The Surgeon's Second Chance

by Meredith Webber

  As if guessing his thoughts, she held up a small bunch of keys.

  ‘Front door, drug cabinet and staff washroom,’ she said, flipping them into the air then catching them again. ‘I tracked down the hospital administrator and got them off him.’

  She smiled and her eyes sparkled with devilment.

  ‘And guess who was in with him at the time?’

  Harry’s startled expression must have given him away, for she smiled and nodded, as close to smug as he’d ever seen Steph.

  ‘The man himself—Bob Quayle. But I didn’t disgrace you, just tugged my forelock, asked for the keys, bowed and departed.’

  ‘Steph!’ The word that had been a plea earlier was now a protest, but she’d turned away and was collecting a pile of what looked like brochures off the little table set up in the middle of the room.

  ‘I’ll get these out of your way. If you could look at the figures, and the different equipment the firm offers, and let me know which way to go, I can order it tomorrow and have it here by next Monday.’

  She whisked away, presumably to collect Fanny, then returned almost immediately.

  ‘You didn’t say which bank.’

  He named the bank where he kept his personal account, and saw Steph frown.

  ‘Something else that doesn’t meet with your approval?’ he demanded, infuriated by her nonchalant behaviour.

  ‘It’s no skin off my nose, but it’s well known their fees and charges are much higher than other banks’. However, they may offer more in other ways—perhaps in overdraft facilities. If you like, I’ll get some information on what business accounts they offer and what the other big banks have that’s comparable, then you can decide.’

  She departed once again, leaving Harry feeling distinctly uneasy. She was determinedly antagonistic in some ways, suspicious of his involvement with the Quayles, yet she was doing far more than he’d have expected a receptionist to do—and thinking further ahead than he ever had when he’d decided to set up his own practice.

  Steph drove carefully, hyped by the Miss Efficiency act she’d put on for Harry to hide her reaction to that kiss, but aware there was so much distraction going on inside her mind and body that she needed to concentrate.

  Queen Street was the main business centre of Summerland, and all the major banks had branches within a hundred yards of each other. Checking she had time to do a quick dash down the road before collecting Fanny, she parked and set off, not waiting in the interminable queues but selecting from the assortment of brochures set out for the public to take—brochures which extolled the wonderful benefits of each particular account.

  Then to the kindergarten, where Fanny, involved in a game with this week’s best friends, was reluctant to leave.

  ‘If I have to leave her here for work reasons, she complains,’ Steph said to Patsy, Fanny’s group leader.

  ‘Aren’t women supposed to be contrary?’ Patsy said. ‘And you have to admit, Fanny’s all woman!’

  All Martin, Steph sometimes thought. Capable of not only charming birds out of trees, but charming the trees to do his—or in Fanny’s case, her—bidding as well.

  ‘Are we going to Uncle Harry’s place this afternoon?’ Fanny demanded, when she’d finally consented to leave.

  The two previous afternoons, Tracy had been available to collect her from kindy and mind her until Steph had come home.

  ‘We’re going to the place where he’ll be working, but there’s nothing much there yet. I brought some toys for you to play with and some colouring in for you to do.’

  ‘Will Uncle Harry be there?’

  ‘Probably,’ Steph admitted, though she fervently hoped he wouldn’t be. Perhaps he’d been called away, or he might have gone to see the furniture she was thinking of getting. Although Fanny was showing enthusiastic delight at the thought, Steph knew that the less she saw of Harry, the easier her own life would be.

  But life wasn’t meant to be easy, was it? Not only was Harry in the suite but, to Fanny’s double delight, so was her Grandad.

  She greeted both men with joy, chattering on about her day, while Steph, sensing the tension between the two men, wondered just what she’d interrupted.

  The moment Fanny finished a story about a boy who’d called her names, Steph took her hand and led her into the smaller room destined to be a tearoom when the suite was furnished.

  ‘Let Grandad talk to Harry now,’ she said to Fanny. ‘Here, you do some colouring in while I do some work. We both have to sit on the floor.’

