Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle

by Meredith Webber / Jennifer Taylor

  ‘I must find Ella,’ she muttered, and backed out of the room, only to remember something and have to return. ‘I didn’t speak to the boy’s mother about future bee stings or the danger they could be to him. Will you talk to her about having something on hand if he’s stung again? ‘

  Jorge looked up at the woman who hovered in his doorway. A few minutes ago he had nearly kissed her, the impulse brought on by a simple touch—his hand going out to halt her—and now he couldn’t remember why. Something to do with her going shopping? Or had he been about to apologise for something?

  He had no idea because the touch had set fire to something inside him and heat had sizzled in the air around them, thickening it like unseen smoke.

  Well, he could forget about sizzle and thick air between them, she’d made it very clear she was over him long ago, yet she’d hesitated before answering that she couldn’t afford to have come sooner and he’d sensed that might only be part of the truth.

  Estúpido! That was what he was, to be feeling disappointment about these revelations. He’d deliberately worded his email to hurt her sufficiently that she wouldn’t rush to his bedside and make a martyr of herself caring for him. Not that there was much of the martyr in Caroline, she was far too practical for that, and speaking of practical, he should go home and check what food he had. Maybe someone would have to go shopping.

  At least a trip to the market would take him out of Caroline’s orbit for a while.

  With that decided he headed back to the hut, to find Caroline stripping the extremely grubby clothes off an extremely grubby small child.

  ‘I played with the kids, Hor-hay,’ Ella told him. ‘Mummy should have changed my shoes first so my good shoes didn’t get dirty but Mummy says we can clean them, and I can kick the ball a very long way.’

  He looked at the naked child and felt a pang of some indescribable emotion deep inside him. Part ownership, although he knew no one could own another person, and part pride, that he had helped create this perfect little being, and part something else—wonder was the closest he could come to it.

  ‘I have a big tub outside the back door where I do the washing. Do you want to have a bath in that?’ he asked, pleased now he’d insisted on building his hut in the old way with the bench and tub outside. Beyond it he’d put in a shower, but the tub was where the local people bathed their infants.

  ‘Will you help?’ Ella asked. ‘I can do my tummy and my legs and toes and arms and fingers, and my ears.’ She threw a glare at Caroline as she added the last bit and he realised it must be a source of argument between them. Was she enlisting his aid against her mother? Could three-year-olds be so manipulative?

  ‘Manipulator par excellence,’ Caroline said drily, rolling the dirty clothes into a ball. ‘Watch yourself! ‘

  ‘I can do ears if you need help,’ he told Ella, who was practising the new word she’d just heard. ‘Manpitor,’ issued from the small lips, the determination in her practice so charming, so delightful, his chest went tight with pain.

  Again!

  ‘I’ll boil some water for the bath,’ he said, needing to get away for a minute while he took stock of his feelings. It was okay to fall in love with his daughter, he told himself, but now he’d admitted that he found fears rising in the joy—fears for her safety, fears for her health, nameless fears.

  The trouble was, falling in love with anyone, particularly a daughter, hadn’t been part of his life plan. His life plan, carefully considered over months of difficult operations, painful treatment and rehabilitation, had been to avoid all emotion in the future. To cut himself off, not from feeling for others, from empathy, but from personal emotional involvement. His father’s love he could handle. He could even cope with Antoinette’s fussing for she’d been their housekeeper since he was a child, but beyond the safe realm of family, he didn’t do emotion any more.

  Or hadn’t up until now, when the figure of a little girl earnestly practising the word ‘manipulator’ had stolen his heart.

  ‘Right, I’ve run cold water in the tub—actually, it’s lukewarm and she probably doesn’t need too much hot in it.’

  Caroline was standing behind him in the small kitchen area, Ella on her hip, a small, super-absorbent towel and a wash-bag in one hand.

