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

by Carol Marinelli

  She made a helpless sound. ‘No. Yes. Probably. Partly.’

  ‘And what’s the reason you’re saying no today? I’m right, aren’t I? You’re saying no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, you’re saying yes?’

  He knew she wasn’t!

  ‘No. I’m saying no.’ Gritted teeth. Melting stomach.

  ‘So…?’

  ‘Because I have to go home and make casseroles to freeze.’

  ‘So you’ll make one less casserole. Reason not accepted.’

  ‘Because you don’t have to do this,’ she burst out. ‘You really don’t! The Thornton baby was a lucky guess, and he’s doing really well in the SCBU now, which is great, so it’s over. We’ve been through this conversation.’

  ‘I know I don’t have to do it. That’s not why I’m asking. Which we’ve also been through. Do you really think I’d ask you for coffee out of duty and obligation?’

  ‘OK, then I’m saying no because I don’t know why you’re asking!’ When desperate, try honesty. Puts ’em off every time. ‘I can’t think why any man would possibly want to invite me, Tammy Prunty, NICU nurse and divorced mother of five, out for coffee. Let alone a man like you!’ she finished, in danger of starting to yell.

  She hadn’t counted on him using the same weapon on her.

  The honesty thing.

  He leaned against the wall and sighed, rubbed a sore spot on the back of his neck with his long, capable fingers. ‘Yeah, I don’t quite understand it either.’

  The lift came, with a couple of people already inside. He shook his head and frowned when they stepped back to let him and Tammy inside, and the lift doors closed again. The light on the lift button went off and neither of them pressed it to summon another one. The corridor was empty.

  ‘On paper, you’re right,’ he said. ‘There’s a definite difference in professional status between us, as well as in life circumstances. I’ve never been married, I have no kids. You’re probably struggling to make ends meet, while I don’t know anything about how that feels. We must be roughly the same age.’ He shrugged. ‘Which means nothing. So I’m at a loss.’

  ‘See?’ She wrapped her arms protectively across the front of her body, aware of every movement he made, every shifting expression in his eyes, every line of his body, lolling so thoughtfully and dangerously against that wall beside the lift. Her skin was tingling, her breathing had gone shallow.

  ‘It’s got a fair bit to do with your hair, I know that,’ Laird continued, sounding thoughtful. ‘The fact that I didn’t even know what colour it was the first time we worked together. It made me curious. And then when I did see it, it was so fabulous and rich and alive. It made you beautiful.’

  ‘Oh…’

  Beautiful?

  Her breath caught.

  ‘But, of course, the fact that I find you beautiful can’t be the only thing. Help me out here.’ She watched his mouth, the way it moved with each word. ‘What is it about you, Tammy Prunty, that makes me want to find out more?’ He was grinning now, inviting her to share the joke, but she couldn’t.

  Had he really just called her beautiful? Was there a problem with his eyes?

  ‘I have not the slightest clue!’ Her voice shook.

  ‘So let’s just do it, have the coffee, and maybe after it I’ll be able to tell you. A whole list of factors. In bullet points. Triaged according to their severity.’

  ‘No. No. Please.’ She flapped her hands and refused to respond to his humour. ‘I have to make the casseroles, or I’m condemning Mum to cooking half of next week. I—I don’t want you sitting there trying to decide why you like me. Or if you like me. Because you probably don’t. Not the way you’re suggesting. Seem to be suggesting. I’m a good nurse. I’m an overworked single parent. I’m not beautiful.’

  ‘Tammy—’

  ‘Occasionally, I make use of both those sides of me—mother and nurse—and it helps me work out what’s going on with the bubs and the mums. Like last week. Mrs Thornton. Which led to…’ she waved her hands again, in a big, loopy spiral ‘…this. But there honestly isn’t a lot more to me than that, so let’s just leave it.’

  Before there’s any risk I’ll get hurt…

  She reached out and pressed the lift button, and it pinged half a second later to announce the opening of the doors, as if the hospital’s unpredictable and overworked lift system was suddenly on her side.

  Except, of course, Laird was going down, too, so he stepped in right behind her.

