Midwife, Mother...Italian's Wife

by Fiona McArthur

  She did not want to drive somewhere with this guy. A car. Close confines. Him in control. ‘No, thank you.’ Besides. It was her invitation and her place to say where they met. ‘You could come to my house, it’s easier. Bring Paulo if he’d like to come and he can play with Jack.’

  She had a sudden vision of her empty pantry and mentally shrugged. ‘At six-thirty? I’m afraid Jack and I eat early or I can’t get him to bed before nine.’

  He shook his head. ‘That does not suit.’

  Tammy opened her eyes slow and wide at his arrogance and his inability to accept she wanted to set the pace and choose a place that would be safe.

  But he went on either oblivious or determined to have his own way. ‘I will come after nine. When Paulo, too, is in bed. I am away all day tomorrow and we will be able to discuss things without small ears around us.’

  Tammy caught the raised eyebrows and stifled smile on her father’s face and frowned. She’d never been good at taking orders. She bit back the temptation to say nine didn’t suit her, but apart from being different to what she usually did, she never slept till midnight anyway.

  It would be churlish to stick to her guns. This once she’d let him get away with organising but he wouldn’t be making a habit of it.

  She conceded, grudgingly. ‘I don’t normally stay up late but a leisurely after-dinner coffee could be pleasant.’

  ‘I’ll see you tonight, then.’ He inclined his head and Tammy did the same while Ben looked on with a twinkle in his eye. Tammy glared at her father for good measure which only made his eyes twinkle more as they left.

  Tammy could hear the suddenly vociferous new arrival in with his mother and, glad of the diversion, she hastened to the ward to help Jen snuggle Felix up to her breast. She couldn’t help the glance out the ward window as the two men crossed the path to the old doctor’s residence.

  She’d always thought her father a big man but against Leon he seemed suddenly less invincible. It was a strange feeling and she didn’t like it. Or maybe she didn’t like being so aware of the leashed power of Leonardo Bonmarito.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LEON arrived at nine.

  ‘So, tell me about your private hospitals. What made you choose paediatrics as a main focus?’

  Be cool, be calm, say something. Leon made her roomy den look tiny and cramped. Not something she’d thought possible before. Tammy had run around madly when Jack had gone to bed and hidden all the school fundraising newsletters and flyers in a big basket and tossed all evidence of her weekly ironing into the cupboard behind the door.

  She’d even put the dog basket out on the back verandah. Stinky didn’t like men. Then she’d put the Jack Russell out in the backyard and spent ten minutes changing her clothes and tidying her hair. Something else she hadn’t thought of before at this time of night.

  But now she sat relaxed and serene, externally anyway, and watched Leon’s passion for his work flare in his eyes. She could understand passion for a vocation; she had it herself, for midwifery and her clients in Lyrebird Lake.

  ‘It’s the same in a lot of hospitals in the public system. The lack of staff, age of buildings and equipment and overcrowding means the convalescing patient is often cared for with less attention than necessary. With children that is doubly tragic.’

  She couldn’t help but admire his mastery of English. Her understanding of Italian was more than adequate but her conversational ability was nowhere near as fluent and his occasional roll of the r’s made his underlying accent compellingly attractive. It did something to her insides. She obviously had a dangerous fetish for Italians.

  ‘This has concerned me,’ he went on, ‘and especially in paediatrics because children are vulnerable, more so when they are sick.’

  That brought her back to earth. Children were vulnerable. He had great reason to believe that after Paulo’s incident but she’d get around to that. Get around to the fact she’d thought him overprotective. ‘I can see what you’re getting at. It’s hard because of priorities with those more ill. But I agree a lonely and convalescing child needs special care.’

  He sat forward in his chair and his shirt tightened impressively across his chest. She didn’t want to notice that. ‘Sì.’ He was obviously pleased with her. ‘There is a shortage of empathetic time for those children on the mend but not yet well enough to go home. I had hoped to prevent their stay from becoming a more traumatic experience than necessary.’ He glanced up to see if she agreed and she nodded.

