And all of a sudden he felt...small. Cowardly.
Stupid.
And with that feeling, suddenly things cleared. The ice wall was a thing he’d made to defend himself, to defend others, but if all it caused now was hurt... Dammit, surely he could kick it down? Or melt it? Or even climb it and see what was on the other side. Sure, he might fall, but why not try, because the only risk was to be left where he was now. The option made him shudder.
So...kick the thing down? Expose the other side?
‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ he said out loud, because that wall had been important for so long. Dudley and Maisie both looked at him in concern.
‘I’m not kidding,’ he told them, and went to knock on the next-door neighbour’s door, because Ruth had offered babysitting and he needed a couple of hours. Now, before he lost his nerve.
Along with everything else, he thought.
But then he thought, What am I talking about? I’ll only lose if I don’t try.
Or if she doesn’t want—
‘Don’t go there,’ he said out loud, because Hannah not needing him was unthinkable.
But then he caught himself and stood for a moment while his thoughts caught up with him. While he acknowledged the truth.
He didn’t need Hannah to need him.
He needed Hannah.
The plane landed at dawn.
It was an appalling hour to arrive anywhere, Hannah thought as she collected her baggage and made her way through Customs. She’d told Josh he wasn’t to meet her. He’d protested, but she’d been adamant. The airport bus stopped right outside the hospital. She’d meet him at the apartment.
Everything’s in order, he’d texted back. You’ll find us shipshape and ready to move on.
Which meant she needed to be ready to move back to the life she’d planned from the moment Ryan had left her. Single mum. Midwife. There was a complication with dogs, but she’d find homes for the pups. And she’d love keeping Maisie.
The thought should cheer her, as should the thought of being reunited with her baby.
It did, sort of, but as she made her way through the gates her legs felt leaden.
Fatigue? Probably. She should have slept on the plane but too much had happened. She was emotionally wired.
She sort of hoped Josh might have disregarded her instructions and come to meet her anyway.
He hadn’t. The arrivals hall was a sea of anxious faces but as she tugged her suitcase through the throng there was no one she recognised.
Of course there wasn’t. He’d reacted with anger to the thought of swapping Erin over at the airport and of course he was right. To take a sleeping baby out of her cot at this hour... No, he’d be at the apartment, packed, ready to leave.
As was sensible. He knew she didn’t need him any more.
So think of practical things. Taxi instead of bus?
It’d cost her a mint, but maybe she could splurge. She was so weary.
But sense prevailed. The bus left every half-hour and it stopped right by the hospital. She tugged her case toward the bus stop...and then stopped.
Stunned.
There seemed to be balloons where the bus should be.
Or maybe they were in front of where the bus should be. She couldn’t tell. All she could see were balloons. Rainbow balloons, every colour she could imagine. And in the front of the balloons... Josh.
Holding a baby.
Her baby.
She dropped the handle of her wheelie case and it fell unheeded to the pavement.
Josh was here.
And it wasn’t just Josh. What on earth had he set up on the pavement?
He’d brought her a playpen he’d bought when he’d furnished her apartment. ‘I won’t need that until Erin’s at least a year old,’ she’d told him, struggling to make him take some of the stuff back, to limit his generosity.
He hadn’t listened, though, and it was being used now. He’d set it up on the pavement and tied balloons all around it, helium balloons so they waved and fluttered six to eight feet off the ground.
And the playpen was full of dogs—Maisie and Dudley and four balls of wide-eyed, waggy-tailed fluff: puppies who seemed to have doubled their size since she’d last seen them.
There was a bus behind the balloons. Her bus? People were gathered as if waiting to board but no one was boarding.
They were watching Josh.
Who was watching Hannah.
‘I hoped you’d have the sense to catch a taxi,’ he told her as she stared. ‘But I knew you’d catch the bus. My thrifty Hannah. Welcome home, love.’
And stupidly she said the first thing that came into her mind. ‘I’m not your love.’
