The Heart Surgeon's Proposal

by Meredith Webber

  She remembered how her mother had massaged her neck and shoulders when they’d been tight from studying or working on an assignment on the computer, and wondered if Phil heard the babies crying because there was so much emptiness inside him. Did the crying echo through the spaces that in Maggie’s life were filled with the love of her family and the memories of the joy and laughter they’d shared?

  He was right about his image of home, whether he’d considered it consciously or not, she thought with a certain degree of bleakness. He needed the security of a stay-at-home wife and a family clustered around his feet, to fill him with the love he’d missed out on in his childhood. Surely then he would no longer hear the babies crying.

  ‘Ouch! Getting a bit rough there.’

  Maggie patted the place she’d probably bruised, digging in deeper when she’d realised where her thoughts had led.

  ‘Sorry. Well, you’re just about done. I want to check on Pete before I go.’

  Phil turned to her again.

  ‘We could both do that then have dinner in the canteen,’ he suggested, and though a faint replica of the twinkle remained in his eyes she sensed he needed company and agreed.

  And by the end of the meal, when they’d relived the tricky moments of the operation and laughed about the translation difficulties between English English and Australian English, Maggie felt peace had been restored between them and, providing she kept her innermost thoughts and feelings about Phil hidden from view—and her body stopped reacting to every casual touch—they could coexist as housemates in an enjoyable and companionable manner.

  ‘It’s dark, I’ll walk you home,’ Phil said as they were leaving the canteen.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not far and I’ve often walked back to Annie’s in the dark.’

  ‘I need some fresh clothes anyway,’ Phil told her, ‘so don’t argue.’

  He put his arm around her waist and steered her towards the hospital exit.

  His touch sent pent-up tremors of excitement flooding through Maggie’s body—so much for not reacting. She’d managed to hold lascivious thoughts at bay while she’d massaged him, thinking about the inner man, not his body, but just one touch had let them loose and she wondered if she’d have to revise her opinion about their coexistence!

  She moved away from him as soon as they were outside, then shivered in the cold night air.

  ‘You forget it’s winter outside when you’re shut in the hospital all day,’ she complained, pulling a jacket out of her bag and shaking it free of creases.

  ‘Winter!’ Phil scoffed, lifting his arms and sniffing the night air. ‘You call this winter? Four degrees of frost, a sudden storm that deposits fourteen inches of snow overnight, sleet that cuts into your bones—that’s winter. This, Dr Walsh, is nothing more than a bracing summer evening.’

  He took her jacket from her and held it while she put it on, then he wrapped it around her and gave her a tight hug.

  ‘That’s nothing more than a thanks-for-having-dinner-with-me hug,’ he explained, when she stiffened in his arms. ‘I had a few demons that needed exorcising and your company helped me do it.’

  Ho! Back to coexisting in harmony, Maggie thought. She might be having licentious thoughts about the man, but he saw her as a colleague, nothing more. Oh, he’d be willing enough to hop into bed with her again—she had no doubt on that score—but for Phil it would mean nothing while for her it would be torment of the worst kind—a tempting taste of what she couldn’t have…

  Minnie’s almost hysterical delight when they opened the front door made Phil feel terrible.

  ‘I should have come down earlier and fed her,’ he said, lifting the little dog into his arms and cuddling her. ‘Instead of all that navel-gazing you were kind enough to put up with.’

  ‘She’s been fed,’ Maggie told him. ‘I phoned Rod and asked him to come up. He has a key he keeps for the dog-walker so she can get in to collect Minnie each day.’

  Phil knew he should have been relieved, but instead felt a contrary dissatisfaction. He could pinpoint it, too. Maggie talking to Rod.

  He put Minnie down and took the stairs two at a time, wanting to get clean clothes and get out of the place—if only so his thoughts could fester in peace.

  OK, so she’d rung him about the dog—fair enough—but for some weeks he’d harboured the idea that Maggie might be keen on Annie’s father, and this chance remark niggled him.

