The Children's Doctor and the Single Mom

by Lilian Darcy

  ‘You don’t actually have to stay, though, Laird, I mean it.’

  ‘I have a change of clothing in the car,’ he drawled. ‘I was a Scout once, I’m prepared.’

  Helplessly, she said, ‘OK, if you’re that much of a sucker for punishment,’ and turned her attention to making chicken casserole and spaghetti sauce—a double batch of each so that she would end up with a meal for tonight and three more frozen for the future. In the background, she heard the kids’ voices and Laird’s, and when she went to see what they were doing, she discovered they were building a zoo.

  ‘Isn’t it fantastic, Mummy?’ Sarah yelped excitedly.

  It was.

  Lachlan tackled the construction, using wooden and plastic blocks, a blue teatowel and a green handkerchief for water areas, even wooden train tracks for a miniature zoo railway. Ben grouped the animals thematically. ‘We can’t have lions in with kangaroos, Lucy! Lions are carnivorous!’ Sarah was the head keeper for the reptiles and nocturnal animals. Laird supervised the whole thing, settled disputes, threw in creative suggestions, and probably got more of a physical workout, crawling around on the carpet, than he’d expected.

  ‘Show-off,’ Tammy said to him, because it unsettled her that he was being so good about this. How long since she’d had an energetic, willing, intelligent man in the house to play with her kids? How long before the novelty factor would wear off for him?

  ‘Next you’re going to remind me that it all has to be cleaned up properly if I want dessert.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Someone’ll cry,’ he warned. He had the sleeves of his light cotton sweater pushed up and several blocks in his hand. He looked strong and relaxed and more like an athlete than a doctor. Tammy had to hide the way her heart flipped at the sight of him.

  ‘And I don’t want it to be me,’ she said, mock-sternly, ‘coming home at ten-thirty tonight to find all of this littered on the floor, or Mum on her hands and knees, tidying up.’

  ‘You’re not really angry, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’m teasing.’

  ‘And do you really want it tidied up?’

  She sighed. ‘I do. But how can I be that much of a dragon, when it’s so spectacular?’

  ‘I have to admit, though, it’s right in the middle of the carpet. We didn’t survey our site very well. Someone’ll trip over it.’

  ‘I’ll see what Mum wants when she comes in.’

  Tammy went back to the kitchen to finish her cooking, but at six-thirty when the children’s dinner was served and Mum had done her usual rap at the back door—‘It’s just Grandma!’—the zoo had been carefully transplanted to the edges of the living room, to leave a clear space in the middle of the carpet and an impression of satisfactory order rather than undisciplined chaos.

  ‘You’d better change,’ Laird said. ‘Can’t go to a Thai restaurant smelling like spaghetti.’

  That night there was no emergency phone call from Mum. They lingered over a meal fragrant with lemon grass and coriander and chilli until almost ten o’clock, and still Tammy didn’t want to go home.

  ‘But we must,’ she said, convincing herself more than him.

  A glass and a half of white wine had softened everything around the edges, including her never-very-impressive ability to hide her feelings. Oh, she was having such a nice time tonight! They’d talked non-stop. He kept making her laugh, and when she said something funny herself, he laughed, too. A lot of men didn’t think funny meant sexy when it came to women, but Laird apparently did.

  ‘Mum won’t go to bed until I’m back,’ she went on, ‘even though her flat’s only thirty metres away from the house, across a piece of lawn.’

  At home, after Laird had insisted he would see Tammy inside and say thanks and goodnight to her mother, all was quiet. Five kids asleep, Mum beginning to doze on the couch, with the TV sound turned low. She yawned as she promised Tammy that no one had given any trouble. They’d all been hungry, they’d all cleaned their teeth. Even Sarah, the latest up, had been asleep by eight-thirty.

  ‘Goodnight, love.’ In the kitchen, by the back door, she hugged Tammy and kissed her on the cheek, then gave off an even more massive and this time transparently faked yawn, which Tammy just knew was intended as a subtle hint and reassurance.

