Meg watched him go and shook her head, sadness overwhelming her. Sadness for Gina, who’d been too young to die, and for Sam, who obviously felt her death very deeply but couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk about it. Couldn’t, most likely, unless he’d changed a lot in thirteen years.
But she had no time to brood over Sam’s reaction to his mother’s death—she had to shower and get to work…
CHAPTER FOUR
‘I WANT to see you in my office here on Thursday,’ Martin Goodall, the cardiologist, told Ben when he’d finished his examination and agreed Ben could go home, but only if he rested indoors—no work, no stress. ‘We’ll do some more tests and get you started on a programme of diet and exercise, and don’t bother arguing because I’ve met your charming wife and I’m quite sure you don’t want to leave her on her own any time soon.’
Meg smiled to herself as she watched the resentment and denial on Ben’s face change to shock. Martin’s blunt words would probably do more good than all the nagging Jenny had been doing over the last few years.
She was talking to Martin about another patient he had in the hospital when Sam appeared.
‘Dr Goodall!’
Martin frowned at the man in front of him.
‘I’m sorry—I don’t remember…’
Sam thrust out his hand.
‘Sam Agostini. My mother, Gina, worked in your office.’
‘Gina Agostini,’ Martin said softly, then he studied Sam for a moment before adding, ‘So you’re Sam. Didn’t end up in jail after all?’
There was a dry humour in the words but Sam obviously didn’t catch it.
‘You’re only the fifth person to say that to me since I came back,’ he snapped. ‘That’s the trouble with small towns—everyone’s mind runs along the same lines.’
‘You did give us cause to wonder,’ Martin reminded him. ‘How’s your mother?’
Sam’s face cleared of expression once again and his voice was even as he answered. ‘She died a month ago.’
Martin shook his head. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sam, and sorrier still for the crack I made about how you’d end up. She was a good woman—a wonderful woman. Was it her heart?’
Sam nodded, while Meg, feeling the agonised tension in the air, wondered why her heart should still ache for Sam—why she should still feel his pain as if it were her own.
It couldn’t be love.
Not after thirteen years.
Not when Sam had broken her heart once already…
And especially not when there was still something about his explanation worrying her—something she knew was important but couldn’t pin down, her mind stumbling over the kiss whenever she tried to think about it.
She left the two men where they were, and headed back to her office. Benjie’s chemo had been delayed for a week, and her prediction that absent staff would return when they heard Sam was back in town had proved true—though she couldn’t honestly put it down to news of Sam’s reappearance! But at least now she had time to herself and could begin to catch up on some paperwork, which would achieve two objectives.
One, she’d get it done and, two, being in her office, there was no chance she’d keep running into Sam.
And if she kept busy, all thoughts of love would be banished from her mind.
Though she hadn’t counted on Bill.
‘Can I talk to you?’ he asked, coming in with a tray in his hands and a hopeful smile on his face.
‘Of course,’ she said, thinking of the chairs she wanted for the other wards—just one for each ward would be a start.
‘It’s about Janelle,’ he said, and Meg struggled to switch her mind from chairs to the young woman from the hospital pharmacy Bill was courting.
‘Yes?’ Meg said cautiously, then she read Bill’s nervousness and beamed at him.
‘You’ve finally asked her?’ Meg guessed, and saw the blush rise to stain the fair skin on his cheeks.
‘I have, but it’s not all good news,’ he said, sitting down across the desk and twisting his hands together. ‘She really, really likes me, even loves me but she’s not sure she’s “in love”.’
He used his fingers to give the final words inverted commas and looked anxiously at Meg.
‘Do you think there’s a distinction? And if there is, do you think marriage can work without people being in love?’
‘I don’t know, Bill,’ Meg told him. ‘With my marriage, well, Charles and I fancied we were in love. We were also good friends so we thought we could make a decent go of things, but the moment things got tough our marriage fell apart.’
‘But surely if we have a strong attraction between us, and mutual respect for each other, and common interests—won’t these things build a stronger base for a marriage than being in love?’
‘Much stronger, I would think,’ a deep voice said, startling Meg so much she all but dropped her cup of coffee, slopping liquid into the saucer as she put it down.
Sam smiled at the evidence of her reaction and she could almost see the words ‘Just a kiss?’ in a thought bubble above his head.
She scowled at him as he went on in an easy drawl, ‘For all the hype about love, has anyone ever measured it satisfactorily? Ever proved it exists? Scientists can quantify most things these days—but love? No one’s worked out a way to prove or disprove it!’
‘Don’t you believe in knocking?’ Meg demanded, ignoring his words as her own reaction continued to upset her. How could Sam walking into her office make her spill her coffee?
How could his smile make her pulse race?
Worse still, how could she feel this way about a man who didn’t believe in love?
‘I did, but you were both too absorbed in each other to hear me. So what’s this all about? Love in the hospital? Is the Bay gossip mill slipping that I’ve been here more than twenty-four hours and haven’t heard a whisper of this romance?’
Blue-green eyes cut towards her—this time ‘And you’ve been kissing me as well!’ was written in the thought bubble.
