The Doctor's Unexpected Family

by Lilian Darcy

  I’m keeping the baby. I’ll welcome as much of your involvement as you want to give. I’m sorry to put you in this position. I was careless, but I’m not attempting manipulation, or pressure. I can’t come to London with you. Robert would never let Josh go so far away, and I couldn’t live half a world from my son. I know there are mothers who can do that…Maybe if he was a different kind of child, but he’s not, and anyway I just don’t think I could do it. I’ll come as far as Sydney, if you want me to.

  Preparing to spoil this quiet, lazy evening together with her roughly rehearsed speech was like preparing to leave a heated house and jump into an icy pond. She was terrified of how this could end up, terrified of all the wrong, impossible things Declan might say, and the more time that passed, the more impossible it seemed for her to tell him tonight.

  Would it be so wrong if she didn’t? If she waited just one more day?

  Declan began to stroke her side. His hand nudged the side of her breast and his lips brushed her cheek. She turned to him, the helpless captive of his kiss, caught as always in the intricate net of sensation created in her by his warmth, his scent, his male strength against her.

  ‘Better?’ he whispered. ‘Not so stressed now?’

  ‘Much better,’ she answered.

  ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CAROLINE made love to Declan that night as if it were the last time, and believing that it well might be. She trembled as she took off her clothes beside the bed, and when he held her, skin to skin, a moment later.

  ‘Cold?’ he asked.

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s how it is for me too, always.’

  She slid on top of him, captured his face between her hands and gave him kisses like precious gifts, distinct and separate, as if she wanted him to remember every one. She kissed his mouth and his closed lids, his earlobes and the fine skin beneath, the pulse in his throat and the invisible line that arrowed from between the two wings of his collarbone down to the hard, flat muscles of his stomach.

  As she moved on him, she felt the new weight of her breasts and the electric sensitivity of her darkened nipples as a reminder of her pregnancy, but she just couldn’t tell him about it and thus let go of this precious night, couldn’t risk losing it when she might never have it again. She doubted he’d notice the way her body had already begun to change, despite how powerfully they were attuned to each other now.

  And she was right. He didn’t.

  He laced his fingers behind her neck and lifted himself up, seeking her breasts with his mouth, then toppled her onto her side and took the dominant position, paying her back in kind for every delectable caress she’d inflicted on his skin. He could make her glory in her own body, purely because of the way he reacted to it, and she hungered for his body in a way she hadn’t known was possible.

  ‘Touch me,’ she begged him raggedly. ‘Don’t stop. Any of it.’

  Arching her back, she reached for him. His mouth was no longer enough. She wanted his weight on her, and she wanted him joined to her. As he thrust into her, she thought fleetingly of the life they’d already made together, rocked by their rhythm. Its heart should already have begun to beat.

  But then all thought was swept aside as they cried out together, and only when she came back to earth did she discover that her cheeks were once more wet with tears. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, and she only stirred when he left the bed in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘Declan?’ she said, her voice croaky with sleep.

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you. I’d better finish the night in my own bed. I’ll see you at work.’

  ‘Couldn’t you get back to sleep after I left?’ Declan asked Caroline the next morning, in the corridor outside her office.

  She had blue smudges beneath her eyes and a papery look to her skin. He wondered, not for the first time, how he could take some of the load from her shoulders. Offer himself to her brother as a part-time stockman? Hardly! He’d had a growing sense, over the past couple of weeks, that fate had done a dirty trick in throwing the two of them together with such powerful chemistry.

  On paper, they were no good to each other at all. Unless…

  ‘No, that was fine,’ she answered, cutting across his thoughts. ‘I dropped off to sleep again straight away. But the boys decided to act like elephants this morning at around dawn.’ She brought a fist to her mouth, and he thought she was stifling a yawn, but then she turned on her heel, gasped, ‘Excuse me,’ and raced for the bathroom, with the same urgency he’d seen in her, at a distance, on Friday.