  Fortunately, Fanny thought sitting on the floor was something of a lark, so she settled down, spilling pencils from her box, turning pages to find the picture she wanted to colour, while Steph picked up a notepad from the counter by the sink and dug the bank brochures out of her handbag. She’d do a comparison of the various accounts they offered, and let Harry decide.

  But though she worked diligently through the information, her heart was racing with apprehension as she imagined what was now going on between Harry and Bob.

  A little before five, as she was preparing to leave, packing away Fanny’s pencils and discussing with her daughter what they’d have for dinner—‘No, you had take-aways last week’—Harry walked in.

  ‘I’ve taken a look at the figures and need to talk them over with you. The bank options as well, if that’s what you’ve got there,’ he said, nodding to where she’d set the bank brochures on the bench. ‘I imagine you’ve still got Tracy living with you and she could take care of Fanny tonight. So how about I pick you up at eight and we have dinner together?’

  He must have seen her lips moving to form a ‘no’, for he continued before she could voice a protest.

  ‘You can take time off in lieu,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, collect Fanny from kindy and go straight home. In fact, you could do that every day, and do any phoning or ordering that has to be done from your place. Keep an account of the phone calls. We’ll need to set up a petty-cash fund, won’t we?’

  He smiled, which effectively ruined whatever excuse she might have come up with, because the smile lit up his dark eyes and made her skin feel warm, although she knew he was doing it to silence any argument, not warm her skin.

  Fanny, who’d obviously followed at least the first part of the conversation, took Steph’s hand and asked, ‘Will you wear a dress?’

  She then turned to Harry.

  ‘Mummy’s got a lot of dresses, but she doesn’t ever wear them,’ she confided. ‘Though I wish she would because she looks so pretty in them.’

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ Harry responded gravely. ‘Perhaps you could make sure she wears one tonight.’

  Steph stopped feeling warm. Her temperature was notching now to hot, but from anger rather than any other silly emotion.

  ‘I don’t think being my boss means you can dictate what I wear,’ she told him.

  ‘No?’ The eyebrows rose above the not-smiling-now brown eyes. ‘I’d have thought it gave me exactly that right, and while I’ll grant T-shirts and jeans are OK while we’re still setting up, I think I’d prefer a uniform of some kind once I open. You’ll be seeing to that, naturally.’

  Shot down in flames, she still managed to rally.

  ‘Not before tonight,’ she retorted.

  ‘Then wear a dress,’ he said, making an order of the words, though a fraction of a second later he softened it with, ‘Please, Steph?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  WEAR a dress?

  Once again Steph stood in front of her wardrobe, and for the second time it was Harry Pritchard causing her indecision.

  True, she had a lot of dresses—mostly bought when she’d been married to Martin. He’d loved to take her to the best boutiques and spend extravagant sums of money on her clothes.

  So she fitted the image of Martin Quayle’s wife!

  And possibly to appease his conscience, though she hadn’t known that at the time…

  She flicked through them distastefully and came across a creamy silk shirt s
he’d always loved, but which Martin had labelled old-fashioned. And somewhere she had good black jeans—designer jeans admittedly, but at least she’d feel comfortable in them. She dug through the rack of clothes, and found them hiding under a jacket.

  Unfortunately, Fanny came in as she was spreading this outfit on the bed.

  ‘Uncle Harry said a dress!’ Fanny said sternly.

  ‘I know, sweetheart, but these are good, dressing-up jeans.’

  ‘No!’ The obdurate look, which Steph admitted came from her genes rather than Martin’s, settled on Fanny’s small features. ‘It has to be a dress. I’ll find one.’

  Inevitably she chose a vivid emerald green ballgown which Steph had always hated.

  ‘That’s a dancing dress,’ she told Fanny, ‘not a going-out-to-dinner dress. Honestly, the jeans will do.’

