Christmas Knight

by Meredith Webber

  A tap on the door made her look up, feeling so guilty about her thoughts she could feel her cheeks awash with heated colour.

  ‘Tara’s just gone. I walked her home, but I didn’t pay her. Should I have done?’

  ‘No!’ Kate said, then realised the word had sounded far too abrupt when Grant put up his hands as if to ward off an attack.

  ‘Hey, I was only asking about paying the babysitter, not if I could mount an assault on your virtue.’

  Kate shook her head, then she gave a quiet laugh.

  ‘Actually,’ she admitted, ‘that’s more or less what I was saying no to. I was thinking about that last summer—about the day you rang to ask me to go swimming.’

  Grant was startled by the admission, but the funny little smile lingering around Katie’s lips, and the softness in her voice, suggested the memories were happy ones.

  ‘We did enjoy it, didn’t we?’ she said, busying herself with changing the baby’s nappy so he could no longer see her face. ‘I mean, it was fun, wasn’t it? Not just a rose-coloured-glasses view of the past.’

  Uncertain how to respond, but aware of a need to step with the greatest delicacy, Grant walked closer, then, as she finished wrapping the baby in the snug cotton sheet, he lifted the little bundle and held her to his shoulder.

  ‘It was the best summer of my life,’ he said simply. ‘Not just because I discovered sex, but because I discovered it with you.’

  This time Katie’s look was of blank astonishment.

  ‘You discovered sex with me? But you’d had…Everyone said…You made out…’

  The run of unfinished sentences ended abruptly and she came closer, peering up into his face.

  ‘Are you telling me, Grant Bell, that you knew no more about it than I did? That we were both virgins?’

  He nodded, though not sure it was the correct thing to do right now.

  ‘Well, of all the cheek!’ she stormed. Remembering the baby, Katie seized her from Grant’s arms, tucked her back into the crib, then all but shoved him out of the room, shutting the door behind them, no doubt so she could yell without waking the baby.

  ‘You let me believe you knew all about it. You even told me the proper names for bits of my anatomy I’d barely realised existed, and gave me a lecture on what happens during orgasm. Were you making it all up?’

  Grant hustled her towards the kitchen.

  ‘I’d read it out of a book Mum had at home,’ he admitted. ‘She’d bought it for my sisters to read.’

  ‘But you had condoms!’ Kate reminded him.

  ‘Everyone had condoms—well, all males of teenage years had them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the girls didn’t carry them as well!’ Grant replied. ‘Talk about hopeful! I’d actually had a supply of them since I was twelve. Every time we went to Craigtown, I’d get a packet at the supermarket. And don’t look so shocked—it was better than buying them at Patterson’s Pharmacy here in Testament. Mrs P. would have been on the phone to Mum before I was out the door.’

  Kate shook her head, though somewhere, deep inside, was a little bubble of warmth she suspected might have been generated by pleasure at Grant’s revelations.

  Though he needn’t know that.

  Definitely needn’t know that…

  ‘I can’t believe you made out—’ she began, but he interrupted with his wide-eyed, innocent ‘who, me?’ look, followed by a smile of sheer devilment.

  ‘Actually,’ he said softly, ‘we both “made out”—remember?’

  She was twenty-eight years of age, a doctor and a mother, and she was not going to blush!

  But just in case, she turned away.

  ‘That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,’ she muttered, heading back to the kitchen for a cup of tea before going to bed. ‘I can’t believe you pretended to know it all! Or pretended to know, in the biblical sense, most of the girls in town.’

  ‘Would it have made any difference?’

  She had to turn again, to face him, and when she realised he was serious, she had to think about it.

  ‘I would probably have been far more tentative and uncertain, but I was such a show-off that thinking you knew it all made me anxious not to appear a complete amateur.’

  She shook her head, remembering.

  ‘Gosh, we were intense, weren’t we? I don’t think I’ve ever felt that level of intensity in a relationship since then. It was probably a hormonal thing, like risk-taking among teenagers. Once the hormones settle down, you don’t get that terrible rush of heat and longing.’