  ‘I can do better than that for towels,’ he said, trying to come to terms with the sheer normality of Caroline’s behaviour. She was calmly going about what had to be done as if she hadn’t just arrived from halfway around the world and been reunited with her former lover, who had shown no sign of welcome, and now had to bathe her daughter in an outside tub.

  Though the Caroline he’d known had rarely let anything faze her so it was only to be expected that she was calmer than he was, which, in itself, was enough to stir his anger again.

  He carried the kettle out to the tub and poured the hot water in, a little at time, testing it in between. That done, he took the kettle back inside, away from small probing hands—fear again—and went to the big camphor-wood chest that had been his mother’s, finding a thick, soft, white towel for his daughter.

  Thoughts of his mother stilled his anger. How she would have loved this grandchild who might, in some way, have made up for the fact that she hadn’t been able to have more children after him. He tucked the towel under his arm and went out to face the two females who had turned his life upside down. He couldn’t be angry with the small one, but reserved the right as far as Caroline was concerned.

  ‘Wow! Lovely white towel, so much better than our make-do ones.’

  Her delight seemed genuine, and she finished washing the soap off Ella and lifted the little girl out of the tub, handing her to him, so he wrapped her tightly and carried her inside, a warm, damp, squirming bundle of delight, chatting to him about the bath and ears and a towel she had at home.

  ‘With princesses on it,’ she finished, as he set her down on the big armchair to dry her properly.

  ‘Princesses?’ he queried.

  He heard a soft warning, ‘Don’t ask,’ from behind him, but it was already too late.

  Ella was telling him about the princesses she knew, Cinderella—'that’s like my name'—Ariel, and someone else he couldn’t make out.

  She hadn’t realised how much it would hurt, Caroline thought, as she rummaged through the backpack for Ella’s pyjamas, to see Jorge interacting with her daughter.

  Their daughter.

  She wasn’t jealous, or at least she didn’t think she was, but seeing them together made her ache for all the time the pair had missed out on—all the bath times and story times and playtimes—the good times and the not so good.

  ‘No sense in getting maudlin,’ she muttered to herself, and she left the sanctuary of the bedroom and returned to the living room, handing the pyjamas to Jorge and trying not to be affected when his hand shook slightly as he took them.

  But that slight tremor in his hand made her realise just how great an emotional upheaval this must be for him, finding out he had a daughter, seeing the child, interacting with her.

  Now, don’t go feeling sorry for him. The mental warning was firm, but it didn’t hold much strength. In fairness, she had to admit that he seemed to be handling the situation superbly.

  The thought saddened her. His interaction was all with Ella—he was doing all he could to win her confidence—which, she thought gloomily, was wonderful. She, Caroline, might not have existed, except as someone to field his anger when he allowed emotion to creep through his iron-hard control.

  Back when he’d touched her in his office, she’d thought that control might crack—had sensed something arc in the air between them—but she’d obviously been wrong and it was just as well because had they kissed, how well could she have hidden her own feelings?

  Dismissing kisses from her mind, she concentrated on practical things.

  ‘A meal? You said you have food, but I have some packages of noodles that only need boiling water added. I can fix that for Ella.’

  ‘Noo
dles, noodles, I want noodles,’ the little girl sang.

  Her father looked up from the pyjamas he was turning over in his hands, Ella still towel-wrapped in front of him.

  ‘Pyjamas?’ he queried. ‘It is only six o’clock.’

  ‘She goes to bed at seven,’ Caroline told him, though now she was remembering other things Jorge had told her about his country—about people not eating dinner until nine or ten at night, nightclubs opening at midnight but people rarely going there before two in the morning.

  ‘But then there’d be no time for a promenade and ice cream,’ he protested.

  And right on cue, Ella bounced up and down, dropping the white towel on the packed earth floor of the hut, shouting, ‘Ice cream, ice cream!’

  ‘Tonight she will have to promenade in pyjamas,’ Caroline said firmly. ‘We have limited clothes and I washed the ones she had on today while she was in the bath and she’ll need the clean set for tomorrow. Two clean sets tomorrow, judging by today’s playtime.’