‘It’s not what you think!’
‘It’s hardly news!’ Bill’s protest came at the same time as Meg’s denial.
‘Well, it sounds very sensible to me,’ Sam reiterated, cool as a breeze off the water, ‘but right now I’d like some help of a medical kind. I have a roster of visiting specialists—who comes to the hospital on which day—but no information on the various consultants, like if they have rooms in town and when they see patients in their rooms.’
‘That’s all on file. I’ll get the details for you,’ Bill offered, but when he walked out of Meg’s office Sam didn’t follow, remaining just inside the door where he’d propped himself on arrival, watching her with an unreadable expression on his face.
‘I did knock,’ he said again. ‘Who’s Charles?’
So he’d heard!
Meg lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug, but inside she was still as twitchy as an exposed nerve.
‘Not that it’s any of your business, but he’s my ex-husband.’
‘And things got tough? How?’
‘That is definitely none of your business. And why are you asking? You were never one for sharing your emotions, and from your cynical remarks on love, you haven’t changed. Yet you’re enquiring into my private life? Why don’t you go and get the hospital information you want from Bill, rather than poking your nose in where it’s not wanted?’
‘I’ll ask Bill. He seems to know the Meg story, chapter and verse,’ Sam replied, and the temper Meg thought she’d learnt to control escaped its leash and burst free.
‘You will do no such thing,’ she said, spacing out each word so he couldn’t miss the threat in them. ‘As I said earlier, my marriage—in fact, my life—is none of your business, Sam. Now, get out of my office and stay out.’
He went, but only after hesitating for an instant, during which Meg contemplated the advisability of throwing her now cold cup of coffee at him.
She was glad she didn’t do it�
��glad she didn’t give him the opportunity to see just how rattled she was. It wasn’t just the way the past kept coming back to haunt her, but the way she was reacting to the present-day Sam. Shaking so much she spilt her coffee—how pathetic!
‘Known her long?’ Sam asked Bill as he obeyed part of Meg’s instructions and wandered into Bill’s office.
Bill’s face betrayed his feeling. His cheeks were suffused with embarrassment, but his smile was full of love.
‘I guess you heard more than the bit about Meg’s first marriage,’ he said. ‘I’ve known her for a couple of years—that’s how long she’s been working at the hospital. I knew straight away she was the one for me, but she didn’t know I was alive. Then one day I went into the pharmacy to check about some stock that hadn’t shown up on a stock-take and she asked me out.’
‘Meg asked you out?’
Bill turned a puzzled frown in Sam’s direction.
‘Meg? No, not Meg, Janelle.’ Then his face cleared and he chuckled. ‘You thought I was talking about Meg and me, but I was asking her advice about Janelle. Meg’s been here four years now. She came right after she finished her degree. I think she’d thrown herself into study as a way to forget about her first marriage breaking up and her baby dying, and then work replaced the study that had been the focus of all her attention. Anyway, after she arrived, we soon became friends…’
Baby dying? Bill was still talking but Sam had lost the thread, his mind too busy with the plethora of emotions Bill’s explanation had thrown up. First had come relief that Bill was interested not in Meg but in someone called Janelle. Jealousy had sneaked in unexpectedly as Meg and marriage had been linked in the same sentence, then the baby information…
Meg had had a baby?
It had died?
Now pity poked its head above the parapet.
What agony she must have been through…
No wonder she’d watched so tenderly over Benjie…
‘Sam!’
Bill’s voice recalled him to the present.
‘These are the files you wanted. Read through them at your leisure then give them back to Katrina—she’ll show you where they’re filed in case you need them again.’
He didn’t want to read files. He wanted to go next door and demand to know just what had happened with Meg’s baby and her marriage—to know all the bits of Meg he’d missed.
That was crazy!
He went instead to his office and set the files on his desk, noticing Martin Goodall’s was on the top.
Martin Goodall? What had he said that was niggling in Sam’s mind? Not the bit about being in jail, he was getting used to that. Something else that had raised a flag…
‘Was it her heart?’
That was it. Sam had heard the question and agreed, but thirteen years ago, when his mother had worked for Martin, she’d been fit and healthy.
The faulty valve in her heart had been a recent thing.
Hadn’t it?
He worried at the question for a minute, then realised worrying at it would get him nowhere. Martin Goodall consulted at the hospital. Sam would run into him again. He’d ask.
But this neat, logical decision didn’t obliterate the sadness he always felt when he realised how little he had really known of his mother.
How little he’d bothered to know?
Read the files!
He glanced quickly through them, picking up background information that would help him when he met the various consultants. Then Sally, his secretary, came in to say the other medical and ancillary staff were waiting for him in the board room—today was ‘meet the new boss’ day!
She led the way then handed him over to Bill, who introduced him to the other doctors. Meg was there, of course, but she was chatting quietly to another woman. Determinedly not looking at him? Sam shook hands with Pete, an intern whom he’d already met, and Kristianne, a young doctor from South Africa who’d been on duty earlier. Then he met another three, who didn’t look much older than the intern. Two were English—more young medicos on working holidays, seeing something of the world before they settled down.
