They would both have been off the hook.
And yet he’d pushed the issue, and let himself in for what might be a tedious or embarrassing half-hour. How long did it take children to eat ice cream? He had no idea.
He had a funny relationship with kids. Understood almost everything there was to understand about tiny premmie bodies, then waved goodbye to them as they graduated out of his care and only saw them again when proud parents brought them in weeks or months or years later to show off how they’d grown and changed. They were unrecognisable by that point, of course.
He responded to the looks on the parents’ faces more than to the kids themselves, and had been wondering lately if he’d ever experience that kind of love himself.
If he wanted to.
If he’d be any good at it.
What kind of woman he’d choose as his partner in such an adventure. It was an adventure, he considered, as much as any more outwardly dramatic activity such as rafting down the Amazon or donning a parachute and jumping from a plane.
Somehow, Tammy gathered her brood and with three redheads and three goldy-brown ones glinting in the sun, the Prunty family made its way just ahead of Laird to the café, where he learned how insanely and irrationally difficult it could be to get five kids to make up their minds about what kind of ice cream they wanted.
The two little girls were cute, rather overshadowing their smaller triplet brother. The other boy was lively and the eldest girl very bossy, in a mother’s-little-helper kind of way. At around eight years old, he guessed, she was probably starting to be genuinely useful, when she wanted to be.
Tammy chose a latte, while Laird asserted his masculinity with a double short black. ‘Have something to eat, too, if you’re not having ice cream,’ he invited her.
He’d started to understand just how hard she must work, between her responsibilities at home and her demanding role as a nurse in the NICU, and he wanted to spoil her—which was unnecessary, because she must have plenty of other people in her life to do that. She had such a warmth and vividness about her, she couldn’t be short of friends.
He expected her to say no to the suggestion of food, the way Tarsha would have done. With zero reason, Tarsha was watching her weight. And Tarsha would certainly consider that Tammy should be watching hers, but apparently she wasn’t.
And thank goodness she’s not, his body suddenly said.
Those smooth-skinned curves were wonderful.
‘Ooh, yes!’ she said enthusiastically, and chose a berry friand. Adding belatedly with a contrite, embarrassed look, ‘Oh, but are you having…?’
‘Yes, definitely. I’m starving.’ He wasn’t, but hated the idea of embarrassing her. ‘Now, where do you want to sit?’
‘At a table where the kids can go and drip ice cream onto the paving stones outside, and I can watch them at the same time.’
‘So, this corner one, on the deck?’
‘Perfect!’
He began to appreciate the presence of the kids after a few minutes.
Any time this began to feel anything like a date—which it most emphatically wasn’t—Tammy would deflect the awkwardness with some instruction along the lines of, ‘Lick the bottom of it, Ben, before the chocolate slides off.’ She could interrupt her conversation with Laird in mid-sentence, and pick up again exactly where she’d left off, without the least apparent difficulty.
His head was soon spinning.
Her head gleamed in a shaft of sunlight.
And he had a weird, unexpectedly emphatic thought that he’d like to get her alone some time, at a proper restaurant, without the kids, so he could actually take in what she was saying, and the way she was saying it—cheerful, direct, with humour and thoughtfulness mixing like colours swirling in a kid’s painting.
‘Couldn’t manage without Mum.’
‘Do they see their dad much?’ he asked.
‘No. He kind of…’
‘I’m sorry, I’m getting too personal.’ Why? He didn’t usually, with someone he didn’t know well. Somehow, though, he felt as if he did know her.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, lifting her determined chin. ‘He cut himself off, that’s all. Opted out. So, no, they don’t see him. The triplets barely remember him. It’s…yeah…not what I would have chosen for them.’
Her face darkened for a moment, and Laird sensed a lot about what she wasn’t saying—the anger and betrayal she must have felt, the sense of hurt and shock and loss, the fierce protectiveness she felt for her children, who had a father who didn’t care. He had to push away a violent spurt of anger towards the man, though he didn’t even know his name. You didn’t need to know someone personally to recognise that level of appalling behaviour.
