The Children's Doctor and the Single Mom

by Lilian Darcy

  And suddenly they were laughing at each other, with a powerful edge of something much more sensual behind the laughter, before she’d even taken another breath.

  ‘The original agreement was coffee.’ Pretending to be angry. How about that? Would that work? ‘And I’m really starting to worry about the health of your memory, Laird, because we’ve already had it at the garden centre.’

  ‘Listen, will you stop pretending you think this is still about the Thornton baby?’ he said softly. ‘You know it isn’t. He’s gone home.’

  ‘I’ll stop pretending when you stop asking me out for coffee. For any kind of hot or cold caffeinated beverage in a restaurant-style setting,’ she added quickly, sensing he was about to become pedantic.

  ‘OK, dinner, then.’

  Just as she’d thought. Pedantic. Which two could play at. ‘When you stop asking me out anywhere.’

  There was a beat of stubborn silence, then he said simply, ‘I would, if I thought you really didn’t want to.’

  ‘And what makes you think I do?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I—I don’t.’

  ‘Really want me to spell it out?’ This time he didn’t wait for an answer, just ticked off the list on his fingers. ‘Your cheeks get pink when you see me. Your voice is pitched higher.’ He looked at her mouth, and the look was like a caress. ‘Your breathing makes your chest go up and down in little jerks. You start making bad jokes. Which I even find funny, because this is my problem, too. I think my chest goes up and down and my cheeks get pink.’

  ‘No, not that, but your eyes…’ She stopped. What ridiculous thing could she possibly say about his lovely grey eyes?

  ‘You want to have coffee with me, Tamara Elizabeth Prunty, née Leigh,’ he argued softly. ‘Yes, I looked you up on the hospital database. Coffee, dinner, whatever. Only there’s something telling you that you’re not allowed to, apparently, and I want to find out what it is, because it is really starting to bug me!’

  ‘You looked me up?’

  ‘I know. I questioned it, too.’

  ‘What answer did you get?’

  ‘That a dinner invitation was required. It’s required, Tammy.’ His voice dropped again, to that cajoling, just-the-two-of-us pitch that shocked her to the bone every time…

  He’s talking like that for me? For someone like me?

  And that she couldn’t resist. ‘One way or another, it’s necessary,’ he continued. ‘Even if that’s all it is. One dinner. One disappointing dinner, I guess it would have to be, or we’d want a second one. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves there. Let’s just…get it over with.’

  Oh, she had to laugh at that!

  ‘Get it over with? All right, and I’ll grit my teeth and hold my nose, Laird, the whole way through the meal.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LAIRD had arranged to pick Tammy up at her house at seven on Friday night, and here he was, driving down her street at two minutes to seven, looking for her house and wondering if the spell would be broken the moment he entered it.

  Now, wouldn’t that be convenient?

  Yeah, but I don’t want it to happen.

  There was some kind of crisis going on in the Prunty household, he discovered before he’d even rung the doorbell. He heard Tammy’s voice, urgently raised, and a child in tears, and frantic, thumping footsteps. Imagining an accident, he put his finger on the bell and let it peal, primed to come riding heroically to the rescue.

  And was then left in no doubt as to the desirability of his arrival at that particular moment when he heard Tammy wailing, ‘Oh, no, is it seven already? That can’t be him! Maybe it’s someone else…’

  Images of himself performing some masterful medical intervention on a temporarily damaged child faded. One of the triplets—Laura?—answered the door and told him in a serious little voice, ‘Mummy flooded the laundry.’

  ‘No, Sarah, I said towels,’ he heard Tammy say. ‘Not teatowels, big ones. Beach towels. You know the drill with this, sweetheart, don’t you? Oh, it’s gone all across the floor! Has someone answered the door?’

  ‘It’s the ice-cream man,’ Laura—or Lucy?—yelled to her mother. Laird followed the four-year-old until he reached the edge of the flood waters and found his lady companion for the evening.

  ‘The ice-cream man?’ Tammy whirled around. ‘Oh, it is you! It’s not quite seven yet, is it? Oh, lord, yes, it is. Hi! Um, hi.’ She smiled, and tried to use her elbow to wipe something imaginary from her flushed cheek because both her hands were full.

