One Baby Step at a Time

by Meredith Webber

  He sounded so serious Bill had to fight an urge to laugh, but instead turned towards him and took his hand.

  ‘It was the family thing, I imagine,’ she told him. ‘Once you’d had that thought—seen the image of yourself as a family man in your head—it would have been hard to shift, and Willowby would have been a natural place for you to settle.’

  He lifted her hand and dropped a light kiss on her fingers.

  ‘I guess so, although at the time I didn’t dwell on the family thing for long. Serena had squashed the idea so quickly and completely I thought I’d put it out of my head until quite recently when coming up here mainly for Gran made me think of it again.’

  ‘You could never have put it out of your heart,’ Bill murmured. ‘Not having had a real family of your own. Once the idea sneaked in it would have been hard to dislodge.’

  He squeezed her fingers.

  ‘I suppose you’re right, but what next, Bill? What do I do? What do we do?’

  Bill retrieved her hand before he could excite it—and her—further, though a light kiss and a hand squeeze was hardly erotic foreplay.

  ‘We do nothing,’ she said, ‘not as a “we”. But you look after Steffi with me or a nanny to help and you go to work and visit Gran and do all the things you intended doing when you came up here.’

  ‘Except,’ she added, remembering the leggy blondes at breakfast, ‘the rushing out to the islands to have a wild old time on your days off. Later, when Steffi gets to know you and feels at home, you can have a social life again, though judging from my family’s experiences late nights are severely limited by their children’s habit of getting up at an unreasonably early hour in the morning.’

  Thinking she’d handled the conversation quite well, for all the churning in her stomach as she’d denied the ‘we’, Bill sat back in her seat and looked out towards the islands, noticing how calm and clear the water was, thinking a swim might clear her head.

  ‘So, that’s me done,’ Nick said. ‘What about you?’

  She turned towards him.

  ‘Me?’

  His eyes were shadowed, his mouth serious, and she wondered what on earth could be coming next.

  ‘Gran asked if it was fair to you to have you minding Steffi. To quote Gran, “considering all that happened”.’

  He touched Bill’s cheek and she felt the shiver of reaction—or possibly despair—rattle through her body.

  ‘What happened? Is this to do with Nigel? With you calling off the wedding?’

  His voice was deep with understanding, with sympathy—with love, the friendship-love they’d shared for ever—and Bill felt something crack inside her.

  The lump in her throat was too big to swallow so she made do with a nod.

  ‘Tell me.’

  It wasn’t an order, more a whispered plea, but suddenly the lump disappeared and she found she could talk about that time, about discovering she was pregnant a month before the wedding, Nigel’s horrified reaction—‘people will think that’s why we married, we can’t have that’. His demand she have an abortion, her realisation that he was a shallow, selfish, social-climbing toadie and calling off the wedding. Then—

  ‘But what happened?’ Nick asked, obviously enough as she certainly didn’t have a baby now.

  ‘I miscarried,’ she said, and felt his arms close around her, drawing her to his chest, holding her tightly as he told her how sorry he was, how stupid she was not to have told him, how he’d have come to her, she should have known that.

  When the hug turned from sympathy to something else she afterwards wasn’t sure, but somehow they shifted their positions and Nick was kissing her full on the lips.

  The sun was shining, the sea was calm, Steffi was asleep...

  Bill kissed him back.

  The world didn’t come to an end.

  Anything but!

  In fact, as Bill responded, meeting the demands of Nick’s lips with demands of her own, her body came to life in a way she’d never felt before. Heat surged through her, her blood on fire, while her breasts grew heavy with desire and the ache between her thighs made her twist in her seat as she tried to ease the longing.

  ‘This is stupid.’ she managed to mutter as Nick’s hand left her cheek and roved across the skin on her neck, sliding down to cup one heavy breast. ‘Idiocy!’

  ‘I know,’ he mumbled back, nuzzling now at the base of her neck and causing goose-bumps all down her spine.