  But it did break the mood, and there were already three people on board.

  He didn’t push her any further.

  Not for another four days.

  This time, he happened to find her alone in the break room. She gasped and backed against the fridge when she saw him, and the whole movement must have looked quite nutty. Paranoid. They worked together. They saw each other all the time.

  He said, ‘OK, make it tea, then.’

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Since coffee’s such a terrible idea.’

  And suddenly they were laughing at each other, with a powerful edge of something much more sensual behind the laughter, before she’d even taken another breath.

  ‘The original agreement was coffee.’ Pretending to be angry. How about that? Would that work? ‘And I’m really starting to worry about the health of your memory, Laird, because we’ve already had it at the garden centre.’

  ‘Listen, will you stop pretending you think this is still about the Thornton baby?’ he said softly. ‘You know it isn’t. He’s gone home.’

  ‘I’ll stop pretending when you stop asking me out for coffee. For any kind of hot or cold caffeinated beverage in a restaurant-style setting,’ she added quickly, sensing he was about to become pedantic.

  ‘OK, dinner, then.’

  Just as she’d thought. Pedantic. Which two could play at. ‘When you stop asking me out anywhere.’

  There was a beat of stubborn silence, then he said simply, ‘I would, if I thought you really didn’t want to.’

  ‘And what makes you think I do?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I—I don’t.’

  ‘Really want me to spell it out?’ This time he didn’t wait for an answer, just ticked off the list on his fingers. ‘Your cheeks get pink when you see me. Your voice is pitched higher.’ He looked at her mouth, and the look was like a caress. ‘Your breathing makes your chest go up and down in little jerks. You start making bad jokes. Which I even find funny, because this is my problem, too. I think my chest goes up and down and my cheeks get pink.’

  ‘No, not that, but your eyes…’ She stopped. What ridiculous thing could she possibly say about his lovely grey eyes?

  ‘You want to have coffee with me, Tamara Elizabeth Prunty, née Leigh,’ he argued softly. ‘Yes, I looked you up on the hospital database. Coffee, dinner, whatever. Only there’s something telling you that you’re not allowed to, apparently, and I want to find out what it is, because it is really starting to bug me!’

  ‘You looked me up?’

  ‘I know. I questioned it, too.’

  ‘What answer did you get?’

  ‘That a dinner invitation was required. It’s required, Tammy.’ His voice dropped again, to that cajoling, just-the-two-of-us pitch that shocked her to the bone every time…

  He’s talking like that for me? For someone like me?

  And that she couldn’t resist. ‘One way or another, it’s necessary,’ he continued. ‘Even if that’s all it is. One dinner. One disappointing dinner, I guess it would have to be, or we’d want a second one. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves there. Let’s just…get it over with.’

  Oh, she had to laugh at that!

  ‘Get it over with? All right, and I’ll grit my teeth and hold my nose, Laird, the whole way through the meal.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LAIRD had arranged to pick Tammy up at her house at seven on Friday night, and here he was, driving down her street at t
wo minutes to seven, looking for her house and wondering if the spell would be broken the moment he entered it.

  Now, wouldn’t that be convenient?

  Yeah, but I don’t want it to happen.

  There was some kind of crisis going on in the Prunty household, he discovered before he’d even rung the doorbell. He heard Tammy’s voice, urgently raised, and a child in tears, and frantic, thumping footsteps. Imagining an accident, he put his finger on the bell and let it peal, primed to come riding heroically to the rescue.

  And was then left in no doubt as to the desirability of his arrival at that particular moment when he heard Tammy wailing, ‘Oh, no, is it seven already? That can’t be him! Maybe it’s someone else…’

  Images of himself performing some masterful medical intervention on a temporarily damaged child faded. One of the triplets—Laura?—answered the door and told him in a serious little voice, ‘Mummy flooded the laundry.’

  ‘No, Sarah, I said towels,’ he heard Tammy say. ‘Not teatowels, big ones. Beach towels. You know the drill with this, sweetheart, don’t you? Oh, it’s gone all across the floor! Has someone answered the door?’

