawn to the house. It’d be different tonight. Rachel would be there.
She certainly was. He walked in the back door and instead of a formally set table, with Myra waiting to serve up chops and three vegetables-her standard fare, to be expected at least three times a week-he walked in to find Rachel packing an enormous picnic basket. Toby was sitting on the table, poking things into its depths, and his small face was lit up with excitement.
‘We’re going to the beach for tea,’ he told his father before Hugo could open his mouth. ‘Or for your tea and an after-tea picnic for us. Rachel says it’s so hot and stuffy that if she doesn’t get a swim she’ll expire.’
‘She will, too.’ Rachel was back in those extraordinary yellow clothes again. Her wonderful clothes. ‘And the dogs are going stir-crazy.’ She gestured to the two dogs, who were lying on the floor eyeing the picnic basket with a devotion that said they’d already tested the contents. ‘Have you finished for the day, Dr McInnes?’
‘I need to do a ward round before-’
‘I’ve done your ward round,’ she told him before he could finish. ‘Elly talked me through every patient in the hospital and there’s no need for you to see any of them again tonight.’ She corrected herself. ‘You might like to look in on Kim to check that her obs are still OK before you go to bed, but as of twenty minutes ago they were fine. There’s no change in the fire crews for another two hours, and things seem relatively settled. The wind’s forecast to strengthen tomorrow, which means havoc might break loose, so Toby and I figured we might have some fun while the going’s good. That’s now.’
‘The nursing home-’
‘Yep. There are a couple of oldies who need checks. Mrs Bosworth’s breathing is cause for concern. I’ve told Don we’ll stop in on the way.’
‘The way…’
‘To the beach.’
She tossed a bag of grapes into the picnic basket and beamed at him, expectant. So did Toby. The dogs looked up and wagged a tail apiece and he could swear they were beaming, too.
‘I can’t,’ he said faintly, and Rachel’s beam slipped immediately. He found himself staring at a lady with her arms crossed, schoolmarm-like, and a martial glint in her eye.
‘Why ever not?’
‘If I’m needed-’
‘You’re needed at the nursing home and Toby and I have agreed we’ll watch television in the oldies’ sitting room while you do the doctor bit. Or vice versa, but Mrs Bosworth’s anxious and she’s asking for you.’ She smiled. ‘You must have something in your bedside manner that I don’t.’ Her smile faded. ‘Or Hazel Bosworth knows you and it’s a familiar face she needs when she’s frightened. But after that… The smoke’s not so bad that it’ll be awful. We have cold sausages. We have cold drinks and fresh bread and some of Toby’s wonderful lamingtons. Your bathing costume’s already packed and we’re already wearing ours under our clothes, so what other objections would you care to make?’
Hugo couldn’t think of any. He couldn’t think of any at all. How long since he’d had a picnic on the beach?
‘Please? Can we go, Daddy? Can we go?’ Toby was jiggling with excitement. Under the table Penelope and Digger were jiggling as well.
‘Yes,’ he said promptly, before he changed his mind and got sensible. ‘Yes, we can.’
Why not?
The nursing home was quieter than they’d expected. ‘Most of the residents have seen scores of bushfires in their
time,’ Don told them. ‘They’re not panicking.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Most of them gave up their households of precious possessions when they came in here. It makes a difference when there’s not so much to lose. Even Mrs Bosworth… Her breathing’s dreadful, Hugo. She has emphysema and we can’t get the smoke out of the atmosphere. She’s so sick. But when I told her I was going to call you she said not to bother-that the doctors would have more than enough to cope with tonight, and if she died then it was her time. Age puts a different perspective on things.’
Not just age.
It was experience, Rachel thought as Hugo disappeared to see to Mrs Bosworth’s breathing problems and she settled to wait with Toby. Once upon a time in another life she’d collected porcelain. She remembered Craig coming home from football, bouncing in the front door full of his triumph, shouting to her. Whizzing her round in triumph, crashing one of her porcelain statuettes off the hall table.
She’d been angry.