‘That’s something we need to discuss.’ He walked forward to meet her. Erin was awake in his arms, interested, curious. She gave her mother a huge, toothless beam and Hannah thought any minute now her heart might melt.
Josh eased Erin into her arms, and she stood, gazing down at her baby, taking in every tiny detail, while Josh stood back and looked at them both like a genie might look at Aladdin. Beaming with genial pride. Ready to grant any wish she might make?
Which was nonsense. This was nonsense.
‘Why?’ she asked, her voice faltering with emotion and fatigue. ‘Why have you brought the dogs? And Erin. And all this...stuff. Josh, this is crazy.’
‘This is to stop me going crazy,’ he told her.
The pups were going nuts. Maisie and Dudley had jumped out of the playpen and were leaping ecstatically around her. The puppies were trying to reach their parents. The bus passengers were looking agog.
‘I had to bring them,’ Josh said apologetically. ‘They’re family. I’m sorry about not being in the arrivals hall to meet you but there’s some dumb rule about not letting animals past the entry door. So I set this up here. I did give your photo and my phone number to the guy organising the taxi rank in case you decided to be extravagant. If you’d turned up there, we would have done a sprint.’
‘With all this stuff?’ She was trying hard to make her voice work.
‘These people were planning on helping me,’ he told her, and grinned at the sea of faces around them—the crowd was swelling by the minute with people were attracted by balloons and puppies. ‘This gentleman...’ he motioned to a thick-set airport security officer ‘...thinks he’d like to buy one of your pups. I told him he’d need be thoroughly vetted but so far Maisie and Dudley seem to approve.’
Hannah turned to stare. The guy in the uniform gave her a sheepish wave. ‘I like the one with the white eye patch,’ he told her. ‘She’s a ripper. I reckon I could train her to come to work with me.’
‘Josh...’
‘I know, it’s too much to take in,’ Josh said apologetically. ‘But the thing is, I need to say something and I need to say it now.’
‘Need...what?’
‘Will you let this guy hold Erin for a minute?’ Josh suggested, motioning back to the security officer. ‘His name’s Michael. He has four kids of his own and he’s very reliable.’
But as if on cue Michael’s radio alarm sounded. Michael lifted it and listened.
‘Yes, we do have a situation down here but it’s a minor domestic and it’s sorted,’ he said into the radio. ‘No, I don’t need back-up, sir. Yes, we’ll clear it as soon as possible but I believe the lady is feeling faint, what with all the excitement. There’s a doctor in the crowd. If I give them just a few minutes, sir, I believe we’ll have the situation under control with minimum impact.’
He hooked his radio back on his belt and grinned at Josh. ‘You heard. Ten minutes. Get on with it, Doctor.’
‘Get on with what?’ Hannah demanded, wholly bewildered.
‘Making the lady not faint,’ Josh told her. ‘Hannah, try not to faint while I say this because my
medical reputation’s at stake. Love, I have something to ask.’
‘Josh...’ She was struggling between laughter and tears. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Josh said. ‘And this bus leaves in ten minutes and Michael’s superiors might send in the riot squad if we haven’t dispersed. No pressure, love, but...’
Pressure? Her lovely steady Josh... Her hero... He’d lost it, she thought. There wasn’t an ounce of sense in any of this.
Oh, but he was here, and he was smiling at her.
She was struggling for sense amid chaos. Okay.
Deep breath. She was, after all, a midwife, she told herself. Calming hysterical situations was in her remit. ‘We do need to disperse,’ she managed. ‘Josh, where’s your car? We don’t need to keep these people here any longer.’ Move away, her tone said. Nothing to see here, people.
But it seemed there was.
‘We’d kind of like to know the answer,’ Michael said. ‘He’s going to—’
‘Don’t you dare say it before I do,’ Josh interjected. ‘Sorry, love, I had to tell them or Michael here would have moved me on.’
‘Too right,’ Michael said, grinning, and he reached out and took Erin, and Hannah was so gobsmacked she let her go.
‘What...?’
