Falling for Her Wounded Hero

by Marion Lennox

  ‘Somewhere between infinitesimal and none,’ he told her. ‘We’ll scan at twenty weeks. A good paediatric cardiologist should pick up on any problems then, but I’m willing to bet my new employee’s monthly wage cheque on a good outcome.’ His kindly face creased into a smile of concern. ‘It’ll be great to have you on board, Tasha. Having a new emergency physician will be amazing. But tell me...’ He hesitated. ‘Why are you leaving Cray Point? I hear Tom Blake’s desperate for a partner.’

  ‘Tom’s my ex-brother-in-law,’ she said, trying to sound diffident. As if it was of no moment. ‘That’s why I came here in the first place, to help him while he was ill. But I don’t want to work with him.’

  Adam nodded and then looked studiously down at Tasha’s notes. ‘And your baby’s father?’ he said gently. ‘Would he be on the scene?’

  And there was no use hiding it. If things went to plan, this man would be delivering her baby, and Tom had made it quite clear he wanted to be there for her.

  ‘Tom’s the father.’

  She waited for shock. She waited for condemnation but none came. Instead, Adam searched her face with concern. He was a man in his sixties, with the air of a doctor who’d seen it all, and was surprised by nothing. ‘I know Tom well,’ he said at last. ‘I suspect he’ll make an excellent father, if he’s involved.’

  ‘That’s what he wants,’ she admitted. ‘I’m not sure it’s what I want. This pregnancy...wasn’t exactly planned.’

  He shook his head in mock disgust. ‘Really? I have no idea what they teach medical students these days, but I’m thinking I need to write to the people who trained you.’ There was another silence while who knew what went through the obstetrician’s head, but finally he beamed. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Planned or not, you should make this work. You and Tom... Cray Point and Summer Bay aren’t so far apart. Barring complications, you can deliver here in Summer Bay hospital. We’re small but we’re good. You’ll find this a supportive practice and with Tom supporting you as well...’

  ‘I don’t need his support.’

  ‘There’s no one I’d rather have as my support person,’ Adam said gently. ‘As a doctor, Tom Blake is one in a million. I have no idea what he’d be like as a partner or a father but I’m guessing good.’ And then he shook his head. ‘But that’s none of my business, so all I’ll say is welcome to Summer Bay, Dr Raymond. We’ll be very happy to have you on board.’

  * * *

  She still had a week to go at Cray Point. She drove back feeling faintly ill but it wasn’t morning sickness this time.

  Why was everyone telling her what a great guy Tom was? Why did she feel that everyone was seeing something she couldn’t see?

  Or was it the other way round? Was it that she was seeing—fearing?—something that wasn’t there?

  Tom wasn’t pressing her. After that one night on the back steps with the cat and the pregnancy stick he seemed to have retired into the background. He let her be.

  She still saw him in morning surgery but she’d stopped going to rehab with him. As far as she knew he was back to setting candles and flowers on the veranda.

  ‘You really are a coward.’ She said it out loud as she drove back along the coast road but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Her fear was too deeply ingrained.

  ‘I love him,’ she said out loud, but admitting it made the knot of fear tug even tighter.

  ‘So I’m a coward,’ she told herself. ‘I can’t take a chance, but to do anything else seemed impossible.’

  Tom wouldn’t pressure her. He’d be there for her baby and that was lovely. Sort of.

  If she only had the courage...

  ‘I don’t,’ she whispered. ‘And there’s not a thing I can do about it.’

  * * *

  Three more days.

  Hilda and her father were due back on Tuesday. Tom still wasn’t operating at a hundred percent but he was coping.

  There was a nice little hospital apartment waiting for her at Summer Bay.

  She’d done what she’d come for. She needed to move on.

  With baby.

  But she was trying very hard not to think of baby. It was so early. She could still miscarry. Anything could happen.

  ‘You’re a wound-up ball of emotion,’ Rhonda told her. ‘Why not relax, dear? Tom wants to take over. Why not let him? Enjoy your last weekend. You could even go surfing. Tom reckons he’ll be back in the surf any day now.’

