Midwife in the Family Way

by Fiona McArthur

  His dark brows almost touched each other. ‘You should not be walking alone, it is almost dark. Please let me drive you to your house.’

  Emma rolled her eyes. ‘I thought accepting lifts from strangers was dangerous?’ she said dryly. She glanced around. Now they were standing closer to the streetlamp but between the orange pools of each lamp it was pretty deserted and darker than she’d realised. But until the silly man had put the notion in her head she’d been happy.

  ‘Come,’ he said imperiously, and held out his hand.

  Emma looked down at his strong brown fingers, even darker in the dim light, and considered the implications of his touch. Did she want to feel the warmth that she just knew was going to stay with her? She didn’t think so.

  Emma avoided his hand and turned to his car. ‘All right.’ But as she reached for the door handle his fingers were there before her.

  ‘May I?’ he said. ‘Please allow me?’

  Emma stood back as he glided the door open. Touchy Italian, she thought. ‘No problem. Feel free. I’m just out of practice with people opening doors for me.’ She swung herself into the low-slung seat and glanced around the interior of the European sports car.

  She read the label of the owner’s manual on the console. She’d never been in a Maserati before. Her door clicked shut beside her shoulder and she forced herself to relax back into the seat. The leather was doeskin soft and she wiggled her shoulders in it. Nice. Different from what she was used to, that was for sure.

  When he climbed in and secured his seat belt she leaned forward slightly, anticipating the car’s forward movement. When it didn’t happen she frowned and resisted drumming her fingers. He continued to linger and she turned to look at him with narrowed eyes. And you’re waiting for…? she thought with rising suspicion.

  ‘Would you like me to fasten your belt for you?’ He’d turned to face her and she realised she’d forgotten the obvious. She bit her lip. The man was scrambling her brains the way her hands were scrambling to get the clasp done up before, heaven forbid, he did help her.

  ‘Does the roof go up?’ She was gabbling but suddenly it was very close inside the car.

  ‘No.’ He reached forward and the engine started with a muted roar. ‘It’s a coupé. A Cambiocorsa 2007. I have one at home.’

  ‘Really? Only one?’ she said straight-faced. The car was black and low to the ground. She could see that. But she doubted she’d ever feel the need to hire one. ‘So you drove down from Brisbane? This is a hire car?’ And he had one at home. He was certainly from a different world.

  His profile shifted as he glanced at her. ‘Are you interested in cars?’

  Was she? The subject wasn’t one she’d buy a magazine on. ‘Not really.’

  He nodded as if the answer was what he expected. ‘Then let us not discuss them.’ End of discussion.

  Emma blinked. He’d assumed a protective and almost fatherly role, and Emma wasn’t sure she liked it. Well, she was no doormat for obedience. Think of your own topic, then, buddy, she thought. He didn’t offer any other conversational gambit and the silence stretched.

  He was going tomorrow, she told herself, which made it acceptable if she gave in. ‘I live straight down this road. Barely worth driving, in fact,’ she said with less than subtle pointedness. ‘Si. And I also do not live far from here as I have rented a chalet at the Lakeside.’ He glanced across and then away. ‘They have a fine restaurant. Italian.’ She could hear the smile in his voice, and she wondered if it was just because it was almost dark and she had to rely on other senses or if it was because for the first time today he’d smiled broadly enough that it affected his voice. She was glad she couldn’t see the curve of his lips. She’d been trying not to look at the sinful promise of his mouth all day. No doubt the sight would haunt her.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  What on earth was he saying? ‘So, what?’

  He sighed. Patiently, as if with a child, and with this man she was beginning to feel like one. Not something she’d felt since she the age of sixteen and not something she decided she enjoyed. ‘Will you join me for a meal, please, Emma?’

  Her heart did that fish thing again. Now? ‘Aren’t you going back to Angus’s?’

  He shook his head once in the dimness. ‘His stepmother is there tonight. I dined with him last night and we talked. I will lunch with him tomorrow before I leave.’

