Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit (23 page)

She almost sighed, then realised she seemed to be spending a lot of time sighing these days, so shut it off and straightened in the chair. Loving Oliver might be a fact, but it was an irrelevant one—a secret she had to keep to herself.

It was also a secret she couldn’t allow to have any bearing on the decisions she would make about Emily’s future.

Right now she had to think clearly of the future, not the past, and of practical matters, not love. For Emily’s sake she had to set aside her personal issues and concentrate on the best outcome for her daughter.

She nodded acknowledgement of this decision and rose out of the chair. Time to shower and dress for dinner, to arm herself against whatever seductive wiles Oliver might choose to use. Though to be fair, it probably wasn’t his fault that his body held such a powerful attraction to hers.

Nor were her memories his fault.

Perhaps if she remembered those two things, she could have a normal, adult conversation with him.

‘You look great!’

Three words, a conventional, probably meaningless compliment, and her resolution about the seductive wiles of his body dissolved like sugar in hot water. And so much for deciding not to put on any make-up. Given the limited time and the decision to ignore attraction, all she’d done was shower, pull on a long cool summer dress, then whip her hair up into a clasp on the top of her head, again for coolness.

‘You clean up okay yourself.’

She returned the compliment, but made sure he
knew
it was nothing more than polite conversation by turning from him to lock her door.

In fact, he’d cleaned up so far ahead of okay that for a moment he’d stolen her breath—and her resolve. He was wearing a dark blue shirt that for some perverse reason made his eyes seem greener, and stone-washed jeans that hugged his hips like a lover, revealing the swell of his butt and thick muscled thighs.

‘So…Emily, horses, you say. Does she have a horse?’

They were across the road and on the path leading through the park, the lights already on, although it was barely dusk.

Great, Emily conversation. Clare knew she could handle this, although she now realised that any time she was with Oliver, especially alone with Oliver, was like walking across a floor littered with broken glass—shards of broken dreams?—so she was always aware of having to tread especially carefully.

What was the question?

Horses.

‘Does she have a horse? Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how much the care and feeding of a horse costs? Different in the country, where a horse can live out in a paddock and eat grass, but in a city? They have to be stabled and exercised and brushed and combed and fed, daily tasks beyond the ability of a nine-year-old who also has to go to school.’

Oliver listened to the words, but part of his brain was considering his companion—how beautiful she looked in the long, swishing dress with its fitted top cupping her full breasts, and the thin shoulder straps revealing the smooth golden skin of her shoulders and the pure, taut lines of her neck.

Emily. They were talking about Emily.

‘How much?’ he asked, and Clare stopped in midstride to turn and face him.

‘How much what?’ she asked, her dark eyes shadowed to almost black, and genuinely puzzled.

‘How much does it cost to keep a horse in the city?’

She frowned at him, then shook her head.

‘I’ve no idea—not in actual, up-to-date figures—but I know it’s a lot. But the reality isn’t the cost of keeping the horse, but a nine-year-old’s forever changing goals and passions. Next year—forget that, next week—it might be swimming or hang gliding or who knows what. For the moment, the school provides an adequate outlet for the horse mania. Students who are interested ride one afternoon a week, and there’s the horse camp in the holidays. If she keeps riding, and does well at it, proving she’s committed to it, then later on I’ll think about a horse.’

‘
We’ll
think about a horse,’ Oliver corrected, but the conversation had puzzled him enough for him to ask, ‘How do you know these things about changing goals and passions and nine-year-olds? Are there books?’

Clare smiled, such an open, delighted smile it made something stir inside Oliver’s chest. He hoped he wasn’t back to ectopic heartbeats.

‘There are books—hundreds of books—but I was a girl myself, and though at nine a horse would have been an acceptable passion for someone who lived on a farm, I wanted to be a surfer like my brothers. I nagged and nagged for a surfboard for my birthday but Mum and Dad had enough sense to start me off on an old one of Steve’s. I was still learning to stand on it when a friend got a pair of hamsters and surfing was forgotten in the bid to become a hamster tycoon. I’ve forgotten what came next, but Mum no doubt remembers every one of my enthusiasms—all the things I’d absolutely die if I didn’t get, have, try.’