  A couple of disparate events and impressions threaded themselves together in his mind. Like coloured beads on a string, they began to make a pattern. He was a doctor after all.

  Along in the lab, Julianne caught sight of him and called out, ‘The Costanza biopsy is ready for you, Dr McCulloch. Remember? The case Dr Forsythe phoned you about yesterday.’

  He knew it couldn’t wait. A patient of Pete Croft’s in the twelfth week of her pregnancy had showed signs of cervical cancer on a routine Pap smear. He needed to examine the biopsied material to determine if it was invasive. The future of the pregnancy would hinge on the result.

  After an hour of meticulous scrutiny and several minutes of reeling off medical terminology into the microphone attached to his computer, Declan was ready to sign off on the diagnosis. He phoned Bren Forsythe and summarised what he’d found.

  ‘It isn’t invasive. It’s CIN 2.’

  ‘So the baby is safe and the mother will just need a cone biopsy at ten weeks’ post-partum. That’s good news. Thanks for giving us a diagnosis so fast.’

  Caroline was back at her microscope when Declan had finished his conversation with Bren. He crossed the corridor and put a hand on her shoulder, and she jumped. ‘Ready for a break?’ he asked.

  ‘I just took one, not long ago.’

  ‘I noticed. You hared down the corridor, like a teenager sneaking a smoke during school recess. Again. Is that the second time today? Or the third?’

  This time, she flinched. ‘Are you angry with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said bluntly. ‘Tell me if I shouldn’t be.’

  Her voice dropped to a whisper, and he saw tears brimming in her eyes. ‘No, in fact, you probably have every right to be,’ she said, ‘But that doesn’t mean I can take it right now. I’m a bit of a mess.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’ Out of the corner of his eye, Declan saw Natalia shift in her seat and stare at them. She looked alarmed, but he didn’t care. ‘Let’s just go.’

  He led Caroline to his car, aware of the careful way she was breathing, and then he just drove, not even thinking about where he was going until he realised he’d automatically taken the route that led towards Cargoola, and her brother’s farm.

  They weren’t going that far today.

  He remembered the sign for a picnic area that he’d noticed, in passing, on previous occasions. Just around this bend? Yes. He made the turn, and found a sealed road that led down to the river, ending at a parking area that was empty on a Monday morning. Caroline hadn’t spoken a word.

  She did so as soon as he switched off the engine. ‘Have you guessed?’ she said. ‘You have, haven’t you?’

  ‘If you’re pregnant, then, yes. I’ve guessed.’ It came out more bluntly than he’d intended. She’d told him she wasn’t strong enough for his anger today. Well, neither was he. Worse, he didn’t fully know why he was angry. The emotion churned inside him, real and powerful all the same, and it rendered him helpless in a way he hated.

  ‘I did the test on Friday,’ she said.

  ‘And you couldn’t have told me that you suspected before that?’

  ‘I didn’t suspect before that. I put it down to fatigue and stress. Then I remembered that stomach upset. I did the test straight away.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me. I had to work it out for myself. You didn’t drink wine last night. You did
n’t touch your tea, or look as if the dinner you’d made had any appeal. I put it down to fatigue and stress, too, until I caught you running to the bathroom again just now, and remembered that you were doing it on Friday, too.’

  She didn’t answer.

  He stared ahead through the car windscreen, then felt her hand on his thigh. The sensation of weight and warmth dragged his gaze in her direction, and he found a raised chin and eyes that glittered.

  ‘Tell me why you’re so angry, Declan.’

  ‘I’m not saying it makes sense,’ he said helplessly. ‘I might even apologise for it in a minute. Possibly I’m being terribly unfair.’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’ Caroline told him. Her jaw locked painfully over the words, because if she didn’t clench her teeth like this her stomach would heave again. She opened the car door, needing the influx of fresh air. ‘Just explain. You think I did this on purpose? Planned it in collusion with Tom, perhaps, to get you to stay? A baby’s the last thing you want, obviously.’