  Emma filled the silence while she considered the implications of his invitation. ‘Angus had a wonderful relationship with Ned since he’d made up with his father.’ Her mind skittered to the idea of dining alone with Gianni in an intimate setting and away again. Her thoughts went back to Angus. It was safer. ‘He seems to be at peace with Ned’s passing.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gianni inclined his head while he contemplated her profile. ‘Thankfully they had time to enjoy each other’s company. And Angus was instrumental in my recent contact with my brother. But you haven’t answered my question.’

  The guy had a single focus. She went with the answer she’d known she’d make from the beginning. To live dangerously. ‘Perhaps. I need to eat.’ She looked down at her grubby skirt that she’d played cricket in. ‘I’d like to get changed, though.’

  He nodded again. ‘How much time do you need?’

  She thought about it. How much did she really need? Five minutes. ‘Half an hour,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’ Satisfaction was obvious. ‘Much faster than I expected.’

  She tried vainly not to smile and she hoped he didn’t see or think she was making fun of him. ‘It’s this house, with the roses over the gate.’

  She lifted her hand to the handle and his fingers came over the top to stay it. ‘Please wait for me to open it,’ he said quietly, and her hand froze under his. She sighed and leaned back against the leather.

  She’d been right. His skin was warm and made the gooseflesh pop up on her arms like bubbles in the muddy sand at the edge of the lake. His hand moved away and she would have sworn his fingers were still there. Hot over hers.

  If he could do that with just a touch, she was in big trouble if she invited anything else. But she wouldn’t. It was just a meal, she was feeling flat after the funeral and Grace was away, and she didn’t get to eat at the Lakeside very often. Never had, actually.

  He opened her car door and she climbed out. It seemed a waste of energy to her but the cosseting was strangely compelling. He ushered her through the gate and up the path to her front door like an old-fashioned footman. Then waited while she unlocked the door and only left her when she entered her house, but he didn’t drive away until she’d shut the door.

  She heard the roar of the car as it accelerated away and Emma’s heart flopped around as she leant back against the closed door. Her hand actually slid to her throat where her pulse pounded. What had happened to her in the last five minutes? It had just been a lift a few hundred metres but she felt vibrantly alive. Ridiculously so.

  There were a hundred good reasons not to be attracted to this man, or any man for that matter, and fifteen good reasons to wallow in it.

  The hundred were all complications and she didn’t need them.

  The fifteen were about the number of good years she estimated she had before the disease that had turned her graceful and gracious mother into a tormented bedridden shell of a woman could begin to do the same to her.

  Fifty per cent chance of having the gene. In the last few years Emma had toyed briefly with the idea of taking the final genetic test, a test that could prove her fate irrevocably, but she’d always come back to that tiny spark of hope she’d not inherited the predisposing gene. She didn’t think she’d cope if that hope was gone. She couldn’t give up that tiny beam of optimism that once lost would never return.

  Her arms crept around her waist and Gianni was forgotten, everything was forgotten, as her worst nightmare touched her again with cold fingers of dread.

  The fear was for Grace, her daughter, and the fact that if Emma was shadowed then
Grace had a fifty per cent chance of having it, too. Emma couldn’t do it. At this time in her life she couldn’t live with Grace being positive for Huntington’s disease.

  Instead, Emma lived her life as if she had only until she turned forty, like her mother had before she’d become ill, and she saved every penny to ensure Grace would have the choices for the support Emma might not be able to give.

  But for this moment Emma was alive, she was well, and apparently she was an attractive woman. Not something she’d thought about for a very long time. She didn’t know when she’d decided that she wanted to savour a little of what Gianni had to offer. If he was offering anything apart from a meal, that was.

  She’d never looked for another boyfriend after she and Tommy had drifted apart. She’d been too busy. Too focussed.

