Jo was so shocked by Lauren’s attitude she forgot a stranger—well, almost stranger—was in the room with them.
‘You can’t possibly still be carrying a torch for that man,’ she fumed. ‘Lauren, get over it—it was, what, nearly fifteen years ago?’
‘I am not carrying a torch for him,’ Lauren said. ‘His dumping me was the best thing he ever did for me. It’s not that, it’s the family thing, coming here with his wife … ‘
She shrugged her too-thin shoulders.
‘I can’t explain it. You know me—practical Lauren—never one to go for vague feelings but the feeling I have isn’t vague and I don’t even know if it’s to do with Nat. Maybe it’s the refuge and the trouble we’re in there, or—oh, I don’t know, Jo, I hate sounding melodramatic and you know that isn’t like me, but I have this terrible sense of impending doom.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘WELL, on that cheerful note,’ Cam said brightly, shattering the tension that had wound around them in the room, ‘perhaps you and I, Jo, can adjourn to the pub. Best place to prepare for doom, surely. I’ll drink squash and do any night calls. Sure you can’t join us, just for a meal?’
He was asking Lauren, who’d regained a little of the colour she’d lost as she’d made her strange confession.
She smiled at him—he was a man who could make women smile, Jo realised—and shook her head.
‘Not tonight but I’ll take a rain-check,’ she told him, then she smiled again and in a softer voice said, ‘Thanks, Cam.’
Maybe if she pushed a little, the two of them could get together, Jo decided, ignoring the squelchy feeling, smothering it under an unspoken assertion that this was a noble thing she was doing, finding Lauren such a nice man.
‘Impending doom?’ Cam queried as Jo packed up her bits of paper, shoving them willy-nilly into a file. Considering her house and what he’d seen of her office, he didn’t think she was the willy-nilly type, so …
‘Don’t tell me you’re picking up on Lauren’s foreboding?’ he asked her.
Her head snapped up and she frowned at him.
‘Why on earth would you think that?’
He grinned at her.
‘The way you’re shovelling papers into your file. Everything I’ve seen of you suggests a person who likes things tidy—meticulous—and that’s not meticulous behaviour.’
‘Well, thanks!’ she snapped, then she muttered, ‘Meticulous behaviour indeed,’ under her breath.
‘Well?’ he demanded, when they reached the car park where their vehicles stood side by side.
‘Well what?’ she was frowning again but this time she seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘Are you concerned about impending doom?’
She shook her head, then sighed again.
‘I am concerned about Lauren,’ she admitted. ‘I have been for some time. She works too hard and she worries too much. We all feel inadequate from time to time, especially when it comes to the women we help, but Lauren takes it more to heart, somehow.’
‘As if it’s personal? Did she grow up in an abusive home?’
Jo looked up at him, her eyes, silvery-green tonight, widening in surprise.
‘Lauren? No way. Her parents were lovely—still are. They run cattle on a property up in the hills behind the town, a farm that’s been in the family for generations.’
She paused, then added, ‘And I know that a lot of abuse does go on in rural areas and that most of it goes unnoticed so it’s unreported, but I stayed with Lauren often enough when I was a kid to know that her father was the gentlest of men. No, there’s no hidden violence in her background.’
Jo was very convinced, and reasonably convincing, but Cam had recognised the signs of extreme tension in Lauren and if her experience of abuse hadn’t come from her family, that left …
Some boyfriend in her past?
Not Nat Williams, surely!
Not the golden boy of Australian surfing?
Lauren would have been away from the Cove while she was studying—down in Sydney, he guessed. Maybe something had happened there.
But she’d mentioned Nat Williams’s return …
‘Are you waiting for some sign that you should open your car door? A green flash in the sky? Three crows on a wire? A pelican flying backwards?’
Jo’s gentle tease made him realise he was standing by his van, key in the driver’s door, fingers on the key, completely lost in contemplation.
‘Would Nat Williams have hit her?’
