by Amy Andrews
‘No. It can have some awful side-effects,’ Marcus agreed, ‘but it’s the only course of action I would recommend.’ Marcus knew that there were complementary methods employed by some alternative medicine practitioners to treat cancers, but the medical doctor in him never took any chances with cancer.
‘Oh, God,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’
Marcus smiled sympathetically, a sudden horrible vision of Connor limp and pale keeping it real for him. ‘As I said, let’s just take this one step at a time. OK? Blood tests first. Then in two hours I want you to go next door, to Dr Madeline Harrington. I’m going to get the lab to phone the results through to her. I’m referring Trent’s case to her.’
‘But I want you,’ she said.
Marcus could see Jenny was trying really hard to hold it together. ‘I’ll be there, too, I promise, but as I specialise in natural therapies I think it’s more appropriate for you to have a traditional GP to take over Trent’s case.’
Jenny stood, barely disturbing Trent. ‘Right. OK. Right. I’ll go, then. OK.’
Marcus led her out gently. She looked totally frozen, like she was registering nothing in her brain other than the words ‘childhood leukaemia’ in big tall letters. He helped her buckle Trent into his booster seat and handed her the car keys. ‘Drive carefully,’ he told her, and waited until she looked at him and nodded.
Marcus sat back down at his desk. He wished he felt more positive about Trent Smith’s chances. But he’d seen this presentation a little too often to doubt himself.
He dialled Maddy’s number. She was with a patient and excused herself for a moment.
‘Well, hello,’ she said softly, recognising the caller ID.
Marcus felt his lips lift up into a slight smile as her voice curled into his ear. ‘Hello to you, too,’ he said softly.
Ordinarily he’d ask her something outrageous like what she was wearing and laugh when she acted all prim and proper in front of a client. But today, despite the delicious lurch of his stomach when he’d heard her voice, he just wasn’t in the mood.
‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
He could hear the smile in her voice and pictured her holding the phone, her lips against the receiver.
‘Business, I’m afraid. Can you clear a space in your schedule for two hours’ time? I have a six-year-old boy that I suspect has leukaemia. His mother is getting his blood tested now.’
Madeline squeezed her eyes shut briefly, her heart going out to the anonymous little boy. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, knowing that imparting news such as this also took it out of a practitioner. Knowing how close he was to his six-year-old nephew, cases like these could be a little too close for comfort.
Her low voice tinged with empathy was soothing. On days like this he wished he hadn’t come to work. He could have been in bed with her, her low voice whispering scandalous things in his ear instead.
He sighed. ‘Yep. Can you swing it?’
Madeline looked at her appointments. She’d swing it somehow. ‘Sure. You coming, too?’
‘Yep.’
‘All right. I have a patient. I’d better go. I’ll see you then.’
Two hours later Marcus walked into the surgery, past a grinning Veronica and straight into Madeline’s office and directly into her open arms. She felt good. It felt good to be there.
‘What are the results?’ he asked, pulling back reluctantly.
‘White cells astronomical. Critically low platelets and red cells.’
‘ALL,’ he said despondently.
She nodded. ‘Fill me in,’ she said.
Marcus went over Trent’s case for a few minutes. Then the intercom buzzed. ‘Jenny and Trent Smith are here,’ Veronica announced.
‘I’ll bring them through,’ he said.
Marcus made the introductions and sat himself on the edge of Madeline’s desk. ‘I’m sorry, Jenny. The blood tests have confirmed it. Trent has ALL—acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.’
There was silence as they watched the confirmation slowly sink into Jenny’s head. She looked at them with tears in her eyes. ‘What is that, exactly?’ she asked.
‘ALL is a cancer of the bone marrow,’ Madeline said, stepping in. ‘Something goes wrong, we don’t know what, that causes an overproduction of immature white blood cells. These crowd the bone marrow, preventing it from making normal cells, like red cells, which is why he’s so pale, and platelets, which is why he has bruises everywhere.’