But she added decisively, ‘In some ways it’s easier that he’s not around.’
‘Really?’
‘It is.’ Even firmer, convincing herself as much as him, he could tell. ‘I know where I stand, not like a couple of women I know—Help him, Sarah, can you?—who can never rely on their ex-husbands taking the kids when they’ve said they would—No, wipe his chin, there, that’s right—or bringing them back on time, or remembering where their soccer games are.’ She smiled suddenly, sat up straighter, pitched her voice a little higher. ‘Hey, though, did you see the new perennials they have in? Gorgeous! The bees are going crazy over the lavender in flower.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Did this have anything at all to do with the unreliability of ex-husbands? ‘I’m not here for perennials, I’m here for a load of—’
‘I was being whiny and boring,’ she explained seriously—and inaccurately. ‘I heard myself, and—Laura, don’t drop the wrapper on the ground.’
‘You weren’t. Being whiny or boring.’
And if you ever are, I can always entertain myself by looking at your hair.
For some reason, it fascinated him. Maybe because he’d first seen her without it, when it had been hidden beneath the surgical cap, and so he hadn’t realised that she was pretty.
He’d even told Tarsha that she wasn’t, which now felt like a betrayal.
Tammy’s hair made sense of her colouring, and of the whole shape of her face. It was like the flowers here at the garden centre. You could get away with colour combinations that would never work in clothing or paint colours. Her hair made her…he hesitated over the word, in his thoughts, but then threw caution to the winds…beautiful.
Her hair really made her beautiful.
Inconsequentially, he remembered something his mother had once said. ‘Natural redheads. So unfair! They can be seventy years old, most of them, and they still won’t have so much as a grey hair!’
Watching the calm, cheerful way Tammy dealt with her brood, Laird decided that she thoroughly deserved nature’s reward in this area. Thirty or forty years from now, when her kids were grown and gone, she would still have the most glorious, beautiful hair.
‘Decided to spare you. Let’s talk about something interesting.’ She looked over his shoulder. ‘Ben, there’s another piece going to slide off.’ Ben peered at his ice cream. Tammy watched anxiously. Without taking her eyes from the little boy, she asked, ‘Have you travelled much? What do you like to do when you’re not saving babies? Oh, good, he’s got it. What are you going to buy here today, apart from coffee and ice cream? Are you a garden nut like I am, or do you just put in a bit of decoration to maintain your property value?’
She turned back to him at last, and beamed at him, took a big bite of her friand and a sip of her latte and fixed her lively blue eyes on his face ready to listen, the way she probably listened to her kids when they talked about their day at school.
‘Do I have to answer all those questions at once, or can I tackle them one at a time?’
‘One at a time will do. I’ll keep track of which ones you’ve done, tick them off, and tell you when to go on to the next.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘Not often. If you ask for serious, you’ll be sorry,
we’ll really be scraping the bottom of the barrel.’
‘Hmm, don’t know about that. I’m open to all options at this stage.’
They smiled at each other.
Was that…a date?
Surely not.
Leaving the garden centre, Tammy was flustered and sort of mushy inside for reasons completely unrelated to Laird Burchell—delirious excitement about going home to plant the lemon thyme, perhaps. Nothing to do with that lovely half-hour—longer, actually—that she’d just spent having coffee with the man.
Coffee that hadn’t been a date.
‘I mean, it just wasn’t,’ she muttered to herself, shovelling the kids into the van. ‘Or if it was, it must have been the date from hell, as far as he was concerned.’
Even though he hadn’t let it show.
He’d been…well, gorgeous, actually.
Yes, that word again.
Smiling at her. Relaxing sideways in the wrought-iron café chair with his legs crossed at his ankles, those big work boots clunky and heavy on his feet, and his elbow on the table, as if he wasn’t a rapidly rising neonatal specialist at one of the state’s best hospitals. Picking up a paper napkin one of the girls had dropped, even though it had been all sticky and sodden with ice cream and had immediately stuck in shreds to his fingers. Ploughing gamely on with what he’d been saying, even when the kids had needed her attention in the middle of a sentence, three sentences in a row.