He hadn’t meant to ask. It had been nothing more than a continuation of his thoughts, but he’d spoken it aloud.
Jo’s ‘Nat?’ was so disbelieving he knew he’d guessed wrong, until she followed it with a soft ‘Oh!’ She shook her head and her eyes looked into his with bewilderment and maybe just a little fear.
‘Surely not,’ Jo added, horrified, pushing away the possibility, but not far enough.
‘Surely I’d have known,’ she said, watching Cam’s face, desperately seeking some kind of answer there. ‘Or Lauren would have told me?’
‘Would she?’ Cam asked gently.
Jo took a deep, steadying breath.
‘Given what I now know about domestic violence, probably not,’ she admitted. ‘When I first got involved with the refuge, I was astounded at how quiet the women kept it, as if they were to blame for it and so were too ashamed to talk about it.’
‘Usually the abuser has convinced them they are to blame,’ Cam reminded her.
‘You’re right,’ Jo told him, despair killing off any last remnants of the upbeat feeling the positive meeting had produced. ‘There’s also the issue that if they do tell someone close to them, more often than not the person they tell doesn’t believe them. Look at Jackie. I know for a fact that her parents think Richard’s a fantastic guy. He played schoolboy cricket for the state and Jackie’s father is a cricket fanatic so he loves Richard like a son. If she mentioned to them that he hit her, her parents would immediately wonder what she’d done to deserve it.’
She slumped against her car, and bent her head, drawing circles in the sandy car park with the toe of her sandals.
‘Sometimes it seems so hopeless,’ she said.
‘Never!’ Cam said firmly. ‘All you need is a hug, then you’ll pick yourself up and soldier on. I know enough of you by now to understand you’re not a quitter. You’re just letting Lauren’s sense of doom cloud you at the moment.’
And on that note he proceeded to prise her off the car and enfold her in a warm, hard hug. A super-hug if hugs could have ratings, because his body was so firm and well muscled, so warm, his arms so all-enveloping, and she could rest her cheek against his heart and let all the tension of the day flow out of her.
She could also feel his heartbeat, strong, and regular, as vital as the man himself, and given that it was a very comfortable position she indulged herself and stayed a little longer than she probably should have. After all, she was giving him to Lauren and this might be her last opportunity to enjoy a super-hug.
He shouldn’t have done it. Cam knew that immediately. He shouldn’t have touched her. He should never touch her because it started his libido shouting about the other things he wanted to do to her, like press his lips against that blue vein at her temple, and kiss her just there at the nape of her neck on the bit of pale skin he saw when her hair was up, and eventually he would slide his lips around her neck, and finish on her tempting pink mouth.
And he’d like to run his hands across her back, feeling the bones beneath the skin of this woman who was getting beneath his own skin. There were other bits of her he’d like to touch and kiss as well, but he definitely wasn’t going to think of those now, just give her the comforting friend-and-colleague hug he knew she needed and leave it at that.
But she seemed happy in the hug so he held on, pressing her body against his, feeling her warmth, wondering if it was because she’d had so much anguish in her life with her sister’s accident that she was attuned t
o unhappiness in others. If so, it would make her doubly anxious about Lauren.
He tightened his hold on her but only out of sympathy …
‘I think perhaps hugging in the community centre car park isn’t the best thing to be doing late on a Friday afternoon, seeing that hospital visitors use it and visiting hours are just finishing.’
She eased out of his arms as she spoke, and looked up at him, her face so delicately flushed, her eyes so intriguingly puzzled—what had just happened? they seemed to ask—he wanted to hug her again.
To be perfectly honest, he wanted to hug her again for other reasons, but best he didn’t consider them right now.
‘Pub?’ he asked.
She nodded, then said, ‘Come in my car, I can drop you back at the van later.’
Strewth, but she was a bossy woman!
‘Not tonight,’ he told her. ‘I’m the one drinking squash. The van might rattle a bit but it’s very comfortable. Before I bought it, the whole thing had been restored by this chap who had a passion for the old original campervans. He’d even reupholstered the seats.’