  But Fanny was searching again, finally coming up with a slim-fitting black jersey dress, which actually predated Steph’s marriage to Martin, and, though old, was so simple in style it was dateless. She guessed Fanny had been attracted by the thin strip of jet and crystal beading around the deep V-neckline, but it was certainly an acceptable compromise.

  ‘OK,’ she told her daughter. ‘But now you’ll have to look in the bottom of the wardrobe to find some black shoes to go with it, then in the bottom drawer of my dressing-table for some black stockings or tights as well.’

  Fanny was delighted, crawling into the bottom of the wardrobe and playing there for a while before producing the shoes, then crossing to the dressing-table where she pulled out all the stockings and a number of suspender belts Steph had forgotten she owned.

  Getting dressed with Fanny’s help took longer than a solo effort, but eventually she was ready.

  She studied her unfamiliar self in the mirror, realising how thin she’d got since she’d last worn the dress when she saw the way it clung to her breasts and skimmed down over her hips, suggesting a shape, rather than hugging her figure.

  And make-up—how long since she’d worn more than a touch of lip gloss?

  The image in the mirror made her nervous and uncertain, but Harry was here already—and Fanny had left to greet him—so she couldn’t put off her grand entrance for much longer.

  Harry, crawling around the floor with Fanny on his back, sensed a movement and looked up, taking in long shapely legs encased in sheer black stockings, then a slip of a dress, a duller, denser black, making Steph’s pale skin seem even paler in comparison, and the short red hair even redder.

  ‘You’re more beautiful than ever.’

  He hadn’t meant to say the words—after all, this was to be a business dinner—but they’d slipped out anyway.

  ‘I’m not sure about compliments from a horse,’ she said, a slight smile tilting her luminous lips.

  Which was when Harry realised he was still on all fours, though his rider had dismounted and was now walking around her mother, nodding her approval of the dress.

  He collected his senses, not easy as his eyes kept going back to the silky black legs, and stood up.

  ‘Some dress,’ he said, again forgetting it was a business dinner. ‘Shall we go?’

  He waited while she gave last-minute instructions to Tracy, turning to him to ask, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I asked the manager at Dolphin Towers. He recommended Travesty—he said it’s fairly new and, though it has a funny name for a restaurant, the food’s good.’

  Steph crossed to the small phone table, pulled out a phone book and looked up the number of the restaurant, writing it down for Tracy. He had a feeling Steph was stalling, putting off the moment when the two of them would be together without the buffer of other people.

  But that was ridiculous. She knew she was more than capable of holding her own with him—she’d proved that with the job situation.

  ‘OK, let’s go,’ she said at last, picking up a minuscule handbag that couldn’t possibly hold more than a handkerchief and her keys. She flashed a smile at him and added, ‘You’ve got the brochures and the figures?’

  He nodded, because he did have them in the car. He’d taken them home to study them, then, in the process of finding somewhere special to take Steph—preferably somewhere she wouldn’t have been with Martin—he’d forgotten about them. But, even though she looked like pure pleasure, she wasn’t going to let him forget this was business.

  He said goodnight to Tracy, kissed Fanny and felt the delight of her soft plump arms around his neck, then escorted Steph out to the car, careful not to touch her in case the desire building inside him might escalate out of control if he felt the softness of her skin, or was close enough to smell the scent of her beneath the faint beguiling perfume she was wearing.

  ‘I think I’ll buy the office furniture and associated necessities,’ he said, once settled behind the wheel and determined to damp down the flames with business talk. ‘Bob was telling me there’s a company willing to supply all the suites at a very good rate, then we can rent the medical equipment I’ll need. That way we can upgrade as new inventions and innovations occur.’

  Steph ignored the jab of pain the ‘Bob was telling me’ caused, and concentrated on the rest of the statement. The mix of ‘I’ and ‘we’.

  How seductive that ‘we’ sounded to her thwarted ambition of becoming a surgeon. True, she might not have gone into Harry’s sub-specialty, but…

  ‘That was a big sigh,’ Harry said. ‘Is it so hard to agree that buying furniture but hiring equipment might be the way to go?’