  ‘All the more reason for me not to relax,’ she snapped, and then she recovered and apologised.

  What was happening to her? She was turning into a grouch.

  Maybe that’s what terror did.

  She spent Saturday morning thinking about packing but most of the time she sat and stared out the window to the bay beyond. She needed to organise her own car. She needed to organise her new home, to move on, but she seemed trapped in a fog of lethargy.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ she told herself. ‘I have a great new job. I have a neat apartment and I can choose a lovely new car. I’ll...’

  And then she paused because she couldn’t think past that.

  I’ll what?

  Carry this baby to term? Have a safe delivery? Live happily every after?

  Without Tom.

  Without courage.

  She was feeling so bleak she was close to tears, but tears were stupid. When the phone rang she was so desperate for distraction she almost ran to it, but Rhonda beat her. And as Tasha reached the hall she saw Rhonda’s face lose colour.

  ‘It’s Tom,’ Rhonda said, putting the phone down, and the look on her face scared Tasha to the bone.

  ‘Another bleed?’ Please, God, not another bleed.

  ‘Tasha, no, sorry. I’ve scared you more than Karen’s just scared me. No, Tom’s okay.’

  ‘Karen?’

  ‘You know Karen, our taxi driver. She’s rung to say three lads have been bird-nesting on the cliffs above the bluff. Alex, James and Rowan. Of course, those three again! Of all the idiots... It’s loose shale and a sheer drop to the rocks and surf below. Stupid, stupid kids. It was Rowan who almost killed himself last time and came close to killing Tom with him. Rowan only suffered bruises but Tom ended up with a cerebral bleed. Now it’s James at the bottom of the cliff, and Tom’s saying he’s climbing down to help him. With his weak leg and arm. Karen says can we come because someone’s got to stop him, but the lad’s in trouble and Tom says he’s going anyway.’

  * * *

  It should take ten minutes to get from Rhonda’s to the bluff but Rhonda covered it in what seemed two, driving like someone in a James Bond movie and swearing all the time.

  ‘Idiot, idiot, idiot,’ she kept muttering. ‘He thinks he has to save the world. Where would this town be without him, and he risks it all for one stupid kid? Again.’

  ‘Do we know how badly James is hurt?’ Tasha asked in a small voice as Rhonda took the next turn on two wheels. Tasha hardly noticed.

  ‘Broken leg. Pete Simmonds has gone down—they called him first because he’s a climber. An abseiler. He went down, risking himself, but he says there’s hardly room on the ledge for one. Apparently he’s anchored James and come up again to let a medic go down. Karen says there’s something urgent needs doing with James’s leg that can’t wait for the rescue chopper. So Tom’s saying he’s going down and Pete’s just realised how weak Tom’s leg is and Karen says you need to talk sense into him.’

  Talk sense into a Blake boy? She didn’t think so but Rhonda swung the car off the road onto the bluff and skidded to a halt beside the Cray Point fire truck, and Tasha was left with no choice but to try.

  Tom was already kitted up. He was wearing a harness. He was kneeling by the cliff edge, sorting gear into a backpack, looking grim. He didn’t look up as Tasha approached.
He didn’t see her until she put her hand on her shoulder and held. Hard.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked, and she was a bit stunned by how her voice came out. She sounded angry.

  But he kept right on packing. ‘I need to go down,’ he told her. ‘James has a compound leg fracture. Pete says it’s bent back at an impossible angle and the foot’s cold to the touch. He’s conscious, ten feet above the surf. The rescue chopper’s caught up with an overturned boat and might be an hour. I’m going down now.’

  ‘Have you abseiled this type of cliff before?’

  ‘Pete’s told me how.’

  ‘So that’s a no?’

  ‘I can do it.’

  ‘With a gammy leg and a gammy arm.’

  ‘There’s no choice and you know it.’ Still he didn’t look up. ‘If I don’t go down, he loses his leg. He might die.’