Jo didn’t seem convinced, climbing into the van and looking dubiously around her.
‘A bench seat?’ she queried, when Cam got in beside her.
‘That’s what all the original vans had,’ he assured her, not adding that he’d always thought bench seats far better than single seats in vehicles. He wanted to point out that it had a seat belt for a person to sit in the middle, thinking how nice it would be to drive with Jo pressed up against him, but she’d already buckled herself into place beside the door—a million miles away, or so it seemed.
Not that there was any reason for her to be closer. Intellectually he knew that. Physically—well, as far as he was concerned, she could never sit too close.
Never?
Was he thinking—?
‘If you turn left as you come out of the gates,’ the person he wanted sitting closer to him said, her voice so matter-of-fact he knew she wasn’t thinking about closeness, ‘we’ll go to the middle pub. You’ve probably noticed it, the two-storey one with the iron lace around the top balcony.’
‘And the old swing doors downstairs? I’ve walked past it and wondered that they’d kept them. Most pubs took them out before I was born, I imagine for security reasons as much as for updating their look.’
He glanced towards her and saw a little smile quirking the corners of her mouth.
‘I suspect they weren’t original to this particular place, but were brought in at some time when the place was undergoing renovation to give it the old-time look it has. There are steel grilles that are lowered to secure the doorways after hours— spoils the look altogether—but for all that, it does the best meals of the three pubs.’
He drove down to the esplanade and found a parking spot almost opposite the pub, but when he pulled into it, neither of them moved. He was watching the way the waves rolled up the beach, seeking out the surfers on the point break closer to the headland, checking out the waves.
Was Jo also watching them? Thinking of the thrill getting back on a board had given her? Would she—?
‘The forecast is good for the morning, tide coming in and a good swell, offshore winds later. I usually go out at about five-thirty, just as dawn is breaking. Want to come?’
She turned towards him but the shadows in the van made it impossible to read her face, and he couldn’t guess what he was thinking.
‘Stupid, isn’t it?’ she finally declared. ‘I’m sure a psychiatrist would say I’m denying myself the joy of surfing as some kind of punishment for Jill’s accident, but at the time, well, all I wanted was to be with her whenever I could, and I got out of the habit of surfing every day.’
‘I doubt a good psychiatrist would tell you that,’ he said carefully. ‘Sometimes we humans over-analyse things that happen. We look back and try to find meanings in them because we can’t accept that often things just happen—there is no meaning. But since you’ve been back living at the Cove, you’ve not wanted to surf?’
Cam held his breath as he watched her considering the situation.
If she gave in and started surfing again, would she also give in on relationships, something else he was reasonably sure she’d been denying herself?
Then, with a little shake of her head, she said, ‘Actually, I run in the mornings these days. It not only keeps me fit but it gives me time to think about the day ahead and plan what needs to be done.’
She slid out of the van, shut the door with care, and walked around to the rear where she waited until he’d locked the doors and joined her. He took her elbow to walk across the street—surely that level of polite touching was permissible in a boss-employee relationship even if his motivations weren’t quite as gentlemanly as the act itself.
Damn it all! What was he thinking? He had to get thoughts of Jo as anything but his boss right out of his head. As she never tired of reminding him, he wasn’t staying, and even on such short acquaintance he was certain she wasn’t a woman who would enjoy a brief, no-strings affair. On top of which, he knew he wasn’t ready for a relationship himself, although—
The ‘although’ brought him up short. It had certainly been hours, perhaps even a full day, since he’d had memory flashes of the carnage in the building where the young soldiers had been, certainly days since he’d replayed in his head some of the conversations he’d had with those who’d survived.
And then there was the satisfaction he’d felt this morning, treating Richard—the return of his confidence in himself as a doctor, as someone who could help another human being through tough times.
Maybe …
They entered through the swing doors and Jo led him through another door into a wood-panelled dining room, complete with crisp white linen tablecloths, small silver vases, each holding a single rose, and old-fashioned glass and silver salt and pepper shakers in a silver cruet.