  She couldn’t stand the confinement of the car any longer. Pivoting, she thrust her feet to the ground and stood up, then headed for a huge, smooth-trunked eucalypt that leaned toward the slow-flowing water. Touching its grey bark, she found comfort in the hard, sculpted surface, and her stomach settled back where it belonged.

  Declan had followed her.

  ‘No. A baby is not the last thing I want,’ he answered, his voice harsh. ‘It’s not the last thing I want at all. It might have been the best thing in the world, if you’d let me in on the secret straight away. If you hadn’t made love with me last night, knowing about it and saying nothing, leaving me out of the loop, for three whole days, on something this important. You know what that tells me? That you don’t consider I’m involved. That you’ll make whatever decisions you make without believing that my input counts.’

  ‘No! That’s not how I felt, Declan.’

  ‘Then you need to explain. I don’t want to be angry with you, Caroline.’ He gave a wry, painful grin. ‘Because I’ve discovered it hurts too much.’

  Well, she knew how that felt!

  ‘I wanted to tell you,’ she said. ‘I picked up the phone, Friday lunchtime, as soon as I’d seen the result. But you hadn’t mentioned a future to this. For us. Tom told me just last week that you were still talking about your job in London. The date you had to be back there. I wanted to wait until I’d had time to think. I wanted to word it in exactly the right way so you wouldn’t feel pressured.’

  ‘Pressured?’

  ‘There’s nothing for you in Glenfallon. We’ve all known that all along. I’ve had to remind Tom of it more than once. The department’s a waystation in your career. What we have…what we’ve had…is a waystation in your life. I realised that you would have assumed all along that the London deadline made that clear to me, and I felt blind and naïve for not looking that far ahead. Or not with my eyes open anyhow. Instead, I just closed them and fell completely in love with you in blissful disregard of any realistic considerations about your future or mine.’

  ‘Caroline, you’re wrong.’ He stepped closer. ‘About all of this.’

  She let out a painful laugh. ‘Is that possible? Think about what you’re saying.’

  ‘There’s everything for me in Glenfallon. Tom…needs to be fobbed off sometimes. You know that. If we’re having a baby, that slots the whole thing into place. The final piece that just fits it all together. I’ve been wanting something like this. Needing it. A truckload of cement.’

  His accent turned the words into poetry, and her pulses began to race as her heart swelled.

  ‘Something solid and real and unbending,’ he went on, ‘that I’ve never found before. I love you.’ He took her in his arms and looked into her face, searching for the right answer from her.

  ‘Oh, Declan…’ She felt too overwhelmed to say more.

  ‘That counts. So much. And we’re having a baby together. That counts even more. London isn’t important. It never was. It was just where I trained, and for a while after that there’d been no reason to move away. With my family scattered far and wide, nowhere else exerted a pull. Until now. You want to stay in Glenfallon, where your son is happy, near your parents and your brother and his family, and that’s enough for me. More than enough. Because I love you and I want to marry you.’

  ‘Yes, oh, yes.’ Happiness flooded her, spilling as tears, turning into kisses, and they didn’t say anything coherent to each other for quite some time.

  When they did, it was about Josh.

  ‘How will he feel?’ Declan asked.

  ‘He likes you.’

  ‘As an unthreatening work colleague and friend of his mother’s. How about as a stepfather? That’s different.’

  ‘Something for us to work on. I’m pretty confident about it, Declan.’ She laughed, dizzy with happiness. ‘Suddenly, I’m confident about a lot of things!’

  ‘Like becoming a parent again?’ he whispered, still holding her close. ‘It’s new for me, so you might need to help.’

  ‘It’ll be new for me, too, with you.’

  ‘Tell me why you’re confident about Josh.’

  ‘Having Mattie and Sam with us and having Josh go out to the farm more often might help him with this, I think. Not to mention his half-sister and stepmother in Sydney. He already has a sense that families have blurred boundaries. Expanding boundaries. There’ll be some difficult moments, I’m sure, but nothing long term.’

