‘He feels sorry for me, that’s all. He—he’s being nice. It’s not all that hard to be nice when you have plenty of money.’
‘Tammy, you’re sounding angry.’
At myself. For wanting to cry about this. For wanting to read way too much into it. For knowing it’s going to go round and round in my thoughts for days.
‘I’m not angry. I’m just— I thought he was looking at me sideways a bit today. Only saw him on the hop, but the way he smiled, as if he had a really nice secret…’ She shook her head, as helpless as Mum.
Mum was looking at her, and seeing too much.
Tammy burst into rapid speech. ‘I just don’t want to assume it’s significant. We went out once. We talked all the way through the meal, and—and swapped tastes of what we’d ordered. And laughed a fair bit. It was nice, but… A man like him, Mum…’
‘What, and you have nothing to offer? My fabulous daughter?’
‘What do I have to offer? What?’ She spread her hands, then dropped them. ‘Now you’re the one looking angry!’
‘Stop me before I say something about a certain person stripping your confidence to the bone.’
Tom.
Neither of them needed to say his name.
‘This isn’t about him,’ Tammy said.
‘It isn’t? Of course it is!’
‘I’m being realistic, that’s all.’
‘What do you have to offer? You have everything to offer! You’re bright, funny, warm, giving, hard-working, a wonderful down-to-earth mother…’
‘I have a daunting, impossible number of young children. I’m at least seven kilos overweight, and that’s being kind to myself. I pinch pennies until I start to feel as if I’m pinching myself, as if my mouth is pinching tight, like a tight little purse pinched in a pair of cramped, obsessive hands…’
‘So you deserve someone who’ll send in a cleaning team after your kids have a stomach bug. You should see the bathrooms, Tammy. You should smell the bathrooms! I don’t know what products they used, but the smell is heavenly. Like daphne, or gardenia.’
‘Really?’ The anticipation of the scent in her nostrils dragged Tammy temporarily up out of her doubts. ‘I must go and look before bathtime messes it all up. It’s—it’s wonderful, isn’t it?’
She looked around. The light fittings were free of dust. The cork floor in the kitchen gleamed. The film of grease on the ceiling above the stove, where she never had time to climb up to clean, was gone.
‘Oh, sheesh, they even did the windows!’ she realised out loud. ‘I could put my hand through them if I didn’t know they were there.’
‘You should send him a card,’ Mum said. Too innocently. ‘I have some nice ones in my desk, blank, so you can write your own message. I’ll find them, and you can choose.’
So Tammy sat in her bedroom that night like a fourteen-year-old writing secrets in her diary. She waited until after the kids were asleep, and struggled over the wording on a piece of scrap paper, not daring to think that she’d get it right the first time.
‘Dear Laird, thank you so much for sending the cleaners.’
‘Dear Laird, you didn’t have to do it, but it made my week!’
Dear Laird, please don’t ever do anything like that ever again, because I’m pretty tough and I can stand life’s struggles, with Mum’s help. It’s kindness that I can’t take, and can’t trust, after Tom. It’s wondering how much you meant by it, if it was just a throw-away gesture, or if it came from the heart. It’s thinking I could get very quickly used to being spoiled that way, and then it would be so, so hard when the spoiling stopped.
‘All the best, Tammy.’
‘Hugs, Tammy.’
‘Love, Tammy.’
No, I can’t use that word, can I? The L word? It’s way too loaded and scary, even thrown away on a signature line. I don’t love you. Of course I don’t. But I’m scared that I could, if you made it too easy for me, and then where would I be?
Writing the card, all sixty-four words, took her over an hour.
Laird felt like a child awaiting the reaction to a hand-made Christmas gift. Would she like it? Did she like it? Didn’t she love it? How could she not?
On Friday night, he’d dropped Tammy home and obeyed her strict order not to enter the house. ‘It’ll be awful, Laird, and you’ll catch something. You don’t have your resistance built up by years of pre-school. I’m not letting you near the front door.’ At home, he’d tried to catch up on some medical reading but the words had just blurred.
And then he hadn’t been able to sleep.
