Dating the Millionaire Doctor (14 page)

‘Does this mean you'll let me buy it for you?' Jake asked.

‘Why yes,' she said softly. ‘Yes, I believe it does.'

 

They bought Chinese takeaway and took it back to the apartment for dinner because Tori was simply too tired to go on.

Jake usually ate at his kitchen bench. His dining table was covered in journals, half-written papers, important work in progress.

He could sort it and stack it neatly, he thought, but that could take half an hour. Or he could make Tori eat at the kitchen bench.

But if this was the only night he had to persuade her, then he needed to move fast. So he cleared the table by the simple expedient of tipping it lengthways. It worked a treat. Hey, when was the last time he'd seen this table? It had cost him a bomb. It was a great table.

Or maybe not, he conceded, thinking on. The table was of cool-grey lacquer, designed to match the apartment's cool-grey walls. He remembered Tori's scathing comments about grey. Hmm.

Tori was looking at the mess as they ate, bemused. ‘It'll take you days to get that back in order.'

‘I have days.' He'd have all the time in the world after she went home, he thought.
If
she went home.

How to broach it again?

He didn't for a while. They shared their food. They both had soda—he'd have liked a beer but Jancey's catheter might mean he'd be called out again. They listened to music. She liked his music. That was something the decorator hadn't chosen.

‘What time's your plane tomorrow?' he asked.

‘Late afternoon. I figure I'll sleep in.'

‘No more sightseeing?'

‘I hear Soho's good,' she said. ‘But maybe not. You need to go to work, right?'

He did. He'd been trying to figure out how not to need to go to work, but case lists for Monday were always the most complex. If he cancelled, patients would be sent home.

‘You can't let them down,' Tori said softly, and he knew she understood.

He was doing a rapid assessment of cases in his head but it wasn't helping. He'd seen Jack Carver in the cardiac ward on Friday. Jack had severe ulceration on his legs, so severe amputation was becoming an option. He needed shunts to restore blood supply back so they could heal, but he had a cardiac condition and diabetic complications as well. When Jake had done the initial assessment—something he usually avoided but he seemed to be doing it more in the weeks since he'd met Tori—Jack's wife had been holding her husband's hand as though if she let go he'd drown.

‘Please,' she'd said to him. ‘Jack's all I have. Make him well.'

The risk of Jack losing his leg—or worse—was increasing every day he waited. He couldn't reschedule, Jake thought grimly. No matter what he wanted personally, he needed to be there tomorrow.

And Jancey would be watching the door, waiting for him. He couldn't let Jancey down.

‘I could have done with some warning of your visit,' he growled, but Tori shook her head.

‘I suspect you'd still be as busy even if you were expecting me, and I didn't want to interrupt your life. I
don't
want to interrupt your life. Soho will just be shops. I might go on my own or I might just sleep, but either way, I can take a cab to the airport. I don't need your company.'

But her voice wobbled a little at that, and he noticed her fingers crept to the chain at her throat.

‘You should stay,' he said strongly.

‘I need to go home. I need to start my life as I need to go on.'

‘Why not stay here?'

‘We already talked about that.'

‘I'd like to marry you.'

There was a sharp intake of breath. But… ‘You've said that before,' she whispered, still touching her chain. ‘Just because I'm having your baby, it doesn't make it any better.'

‘I think I love you.'

She gazed across the table at him, seemingly bemused. Seemingly astounded. ‘You think?'

‘I don't know,' he admitted. ‘Hell, Tori, I haven't done this before.'

‘Done what?'

‘Become involved.'

‘You sound like it's happened against your will.'

‘Well, what do you think?' he said, raking his hair. ‘I don't have a clue how I'm feeling. But we're going to be parents. You need to rebuild anyway. You've lost everything.…'

And finally she reacted with something apart from shock. ‘I haven't lost everything,' she retorted, and she tilted her chin and met his gaze levelly and calmly.

‘Okay, you've got your dogs,' he conceded.

‘I've got my home.'

