The Doctor's Destiny

  With a soft “Oh Rory,” she leaned forward and kissed him very gently on the lips

  They were close enough for her to feel a shudder rip through his body, for her ears to catch the echo of a despairing groan. Then he touched her lips with his finger—a don’t-speak kind of gesture—and took her hand, holding it tightly in his, his thumb running over her skin, telling her all kinds of things his lips could never say.

  And right then she knew that tonight would be their night. A one-off, one and only, but theirs no matter what. With Jason away, her flat was entirely hers. They’d have tonight—possibly tomorrow night, as well. Then—

  “The custody hearing’s set down for Wednesday.” Rory put her thoughts into words.

  “So we’ve got tonight.”

  She felt Rory stiffen, and saw the shock in his eyes as he turned toward her.

  “You’re saying?” he demanded hoarsely.

  “That at least we’d have something to remember—to hold on to. That we’d at least have one night—”

  “Come on!” Rory hauled her to her feet. “We’re going home.”

  Dear Reader,

  Over the past few years I’ve really enjoyed reading “relationship” books involving the lives of young, single career women juggling priorities to find enough time for love, friendship, shopping and even basic personal maintenance. Generally, the support network of other single friends keeps them sane, so the idea of helping four friends find love really appealed to me.

  Gabi, Kirsten, Alana and Daisy all live in the Near West apartment building, and work or have worked at the Royal Westside Hospital. Gabi, a doctor, has loved and lost. Kirsten, an occupational therapist, has been held in the grip of unrequited love. Nurse Alana’s previous venture into romance has left her preferring the company of her pets; though she strongly believes in love, she theorizes that it grows from friendship, not attraction. Daisy is the psychologist, who can tell them why things happen as they do, but can’t quite sort out her own problems.

  The four friends share one another’s tears and laughter, and, often with unexpected consequences, try to help one another along the rocky road to love.

  I have had such fun getting to know these women as I wrote these four books, and I hope you enjoy their company as much as I have.

  Best wishes,

  Meredith Webber

  The Doctor’s Destiny

  Meredith Webber

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  ALANA walked out of the hospital, not with her usual brisk stride but with her feet on autopilot as she pondered the problems she saw developing in her precious Ward Eight B—the admittance ward at Royal Westside Hospital.

  ‘Hey, slowcoach, what’s with you?’

  She turned towards the source of the voice then wished she’d kept walking.

  ‘Honestly, Kirsten,’ she groused at her recently engaged friend. ‘You could dim the radiance a little. Happy as I am for you and Josh, this glowing thing you’re doing is very depressing for a single, unattached-and-likely-to-remain-that-way thirty-year-old.’

  Kirsten simply grinned and glowed a little brighter, making Alana wish she hadn’t lost her latest pair of sunglasses.

  (Where did all the world’s lost sunglasses end up? Sunglass heaven?)

  ‘You’re just tired because you’ve had a long day,’ Kirsten said, her overwhelming happiness making allowances for even the grumpiest of friends. ‘And why’s that, anyway? You’ve been on seven o’clock starts—seven to three-thirty shifts—so what are you doing walking home at five-thirty?’

  Unable to provide an answer—Kirsten might seriously doubt her sanity if she said she’d been up on the ward, staring blankly at her time sheet for the last hour—Alana kept walking.

  Not that a little silence would put Kirsten off the scent.

  ‘It’s not this hang-up you’ve got over Rory Forrester again, is it?’ she demanded. ‘Honestly, Alana, for someone who’s never met the new senior physician, you’re behaving very strangely.’

  ‘He’s disrupting my ward!’ Alana stormed, lengthening her stride as anger built. ‘Students in an admittance ward! The whole idea’s ridiculous. I went along with it for a month at the end of last year, then managed to persuade Ted Ryan, the registrar, that it just wasn’t working. The students’ year was about to finish anyway, so it wasn’t too hard. Now, apparently, the phantom is due back and Ted’s got his trousers in a twist over the fact that he hasn’t reinstated it. He tells me they start again on Monday week, whether I like it or not!’

  ‘Why are students such a nuisance?’ Kirsten asked, as they waited for a break in the traffic before crossing the road. ‘I mean, I know there are a lot of them, and they take up time, but why’s it worse in Eight B?’

  Alana sighed.

  ‘You know they type of patients we get, Kirsten. They’re often elderly, they’re usually either confused or panicky, and for a lot of them, Eight B’s only a brief stopover on their way to somewhere else in the hospital. Depending on what their test results show, they might be transferred to Neurology, or to the renal unit, or slated for surgery and go from Eight B to Theatre then to a surgical recovery area. Most nurses avoid it like the plague, but I love the challenge of helping patients feel comfortable and at ease in the hospital surroundings. It doesn’t bother me that they’re only temporarily in my care. My job is to see they receive the best possible attention, that they understand at least something of what’s happening to them, and what could be happening in the future.’

  ‘And students mess this up?’

