A Very Precious Gift Read online

  She mumbled something about carrying on regardless but was distracted by the inexplicable regret lodged in her heart.

  Surely she couldn’t be sorry nothing had happened? Think of the consequences if it had!

  She shuddered, then felt Nick touch her arm.

  ‘OK?’ he asked, his voice gentle with concern.

  She looked up at him, met his eyes but couldn’t read their expression, although the blue-green depths left her more breathless than usual.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said stoutly, but knew it was a lie. She might never be OK again.

  Not if it was love.

  ‘Hi, you two. You coming to work or not? Did you enjoy the ball, Phoebe? Fantastic dress. You had Gerry’s eyeballs out on stalks. I told him I’d have to belt him one if he kept drooling over you.’

  Sheree overtook them, and her description of her husband’s reaction made Phoebe smile. Everyone who knew Sheree and Gerry knew he worshipped the ground his wife walked on. Gerry was a solid six feet two, and his tiny wife’s constant threats to bash or batter him were a source of great amusement among the staff.

  ‘I bet he was terrified,’ she teased Sheree, which was easier than answering the question.

  Because she had enjoyed the ball. Had enjoyed dancing with Nick, being held by Nick, feeling secure in Nick’s arms. Even when he’d been so very angry with her, she’d still felt safe.

  Even cherished.

  Which was totally off the planet, but a girl could dream.

  Nick and Sheree were discussing the food, something Phoebe could barely recollect. She followed in their wake, wondering idly what illnesses—apart from love—might include loss of appetite in their symptoms.

  The broad-shouldered shape of Nick’s back drew her attention and all the fizzy tremors re-ignited along her nerves. Physical attraction, she assured herself.

  ‘We’ll both get past this,’ he’d said, but she was beginning to doubt she would. Which meant it was going to be a very long six months.

  ‘So what’s new with you and Nick?’ Jess demanded, when Phoebe once again met up with her in the canteen.

  ‘Do you lie in wait for me?’ Phoebe demanded. ‘I’ve worked in the skin cancer unit for the last six months and rarely eaten lunch with the same person twice.’

  Apart from Charles, she remembered grimly.

  ‘Nowadays, I seem to meet you here every day.’

  ‘That’s because you hadn’t made any special friends,’ Jess said with the boundless good cheer she radiated so effortlessly. ‘Now you’ve got me, it’s natural we should eat together.’

  Is it? Phoebe wondered. When you’re so obviously happy you make this love thing seem like a good idea?

  But she smiled at Jess. ‘I guess so,’ she admitted.

  In the end, she had to admit it turned out well. Listening to Jess talk, whether of work, or Charles—even sex—made the time pass swiftly, and lightened the general gloom of the day for Phoebe.

  Lunch over, she visited the ward, to find Jackie absent and Peter sleeping. With nothing else to do, she returned to the clinic and studied the files of patients who were due in that afternoon.

  ‘You OK?’ Sheree asked, unknowingly repeating Nick’s question of the morning.

  ‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?’ Phoebe replied.

  Sheree shrugged.

  ‘No reason, but you seem to have reverted to the Phoebe who first joined us here when you were new and shy. You’ve lost that sparkle you’ve had since you got to know us all.’

  ‘Sparkle doesn’t do much for the patients,’ Phoebe told her, but the words didn’t remove the speculative gleam in Sheree’s eyes, and Phoebe guessed it wasn’t the last she’d hear of the conversation.

  Unless she pulled herself together yet again, and dredged up a bit of pretend sparkle. She’d start with a visit to her father. Tonight! Just to remind herself why she shouldn’t, ever, be thinking in terms of love with a man like Nick. Then relief that they’d not become too involved would wipe out the regrets and recriminations, and the old Phoebe would return.

  But the visit didn’t work. Her father was, if only temporarily, very much in love with Mindy, and Mindy was obviously besotted by him, while Beatrice, the prodigy, was adored by both parents. Part of Phoebe hoped this was finally the real thing for her father, but the cynic in her head mocked her sentimentality.

  The rosy glow of love doesn’t last, it reminded her.