  ‘It’s the ice-cream man,’ Laura—or Lucy?—yelled to her mother. Laird followed the four-year-old until he reached the edge of the flood waters and found his lady companion for the evening.

  ‘The ice-cream man?’ Tammy whirled around. ‘Oh, it is you! It’s not quite seven yet, is it? Oh, lord, yes, it is. Hi! Um, hi.’ She smiled, and tried to use her elbow to wipe something imaginary from her flushed cheek because both her hands were full.

  She was still in the blue surgical scrubs she’d worn to work today, and they had wet patches all down the front. Clashing gloriously with her pink cheeks, her hair was in a copper frenzy, and bits of it were wet, too. Occupying both hands was a heavy, sodden towel, which she held over a bucket, twisting and squeezing.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ she added.

  ‘No, really?’ he drawled.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was…more than obvious, wasn’t it? This happens. I have an eight-kilogram top-loading washing-machine. Really good for a big family. It holds a heck of a lot of water, on the maximum load setting. There’s one of those black plastic pipes that drains it into the laundry sink. But sometimes the pipe gets knocked out of the sink and hangs down in the gap between the machine and the sink, or the sink gets blocked by a rag and overflows. I’m feeling a need to explain on this ludicrous level of detail, by the way, because I just know nothing like this has ever happened to you in your whole entire life.’

  ‘Well, the holes with my new trees planted in them were drowned by the rain last week, so half of them developed an unacceptable degree of lean.’

  ‘Not the same.’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You probably didn’t even know there were eight-kilogram top-loading washing-machines.’

  ‘My life has been the poorer for it.’

  ‘And somehow I’m always upstairs or in the garden when it happens, and water gushes all over the floor before one of the kids hears the splashing noise and tells me the laundry’s flooded again.’

  ‘Seems to me that it’s more than just the laundry.’ The shiny expanse of water looked vast.

  ‘The floor isn’t very level.’ She gestured to the shallow river that headed across the family room, into the kitchen, under the jutting, family-sized fridge, out the other side and onto the living-room carpet that started beyond the open kitchen door.

  Sarah arrived with her arms full of towels.

  ‘Just spread them over the puddle, love, so we can stop the water getting to the carpet.’

  ‘I think it’s too late for that,’ Laird said, bending down to help.

  ‘Don’t,’ Tammy ordered. ‘You’re so nicely dressed. While I’m…’ She looked down at herself, then finished succinctly, ‘Not.’

  ‘Let me clean this up while you get ready.’

  ‘No, no.’ She dropped the sodden towel in the bucket and began helping Sarah with the fresh ones. Her dryer would be chugging all night. Laird caught a glimpse of the cramped laundry room behind her and discovered she didn’t have a dryer. Correction, then. Her back-yard clothesline would be draped with towels like a circus tent tomorrow. ‘I know the system, you see,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a system?’

  ‘If you dam the water in the wrong place, it spreads under the stove as well, and then I can’t get to it properly to mop it up. The floorboards’ll rot if this keeps happening.’

  ‘Right. So I should…?’

  ‘Find out why Ben’s crying.’

  Which he’d been doing since Laird’s arrival, he realised. Not letting on that he found it slightly daunting to contemplate probing the inner emotional life of a four-year-old boy, he searched for the source of the sobbing, and found Ben in the living-room, with a dogeared TV guide in front of him and a world-weary six-year-old brother ignoring his woe.

  The six-year-old was Lachlan, Laird remembered. He greeted the boys and made sure they remembered who he was. The ice cream man, right? From the garden centre? Three weekends ago? Then he got down to kid level and asked Lachlan quietly, ‘Do we know why he’s crying?’

  It wasn’t from physical pain, he recognised that much.

  ‘His show isn’t on tonight.’

  ‘His show?’

  ‘On TV, the pet show. It says in the TV guide that it’s on, but it’s not, they’ve got something else. He says I’ve got the wrong channel, but I haven’t and now he’s upset.’

  ‘He really likes that pet show!’ He turned to Ben, who still seemed inconsolable.

  What did you say at a time like this?

  Cheer up, maybe it’ll be on tomorrow night instead.