Had his face betrayed his reaction that she reached out and grasped his arm?

‘Oh, Oliver, I’m sorry. I forgot what a miserable excuse for a childhood you had.’

He stepped towards her and slipped his free arm around her shoulders.

‘Don’t be sorry about your happiness—it’s beautiful to see,’ he told her, then he kissed her, very lightly, on the temple, where a blue vein pulsed beneath her golden skin. ‘And that’s a caress, not a kiss,’ he added as he turned away, steering both of them along the path, but keeping his arm firmly around her shoulders.

It was obvious the physical attraction between them was as strong as ever, however much she might shy
away from their kisses and make rules about not kissing again. So surely if he promoted the attraction, even with a casual hand holding their bodies close, it would be a good thing…

A good thing when she’d flinched and paled and drawn away from him in fear or pain?

He shook his head, determined this night would be different. This night would be about Emily.

It was wrong, walking with Oliver like this. It made Clare think all kinds of things she shouldn’t think, like might not being married to him, being a family with him and Em, be a good idea.

She forced herself to think of how she’d shrunk away from him when he’d kissed her, her movement sheer instinctive fear. And how she’d fled from him last night, afraid it might happen again.

No, marrying Oliver—marrying anyone—was an impossible dream.

‘There’s the restaurant.’ He pointed ahead, and Clare felt a sense of relief that the far-too-intimate walk was nearly at an end. Although they still had to walk back.

‘I’ll pay tonight,’ she said. ‘You got the bill last night and—don’t argue—I’m a working woman and pay my own way.’

‘When I’ve not contributed one penny to my daughter’s upkeep for nine years? Forget it!’

She glanced at him, about to argue that he’d said they’d go Dutch when she saw the set expression on his face. The argument died on her lips as she imagined how emotionally overwhelming it must be to suddenly discover you have a nine-year-old child.

If they were married, she could be more supportive to him, help him in his dealings with Em.

And happily go to bed with him?

She was back on the field of broken glass again.

‘Have you been here before?’

The nice, normal question pulled her out of useless speculation.

‘No, but I believe it’s very popular with hospital staff. Oh, damn, I hadn’t thought about that, and here’s me hoping to keep any relationship between us quiet until after we’ve got Em sorted out.’

Oliver stopped walking on the pavement outside Scoozi, and looked at her.

‘You used not to worry about every little thing. In fact, you plunged into life as if welcoming the rocks as much as you welcomed the diamonds. Is it motherhood or something else that makes you so cautious now?’

Something else, maybe both—but neither was a reply she intended giving.

‘Have you considered it might just be age?’ she said as lightly as she could, given the memories he’d stirred up again.

He studied her for a moment longer, then shook his head.

‘Age doesn’t change a personality,’ he said quietly, then he took her elbow and guided her into the restaurant, agreeing with the waiter who met them that, yes, the garden courtyard would be a lovely place to eat this evening.

Clare looked around her, accepting that some of the other patrons would inevitably be hospital staff but pleased that no-one from their team was dining there tonight. So Emily would be a safe topic of conversation; actually, Emily would be the only safe topic, given the physical tension that still stretched between herself and
Oliver. Some of her colleagues were already aware she had a daughter; in fact, Alex had already met Emily, but now that Oliver had come into the picture, explaining
that
relationship—well, that was too complex to consider right now.

‘Tell me about the school,’ Oliver suggested, as if he, too, had decided his daughter was to be the focus of their conversation.

‘It’s a great place—unbelievable. I’d heard about it over the years because Mum’s youngest brother lives on a property out in western New South Wales and his daughter Caitlin has been a border there since she was about the same age Emily is now. Over the years, we’ve stayed with Uncle Ken in holidays so Em already knew Caitlin, and it was Em who decided, when we came back to Australia, that that’s where she’d like to go.’

‘Is it some distance from where we live? Is that why you opted for the boarding option?’

Clare shook her head, then paused as the waiter set down their drinks and took their food order.