  The same way that lanky Evan Knowles irritated him!

  Maybe he needed a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Someone to sort out his head which, though relatively uncomplicated in the past, had been getting some very strange ideas lately.

  He chose clean clothes, packed them in a small overnight bag, put toiletries in with them then headed back downstairs.

  Minnie and Maggie were in the kitchen, Minnie cavorting in circles around Maggie’s feet while Maggie picked up what looked like the entire contents of the kitchen tidy from the floor.

  ‘Problem?’ he asked, and Maggie looked up and grimaced at him.

  ‘She may have been fed but Minnie obviously felt food wasn’t enough and showed her disapproval of our late arrival home by strewing the contents of the kitchen tidy across the floor.’

  She dumped the last piece of rubbish into a plastic garbage bag, tied the top of it and washed her hands.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not a new habit she’s developed,’ Phil said, then added, ‘What a bad dog!’ to Minnie who was now leaping around his feet.

  ‘I’ll put the bin on the table tomorrow morning just in case,’ Maggie told him, and smiled as he continued to tell off the dog.

  ‘I don’t think she understands the concept of “bad dog”,’ she said. ‘I tried to point out the error of her ways and she seemed to think she’d been extraordinarily clever to have spread it all so far.’

  ‘Do you want me to run a mop over the floor before I go?’ Phil asked, and Maggie laughed.

  ‘To prove how domesticated you are? No way—you get back up to the hospital to Pete, I’ll mop.’

  She smiled at him, and Phil saw the teasing laughter in her face and read it in her night-dark eyes.

  ‘OK?’ she said. Just one word. But again Phil felt that little hitch in the region of his heart and wondered what was happening to him.

  Could he be falling in love with Maggie? he wondered as he walked back to the hospital.

  Now, that would be a disaster! He didn’t need a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst to tell him that. He wasn’t in the first flush of youth and knew all about genetics, so he was reasonably sure he’d inherited enough of his father’s genes to make him a poor prospect in the love stakes. It wasn’t that he deliberately set out to hurt the women he fell in love with, it was just that, for him, love didn’t seem to last and, having lived with pretence in his parents’ marriage, he knew he couldn’t live a lie himself.

  So he’d always been honest. He’d told the women—there had only been three, not three dozen—that he no longer loved them, and had seen their hurt first-hand. Since the third of them he no longer dated seriously—just going out a few times with women who knew that was all a relationship with him would be. Something pleasurable, he hoped, but casual.

  But Maggie was different. There was nothing casual about either the hospital Maggie or the dancing Maggie. Both lived their lives with intensity and passion, though the hospital Maggie kept these emotions under tighter control.

  ‘So, Minnie Min, what do I do about that man?’ Maggie asked when she’d finished mopping the kitchen floor and had decided to forgive the mischievous dog.

  ‘It’s the baby,’ Maggie explained because the dog was the most receptive audience she knew and wouldn’t pass on any secrets. ‘I know I should tell him, and I will—if I manage to hang on to it—but when I do that, is he likely to go all Sir Galahad about it and insist on marriage?’

  The thought of marrying Phil sent a shiver of delicious delight through her body, but a loveless marriage would be infi
nitely worse than no marriage at all, and she would hate to see Phil tied up that way because it would mean he’d be living out his worst nightmare—a replica of his parents’ marriage.

  ‘I’ll just wait and see,’ she finally decided, sharing this with Minnie in case the dog was worrying. ‘If I do go past three months, it will still be wintry and I can bundle up in warm clothes and no one will notice for a while—though I guess even without warm clothes no one will notice for a while.’

  But that thought depressed her immeasurably. Being pregnant was a great and joyous thing—exciting and exhilarating. She should be shouting her news from the rooftops, not moping in the kitchen, sharing the news with a dog, even if the dog in question did have understanding eyes.

  She pressed her hand to her stomach and offered a silent apology to the small cluster of cells busy multiplying inside her.