‘Okay, this was maybe a dumb idea,’ Josh conceded hastily. ‘When I thought it through I hadn’t factored in Security. But now we’re here...’
‘Now we’re here, what?’
‘Will you marry me?’
He said it in a rush, almost panicked, and it brought them both up short. For a moment they stared at each other. Even Josh seemed too stunned to take it any further.
‘Help, I didn’t get that right,’ Josh said, and there were mutters of agreement—and disapproval—from the onlookers. ‘Can we try again?’
‘Josh—’
‘Shush, love,’ he told her. ‘I will get it right. Give me space.’
‘Seven minutes max,’ Michael warned, and Josh waved acknowledgement, but his gaze didn’t leave Hannah’s.
He delved into his pocket and hauled out a tiny crimson box.
He dropped to one knee.
‘I can’t believe I’m seeing this,’ an elderly lady from the bus queue said. ‘Ooh, it’s giving me palpitations.’
‘You can be my fainting lady if I have to explain this away,’ Michael said kindly. ‘You want to lie down?’
‘I want to watch,’ she said with asperity.
‘Yes, but the bus is due to leave, and she hasn’t even answered,’ someone else said.
‘Bus ain’t leaving till she does,’ a woman in a bus driver’s uniform declared, and Hannah gasped and choked and looked down at Josh.
Who was looking up at her.
Who was holding a ring.
Who was holding her heart.
‘Josh, don’t...’ she said falteringly. ‘I can’t. You know you don’t want me. You’re just kind and lovely and caring. You’re a hero and you rescued me, but I don’t need rescuing any more.’ She bit her lip but she made herself say it. ‘I don’t need you.’
‘Don’t you, love?’ Josh said tenderly, and suddenly their extraordinary backdrop faded into insignificance. Everything faded to insignificance. There was only this moment. This man. Josh.
‘You don’t want marriage,’ she managed, forcing the words out. ‘And, honestly, Josh, I don’t need it. I don’t need you.’
‘That’s just it,’ he told her. ‘I’ve been thinking of all the ways you could need rescuing, racking my brains to think of any way I can be useful. And, honestly, Hannah, I can’t think of one. But I’ll try. I need to try because... Hannah these last few days... I’ve figured...my vow to stay isolated was just plain unworkable. Unthinkable. Or maybe it was thinkable until I fell in love.’
‘Ooh,’ said the lady with palpitations, but Hannah didn’t say anything at all.
‘You see, there’s need and there’s need,’ Josh said, almost apologetically. ‘There’s physical need, like hauling you out of sinking cars and delivering babies and—’
‘And sex,’ some yahoo called out.
‘Thanks,’ Josh said dryly, but he caught her hands and smiled. ‘Yeah, there’s sex, and I’ll admit that I’ve pretty much thought of that from the moment I met you. But there’s the other need. The need that makes me ask—makes me plead—that you’ll become my wife. For I need you, Hannah. When you found me—or when I found you—I was as near to a hermit as made no difference. I might have hauled you out of a car but you hauled me out of so much more. Out of an existence I look back on now with disbelief. When Alice died I pretty much closed down. It took you, my beautiful, funny, strong, wonderful Hannah, to show me how to open up again. To be open to my need as well as yours. To be open to love.’
Whew.
There should be a word bigger than gobsmacked, she thought dazedly. There should be a word to describe—the fact that her heart was about to burst?
‘So what about it, Hannah, love?’ Josh asked, and she looked down into his eyes and saw anxiety riding above all else.
He truly thought she wouldn’t? It was enough to make her dizzy all over again.
‘Two minutes,’ Michael warned. ‘They’ll bring a squad.’
‘Shut up,’ the palpitating lady snapped, and Michael gave her an apologetic look.
‘Sorry, but it won’t do a mite of good saying we’ve got longer. There’s other buses wanting to use this bay. So what about it, love?’ he demanded of Hannah. ‘Marriage or not? Put the man out of his misery?’