  She was still in the blue surgical scrubs she’d worn to work today, and they had wet patches all down the front. Clashing gloriously with her pink cheeks, her hair was in a copper frenzy, and bits of it were wet, too. Occupying both hands was a heavy, sodden towel, which she held over a bucket, twisting and squeezing.

  ‘I’m not ready,’ she added.

  ‘No, really?’ he drawled.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was…more than obvious, wasn’t it? This happens. I have an eight-kilogram top-loading washing-machine. Really good for a big family. It holds a heck of a lot of water, on the maximum load setting. There’s one of those black plastic pipes that drains it into the laundry sink. But sometimes the pipe gets knocked out of the sink and hangs down in the gap between the machine and the sink, or the sink gets blocked by a rag and overflows. I’m feeling a need to explain on this ludicrous level of detail, by the way, because I just know nothing like this has ever happened to you in your whole entire life.’

  ‘Well, the holes with my new trees planted in them were drowned by the rain last week, so half of them developed an unacceptable degree of lean.’

  ‘Not the same.’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘You probably didn’t even know there were eight-kilogram top-loading washing-machines.’

  ‘My life has been the poorer for it.’

  ‘And somehow I’m always upstairs or in the garden when it happens, and water gushes all over the floor before one of the kids hears the splashing noise and tells me the laundry’s flooded again.’

  ‘Seems to me that it’s more than just the laundry.’ The shiny expanse of water looked vast.

  ‘The floor isn’t very level.’ She gestured to the shallow river that headed across the family room, into the kitchen, under the jutting, family-sized fridge, out the other side and onto the living-room carpet that started beyond the open kitchen door.

  Sarah arrived with her arms full of towels.

  ‘Just spread them over the puddle, love, so we can stop the water getting to the carpet.’

  ‘I think it’s too late for that,’ Laird said, bending down to help.

  ‘Don’t,’ Tammy ordered. ‘You’re so nicely dressed. While I’m…’ She looked down at herself, then finished succinctly, ‘Not.’

  ‘Let me clean this up while you get ready.’

  ‘No, no.’ She dropped the sodden towel in the bucket and began helping Sarah with the fresh ones. Her dryer would be chugging all night. Laird caught a glimpse of the cramped laundry room behind her and discovered she didn’t have a dryer. Correction, then. Her back-yard clothesline would be draped with towels like a circus tent tomorrow. ‘I know the system, you see,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a system?’

  ‘If you dam the water in the wrong place, it spreads under the stove as well, and then I can’t get to it properly to mop it up. The floorboards’ll rot if this keeps happening.’

  ‘Right. So I should…?’

  ‘Find out why Ben’s crying.’

  Which he’d been doing since Laird’s arrival, he realised. Not letting on that he found it slightly daunting to contemplate probing the inner emotional life of a four-year-old boy, he searched for the source of the sobbing, and found Ben in the living-room, with a dogeared TV guide in front of him and a world-weary six-year-old brother ignoring his woe.

  The six-year-old was Lachlan, Laird remembered. He greeted the boys and made sure they remembere
d who he was. The ice cream man, right? From the garden centre? Three weekends ago? Then he got down to kid level and asked Lachlan quietly, ‘Do we know why he’s crying?’

  It wasn’t from physical pain, he recognised that much.

  ‘His show isn’t on tonight.’

  ‘His show?’

  ‘On TV, the pet show. It says in the TV guide that it’s on, but it’s not, they’ve got something else. He says I’ve got the wrong channel, but I haven’t and now he’s upset.’

  ‘He really likes that pet show!’ He turned to Ben, who still seemed inconsolable.

  What did you say at a time like this?

  Cheer up, maybe it’ll be on tomorrow night instead.

  Inadequate.

  Want some ice cream?

  No, he was multi-faceted. He couldn’t be just the ice cream man. When you embarked on the Amazonian rafting adventure of getting to know someone else’s kids, you needed more than one way to steer the boat. And, anyway, Tammy might not believe in distractions and bribes of that nature. He didn’t yet know enough about her parenting strategies.