  He was determined to ensure his goals were realised. ‘This is especially important if these children are dealing with other issues, such as grief from loss of loved ones, or difficult family circumstances.’

  There was an added nuance in his voice that spoke of history and vast experience. An aversion to children suffering, perhaps more personal than children he’d seen in wards. The reason teased at her mind. ‘Was there something in particular that made you so aware?’

  His answer seemed to come from another direction. ‘In our family all sons have entered the medical profession, though disciplines were left to our personal preferences. My grandfather was intrigued by surgery, my father ophthalmology. My passion lies with paediatrics and Gianni’s with emergency medicine. Paolo’s area is yet to be discerned.’

  That made her smile. ‘Paulo’s a bit young to be worrying about disciplines, don’t you think? I doubt Jack would have a thought in his head about what he’ll do when he grows up.’

  Leon shook his head. ‘In Italy a man learns at an early age that he will be responsible for others.’

  ‘Like dancing,’ she suggested. ‘A man must be able to lead?’

  He returned her smile. ‘Sì.’

  She couldn’t resist teasing him again. ‘So you turned your father’s eye hospitals into paediatric wards?’

  He raised one stern eyebrow but something made her wonder if he was secretly smiling. ‘You do not really think that I would?’

  There was a lot going on below the surface here. From both of them. She shook her head. ‘No.’ He wouldn’t do that. She knew little of him but already she could tell he would hold his father’s wish to provide service to the blind sacrosanct. ‘So the eye hospitals are thriving.’

  There it was. A warm and wicked grin that wrapped around her like a cloak dropping over her shoulders. A cloak that enveloped her in all the unusually erotic thoughts that had chased around her head for far too long last night in bed. She was in trouble.

  ‘Sì. I built more hospitals. Designed especially for children and staffed with nurses who have much to offer an ailing or grieving child.’

  He leaned back in the chair and the fine fabric of his handmade shirt again stretched tight across his chest. He picked up the tiny espresso coffee she’d made for him, black and freshly ground from the machine she couldn’t live without, and sniffed it appreciatively. He took a sip, and those large hands looked incongruous around the tiny cup. ‘Perfetto.’

  She’d learned to make good coffee years ago and it was her one indulgence. She dragged her eyes away from his hands because down that road lay danger.

  She remembered he and Gianni were orphans and the pieces fell into place. ‘How did your parents die, Leon?’

  She had connected with his previous statement and why she could sense and understand meanings so easily from a man she barely knew was a puzzle she didn’t want to fathom. She wondered if it worried him as much as it worried her.

  To her relief he didn’t try to avoid her question. ‘My parents drowned off the Amalfi Coast from our yacht in a storm.’

  Drowned. Poor little boys. ‘Storms at sea.’ She sighed. ‘Mother Nature’s temper can be wild and indiscriminate,’ she said softly. His eyes gazed off into the distance and she was with him. She could almost feel the spray in her face and hear the scream of the wind and she nodded. ‘I’ve lived by the sea. The weather can be unexpected and fierce. My father still has a house on a fabulous beach, but even he nearly drowned one day when h
e was washed off the rocks.’

  He was watching her, listening to her voice, but she could tell half of him was in another place. ‘What happened with you and Gianni?’

  He looked through her and his voice dropped. ‘Gianni almost died, and I, too, had pneumonia.’ She glanced at his face and couldn’t help but be touched by his effort to remain expressionless.

  ‘And you were both in hospital afterwards?’ Spoken gently, because she didn’t want to break the spell.

  He nodded and now she understood where his empathy for those in similar circumstances had grown from because she could see the suppressed emotion, even in the careful blankness. That concept hit her hard, in mutual empathy from her early teens and the scars she still bore. ‘How old were you when they died?’

  Leon shrugged the pain away. ‘Fourteen.’ Grieving, convalescing, in a hospital that was rushed and old and unintentionally uncaring. With a ten-year-old brother he’d nearly lost as well.