And Hannah stared around her at the sea of concerned faces, of these people she’d never met in her life. At her dogs. Her puppies. At her baby in the security guard’s arms.
Home, she thought mistily. How could she have thought it was anywhere but right here?
And she dropped to her knees to face Josh.
‘What about it, love?’ she said, smiling mistily at her beloved. ‘Shall we put them out of their misery?
‘Hannah... Will you say...?’
‘Of course I’ll say,’ she said, and then she tugged him into her and kissed him gently on the mouth. And then she tugged away.
‘And of course I’ll marry you,’ she told him loudly, as the crowd roared their approval and he gathered himself together and tugged her into what he termed a proper embrace. An embrace that would have lasted...a lifetime?
‘Time’s up, people,’ Michael said warningly.
‘No,’ Josh said, cupping Hannah’s face in his hands and tugging her mouth to join his. ‘Time’s starting now.’
Baby steps.
That was what Josh had warned her to expect. ‘This isn’t a miracle, Hannah. There’s so far to go. Every step forward seems to produce more complications but this...well, come and see.’
So she sat up the back in a conference hall at one of the most eminent universities in the world, while Josh and his team presented their progress.
Madison sat beside her, clutching her hand. For Josh’s sister this was almost as huge as it was for Hannah. ‘Of course I’m coming,’ she’d said breathlessly when Josh had rung to tell her. ‘Josh, I’m family.’
And there was yet more family, for unbelievably Bridget was outside, playing with two-year-old Erin. Erin couldn’t be trusted to stay quiet during such an important presentation, but when Hannah had told Bridget she and Josh would be in London her sister gone very quiet. Two days later she’d rung back.
‘I’ll be there. I’m even telling our father. And I’m coming to Australia to visit,’ Bridget had breathed. ‘And, Hannah... Our mam... She says she has money Gran left her, and she might just use it to come, too. Can you believe it?’
She couldn’t. She’d believe it when it happened.
Baby steps.
Which was what was happening in f
ront of her. The team had left the stage, leaving only Josh and Oscar.
Twenty-year-old Oscar had been a surf fanatic, supremely fit, vibrant, active. A wave had dumped him into a sand bank four years ago and he’d been a quadriplegic ever since.
Three years ago, when he’d had been chosen for this first major trial, Oscar had simply been ‘the patient’ when Josh talked of him. Josh had carefully made his work impersonal. All the fittings and trials had been done by Josh’s team, with Josh working on technicalities in the background. Two years ago, though—post-Hannah—the friendship between the two men had become deep and abiding, and Josh’s research had flown because of it.
Alone on the stage, Josh was adjusting the last of the electrodes that wired Oscar to an exoskeleton.
The exoskeleton was a simple brace—or maybe not so simple—supporting Oscar’s lanky frame. The first frame they’d built had been so bulky it had been impossible. They now had it down to twelve kilograms—they’d get it lighter—and it took only five minutes to fit.
A simple cap contained electrodes that sent neural signals from Oscar’s brain to the exoskeleton. Because of day-to-day electrical interference—such as someone using a cellphone nearby—sensor patches were attached beside Oscar’s eyes so he could adjust errant signals with vision.
The five minutes were almost up. Oscar, a big, eager kid, sat in his wheelchair, looking excited.
Josh looked tense. As he should. On this prototype lay hopes of massive international funding, hopes of helping so many.
Done. Oscar grinned up at Josh. Josh managed a tense smile back and stepped away.
Oscar was alone.
He wasn’t completely alone, though. In the audience was Josh’s team, men and women who’d put their hearts and souls into this research. The entire team seemed to be friends, as Oscar was a friend. They were all now Hannah’s friends.
And Josh’s friends.
Josh and Hannah’s little family now lived right in Townsville. Camel Island would always be their happy place, their place of peace, but it was no place to be part of a community. Their new home, on the hills overlooking the sea, was full of dogs, friends, love and laughter.
And child.
Pregnant Midwife On His Doorstep Page 17