  ‘Of course they mess it up!’ Alana snorted, when they’d dashed across the road in a small break between two cars and a council truck. ‘In order not to be caught out by a question during a round, students straggle in whenever they feel like it and ask patients what’s wrong with them, and the whole point of being in Eight B is that no one quite knows what’s wrong with them. If renal failure had been picked up down in A and E the patient would have gone straight to the renal ward, ditto acute appendicitis. In Eight B we wait for the results of tests ordered by A and E, and order more if these are inconclusive. The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with half the patients, so how would the patients?’

  Kirsten nodded.

  ‘I can see your point, but as soon as they’re through their studies, doing their intern year, most youngsters end up in wards like Eight B doing admittance procedures, so don’t they need to see these places?’

  Alana glared at her.

  ‘I hate people who argue practicalities,’ she muttered. ‘And I don’t mind them seeing Eight B, even walking through it from time to time, preferably on their way to somewhere else. I just don’t want student rounds in my ward!’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to talk to Rory Forrester about it. I hear he’s finally due to start on Monday.’ Kirsten paused and looked at her friend. ‘Which, no doubt, you’ve also heard, and which explains why you’re so touchy!’

  Alana decided the comment didn’t deserve a reply. Besides, she could hear the sound of a tennis ball thwacking into the practice wall at the end of the tennis court of the Near West apartment complex.

  It reminded her of just how long it had been since she’d had any practice. Winter fixtures began in early April, just over four weeks away.

  Deciding a hit-up would be infinitely better than practising alone, she mumbled at Kirsten, ‘Ha, a possible tennis partner!
’ And instead of accompanying her friend up the front steps of the building where they both had flats, she detoured around the side to suggest a game to whoever was on the court.

  A skinny kid with the obligatory baseball cap, bill backwards, on his head. He was either visiting someone in the building, or using the court illegally, but as she watched him chase down the balls he spun into the wall, she decided legality didn’t matter—he was good.

  ‘Want a game?’ she called, startling him into missing a return. And into using a swear word she pretended not to hear.

  He chased the errant ball, then turned towards her, his arrogant young eyes skimming her far from pristine navy skirt and aqua top and bulky but comfortable work shoes.

  ‘Can you play?’

  Arrogant mouth, too!

  ‘A little,’ she said, her voice as mild as milk, though she wanted to shake the young brat. ‘Give me ten minutes to change?’

  He shrugged as if he couldn’t care less whether he played with her or not, but Alana knew from experience that playing was far better than hitting practice balls against a wall. He’d play!

  She hurried through the back entrance to the foyer, raced up the two flights of stairs, threw off her skirt and top and leapt under the shower, before pulling on an old pair of shorts and a loose T-shirt.

  She found a new tube of balls, grabbed her racket and rocketed back down the stairs, intent now not so much on tennis practice but on beating the bratty youngster.

  He was practising his serve now, using balls from a bucket he must have brought with him. Serious practice, then, whoever he was.

  Alana watched him for a few minutes, admiring his technique, then moved forward to introduce herself.

  ‘I’m Alana Wright. I live on the second floor.’

  ‘Jason McAllister.’ His blank-eyed expression told her that was all the information she was going to get. ‘Toss for serve?’

  ‘No, you’ve been practising, you go right ahead,’ Alana told him. ‘Best of three? I’ll turn on the lights as it will be dark before we finish.’

  She offered the tube of balls and he glanced at the label then checked out her racket. She could practically hear his brain assessing her ability at the game, then the smile, matching the eyes in arrogance, told her he’d decided he could beat her anyway—the phrase ‘she’s only a woman’ transmitted as clearly as if he’d spoken it.

  Jason was good. And he was younger and faster, and had obviously not missed as much practice as she had over the summer, but he hadn’t had an extremely frustrating day in Ward Eight B and didn’t have a whole lot of anger to work off.

  He won the first set easily, but she took the second in a tie-break and, using every ounce of guile she’d developed over the years, broke his first service game in the third set and hung on grimly to win two sets to one.

  ‘Best of five?’ he suggested, which was as close to conceding defeat as his youth would allow.

  Alana grinned at him.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I haven’t been practising, and after this little effort I probably won’t be able to walk tomorrow.’

  ‘Most people let kids win!’ he grumbled, almost but not quite under his breath.

  ‘I’m not most people and it doesn’t do your tennis any good to have people letting you win,’ Alana countered. ‘But you’re not bad and we made a game of it. Do you live around here? Would you like to play a regular game with me? Or even occasionally?’

  The blank-eyed stare returned, and the lad shrugged then began to collect some stray practice balls from over by the fence.

  Alana waited, but he obviously wasn’t going to reply so in the end she said, ‘Well, thanks for the game. I’m in Unit 2A on the second floor of this building, if ever you want someone to knock up with. I’m usually home from work by four-thirty and until fixtures start I’m available most afternoons.’

  He didn’t answer, simply picking up his bucket of balls and walking towards the gate. When he’d opened it, he paused, turned back towards her and nodded, and she could have sworn she heard a whispered, ‘Thanks.’ But it was the look in his eyes that remained with her—a look that encompassed loss and despair and such empty nothingness it was like being sucked into a deep black hole.