  ‘But the pain sure does,’ she told it, as she drove home to the cottage which had once been her haven, but was now a lonely shell.

  Misery stalked her all week, though, mindful of Sheree’s observation, at work she pretended to a gaiety she was far from feeling. By Friday, the play-acting had exhausted her and, too tired to drive home, she opted for patient visiting instead. She’d go and talk to Peter. Since the night she and Nick had visited him instead of going to dinner, she’d made a point of popping in to see him most days.

  Knowing he’d talk about Nick?

  Well, probably, she admitted to herself. But surely that was OK? It wasn’t as if she was trying to bump into Nick accidentally. He always visited much later in the evening.

  ‘Come in, lovely lady. Tell me what’s been happening,’ Peter said, as she cautiously pushed open the door and peered around it to see if he was alone.

  ‘Nothing much. We’ve been busy, but everyone on the staff has been pleased to hear the daily reports on your progress. It certainly looks as if your immune system has finally decided to get its act together.’

  Peter smiled at her.

  ‘A temporary reprieve, methinks, but certainly one worth having. How’s Jackie?’

  Phoebe gave her own report, mostly hearsay, of Jackie’s progress. The aggressive chemotherapy Jackie was undertaking had left her without any immunity at all, and she was temporarily in the isolation unit.

  They chatted for a while, Phoebe telling him the news of other patients he’d met during earlier stays in the hospital, Peter making her laugh with accounts of some of his hospital antics.

  Then he switched the conversation with a suddenness that left Phoebe floundering.

  ‘Is it Nick making you so unhappy?’ he asked, and Phoebe could only gape at him.

  Then anger came to her rescue. Why was everyone commenting on her emotions? What business were they of anyone’s but hers?

  ‘What makes you think I’m unhappy?’ she demanded.

  ‘You’ve lost your usual sparkle,’ Peter pointed out, and Phoebe felt the top of her head about to explode again.

  ‘What am I? Some kind of fire-cracker? A little ray of sunshine who has to glow and glitter, day in and day out? I don’t know how you all got this sparkling idea. I’m just me, and I’m reserved, and I always have been.’

  Peter nodded gravely.

  ‘But your eyes danced, and your lips curled upward, almost as if they couldn’t help but smile most of the time.’ He paused then added, ‘I said something stupid to Nick a while back. Prompted, I realise now, by my own personal upheaval.’ He made no move to explain this cryptic comment, merely adding, ‘I wouldn’t like to think it had rebounded onto you.’

  ‘Whatever you’ve said to Nick had nothing to do with me,’ Phoebe told him, although she remembered the totally weird proposal and Nick’s muttered comment about something Peter had said. ‘Nothing Nick says or does has anything to do with me.’

  She stood up so Peter would understand the conversation was finished. ‘And I don’t know why you or anyone would think it does.’

  On that note, she crossed to the door, tilted up her lips and smiled at him, wondering how one went about putting sparkle in one’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll visit you again tomorrow if you promise not to bring up this subject,’ she said, and Peter chuckled.

  ‘As if I’d dare,’ he said, then waved goodbye.

  She was through the door and was smiling at the nurse on duty at the desk when Peter’s voice called her back.

  ‘If you’re c
oming tomorrow, could you make it about two o’clock?’ he said. ‘That’s if it’s not inconvenient.’

  Suspicion flared in Phoebe’s breast. She walked back into his room.

  ‘You’re not setting me up. Arranging for your old mate to be here at the same time, or anything stupid like that?’

  Peter shook his head.

  ‘As if I would,’ he said, plaintive innocence echoing in the words.

  ‘I wouldn’t have put it past you,’ Phoebe told him. ‘But if you promise you’re not, and that time suits you, two o’clock it is.’

  ‘It’s not as if I have a life!’ she muttered to herself, as she once again walked out the door.

  But the ‘appointment’ aspect of the visit intrigued her, so she wasn’t surprised to find an elegant middle-aged woman ensconced in the most comfortable of Peter’s visitors’ chairs next day. Assuming it was his mother, she acknowledged his introduction to Marion, deposited the grapes she’d brought along on Peter’s tray and settled into the second chair.