‘It’s a ten-minute ride in a taxi, or if she was a day girl a school bus would collect her outside the door,’ she explained. ‘But as I think I told you, Mum lived with us up until now so she was always there for Em. However, it was time we let Mum go back to her own life, and although I work fairly regular hours there are times I’m called out at night or work late and I couldn’t have Em being on her own. Weekly boarding gives us the best of two worlds as she has friends among the other boarders to do things with after school hours, and we have the weekends together.’

Together.

Although he’d felt he’d been handling this emotional bombshell quite well up to now, that one word caused such pain he actually winced.

Go forward, he repeated to himself. Think of the future, not the past.

‘The text message—did it say what time you could collect her?’ he asked. ‘I was so impressed by your ability to translate it, I’ve forgotten what it said.’

‘Soon after five,’ Clare replied, then her dark eyes met his and she studied him for a moment before adding, ‘I’d suggest you come with me, but that’s too sudden. Give me time to get her home and tell her, then can we leave it up to her?’

‘How, leave it up to her?’

Oliver was aware he was growling, but now a new gigantic worry had loomed up in his mind.

What if she wasn’t excited about having a father?

What if she didn’t want to meet him?

Keeping a scrapbook was one thing, but
meeting
her father…

E
MILY’S
meeting with her father so far exceeded any expectations Clare might have had, that by the end of the weekend she was beginning to feel she was being excluded from a secret society.

Surely she couldn’t be jealous of Em’s delight in finding a father, nor feel put out that Oliver had slotted into the role with so much ease it seemed impossible the pair hadn’t known each other forever.

Having delivered the news in the taxi ride home—incredible coincidence, maybe meant to be, et cetera—Clare shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Em’s first thought on arriving at the flat was to meet her dad.

‘Can I call him Dad?’ she’d asked, doubt in her eyes for the first time.

‘You sort it out with him,’ Clare had replied as she’d knocked on the door, behind which, she guessed, stood a very anxious and uptight Oliver.

By the time the three of them had finished dinner—Em’s favourite lasagne always cooked by Clare on Friday nights—together in Clare’s flat, Emily and Oliver were chatting away like old friends, and the name
Dad
was falling easily off Emily’s lips, and was seemingly as easily being accepted by Oliver.

Saturday they’d gone to the beach, then Saturday night to a movie Em just
had
to see. ‘Does it worry you she seems to take such weird stuff as vampires and werewolves for granted?’ Oliver had asked. So it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon, not long before Em was due back at school, that the scrapbook came out.

‘My gran did scrapbooking so she helped me put it all together,’ Emily said shyly as she handed the carefully decorated book to Oliver. ‘Gran says it will tell you the story of my life in pictures mostly, although there are words as well.’

Oliver was sitting on the couch in Clare’s flat. He seemed to have been there all weekend and his presence had been even more unsettling than the instant rapport the pair had achieved.

Now he patted the couch for Em to sit beside him, and with her by his side, pressed against him, he opened the book.

And frowned.

‘That’s when I was born,’ Emily said, pointing to the first photo. It was a newborn-baby photo like a hundred others Oliver had seen, but it was the set of pictures on the other side of the page that had him frowning. These were pictures he’d seen before as well—a baby in a special-unit crib, tubes and monitor leads attached.

‘Those are when I had my operation. I had a PDA. Mum said I needn’t put those pictures in, but I think that’s because looking at them makes her sad. But I don’t remember and it was part of me, so me and Gran decided they should be there for you.’

‘You had a PDA—you know what the words mean?’

‘I used to know them,’ his daughter answered cheerfully, ‘but I forget. A little something went wrong with my heart and I had to have an operation—that’s when Mum stopped being an actor and started being a perfusionist, because of my operation and learning all about babies with bad hearts.’

Oliver heard the words but his eyes were now on Clare. How could she have kept this from him?

How could she have not contacted him when
this
happened?

She must have read the anger and accusation in his eyes for she shook her head, just slightly, warning him to let it go for now, nodding to the new page open in the book which Emily was keen to show him.

He turned back to his daughter, banking down his anger, but determined to have this out with Clare later. She
could
have found him. He’d written enough papers that simply searching his name on the internet would have produced some hits.

‘Are you looking?’

Emily’s voice brought his attention back to the book, and looking at the pages, photos of his daughter as she grew older, the surrounds of each one decorated with small bears or balloons or pretty flowers, he felt such a surge of love for this child who’d done this for a father she didn’t know that he forgot his anger and simply enjoyed the gift, not only of the scrapbook, but of a daughter.