  As two sixteen-year-olds she and Tommy had discovered they’d little in common except Grace, and Emma had been sensible enough not to tie herself to a man she’d already grown out of. Tommy had left to see the world with Emma’s blessing. But maybe she’d missed out on the subtle thrill of a man’s appreciation.

  In fact, even with the little exposure to Gianni’s attention today she’d begun to revel in the unfamiliar feeling of being a fragile flower to be cherished and taken care of. Not something she had any experience of and no doubt it would irk her very quickly in the real world, but this was an out-of-the-ordinary opportunity to let herself be spoiled.

  And there was something about Gianni that called to her in a way she’d never heard before. Heaven forbid, there might be a fabulous encounter her body was trying to tempt her into, and the idea had a compulsive magnetism, like the man did. As long as she was careful and it didn’t get out of hand.

  Gianni was right out of her comfort zone. And he was leaving soon. To go back to Italy. If she made a fool of herself, he was a ship in the night with a home port she couldn’t get much further away from than inland Queensland.

  She looked at her watch and bounced away from the door as if someone had poked her with a cattle prod. She’d wasted five minutes!

  CHAPTER THREE

  TWENTY-FIVE minutes later Gianni knocked on Emma’s door and the sound echoed through Emma’s chest and under her ribcage. Boom. Boom. Boom. He was here. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a real date. Probably never.

  She sucked in her breath and ran her tongue inside her gums to make sure she didn’t have any lipstick on her teeth. Still not convinced, she grimaced toothily at the mirror on the way to her door. Yep. All was well. Another deep breath as she paused and hoped she’d dressed right. She opened the door.

  Christo. Gianni sucked his own lungful of air. Emma’s blonde hair was loose over her shoulders and she’d abandoned the pink lipstick for a deep sultry red that matched the lush material of her blouse. To call it a blouse was a blasphemy. The soft material clung like a skin and lingered like his eyes on the swell of her breasts and plunged, also like his eyes, down into a V of paradise.

  His breath jammed for a moment and then resumed, like his mesmerised surveillance of her preparations. All this in half an hour?

  He’d never been attracted to trousers on women, preferring the femininity of a swirling skirt, but when she twirled to show him, the way her firm buttocks snuggled into the stretchy black material made his eyes blink. Then she moved back further to open the door for him and he could see it hung almost like a skirt, lots of fabric swirling around her legs from the tight tapering waist, teasing him with the thought of it in a pool of darkness at her feet.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice broke the spell and he blinked and swore again in his head. What was it about this woman that grabbed him by the throat and demolished his brain? ‘Bella. You are beautiful and took my breath away.’

  She laughed. Softly, and to him like the musical bells of his favourite chapel. Everything she did entranced him. ‘Thank you.’ she said. ‘The men around here would be far too embarrassed to say that out loud.’

  He frowned. ‘I speak the truth.’ He glanced around the inside of her house. A welcoming room, evidence of a family and very clean. But he wanted her in the dark, beside him in the close confines of the car, somewhere he could inhale her scent and absorb the vibrations her body caused in his. With no distractions. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Did you manage to get a table in the restaurant?’

  He frowned again. Why would he not? ‘Of course.’ She glanced away and shook her head slightly, and he was teased by the tiny smile she tried to hide. ‘I amuse you?’

  ‘Very much so. But it’s nice because you are so very different from the men around here.’ She walked past him onto the veranda, the hint of roses she left in her wake teasing him almost more than her words, and then she handed him her house keys. ‘I’m guessing you want to lock the door?’

  ‘Grazie. You learn.’ Her profile against the lights from the veranda made his eyes gleam. Did she have no idea how seductive she looked in those trousers? He had changed his preferences already.

  ‘I’m a smart woman.’ She tossed her head teasingly.

  The movement exposed her throat to the light. ‘And very beautiful.’

  ‘I could get used to this.’ He heard the whispered words but was sure he’d not been meant to. How could this woman not have a hundred men beating a path to her door? It was a tragedy he went home tomorrow or he would have shown her what she deserved—or maybe it was a good thing. Either way he could introduce her to the way she should be cared for tonight.