  Jorge nodded and began the task of getting an excited, squirming child into pyjamas and finding the right holes for the right buttons in a garment that seemed to be nothing but holes and buttons.

  ‘She’s a restless sleeper—that’s why she needs a sleepsuit.’ Caroline knelt beside him to change a few buttons into the right holes, but it was a mistake. Try as she might to deny it, the attraction she had felt towards Jorge almost from their first meeting was still as strong as ever—perhaps even stronger, now that he was off limits.

  Was he off limits?

  He was as far as she didn’t intend revealing her feelings for him, but personally off limits? Was he in a relationship? And if so, how would the revelation of Ella’s existence affect it?

  The thought of him in a relationship—normal though that would be—sent an icy chill racing through her blood. She straightened up and told Ella to get a book from her backpack then faced her child’s father.

  But how to ask?

  ‘Is this going to be a problem for you in your personal life?’

  She blurted it out, and could practically see the question hovering in the air between them so hurried on. ‘I mean, the article said you were a bachelor but that doesn’t mean—I mean, you might have married and divorced, have other children. Is this a personal disruption for you?’

  He scowled at her.

  ‘You mean is finding out I have a child not enough of a personal disruption, but might it affect a whole family? And you didn’t consider that before your mad dash across the Pacific?’

  ‘The article said you were a bachelor!’ Caroline repeated, standing up for herself, although inwardly cursing herself for not thinking it through before she’d rushed into her arrangements. ‘And if you have a girlfriend or a partner, surely that’s okay. Even other children. Eventually Ella would have to meet them and they meet her, so what harm is done?’

  His scowl deepened, but as the room had grown shadowy she could barely see his eyes, let alone read any expression in them.

  ‘I have no wife, no current lover, no—no other children. Satisfied?’

  And with that he stalked out of the hut.

  Why was he letting her upset him this way? Jorge asked himself the question as he strode towards the clinic. Why had questions about his private life angered him so much?

  He’d have liked to think it was because she was so insensitive she hadn’t considered how unlikely it was for a man who looked like him to find love, but that would be a coward’s way out. His visible scars were only reminders of the deeper ones—of the damage the explosion had left inside him, physically and mentally, of the darkness that had come upon him and the long struggle he’d had to come to terms with the man he was now.

  He’d had women love him since the accident, he just hadn’t been able to love them back. And that was what had angered him! That the woman against whose love he’d measured other loves should ask such questions—that was what had hurt!

  All was quiet at the clinic, the boy gone home, the place lit but only a nurse on duty for emergencies. He had no reason to linger there, although there was always paperwork, but back at his hut his daughter would be eating her dinner.

  Caroline was waiting for the kettle to boil when he walked back into the hut. He looked across at her and some trick of the late afternoon light coming through the square hole in the wall that served as a window showed the depth of the scarring on his cheek.

  Once again she longed to press her hand against it, while her mind raced through the likelihood of other scars, picturing them on his body—his beautiful body—not to mention the damage beneath the skin, physical and mental damage too terrible to contemplate.

  Determined not to give in to the ache inside her, especially now Jorge had lifted Ella from the chair and had sat down with her on his knee to read the story to her, Caroline poured water onto the noodles and while she waited for them to swell and cool, she crossed to the stacks of books and pulled out the biggest of them, setting them down on a chair in the kitchen and putting her absorbent towel over them to protect them from spilled noodles.

  ‘When the story’s finished,’ she said to the pair in the armchair, pleased she sounded so calm when inside her mind and body emotions whirled in senseless twists and turns—pleasure at the domesticity of the scene in front of her, slight envy that Ella had adopted Jorge as a friend so easily, the agony of realising her love for him was still so strong and, worst of all, the stress of hiding how she felt.

  He carried Ella into the kitchen and set her down on the raised-up seat.