  But the kissing didn’t stop, the desperation in it suggestive of a starving man needing to eat his fill in case the meal should be his last.

  Bill’s head tried to rationalise the situation—this was Nick, he was in trouble at the moment, shocked by the discovery he had a daughter, he needed comforting.

  And she’d just told him what had happened—she was entitled to a little comfort herself.

  But as the intensity of her response to Nick’s kisses grew, she lost track of the excuses and gave herself up to the pleasure of kissing Nick and being kissed by him.

  It wasn’t Steffi waking up that stopped them but the arrival of another vehicle, a battered four-wheel drive, pulling up not at the other side of the car park, in spite of it being empty, but right beside them.

  They broke apart, and seeing Nick’s flushed face Bill knew she’d be fiery red herself. To hide her tell-tale cheeks, she turned in her seat, pretending she was checking Steffi, who still slept on, blithely unaware of the behaviour of her father and his best friend.

  ‘And what are you doing here, Whillimina Florence? Not necking with some worthless boy, surely?’

  Dirk, the youngest of her six brothers, a mad keen fisherman no doubt heading for the rocks below where they were parked.

  ‘We’re actually enjoying a few moments’ peace and quiet while Steffi sleeps,’ Nick responded, getting out of the car and coming around the hood to shake Dirk’s hand—shielding Bill from him at the same time.

  ‘Or we were until you arrived,’ Nick added.

  ‘Heard about the kid,’ Dirk said, grinning at Nick and peering into the back of the vehicle to check his information was correct. ‘Bet that’s put a dampener on your social life.’

  ‘Maybe it needed one,’ Nick replied, and Bill knew he meant it, though she wondered, apart from his sudden longing for a family, if something more had happened to her friend.

  Perhaps he’d really loved Serena and had been hurt by her refusal to marry him?

  Oh, damn and blast. Surely not?

  Although it would explain the passion of his kiss.

  Rejected by the woman he adored, he’d taken off for overseas and now, back in Australia, had turned to the next one that came along, who just happened to be her, Bill...

  She wanted to wail in protest and bang her head against the steering-wheel, then bang Nick’s head against anything handy.

  How stupid could one woman be? Kissing him back when she knew nothing could happen between them—knew, whatever had happened in the past between him and Serena, Serena would be back...

  ‘Sorry, but I have to feed the kid then get to work,’ Nick was saying to Dirk, ‘but if I can organise Gran to sit with her for a few hours later in the week, I’d love to join you on the rocks. I’ll give you a call.’

  Organise Gran to sit with Steffi?

  So Nick, too, had realised just how stupid the kiss had been, and he was already working out how to get her out of his life—well, possibly not right out but he was definitely figuring how to put distance between the two of them.

  ‘Fishing with Dirk?’ Bill asked when she’d said goodbye to her brother and Nick was back in the car.

  He turned and smiled.

  ‘Simple pleasures,’ he said. That fitted with all the other stuff he’d said, but it also wiped away any memory of the kiss—dre
w a line under it without it being mentioned while telling her in no uncertain terms that there was a line, and it would not be crossed again.

  Driving back to the apartment block, she wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sorry. Common sense, of which she’d once had plenty, told her she was glad. She could count it as an aberration and tuck it away deep in her memory and with any luck forget it altogether.

  That’s likely, an errant voice in her head piped up, but she knew she had to ignore it.

  * * *

  Somehow he had to ease himself out of this situation without hurting Bill, Nick decided as she drove him towards the apartments. The hurt she’d already endured—hurt he’d known nothing about—was more than enough and Gran was right—how fair was it to expect Bill to take care of his child now he knew what she’d suffered?

  As for that Nigel...

  No, Nick told himself as he felt anger against the man building in his gut, forget the past and work out how to get through the next little while.

  He had to get over the attraction business and definitely avoid physical contact because kissing her had made the situation worse. He had to forget the hunger he’d tasted on her lips, a hunger that had met and matched his own.

