The Surgeon's Second Chance

by Meredith Webber

  Which made it a good time to press the advantage.

  ‘Agreed?’ she demanded, then, worried she might be late home for Fanny, she glanced at her watch.

  Could it only have been five minutes since she’d left the clinic?

  ‘Let’s have a cup of coffee and talk like real people, not actors in a daytime soap,’ Harry suggested. ‘The kitchen’s this way.’

  He walked away and she had the choice of following—which was the only way she could push through to his agreement to her demands—or not following, which would get her precisely nowhere.

  But she didn’t like the fact he was now the one giving orders any more than she liked having to obey.

  She went as far as the bench dividing the dining room from the kitchen and stopped there, looking out through uncurtained windows to the still dark expanse of ocean and the brightness of the eastern sky where the sun would soon rise.

  Harry ignored her, keeping his back—broad but tapering down to where the pyjamas hung on his hips—to her as he delved into cupboards, producing mugs and instant coffee, filling the electric kettle and turning it on. Then the coffee was made, and he pushed a mug towards her.

  ‘Still black with sugar?’ he said, placing a teaspoon and sugar bowl beside the mug.

  She didn’t bother answering, merely waiting until he brought his own cup across to the bench and settled on a stool opposite her.

  ‘Now, start at the beginning,’ he suggested, looking sternly at her. ‘Not the slime-ball part but before that. What’s happened that you need a job?’

  ‘The clinic’s closed as from Sunday.’ She shot the words at him, adding, ‘As if you didn’t know,’ with reheated rage.

  He didn’t take advantage of her short pause, so she leapt back into the attack.

  ‘Just what did you tell Bob Quayle? I presume it was Bob who’d bought the place. Bob, the new owner, identity kept secret, who wanted you to do his dirty work. Only he—’

  ‘Steph.’ Harry’s quiet voice interrupted her tirade, but he reached out to take her hand at the same time, and it was more the touch of his fingers on hers that made her pause.

  She snatched her hand away, but not soon enough apparently, because the sense of warmth his fingers generated lingered on her skin.

  ‘Tell me what’s happened. Why you’re so paranoid about the Quayles. Why you feel only Bob would shut down the clinic. Why you think he’d deliberately put you out of work.’

  Harry’s voice was gentle but, as ever with Harry, there was steel beneath the velvet.

  She met his steel with a sword thrust of her own.

  ‘Are you saying Bob isn’t the new owner? That you weren’t working for him?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that at all,’ Harry told her. ‘Bob did buy the clinic, and he did ask me to look at it—’

  ‘And you told him it should be shut down.’

  ‘I didn’t tell him it should be shut down. In fact, I told him the opposite—that the clinic could be a lucrative investment if it stopped bulk-billing.’

  ‘Well, according to the dismissal slips we all received in our pay packets, an independent advisor had pointed out the clinic was no longer viable and monetary considerations were, regretfully, forcing the owners to cease operations. You’re saying you’re not that independent advisor?’

  ‘I’m saying I didn’t tell him to close down,’ Harry repeated, hoping he sounded more in control than he felt.

  For a start, Steph had never been irrational, yet there had been something definitely irrational—close to paranoid—about her vilification of Bob Quayle’s behaviour.

  But he couldn’t let Steph’s paranoia get to him. True, there were strange currents flowing here, and apparently the clinic had been shut down against his recommendations, but for Steph to be imagining a vendetta against her…

  ‘What’s happened between you and the Quayles?’ he asked again, and saw her reaction in a sudden stiffening of her body, followed by tremors obvious from his side of the bench.

  ‘Steph!’

  He had to go to her, to hold her, but she twisted out of his grasp and walked away, ignoring the coffee, making for the wall of glass on the far side of the living room, where she stood, head bowed and shoulders hunched, her arms wrapped protectively against her body—silhouetted against the magic colours of the rising sun yet oblivious to its beauty.