‘A relocatable.'

‘I have my community.' The emotion now was suddenly pure, unmitigated anger. ‘I have my work,' she said, struggling to stay calm. ‘You have your work, too. It's important, as my work's important. But I have more. I have
place
. My parents lived and worked at Combadeen and so do I. I know every family rebuilding on the ridge. My parents are buried in the Combadeen cemetery. I've buried my dogs behind our house. Okay, I've been stunned, shocked, gutted by the fires and their aftermath but I'm handling it. And I'm moving on to make a home for myself, in my place, not in some sterile, grey, designer shoebox on the seventeenth floor of a thirty storey tower block.'

‘It's not—'

‘A shoebox? Yes, it is,' she retorted. ‘They're all shoeboxes. It's what's around them that matters, and what's in them. Here, you'd be at work all day every day, and the shoebox would close in on me.'

‘You could work part-time. We could get somewhere a bit bigger. Hell, Tori, you need looking after.'

‘I don't need looking after.'

‘You're pregnant.'

‘And I still don't need looking after.' Her anger was building rather than subsiding. ‘I have a community who cares. I have friends and I have colleagues. You've seen me at a point where I was at my lowest, where the resources of the whole district were stretched to the limit, but don't judge me on that. Don't judge Combadeen by that. There's not one person in Combadeen who'd suggest I live in a grey monument to solitude and go crazy!'

‘You wouldn't go crazy.'

‘I would if I lived here,' she said, rising and glowering. ‘So
would you, but you don't live here either. You use it to crash or to study or to take a shower. No one lives in places like this. Living… Jake, you don't know what living is, and I'm surely not raising my child teaching him this life is normal.'

She closed her eyes then, and she swayed. He was on his feet in an instant, surging around the table to hold her, but her eyes snapped open and she stepped away.

‘No,' she said. ‘Don't.'

‘Don't?'

‘Don't touch me,' she whispered. ‘I was a fool to come. The truth was I wanted to see you, as well as needing to tell you about our baby, but it was wrong. You and me… No. There's no you and me.'

‘Tori…'

‘You're alone,' she whispered. ‘And that's the way you want it. But if I'm alone I'd curl up and die. I need people. I need dogs. I need…life.'

She sighed then and steadied.

‘I'm sorry, Jake,' she said. ‘Getting angry was dumb. Yelling at you is dumb. You're doing the best you can.' She shook her head as if clearing fog. ‘Okay, here's confession time,' she said. ‘I'm trying desperately not to fall in love with you. You say you might love me? Well, maybe I know that I could love you. And you know what that means? If I came here, then you'd risk me clinging.'

He didn't understand. ‘Why would you cling? You have your work.'

‘I'm not talking about my work. I'm talking about needing you, and you needing me. You're fine with the idea of looking after me. Could you ever admit that
you
need
me
?'

‘I…' There was deathly silence.

‘No,' she said, and she was fighting now for the composure she'd lost. ‘Enough. This is dumb talk, and we both know it. We're two mature professionals—we can handle
this. Your work is waiting, and my life is waiting. So please, Jake…'

She took a deep breath. ‘Please, Jake,' she said again. ‘I'm exhausted and I need to go to bed. Thank you for a wonderful day.' Her fingers crept once again to her Celtic knot. ‘Thank you for my chain. I'll keep it for ever. But now…' Another deep breath.

‘Now I'm going into your bedroom,' she said softly, steadying. ‘And I'm going to bed. Alone. That's the way it has to be. We both know that. I guess when I wake up in the morning you'll be gone to work. So I'll get on my plane tomorrow and I won't look back. Yes, you'll want to see our baby. We can work that out later. But we need to do it in a way where I can be normal and civil, and the fact that I had the best night of my life with you, and I'm thinking entirely inappropriate thoughts, can be forgotten. Please, Jake, that's what I need. So goodnight.'

And before he could guess what she intended, she took three swift steps towards him. She took his face in her hands and she kissed him, fast and hard, on the mouth. Then, before he had a chance to respond, before he could hold her as he needed to hold her, she pushed herself away.

