Christmas Knight

by Meredith Webber

Baby names?

  ‘I might make a list,’ she said, startling Grant with his fork midway to his lips. ‘Of baby names I quite like,’ she explained. ‘That way, if you persist in addressing her by name, I won’t be constantly appalled.’

  ‘Good move,’ he said, but the lips, still awaiting the fork-load of food, twisted upward at the corners and seemed to quiver as if holding back a smile might soon prove too much.

  The teenage Grant Bell had had killer lips, but these full-grown features were even better. Full, but not too full, beautifully shaped and clearly delineated by a neat, pale rim, so in a lip contest he’d have to be a frontrunner. And they were ultra-mobile as well—ready to smile, or open in a shout of laughter.

  ‘Yo, Katie? You still with me here? We were going to make a list.’

  His words brought her abruptly out of her contemplation of lip structure, though not completely.

  ‘Have you been in touch with Linda? What does she do? Is she a doctor? Does she live in Sydney?’

  His startled look told her she’d asked far too many questions—showed way too much interest. While the sensible Kate who resided in her head was scoffing at her lack of moral fibre, allowing killer lips to distract her.

  ‘I thought we were discussing baby names,’ he reminded her. ‘I’ve a pencil and a paper. I’m ready.’

  He managed to sound hurt, an act she didn’t believe for a moment, but as he obviously wasn’t going to answer her questions about the woman in his life, she might as well go with the baby-naming option.

  ‘I quite like Sophie.’

  ‘I’ve already got that down. Come on, there must be more than one—though if there isn’t then Sophie she’ll have to be.’

  ‘No, it’s not quite right. What other girls’ names are there? You must have been out with dozens of women—what were their names? Apart from Linda, because I’d always think of the Chlorinda thing, and I must add I find it very strange, considering you used to tell me about all the girls at school with whom you were passionately in love—before you and me…you know—that you’re being so close-lipped about her.’

  The ‘lip’ word made her look at his again, and this time she shivered, remembering, just before those lips had touched hers the first time, him saying he’d only talked about the other girls to make her jealous.

  She’d wanted to believe it then, but didn’t need to now.

  ‘I once took out a Rachel—do you want it on the list?’

  ‘Rachel? Rache? Would that morph to Roach so the poor thing would be known as either a cockroach or an iffy cigarette?’

  Grant crossed out ‘Rachel’.

  ‘Let’s go alphabetically. Anna, Annabel, Alison, Archimedes?’

  ‘You’re being silly now,’ Kate said crossly. ‘I told you I didn’t like lists—and this is why. I know I suggested it, but I’m no good at it.’

  ‘Don’t you have a book with baby names in it?’

  She looked at him with wide-eyed surprise.

  ‘And where would I get one of those? At the local news-agent so everyone in town would know I didn’t have a name picked out for the baby?’

  ‘They all know by now, anyway,’ Grant said gently. ‘Every patient I saw this morning asked if you’d decided yet.’

  Katie shrugged as if the whole conversation was aggravating her, then got up and began to clear the table.

  ‘Megan. I’ll call her Megan. Or will that clash with Fenton? Megan Fenton? Isn’t there a rule about having a different number of syllables in each part of the name, though you’ve got one and one and it suits you.’

  Grant stood up and carried his plate to the sink. He set it down, put his hands on Katie’s shoulders and turned her so he could look directly at her.

  ‘Don’t panic about this, Katie. There’s no rush and there are no rules. She’s your baby, and you can call her what you like and take as long as you like deciding, though she’ll hate you if you’re still calling her “the baby” or, even worse, just “baby” when she goes to school.’

  He received a wobbly smile for his efforts.

  ‘I tell you, Grant, this motherhood caper is for the birds. I seem to be managing my learnt skills like doctoring just fine, but as far as everyday living goes?’ She shook her head. ‘Whatever neurones I possessed have closed down, and my body seems to have reverted to automatic responses that come from primitive instinct, before Homo sapiens developed the skill to reason.’