  ‘I’ll tell my mother when I get to three months,’ she promised them. ‘She’ll be excited with me.’

  For a moment or two, Maggie amended in her head, until she asks me who the father is and when we’re getting married.

  But if all went well and she had the baby, her family would stand by her, so Baby Walsh would have heaps of cuddles and grow up wrapped in family love.

  ‘But we’re getting way too far ahead of ourselves,’ she said, ruffling the curls on the top of Minnie’s head. She lifted the little dog and put her in her basket, then turned out the kitchen light and made her way upstairs.

  Passing Phil’s room, even knowing he wasn’t in it, she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret. Here they were, two adults, who’d already enjoyed a night of explosive and satisfying love-making and could, as they were living in the same house, continue to enjoy such nights, yet they were sleeping in their own rooms—alone in their big beds.

  But in her heart she knew that spending even one more night in Phil’s arms, in either of their beds, would only deepen what she felt for him, which would undoubtedly lead to her being tempted if the time came that he asked her to marry him. And there they’d be, she head over heels in love with a husband to whom the concept of love was foreign.

  Although if I did the stay-at-home-wife thing and provided him with all the love he needs, surely that might work, a sneaky inner voice said temptingly, but Maggie knew it wouldn’t. She’d feel cheated and become frustrated, and what kind of mother would she then be for her baby?

  ‘You’re a problem,’ she said, patting her stomach, but she said it with love because she couldn’t help the excitement building inside her, even if she wasn’t shouting it from the rooftops.

  Yet!

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE solution to one of her problems, when to tell Phil she was pregnant, came much sooner than Maggie had anticipated. Not because morning sickness struck with such intensity she couldn’t hide the fact but because of one small dog who had suddenly decided she didn’t like being left alone in the house.

  True, Mayarma, the dog walker, called for Minnie every day and took her for a long walk and play in the park, but Minnie still felt obliged to show her dissatisfaction with her lack of company by strewing rubbish across the floor. Remembering to put the kitchen tidy on the bench became as high a priority as locking the front door, but as Minnie rarely ventured upstairs, Maggie hadn’t given a thought to the small waste-paper basket in her en suite bathroom.

  ‘Not again,’ Phil groaned as they came home together one evening and opened the door to see a trail of rubbish leading down the stairs. ‘My turn to do the clean-up,’ he said. He lifted the milk they’d bought on the way home out of the plastic bag, passed the bottle to Maggie and kept the bag for the rubbish.

  Maggie, admonishing the little dog all the way, went on through to the kitchen to put the milk in the fridge.

  With the door still open she pulled out some chicken breasts and an assortment of vegetables. She’d make a stir-fry and rice—easy meal to prepare yet filling enough to satisfy Phil’s appetite. Her own appetite was on the wane at the moment, and though she wasn’t feeling nauseous at any stage of the day she also wasn’t hungry.

  She was slicing celery into long julienne strips and pushing them across to sit beside the similarly sliced capsicum on the cutting board, idly admiring the contrasting colours, when she heard Phil come down the stairs, across the polished wooden floor of the living room and into the kitchen.

  Would she always be as conscious of his footsteps?

  Would her heartbeat continue to accelerate as he got closer, so whenever she was in his presence there was turmoil in her chest?

  Should she leave work now—return to Melbourne—before this whole ‘love for Phil’ condition got totally out of hand?

  He didn’t say anything and she kept chopping, assuming he was getting a light beer out of the fridge, but she didn’t hear the fridge door. In fact, she heard a chair scrape across the tiles and guessed he’d just sat down.

  Determined not to give in to the urge to turn and look at him—looking at him at home was so different to looking at him at work—she pulled a head of broccoli towards her and began to separate it into small flowerets.

  ‘Stir-fry and rice OK with you?’ she asked, when the silence became too much to bear.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  Hard to read much into a single word.

  Was he reading something that he hadn’t said more? Hadn’t started some general conversation about work or housekeeping, the two subjects they both seemed to feel were safe?