  Did he want to find out? Did he really? The sense of dauntingness—OK, it wasn’t a real word—overtook him suddenly, and he remembered everything that Tarsha had said, all those sensible warnings about mismatched couples and things ending in tears. He didn’t want to make Tammy cry.

  Take her for dinner and then step away, he decided. Get your feet back on the ground. Don’t hurt her. Think of all the reasons why this can’t possibly work.

  And, for now, tackle Ben.

  ‘Hi, Ben,’ he said.

  Ben looked up. ‘The guide says it’s on, but it’s not.’

  ‘Shall I check the guide, just to make sure?’ Laird reached out for it. ‘Maybe Lachlan read the time wrong.’

  ‘I already checked.’

  ‘Can you read, Ben?’

  The little boy nodded, while Lachlan said generously, ‘He’s not as bad as you’d think, for a four-year-old.’

  Laird was impressed. He checked the guide anyway, but the boys were right. The pet show should have been on, but it wasn’t. ‘Did Mummy teach you to read?’ he asked.

  Ben had almost stopped crying, but not quite. Lachlan answered for him. ‘He just learnt. Mummy did the letters with the triplets, and Ben started putting them together to read words.’

  ‘That’s really good, Ben. You like animals, hey?’

  He nodded.

  There was a knock at the back door. Laird wondered if he should answer it, but it opened at once and he heard a voice uncannily like Tammy’s saying, ‘Yoo-hoo, Grandma’s here!’

  Tammy herself appeared, even wetter down the front but a little calmer. She saw that Ben had stopped crying, and mouthed, ‘Thanks,’ although Laird felt he hadn’t done much. Aloud, she said, ‘I’ll go and get ready. I’m sorry about this. Leave everything to Mum now, won’t you?’

  Laird introduced himself to her mother, who was clearly a lovely woman—a natural redhead, around sixty years old—which made it perfectly understandable and reasonable that she would proceed to cast him dagger-like glances of suspicion every thirty seconds.

  What was he doing, going out with her divorced daughter? Would she have to beat him severely around the head and shoulders with her handbag, or something more violent? If Tammy’s mum had her way, any tears involved in this whole situation would be his own, Laird realised.

  And she was right to feel that way. Whatever happens, he vowed, I can’t hurt her. I won’t. Whatever it takes, I refuse to hurt her.

  Tammy arrived back downstairs ten minutes later.

  And, of course, she didn’t look anything like the way Tarsha would have looked.

  Because she looks better, said a rebellious new voice inside Laird’s head. Not the way he was supposed to be thinking at all. He attempted to firm his resolve.

  How would Tarsha herself have tallied up Tammy’s appearance?

  Ten points for the attractively piled-up hair, minus five for the strands that were already escaping down to her bare neck. Laird liked the strands, though. They whispered against her fine skin the way a man’s lips would do.

  Zero points for the shoes, because they were black while her dress was midnight blue, but Laird would personally have scored the shoes quite highly because Tammy could actually walk in them, swift and skimming and graceful, without either wincing or risking permanent damage to her feet.

  Make-up? Minimal, but then he would have argued to Tarsha that Tammy’s colouring worked so well without it that she didn’t need to mess around for hours with that stuff.

  Aha, but her bra strap was showing, he saw. Her very tired-looking bra strap. Minus hundreds of points for that. It was the wrong colour, too—beige, instead of blue or black, slipping across the top of her shoulder beyond the neckline of her clingy dress.

  Oh, damn it, forget the bra strap! She had such delicate, beautiful skin…

  ‘You look lovely,’ Laird told her sincerely, but his eyes must have arrowed unconsciously to the bra strap, in a final useless attempt to be sensible about the woman, because she looked down at it and fingered it, and a look of horror appeared on her face.

  ‘It’s the wrong one,’ she said. ‘Help! I forgot to change it to the black one. Oh, I have to go back up!’

  ‘Tammy, it’s all right. Really. You look—’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’

  In a flurry of haste she hooked her index finger into the back of each shoe to lever them off, dropped them at the bottom of the stairs and darted up in her stockinged feet, leaving Laird feeling terrible that he’d channelled Tarsha enough to notice the bra and hadn’t masked his reaction to it.