  His future was too uncertain.

  Well, not uncertain in one way. Steffi was his future and if he could just concentrate on that and ease Bill out of his life—or at least out of his apartment—as quickly as possible, then everything should be okay.

  He glanced at her, and saw the little frown puckering the clear skin of her forehead and wanted more than anything to touch her, to assure her everything would be all right, but the kiss had made it impossible for him to touch her—possibly ever again. The kiss had shifted their relationship into a place where it couldn’t be...

  ‘If you cook a potato and mash it with some peas and a little gravy and carrot from the casserole in the slow cooker, I think Steffi will eat that for her dinner.’

  Nick’s turn to frown.

  Was that all Bill had been frowning about?

  Steffi’s dinner?

  Could she have shoved her emotional confession back into some box in her mind and switched back to practical Bill?

  Could she have dismissed the kiss so easily?

  They’d reached the entrance to the car park and she was leaning out to press the code that opened the big doors so he couldn’t see her face, but even if he could see it, would he be able to read it?

  The Bill he’d kissed, and who’d kissed him back with mind-blowing enthusiasm, was a Bill he didn’t know at all.

  ‘I’ll drop you both off and be back in time for you to go to work,’ she added as she pulled up next to the lift. ‘I need to pop over and see Kirsten to ask her about nannies—she had one when she went back to work after her kids started school—just part time, some kind of share arrangement with another mother. I know there are a couple of agencies in town but she’ll know which one is best.’

  Nick took in the information, aware as he did so that Bill was intent on distancing herself from him, just as he’d intended doing from her. Yet somehow it aggravated him that she’d moved first.

  Pathetic.

  That’s what he was.

  ‘Well, go on, out you get, and don’t forget your daughter,’ Bill told him, back to her old bossy self, which aggravated Nick even more.

  But he got out, unstrapped Steffi from her car seat—a feat in itself—and carried her and the colourful bag into the elevator, refusing to wave as Bill took off, tyres squealing on the concrete floor.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘HA! YOU WEAKENED,’ Nick said to Bill when she turned up an hour before he was due to go to work. ‘Bet you thought I couldn’t do the bath myself.’

  This, he’d decided as he’d fed and bathed his daughter, was how he was going to play things. As if nothing had ever happened between them.

  The tightening of his body suggested it hadn’t totally accepted this idea but he soldiered on.

  ‘Nothing to it,’ he said, pointing to where a pyjama-clad Steffi was playing with toys on the living-room floor.

  ‘Until you need to shower yourself,’ Bill said, smiling as Steffi noticed her and began to crawl towards her, gurgling a welcome.

  ‘I did wonder about that and decided that’s why you had the playpen thing. Pop her in there with some toys and shower quickly.’

  ‘Well done, you,’ Bill said, swinging Steffi up into her arms so Nick wasn’t sure if her praise was for him or his daughter. ‘But now I’m here I’ll read her a story while you do whatever you have to do to get ready for work, okay?’

  Bill turned back to face him as she added the last word, and he knew she was asking something else.

  Like were things okay between them?

  Or, dread thought, was it okay if they never mentioned the kiss?

  ‘The casserole was fantastic,’ he said by way of reply, ‘but Bob didn’t include containers for freezing things when he furnished this place so I’ve left it all in the pot.’

  He decided that had answered the first possible question—a normal Nick-Bill conversation. The second question was unanswerable.

  He showered, shaved and dressed for work, returning to the living room to find Steffi already asleep in Bill’s arms.

  ‘You want to pop her into bed?’ Bill asked, and he bent and lifted his daughter, smelling the baby smell of her and feeling his heart swell again with love and pride.

  Knowing that, whatever happened in the future, Steffi’s welfare would come first.

  He carried her into the bedroom and laid her down gently in her cot. Bill had followed him, carrying a small ornamental angel. She fiddled with it for a moment, plugging a lead from it into a power point then pressing one of the angel’s wings.