Jenny hugged a listless Trent to her and rocked him, a tear tracking down her face. ‘So, what happens now?’
‘We want you to go home, pack a bag and take Trent straight up to the children’s hospital. I’ll ring ahead and let them know you’re coming,’ she said. ‘You’ll be seen by an oncologist and treatment will commence immediately.’
‘Chemotherapy?’ Jenny asked.
Madeline nodded. Poor little Trent, he was going to be put through hell in the next few months, trying to force his body into remission.
Jenny shook her head. ‘This is all happening too fast,’ she cried.
‘Have you told Trent’s father?’ Marcus asked.
‘We’ve been separated since just after he was born,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t have anything to do with him.’
Marcus shut his eyes briefly. Oh, no. Poor Trent. He remembered how much it sucked not having a dad around and felt overwhelmingly protective of this sick little boy. Poor Jenny. She was going to have to shoulder a huge burden.
‘Do you have someone in Brisbane to support you?’ asked Madeline, stepping in for Marcus. She could feel his distress and knew that he wouldn’t be able to walk away from this fatherless boy either.
‘My mother,’ said Jenny absently. ‘She’s away for five days in the back of beyond, visiting my grandmother. I’ve tried a couple of times to ring but they’re not in and mobile coverage is pretty patchy out that way.’
‘Give me the numbers. I’ll keep trying for you,’ said Marcus. ‘Just get Trent to the hospital. That’s the most important thing. I’ll call in later.’
Jenny’s hand shook as she wrote on the pad Madeline provided. She stood, hugging Trent to her for dear life, and Madeline swallowed a lump. Jenny was like so many mothers she had seen in the past in the same situation. Shocked and worried but holding it all together so their child wouldn’t get upset. Madeline knew that the minute Jenny had a spare moment alone or her mother walked through the door, she was going to completely lose it.
When Jenny had left they both stared after her, lost in their own thoughts. Days like this were all part and parcel of their jobs but giving horrible news was never a pleasant task. There were many highs in this line of work but the lows really took the shine out of a day.
She moved closer to where Marcus was sitting on the edge of her desk and hugged him around the shoulders from behind. He laid his head back into her shoulder and Madeline kissed his forehead.
‘Want to go out and eat somewhere tonight?’ he turned to her and asked after a while.
She smiled at him. It would be the first time in six weeks they’d actually eaten first. She understood. ‘Sure, sounds good. South Bank?’
He nodded and gave her a slow, sad smile, pushing up off the desk. ‘I’ll see you after work.’
She nodded and watched him leave the room. The situation with Jenny and Trent had obviously left him as dispirited as it had her.
‘Did you get hold of Jenny’s mum?’ Madeline asked as they strolled to South Bank, holding hands.
‘Yes, not long ago. She’s flying back to Brisbane early tomorrow morning. I called in and saw Jenny, too.’
‘How’s she holding up?’
‘Barely,’ he said. ‘They’re hoping to start his first round of chemo in the morning.’
‘Poor kid,’ she murmured, and Marcus squeezed her hand. When she looked at him she knew he was feeling even more wretched.
They walked the rest of the way in silence and wi
thout any consultation they ended up at the pub where it had all started only a few weeks ago. They sat at the same table and he ordered them the same drinks and they whiled away the evening eating and talking, trying to keep their minds off the plight of another fatherless six-year-old boy.
But when they ended up back at his apartment, it wasn’t the same as the first time. Their joining wasn’t the fast, furious, get-your-clothes-off exercise it had been last time. It wasn’t flirty or funny. It was one hundred per cent more intimate than any time before. Madeline felt as if her soul had been stripped bare and Marcus had given her a rare insight into his.
Her orgasm was more intense than it had ever been and afterwards he held her to him, not moving away. His weight grew heavy and eventually she stirred and he reluctantly shifted. But he pulled her in tight, her back against his chest, spoon fashion, and he dusted her shoulders and neck and back with feather-light kisses as she fell asleep.