  She was about to utter a harmless remark about the weather when the older woman spoke.

  ‘What a truly beautiful bride you’ll make,’ Marion said, and while Phoebe gasped and stared and generally stuttered out her astonishment, Peter laughed.

  ‘Don’t mind, Marion,’ he told Phoebe. ‘She does it all the time. Can’t see a young woman without rigging her out in bridal regalia. When Nick and I were young we spent years pretending we weren’t interested in girls and keeping them out of the house so Marion didn’t fill their heads with images of orange blossom.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with young girls having images of orange blossom in their heads,’ Marion said serenely, while Phoebe struggled with the ‘Nick and I were young’ scenario and wondered where Marion fitted into it. ‘Young people might think they don’t need romance in their lives, but the world’s a poorer place without it.’

  She frowned sternly at Peter.

  ‘I know you and Nick laugh at what you call my foolish fancies, but every wedding dress I make is sewn with love, every stitch set in the certain knowledge that the marriages of my brides will last for ever.’

  She folded her arms across her chest and nodded complacently. ‘So far it’s worked.’

  Phoebe smiled at her, relieved to find the woman made wedding dresses, which explained her original statement.

  ‘Do you design the dresses as well as make them?’ she asked.

  ‘Right from the first sketch,’ Marion replied. ‘I don’t know how it happens but I only need to see a young woman and I get an image in my head of how she’ll look at her wedding.’

  ‘You can imagine how scary that was for Nick and me,’ Peter said to Phoebe, ‘on the rare occasions she caught sight of a young woman in our company. Almost as bad as casting spells.’

  Marion chuckled at his horror, while Phoebe again pondered the ‘Nick and me’ thing. Perhaps Marion was Peter’s mother and, because she was obviously a businesswoman in her own right, she preferred him to call her by her Christian name.

  ‘You never looked too scared,’ Marion said fondly, then she dug in her capacious handbag and produced a pencil and a small sketch pad. ‘While Nick adopted the perfect antidote to my spells by taking out a different woman every night.

  ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said to Phoebe, ‘but when I’ve got an idea I need to get it down. You’ve such a serenely lovely face, I’d hate to think I couldn’t capture it. You keep talking to Peter. You don’t have to sit still or anything.’

  Ordered to keep talking, Phoebe found she couldn’t utter a word. Fortunately Peter helped out, speaking of Jackie. A softness in his voice alerted Phoebe, and she studied him more closely, seeing the animation with which he spoke of her eventual return to the ward.

  ‘We might both end up out of here at the same time, even if it’s a short remission,’ Peter said. ‘I’ve been thinking maybe we could take a trip together. Share the time. What do you think Mrs Stubbings would say?’

  Now there was hesitancy with the softness and Phoebe felt her heart cramp. Sharing an uncertain future, had the two of them grown close? Was love stronger than the faceless shadow of death? Could it really move mountains?

  ‘I’m sure she’d understand,’ Phoebe told him, her voice coming out far too husky for someone trying to be practical. ‘Have you got somewhere in mind? Would you like me to do some investigating for you? Come up with some possible destinations?’

  Peter’s face lit up.

  ‘Would you? I was going to ask Nick, but I know he’s likely to disapprove—well, maybe not disapprove but worry. I’d like somewhere quiet—in the mountains. Jackie talks about the mountains all the time. Somewhere we can have all meals provided. We won’t be up to too much activity, either of us. And not too far to drive. I’d get a chauffeured car to take us but can’t afford to drive across Australia.’

  ‘I know a guest house up at Mount Tamborine,’ Phoebe told him. ‘It has views to the ocean one way and the distant ranges the other. It’s an old Queenslander style house with big verandahs where you can sit, and when you get sick of one view you can walk around the verandah and settle down to look at another. There are a lot of native birds, and little wallabies come close to the house. It’s the perfect retreat.’

  ‘Or a honeymoon haven,’ Marion said, reminding Phoebe that she and Peter weren’t alone. ‘There,’ she added, and handed Phoebe the sketch. ‘You don’t have to wear a Marion David design when you get married, but don’t you think something like this would suit you?’

