Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit Page 6

  It must be the prolonged period of celibacy his libido had been suffering. His last female friend had fallen out with him six months ago over the amount of time he spent with Hamish. The argument had been fierce, mainly because Angus knew he spent the time with Hamish in an attempt to make up for what he didn’t give the child. Not love, exactly, for he loved him deeply, just…He didn’t know what the ‘just’ was, except that it was there—a missing link.

  But the outcome of that argument had been that he’d decided it was easier to stay out of relationships for a while, especially as by that time he’d been offered the job in Sydney and had known he’d be moving on.

  So, have a swim and settle down, he told himself, shucking off his own shorts and polo shirt, then following his son and Kate down to where green waves curled, then broke into foaming swirls that slid quietly up the beach.

  ‘These are big waves.’ The awe in Hamish’s voice made Kate smile. ‘In Scotland we have little waves and in America there aren’t any beaches.’

  ‘Not where you lived,’ Kate reminded him, forbearing to point out America had thousands of miles of coastline on two oceans. He was jumping the waves as they washed towards him, shrieking with glee, and Kate’s heart ached with wanting. To have a child, her own child—any child, she was beginning to think.

  Although it was a baby her arms ached for…

  ‘Want to go out deeper?’

  Angus scooped up his son and strode towards the curling waves.

  Presumably Angus could swim.

  Kate watched them go, the ache still there—stronger if anything. It was all to do with family. Were Angus and Hamish a family? Was the base of family solid beneath the little boy? Had it not been solid in her case, even before Susie drowned? Had her family been doomed to disintegrate like so many families did these days, even before Susie died?

  She could see the pair in the deeper water, ducking under waves, and remembered times, after her mother died, when she and her father had come to the beach. He would take her out into deep water and throw her over the waves. He’d loved her, Kate had no doubt of that, but it had been a detached, distracted kind of love, the kind one might give to a specially favoured pet, the concept of family perhaps as unfamiliar to him, another only child, as it was to Kate.

  Enough! She dived beneath the next wave, surfaced for a breath, then dived again, coming up beyond the breakers, feeling the water wrap around her body, cooling and soothing her, reminding her of all the wonderful things in her life, counterbalancing the aches.

  A good wave was coming, rising up above the others, curling early. Swimming hard she caught it and rode it to the beach, aware of passing Angus and Hamish on her way. She lay where the wave had left her on the sand until an excited little boy joined her.

  ‘Will you teach me to do that, will you, Kate, will you?’

  Kate rolled over and smiled up at him.

  ‘I surely will, champ,’ she said. ‘Next time I’m at the shops I’ll get you a little boogie board. It’s easiest to practise on that in the shallows, then I can take you out in front of me on my bigger board. One day when you’re older, if your Dad decides to stay in Sydney, you might learn to surf. See the people at the far end of the beach, standing up on their surfboards?’

  ‘Can you do that? Can you teach me that?’

  His excitement had him hopping up and down, splashing her with water.

  ‘There are better teachers than me, for board surfing,’ she told him, sitting up and looking around for Angus. Perhaps she should have asked if he could swim! Then his body, sleek as a seal’s, slipped onto the beach beside her.

  Angus sat up and shook the water from his hair.

  ‘I didn’t catch it way out where you did,’ he said to the woman he’d been watching since she was deposited on the sand, a slim white mermaid in a green bathing suit. ‘I just surfed the broken bit. It’s been a long time since I caught a wave—student days at St Ives in England, an annual summer pilgrimage.’

  He’d flopped onto the tail end of the wave to stop thinking about her, but now, this close, not thinking of her was impossible. The beautiful skin, so fine and pale he could see the blue veins in her temples, and in the slender lines of her neck, then the fiery red hair, darker now, wet and bedraggled, framing her face like a pre-Raphaelite painting.

  ‘Kate is going to teach me how to ride on the waves,’ Hamish announced, and now colour swept into her cheeks.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you knew how. He asked me, but of course, you’re a surfer, you can teach him.’