Names again became a blur but Sam managed to sort out most of the positions. The older woman with dark hair was the radiographer, a younger version of her the lab assistant, while a bouncy blonde was the physiotherapist and a well-groomed woman in her forties turned out to be an occupational therapist.
Bill had also gathered four local general practitioners, representatives of the four medical practices in the Bay. Fortunately, though two were old enough to have known him, they didn’t seem to recognize him. Or if they did, they had more class than to make the ‘Why aren’t you in jail?’ remark.
Sue poured tea and coffee, and passed around plates of cake and biscuits, while Sam explained that although he was only acting super at the hospital, he was in the Bay for the foreseeable future.
‘I’ll be running the new private hospital,’ he explained. ‘The new building up near the mall.’
He sensed a movement at the far end of the table and in a quick look in that direction caught the expression of—despair? horror?—on Meg’s face.
‘We’re looking forward to it opening,’ one of the GPs said. ‘It will mean a number of the visiting specialists can do day surgery here at the Bay rather than their patients having to travel a couple of hours into town.’
‘We’re looking forward to it opening as well,’ Bill assured him, though he was obviously as startled by this news as Meg was. ‘At the moment some of the consultants use our theatre for minor procedures that would be more efficiently done in a day surgery theatre.’
‘When do you expect it to open?’
‘How many beds will it have?’
‘Have you appointed staff already?’
‘Who actually owns it? One of the big health delivery companies?’
The questions came faster than Sam could answer them, which was just as well because some of them, especially the final ones, he had no intention of answering. The hospital had been built and was owned by a company—his company to be precise, set up by himself and his mother—but there was no reason for anyone to know that.
Eventually the meeting ended, although the local doctors remained behind, wanting to know more of Sam’s intentions as far as the new hospital was concerned, and wanting to assure him again that the facility was greatly needed and would be well used.
Out of the corner of his eye he’d seen Meg depart, her back stiff with indignation, as if his failure to inform her of the real reason for his return to the Bay had been a deliberate slight.
Though when had they had time to talk?
They’d had time to kiss…
She was already in the emergency department when he arrived in answer to a page.
‘This is Riley,’ she said, glancing up briefly from where she was suctioning blood and other detritus from the mouth of a young boy. ‘He fell off the high bar of the uneven bars and tried to catch the lower one in his teeth as he went down.’
Another glance said, don’t ask, so he didn’t question how such an accident could happen, but turned instead to the X-ray a nurse was slotting into the light-box.
The X-ray showed a distinct crack through the mandible, one of the strongest bones in the body, the crack wide enough to have separated Riley’s two front teeth. The maxilla seemed intact, although it appeared his upper teeth had taken a hard enough knock to lose their alignment.
‘I don’t suppose there’s an oral surgeon in town,’ Sam said to Meg, although what he really wanted to know was where the other medical staff were, that the director of nursing and the medical supervisor were on duty in the ED.
‘Broken, huh?’
Knowing able patients preferred to control their own suctioning, Meg handed Riley the suction device, showing him how to press the button to start suctioning, then moved towards the door of the cubicle.
‘There is an orthodontist who did further studies so he’s qualified in oral surgery. H
e’s semi-retired up here but he’s still an excellent surgeon. Trouble is, he mainly does private work—and he charges like a wounded bull. Riley’s dad’s a fisherman. There’s no way they can afford to pay.’
‘So what’s the alternative?’
‘Sending him to the city, but he might have to hang around for days before they get a specialist to wire his teeth together and insert a plate to hold the bone while it mends. Then they’ll have to go back to have the wire removed—’
She broke away from him to cross to the admittance office, spoke briefly to the girl behind the window, then returned, frowning disappointedly.
‘Every now and then we get some emergency money from one or other of the service clubs and use it for stuff like this—paying a private specialist. But the kitty’s bare at the moment.’
Then she touched Sam on the arm.
‘I can only try,’ she said, obviously answering some question she’d posed herself and to which he wasn’t party. ‘We really called you because there’s a woman coming in—she’s pregnant with twins and having labour pains. The other medical staff on duty are in Theatre—the visiting surgeon’s here—but he needs one of our staff to assist, one doing the anaesthetic and the intern’s watching because he’ll have to assist before the end of his time here.’
‘So where are we with Riley?’
Meg passed him the chart.
‘He was given some mild pain relief—liquid paracetamol—at the school, but that’s all he’s had. I haven’t intubated him because his airway seems clear, but you’ll have to decide about that.’
Meg smiled at him.
‘I bet you didn’t suspect being a medical super would include all the fun of the ED!’
She hurried away, this time entering the small office and disappearing behind a cupboard that separated the outer room from a second office inside the ED.
Sam went back into the cubicle, where the nurse who was attending Riley was wiping blood from his chin, while the lad, who looked about thirteen, tried to flirt with her, in spite of the difficulty he was having forming words.
Bride at Bay Hospital Page 6
