Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit (6 page)

‘Come on,’ Angus said, ‘let’s get changed. Kate’s taking us to the beach.’

‘Are you, Kate? Are you really?’ the little boy perched on Angus’s shoulders demanded.

Stupid, this is stupid getting more involved with them, but something in the anxious young eyes made her reply immediately.

‘Of course. Get your swimmers, or whatever you Yanks and Scots call swimming costumes and meet me at the shed in my backyard in half an hour.’ Kate turned back to Juanita. ‘You’ll join us.’

Juanita looked far less interested in a trip to the beach than Hamish had been.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to stay at home. I need to send some emails to my family to let them know we’ve arrived and are settling in, then I must make some phone calls about the ex-pat organisation and bridge club.’

As Angus and Hamish had disappeared into their house, Kate assumed this would be okay with him, so she nodded to Juanita and hurried inside herself, worrying again because a swim was just what she needed to wash away the tension of the day. But on the other hand, letting Angus McDowell see her lily-white body in a swimsuit, especially on a beach full of bronzed bathing beauties, was a very embarrassing idea.

As if he cared what she looked like in a swimming costume, the common-sense half of her brain told her, though the sensible admonition wasn’t strong enough to stop a rather wistful sigh.

She changed into her swimming costume, pulled shorts and a T-shirt over it, then dug through the kitchen junk drawer in search of the car keys. She used the car so rarely, the keys got buried under spare change, receipts
and reminder notices from the library—even an apple core, today, although how that had got in there, Kate had no idea.

Then out the back door, locking it, and casting a quick glance at her pots to check if they needed watering. Later—she’d do that later, because excited voices from the far end of her backyard told her Angus and Hamish had arrived.

‘We came down the lane,’ Angus explained, ‘although I’ve found the gate between the properties. I just haven’t had time to hack through the jungle to release it.’

It’s because he’s got this outer carapace of an easygoing man that I feel as if I’ve known him for ever,
Kate decided as she unlocked the shed and turned on a light, revealing her father’s ancient old car. But all he lets people see is the outside…

‘That’s your car?’

Two voices chorused the question, the younger one excited, the older one full of disbelief.

‘It goes,’ Kate said defensively.

‘I think it’s super,’ Hamish announced. ‘Like something out of a storybook. Has it got a name?’

As a person who thought giving names to inanimate objects was stupid, Kate longed to say no, but if she did, the car would probably hear her and refuse to start.

‘My father called it Molly,’ she admitted, hoping maybe Angus, who was walking around it, examining it the way one would an antique, hadn’t heard, but just in case he hadn’t, Hamish made sure he knew.

‘Did you hear that, Dad? We’re going for a ride in Molly.’

He was patting the car’s pale blue paintwork, his little hands leaving prints in the dust, so Kate was squirming
with embarrassment before she’d even opened the doors. She did that now, helping Hamish into the back seat, pulling down the booster seat and fastening the seatbelt around him, then getting in the car herself.

‘Molly?’ Angus queried softly as he slid into the passenger seat beside her.

‘My father named her.’ Defensive didn’t begin to describe how Kate felt, until she remembered—‘And if you want to borrow the car to visit your dog at the weekend, then I don’t want to hear another comment, thank you.’

Before Angus could reply, Hamish began chattering about McTavish and how much he would like a car called Molly, and the child’s innocent delight in the situation eased Kate’s tension, so by the time they’d driven around the immediate neighbourhood and arrived at the beach at Coogee, she’d even stopped worrying about Angus seeing her in a swimming costume.

He’d have been better not having seen her in a swimming costume, Angus decided as their chauffeur slipped out of her shorts and shirt, revealing a pale but perfect body. All of his mother’s figurines were decorously covered, so it wasn’t a similarity to one of them that sent his heartbeat into overdrive.

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.

‘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.’