  ‘Intercom,’ she explained. ‘I put the receiver near my bed so I can hear her if she wakes in the night. Kirsten gave it to me this afternoon, along with some info about nannies. We can talk about that tomorrow.’

  And with that she slipped away, leaving him watching his sleeping daughter, trying to take in the enormous changes that had happened in his life in three short days.

  ‘Not that I regret them,’ he told the sleeping Steffi, reaching down to pull a light sheet over her.

  He called goodbye to Bill, who’d disappeared into the bedroom she was using, and left for work, hoping it would be a busy night so he didn’t have time to think about Bill or bedrooms or anything other than work really.

  * * *

  Bill heard the door close behind him and came out of the bedroom, telling herself how pathetic she was, hiding away like that. Although she’d had a valid excuse, putting new batteries into the receiver of the intercom and setting it up on the table next to her bed.

  In the kitchen she peered into the slow cooker, cursing herself for not slipping back down to her apartment before Nick left, to get some containers to freeze the leftovers.

  Tomorrow would do.

  Helping herself to a plateful, she sat down to eat it, wondering how long it would take to find a nanny and wondering if not living here with Nick would make things better or worse as far as the attraction went.

  She’d barely finished her meal when her mobile trilled.

  The hospital!

  Nick?

  Answer the damn thing, she told herself, and did so.

  ‘Mass panic,’ Angie, the triage sister, told her. ‘I know you’ve got time off for some reason or other but we need anyone we can get. A backpackers’ minibus overturned on the bypass, fourteen passengers and driver all with various injuries. The first admissions will be at the hospital in fifteen minutes. Can you come?’

  Thank heaven she’d seen Kirsten just that afternoon was Bill’s first thought.

  ‘I’ll be there, possibly
not within fifteen minutes but as soon as I can get there,’ she told Angie, then she phoned Kirsten, who’d offered to babysit any time, explaining, as she’d said it, that her two were off at her mother’s place for a few days and being school holidays she was free herself.

  She could also ask Kirsten to bring freezer containers...

  * * *

  ‘Kirsten’s minding Steffi,’ Bill said, finding Nick as soon as she walked into the ER, knowing if he saw her there before she explained, he’d panic.

  He was bent over a stretcher, listening to the ambo explain the treatment that had already been given to the patient, but he nodded to show he’d heard Bill’s words then smiled.

  ‘Glad you’re here,’ he said briefly but with such genuine gratitude that Bill knew the situation was dire.

  ‘Second ambulance two minutes out,’ Angie said, when Bill approached the triage desk. ‘I’ve more doctors coming in but no one to take this patient yet. Will you meet and assess? Nick can join you when and if he stabilises the young woman he’s with now.’

  Bill nodded, and grabbed a trolley, knowing the ambulance would have to turn around to return to the accident. They’d move the patient onto it, quickly transferring her to hospital monitoring equipment so the ambulance equipment would be free.

  The patient was another young girl, blunt chest trauma, intubated and with fluid flowing into her, but Bill could hear a wheezing noise and wondered if the oxygen she was getting was flowing out as quickly as it flowed in.

  ‘Open pneumothorax,’ the ambo said after they’d settled her on the trolley. He lifted the sheet that covered the young woman and pointed to a large sterile dressing on the left-hand side of her chest. ‘Freak accident. She must have been holding her backpack on her knee when the bus tipped over and a weird silver thing went into her chest. We had to remove it to put the patch on her, but it’s there near her legs somewhere in case the docs need to see what it is.’

  He handed Bill the paperwork and took the empty stretcher back to his ambulance.

  The ‘weird silver thing’ was of no importance to Bill or the young woman right now. The patch was acting as a flutter valve, one side open to allow air to escape, but the wound would have to be closed, and quickly. Were there surgeons coming in? Another nurse arrived and together they assessed the patient, knowing everything they did, even in an emergency, had to be checked and rechecked.