Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit

by Meredith Webber

  ‘There’s a hole in the trunk of that tree where they can live,’ Kate told Hamish. ‘They could go and live in the park but they probably won’t because they know they get fresh fruit here every night.’

  She’d lifted him off the bench and carried him outside as the possums departed, and though she enjoyed the heaviness of his tired body in her arms she knew she had to hand him over to his father.

  ‘Can I come and see them again?’

  She was about to answer when she realised it was probably way past his bedtime. Fortunately Angus answered for her.

  ‘Perhaps in winter when it gets dark earlier,’ he said, ‘although maybe we should think about putting out some fruit some nights, just as we used to put out bird feed for the birds in winter back home.’

  Back home!

  The phrase echoed in Kate’s head as Angus lifted his son from her arms and, after thanking her, walked towards the gate in the hedge.

  It was a reminder that on top of all the other reasons she shouldn’t be attracted to this man, he didn’t really belong here. Although as far as she knew he wasn’t on a time-limited contract. Silly woman! Stop thinking about him. Get on with the job you have to do!

  Angus kissed Hamish goodnight and left him with Juanita, determined to get back to Kate’s place before she began her precarious task on the ladder. He’d go up and do it himself, and to hell with her ‘liberated woman’ attitude. After all, what use was an injured anaesthetist to him?

  Too late! By the time he returned to his backyard she was already at the top of the ladder, and he could hear the hammering even before he walked through the gate.

  Now he was in a dilemma! He didn’t want to startle her, but he couldn’t not approach. The least he could do was hold the ladder steady.

  ‘I’ve come back,’ he said, speaking quietly. ‘And if you climb down, I’ll do that for you.’

  ‘I’m nearly done,’ she answered cheerfully. ‘Once I had the size it really wasn’t difficult. There were studs under the soffit I could nail to, and though I feel just the teensiest bit guilty about shutting the family out of their home, at least I’ll get to sleep more easily.’

  ‘Which is more than I’m doing at the moment,’ Angus muttered to himself.

  He only realised he’d spoken the thought out loud when Kate said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he told her. ‘I was just wondering why you haven’t someone in your life you can get to do these jobs.’

  Well, he had been wondering that earlier! The ‘someone’ might be a boyfriend or partner and he was far more curious about her single status than he should be!

  ‘Are we back on the “man’s job” thing?’ she asked, beginning to come down the ladder so it moved in his hands.

  ‘Not really,’ he admitted, ‘but it’s hard for most men to think a woman is just as capable at odd jobs as they are. In fact, you’re probably far more capable than I am. I’m a total fool when it comes to hammers—I seem to hit everything but the nail.’

  Blithering, that’s what his mother would say he was doing, but as Kate came closer he realised he’d either have to change the way he was holding the ladder, or let her finish her climb to the ground right through his arms.

  The silly conversation ceased but he couldn’t let go of the ladder, and although he pushed himself as far back as he could he still feel her body slither against his as she reached the lower rungs. A slight sway of the ladder and she was in his arms, all reason forgotten as he lifted her off the second bottom rung, setting her on the ground, turning her, kissing her, kissing her with the desperation of a—

  He had no idea how to classify his desperation—just knew it existed, for his hands were clamped around her body and his lips were pressed to hers, his tongue already exploring the taste of her, the shape of her lips, the hardness of those neat white teeth…

  It could have been a minute or an hour later that she moved against him, pulling back, smiling weakly at him in the yellow outdoor light.

  ‘Surely only a fool would kiss a woman with a hammer in her hand,’ she said, but though her voice was steady, he could see the unevenness in her breathing, see the way she was drawing air deep into her lungs. To replenish what she’d lost during the kiss or to steady her heartbeats as he was trying to steady his?

  She should have hit him with the hammer, Kate thought as she waved the tool aloft. Or hit herself! Her heart thudded in her chest and no amount of denial or sensible talk could convince her she wasn’t attracted to this man.