Then, when it had been time to leave, instead of the token piece of greenery she’d expected him to take home, he’d pointed to a large truck filled with orchard trees and young eucalypts and acacias. ‘That’s my lot heading off now. I’d better get ahead of it, so I can direct the driver where to go.’
‘All of it? The whole truckful?’
‘I have a piece of land just up the valley.’
‘A hobby farm?’ she guessed.
‘Well, a bit bigger than that.’ He gave her a stern, reproachful look.
Him? A hobby farm? Please! As if that fitted with the dignity of a good-looking and well-built medical specialist.
‘More of an investment,’ he stressed. ‘A vineyard. It should start turning a profit within the next couple of years. Meanwhile, there are a couple of acres around the house that need more trees.’ Then he confessed with a wry grin, ‘You’re completely right, though, I should be more honest with myself. I own the place for fun more than money—such a change to get dirty instead of keeping watch on the scrupulous sterility in the NICU—which makes it a hobby farm.’
‘I didn’t mean that to sound rude.’
‘It didn’t. It just sounded upfront. I’m going to embrace the truth from now on, with my eyes open. I, Dr Laird Burchell, have a hobby farm.’
‘What did you say, Mummy?’ Sarah asked.
‘Nothing, love.’ Oh, dear, had Sarah heard that muttering a few seconds ago about the date from hell?
‘Who was that man?’
‘Just one of the doctors. I gave him a good suggestion about one of the babies at the hospital, so he bought us the coffee and ice cream to say thank you.’
‘Did he pay?’
‘Yes, he did.’ Even though she’d tried to protest about his offer, probably for too long.
‘So we saved money.’
‘Yes, sweetheart, we did.’
Nearly twenty dollars.
Tammy didn’t even try to pretend to herself that she wasn’t counting. Twenty dollars would pay for a school excursion each for Sarah and Lachlan, or several DVD rentals, or the part of a GP’s bill that the government didn’t cover.
It was a challenge, living on such a tight budget, but Tammy refused to let it get her down. She liked challenges. She liked the small, regular victories over her finances that came from things like making pizza at home instead of succumbing to the enticing odours of the local Italian place, or putting hot-water bottles in the kids’ beds on a cold winter night instead of running the expensive electric wall heaters.
It was all about attitude.
Which brought her back to Laird Burchell, their coffee and their much-interrupted conversation.
Definitely and absolutely not a date.
Not the right attitude for such a thing, in either of them.
But I liked it.
‘He’s so-o-o nice,’ Sarah said.
‘Is he?’ she asked absently.
‘Because he paid.’
Sarah was such a canny thing, Tammy thought with a pang. Even though she tried not to speak ill of Tom in the kids’ hearing, her eldest daughter somehow knew how much her dad had let them all down—how much he was still letting them down by never seeing them and sending those erratic, unpredictable child-support payments.
He knew her well enough to guess just when his unreliability would have pushed her to the edge of her tolerance, so that she’d start seriously thinking of taking him to court, and then a cheque would come. It hurt a lot to think that he’d use his understanding of her that way.
She’d talked about this to a couple of friends recently—Mel and Bron—and as usual they’d taken her side too heartily, indignant at what a rat he was. She hugely appreciated the way they stuck up for her…and she wished they wouldn’t. Mostly, she tried not to talk to her friends about Tom. It was safer, somehow, to keep her darker feelings and her vulnerabilities to herself.
And, Tammy discovered, she wasn’t thinking about Tom as she drove home. She was thinking about the sun on the garden-centre plants, and Laird Burchell’s vivid descriptions of Egypt and Japan, his cheerful admission to indulging in a hobby farm for the pleasure of getting dirty and the way he hadn’t seemed nearly as appalled by her rabble of children as she would have expected.
I’m in trouble…
Another realisation that she immediately knew she wasn’t going to share with friends who cared about her too much.
Or Mum.