Madeline woke a couple of hours later, Marcus’s arm still around her, his breathing deep and steady. She shifted his arm gently, needing to use the bathroom. He stirred a little then rolled on his stomach and drifted back to sleep.
She took care of business then stood in the en suite doorway for a few moments, just watching him. Ordinarily she would have gone back to bed and woken him for more sex but his face was free of the frown he’d been wearing all day and she decided to leave him alone.
Feeling restless, she pulled on her knickers and her shirt, fastening one button at the front, and wandered into the kitchen. She put the percolator on and fixed herself a cup of coffee and took it onto the deck, sitting in a chair and putting her feet up on the railing. It was a beautiful night. A three-quarter moon hung large in the sky and bathed the river below in its milky glow.
A soft breeze blew, lifting her heavy curls off her neck, and she shut her eyes, enjoying the kiss of the wind on her heated skin and the sounds of the river below and the background hum of the city all around her. Her thoughts drifted to Marcus’s love-making and her stomach flopped over, thinking about how he had made her cry out for mercy from the power of her orgasm.
Six weeks down the track she still couldn’t believe how he made her body come alive. He knew every inch of her skin and where to stroke it and where to kiss it and where to lick it. He knew the bits of her that made her shiver, the bits that made her moan and the bits that made her beg for more. She had never been ‘known’ so thoroughly.
And she knew his special places, too. She knew that if she stroked the sensitive flesh where his hip bone sloped down into his abdomen he would tense and if she licked his collarbone he would break out in goose-bumps, and if she bit his neck he would groan out loud.
She sipped at the coffee, relishing the wave of lust that undulated through her body. If she kept thinking like this she was going to have to go back in and wake him, whether she wanted to or not. She could feel her pelvic-floor muscles ripple in anticipation and she sighed deeply.
She let her thoughts drift to other things and invariably they went to Trent Smith. She thought of Jenny out there somewhere, probably lying awake in the dark, worrying or crying herself to sleep. The fragility and uncertainty of life seemed magnified tenfold by the Smith family’s tragedy.
It just didn’t seem fair that a little boy, innocent and carefree, was looking down the barrel of a potential death sentence. Yes, these days there was over a seventy per cent five-year survival rate for childhood leukaemia, but you could never be sure who was going to be in the seventy and who was going to be in the thirty.
She realised that you never knew what was around the corner. Trent Smith had been a happy little boy a week ago, a little pale and a picky eater, but essentially normal. And now he was in hospital about to start chemotherapy. If it could happen to him, it could happen to any of them.
It had happened to her parents. And Abby. Happy and alive and in love one day and then three days later on her couch, minutes away from dying. Life was short and unpredictable. She knew that from Abby and now from Trent and she certainly knew it from her line of work.
She thought about how Marcus’s heart had melted today when he’d discovered that Trent’s father wasn’t around. She knew him well enough to know that it had really affected him. He had a big squishy soft spot inside for kids just like Trent. Kids like Connor. Like the kid he’d once been. She had seen how great he was with his nephew and knew that Trent facing leukaemia without a dad was like pushing a big old bruise inside him that had never quite healed. She loved him for that.
And there it was. She loved him. She hadn’t meant it to be. She hadn’t planned it. Hell, she hadn’t even realised it until this very moment. But the truth was inescapable. She was in love with him. He had warned her not to, he had been very clear that it was just sex, but it had happened anyway.
Quite what the hell she was going to do with her revelation she didn’t have a clue. Neither of them had talked about their future. They’d both just been living in the moment. Maybe after all this time his feelings had changed, too? But if they hadn’t? What would he do if she told him and he walked? Could she handle it if he did? And was tonight really the best night to spring it on him?
Was there ever going to be a good time? When would have been the right time to tell Jenny Smith about her son? What the hell were her and Marcus doing? Having nights of endless sex and spending every spare moment together was all well and good. But what if she was diagnosed with cancer tomorrow? What if he was hit by a car, riding that ridiculous skateboard? Would she regret not having told him? Did Jenny regret not having told Trent she loved him one more time each day for the last six years?