  ‘I don’t do serious relationships.’ The words were as blunt as hammer hits would be, his voice deep and husky as if he’d had to force it out past innumerable obstacles.

  Keep it light! Kate warned herself.

  ‘And you’re telling me this, why?’

  She even managed a smile as she asked.

  ‘Because I’m about to kiss you again and I thought you should know,’ he said, and before she had time to make sense of the statement, he’d turned the words to action. He reached out, removed the hammer from her hand and dropped it on the ground. One arm clamped around her, drawing her close against his body, tucking her into it as if to fit a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, then the fingers of his free hand grazed her chin, tipping her head, fingers running into her hair.

  By the time his lips met hers, Kate was breathless with the delay, her body throbbing with a desire she’d never felt before. Had he felt it, tasted it with the brush of lips on lips, so that his mouth became demanding, insistent, forcing her lips open as if he needed to claim all he could of her in a kiss?

  She was melting, floating, boneless in his arms, held upright by his strong hand against her back, the other tangled in her hair. And he murmured as he kissed—muttered, really—little words and sounds she really couldn’t make out, although they sounded more like reprimands than endearments.

  But the noise did nothing to diminish the potency of the kiss. If anything, it intensified the excitement, so when Kate realised she was making little moaning noises, she didn’t try to stop them. She surrendered to sensation, enjoying the searing heat of desire along her nerves, the burning need settling at the base of her abdomen.

  Crazy as a loon! Angus didn’t think he’d ever used the expression he’d heard often in the U.S., but it was the only one that seemed to fit. Yet even as it echoed in his head, and he chided himself for his behaviour, he couldn’t take his lips from hers, couldn’t release her body from his clasp. He wanted her—dear heaven but he wanted her—and kissing her like this, feeling her response, there was only one place they’d end up and that was in bed.

  Hers, obviously. He’d never paraded any of the women he’d occasionally enjoyed relationships with in front of Hamish.

  She was so slight and delicate, like quicksilver in his arms, yet the breasts he could feel against his chest were real and soft and full and, as his hand slid to her butt, he felt its curves. But it was her mouth that still demanded most of his attention. Syrup sweet, that mouth! Maple syrup! Years in the States had given him a taste for it and now he tasted it in Kate—addictive.

  Then she was gone, warm night air where her body had been, a distance of perhaps a foot between them.

  ‘Not a good idea, Dr McDowell,’ she said, although the flush on her cheeks and the glitter in her eyes suggested otherwise.

  ‘You’re going to deny there’s an attraction between us?’ He was still trying to work out how she’d slipped away from him, while thwarted lust was making him tetchy.

  ‘Of course not.’ She shook her head to emphasise the words, the wild red curls flying every which way. ‘It’d be easier to deny the sun rising, but that’s all it is, Angus, attraction, and at my age I really don’t want a go-nowhere affair. If I’m putting time and energy into a relationship, then I’d like to think there might be some future in it.’

  ‘So every relationship should lead to marriage? Is that what you’re saying?’ Maybe he was a tad more than tetchy!

&n
bsp; ‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not entirely stupid. But I don’t see the point of going into a relationship that has nowhere to go and you’ve made it clear anything between us would have nowhere to go. What was it you said? “I don’t do serious relationships”? Well, that’s fine, and I like the fact you set out the guidelines from the beginning, but I’m entitled to do the same, and I don’t want to go into something just for the sex.’

  ‘It wouldn’t just be sex,’ Angus muttered—not good that he was down to muttering already. Muttering was usually part of losing an argument. But he persevered anyway. ‘We enjoy each other’s company. We can have dinner, go to the theatre—’

  Kate couldn’t help but laugh, shaking her head at her behaviour at the same time, but unable to control the gurgles of mirth that were bubbling up from deep within her.