  She spoke with clinical detachment, as if it was something that had happened to two other people. So why, Grant wondered, did his body feel a faint quickening of interest?

  Because whatever he’d had with Katie was unfinished?

  Because ‘that terrible rush of heat and longing’ described those feelings so well, and he, too, had never experienced them again.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she demanded. ‘Do you want a cup of tea is one of those “answer yes or no” type questions. It doesn’t require frowns, or even a great deal of brain power to reply.’

  He looked into the green eyes and told himself it was dangerous to think of anything apart from the job. Excessively dangerous to go wallowing into the murky waters of the past. Worse than diving into unexplored parts of the creek—near where they’d…

  ‘Sorry, didn’t hear you. Yes, please.’

  ‘I’ve shop biscuits. They may be a bit old, but I’ve a wonderful assortment of jam, pickles and chutneys to spread on them to disguise the oldness. I think everyone in town has brought me a bottle of homemade something since I’ve been here. They’ve been good that way. There are the hard scones as well.’

  She was bustling around the kitchen, filling the electric kettle and setting it to boil, finding mugs, tea bags, talking.

  Talking?

  Grant smiled to himself.

  Katie had always talked too much when she was nervous. Maybe the nostalgic memories had quickened her body, too.

  So he needn’t feel so bad, and he could put the small incident behind him, back in the furthest pigeonholes of his mind where those happy teenage memories belonged.

  ‘There!’ She set a mug on the table in front of him, with the air of someone who’d just split the atom using only a blunt kitchen knife. ‘I’ve sugar somewhere if you want it, and litres and litres of milk. You want milk?’

  Grant picked up the string of the tea bag and jiggled it furiously, hoping to darken the watery brew.

  ‘No milk, no sugar. Working in A and E makes shopping erratic so, rather than hating the taste of tea with no milk when it went sour or with no sugar when I ran out, I learned to live without both.’

  ‘Why A and E?’ she asked, dropping into a chair opposite him, removing her tea bag and placing it on a saucer.

  Grant hesitated, then decided there was nothing to be gained by not telling the truth.

  ‘Money,’ he said simply, then he grinned at the astonishment in her eyes.

  ‘Hey, I had my reasons,’ he said, hoping to banish the disbelief which had followed the astonishment. For some unknown reason, he didn’t want Katie thinking badly of him. ‘When we had to leave the property—and I know it wasn’t your father’s fault, no matter how I acted at the time—we shifted to Sydney where Mum’s family were. But the country was still in my blood and I vowed I’d get the place back one day. Well, maybe not that property but a property. Somewhere I could run a few cattle—I didn’t want the hassle of sheep or even crops.’

  He shrugged, then smiled as he admitted, ‘I guess it was that teenage intensity you were talking about earlier. Anyway, you’d always talked about becoming a doctor, and I knew a lot of doctors made a lot of money so, once I’d accepted I wasn’t going to be raising cattle in the immediate future, I thought I’d be a doctor, earn heaps and buy back the farm.’

  ‘Easy-peasy!’ Katie teased.

  ‘Exactly,’ Grant agreed, though the silly phrase
jolted his complacency about having the past tucked securely back in the pigeonholes. ‘Once I qualified, I stayed in hospitals, working the weekend and night shifts in A and E whenever possible, often moonlighting as well in private twenty-four-hour clinics or on-call services.’

  ‘And when did you realise you’d kill yourself with work before you ever had enough money to buy a cattle property around here?’

  Her lips flickered into a smile, her eyes were alight with a teasing laughter and he found himself grinning happily back at her, feeling dangerously at home in Katie’s house—in Katie’s life!

  More than at home…

  ‘Pretty soon after I’d started,’ he admitted, banishing all other thoughts. ‘I decided I could settle for somewhere less expensive, fewer cattle, maybe a hobby farm. Though, by the time I figured it out, I was hooked on the A and E department. Talk about an adrenalin junkie! I’d have fitted right into one of those manic scenes in televised medical dramas.’

  ‘So you stayed three years?’