He knew Tammy wouldn’t be asleep either. She’d be in and out of children’s rooms all night, soothing miserable tears, changing messy pyjamas, being strong and cheerful even when she was dropping in her tracks.
The offer of help he’d made at the restaurant…ridiculous. Was he intending to follow her children around with a mop and bucket? Send in a pizza delivery when their stomachs were still in rebellion?
Then he’d thought, Cleaners! and it seemed perfect. A genuine way to help. Not too intrusive. Not too personal. A kindness, rather than the grand-piano-sized, exhilarating gesture of…oh, what could you call it…just wowiness that he really felt like making.
Wow, Tammy.
The way you kissed me. The way the restaurant lighting shone on your hair. The way you laughed every time those gas jets went off and we saw the flames billowing up into the night and felt the heat. The way you juggled those plates back and forth.
Your breasts.
Bouncing.
Making you embarrassed because you were wearing the wrong bra.
I loved the feel of you in my hands, all that silky, scented fabric and skin, so soft and curvy and giving…so giving.
She didn’t think to hold herself back. There was no illusion of sophistication to mask her carefully concealed self-doubts. Tammy’s self-doubts dangled from her sleeve, her kisses weren’t a performance at all, and her reaction to him hiring the cleaners wouldn’t be a performance either.
Brittany, the strongest of the surviving two Vitelli triplets, was going home today, and Tammy was helping Alison to prepare for her discharge. The little girl was still on oxygen and would need frequent check-ups to look at her heart, her lungs, her eyes and her general development, but she’d begun to feed well and was putting on weight daily.
Consulting about another tiny patient nearby with a paediatric heart surgeon he’d called in, Laird couldn’t help listening to every word.
‘I’m so nervous,’ Alison said. A friend had spirited her off to the hair salon yesterday and she looked better, fresher, with those dark roots gone. She’d begun to take care of herself just a little bit better, which gave Laird confidence that she’d take care of Brittany and still manage to come in to see Harry.
Tammy gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Good! I’d be worried if you weren’t,’ she said calmly, as she completed some notes.
‘I couldn’t eat breakfast.’
‘Nature’s way of telling you that it’s totally daunting to be taking a premmie home from hospital for the first time. But it’s not a one-way street, Alison. If you need to, if you have any doubts or concerns at all, you’ll bring her back.’
‘Oh, I hope not! Oh, I so don’t want to have to do that!’
‘Of course not, and that’s why you’re going to tell me right now if there’s the tiniest thing you don’t understand about the oxygen equipment, or anything else. You have no smokers in your house, right? None who make regular visits?’
‘No, thank goodness. If we did, I’d send them outside.’
‘You have the phone number of the NICU on speed dial.’
‘I have a reliable thermometer, I have frozen breast milk for if she’s too tired to suck.’
‘Harry’s going to need more of the frozen milk soon. Dr Burchell upped him to ten mils this morning.’
‘Oh…see? I hadn’t caught up with that. I’m so busy thinking about Brittany. How are we goi
ng to manage, with one baby here and one at home?’
‘What help do you have at home?’
‘Mum’s coming again tomorrow, staying for six weeks and longer if we need her to. She’s very keen to help, but she says she’s forgotten everything she ever knew about babies.’
‘Good,’ Tammy told her firmly. ‘That’s what you want. The ones who think they remember it all are the dangerous ones. You don’t want her slipping three tablespoons of port wine into Brittany’s bottle because that’s what mothers did when you were a baby.’
Alison looked appalled for a second, then realised that Tammy was joking. The wicked look in those blue eyes gave it away. Laird could have told her that.
‘Seriously, though,’ Tammy said, ‘it sounds as if she’s willing to learn about Brittany’s needs, and that’s good.’
‘She’ll be good with Harry, too. We named him after Dad…’ Alison grew tearful and Tammy hugged her. Laird resolutely moved his head thirty degrees so that the two women and the baby no longer featured in his peripheral vision.
‘Unusual defect, so I’m bringing in Michael Begley from Royal Victoria, and I’m thinking we’ll do it tomorrow,’ he heard. ‘Provided you think she’s strong enough.’