  A Marion David design? This woman was Marion David—as in Nick David—as in Nick’s mother, not Peter’s?

  Phoebe was too confused to even look at the sketch. She passed it into Peter’s outstretched hand, muttered something about another appointment, and seeing Peter later, nodded to Marion, then left the room.

  Now she thought about it, she remembered hearing Peter was an orphan—parents killed in an accident, hence boarding school—so, of course, it couldn’t have been his mother.

  It added to the puzzle of the ‘appointment’. Why had Peter asked her to visit at a particular time? So she could meet Nick’s mother? Or so Nick’s mother could meet her?

  She tried to recall Nick’s words when she’d questioned him about telling his mother about all his dates. He’d claimed it was a strategy—obviously one he’d developed to stop her putting ideas of orange blossom and happy-ever-after into the heads of every woman he met.

  One which Marion recognised.

  So why today’s meeting?

  Phoebe sighed. The answer was obvious. It was so she could be added to the list—the harem—and thus rendered harmless. Nick and Peter in cahoots as they’d obviously been all their lives.

  The realisation was so depressing it all but overwhelmed her and, head bowed under the weight of it, she headed down the corridor towards the exit and the car park.

  Nick saw her coming and waited by the door. He could read unhappiness, even desolation, in the way she moved, the way she held her head. Something shifted in his chest and he cursed his own ineptitude. He’d started the damn charade in the first place because he’d hated seeing her unhappy, and had only succeeded in making things worse.

  ‘Phoebe?’ he said hesitantly, when it became apparent she was so lost in her own thoughts she was going to walk right past him.

  She stopped as if he’d struck her, and her head jerked up, the startled expression in her lovely eyes evidence of how deep she’d been in thought. Then the expression shifted, momentarily, to what looked like pleasure, only to be immediately wiped away by a remoteness so contained he shivered.

  ‘Oh, hello, Nick,’ she said, supercool. ‘I’ve just met your mother.’

  And with that, she stepped past him, pushed open the door and walked away.

  He hesitated, wanting to follow her, to ask if they could talk. Somehow to make things right between them. But the enormity of what she’d told him held his feet glued to the ground
. She’d met his mother?

  His mother had met Phoebe?

  Peter!

  He strode towards the ward, murder in his heart. Well, maybe not murder but, sick or not, Peter was going to taste a little of his anger. This plan was foiled when he found neither Peter nor his mother in the room. He paced around the bed, ate a couple of grapes, then idly picked up his mother’s sketch pad, which was sitting on Peter’s tray.

  She’d drawn Phoebe as a bride, but not with a veil. Instead there was a filmy mantle of some kind, softly draped across her head. The dress his mother had sketched was simple, draped as well so Phoebe’s lush curves were suggested rather than emphasised.

  Nick felt his groin tighten but it was his heart that was more of a problem. It had spluttered into a panicky arrhythmia, causing his breathing to falter and his entire body to grow hot. He dropped the sketch pad back on Peter’s table and sat down on the bed, one hand pressed to his chest, forcing himself to breathe slowly, taking in great gulps of air.

  Perhaps he’d better see a cardiologist, he told himself, hoping a medical conversation, even with himself, would calm the furore in his body. Carl Simpson would be the man. He’d make an appointment on Monday. Have a thorough check. Do a stress test, the lot.

  His breathing was easier now, and his pulse, when he felt his wrist, steady. He was tempted to glance just once more at the sketch, to prove to himself it hadn’t been the cause of his panic, but decided he was better getting out of the room before Peter returned from wherever he was.

  He’d yell at him later. Some other day.

  Like Monday afternoon at five-thirty? Nick, who’d already had a trying day pretending his body wasn’t reacting to Phoebe’s presence, answered a call to the oncology ward, thinking it was nothing more than routine. But the tension in the air when he entered the ward suggested it might be more than that, and the nurse’s signal that he go to Peter’s room filled him with foreboding.

  But what he found was far from his expectations. Peter was sitting in his wheelchair, and Jackie Stubbings, newly released from Isolation, was in hers beside him—with her mother looming over her. Phoebe was perched on the bed, and Malcolm Graham was standing at the end of it, fidgeting uneasily.