  ‘Oh, Angus, if you could only hear yourself. We could go to dinner—yep, and then back to my place to bed. We could go to the theatre and—’

  ‘Okay, I get your point,’ he growled. ‘I can even see it from your side and understand, but don’t think for a moment this discussion is over because whatever it is between us is so strong I doubt either of us can resist it.’

  The growl became a husky whisper as he added, ‘Or can you?’ before he took her in his arms and his mouth claimed hers once again.

  Enjoy it while you can. That was Kate’s last rational thought before sensation took over and she floated on the blissful cloud of desire he seemed to generate so easily.

  It couldn’t just be the way he kissed.

  The thought eased into her head as she turned her lips away from his to catch her breath. There had to be more to the way he made her feel than just kissing. Perhaps the way her body fitted his had something to do with it. She pressed experimentally closer and went back to kissing. But not mindlessly this time, for her sensible brain was chiding her the whole time

  Idiocy! Plain and simple. Stop before it becomes impossible to stop.

  But she couldn’t—wouldn’t—because kissing Angus was the most exciting, enthralling, stupendous thing she’d ever done…well, that she could think of right now! Perhaps if they kept to kissing, a kissing relationship…

  ‘You’re not behaving like someone who doesn’t want to get involved with me.’

  The accusation was delivered with a warm breath close to her left ear and she shivered as his tongue flicked, then his teeth nibbled gently on her earlobe.

  ‘I never denied the attraction,’ she whispered back, kissing him this time, pressing her lips to his as a punctuation mark at the end of the sentence. Then a sigh filtered out and she pushed away.

  ‘I do mean it, Angus. I really don’t want to go into a pointless relationship—’

  He moved but not so far away that he couldn’t still clasp her loosely, holding her within the circle of his arms so his strong features were in profile against the yellow light and she could see his lips—those lips—move as he spoke.

  ‘A lot of relationships turn out to be pointless,’ he reminded her. ‘There are never guarantees that everything will work out. Surely it’s not so much how you go into them as how you come out of them.’

  A hopeless mess, that’s how I’d come out of a relationship with you, Kate thought, but she didn’t say it. I’ve done that before and really do not want to do it again.

  He was making some kind of point here, and she should have an argument to counter it, but her brain was still fuddled from the kissing and her body was suddenly very, very tired.

  ‘I am not going to argue semantics with you tonight,’ she said, then regretted saying anything when he grinned at her and restarted all the fizzing sensations that had been happening along her nerves.

  ‘Aha, so that means we’ll have another night to argue them.’

  He was teasing her and suddenly she hated him—well, not hated, but definitely didn’t like him very much. He’d awoken responses from her she’d never thought to feel and to him it was nothing more than a game—kissing, flirtation, an affair—with no more point than the kissing games young teens played at parties, practicing for love…

  ‘Go home,’ she told him, and though his arms tightened momentarily around her, she stiffened and he didn’t pull her close.

  ‘No goodnight kiss?’

  ‘No kisses period,’ she told him, but as he walked towards the gate she remembered it was Friday night and called him back. ‘Wait, I’ll give you the car keys and the sat nav so you can take the car to visit McTavish. I might not be here in the morning.’

  Angus turned and followed her into the house, into the kitchen, the only room he’d seen so far. She rummaged through a drawer in search of keys while he studied her, wondering why this woman of all the women he met in his day-to-day life should fire something in him, something so strong he knew he should be strengthening his resistance against her, not wondering how soon he could kiss her again.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, turning to him with triumph in her eyes, her smile so open and delighted he felt as if a hand had tightened around his heart. ‘Not only keys but the sat nav, as well. You’ve used one? Can program it?’

  He took the little device and nodded, knowing it was the same brand as the one he’d used in the U.S., but the hand clutching his heart hadn’t let go and he suspected he’d have to rethink his ambition to kiss Kate again as soon as possible. He was beginning to suspect that kissing Kate could be addictive, and addictions were hard to break…

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, aware he sounded formal and aloof once more, the way he sounded at the hospital when he was talking to the parents of his patients.

