‘I get that. It’s just... I didn’t think I could feel...’
‘Well, don’t feel,’ she said, breathless now but angry again. What was he doing, sitting on her back step looking like he was offering her the world when she knew very well that the world wasn’t his to offer? Her tiny part of the world was prescribed, definite, and there was no escape clause.
‘I don’t think this thing is something that can be turned off at will,’ he was saying.
‘Then put a plug in it. Take your wine and go back to your side of the hospital.’ While she was away he’d shifted out of his hospital bed and was staying in an apartment used for the occasional patient relative who needed to stay overnight.
‘I will—in a moment. Elsa, I’m not threatening you.’
‘But you are. My life can’t change. I have no choice.’
‘You have no choice but to change.’
‘But not with you.’
‘Elsa.’ He reached out and caught both her hands, compelling now, assured. ‘You sound terrified but there’s no need. I’m not threatening,’ he repeated.
‘You are.’
‘Is it me you’re frightened of or the situation?’
There was no answer to that. She tried to sort it in her head, but her head was struggling to co-operate. Was she frightened of her situation? Being forced to leave the island to make her living somewhere else? Was she terrified of breaking her grandfather’s heart by insisting he leave the island, too? Yes, she was.
Was she frightened of Marc? No, but she was frightened of the way she was feeling.
He was being practical whereas she...
She was totally, absolutely terrified, because falling for this man, exposing what she wanted most in all the world seemed unthinkable.
‘Elsa, relax,’ Marc said, gently now, as he watched her face. ‘Stop it with the convolutions. Just feel.’
Just feel. So easy for him to say. But his hands were holding hers. His eyes were holding hers too, and what she saw there... She managed to fight back panic just for a moment, and in that moment something else surged in. Something sweet and sure and right. Something strong enough to drive everything else from her tired mind.
Love? Who knew? All she knew was that suddenly she was over trying to understand what she felt. He was sitting beside her in the moonlight, turned towards her. His eyes were gentle, kind and he was tugging her close.
She should protest. She should pull away. She should do a million things.
She didn’t. The night seemed to dissolve. Everything melted away as his hands tugged her closer. As he released her for a nanosecond so that instead of holding her hands he was cupping her face. Tilting her chin. Looking into her eyes, searching for a truth she didn’t understand.
The fight, the logic had simply disappeared.
Almost of their own volition, her arms moved to hold him, and with that hold came surety, strength, power. In the last few days her world had been tilting so much that at times she’d felt in danger of falling off.
This man was no long-term safe anchorage—she knew that—but for now he was here, he was Marc, and he was holding her.
He wanted her and she wanted him. Nothing more, nothing less.
He was holding her, but he’d paused, a fraction of a breath away from kissing her. This was no practised seduction. The final decision was being left to her.
And with that knowledge came a longing so strong, so fierce that any reservations disappeared into the night.
He was giving her space but she wanted no space.
‘Yes,’ she murmured. She hardly knew whether the word was said out loud or not, but there was room for no other.
His mouth claimed hers, and the way she was feeling there’d be no need for words for ever.
* * *
What was he doing?
He knew damned well what he was doing. He was kissing a woman he wanted in a way he’d never wanted a woman before.
To have and to hold... He’d heard those lines before, in the marriage ceremonies of countless friends, but until now they’d simply been a formality.
They weren’t a formality. To have and to hold. That was what he wanted, what he was melting into—a sense of rightness...desire. Possession?
She was in his arms and she felt as if she belonged. She did belong there. This was his woman and as his mouth claimed her, so did his head.
Elsa. His woman.
She was letting him kiss her, and unbelievably she was kissing him back. The desire between them was white-hot, a fire that felt all-consuming.
The porch light was on. They could probably be seen by half the island—and indeed Sherlock had backed away and was watching them, his head cocked to one side as if this was a moment he should take note of. It was merely a kiss, but it felt like much, much more.
It felt like a joining. A claiming. It was a sensation of being where he belonged. Home? Who knew what such a word meant, but it suddenly seemed like a siren song.
And when they finally pulled apart, as pull apart they were forced to do because Sherlock finally decided what they were doing seemed interesting and he might just join in, Marc knew his world had changed.
‘Elsa...’ The word was a caress. She was looking at him in confusion. Her hands were cupping her cheeks and a blush of rose had spread across her face.
‘I don’t...’
‘Don’t understand? Neither do I.’ He went to take her hands again, but she pulled back. As he watched he saw her confusion turning to fear.
‘Marc, don’t.’
‘You don’t want this?’
‘Yes. No! I can’t.’
‘Why not, my love?’ Was this the first time he’d ever used such an endearment? No matter, it felt right.
But the look of fear was still there. ‘Marc, I can’t afford to fall in love with you.’
‘Hey, I’m cheap to run,’ he told her, trying to take the fear from her face. Trying to make light of what seemed so important. ‘In fact, I might even run in the black rather than the red. I make a decent income as a cardiologist, you know, and I’m wealthy in my own right.’