To take out yet more insurance against being completely ridiculous, Tammy ate an extra piece of cake on top of her sandwich lunch. Five kids, and two more kilos on her butt, to counteract the fact that she’d been right about the Thornton baby and therefore Laird Burchell wouldn’t be able to conclude she was an idiot.
But she was worrying about it for nothing. The cake was unnecessary. No man in his right mind would be remotely interested in her.
Laird drove out to the vineyard in a daze and arrived ahead of the truck containing his trees. Knowing they’d be here any minute, he waited out front, ready to point in the direction of the arrangement of pre-dug holes. Hell, where was the plan he’d sketched out? Which tree went into which hole? He’d thought he had it clear in his head but for the moment it seemed to have gone.
To be replaced by bright, dizzying visions of Tammy Prunty.
He kept thinking about the way the sun had shone on her hair. She must have washed it that morning, because every time she’d moved her head, it had bounced or swung or slid over her ear, rippling and shimmering like a shampoo commercial. He could see it in his memory, and it gave him a bright flash of pleasure every time. Her smile and her eyes, the way she looked at her children, the moments of self-doubt he’d read in the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head.
The whole morning seemed drenched in colour. The sky, the vivid greenery, the glossy chocolate of the kids’ ice creams melting in the sun. The vivid oranges and yellows and greens of the fruits forming on the new citrus trees, which were currently wending their way in the truck up his long drive.
Into his mind there flashed another image—Tammy opening her mouth to bite into Lachlan’s ice cream.
‘Want a taste, Mummy?’ he’d generously asked.
She’d answered, ‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ given him a hug and taken a small chunk of lurid turquoise bubblegum-flavour ice cream between her surprisingly dainty white teeth. ‘Mmm, yummy!’
She’d leaned forward so as not to risk the ice cream dripping onto her summery cream vest top, and for a moment he’d glimpsed the lavishly full slopes
of her breasts, as creamy white and smooth as the rest of her skin and edged with a couple of token pieces of lace. He’d looked quickly down at his coffee, but somehow the memory had imprinted itself in his mind and he couldn’t seem to let it go.
I want her. In my bed. In my life.
In his damned garden!
It wasn’t possible. Here he was, waiting for his trees as the truck slowed to negotiate a final bend, thinking lustful, rosy-edged thoughts about a curvy divorced mother of five who’d narrowly escaped spilling ice cream down her chin.
And yet he felt as if someone had hit him over the back of the head with a brick and he was seeing stars…along with her blue eyes, red hair and sumptuous figure.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before in his life. Knocked sideways. Without warning.
He must have had the experience before. Surely. Or else the feeling itself had something fatally wrong with it. Someone had drugged his coffee, or he was getting sick, or he’d temporarily taken leave of his senses.
He couldn’t be falling in love with her. Not so fast. Not on so little foundation. Not with someone so flagrantly impossible and unlikely. Had that it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversation with Tarsha the other night come as more of a disappointment than he’d honestly acknowledged to himself? Was he just an unattached male approaching middle age and getting desperate? Neither possibility rang true, despite some strenuous theorising.
The truck ground to a halt in front of him, and the driver wound down his window to speak, wanting to know where to go next. Laird directed him around the side of the house and the plan for the trees re-formed itself in his head, which made him feel a lot better. With the driver, his sidekick and Laird himself all working hard, they put the trees into the correct holes in ten minutes, and Laird himself spent the rest of the day shovelling in dirt and composted manure and mulch until the job was done.
There was something about tree roots and fresh soil and hard work. The sudden, raging fever called falling in love with Tammy settled down considerably during the course of the afternoon and he ended the day confident that he had it under control. He didn’t want it and didn’t trust it and it didn’t make sense, therefore it wasn’t real or significant, and would soon fade.
Six Sexy Doctors Part 1 (Mills & Boon e-Book Collections): A Doctor, A Nurse: A Little Miracle / The Children's Doctor and the Single Mum / A Wife for ... / The Playboy Doctor's Surprise Proposal Page 19