The explosion came as they drove away from the school, leaving behind a little girl so full of excitement and
delight Clare was worrying more about whether Emily would get sick with it, than any repercussions from the photos.

‘She had a patent ductus arteriosus and you didn’t think to tell me that before I met her?’

The accusation reverberated through the car, bouncing off the closed windows, unmuffled by the leather upholstery.

‘We haven’t had that much time to talk, and why tell you anyway? She had the op, video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery to tie it off. She’s fine—I never think about it.’

Clare hoped she sounded calmer than she felt. Yes, she’d always discussed Emily’s health with her mother, but she’d never had to answer to anyone for the decisions she’d made on Emily’s behalf. Now, here was Oliver—who hadn’t wanted a child in the first place—demanding full disclosure of his daughter’s life.

‘
Never?
She doesn’t have ongoing specialist appointments? You didn’t have her heart checked out before this riding business started? Are you sure she should be riding? Is it safe?’

Clare felt her own explosion building, and the tension of the past few days uncoiled in a flaming rush of words.

‘Do you seriously think I’d put her life at risk allowing her to do something she’s not fit to do? Where do you get off, walking into her life and criticising me, second-guessing my decisions? Of course she has regular check-ups, though only once a year now she’s older. She’s seeing Alex here, and yes, he did agree there was no problem with her riding. I’m not entirely stupid, you know!’

She paused for breath but her fury wasn’t spent.

‘Nor did I keep a daily health diary just in case you might one day turn up in her life. She had whooping cough when she was two in spite of having had the immunisations. Do you want to know that as well? A greenstick fracture of her wrist at four, caused by falling off her bike when she persuaded Mum to take the training wheels off? What else?’

‘You’re being ridiculous now,’ he growled, but Clare didn’t care. The togetherness of the weekend had been bad enough, but now to have Oliver carrying on as if all that had happened in the past was somehow her fault was just too much. On top of that, she hated thinking back, especially to that period of time after Emily’s birth, which was jammed tight with so many bad memories she tried never to think about it.

‘
You
brought it up!’ she snapped, the tension between them as palpable as the electricity in the air before a storm.

Oliver didn’t reply, his silence intensifying the pressure in the atmosphere as they finished the short journey home.

He dropped her off in front of the flats and drove off, Clare so relieved to be out of the car, she didn’t care where he went. But just in case he was simply putting the car away, she fled up the path, unlocked the door and bolted up the stairs to the refuge of her flat.

Refuge? When she was listening all the time for the sound of a vehicle in the back lane, or the growl of the garage doors opening?

She had a shower, hoping hot water might ease the aching tightness their conversation had caused in her muscles. It was okay they’d parted as they had. Seeing

how good he was with Emily had intensified the love Clare felt for him—but only by about a thousandfold. And after a weekend of such togetherness some traitorous part of her brain had been thinking maybe marriage wasn’t such a bad idea.

A platonic marriage, of course.

Which would go down
really
well with Oliver!

But now she was sure he was sufficiently annoyed with her to have forgotten he’d ever suggested it, which should make her feel relieved, not uptight and disappointed.

And angry.

She turned off the water, wrapped a towel around her body, found a copy of Emily’s health file and left it on Oliver’s doormat, then made herself toast and jam for supper, and went to bed. She might not sleep, but at least with all the lights out Oliver might think she slept.

Or had gone out.

That thought made her think some more, her mind tracking along a completely new path.

His assumption that they should marry indicated he was assuming she had no social life at all.

Which she didn’t, but that didn’t mean he should assume it.

Could she conjure one up?

Pretend?

He had a daughter!

Oliver stood on the top of the cliff above Coogee Beach and looked out to sea, trying to assimilate the information, the reality of it.

Emily had been real enough when she was there—chatting so unselfconsciously, showing so little reserve
to a virtual stranger, so childishly confident in the love of the adults she knew that she hadn’t seemed to doubt for a moment he would love her.