  ‘Maybe we could both teach him.’

  Angus heard the words come out and wished there was some way he could unsay them. How could he include someone else in his family before he’d made sure it was a family? It had obviously embarrassed her, as well, for the colour in her cheeks had darkened, and she stood and headed back into the water.

  ‘I’ll just catch another wave.’ The words floated back over her shoulder before she dived beneath the breakers.

  ‘Can I do that? Can I?’ Hamish demanded, so Angus put thoughts of pale-skinned mermaids right out of his mind and concentrated on teaching his son to dive beneath the waves.

  ‘Time for a shower and something to eat?’

  Angus and Hamish, the diving lessons over, were sitting on the beach, making sandcastles, when the mermaid surfed right to their feet, lifting her head to ask the question.

  ‘We can shower up on the esplanade,’ she added, pointing towards the road, then, as if that was all the information he would need to realise the swim was over, she stood and walked back to where they’d left their towels and clothes. Angus hoisted Hamish onto his back and followed, thanking Kate as she picked up their clothes and handed them to him.

  ‘There are changing rooms if you don’t want to put your clothes on over your swimmers,’ she said, ‘but I find it’s cooler to stay wet underneath, and as we can eat our fish and chips in the park, it doesn’t really matter.’

  Very matter-of-fact, yet that was what this outing was, a neighbourly gesture.

  So why did he feel disappointed?

  Feel as if something had changed between them?

  For the worse!

  She held their clothes while he showered with Hamish, then dried the little boy with her towel while Angus dried himself.

  Being busy with Hamish meant Kate didn’t have to look at Angus’s sleek, wet body. She’d always considered herself immune to hormonal surges of attraction but the man next door was definitely setting her hormones in a twitch. What to do about it was the problem.

  Keeping her distance from him would be one answer, but that was impossible when she not only worked with the man on a daily basis but also lived next door to him.

  So she’d have to fake it—pretend to a platonic neigh-bourliness she was far from feeling.

  ‘The Frisky Fish is the best for fish and chips, or it was last time I bought any.’ She finished dressing Hamish and straightened up as Angus, his body now suitably covered, came to join them.

  ‘That one just across the road?’

  Such a simple question but his accent really was to die for! She was thinking accents when she should have been answering but now it was too late, for he was speaking again.

  ‘I’ll buy our dinner,’ he announced. ‘I know what Hamish eats, what about you—a serve of fish and chips?’

  The dark eyes were fixed on her face and Kate found it hard to pretend when just this casual regard made her feel warm inside.

  ‘I’m more a calamari person—not into fish at all—and could I have a battered sav, as well?’

  ‘Battered sav?’ Again man and boy made a chorus of the question, though Hamish added, ‘Oh, I want one of those, as well.’

  ‘Just ask for it, you’ll see,’ Kate told Angus, smiling at his bewildered frown. ‘Hamish and I will bag us a table.’

  She took the excited little boy by the hand and they walked through the park until they found a vacant table.

&
nbsp; ‘I’m going to kindy tomorrow—Dad’s taking me,’ Hamish told her, and though he sounded excited there was a hint of anxiety in his blue eyes.

  ‘That will be such fun for you,’ Kate said. ‘Meeting lots of new friends, finding people to play with at the weekends. Maybe we can bring some of your friends to the beach one day.’

  ‘When I can ride the waves so I can show them,’ Hamish told her, and Kate wondered at what age children developed a competitive streak.

  She asked about his friends back in America and laughed at the adventures he and McTavish had shared, so she was surprised to see nearly an hour had passed and Angus hadn’t returned. The Frisky Fish was popular and you usually had a wait while your meal was cooked, but this long?

  ‘Here’s Dad! He’s remembered drinks even though we didn’t tell him.’

  Kate turned to see Angus approaching, holding white-wrapped parcels of food in one hand, a soft drink and a long green bottle in the other. He reached the table and put down the white parcels, gave Hamish his drink, then deposited the bottle on the table.