He snapped into focus quickly, put Tammy out of his mind for the moment and told the other man, ‘That’s sooner than I’d envisaged. I’d like to get this little girl’s weight up another couple of hundred grams first.’
‘Is she putting on weight? With her heart working this hard?’
‘She is. It’s slow, but she’s a fighter. Look, if it seems like she’s not progressing, we’ll have to rethink. Is Begley available over the next two or three weeks?’
‘I’ll have to check. I know he’s away in the second half of November.’
‘You wouldn’t feel confident tackling this without him?’ They’d looked at the test results and scans together. Like most surgeons, Eric Van was energised by the prospect of tackling something new, but he wasn’t the kind of man to overestimate his own abilities.
‘Confident, yes, eager, no,’ he said. ‘If I can say to the parents, look, this is a very rare defect, but we have a surgeon coming in who’s seen a very similar problem before…’
‘Makes sense,’ Laird said. ‘So our job is to get her strong enough before mid-November.’
‘That’s how I see it, yes.’
Half an hour later, Laird found the card from Tammy in his pigeonhole. It was a nice card, in an aqua envelope labeled Laird, showing a tranquil tropical beach scene. He flipped it open.
‘Dear Laird, thank you so much for smoothing out my week in such a wonderful way! Mum was bowled over, and so was I. You didn’t have to! Please don’t do it again! But I’m so grateful for your doing it this once. Every time I go into the bathroom or look through those sparkly windows, my spirits lift. Once again, thank you, Tammy.’
He found her in the break room, gulping a cup of tea and a milk arrowroot biscuit far too fast. She’d let down her hair in order to redo it—it often worked too loose during the day—and she had the stretchy piece of black elastic around her wrist ready for the tightly scraped ponytail she would make once she’d gulped the last of her tea.
Laird wanted to yell at her, and he must have projected the fact in his body language, because her blue eyes went wide and she put the tea down on the countertop with a bump. She opened her mouth to speak—her lower lip glistened enticingly from the tea—but he didn’t give her time.
‘I didn’t want you to write a bloody card about it,’ he said.
He knew he was coming on too strong, but…hell! He’d kissed her on Friday night and he knew she’d reacted exactly the same way he had—wanting more, shocked at the intensity of one semi-public kiss—but she kept wilfully misunderstanding what that meant, what he meant, and what he wanted.
Well, what did he want? asked the treacherous part of him that channelled Tarsha’s well-meant opinion.
Oh, hell, he couldn’t ask himself those questions now!
Tammy lifted her chin, and lifted her shoulders, making those delicious breasts push more firmly against the bland fabric of her surgical blues. ‘It’s good manners, isn’t it? I wanted to say thank you.’
‘So you should have said thank you. Not written it on a pretty card. Not in that dismissive way.’
‘Dismissive?’
‘Distancing. So polite. And brittle. It wasn’t you, Tammy.’
‘You’re such an authority on me?’
‘I think so,’ he said quietly, stepping closer. He wanted to touch her, but wasn’t yet in reach, and anyway this was the break room. Nurses or parents or visitors looking for a glass of water could show up at any moment. He kept his voice low. ‘I’d like to be an authority on you. I like everything I know about you so far.’
‘Except the fact that I write polite thank-you cards,’ she reminded him. She folded her arms across her chest, the defensive pose belying the hectic pink in her cheeks. He loved that pink. It told him a lot.
‘Except that one specific polite thank-you card,’ he corrected her. ‘You do it on purpose, this way you misunderstand me. You’re talking about good manners—you used them like a shield with that card, Tammy. The manners, the misunderstanding. They’re both shields. Deliberate shields. That wasn’t a one-off, the other—’
‘I don’t want you to keep sending cleaners,’ she cut in. ‘Or any other kind of favour. I just don’t.’ She waved her hands at him for a moment, then pressed them against her hot cheeks.
‘I don’t mean the cleaners, you crazy person, I mean dinner, I mean spending time with you, taking you out to the vineyard with the kids, spoiling you a bit.’
His hands itched to touch her—to push that wild, bright hair back from her neck so he could kiss her there. He wanted to cool her cheeks with the brush of his mouth and breath, wanted to hug her until she laughed and fought for air, wanted to whisper in her ear a long, sinful list of all the ways he desired her.