  She stood so still she could have been a statue, long limbs and classic profile carved from the finest marble. The artist would have called it ‘Pain’ or perhaps ‘Despair’.

  Harry followed, but didn’t venture too near and though his arms longed to draw her close, and his heart wanted desperately to comfort her, he knew she’d retreated so far from him he might never get close again.

  A matching despair settled like a yoke around his shoulders, but he had to ignore it for the moment.

  ‘Tell me what’s happened?’

  That won a huff of mocking laughter.

  ‘Where do I start?’ she said. ‘And why should I, when you obviously won’t believe a word I say, even though you’ve now seen Bob in action? The basic facts are that Bob Quayle doesn’t like to lose. What he wants, what he’s always wanted, is for Fanny and me to live with him and Doreen, and he’ll go to any lengths, including rendering me unemployed, to do it.’

  She turned now, straightening her shoulders and looking directly into his eyes, although, with the strengthening sunlight behind her, her face was shadowed.

  ‘He’d actually prefer Fanny without me—they both would—and that’s always the second string to his bow. The moment he gets even a whiff of something that might prove I’m an unfit mother, he’ll have a custody case in court so quickly we’ll all skid along the pavement.’

  She paused but only to take in air for the next attack.

  ‘Do you know, he had the hide to have Tracy investigated? My little cousin, just down from the country, followed about by a couple of thugs Bob had hired to check her out? They were too stupid to keep out of sight, and she was terrified, thinking she was being stalked, but when we called the police and Bob explained, it was all laughed off as a big joke.’

  ‘Steph, I hear what you’re saying, but is it all so bad? If you look at it from Bob’s point of view, would living with them in luxury be so awful? And was it wrong of him to want to know who’s caring for his grandchild when you’re not there?’

  ‘He could have asked me about Tracy,’ Steph snapped, answering the last question first. ‘As for living with them, can you really ask me that, Harry? Can you consider, coolly and rationally, the kind of person Martin was at his core, and deny it was his upbringing that made him that way?’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘We both loved Martin, Harry. He was clever, and fun to be with, and kind and generous, but underneath that Martin was the other Martin, the one who’d grown up with every wish granted, with the money to buy whatever he needed, and the notion that just wanting something was enough to justify having it. Or taking it! The psychologists even have a name for it—entitlement. A person truly believes he or she is entitled to have whatever they want.’

  She half turned, so her face was now in profile against the colours of the morning sky, and Harry felt an inner wince again when he read the sadness in her stance.

  ‘Did it never occur to you,’ she said softly, ‘that it wasn’t until you started showing an interest in me—seeing me as a woman instead of a friend—that Martin made his move? He swept me off my feet with all the considerable charm and wealth, and, now I see it, expertise at his disposal. And I went along—fell in love with love, the way he offered it—and believed every lie he told me.’

  Her shoulders squirmed, as if shedding the skin of the past, and she looked directly at Harry.

  ‘I will not have my daughter grow up like Martin!’ she said, challenge in every syllable of every word.

  Then she walked towards the door, turning as she opened it.

  ‘I’ll be in touch abou
t the job,’ she told him, then disappeared from sight.

  He was too stunned to follow—too blown away by all she’d said, particularly her reading of Martin’s sudden pursuit of her.

  But even if she was right, he decided much later, it didn’t mean she was also right about the Quayles. He could see they’d want the best for their granddaughter, so, to a certain extent, he could even understand them wanting people who minded Fanny checked out. But to deliberately take away Steph’s job?

  She was getting into the realms of fantasy.

  Wasn’t she?

  The questions spun around and around in his head until, by late afternoon, he knew he had to see her—to find out if her fears had any basis in fact.

  Apart from Bob closing the clinic, of course.

  But he’d have had his reasons for that…

  Fanny was playing in the front yard when he pulled up outside, and she greeted him with such delight he swung the little girl into his arms and tossed her into the air.

  ‘That could send her brain bumping against her skull.’