  ‘I haven’t a clue about Australian wines. I drank a fair bit of it in the U.S., but none of the names were familiar so I asked the chap behind the counter what went with battered savs.’

  He was pulling two wineglasses from his pocket as he spoke, then he looked apologetically at Kate.

  ‘I do hope you drink wine. I didn’t think—should I have got you a soda, as well?’

  ‘I’d love a glass of wine,’ Kate assured him. ‘Especially a glass of this wine. The bloke at the wine shop saw you coming, and sold you something really special—really expensive, I would think!’

  Angus smiled at her, destroying most of her resolution to pretend she felt no attraction.

  ‘Phooey to the price, as long as you enjoy it. We can both have a glass now and you can take the rest home to enjoy another time—it’s a screw-top.’

  He poured the wine, then busied himself unwrapping Hamish’s dinner, showing him the battered sav.

  ‘It’s a kind of sausage called a saveloy that’s fried in batter,’ he explained to Hamish, who was squeezing tomato sauce onto it with the ease of an expert in takeaway food.

  ‘And don’t think you’ll get one too often,’ Angus added. ‘Full of nitrates, then the batter and the frying in oil—just about every dietary and digestive no-no.’

  ‘You’re just jealous you didn’t get one,’ Kate told him, biting into hers with relish, then she laughed as Angus delved into his white package and came up with one.

  ‘Well, I had to try it, didn’t I?’ he said defensively, but as he bit into it, he pulled a face and set it back down, deciding to eat his fish—grilled not fried, Kate noticed—instead.

  ‘They’re not to everyone’s taste,’ she said, ‘but my father was the food police like you and I never got to taste one as a child, so I became obsessed later on in life.’

  ‘Obsessed by battered savs?’ Angus teased.

  ‘Better than being obsessed by some other things I could think of,’ Kate retorted.

  Her next-door neighbour for one!

  Chapter Four

  KATE stopped the car in the back lane outside their gate and watched the two males walk into their yard, the taller one looking straight ahead, although Hamish was chattering at him.

  He was a good father, Angus, Kate told herself as she pulled into the shed that did service as a garage for Molly, but she sensed that something was amiss in his relationship with his son. Back when she was young, she’d felt guilt—blamed herself—for her family’s disintegration, thinking that if somehow she had managed to save Susie, everything would have been all right. It was this, she knew, that had led her to accept that, although her father loved her, there would always be a wall between them, so even when he was dying they couldn’t talk about the past.

  Had his wife’s death built the same kind of wall between Angus and Hamish, or had Angus simply shut himself off from all emotion to shield himself from further pain?

  And just what did she think she was doing, pondering such things? she asked herself as she closed the double doors of the shed. Why was she considering the convoluted emotional state of someone she barely knew?

  Because you’re interested in him.

  The answer was immediate and so obvious she felt a blush rising in her cheeks and was glad that Angus wasn’t around to see it. A dead giveaway, her blushes.

  She thought of Clare instead, of the dark-haired beauty, and reminded herself that if Angus McDowell decided to be interested in a woman on their team, then Clare would surely be the number-one choice.

  Kate grumped her way inside, a depression she rarely felt dogging her footsteps, but as she showered she thought of baby Bob and realised how little she really had to complain about.

  Refreshed, she opted not for lounging-at-home clothes—in her case a singlet top and boxer shorts, her pyjamas of choice—but for respectable clothes—long shorts and a T-shirt, reasonable hospital visiting clothes. She’d just pop up and check not only on Bob but on Mr and Mrs Stamford, as well, to see how they were coping.

  ‘There’s something wrong? You’ve been called in?’

  The panic she’d felt when she saw Angus by Bob’s crib was evident in her voice, but when he turned and smiled at her she realised she’d overreacted.

  ‘Did you think you were the only one who likes to check on patients, even when there’s no reason for alarm?’ he said.

  Damn the blush.

  ‘Of course not,’ she managed stoutly. ‘It was just that seeing you there with him gave me a shock. Mr and Mrs Stamford?’

  ‘Gone to get a bite to eat. I said I’d stay.’