‘Goodnight, Jake,' she said, firmly and steadily. ‘And goodbye.'

And she was gone, into his bedroom, closing the door firmly behind her.

And he knew he couldn't follow.

 

It was all very well being angry and virtuous and sure. Anger and virtue and certainty lasted all the way until the door was shut, and then she just felt miserable.

Nothing else. Just plain bad.

He'd asked her to marry him and she'd refused.

She'd hardly had a choice, she told herself, fighting to drum up anger again.

What had she hoped for?

And there was the crux. The biggie. Hope. Finally she was acknowledging exactly what she'd hoped for.

She loved him. She'd told herself that one night together was simply a way of moving on, but it was so much more, and that was regardless of her pregnancy. He'd said he thought he loved her but he didn't know what it meant.

Love.

She thought back to Jake holding her as they'd buried a little koala named Manya. She thought of the way he'd held Glenda's hand, of the way he'd laughed at Bitsy.

She thought of Jake in the ward, talking through a procedure to the patient he was about to anaesthetise, carefully so there could be no misunderstanding. She knew he'd be wonderful.

She thought of the way Jake's body felt against hers.

‘Oh, enough, you're behaving like a moonstruck teenager,' she scolded herself. ‘You've come all this way and he's been lovely. He's taken you sightseeing. He's given you a beautiful piece of jewellery. He's reacted to our baby with honour. He even tried to figure out how he could love you. What else do you want from the man?'

Nothing.

Jake lay on the too-hard settee and stared up at his blank ceiling. Running the conversation over and over in his head.

Love…

Yes, he'd said it, but Tori had known he hadn't meant it and she must be right. Love would be something you learned over months or, more probably, years, a gradual build-up of trust and affection. It surely wasn't what he and Tori had. A one-and-a-half-minute date, followed by one night of passion.

Unbidden, the words of his mother crept back into his subconscious.

‘I fell in love with your father on one meeting. One meeting! How ridiculous was that? He carted me off to some strange country, to a life I had no way of dealing with, and look what happened. Love at first sight? Don't make me laugh.'

Nothing made sense. The night was too long, the settee was too hard, the concept of love and of home was too difficult to get his head around.

That Tori could say she loved him, that she could possibly throw her heart where her head should be, seemed unreal. And if she felt like that, then why wouldn't she marry him?

Should he have insisted he love her? Do the romantic-hero thing?

If he did that he'd be no better than his father.

But he no longer believed in his father as the villain. He no longer knew what he believed in. He was getting into territory that was simply too hard.

And the hardest thing…

The hardest thing was that Tori was right through that door. His woman.

She wasn't his woman. He had no rights.

She felt like his woman.

‘So what are you intending, caveman?' he muttered into the night. ‘Go and stake your claim? You've done enough damage. You have a surgical list longer than your arm waiting for you in the morning. It's not fair on your patients if you don't sleep.'

Somehow he managed to switch off, and sleep.

But he couldn't turn off his dreams.

 

She woke and she knew he'd gone. The cool-grey apartment practically echoed.

She'd thought—maybe she'd hoped—that she'd wake when he left and she could say goodbye, but it had been
almost dawn before she'd drifted into troubled sleep. Her exhausted body had finally demanded what it needed and Jake's bedside clock was telling her it was eight o'clock.

She threw back the covers and padded out to the living room, cautiously, just to see, but the sleek leather settee was back being a sleek leather settee. The spare bedding was neatly folded, ready to be stored back in the bedroom closet.

There was a note on the bench.

Catheter trouble again. Travel safe. I'll be in touch.

A farewell note. How romantic. She crumpled it and slid it into the trash.

The kitchenette was squeaky clean, not even a dirty coffee mug to tell her he'd breakfasted before he'd left. She touched the designer kettle. It was cold. Really cold. He hadn't even had coffee here.

If she lived here she wouldn't have her morning coffee here either, she decided. This place was awful.