  ‘Is she safe there?’ he asked, and Caroline felt a pang of sympathy for him. If her insides were in turmoil, how must his be?

  ‘She sits on books at home,’ she replied. ‘Fat telephone books.’

  Ella was spooning noodles into her mouth, taking her time because she hated spilling any.

  ‘She’s a neat freak when it comes to eating,’ Caroline explained, but even as she said the words she realised that every tiny detail she revealed must cut deeply into Jorge’s emotions, that she knew these things about their child while he’d been cut off from learning them as she’d developed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly, remembering she’d said it earlier, and now, as then, she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologising for.

  But he seemed to understand for he nodded, but not before she’d seen the pain in his eyes and read there his very real regrets.

  ‘Finished!’

  Ella set down her spoon and looked at Jorge.

  ‘Ice cream now?’

  Caroline had to laugh. She hoped it wouldn’t take too long for Jorge to learn not to say anything he didn’t want repeated in his daughter’s hearing.

  ‘Ice cream,’ he agreed. ‘We need to walk a little distance. Perhaps you would like to ride on my back.’

  ‘Piggyback?’ Ella asked, her delight at this idea obvious.

  Caroline lifted her off the chair and settled her on Jorge’s back, then for one craven instant considered telling them to go without her. The togetherness of it all—the family thing that was happening already—was upsetting her in ways she didn’t understand.

  But though she knew Jorge and would trust him with her daughter’s life, he was still a stranger to Ella, for all she’d taken to him.

  She followed them out the door and into the dusk.

  ‘Look!’ he said, jerking her out of thoughts she didn’t want to have.

  He was pointing west to the vivid colours splashed across the sky, the bare branches of a leafless tree making a tracery of black patterns against the scarlet, pink and orange.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Caroline murmured. ‘We don’t look up enough, too busy looking where we’re going next to appreciate what’s here around us now.’

  He looked at her and smiled, and the pain of her love for him all but exploded in her chest. Yes, his smile was a little lopsided now, and there was grey in the prickle of hair on his close-cropped head, but he was still J
orge, the man she’d loved.

  Still loved.

  She looked so beautiful, standing there looking at the sunset, that Jorge had to move away. To stay would be to fall in love again—if he’d ever fallen out of love with her. And while he might want her with every fibre of his being, he couldn’t saddle her with the man he had become—couldn’t trust that all she had to give him would be pity, for to be pitied by Caroline would surely kill him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘ICE CREAM!’ his daughter reminded him, patting him on the head. He headed down the alley towards the main road where a small ice-cream cart usually stood at this time of the evening.

  The van was there but it was the white pole on the pavement close by that attracted Caroline’s attention.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked, studying the side of it that had its message in the Toba language.

  ‘Walk around it. You will understand when you find the Spanish.’

  ‘“May peace prevail on earth”,’ she read. ‘How lovely. The other languages?’

  ‘One in Toba, one in Guaran'—Toba is a sub-language of Guaran'—and one in Italian, representing the cultures that have contributed to the development of the neighbourhood. There is another such pole near the National Flag Memorial. They are called Peace Poles.’

  He had squatted down to allow Ella to climb off his back and now he lifted her so she could see the variety of ice creams available. Caroline was still walking around the pole, reaching out to touch the words painted on it.

  ‘We have to believe it will happen, don’t we?’ she said quietly, and he remembered that there was so much more to her than her beauty—so much more that he had fallen in love with.

  ‘I’ll have choc’late,’ Ella announced, breaking into his thoughts, which was just as well. He ordered her ice cream and made sure he grabbed a handful of napkins to mop up any spills. He carried the ice cream for her across the road to a small park bench and when she’d settled on it, handed it to her.

  To his surprise she was as careful eating ice cream as she was eating noodles, both messy dishes for a child, but the little pink tongue licked around the edge, never allowing a melting drop to trickle down the thick waffle cone. He was so fascinated by her actions he didn’t realise Caroline wasn’t with them until she joined him, a cone in each hand.