Dear God, she’d been angry.
The porcelain was long sold. It had been many years since Rachel had seen anything more important than people. Life.
Now.
This minute.
Mrs Bosworth was settling. Hugo was emerging, discussing her condition with Don. The oxygen rate was up to maximum now and he’d given her a relaxant. Fear was making her breathing faster, causing more problems.
Because, of course, there was fear. Possessions could be abandoned. But not so life.
Sometimes life was wonderful.
Life was now, Rachel thought with quiet satisfaction as they reached the shoreline. Tomorrow might well be ghastly, but for now…for now there was this moment.
The locals had too much sense to be sitting on a smoky stretch of beach. Everyone not directly committed to the fire effort was supporting those who were. Tired people chose to stay indoors.
But now was too good to waste.
The tension eased from Hugo’s tired mind almost as soon as his toes touched the sand.
The wind had miraculously dropped to almost nothing. The fine haze of eucalypt-filled smoke was even soothing. If there hadn’t been the possibility that it might threaten the town when the wind came up, he could almost enjoy it.
Or maybe he could enjoy it anyway. How long since he’d hauled off his shoes and spent the evening on the beach?
He wouldn’t have thought to do it.
Rachel had thought of it. Rachel…
‘Maybe we won’t light fires to warm our sausages,’ Rachel was suggesting, as the dogs went careering like mad things along the shore, and Hugo could only agree.
‘Wise idea. One spark and we’d have every hose in town pointed straight at us. There are people on the lookout right now. Sparks drift for miles and are a threat all by themselves.’
‘The town won’t burn, will it, Daddy?’ Toby asked, and Hugo hauled himself together. He’d been sounding too solemn.
Maybe he’d been sounding too solemn for far, far too long.
‘No. The town won’t burn. There’s no wind at all tonight so the backburners can really get things under control.’ He took a deep breath. For now-for this small fragment of time-he could forget about fires. He could even-amazingly-forget about medicine. He could concentrate on what was important. ‘Let’s eat,’ he suggested, and he could feel the tension easing out of him still more.
Rachel was smiling again, as if she knew that some invisible barrier had been broached. But it seemed she wasn’t pushing.
‘I’m swimming first,’ she told him. ‘Toby and I snacked while we waited for you. You have a sausage or two and join us-but don’t eat too much. It’d be a shame to have to wait your requisite half an hour because you were scared of cramps.’
‘That’s an old wives’ tale,’ he said, and she raised mocking eyebrows.
‘It’s the medicine my granny taught me. Are you saying my Granny’s medicine-and therefore my medicine-is wrong?’
He thought about that. He thought about the way he was feeling. Free. Almost light-headed. There was an anticipation in his heart that had nothing to do with common sense and everything to do with the way this lady smiled. Dr Rachel Harper’s medicine.
‘No, but-’
‘Good,’ she told him, her smile showing him she was aware of the fact that he was confused and she intended enjoying it. ‘Mind your sausages, Dr McInnes. Toby and I are going for a swim.’
So Hugo sat and ate and watched his small son and this strange city doctor cavort in the shallows.
Rachel was the strangest creature, he decided. She was part girl, part woman. Part professional doctor, part kid who was searching for fun and laughter.
There was so much about her he didn’t understand.
The hardest thing of all was to reconcile her marriage to Michael. To a doctor who’d risked a girl’s life…
Hugo was under no illusion that Michael couldn’t have redirected the helicopter. He would have heard the impassioned plea to return. He’d have heard how desperately ill Kim was. Hugo himself had talked to the pilot and he’d heard the pilot turn and talk to Michael. It had been Michael the helicopter had come to collect: to have forced him to stay in the air would have been nothing short of abduction.
Michael therefore must have been complicit in the decision not to bring the helicopter back to take Kim to safety.
And Michael was married to Rachel.
Rachel, who was gorgeous.
‘Hey, Toby, spin,’ Rachel was calling. Waist deep in the shallows, she had Toby high in her arms and was spinning him like the sails of a small windmill. She spun and spun while the dogs barked and barked and Hugo couldn’t stop himself from grinning in delight.