  Was there an edge of strain in his voice that the statement pinged some memory in Kate’s head?

  ‘I got the impression you didn’t like getting too involved with patients and their parents?’

  He frowned at her but she was getting used to that.

  ‘I think a certain degree of emotional detachment is necessary in our job.’

  But even as Angus said the words he knew it hadn’t always been that way. He also knew that it was seeing Kate Armstrong’s empathy with Mrs Stamford that had broken through a little of his own detachment, enough to lead him to suggest he stayed with Bob while the couple ate together.

  Was this good or bad, the breakthrough?

  He was so caught up in his own thoughts it took him a moment to realise Kate was talking to him, pointing out the oxygen level in Bob’s blood, suggesting they might be able to take him off the ventilator sooner, rather than later.

  Dragging his mind back to his patient, he nodded his agreement.

  ‘The operation is so much simpler when the coronary arteries are good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking the same thing about the ventilator when you came in. Maybe tomorrow morning we’ll try him off it.’

  They stood together beside the crib, Angus so conscious of the woman by his side he knew he had to be very, very wary of any contact with her outside working hours. Admittedly, her taking them to the beach, her offer to lend her car at the weekend, were nothing more than neighbourly gestures, and he wouldn’t want to rebuff her or offend her, but every cell in his body was shouting a warning at him—danger, keep clear, problems ahead.

  Kate felt him closing off from her and wondered if he’d been offended by her comment earlier—the one about detachment. But if he was closing off from her, well, that was good. It would be easier for her to pretend that’s all they were, neighbourly colleagues, in spite of how her body felt whenever she was in his company.

  She felt hot and excited and trembly somehow, physical manifestations she couldn’t remember feeling since she was fifteen and had had a crush on the captain of the school’s football team. Not that he’d ever looked at her, nor even stood close to her.

  She stepped away from the crib, turning to greet the Stamfords, who’d returned from their dinner.

  Pete Stamford eyed her with suspicion, and she wondered if
he was worrying again, thinking the presence of two doctors by his son’s crib meant there were problems.

  ‘It’s a habit,’ Kate was quick to assure him. ‘I find I sleep better if I do a final check of my patients before I go to bed.’

  Pete nodded and Mrs Stamford, who still hadn’t offered them the use of her first name, shook her head.

  ‘Maybe all the horror stories we hear about health care are exaggerated,’ she said, and Kate knew it was an apology for her anger of the morning.

  ‘I don’t think the news channels would attract an audience if they didn’t exaggerate a bit,’ she said, then she said goodnight to the couple, including Angus in the farewell, and left the PICU.

  Angus caught up with her in the elevator foyer, and though he’d told himself he should linger with the Stamfords until Kate was well away from the hospital, he felt uncomfortable about her walking home on her own this late at night.

  ‘Oh, I do it all the time,’ she said when he mentioned the folly of a woman walking the streets on her own. ‘There are always people around near the hospital. Cars and ambulances coming and going, police vehicles—we’re not quite in the middle of the city, but we’re close enough and the streets are well-lit.’

  ‘There’s that dark park across the road,’ he told her, stepping into the elevator beside her and wondering if it was the enclosed space, or her presence within it, that was making him feel edgy.

  ‘The park’s well-lit, as well,’ she told him, smiling up at him. ‘I’m not totally stupid, you know. I wouldn’t take any risks with my personal safety, but around here, well, you’ll see.’

  And see he did, for there were plenty of people around as they walked down the street towards their houses. People, cars, ambulances and, yes, police vehicles.

  Too many people really.

  Far too many!

  The thought jolted him—hadn’t he just decided that Kate was nothing more than a neighbourly colleague? But the light steps of the slim woman by his side, the upright carriage and slight tilt of her head when she turned towards him…something about her presence was physically disturbing. So much so he wanted to touch her, to feel her skin and the bones beneath it, to tilt her head just a little bit more, run his fingers into the tangled red hair and drop a kiss on lips so full and pink they drew him like a magnet.