  He nodded, but realised just how close he’d come to talking about other things.

  ‘Well, it’s been a long day. I might head for bed. OK if I use the bathroom?’

  Kate nodded, and watched him leave the room. They hadn’t discussed work tomorrow, or wages, or shared housekeeping, or any of the things which should have been discussed, but when she’d asked about the length of his stay in A and E, a dark shadow had clouded Grant’s blue eyes and drawn lines of strain down his cheeks, and she’d known he needed to get away.

  Right then!

  Before he told her more?

  What kind of more?

  She shivered in the warm night air, sensing a darkness in the heart and soul of her old childhood companion—some kind of wound that hadn’t healed. And her heart, which she’d been sure was armour-plated against all emotion, ached for Grant.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GRANT BELL was the last person on her mind as Kate stumbled into the kitchen in the light of early dawn. The baby—today, much later today, she’d decide on a name—had woken every two hours, and though she’d gone happily back to sleep after each feed, for a new mother hoping to get four or even six hours’ straight sleep, the two-hourly demands had been a nightmare.

  Kate poured milk into a mug and, clutching it in one hand and a slice of bread in the other, was making her way back to bed, fuzzily working out that if she went straight to sleep now, and could stay asleep until eight, she’d have—five from eight leaves three—three hours’ sleep before starting work at eight-fifteen. Surely she could shower and dress in ten—

  ‘Go back to bed and stay there!’ The gruff order interrupted her muddled mathematical calculations. ‘I’ll take the morning surgery—it’s why I’m here after all. If I need any help Vi can’t give or information she can’t supply, I’ll phone you.’

  Kate stared blankly at the man who’d emerged from the spare bedroom. She’d known he was there—had been aware, all through the night, of another presence in the house. But seeing him, recognising him as Grant, standing and talking to him—she in a faded old shirt she wore to bed, and he in boxer shorts that seemed, to her sleep-deprived eyes, to have big red lips all over them—was too way out to believe.

  ‘I thought I might have dreamt you,’ she admitted, then added ruefully, ‘Though I guess I’d have to have been asleep to dream, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Bad night?’

  ‘Just interrupted,’ Kate said quickly, remembering she’d promised herself she wouldn’t be one of those mothers who complained all the time about the demands of any aspect of motherhood.

  ‘Though they’ve every right to complain about two-hourly night feeds!’ she grumbled to herself.

  Then she glanced guiltily at Grant, hoping he hadn’t heard. But if he had, he gave no sign of it, merely studying her with an intent kind of interest, as if he, too, was slightly bemused to find the two of them meeting like this in a passageway.

  ‘Bed!’ he repeated, making a command of the word, and Kate’s mind, fuzzy with tiredness, wondered how it would sound as an invitation.

  ‘And don’t smile at me like that!’ he added, sounding quite cross now, so she didn’t dare to ask, Like what? ‘I’ll do morning surgery, you rest. We can talk over lunch, decide on a rough programme, then shop before afternoon surgery.’

  ‘That sounds suspiciously like a list,’ Kate told him.

  ‘It’s not a list, it’s a plan. Now go back to bed, Katie, before Fiona wakes again.’

  ‘Fiona? I thought you’d decided on Sophie—for this week at least.’

  ‘I’m flexible,’ Grant said with a grin, then he put his hand on her shoulder, turned her around and steered her into her bedroom.

  Which was when Kate realised just how great a danger to her peace of mind Grant Bell represented.

  It wasn’t so much the touch, which had started the shivery-skin phenomenon again, as the rightness of the touch—and that was a really scary thought!

  She glanced over to where he was studying the sleeping baby, trying out the name Fiona, if Kate’s reading of his lips was correct. Tall, lean and hard, though she doubted he did much physical work these days, there was a familiarity about Grant as if the very cells that made up her body recognised a match in his.

  Nonsensical meanderings of an overtired mind, Kate chided herself, but her eyes continued to watch him, and her body cells to recognise his.