She tried to laugh but it didn’t happen. It turned into a choke that seemed perilously close to a sob.
‘As if that matters. Marc, this can’t happen. It’s far too soon.’
‘Well, too soon is something we can do something about,’ he told her. ‘We have all the time in the world to sort out too soon.’
‘You’re going back to Sydney.’
‘Which is where I think you should go, too. I have friends, influence... Love, there’ll be a score of jobs for a doctor with your skills. You’ll find work in a minute. My house is huge and you’re welcome to stay there, but if it’s indeed too soon then we can find you and Robert a decent apartment while we figure how long is soon enough.’ Then he glanced at Sherlock who was looking at him in confusion. ‘Or,’ he added practically, ‘a house with a backyard.’
‘So Sherlock can stay in the backyard all day and Grandpa can stay in the house?’
‘Your grandpa will die if he stays on the island,’ he said bluntly. ‘You’ve seen the cardiology reports and the reports from the renal physician. He needs constant monitoring. That heart of his is no longer strong enough to cope with anything worse than a bad cold.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I can guess it, and so can you.’
‘Then it’s Grandpa’s choice.’ Her hands were still holding her cheeks. She looked stressed, frightened—but also angry. ‘Marc, why are you saying this? It has to be our decision, mine and Grandpa’s, where we live, and our choice is here.’
‘Then we’ll never see how our relationship might work.’
‘That’s blackmail!’
‘It’s only blackmail if you want what I think we both want. To see if y
ou and I...’
‘There is no you and I.’ The anger was still there. ‘There can’t be a you and I unless you decide that being an islander is part of your life plan. But people don’t come here to live. They’re born here, and some of them stay and some of them don’t. Apart from half a dozen hippies who live at the far end of the island where the surf’s best, no one’s migrated here for decades.’
‘I know that, which is why...’
‘Which is why I have to leave if I want a life with anyone other than another islander. But that’s okay because my other islander is my grandpa.’
‘He won’t live for ever.’
‘So you’re threatening me as well as blackmailing me?’
‘Elsa...’
‘Leave it.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them again he saw a wash of weariness so deep it was all he could do not to reach out and support her. But she was holding out her hands in a gesture that said she was warding him off, not wanting him to come closer.
He’d stuffed it.
He’d totally, absolutely stuffed it.
He’d only spoken the truth.
But it hadn’t worked. She was tipping the untouched wine from her glass onto the garden. She was done.
‘Go back to your quarters, Marc,’ she said quietly. ‘I have enough to think about tonight without a proposal that has so many impossible conditions that it makes me feel ill.’
‘It wasn’t a proposal,’ he denied automatically.
Or was it? The way he’d framed it...
‘Then I’m glad,’ she said, and sighed and clicked her fingers. Sherlock sidled to her side, cocking his head to one side as if he was trying to figure what was wrong. Then he nuzzled next to her leg and pressed his body against her knee. It was an unmistakable gesture of comfort, and Marc looked down at the dog and thought that Sherlock had got it right.
And he’d got it impossibly wrong.
‘I’ll still stay for two weeks anyway,’ he told her, searching for anything to allay the pain he could feel washing over her in waves. ‘That should take care of the worst of the tourist season.’
‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘We’ll pay you full time clinician rates.’
‘There’s no need...’
‘There’s every need,’ she said, suddenly angry again. ‘From now on... Well, we’ll start as we mean to go on, Dr Pierce. As medical colleagues and nothing more.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
MARC HAD TWO weeks to repair the mistakes of that night. He had two weeks to find a way to undo the damage.
In two weeks he found not a single solution.
She was pig stubborn, he told himself as it neared the time he had to leave. She had to face a future off the island.
And yet, as he saw Robert gradually regain health, as he watched the elderly doctor sitting on the veranda with Sherlock at his feet, with his islander mates sitting beside him, as he saw Robert’s devotion to the islanders and the islanders’ devotion to Robert, he had to concede that it’d be extremely hard to drag him to a new life in Sydney.
Yet it meant that Elsa could have no new life. Until...
Yeah, that was a good thing to think—not. Wait until her grandfather died to move away? How bleak was that? But meanwhile, for Elsa to work herself into the ground holding this practice together while she waited for her grandfather’s health to fail, as it surely must without specialist care...
It made him feel ill to imagine it, but there was nothing he could do.
He worked beside her, taking clinics while she did house calls and took care of the patients in the hospital. That had been pretty much the set-up before Robert fell ill, and it worked. The island could function on one and a half doctors, but that doctor couldn’t be Robert.
Nor could it be Marc. He’d thought of staying on the island—of course he had—but he wasn’t so deeply thrown by these new emotions that he failed to see the impossibility of such a plan. He was a cardiologist and there was little here for him to do. He’d worked hard to achieve his skill set. Managing the occasional imperative heart problem on Gannet with no support staff... No.