He
had doubted—oh, how he had doubted. Yet when he’d looked into those green eyes, familiar from the face he saw in the mirror every morning, something had swelled inside his chest, filling it to capacity, making him feel light-headed and woozy.

Stress, that’s what he tried to put it down to, but her lack of awkwardness should have dispelled stress within seconds and that strange wooziness had remained with him all weekend, less all-encompassing but still there, swelling to maximum power again when she’d given him the scrapbook.

Was it love?

Could you feel love so instantaneously?

So intensely?

How could he know so little about love that he had to ask himself these questions?

Not wanting to think about the answer to that conundrum, he turned his attention to the future, except that thinking about the future meant thinking about Clare and, right now, thinking about Clare fanned the doused embers of his anger.

Logically he could accept that she had done her best to contact him when she discovered she was pregnant. Intellectually he could accept that not hearing from him, she would assume he didn’t want to know his child, especially after the way they’d parted.

But the newly discovered emotional person inside him still blamed her and, blaming her, felt she was the one with the responsibility of sorting out where they went from here.

Because they
were
going somewhere.

All three of them.

The idea of being a part-time father was totally unacceptable. Emily deserved better than that. She deserved a family.

Oliver spun around and retraced his steps to the car. He needed to talk to Clare and he needed to talk to her now.

Clare was lying in bed, not even pretending to sleep because her mind refused to settle, when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

Oliver was returning.

The footsteps hesitated on the landing and she knew he’d have found the file—the photocopy she always kept as they moved the original file from one specialist to another.

She hadn’t left a note, just the file, but surely it was self-explanatory. Yet she didn’t hear a key turning in his lock, instead there was a tap at her own door, then a louder knock.

Depleted of all energy from the emotionally fraught weekend, she didn’t answer the summons. Let him assume she was asleep.

Or out?

She wasn’t sure where the idea had come from, but suddenly the idea of avoiding Oliver for the next few days was intensely appealing. If she could just have a few days to herself—to go to work, come home and pretend life was normal—then by next weekend she might be able to think clearly enough to work out where they went from here in Em’s relationship with her father.

It wasn’t hard. Monday’s operation was a complicated one that Alex and Angus were doing so she wouldn’t
have to see Oliver, and she knew Oliver was working Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, having swapped his weekend duty with Angus so he, Oliver, could spend time with Emily. Clare could go to the pantomime meeting without fear of seeing him there.

Thursday—well, she wouldn’t get too far ahead of herself just yet, but if Monday’s op was a long one, and there was no surgery scheduled for Thursday, she could probably take the day off and start on her Christmas shopping. She’d like to get something special for those nieces and nephews up in Queensland, and something extra special for her mother, who’d been such a rock in her life since Em was born.

Plans are one thing but, in reality, avoiding Oliver was difficult when he catapulted down the stairs behind her as she was leaving for work the next morning.

‘Wait up. I want to talk to you.’

‘And asking so politely too!’

Okay, so snapping at him was petty, but after a week of unadulterated tension, she was desperate for a little Oliver-free time.

‘It’s about
our
daughter,’ he growled, his voice telling her he probably wanted to see as little of her as she wanted to see of him.

She shrugged off the sniping comment.

‘Was any explanation given for the PDA? According to the file she was slightly premature but four weeks is nothing these days. Did the paediatrician who saw her think it might have been genetic?’

Clare sighed.

‘I really, really don’t want to think about that time,’ she muttered. ‘You might not believe it, but it wasn’t exactly a high point in my life. I’ve given you the file, what more do you want?’

She was striding up the road, trying not to get ahead of him but to escape the relentless awareness that stirred her senses whenever he was close.

‘I want to know the nitty-gritty stuff. If we have another child, should we be prepared that this could happen again.’

‘If we have another child?’

The words came out so loudly three pigeons nodding to one another on the roof of a nearby house took flight, the whirring flutter of their wings echoing in Clare’s head.

Along with a lot of other confusion.

‘Why on earth would you suppose we’d have another child? How’s that likely to happen? Immaculate conception?’

He didn’t touch her, but he was walking far too close to her, invading her space in a way she did and didn’t like, her body and mind set on different paths.

‘I told you I thought we should get married, and having met Emily I’m more convinced than ever that it would be the right thing for her.’