  Well, she hoped that’s all it was—the recognition thing—because there was no way she could possibly be feeling sexy. Not two weeks after giving birth—it just wasn’t possible. And Grant Bell was passing through Testament, then going back to his Linda, while she was setting up a life for herself and the baby—a life and a career.

  ‘I think Fiona would suit her.’

  The statement startled Kate, bringing her abruptly out of her straying thoughts, but not swiftly enough to deny his words.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, ‘when I’ve had some sleep and my brain starts functioning again.’

  She smiled at Grant, because he was there, and being kind, and it certainly wasn’t his fault her body was behaving the way it was.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she admitted.

  He’d been doing all right until she’d smiled, Grant realised as he left the room, shutting the door firmly on the woman and sleeping baby. Or had it been the ‘I’m glad you’re here’ that had thrown him?

  Whatever—but the two, taken in conjunction, had caused a tremor that could only be anxiety. And given his decision to remain preferably single and definitely childless, getting tremors of any kind in a bedroom with a sensual woman and tiny sleeping baby was not good.

  But she had looked so incredibly sexy, in her big, loose shirt, her hair tousled into a tangle so seductively sensual it was all he could do to keep his hands out of it. Maybe it was because she was feeding the baby, and positively oozing maternal hormones, that his body found her disturbingly attractive. It was all to do with primal urges, and procreation, with a bit of a protection thing thrown in. Though he, of all people, knew protection didn’t extend far—knew the futility of thinking anyone could keep another human being safe.

  He went through to the kitchen, his arms aching again in a way they hadn’t ached for eighteen months, and, as he slumped into a chair and stared out the window at the pale relentless blue of an early summer morning sky, he wondered why he’d come to Testament.

  And why he hadn’t realised his coming would peel away the scabs of healing wounds and expose him to pain he’d thought he’d conquered.

  ‘You came because Vi said Katie needed help, and helping anyone was better than hanging around a beach that lacked enough swell to make a ripple, let alone a wave, feeling sorry for yourself,’ he reminded himself. ‘And speaking of Vi, it’s time you got dressed and went over to investigate the surgery. No! Bakery first. Some fresh bread. Maybe Katie would like a pastry or two when she wakes later.’

  Which was being practica
l, not protective.

  Thus assured his motives were OK, he was out the door and almost at the back lane when he realised he was wearing the ‘hot lips’ boxer shorts and nothing else. Shirtless might just pass in Testament at six in the morning, but boxer shorts?

  He doubted it!

  Back inside he pulled board shorts over the boxers and a flowered shirt over his chest. Looking at the flowers reminded him of the fictitious Chlorinda. He’d invented her on the spur of the moment, to make it easier for Katie to accept him, then hadn’t followed up on the idea. Should he let that story drop completely, keep her in reserve, or bring her to the fore of his conversation—use her like a shield to deflect the emotional weakness he was in danger of exposing if he became too involved in Katie’s and Fiona’s lives?

  It was a dilemma he would normally have considered as he walked briskly down the road towards the shops, but a carolling magpie peering, bright-eyed, down at him from the branch of a she-oak, raucously chattering galahs flying like a pink cloud overhead, the scent of eucalypts in the air, the sun flirting with the leaves, turning them from green to silver, all combined to banish thought from his mind. He moved along, barely conscious of the physical effort as his body revelled in a sense of homecoming so strong he wanted to shout out loud and spread his arms wide enough to embrace the world.

  ‘Embrace the bloody world? You’ve gone bonkers, you have!’ he muttered, then he nodded good morning to a startled dog walker who’d caught him talking to himself.

  He concentrated on practical matters—food first, then check out the appointment book in the surgery and have a quick look at the patient files so he wouldn’t be completely at a loss when the patients came in. Too late now to phone Vi to assure her he’d arrived safely but, given the efficiency of country-town grapevines, she’d probably know anyway.

  ‘Grant Bell! Heard you were back in town but didn’t believe it.’

  The greeting, as he walked into the bakery, redolent with the smell of new-baked bread, suggested the grapevine still worked, but though the face which uttered it was familiar it took a while to dredge up a name.