  Steph stood at the top of the steps that led up to the veranda, her arms folded, not defensively in the way that said she was defending herself, more defending her home—her family.

  ‘I won’t do it again,’ Harry promised, settling Fanny on his shoulders. ‘Ouch, not too tight!’ he added, as the small hands gripped his hair.

  ‘Oh, poor Uncle Harry!’

  The child was instantly contrite, smoothing her fingers down his face.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Harry asked, as Fanny called to Tracy to come and see how high she was.

  ‘Only if it’s about a job.’ Steph was obdurate.

  Harry felt the frown gathering on his forehead. He was frowning inside as well.

  ‘That’s another thing,’ he growled. ‘The job situation. Not about getting you a job—I’ll do what I can to help—but it’s ridiculous for you to even consider doing a job you’re overtrained for.’

  ‘People do it all the time,’ Steph told him, leaning one shoulder against the wall but not uncrossing her arms.

  ‘I know, I know.’ He waved aside the objection—and that subject. ‘It’s the other job I’m talking about. Your GP work. You were always going to specialise—do surgery. You’d even been offered a place on the surgical programme. What happened?’

  He could feel her disbelief radiating in waves towards him.

  ‘What happened to being a surgical registrar and working twelve or fourteen hours a day with a new baby? Can’t you guess?’

  He could, of course, but Fanny was nearly five now.

  ‘But later—you’d already deferred. The Prof would have let you defer again.’

  He wanted to add, ‘And if you’d been living with the Quayles, it would have been easy,’ but discretion was definitely the better part of valour at the moment.

  Tracy had appeared, and he lifted Fanny off his shoulders, kissed her cheek, then watched her chase her friend across the yard.

  When Steph didn’t reply, he turned towards her and saw she, too, was watching Fanny. But the look on her face held little joy—in fact, it was heart-wrenchingly sad.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘YOU’D better come in,’ Steph said, turning back to face Harry, the invitation so reluctantly issued he didn’t want to accept it.

  Part of him didn’t want to accept. The other part was willing to accept any scraps of time Steph might throw his way. That part was desperate to see more of her.

  He followed her through to the kitchen, where it was her turn to fill a kettle, pull mugs from a cupboard, make coffee. Only hers was filtered, not instant, made in the plunger he’d given her for her twenty-first birthday.

  Martin had given her a car.

  Which she’d promptly given back.

  Growing up in a single-parent household, she’d learnt to fend for herself—and to pay for what she needed. Her fiercely independent spirit must be part of her war with the Quayles.

  ‘So, tell me,’ she said, when she’d poured them each a coffee and pushed his across the table to him. She didn’t sit, but leant against the kitchen cupboards, arms not folded, though her attitude was still as defensive as it had been earlier. ‘What staff will you be employing? Is it already a done deal? Have you signed people up? Will you be able to find a place for me?’

  ‘Steph!’ The protest blurted from his lips. ‘You can’t be serious about this job. I know you were upset this morning, but don’t tell me there’s such a surplus of trained doctors at the moment that you couldn’t register with an agency and have a job to start on Monday.’

  ‘Not a job that allows me the time I want to spend with Fanny,’ she retorted. ‘I’ve been there and done that, Harry. Agencies don’t actually care about people—they care about the number of vacancies they can fill. That’s how they make their money. Oh, they’re charming enough at the initial interview—of course, Dr Prince, we understand completely—and I start off working nine to two-thirty, or night shift nine to five, then next minute the schedules change—they’re always very sorry—and I’m paying for extra hours for Fanny to stay late at kindy, which she hates, and I hate, and the Quayles jot down as yet another black mark against me.’

  Harry sipped his coffee.

  ‘But I don’t see how I can help,’ he said. ‘I’m setting up in practice—I’ll be touting for business. I thought to begin with all I’d need would be a receptionist who can double as a nurse if I need one. I’ve registered to be on call for the General as from Monday and I’ll be happy to do whatever hours they give me, but as for staff…’ he tried to lighten the atmosphere with a smile ‘…I’m hoping the cleaners come as part of the deal with the hospital.’