  ‘Sometimes it might be best not to reason,’ he said softly, then, because she was so goldenly beautiful, so soft to the touch, and so very, very familiar, he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips.

  Beneath his fingers, he felt her shoulders stiffen, then an almost imperceptible relaxation of the muscles as her lips moved against his, not exactly responding but definitely not drawing away.

  Sanity returned in time for him to do the drawing away.

  ‘You taste the same, Katie Fenton,’ he said, hoping lightness might carry the day, while his head berated him for his folly and reminded him he had no excuse, like recent childbirth, to explain why he’d given way to primitive instinct.

  ‘You say that as if people taste different,’ she said grouchily. ‘All skin’s made up of the same chemical and molecular composition, so there shouldn’t be a difference.’

  ‘There is if someone’s been eating a lot of garlic. Don’t tell me you can’t taste it in the sweat,’ he argued out of habit, and because it saved him thinking about his body’s reaction to kissing Katie.

  ‘I haven’t ever licked the sweat off a garlic-eater so I wouldn’t know,’ she said, with sufficient huffiness for him to wonder if she, too, had been disturbed by the kiss.

  Physically disturbed?

  ‘And shouldn’t you be heading off to the butcher’s? The baby will wake any minute, expecting to be fed, so I can’t come with you, but remember, my cooking skills are restricted to throwing something under a grill, or into a frying-pan, or on a barbecue. Words like “braising” bring on heart palpitations.’

  ‘I told you I’ll do the fancy stuff,’ Grant promised, realising it was a good idea to get away from her while he worked out why he’d given in to the urge to kiss her—and how he could prevent it happening again.

  He was out the back door when she called him back.

  ‘Wait. I didn’t give you money. And we haven’t talked about pay or board or the patients you saw or any of the things we should have talked about at lunchtime. You diverted me with baby names and now look where we are!’

  He grinned at her.

  ‘Calm down—we have all afternoon to talk. It’s Monday and, according to Vi, you don’t have afternoon surgery on a Monday—just an evening session, six to eight.’

  ‘Oh!’ Kate said, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Then she remembered the money again but it was too late. He was already crossing the paddock at the back of the hospital, taking the short cut everyone used to reach the shops.

  She pushed her hands through the thick mass of her hair, and for the thousandth time since summer had begun she considered getting it cut. But growing her hair long again had been the first of her post-Mark rebellions. He’d always insisted she keep it short— ‘I mean to say, Kate, a mop like that just won’t fit into a theatre cap, now, will it?’

  No, she wouldn’t cut her hair, but she’d have to do something about the brain-drain she was experiencing. Perhaps it was the heat, as well as the after-baby problem, that was causing her neurones so much trouble.

  Though she doubted she could blame the weather for her reaction to Grant’s kiss, for the sizzle it had caused deep in her abdomen, and the fiery rush of longing that had triggered a trembling in her limbs and a pit-a-pat of uncertainty in her heartbeats. Maybe the heat and longing she remembered from the long-ago relationship hadn’t been anything to do with their age…

  Maybe it was to do with some special chemical balance between the two of them…

  But Grant’s presence was temporary, an
d he was engaged to another woman, and even if he’d been available, there was the baby to consider…

  With confusion raging in her head, Kate pressed her hand to her chest. Perhaps if she could regulate the still uneven thumping of her heart she’d be able to think more clearly.

  It didn’t help so, because her knees remained unreliable, she sat down.

  That didn’t help either.

  Distraction—she needed distraction!

  Maybe she should get into lists. She could start with one of things to do—discuss wages with Grant, discuss board with Grant, discuss division of labour with Grant, ditto patients, ditto kissing. No, no more kissing, and definitely no discussion of it.

  Grant was here as a friend, doing a favour for his aunt. Temporarily here. And Grant had a Linda he didn’t want to discuss, so even if Kate wanted a man, which she didn’t, Grant wasn’t the one, which was just as well as he’d already admitted he was in medicine for the money he could make, and she could never marry someone who saw the career she loved as nothing more than a means to an end.