  Inadequate.

  Want some ice cream?

  No, he was multi-faceted. He couldn’t be just the ice cream man. When you embarked on the Amazonian rafting adventure of getting to know someone else’s kids, you needed more than one way to steer the boat. And, anyway, Tammy might not believe in distractions and bribes of that nature. He didn’t yet know enough about her parenting strategies.

  Did he want to find out? Did he really? The sense of dauntingness—OK, it wasn’t a real word—overtook him suddenly, and he remembered everything that Tarsha had said, all those sensible warnings about mismatched couples and things ending in tears. He didn’t want to make Tammy cry.

  Take her for dinner and then step away, he decided. Get your feet back on the ground. Don’t hurt her. Think of all the reasons why this can’t possibly work.

  And, for now, tackle Ben.

  ‘Hi, Ben,’ he said.

  Ben looked up. ‘The guide says it’s on, but it’s not.’

  ‘Shall I check the guide, just to make sure?’ Laird reached out for it. ‘Maybe Lachlan read the time wrong.’

  ‘I already checked.’

  ‘Can you read, Ben?’

  The little boy nodded, while Lachlan said generously, ‘He’s not as bad as you’d think, for a four-year-old.’

  Laird was impressed. He checked the guide anyway, but the boys were right. The pet show should have been on, but it wasn’t. ‘Did Mummy teach you to read?’ he asked.

  Ben had almost stopped crying, but not quite. Lachlan answered for him. ‘He just learnt. Mummy did the letters with the triplets, and Ben started putting them together to read words.’

  ‘That’s really good, Ben. You like animals, hey?’

  He nodded.

  There was a knock at the back door. Laird wondered if he should answer it, but it opened at once and he heard a voice uncannily like Tammy’s saying, ‘Yoo-hoo, Grandma’s here!’

  Tammy herself appeared, even wetter down the front but a little calmer. She saw that Ben had stopped crying, and mouthed, ‘Thanks,’ although Laird felt he hadn’t done much. Aloud, she said, ‘I’ll go and get ready. I’m sorry about this. Leave everything to Mum now, won’t you?’

  Laird introduced himself to her mother, who was c
learly a lovely woman—a natural redhead, around sixty years old—which made it perfectly understandable and reasonable that she would proceed to cast him dagger-like glances of suspicion every thirty seconds.

  What was he doing, going out with her divorced daughter? Would she have to beat him severely around the head and shoulders with her handbag, or something more violent? If Tammy’s mum had her way, any tears involved in this whole situation would be his own, Laird realised.

  And she was right to feel that way. Whatever happens, he vowed, I can’t hurt her. I won’t. Whatever it takes, I refuse to hurt her.

  Tammy arrived back downstairs ten minutes later.

  And, of course, she didn’t look anything like the way Tarsha would have looked.

  Because she looks better, said a rebellious new voice inside Laird’s head. Not the way he was supposed to be thinking at all. He attempted to firm his resolve.

  How would Tarsha herself have tallied up Tammy’s appearance?

  Ten points for the attractively piled-up hair, minus five for the strands that were already escaping down to her bare neck. Laird liked the strands, though. They whispered against her fine skin the way a man’s lips would do.

  Zero points for the shoes, because they were black while her dress was midnight blue, but Laird would personally have scored the shoes quite highly because Tammy could actually walk in them, swift and skimming and graceful, without either wincing or risking permanent damage to her feet.

  Make-up? Minimal, but then he would have argued to Tarsha that Tammy’s colouring worked so well without it that she didn’t need to mess around for hours with that stuff.

  Aha, but her bra strap was showing, he saw. Her very tired-looking bra strap. Minus hundreds of points for that. It was the wrong colour, too—beige, instead of blue or black, slipping across the top of her shoulder beyond the neckline of her clingy dress.

  Oh, damn it, forget the bra strap! She had such delicate, beautiful skin…

  ‘You look lovely,’ Laird told her sincerely, but his eyes must have arrowed unconsciously to the bra strap, in a final useless attempt to be sensible about the woman, because she looked down at it and fingered it, and a look of horror appeared on her face.