  ‘I’ll do my best on that, Caroline.’

  ‘Oh, Declan, I know you will! Robert said that if I married again, he’d rethink his insistence on Josh going to Woodside. Do you mind if I hold him to that?’

  ‘Do I mind having Josh living with us, instead of bumping him off to boarding school in Sydney? Josh isn’t the only one who’s going to discover the joys of expanding family boundaries, you know.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  ‘You’ll have a whole lot of new Irish relatives in your life when we take this little thing over to show off, in a year or so. I can’t wait for that. So much I can’t wait for, sweetheart, except I don’t want to wish away any of this.’

  He put his hand over her stomach, where their baby grew, and Caroline lifted her face and kissed him again, too happy to speak.

  Declan did wish away some moments during the months that followed.

  He could have done without the times when Caroline—first his fiancée, then his wife—was gripped by nausea, sleeplessness and backache. He could definitely have skipped that terrifying hour immediately before their wedding ceremony, when every doubt he’d ever had about himself in particular and the institution of marriage in general seemed to coalesce into an enormous, sticky, rock-hard wad in his throat.

  Would he make her happy? Could he live up to the light he saw in her eyes when she looked at him? What kind of a father would he be, to Josh and to the baby due to be born at the end of March?

  His doubts had disappeared the moment the ceremony began, and hadn’t resurfaced in the months since. Caroline’s parents ended their Queensland experiment and moved back to Glenfallon, to the house they’d once rented to him. They were already looking forward to taking care of the baby during the part-time hours Caroline planned to work. Sandie completed her remaining cycles of treatment and joyously reclaimed her place in the lives of her boys out at the farm. Christmas passed, with Josh away in Sydney with his father for two weeks. When he returned, Caroline moved awkwardly through a hot January, getting him ready for school.

  Robert had accepted Ranleigh as a substitute for Woodside, and Declan’s ‘male influence’ as a substitute for his own. Since they went out to Comden Reach every second weekend, Declan’s apparently valuable masculinity received frequent shots in the arm. He’d learned to fix fences, administer treatments to sheep and drive a tractor, and was secretly astonished at how much he enjoyed helping Chris with the hard physical work of the farm.

  Now, why was that? Just because it provided such an extr
eme contrast to his professional routine? More than that, he thought. It was about regaining a sense of family that he hadn’t had since his siblings had scattered, years ago.

  March arrived—the end of a summer that hadn’t been nearly as harsh as last year’s. They’d had good enough rains last spring to fill up the tanks and dams and tide them through the heat. The sheep were healthy, and the garden around the Comden Reach homestead looked lush and filled with produce.

  ‘This will be our last trip out here until after the baby’s born,’ Caroline said to him as they wandered around the vegetable garden together, picking vegetables and salad items for the evening meal.

  ‘I’m looking forward to bringing my parents for a look at this place.’

  ‘You’re getting quite possessive about it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Possessive about a lot of things,’ he answered, almost gruffly. He squeezed her shoulders and kissed her neck. Found it harder than ever to keep his hands off her now.

  Sandie sat on the veranda, watching them, as they came back to the house. She’d put on some weight over the past three months after the frightening amount she’d lost last year, and her hair had grown back curlier and lighter than before. The whole family worked very hard on keeping her as well rested and healthy as possible, and so far her body was responding the way they all wanted.

  ‘You’ve dropped,’ she said to Caroline, as they came up the steps. ‘Have you noticed?’

  ‘I did think I was breathing a little easier today. And feeling sort of…’ She didn’t finish.

  ‘I should think so!’ Sandie exclaimed. ‘Watching you walk just now, I could really see it. That baby is low!’

  Declan felt a little impatient at Sandie for interrupting Caroline so quickly after that trailed-off sentence. Caroline was feeling ‘sort of’ what, exactly?