‘They certainly carried through with the olden-days feel for the place,’ he said, as they slid into chairs at a table for two in the far corner of the room. It was a quiet corner, away from a family group at a larger table and another table where two couples were laughing as they discussed some mishap that had befallen one of their party.
The menus were in a rack and Jo picked one up but didn’t open it, looking at him instead, a serious expression on her face.
‘What form does your baggage take?’ She frowned and shook her head. ‘That sounded wrong, but I know about baggage and how we shut it away in dark corners of our minds, but does yours recur in some way so you realise it isn’t really shut away at all?’
He found it hard to believe she could ask the question out of the blue when he’d been thinking about it as they’d crossed the road, but he didn’t believe people could read each other’s minds, so it had to be coincidence.
You don’t have to answer her, his head told him, but the anxiety he could read in her face contradicted that.
‘I get flashes of images in my head and hear scraps of conversation,’ he admitted. ‘I hear young soldiers telling me they can’t take any more, or crying as they admit to being scared. The voices are worse than the images, although the images are of brutally injured bodies. They bring out all the usual symptoms—cold sweats, racing heart, minor panic attacks—great stuff for a doctor to be experiencing, although I can assure you it never happens when I’m with a patient.’
She reached out and touched his hand where it lay on the open menu.
‘I wondered because I had images as well, usually at the most—not exactly inappropriate time but at weird times. I’d be really involved in something that bore no relation to the accident, and suddenly I’d see Jill’s body picked up by the wave and flung towards the cliff. And although with the crashing of the waves I’m quite sure I didn’t hear her cry out, I used to hear this desperate yell … ‘
Cam watched her chest rise and he knew she was taking a deep breath.
‘You must think I’m crazy, coming ou
t with the question—telling you this stuff—but I wanted to say that although you never forget—it’s always with you—in time the images fade and the cries become fainter.’ She shrugged her shoulders and he saw that delicate flush that fascinated him rise again in her cheeks. ‘It probably won’t help you, your own experiences must have been so cataclysmic compared to an injured sister, but I thought I’d say it anyway.’
She moved her hand, but he caught it, and squeezed her fingers, feeling his chest grow tight at the same time.
‘I’m glad you said it. Thank you, Jo.’
Her fingers moved in his, returning his clasp, and Cam felt he’d like the moment to last for ever—to just sit and hold Jo’s hand in his.
For ever …
CHAPTER NINE
ON SATURDAY the schoolies arrived and Cam, wandering down town after the medical centre had closed at midday, was astounded to see the action. Large cars pulling up to disgorge teenagers, luggage and cartons of beer and spirit mixes. Teenagers everywhere, mostly roving in packs, tents springing up like colourful, exotic fungi in the caravan park, high fences up along the esplanade and a stage erected where the bands would perform.
He found the chill-out zone, already staffed by a young policeman who was handing out wristbands to anyone who wanted them.
‘Wristbands?’ Cam queried after he’d introduced himself.
‘All schoolies must be wearing one to gain entry into the fenced areas. We personalise them, using indelible markers that won’t wash off in water. We print their best friend’s mobile number in blue and a phone number for their family in red. The red is for emergencies should one of them be hurt, but if the person is just lost or a bit under the weather, we call the friend.’
‘Great idea,’ Cam said, looking around the fenced area with its chairs and rugs and cushions, the stacked boxes of bottle water, a stack of buckets—for people who were sick?—wet paper towels, dry towels and a locked medicine chest.
‘Do the kids use this place?’ he asked.
The young policeman nodded.
‘Just you wait and see. It’s not so busy during the day, usually just kids wanting directions or programmes, but at night the volunteers are flat out. Right now the volunteers are out there, giving out pamphlets that explain what’s available at the chill-out zone and a list of phone numbers for emergencies.’
New Doc in Town / Orphan Under the Christmas Tree Page 13