  He was moving morphine ampules from his bag into the backpack. She stooped, took the ampoules from him and put them in herself.

  ‘Just pack the light stuff,’ she said. ‘You can lower saline, oxygen, anything heavy I need when I’m down there. I’ll need a thinner loop line attached as well so we can guide stuff down.’ She looked up at a man who must be Pete—he was big, burly and carrying a coil of businesslike rope. ‘Can we organise that?’

  ‘Sure, Doc,’ Pete said with an uneasy glance at Tom. ‘I’m so sorry I can’t do stuff myself but I never learned any first aid. Blood makes me want to pass out and the last thing the kid needs down there is me unconscious on top of him.’ He hesitated. ‘So you reckon you’re going down instead of Tom?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  Tom sat back on his heels and stared.

  ‘Of course you’re not. I can do this.’

  ‘You might be able to,’ she said, meeting his gaze square on, ‘if you’re lucky. But you have no climbing skills and you still have left-sided weakness. Pete, what are the odds on a first-time climber making it?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Pete said. ‘It’s loose shale. You can’t depend on footholds. The kids were damned fools to be here. It’ll take skill.’

  ‘I have skill,’ she said evenly, and then both men were staring at her.

  ‘You,’ Tom said, as if she’d suddenly grown two heads.

  ‘It’s called trying to keep up with Paul,’ she said. ‘He wanted to climb things, and for a while I tried to go with him.’ She managed a smile. ‘I gave up in the end—Paul was never happy unless the climb was dangerous and it turned out he didn’t want me with him anyway—but I learned from good people and I’ve climbed places more difficult than this. Take off the harness, Tom. This is my call.’

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ Tom said.

  ‘But you were going down.’

  ‘I’m not pregnant,’ he retorted.

  And suddenly she grinned. Suddenly it seemed like she was back in her emergency ward in London, arguing responsibility with a macho colleague. Equal rights for women had come a long way in medicine but there were still male doctors with a deep-seated belief in their own superiority.

  She’d learned to bypass them with humour, no matter how grim the situation. Now she simply reached out and tugged Tom’s harness. She took one shoulder, Pete took the other and the harness was removed from Tom before he could react.

  ‘You’re right, I’m pregnant and you’re not,’ she agreed equitably. ‘At least I hope you’re not. But I don’t exactly have a bulge big enough to get bumped. Next objection, Dr Blake?’

  ‘You can’t. Hell, Tasha...I’ll go nuts if you go down there.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘You’ve already said that. So you’d rather I sat up here and thought the same about you.’

  ‘Yes!’

  She smiled again, then looked at the people clustered around them. ‘Okay, let’s make this democratic. Rhonda, Pete, Karen, we need to vote. On this side of the argument I give you an experienced emergency medicine specialist with solid abseiling skills. I’ve done much harder climbs than this. I’m fit and I’m prepared. I’ll admit I’m also in the very early stages of pregnancy but I have no side effects and that shouldn’t make a difference at all.’

  ‘But that’s my baby,’ Tom groaned, while the onlookers’ collective jaws dropped.

  ‘That makes a difference how?’ Tasha asked serenely. ‘It seems Pollywig’s about to have an adventure. You taught me with Emily to introduce my baby to life early. So... Pete, Karen, Rhonda, on the other side of the equation we have Tom, a skilled doctor admittedly, but with no experience in this sort of climbing and residual left-sided weakness. We need to vote. Now.’

  But there was no voting to be done. Pete was clipping her harness on, and after a moment’s loaded silence Tom finished loading the bag. His face was drawn, his mouth grim.

  He rose and helped her on with the backpack. ‘You dare fall...’

  ‘I don’t dare anything,’ she told him, taking the backpack and meeting his gaze square on. ‘It’s the Blake boys who dare. I’m using my skill set. There’s a difference.’

  ‘I shouldn’t let you.’

  ‘Sense, Tom, instead of bravado. Who’s the most sensible candidate for the job?’