Enough. He’d eaten enough.
‘One more sausage and I’ll cramp,’ he told himself, and strolled into the water to join them. At the water’s edge he paused, laughing at the expression of joy on Toby’s face as he whirled faster and faster. Hugo chuckled out loud-and then his chuckle died.
Rachel and Toby had shed their outer clothes at the water’s edge. From where Hugo had sat thirty yards up the beach, Rachel had looked beautiful. In her crimson, one-piece bathing suit, cut to reveal every gorgeous curve, she’d been glowingly lovely.
But closer…
Closer there were scars.
He stared, caught by the incongruity of it. By the questions. The fine white lines were the marks of a skilled plastic surgeon. Hugo could see that. But no skill could entirely cover the trauma Rachel’s body must have once endured.
When? A long time ago, he thought, looking at the way the scarring had faded-fine lines blending into her near-perfect skin.
She was laughing and whirling and she and Toby turned to face him, glowing with happiness.
He didn’t get his face in order fast enough.
She stopped whirling and set Toby down on his feet. Carefully. ‘What?’ she said.
‘You’ve been hurt.’ He spoke without thinking and then could have kicked himself. He could have said nothing. He should have. He could have pretended he hadn’t noticed.
A non-medical person might not have noticed.
No. She was so lovely that any man would look at Rachel long and hard. The fine lines of scarring didn’t detract from her loveliness but they were unmistakable.
‘Car accident,’ she said shortly, answering his question before he’d voiced it. ‘Eight years ago.’
A car accident. Of course. He gave himself another mental kick. Why had his thoughts gone straight to this Michael character he was starting so stupidly to dislike?
These weren’t the type of scars that were the result of battering from an aggressive husband-and anyone could see that Rachel wasn’t a battered wife. She was probably a hugely contented wife who occasionally threw car keys at her husband. Wives did that.
Beth had thrown more than car keys at him!
But what was he thinking of? He was still staring at Rachel as if he were stupid.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told
her. ‘I didn’t mean to stare. It must have been some accident.’
‘It was.’ She looked as if she was about to say more and then closed her lips together, tight.
‘Internal injuries? Fractures?’
‘You name it, I had it.’ She shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago. Bodies heal. Mostly.’
There was a depth of bitterness in her words that he couldn’t help but hear. Maybe someone had died in the accident? Someone she loved? But the blank look on her face was a shield all by itself. Keep off, the look said. Don’t go there.
So he didn’t. Even though he badly wanted to.
It was none of his business.
‘It looks like you’ve had some great corrective surgery,’ he managed, and her smile came flooding back. There was relief there and the beginnings of laughter.
‘I have, haven’t I?’ For heaven’s sake, was she laughing at his discomfort? ‘There’s a wonderful plastic surgeon in Sydney who calls me his masterpiece. I sometimes get the feeling he’d like to hang me on his wall for show and tell!’
Rachel was so damned courageous. He just had to look at that scarring to know the trauma that lay behind it. And that brief look of pain had told him there was even more…
‘You are a masterpiece,’ he said softly, and she flushed. She wasn’t giving in to her discomposure, though. She moved right on to discomfit him further.
‘You know, you’re not too bad yourself.’ She scooped Toby up into her arms and twinkled. ‘What do you reckon, Toby? Don’t you think your dad has the greatest six-pack you’ve ever seen?’
‘Six-pack?’ Toby was giggling, entranced.
And entranced was a good way to describe his father. Hugo was enchanted by this vivacious slip of a girl. She was soaking wet, her soft brown curls were lying in dripping tendrils around her face, her eyes were dancing…
‘You know six-packs,’ she told Toby, seemingly unaware of the riot she was causing in Hugo’s solar plexus. Or somewhere. Some nerve centre he’d hardly been aware he possessed. ‘Six-packs are cans of beer tied up together. You look at your daddy’s chest and tell me if it doesn’t look just like that?’
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