  She switched off the lights and left the courts, wondering, as the lock on the gate snicked shut, how Jason had found his way in. All the tenants had keys, but Near West apartment building was home to mainly young—OK, youngish—mostly medical people who worked at the nearby Royal Westside hospital. The Frosts, in the penthouse, had infant twin boys, but as nominal landlords of the building, by virtue of the fact Madeleine Frost’s father owned it, they rarely leased to other families, preferring singles or perhaps newly married couples.

  No one she knew in the building owned a teenager.

  She made her way back to her unit and was unlocking her door when Daisy Rutherford, a psychologist who had the other unit on the second floor, emerged from the opposite door.

  ‘Off to work?’ Alana asked, and Daisy nodded, but this evening her smile didn’t seem quite as serene.

  ‘Getting sick of your vampirish working hours?’ Alana teased, and Daisy grimaced.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the night work that’s getting me down, although the hours I work mean I don’t get to have a proper life.’ She released a breath that in anyone else might have been taken for a sigh, but Daisy was so together it couldn’t possibly have been one. ‘It’s the people who contact me. I mean, I have parents phone in for advice about their toddlers or teenagers, I give it to them, and do they take any notice? Not a bit. They ring again the next night and ask the same questions. That was one of the reasons I changed the focus of the show to include a segment for kids to phone in themselves, but I think that was a mistake. I’ve got ten-year-olds phoning up at ten o’clock at night to tell me their parents keep making them go to bed, and twelve-year-olds complaining because their mothers think they’re too young for sex.’

  Alana chuckled.

  ‘I thought that’s what psychology was all about, providing an outlet for people who need to get things off their chests.’

  ‘You can do that at the complaints department of the local department store,’ Daisy growled at her, then she pressed the button to summon the lift, and found a reasonable facsimile of her usual smile. ‘Or in the foyer of your building if you’re lucky enough to live near Alana,’ she added. She smiled as she stepped into the lift, and added her punchline, ‘I’m thinking of giving it up and going back to real people rather than voices on a phone!’

  Alana walked into her flat, shaking her head over this revelation of another side of Daisy, who was usually the most placid, sunny-tempered and quietly optimistic of women. And who, up till now, had always seemed to love her job.

  Maybe her own mood was being reflected in other people, Alana decided, as the cat wound its way around her legs, reminding her it was way past feeding time.

  ‘OK,’ she told it. ‘I’ll see to you now.’

  But before she’d finished washing out his water bowl, the phone rang.

  Alana studied the instrument for a moment then decided there was absolutely no one in the entire world with whom she wished to speak, so she let the answering machine, still turned on, pick it up.

  Kirsten’s voice.

  ‘Come on, Alana, we know you’re there. We’ve just seen Daisy. Get out of your tennis gear and come down to Mickey’s for a drink. Gabi and Alex are here, but Josh is working so you can keep me company.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Alana said, picking up the receiver as ordered and hoping she sounded firm rather than bloody-minded. ‘I haven’t fed the animals, and when that’s done, I’ve got “me” stuff to do. Hair-washing, leg-shaving, and general depilatory and maintenance processes. You know the kind of thing.’

  Kirsten protested she could do all that the following day—what else were weekends for?

  ‘Shopping, for one thing,’ Alana told her. ‘The only human edibles in the fla
t are a rind of cheese, a slice of bread and a tin of artichoke hearts. If I don’t do a major shop tomorrow, I’ll be fighting Biddy for her guinea-pig food and, believe me, I wouldn’t want to win.’

  Kirsten argued lack of food was a good reason to eat at Mickey’s, the bistro connected to the bar on the ground floor, but Alana remained firm.

  ‘Tonight’s an at-home night,’ she said, then she said goodbye and hung up, leaving the answering machine on to handle any further invitations.

  Not that there was likely to be a rush of them.

  She went about her tasks with no regrets, finally settling into a foaming bubble bath with a book, a glass of white wine and every intention of relaxing there for some time to come.

  But the wine failed to relax her and the bath failed to soothe, the frustrations of the day refusing to be washed away by sudsy water.

  Was it the job itself? Had she become too involved with Ward Eight B? Was this involvement making her exaggerate the student problem?

  She sighed and sank beneath the water, feeling her long hair mingling with the bubbles. She’d wash it under the shower when she’d finished, she decided, then, as the problem seemed no easier to solve underwater than it had been above it, she sat up again, pushing soap and hair off her face, wondering if it was time for a career move.

  This question was still fluttering in Alana’s head some twenty hours later as she dressed for the first night of a concert she’d particularly wanted to attend—back in September when she’d read the full programme for the summer concert season. Tonight, however, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and a cello concerto by a composer she didn’t know lacked the appeal they had held for her last spring, and only the fact that she’d just happened to catch sight of a divine designer trouser suit as she’d shopped, and it had just happened to fit, so she’d just happened to buy it, so she now really needed to wear it out to justify the expense, was forcing her along to the State Theatre.

  Reluctance made her late, so the lights were already dimmed and the orchestra tuning up as she made her way to her seat, murmuring hellos and apologies to the regulars in the seats between the aisle and her allotted position.