  Although if the end was buying back the family property, or replacing it with another one, surely that was allowable, if not admirable…

  She frowned out into the garden. Was making money with a reason behind it better than making money for the sake of it? Mark was in medicine for the money, as were a lot of his friends. Money had been the reason Mark had wanted her to specialise. But Grant?

  Recalling the ‘making money to buy back the farm’ conversation they’d had, she remembered it had shifted focus. She’d sensed Grant’s initial aim was no longer relevant, or that his career now had another goal—something he hadn’t wanted to discuss.

  Something to do with the sadness she caught glimpses of behind the twinkle in his eyes?

  Or maybe Linda didn’t like cattle.

  The baby’s cry roused her from the pointless speculation, and by the time she’d changed and fed the wee darling and popped her, sleepily digesting her tucker, back to bed, the subject of her musings had returned and she went out to have the talk they should have had earlier.

  Was it because she’d been studying his lips earlier that she found it so hard to concentrate? OK, so they’d settled on a reasonable recompense for him, and on who’d do which surgery sessions. She’d, reluctantly, agreed he could mind the baby while she worked a couple of sessions a week, though she’d insisted Vi would manage if he wanted to get out of the house, perhaps have a look around the place, explore old haunts.

  She’d even managed to retain most of what he’d told her about the patients he’d seen that morning, but throughout it all a separate part of her mind had been cataloguing his features, checking out the strong, straight nose, with enough of a flare to the nostrils to make it distinctively attractive. And the eyebrows—thick but nicely shaped, arching neatly over those incredible blue eyes.

  So far, she’d managed to avoid too close a study of the eyes, though she suspected she’d get there eventually.

  And find them shuttered against her?

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Y-yes, yes, of course I was,’ she stammered, more flustered than she cared to admit. ‘You were talking about Mrs Milward, your old Grade Two teacher. She was gone before I came to Testament, though I’d already done Grade Two by then.’

  The lips she’d given an A-plus to earlier twisted into a funny kind of smile.

  ‘Mrs Milward was three patients ago. I thought you’d zoned out on me. Go and have a sleep, Katie. I picked up a baby-name book at the newsagent, and I’ll go through it and write down names you might like.’

  She should have said, Don’t bother, and reminded him the baby’s name had nothing to do with him, and probably suggested he go out somewhere—look up old friends—but somehow the concept of Grant buying her a baby-name book, together with the A-plus lips, had sent what useful bits of brain she retained into a spin, and having a sleep seemed like an excellent idea.

  Grant watched her go and sighed with a release of tension he hadn’t been aware he’d been feeling. This rescue scenario wasn’t playing out the way he’d expected. The kiss had been bad enough but, OK, that was a mistake he could live with, but after he’d made his escape, and cooled down on his walk across the back paddock—cooled down metaphorically, not physically as it was hotter than Hades out there—he’d been thrown back into chaos at the butcher’s.

  His murderous feelings towards Mick Gazecki, who’d winked at him and made lewd suggestions about how sexy new mothers usually felt, had made him realise Katie’s impulse to brain the butcher with his own meat cleaver had some merit.

  He’d even gone so far as to eye the implement in question.

  The heat must be getting to him. He needed something to do.

  He’d put away the meat earlier, dividing it into portions and freezing most of it, though he’d decided to use the mince tonight. He could do that now. Make a pasta sauce and shove it in the fridge until the evening surgery finished. He could reheat it while he cooked the pasta. He assumed she did have pasta.

  He checked the pantry, and there among the basics found an open packet of little pasta bows that had possibly been there since Dr Darling’s time.

  Not that pasta suffered much with keeping. The corner store where he shopped when home probably had older stuff on its shelves.

  But while his mind tried to stay focussed on the merits of aged pasta and the construction of a suitable sauce to accompany it at dinner-time, another part of it was recalling the softness of Katie’s lips, the luminous quality of her skin, the way her eyes caught and held his, the brash confidence in them undermined by an apprehension he guessed only he could see.