  He closed his eyes and when he opened them again she knew he agreed. He still looked grim but he also looked resigned.

  ‘I’m with you every inch of the way.’

  ‘I know.’

  And then he smiled, a weary smile that said he was hating what was happening but he knew it was inevitable. Then he took her shoulders and tugged her forward and kissed her.

  It was a fast kiss, as circumstances dictated it must be, but it packed a punch. It was hard and strong and an affirmation of worry, of fear. Of love?

  And there was also something else. When he pulled away she saw an expression that could only be described as pride. ‘You’re one amazing woman, Tasha Raymond,’ he told her.

  ‘I’m a doctor doing her job,’ she told him, and only she knew just how much she wanted to sink back into his arms. But there was work to be done. ‘Let’s get me down there.’

  * * *

  She’d sounded confident when she’d talked her way into this job. In truth, she was a long way from confident. Climbs could be graded in difficulty and this was high on the scale. The shale and the lack of footholds, the knowledge that her feet could dislodge rock that could fall to the boy below, the steepness of the slope and the roar of the surf...they combined to make a climb where she had to use every one of her skills to keep herself safe.

  Pete must have known but he hadn’t said, she thought as she manoeuvred herself down the cliff, and she thought Pete would probably prefer it was her risking her neck rather than Tom. Because Tom was the town’s doctor and the town loved Tom.

  As she loved Tom. His image stayed with her, as did the look on his face as she disappeared over the edge of the cliff. There wasn’t a person there who didn’t look frightened, but Tom...

  He looked haggard and she hated that he looked like that.

  Every trace of her concentration was taken with climbing, keeping herself steady, not disturbing the shale, but deep within she was conscious of an almost subconscious undercurrent of thought.

  Tom was almost as terrified for her as she’d once been terrified for Emily. But he’d let her go. He’d conceded she had the skills and he’d stepped aside, even if it had almost killed him.

  She was suddenly thinking of Rhonda’s words.

  ‘It was Rowan nearly killed himself last time and nearly killed Tom with him. Rowan ended up only with bruises but Tom ended up with a cerebral bleed.’

  And suddenly she was thinking of the meaning behind Rhonda’s words. Maybe she hadn’t asked enough questions. She’d assumed Tom had been injured doing his
own reckless, Blake boy thing, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d been in the position she was in now, where he was the one with the skills. He’d been able to surf so he’d been the one to rescue Rowan.

  Smashing his head might not have been because of reckless behaviour. It might not have been no more reckless than what she was doing now.

  She’d categorised him as a Blake boy. A womaniser. A testosterone-driven risk-taker.

  Maybe she’d been wrong.

  She was two-thirds of the way down now, closer to the boy at the bottom than she was to Tom, but suddenly she felt so close to Tom it was as if he was physically beside her.

  It had taken courage to let her go. She knew it had. How much harder to stand aside and let the one you love take the risks...

  She was taking a risk now, she acknowledged as she fought to keep herself steady, fought to stop herself spinning and hitting the shale.

  How much greater a risk was falling for Tom?

  How much greater a risk than falling was loving someone who loved her?

  And then she found herself thinking of Iris and Ron and their appalling relationship, and then back to her own dreadful marriage. And suddenly she was swinging on a rope half way down a cliff, thinking she must have had rocks in her head until now.

  ‘Because Tom’s been my very best friend for almost two years,’ she whispered. ‘So how can I possibly compare? I think I must have been a little bit mad.’

  * * *

  He was going quietly crazy.

  Pete was doing all the work, feeding out line, keeping in radio contact to give advice, keeping Tasha as safe as he could, so for the moment there was nothing Tom could do.

  Pete’s face was grim. He knew the risks. He knew what Tasha was being asked to do.

  James’s parents were clinging to each other. James’s friends were huddled against their parents, turned from defiant teens to children again, wanting comfort.

  ‘We were just trying to reach the easy nests from the top,’ Rowan was muttering, and his dad gave him a clout across the shoulders and then hugged him.