  She could see he knew she’d connected the dots. And wasn’t happy. ‘It is better in my hospitals now.’ He changed the subject. ‘To see what you do here, in your maternity section, is good too.’

  She allowed the change of subject, aware instinctively how privileged she’d been to glimpse into the private man and sensitive to his need to close the subject. ‘The maternity hospital concept is an exciting idea. I’ll certainly talk to Emma about it.’

  No doubt he would also be happy because it would mean his brother’s new wife would be interested in staying more often in Italy. She didn’t fully trust his superior motives without a thought for his ulterior ones.

  He was watching her again and she wondered what he’d seen of her thoughts. Not much, she hoped.

  ‘So you, too, have suffered the loss of a parent?’ His turn to pry. ‘You said you lost your mother young, also?’

  Not going there. Fifteen hadn’t been a good age to be allowed to run free. ‘Yes.’ The less said there, the better.

  ‘And that you lived with your grandmother?’ So he remembered. Deep creases marred his forehead. ‘Why did you not go with your father when your mother died?’

  ‘It’s a long story and maybe another day.’ She and her father would have preferred that and maybe her life would have been different. She shrugged her shoulders for something she’d no control over. Fifteen had also been a bad age to be told Ben wasn’t her real father.

  Rebellion saw Tammy spend many hours loitering at that Italian coffee shop. Months had passed without her father’s knowledge of how little supervision her grandmother had exercised.

  Rides in fast cars she later found out were stolen. Dark and dangerous men that even her boyfriend was wary of. Secret meetings she’d had to stay silent in.

  The day Ben, her father in all that counted if not legally, had arrived to rescue her.

  He’d picked her up from the coffee shop when she’d rung him to say she was pregnant and whisked her to Lyrebird Lake. He’d told her then they were petty criminals. Not long later she’d read that her baby’s father had been sent to jail for a long time.

  No wonder she’d found it all so dreadfully, horribly exciting. That risk-taking and foolish time in her life was something she’d buried when she’d become a responsible mother.

  Until Gianni had arrived in Lyrebird Lake and wooed her best friend, she’d covered the Italian episode in her life. Hadn’t even tried her language skills out on Gianni so she doubted there was anyone except her father, and maybe his wife, Misty, in Lyrebird Lake who knew her secret.

  Emma’s betrothal had been such a whirlwind affair she hadn’t even mentioned it when her friend had fallen for Gianni.

  But she had Jack. The light in her life. And she’d change nothing now. Except maybe the subject again.

  She had other motives for asking him here and he’d stayed a while already. ‘There’s something I want to ask you, though you may not want to discuss it. Something that means I should apologise for my presumption without knowing the facts.’

  He frowned and inclined his head.

  She hesitated, because she didn’t really know him or how he’d react, and then typically, she dived in anyway. ‘Was Paulo almost abducted before you came here?’

  His brows snapped together. ‘Who told you this?’

  She straightened in her seat, refusing to be cowed. ‘Paulo mentioned it to Emma’s daughter, Grace.’ She didn’t say Grace had told Jack and Jack had told her.

  His hand tightened on the cup he held and for a fleeting moment she had the ridiculous thought he might crush it without realising. Surely a man’s hand couldn’t really do that? In the silence she imagined she could hear the porcelain creak in protest.

  ‘This is true.’ He glanced at his white fingers and carefully put the cup down, then ran his other hand through thick black curls. She glimpsed the flicker of white-hot fury in his eyes and it was a warning of what he would be capable of. Strangely she had no problem with that. She’d almost pity the men who tried to harm his son if he caught them.

  ‘I was stupidly distracted by my wish to arrive well before the wedding and took too little care. We are not the first family to be targeted by those who wish to benefit financially from people they see as too wealthy.’

  So it was true. The thought made her want to clutch at her throat but she kept her hands together in her lap as if to hold onto the pictures that wanted to rise up and fill her mind. ‘Good grief. What about the police?’