  But if he thought Steph would be deterred by a smile, he was wrong.

  ‘And have you employed this nurse-receptionist?’ she demanded. ‘Signed her or him up?’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve spoken to an agency—they’re sending people for interviews on Monday. I can’t see patients in the suite for another three weeks so there’s been no urgency.’

  ‘Until I was made redundant,’ Steph said crisply. ‘You’d better cancel the interviews.’

  He stared at her, unable to believe she could play so tough.

  ‘Steph—’ he began, but she held up her hand to silence his protest.

  ‘No, it’s absolutely perfect,’ she said. ‘You’re just starting off, so won’t have many patients. I can work nine to two-thirty, take my lunch-hour then, and pop out to collect Fanny, bring her back with me to your rooms and she can play there until I finish.’

  She grinned at him and he felt an answering smile somewhere in the region of his heart, although his head was warning him things were only getting worse.

  ‘Best of all,’ she said, confirming the warning, ‘it’ll drive Bob absolutely nuts to think he turfed me out of one job, and there I am, working in his precious new hospital!’

  ‘Steph, they’re Fanny’s grandparents. Does it have to be so—so warlike between you?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ she said decisively. ‘And if that bothers you, too bad. You chose your side back when you decided not to tell me about Martin’s infidelities, and you obviously haven’t changed sides since. But as well as being their granddaughter, she’s also your god-daughter, and if you want what’s best for her, you’d better agree to employing me—at least while I look around for something with the right hours.’

  Steph hoped she sounded more confident and determined than she felt. Inside, she was a wobbling mass of insecurity, made worse by knowing she was hurting Harry, talking the way she was. But Harry had hurt her, and though she was doing this for her daughter, not out of vengeance, a little bit of vengeful sweetness flavoured her decision.

  Until she looked into his face and read the pain in his dark eyes.

  ‘Harry, it’s not just me!’ she said, instantly regretful and pleading for his understanding. ‘You said yours
elf you’d advised Bob to keep the clinic, yet he’s closed it—it’s a pattern that’s gone on since Fanny’s birth.’

  But it was too late. He was on his feet, and moving towards the front door.

  ‘No doubt you know where the hospital is—you can start at nine on Monday. You’ll have to organise furniture, computers, a patient filing system, appointment records, the lot. I assume you can do it?’

  ‘You’d better believe I can!’ Steph muttered to herself, already planning on phoning Rebecca to talk about exactly what she’d need. She’d worked in Reception in medical offices to earn money during her student years, and was sure it would all come back to her. But furnishing an office?

  He didn’t wait for her reply, but he did stop in the front yard to play with Fanny for a while, before kissing her goodbye and promising to see her soon.

  Steph felt as if she was being split in half. For a start, Fanny would benefit from the involvement of Harry in her life. In spite of whatever was going on with him and the Quayles, he would be a good male influence in her life. But if she trusted him in the way she’d once trusted the Quayles, was she risking losing her child again?

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ Harry muttered for the twentieth time that morning. It was the following Wednesday, and the strain of having Steph behaving as if she really was a receptionist was grating on his nerves. ‘A trained doctor ordering office supplies.’

  ‘Get used to it!’ Steph snapped at him. ‘And bear in mind you’re paying me as a doctor, not a receptionist.’

  ‘You must realise I can’t afford it,’ he grumbled. ‘You know the cost of setting up a practice.’

  ‘So borrow more money,’ Steph told him, determined to make him pay for his involvement in the loss of her previous job. Then she relented. ‘It won’t be for ever. I’ve contacted the agency and let them know what I want. You might be rid of me by Friday, but in the meantime Fanny has to eat and I’ve a mortgage to pay.’

  Harry was caught in a bind. Getting rid of her by Friday should have made him delirious with joy as it was obvious that having her around was going to be so distracting he doubted he’d ever get any work done. But not having her around might be worse.