  Maggie began to slice the beans.

  ‘Alex and Annie are due back Saturday.’ Great—tell the man something he already knows, why don’t you? ‘I wondered if we should have them down for dinner Saturday night. And Rod, of course. And Henry if he’s well enough to have Minnie clambering all over him. I thought I could do a Japanese meal. Is Alex into raw fish and seaweed and things like that?’

  When silence greeted this offering Maggie realised there was something going on behind her back she didn’t know about. Something she guessed she didn’t want to know about!

  She stopped cutting, terrified her suddenly trembling hands would send the knife slicing through her fingers if she continued.

  Then she turned around to see Phil sitting exactly where she’d envisaged him at the table. On the table, on a tissue, directly in front of him, was the test strip from the second pregnancy kit, with its telltale stripe across it.

  ‘I realise it’s none of my business, and a gentleman should simply have dropped it into the bag with the rest of the rubbish. But then I thought about repercussions, your work as part of Alex’s team, and also how you might be feeling yourself—up here without your family and as far as I know no man in your life to support you—so I thought maybe it would be best to talk to you about it.’

  His eyes, expressionless, were fixed on Maggie’s face as he said these things, and as she could feel her blood pounding through her veins, she guessed her cheeks were, by now, a bright, rosy red.

  She opened her mouth to say something—anything, yell at him perhaps for not minding his own business—but no words came out.

  ‘I won’t hassle you, Mags,’ he said gently, ‘but I do want you to know that I’m here for you. I’ll help you any way I can, listen if you need to talk things through, make cups of tea for you in the morning if you’re sick—be there for you.’

  He paused to smile at her, but it was the saddest smile Maggie had ever seen and its sadness pierced her heart.

  ‘After all, isn’t that what being housemates is all about?’

  It was at this stage Maggie realised there was something wrong with the conversation.

  Oh, she was hearing it all right, it just wasn’t coming through in her head as clearly as it might be. Like trying to see through thick fog and catching only blurry outlines, what she was hearing was distorted in some way.

  ‘Have you told the guy?’

  The fog lifted—though in her head, not his. He certainly hadn’t the foggiest notion that the baby might
be his.

  And why should he? They’d used protection, but somehow something had happened and it hadn’t been enough…

  Phil thought he’d got through the conversation remarkably well. His first instinct on seeing the test strip had been disbelief. How could Maggie have made love to him when she was seeing someone else?

  Pain—jealous pain—that she was seeing someone else intervened!

  Then anger had begun to smoulder—not at Maggie but at the someone else. Where was the blighter? He certainly wasn’t around at the moment because Phil knew Maggie, apart from an occasional night out at a club, was, at the moment, leading as non-existent a social life as he did.

  Was the father someone she’d been seeing in Melbourne?

  Dancing with?

  Questions bombarded him, which was just as well as they stopped him thinking about the nauseous feeling creeping over him, as if Maggie’s pregnancy was a personal disappointment.

  Anyway, he’d got this far, made his stand—he’d look after her, that was what he was saying—but she obviously hadn’t caught onto the gist of it for she was still staring at the strip on the table in front of him with a kind of mesmerised horror.

  Pity for her pushed him to his feet, and he walked around the table, put his arm around her and led her to a chair.

  ‘I’m sorry if you’d have preferred I didn’t say anything, but I wanted you to know I’m on your side—that you’re not alone in this.’

  He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and thought ugly thoughts about the man who’d abandoned her. And abandoned she must have been to be keeping the pregnancy a secret.

  Although maybe she’d only just found out.

  Or maybe she hadn’t kept it a secret. Maybe she’d told a lot of people, just not him.

  Now disappointment surged through the turmoil of emotions he was suffering.

  She pushed away from him and sank down into the chair he’d pulled out for her, then rested her elbows on the table and pressed her head into her hands, so all he could see was the pale nape of her neck where her dark hair parted and fell to each side.