  She had to smile.

  ‘It was a sigh for something else—for what might have been, Harry.’

  ‘Surgery?’ he guessed, and his prescience caused a stiffening of her muscles and a prickling of the hair at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Did you do a course on mind-reading while you were away?’ she asked, desperate to keep the atmosphere light.

  ‘No.’ He glanced her way. ‘But it was such a passion with you, I can’t help wondering what happened. I know you mentioned Fanny, and understand you couldn’t have done your registrar years with a tiny baby, but—’

  ‘I didn’t have to get pregnant right then?’ she finished for him, hoping she’d learnt to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘No. I didn’t.’

  Harry heard the blend of regret and pain and knew there was no way she would regret having had her daughter. But if she hadn’t wanted to get pregnant, what had gone wrong?

  He thought back, reconstructing the past through new eyes since Steph had mentioned Martin’s pursuit of her—and her contention that it had only been when Harry himself had become interested that Martin had swept her off her feet.

  All Martin had ever wanted, as far as his medical career had been concerned, had been to qualify, gain some hospital experience in Brisbane, then return to Summerland to run the hospital his father had built for him. Martin had seen it as the start of an empire—and himself as the head of a national chain of private hospitals.

  And Steph couldn’t have done her specialty years in Summerland. Summerland General wasn’t a teaching hospital.

  ‘Weren’t you on the Pill?’ he demanded, when his thoughts had led him to an unpalatable possibility.

  ‘I went off it for three months—it’s what most of us doctors advise women to do from time to time.’

  And Martin had been in charge of contraception, Harry guessed, though he didn’t say it, merely reaching out to take Steph’s hand and feeling the coldness of her fingers although the night, now the rain had stopped, was quite warm.

  Steph slipped her hand out of Harry’s, but his mind was occupied with thoughts of the man who’d been his best friend. Had finding out about Martin’s infidelities affected Steph to such an extent she’d let bitterness colour her memories of the man? That could explain her animosity to the Quayles.

  Or was she right? Harry had to admit Martin had been spoilt and used to getting his own way. But had he been devious enough to marry Steph purely because Harry had been falling in love
with her? Sly enough to use a pregnancy to prevent her doing surgery? It had all happened so quickly—courtship, marriage, pregnancy—then, in a little over a year, Martin had died.

  The problem was, the more Harry reconstructed Martin, the more he had to think about Bob, and being inextricably tied to Bob meant he didn’t want to be harbouring suspicions about the man.

  ‘Wasn’t that the place?’

  Steph’s sudden comment brought him out of his reverie. He pulled over, checked for traffic, then swung the car around in a U-turn, pulling up a couple of car spaces past the entrance.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, climbing out and walking around the bonnet to open the door for her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and when she kissed him lightly on the cheek, he knew it was for more than his politeness in opening the door. She’d called him a mind-reader, but had she sensed his thoughts? Were the old bonds between them still so strong they could follow each other’s emotional shifts?

  He rather hoped not, as some of his emotional shifts were practically X-rated.

  He took her arm to walk into the restaurant, pleased she didn’t draw away, though displeased by his own mental warning that holding her arm was as close as he was going to get.

  She was as wary as a cat, and her mood changes as unpredictable as the weather, while suspicion about his involvement with the Quayles was probably providing her with more than adequate armour against any advance he might make.

  The tables at Travesty were set apart, small groves of potted greenery providing privacy between them.

  ‘This is lovely,’ Steph said, her face lighting up with such honest delight Harry felt his chest cramp with the love he felt for her.

  Then she looked at him—really looked—and added, ‘You haven’t brought the papers—the comparisons.’

  Now his chest cramped with a different emotion. She might be relenting—slightly—in the war she’d declared on him earlier, but now she was reminding him this was business.

  And that there was a big gap between a truce between them and acceptance back into her life as a friend.