  He was standing in the pantry, pasta packet in hand, when she came, soft-footed, back into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m just getting a drink of water,’ she explained, but now there was more apprehension than confidence in those fascinating eyes, and he waited, knowing she’d eventually get to what she’d come to say.

  ‘I drink a lot—it’s something I vaguely remember from the early Obs and Gyn lectures, about nursing mothers needing to keep the fluids up. I don’t think we should kiss any more.’

  And with that she was gone, leaving him wondering if she’d really tacked that embargo on the end of a statement about the fluid intake of nursing mothers.

  He made to follow her, then realised it would be a mistake. But standing in the pantry with a packet of pasta in his hand wasn’t much use either. He returned the packet to the shelf, checked on the other ingredients he’d need, then walked through to the bedroom with the floral sheets.

  He had plenty of time before he needed to start cooking. He’d get his leathers and take the bike out—tool around the country, visit old haunts as Katie had suggested. Ride past the old property and see how it looked.

  Banish a few ghosts.

  He pulled on his leather pants, then boots, and lastly shrugged into the jacket. It was too hot for full leathers, but experience told him only speed would do at times like this and he wasn’t stupid enough to risk it without some protection.

  But a new ghost rode right along with him. The friend of his childhood, the Katie he’d first known—laughing, joking, daring and being dared. The slim, vibrant Katie who’d suddenly, that long-ago Christmas holidays, grown breasts and hips and had made his loins ache just being near her. Who’d become more than a friend, firing his blood to madness with her kisses, entering passionately into their first explorations of their sexuality.

  The real Katie, today’s Katie, was different. For a start, she had a lush, full, womanly body, and it was, once again, having an unfortunate effect on his loins.

  But she also had a baby, he reminded himself as he passed beyond the limits of the town and opened the throttle on the bike, hoping speed might banish his uncertainties and blow away the memories.

  Though he knew he couldn’t outrace all of them. Hadn’t he tried it before? He eased back before the bike reached top speed and
rode more cautiously, enjoying the rush of fresh-scented air, the sight of wide paddocks stretching out on either side of the road, white-faced cattle resting beneath shady trees, lifting their heads to watch him pass.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LIFE settled into a routine. Baby names were added and crossed off the list that wasn’t really a list, and Katie began not only to feel human but to fret about not doing more.

  Especially when Grant had free time, because being with him, whether in the house talking over the day, or out of it walking the baby or going for drives to places they’d frequented as children, was making her think things she shouldn’t think. Being with him was giving her an idea of family that was dangerous in the extreme as Grant would be gone within weeks and she’d be more alone than ever.

  ‘I’ve found a phone number for an agency in Brisbane,’ she announced, when he came back from surgery to join her for lunch on the fourth Monday of his stay.

  ‘Looking for another locum? What did I do wrong?’

  His teasing smile caused heart problems which were another reason she should be doing more. It was having so little to do that had her mind thinking things it shouldn’t think, while Grant’s constant presence had her body behaving in ways that the new mother in her found shockingly irresponsible.

  ‘I need a nanny, not another locum. Vi’s come up with one or two possibilities, but one lass is engaged to a young man in Craigtown and will be moving away as soon as they’re married, and the other is just the kind of woman I want but she’s planning a three-month trip overseas early in the new year. And also, I don’t know if a live-in mightn’t be better—for call-outs.’

  ‘Vi was talking about Mrs Carter, the woman who’s going overseas. I don’t know about her. One of my younger sisters was at school with a Carter and I’m sure Sue said Mrs Carter used to beat her kids.’

  ‘Mary Carter? That can’t possibly be right.’

  ‘OK, not beat them but wave a wooden spoon at them,’ Grant conceded, though why he felt obliged to throw a spanner in the ‘nanny’ works, he wasn’t sure. Looked at sensibly, having someone else in the house, if only during the day, was a good idea. It would provide a kind of buffer zone between himself and Katie, so maybe his body would stop reacting to her presence and his mind stop thinking things it shouldn’t think.