The mere thought made her sit up straighter and she felt a pain in her heart just thinking about it. She loved Marcus. And she wanted to tell him because her heart was so full of emotion at the moment she wanted to share the magic with him.
But she wasn’t brave enough to lose him over it either. She may not have ever intended to fall in love with him but now she was here, she needed to be careful of her heart. He had an ex-wife who had left him with baggage—permanent commitment scared the hell out of him. She needed to tread gently.
Tonight might not be the night for declarations of undying love but she needed something to cling to. Maybe she just needed to start talking about the future a little more? Her feelings a little more. Maybe she could get an acknowledgement that they were more than rebound sex, that they’d moved on from there. That they were in some kind of relationship.
She heard Marcus rustling around in the kitchen a few minutes later and felt her heart pick up its tempo. Strike while the iron was hot?
Marcus stepped on to the deck. ‘Here you are,’ he murmured, leaning over and kissing her on the head. He could see straight down her top from his vantage point behind her and liked what he saw very much. He put his coffee on the table and nibbled down her neck, his hands sliding from her shoulders down under the collar of her shirt, until he was cupping her naked breast. He rubbed his thumbs over her nipples and felt himself twitch.
Madeline shut her eyes and gave herself up to the erotic rub of his fingers. Her internal muscles tightened and she wanted to stretch and purr like a contented cat.
He growled into her neck and slowly unhanded her. He stood up, collected his coffee and sat in the chair beside her.
They sat in silence for a few moments, looking at the river. He watched the breeze lift her curls off her neck and felt the urge to nibble there return again. ‘Penny for them,’ he said.
She looked at him, her heart beating a mad tattoo in her chest. Strike while the iron was hot. ‘We’re not having rebound sex any more, are we?’
Marcus looked assessingly at her earnest face. No, they weren’t. It had been an easy thing to continue to believe they were. There had been no insistence from her, no suggestion that it was anything else. No hints they make it more permanent, buy a ring, move in together. But deep in his heart he knew they’d moved into a relationship.
/> ‘No,’ he said.
She smiled. That was the first hurdle.
He cocked his head and then sipped at his coffee. ‘What brought this on?’
‘I’ve been thinking about Trent and Abby and how fragile life can be,’ she said quietly.
Marcus nodded. It was hard not to reassess the course of your own life when confronted with someone else’s mortality. Especially a six-year-old boy’s.
‘I think I’m falling for you.’ Madeline didn’t know where the words had come from and cursed herself for letting them out. This wasn’t in her plan. At least her disobedient brain had the good sense to not completely blow her cover.
Marcus blinked. He waited for the alarm bells to start ringing and the denial to spring to his lips. But there was nothing. Just the intriguing possibility that Maddy was actually serious.
‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she asked a few minutes later.
Marcus stood and leaned against the railing, facing her. He moved her legs, supporting them against his body instead, and massaged a foot.
‘You know that’s not the idea of a rebound relationship, right? You’re supposed to just use me for sex. And then have several other sexually based relationships until you fall for someone. I’m rebound guy. You’re supposed to use me up and leave me. It’s not wise to fall for rebound guy.’
Hmm. So he hadn’t rejected her outright. She felt amazingly heartened. ‘Sorry.’ She shrugged and then smiled, obviously not that sorry at all.
He smiled back. ‘Think about it, Maddy. You’ve been with one person for ten years. You should have a period where you date other men, sample what’s out there before you chose from the menu.’
His foot massage was sexy as hell and she was finding it difficult to concentrate on the conversation. She’d found her entrée, main and dessert in one. ‘Is that what you want?’ she asked. ‘You want me to go off and date other men?’
Marcus stopped rubbing her foot. Was it? Hell, no! The thought of another man touching her, being with her, made him want to break things. Made him want to lock her away. She was his, he did things to her, and she did things to him that he’d never experienced before. He had no idea why he was playing devil’s advocate. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t.’