  If Laird happened to stay for coffee, and the coffee happened to get a little more intimate after a while, Mum would already be tactfully fast asleep.

  Thanks, Mum. I love you, too.

  She found Laird on his knees in the living-room, making some improvements to the zoo. He laughed when she caught him at it, and climbed to his feet. ‘Sprung! I never totally grew up, did I?’

  ‘You really are a show-off,’ she told him.

  ‘I’m a perfectionist. The primate enclosure was too small.’

  ‘This is what you’re going to do at your vineyard, isn’t it? Play around with it until it’s perfect. I bet the trees will look spectacular.’

  ‘Come and see them. They’re all planted—straight, this time—although I’m planning to order a couple more truck-loads. Bring the kids.’

  ‘It sounds nice. I—I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  There was a moment of awkward silence while they smiled at each other in a goofy kind of way.

  ‘So, did you want coffee?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, I thought we’d skip straight to the hard stuff.’

  ‘Hard?’

  ‘You. Hard to get. Let me kiss you properly tonight, Tammy…’

  Before she could give him an answer, he’d taken charge, had switched in seconds from the relaxed type who was happy to crawl around the floor, playing zoos, to a man who knew what he wanted, wanted a heck of a lot and was totally accustomed to getting it.

  He stepped in front of her and pushed her hair away from her face. She’d left it loose tonight. Felt safer that way. At a pinch, her hair could screen a blush or a smile. It would shadow her face if she had to look down because she could no longer meet the light in his warm eyes. Laird liked her hair, and it apparently gave some people the illusion that she was pretty.

  But now it betrayed her.

  His fingers ran through it, releasing the scent of her shampoo all around them. Her scalp tingled and sent shivers all down her spine and across her skin. He bent and buried his face in the hard-to-tame waves, then kissed her neck, trailing his lips across her skin with slow, teasing intent. His breath felt hot. His touch sent up sparks. She shuddered and gasped, wrapping her arms around his body because she needed the support. She just needed him.

  ‘I want you,’ he said. ‘There’s something about you. Every inch of you. Your skin. The weight of your breasts in my hands. The way you smell. The way you laugh. The way you call me on things like my hobby vineyard and my pretty new trees.’

  ‘But I’d love to see them.’

  ‘You will. Soon. As soon as we can manage it. You’re real, Tammy Prunty. I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman as real as you.’

  ‘I want you, too. So much. Sometimes I can’t breathe. Or blink. Or speak. Or believe it’s happening. Or—or think that this is really me. That this is happening to me.’ The words spilled out on their own, and she cursed her own honesty.

  A little restraint, Tammy, for once?

  She couldn’t.

  She wasn’t made that way.

  His body felt so hard and warm and wonderful. He smelled right. Familiar and delicious, but new, too. She breathed him in, felt herself surrounded by his fresh male scent and it lit up something inside her that she’d forgotten or maybe had never known. His thighs brushed against her, his chest was like a wall, and she felt utterly safe with his strength, even on such new ground.

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’ he muttered.

  She didn’t answer, just lifted her face in search of his kiss. Their mouths crushed together, breathless and hungry, too impatient to be gentle or tender. It was a huge kiss, deep and almost bruisi
ng. Her body throbbed and ached and tingled and sang as she tasted him.

  He had his hands in her hair again, lifting it off her neck, stroking her skin and curling the strands around his fingers. She arched her back, pressing her breasts against him so that he’d know what he’d done to her, shameless about it. Her nipples were hard and tight and tender.

  She felt his hardness, too—the unique maleness of it nudging her body, betraying his need. He moved his hands to her breasts, cupping and lifting them so he could kiss the swollen slopes that rose above the dipping neckline of her shimmery, thin-strapped black top. She touched him everywhere she could reach, learning his body by heart, learning the way he responded, and all the different ways they fitted together.

  How long since she’d done this? Or had wanted to do it?

  A long time. Five years. Only days before Tom had moved out, when she’d still thought that they were just going through a temporary bad patch and soon they’d—

  Stop, Tammy.

  She didn’t want to think about Tom.