‘It seems like charity,’ she finished, the words so far from where his thoughts had travelled that he almost didn’t understand them.
‘Taking you to dinner?’
‘Sending cleaners. I’m not the kind of woman you should be going out with, Laird. I’m just not.’
‘So tell me what kind of a woman is that?’
‘Someone thin and single and gorgeous,’ she listed so fast he barely caught the words.
‘Sending cleaners brings us to this?’
‘Yes, because a single, gorgeous, childless woman wouldn’t need a cleaner. She’d have one, or she’d clean her own place in half an hour a week, because single women on their own don’t get things dirty.’
‘Can we please not talk about the damned cleaners any more? Let alone about this single, childless woman of yours who doesn’t exist. I’m trying to ask you out again!’
‘Even though you’re yelling at me’
‘Yes!’
‘Why do you want to go out with me again?’
‘Because you make me crazy. In all sorts of ways.’
‘And that’s how it works? A woman makes a man crazy, so he asks her out?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’ His voice rose again, despite his attempts to stay low key and in control. ‘Don’t you know that?’ Oh, lord, this was frustrating! ‘Sometimes that’s exactly how it bloody works!’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I WANT to have dinner with you again,’ Laird said, visibly attempting to curb his impatience. ‘This time, when your kids hopefully won’t get sick—poor little munchkins, I do know it wasn’t their fault!—so we don’t have to rush you home. Just a simple dinner, focused on the two of us, no distractions. Is that too much to ask?’
‘I’m sorry about the other night,’ Tammy answered, struggling to get past the fact that he was almost yelling at her, that he’d hated her card, and yet he still apparently, for some mystifying reason, wanted to see her again.
Was he right when he’d said just now that a ma
n and a woman making each other crazy could be the most telling indication of what they felt?
She wanted to see him again, too, but that was a lot easier to understand, and a lot scarier.
Fight this just a little bit, Tammy Prunty!
‘So…when?’ he demanded.
‘I can’t just do dinner,’ she said, instead of what she wanted to say, which was, Yes, yes, yes.
‘Not just dinner? What do you mean?’
‘It’s not fair to Mum. It’s so hard to persuade her to take time for herself.’
‘Now, why does that sound familiar, I wonder?’ he muttered.
‘I know. I’m the same. I do realise that. But they’re my kids. I’m the one who should be driving myself into the ground, not my sixty-two-year-old widowed mother.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I want to see you…’ Having said it, she immediately felt three times as vulnerable, yet managed to stay firm, on one point at least. ‘But dinner has to be the reward at the end. If we’re going to do something together, it has to be a day out somewhere with the kids, so Mum has the whole place to herself for a while, and dinner and having her babysit for us comes afterwards.’
It was a test.
Laird probably recognised the fact as clearly as she did.
If he wasn’t willing to stump up enough of his free time to spend a few hours with her children, getting to know them…putting up with them, as would no doubt be involved for at least some of the time, as they were normal human children, not angels…then she needed to say no to dinner and put a stop, right now, to the frivolous, impossible idea that this craziness between them might go somewhere or mean something.
‘Where shall we take them?’ he said. Bravely.
Without hesitation, Tammy replied, ‘The zoo.’
The zoo was always…well…a zoo. Five very individual children did not all like the same animals, or like them to the same degree.
Ben was a total animal nut, but with a four-year-old’s tendency to live in the present, he couldn’t envisage that if he loved looking intently at the elephants for fifteen minutes, he’d probably love looking intently at the giraffes and monkeys just as much. He had to be dragged and cajoled and bribed from one viewing area to the next, while Lachlan was the exact opposite and ran from enclosure to walkway to viewing platform and would have covered the whole place in half an hour and been ready to go home, if the other kids hadn’t slowed him down.
Six Sexy Doctors Part 1 (Mills & Boon e-Book Collections): A Doctor, A Nurse: A Little Miracle / The Children's Doctor and the Single Mum / A Wife for ... / The Playboy Doctor's Surprise Proposal Page 23