  He inclined his head but the movement was noncommittal. ‘The police do their best to capture these criminals but by then it is often too late for the one abducted. This will not happen to my son or anyone in my family. I have a private investigator and bodyguards working with me full-time now. Experienced operatives whose records are impeccable and that I trust with my and my family’s lives.’

  There was almost an aura around him and she recognised the implacable determination that would see him succeed in whatever he set his mind to. ‘So you believe Paulo is safe, now that these people work for you?’

  He inclined his head. ‘Already they have paid tenfold for the money I retain them with. Those responsible have been passed over to the police. Paulo is safe now. No more at risk than any other boy, but it is hard not to look into the dark for danger.’

  Who were these Bonmaritos her friend had bound herself to? These superficially cultured men who hid wolves beneath their Italian suits and hired bodyguards. More gangsters she’d fallen in with? Or truly philanthropic doctors merely protecting their own from a culture she didn’t understand.

  ‘This all sounds very James Bondish. Not something Lyrebird Lake would ever have to worry about.’ She said it firmly, and perhaps a little too quickly, but she really didn’t want to think of this scenario in her own home. In the lives of people she knew. In the man opposite her she was strangely drawn to. Dark forces she never wanted to be involved with again. It was too unsettling.

  ‘So my brother says. He does not believe I need the bodyguards here but, for the moment, it is for me. These and other reasons are perhaps why my brother and I should return to our homeland.’

  Surely nothing would happen here? In Australia? She didn’t like any of this conversation and regretted what she’d discovered. She wondered if Emma was aware of the more menacing undercurrents of the Bonmarito family. ‘This seems a long way from discussing children’s hospitals and maternity wings.’

  Visibly Leon forced his shoulders to relax. ‘I’m sorry, Tamara. I apologise if I’ve upset you. I still struggle with allowing Paulo out of my sight.’ But his face remained changed. Harshly angled and fierce. The face of the stranger he really was.

  Her chin was up as if she needed to rise and meet the challenge of this warrior of a man. He didn’t frighten her but she gave him the respect he deserved. ‘And I apologise for judging your need to know where Paulo was the other night.’

  He inclined his head. ‘You could not know.’ While the dangerous side to this handsome Italian made her une
asy, it was less upsetting when she thought of her own response when Jack had asked what she would do—limb from limb seemed pretty similar to Leon’s response. ‘The lives of children should be protected.’

  ‘Sì. And I should go to check Paulo. It is late.’ He stood and she rose also, and couldn’t squash the tiny irresponsible hope he would kiss her before he left. She walked him to the door and paused as she opened it. When she turned to him some of the hardness had faded from his face but there was enough of the wolf in him to still keep her head up as she met his eyes.

  He had no difficulty seeing into her mind. His brows lifted. ‘Do you want to play dare again, little one?’

  So he thought she was little? Danger shuddered deliciously along her veins and made her remember a time in her dim past when she’d put her ear to a train track, the early rumbles of an approaching train, the danger, the paralysing fear that screamed to move. ‘Should I in this mood you’re in?’

  He stepped in. ‘That is enough answer for me.’

  This kiss was different. Harder, decidedly more dominant with her crushed against his chest, and she pulled him against herself more to keep her feet on the ground and show she wasn’t subdued by him. But she was. They leaned into each other, searching out secrets, showing each other hidden facets of their souls rarely exposed like little shafts of moonlight illuminating the areas used to darkness. All the more penetrating because there was no future in it.

  When he left her, she leaned her forehead against the closed door with her eyes shut and listened to his car purr away in the darkness.

  ‘Hit by the train,’ she murmured into the darkness.

  The next day as Tammy worked her early shift in the birthing centre she found herself glancing out the windows whenever she heard male voices, and once she saw her father in the distance with Leon, two dark heads together. One that made her smile and one that burned her with the heat of that last hard kiss.