  And Kate heard it, too, for her dark eyebrows rose and her pink lips, still swollen from his kisses, twisted into a wry smile.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, as if she understood exactly what his tone had meant. ‘Enjoy yourselves tomorrow. There’s plenty of fuel in the tank if you want to take Hamish to the beach after you’ve been to the quarantine station.’

  He nodded and departed, pausing in the doorway to look back at her, the smile gone from her face and in its place an unmistakeable sadness.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said, for what else was there to say. An affair between them could not have any point and he wasn’t going to lie to her to get her into bed.

  Although, as he shut the gate between their properties, the discomfort in his body suggested that this stance was all very well morally and ethically, but physically, given that he wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing her every working day, it might be difficult.

  Kate was actually pleased when the phone rang at one o’clock in the morning. She might have been in a light sleep but whatever sleep she’d managed had been deeply disturbed, her body tossing and turning, feeling the magic Angus had generated, the heat, and wanting to satisfy it.

  It was a good thing she was mentally strong, she told herself as she pulled on slacks and a T-shirt. She had a stock of laundered white coats in her locker at work, so all she had to do was clean her teeth, wash her face, tie her hair up in a bundle and get moving up the road.

  A five-day-old baby girl had been admitted to the hospital with cold, clammy skin, rapid breathing and alarming cyanosis, her lips very blue. The neonatologist on call was doing X-rays, an ECG and an echocardiogram, but had called in one of Kate’s team—she rather thought Oliver was on call this weekend—thinking they’d need to do a cardiac catheterisation to see what was happening in the baby’s heart.

  Kate considered what lay ahead as she jogged up the street, thinking, too, of the parents, so happy with their new baby, then panicked by her distress. She made her way to the treatment room off the PICU where she found not Oliver but Angus.

  ‘You’re not on call,’ she told him, so bothered by the unexpected encounter her heart was racing and her mind in a whirl—not a good way to be before sedating a tiny baby.

  ‘Oliver had a family occasion of some kind so I offered to do tonight for him. He’ll owe me.’

  Well! Obviously Angus w
as in hospital mode, all thoughts of hot kisses in her backyard well and truly gone.

  Which is how it should be, she reminded herself.

  And if he could do it, so could she!

  ‘How long will you need?’ she asked as she read the baby’s chart, checking her weight so the sedation could be accurately measured.

  Angus didn’t answer immediately, but she was used to that now. She could imagine him running through the operation in his mind—inserting the catheter into a blood vessel in the patient’s groin, feeding the wire carefully up into the heart, perhaps introducing dye so he could better see the problem, perhaps also, depending on what he found, needing to use a special catheter with a balloon at the tip to open up a hole between the left and right atria.

  ‘Forty minutes! I should be able to do it in half an hour but we’ll take the extra ten minutes just in case. It’s a suspected TAPVR.’

  Kate mentally translated the initials, thinking how frightening it must be for parents to hear that their child had total anomalous pulmonary venous return, when, in fact, it simply meant that the veins from the lungs, pulmonary veins, had somehow got themselves attached to the wrong part of the heart. Angus would find out exactly what was happening now, and later the baby would need an operation where the veins would be disconnected from where they were, and set into place where they should be, connecting to the left atrium. At the same time, the surgeon would close the little hole Angus was about to make, and the baby’s heart should operate beautifully.

  She checked the dosage of sedative and injected it into the intravenous line already attached to the baby girl, who lay, unresisting and lethargic, looking up at her until slowly the dark blue eyes closed and her breathing grew less laboured.

  Kate took a blood sample from a second catheter in the baby’s foot, wanting to check on the blood gases before the procedure, so they could compare it after Angus had completed the operation. A small oxygen monitor was attached to one of the tiny fingers, but Kate always checked the blood, as well, not wanting to rely on just one reading.