  But when she thought about Laird, she realised she was giving far too much, far too soon. What was her eagerness telling him? That she wanted to sleep with him tonight? That it would be easy, and without any serious implications?

  It wouldn’t.

  Just thinking about it made her feel as if a big hand had reached into her stomach, taken a handful of her insides and twisted them into a knot. If she slept with him, she’d give him her heart.

  At once.

  Completely.

  She knew herself well enough to be in no doubt of that. And her heart was so tender and sore. It was only the feeling of bruising and the fear of pain that allowed her to push him away.

  Too gently. He didn’t even understand what she was doing at first, and she had to say it in words. ‘Can we stop?’

  For several moments she felt him struggling against the demands of his body. He touched his fingertips to her lips and traced their shape while his hips and legs stayed pressed against her, making her fully aware of how aroused he was. ‘Of course we can stop,’ he said at last. ‘But you have to tell me when you next have a day off with no night shift before it.’

  ‘Um, next Saturday. I try to stay clear of too much weekend work.’

  ‘So we’ll go out to the vineyard with the kids then, give your mother some more time to herself.’

  ‘Lachlan and Ben are going to a friend’s place. It would just be the girls.’

  ‘Whoever, as long as one of the girls is you. Want to meet me out there? I’ll give you directions, or I can pick you up.’

  ‘Give me directions.’

  ‘I’ll see you during the week at the hospital.’

  ‘Give me the directions now. It’s—it’s different at the hospital.’ She trusted this whole sizzle and fire and intensity even less when they were there.

  He nodded at her words. Maybe he felt the same. She found a pen and an old note from school and he wrote the directions on the back of it, with a clarity and detail that made her smile. There was something protective about it, and a subtext that said he really, really didn’t want her to get lost.

  She felt ridiculously cherished by directions such as ‘Big tree on LEFT’ and ‘If you get to the turn-off to Laidlaw Mountain Road, you’ve gone too far’. He finished the whole thing off with his mobile phone number, his land-line number, and even his home email address, then gave her back the scrappy piece of paper as if giving her a bunch of flowers.

  When he’d gone, she folded it carefully and put it in her bag as if it was precious, her vulnerability and doubt battling with the sizzling happiness and expectation in her heart.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY had rain during the week and Tammy crossed her fingers for it to clear. She imagined Laird bravely pretending that muddy footprints in his house and bored, housebound kids running and shrieking through the rooms didn’t bother him a bit.

  In the NICU, two babies graduated to the high dependency unit. One of them was Max Parry, which was very good news, although his brother would be here in the NICU for longer. Fran was still looking exhausted and Chris had a hard time persuading her to take the breaks she needed. He and Alison Vitelli’s husband Steve ganged up together and sent Fran and Alison off to the hospital cafeteria whenever they could. They were both good fathers, although very different people, and they somehow managed to appreciate each other’s different emotional styles.

  Two more newborns arrived, both of whom looked like they would only need a comparatively short stay. Tammy and Laird encountered each other several times a day—bright points in an average week, little memory-making moments that she hugged to herself at night in bed and then worried about.

  By Friday, the rain had cleared and the forecast for the weekend was breezy and fine. Laird phoned that evening to confirm that Tammy and the girls were still coming, and she gave him an expected arrival time. ‘I have to drop the boys off first.’

  With the precious directions to the vineyard entrusted to Sarah in the minivan’s front seat, Tammy left the city behind on Saturday. Suburban blocks gave way to acreage. There were hobby orchards beginning to fruit, shaggy family ponies standing in grassy paddocks, and they passed the garden centre where Laird had bought his trees.

  Farther out, the farms and vineyards started. She turned ‘LEFT’ at the big tree, didn’t make the dreaded mistake of going as far as Laidlaw Mountain Road, and found Laird’s place, a modern log-cabin style house with wide verandas and huge, north-facing windows, set among a series of rolling slopes striped with rows of young vines, at the end of a long driveway. Behind the slopes rose the backdrop of the forested Dandenong Ranges.