  As Gianni followed her down the path and under the rose arch he had the sudden urge to reach out and halt her progress, turn her beautiful face toward him and taste the promise he saw while the heady fragrance drifted around them, but he held back. Something he would regret later. No doubt the scent of roses would remind him of this moment that could have been.

  This time she’d waited beside the car for him to open the door and the sleeping animal inside him growled complacently at securing her compliance. That beast had been dormant for a very long time and he’d forgotten the taste of cosseting a woman.

  When she was seated he bent to lift a swathe of material from the hem of her trousers that had fallen outside the door and the material cascaded across his palm and fell like liquid around her tiny feet. All sensory input that teased him more. He clenched his fingers as he moved back to shut the door before he trod with restrained haste to join her. Still he could feel the material, cool and seductive like the woman who awaited him. She had him entranced.

  Gianni’s door closed quietly as he was seated and Emma felt the car shrink to only the space between them. Yet not claustrophobic. Different. It felt intimate and exciting, and every nerve in her body seemed to be waving its receptors at the man beside her. Strange feelings for a woman who thrived on control and organisation.

  He glanced across before he started the engine and it was as if he touched her. A slow caress. Hurriedly she did up her seat belt.

  He smiled, and his eyes seemed to glow like a brown-eyed tiger, and her belly kicked. ‘I could have helped,’ he said.

  She rubbed her arms. Not likely, buddy. The thought of his hand at her waist gave her more goose-bumps.

  ‘Do you live in your house all alone?’

  She raised her eyebrows at him but doubted he’d see that in the dashboard light. ‘Not something I should tell a man I barely know.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, and she laughed again. He was funny. And old-fashioned, and yet she had the feeling that his moral code might bend dramatically when it was his own desires that were at stake. She didn’t think he realized how at sea she was. Luckily.

  She looked out the window and back again. ‘I live with my daughter. My father comes sometimes to stay when he can and my brothers used to live there but the last of them has just married. They’re all shift workers so they used to come and go a lot anyway.’

  ‘In my country, alone in a house is not good for a woman and her daughter. It is different here?’

  She frowned. N
ow he’d annoyed her. Though, if she was honest, maybe a little of her response was due to the fact she didn’t want to think about the example she was setting to her daughter by going out with a man who made her feel sexy for the first time in her life. ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘My daughter is safe. Lyrebird Lake is a safe place. We have very little crime. I know everyone in town.’

  His heavy brows drew together. ‘And people don’t drift through?’ His voice was dry. ‘I’m sure Angus said there is a working mine? A transient miner population only up the road.’

  She tilted her head at him. Defiantly. ‘Where I live is fine. And not your concern.’ His interest had become too pointed. ‘In this country customs differ. Did you say we would eat?’

  He sat back, and then nodded. ‘My apologies. It is none of my business.’ He started the car and of course now she felt guilty… But then she shrugged in the dark. He could get over it. Get used to the way women could look after themselves in Australia. Had to look after themselves. She thought with amusement about Tommy and her brothers, and the way she more looked after them. They should fly a women’s independence flag for her at Lyrebird Lake.

  No conversation occurred until they drove into the cobbled courtyard of the Lakeside and the restaurant lights spilled into the car park and reflected back off the water.

  She stayed in her seat, very tempted to open her own door just to tease him, but that would be petty. Was she bored with his old-fashioned manners already? Her door swung away and he held his hand out to help her.

  ‘May I assist you?’ His voice was low and courteous, no hint of assertiveness as it curled around her like a tender scarf. It was interesting he hadn’t presumed this time.

  No, she wasn’t bored with being spoilt, she thought as she shivered in the sensations and hugged them to herself. His fingers were warm and strong when she took his hand, just like last time, and she felt the same burning sensation up her arm and the tightening of her breasts.