But the more he saw of Elsa, the more he knew how much he wanted her. He also knew how badly he’d messed up his proposal. Blackmail and threats? It honestly hadn’t seemed like that to him—surely he’d only been laying out the truth—but he knew he’d hurt her.
And that hurt him. As he saw her flinch whenever she caught sight of him in the distance, as he saw each flash of pain in her eyes, as he watched her quickly turn away, he knew his clumsy attempts to get her to accept a future off the island had done nothing but cause her distress. He felt gutted.
So what to do?
There was little he could do. He worked on. Elsa paid him and he couldn’t refuse—she said she’d lock the clinic doors on him if he didn’t accept it. He funnelled the payments via Maggie into funds for a new incubator, something the hospital desperately needed.
‘I’ll tell Elsa it’s from an anonymous donor,’ Maggie said when he proposed it. ‘She might suspect it’s from you, but she doesn’t need to know for sure. If she did...well, she’s already grateful to you for the lift chairs and this might stress her more.’
‘Because?’
‘You know very well why,’ she said, irritated. But then she softened. ‘I know it’s an impossible situation and I’m desperately sorry that the pair of you can’t take this further, but this is our Elsa we’re talking about. Ours.’
Ours. The island’s.
That line wormed its way back into his head. To have and to hold.
The island had staked its claim and it was holding on. Elsa was staying, and the bottom line was that he had to leave.
So he worked on, but as he did he racked his brain as to how he could help her. Half a doctor—that was what she needed. That was what Gannet Island needed. It couldn’t be him, not long-term, but she had to have help.
None of his colleagues would be even vaguely interested. They were all high-flying achievers.
So where to find half a doctor?
And then, a week before he was due to leave, he found himself thinking of his mother, mixing medicine with mountain climbing.
Half a doctor...
He started making phone calls. Half a doctor couldn’t be him, but at least this could help Elsa.
It wasn’t nearly enough, he thought as his departure date loomed closer, but at least it was something.
It seemed something was all he had left to offer.
* * *
Saturday. The day of his flight home. He’d asked Elsa to have dinner with him on Friday night and she’d agreed—‘But at our kitchen table with Grandpa. We still have a mountain of casseroles.’
What followed was a stilted dinner where he and Robert talked medicine and island history, and Elsa said little at all. She saw him to the door afterwards and he wanted to kiss her—no, he was desperate to kiss her—but she backed away. The closed look on her face said there was no compromise. Ryan drove him to the airport the next morning, and that was that.
But then, just as the incoming plane landed, he saw Elsa’s car pull into the car park. He watched and waited, saw her hesitate as if she was regretting coming and wasn’t too sure she was doing the right thing, but then she came right in.
This was a tiny airport. There weren’t such things as separate arrival and departure lounges. She walked through the swing doors and saw him straight away.
‘Hey,’ he said as she reached him. Her eyes were troubled. Sad. He desperately wanted to hug her, but somehow he stopped himself and managed to smile. ‘Going somewhere?’
She tried to smile back. ‘You must know that I wish I could.’
He did know that. It was breaking something inside him, but he understood.
‘I just... I couldn’t let you go befor
e I thanked you again,’ she told him. ‘Last night was too formal. Too...unhappy. I didn’t say it, just how grateful Grandpa and I are for all you’ve done.’
‘You don’t need to say it,’ he told her. ‘The thanks on both sides just about balance themselves out. And I’ve brought you trouble. I’m so sorry, Elsa, that I’ve made you feel...’
‘Trapped?’ she told him and managed a smile. ‘That’s not your call. I felt trapped long before you arrived.’
‘But you still won’t come to Sydney.’
‘Don’t go there again, Marc. You know it’s impossible. I’d still be trapped in Sydney, only it’d be worse. I’d have an unhappy Grandpa and I’d have the islanders on my mind for the rest of my life.’
You’d have me. He wanted to say it, but he couldn’t. The time for that was over.
‘So I just need to say goodbye,’ she told him, and she reached out and took his hands. Around them a small group of his fellow travellers were doing much the same, hugging goodbye, shaking hands, shedding tears.
That was how he felt. Like shedding tears. How could he feel like this about a woman he’d known for such a short time?
How could he feel like this about any woman?
No woman but Elsa.
‘Goodbye, Marc,’ she told him and the tug on his hands was suddenly urgent. She pulled him close and then reached up and kissed him.
It was a light kiss, a feather touch. A friends’ farewell.
Good friends. Friends who could never be more.
His instinct was to kiss her back, tug her arms around him... To have and to hold.
He couldn’t. He didn’t. She stepped back and he let her go.
‘Marc!’ It was a booming yell from the far side of the lounge, where a cluster of incoming passengers were collecting their baggage.
He turned and saw a woman, middle-aged, small and dumpy, dressed for what looked like a two-week hike. She’d just gathered a gigantic pack from the pile of baggage and was hitching it onto her back as she yelled.
‘Stella,’ he said and then grinned. Of course it was Stella. He’d thought she wouldn’t get here for days, yet here she was.
Mistletoe Kiss with the Heart Doctor Page 15