  Laird heard the van—well, its engine was pretty loud, due to the fact that it hadn’t been running all that smoothly of late and she hadn’t had the time or money to take it to the garage—and came out to meet them. ‘No boys? That’s right, you said. When do you need to pick them up?’

  ‘They’re staying the night with my friend Mel.’

  ‘So you don’t have a curfew.’ He looked pleased.

  Tammy wished he wouldn’t do that.

  The looking-pleased thing.

  It drew her in, weakened her defences, gave her one of those giddy heart jumps that felt so scary and nice. She didn’t know what he had planned for them today, and that was scary and nice, too—the thought of doing very little in the company of a man who made her blood sing and who took care of her and smiled at her and transparently planned to kiss her later on.

  She saw his gaze settle on her mouth and stay there for too long, while he smiled. If he was already thinking about a kiss in delicious detail, so help her, so was she.

  He was casually dressed in jeans and a cream and blue polo shirt, with those same clunky work boots he’d worn to the garden centre already crusted with dried mud. He must have washed his hair this morning, though, because it shone in the sun and she could smell the clean, fresh scent of soap and shampoo and sun-dried clothes.

  Her own jeans and stretchy apricot cotton top actually felt a little less tight than they had the last time she’d worn them. She’d had a butterfly appetite this week and the scales said she’d lost two kilograms in the past month, which she couldn’t quite believe.

  Totally Laird’s fault. When she thought about him, her appetite faded.

  ‘You look good,’ he said, and rested a hand against her shoulder blades for a lingering moment as he ushered her ahead of him towards the house. She hoped Sarah wasn’t looking, and instinctively turned her head to check. She didn’t want perceptive eight-year-old-girl questions…

  No, it was fine. The girls had seen something in a nearby paddock—one that wasn’t planted with vines and was at a diagonal to the house and just behind it. Three somethings, Tammy discovered as she looked more closely. A donkey and two ponies.

  ‘Laird, you didn’t tell me you had animals!’

  ‘The kids aren’t allergic, are they, or scared? They weren’t at the
zoo…’

  ‘No, the opposite. They’ll be in heaven.’

  ‘The ponies are Amira and Banana, and the donkey is Solly. He’s purely for decoration. I’m getting completely out of control with this hobby-farm thing, as you can tell.’

  ‘Oh, I can! First a house, then vineyards and orchards and ponies. What’s next, Laird?’

  ‘I have a horrible feeling it’ll be ducks and hand-reared lambs, and that I’ll be pressing grapes into wine with my own bare feet.’

  ‘You’ll have to retire from medicine to take care of it all.’

  ‘My neighbour agists several of her horses on my land for free, and takes care of these three in return.’

  ‘Better get her permission on the hand-reared lambs, then.’

  They grinned at each other.

  ‘We can saddle the ponies and give the girls a ride, if they’d like,’ Laird offered. ‘My neighbour’s kids ride them, and I’m told they’re very good-tempered and safe. As well as nice and close to the ground.’

  All three girls shrieked with excitement when they heard what was happening, and almost the whole morning was taken up with grooming and saddling, a sedate ride each for Laura and Lucy and a longer ride for Sarah in which Laird taught her some basic skills and positioning with stirrups and reins. She was in a transition phase at the moment, coming out of a little girl’s dolls and fairies and into…Tammy didn’t know quite what, and Sarah didn’t seem to either. Ballet, maybe? Tennis?

  Now the issue was settled.

  After an hour in a paddock, Sarah was totally, utterly and permanently in love with ponies.

  ‘Can I go faster?’ she asked, just as Tammy was about to tell her she’d done enough for today. ‘Can I trot?’

  ‘Would you let her trot?’ Laird asked. They looked at each other.

  ‘I’m making a commitment here, aren’t I?’ Tammy realised out loud. ‘If I let her go any further with this now, then one day I’m going to have to try and scrape up enough money for riding lessons. I’m going to have to watch her galloping over big wooden jumps with my heart in my mouth.’

  ‘Those are the implications,’ he agreed. ‘Brave enough for it?’