  ‘You looked fine before,’ he said, as soon as she appeared again. ‘Really. You looked great.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I bounced.’ For a moment her hands flattened over those two generous, rounded shapes, then she dropped them again, as if realising that a woman wasn’t supposed to touch her own breasts in front of a man.

  Laird experienced a sudden and very primal shock to the groin. She bounced in the other bra. And he’d missed it. But she’d just touched the palms of her hands to the soft fabric that clothed those lovely breasts and he hadn’t missed that. The gesture had drawn his gaze there like a magnet. He had to suppress a groan of regret and need—almost of pain.

  She bounced.

  Never mind. He hadn’t missed it after all, as it turned out. She said goodbye and goodnight to the kids and her mother, gave a couple of last-minute instructions about the whereabouts of clean pyjamas, and then, as they went down her front steps, Laird discovered that she bounced in this bra as well, just the perfect amount.

  He had to fight not to keep looking until she saw him doing it. Had to fight not to start picturing those generous, curvy, sexy breasts without the bra. Not to mention the rest of her, so smooth and ripe and generous beneath his hungry touch.

  He began to feel thick-headed and punch-drunk and giddy. A satisfying warmth filled his veins—a mix of anticipation and desire and earthy contentment that, once again, he couldn’t remember feeling in years.

  Or ever?

  Who else in his life had ever made him feel this way? Feet grounded, head in the stars.

  ‘Thanks for this, Laird,’ Tammy said beside him, just before they reached his car. ‘It’s a real treat to have a meal out without the kids. You’d better watch me. There’s a serious risk I’ll get up on the restaurant table, hitch up my dress and start dancing. You might have to grab my ankle and pull me to the floor.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ he said, matching her jokey tone.

  But then he started thinking about her ankles, about running his hands up her smooth, curvy legs, to her thighs and beyond. His head felt even thicker, and if he felt this close to being drunk now, when he hadn’t touched a drop, how would he feel after a glass or two of wine?

  You never knew until you tried…

  Yes, but the strength of this scared him.

/>   CHAPTER SIX

  ‘DECIDED yet?’ Laird asked.

  Tammy hadn’t. She still held the open menu in front of her, overwhelmed by choice. Overwhelmed by being here. Overwhelmed most of all by Laird, seated across from her, looking so…oh…eligible, or something. The kind of man who turned women’s heads and made other men stand up straighter and square their jaws.

  The last time she’d eaten in a restaurant that even approached this level of magnificence had been the night she’d told Tom about the ultrasound, five years ago.

  He’d known she was pregnant, and that this one was hitting her harder. She’d told him of her intuition that something was different. Her doctor had scheduled her for an ultrasound at eight weeks to see what was going on, but it was her third pregnancy so she’d told Tom, ‘Don’t come.’ His army routine was pretty tightly regulated. She would have more need for him to take time off from his duties later on, when the baby was born.

  Babies, she’d discovered.

  And she must have known at some level that he would react badly to the news because she’d said, ‘Let’s go out to eat, tonight,’ and then had bided her time until after he’d had a beer or two…

  Right. Make a decision, Tammy. Prawns or pasta or that lamb thing or the fish, or even the duck…Don’t dither and keep him waiting.

  ‘How many courses are you having?’ she asked Laird cautiously.

  ‘Starting with two. If I’m still hungry, I’ll order dessert.’ He dropped his voice a little. ‘Don’t hang back, will you, Tammy? I promise you, you won’t eat an embarrassing amount more than I do.’

  ‘Ooh, don’t bet on that!’

  He laughed.

  For a moment or two she laughed back and felt fizzy and happy inside.

  Then, not for the first time, a sudden aftershock of self-doubt kicked in, and she wondered if he was laughing at her or with her. Maybe she shouldn’t have spoken so frankly about her appetite. Maybe she should pretend to be one of those women who picked at their food as if suffering from perpetual hunger would win them a gold medal.

  She teetered on the edge of choosing a salad and a light chicken dish, then thought, Darn it, no, I’m going to order what I really want. There’s no point in pretending to be who I’m not. I’d make a pretty bad job of it anyway!