Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit: Bachelor of the Baby Ward / Fairytale on the Children's Ward

Very matter-of-fact, yet that was what this outing was, a neighbourly gesture.

So why did he feel disappointed?

Feel as if something had changed between them?

For the worse!

She held their clothes while he showered with Hamish, then dried the little boy with her towel while Angus dried himself.

Being busy with Hamish meant Kate didn’t have to look at Angus’s sleek, wet body. She’d always considered herself immune to hormonal surges of attraction but the man next door was definitely setting her hormones in a twitch. What to do about it was the problem.

Keeping her distance from him would be one answer, but that was impossible when she not only worked with the man on a daily basis but also lived next door to him.

So she’d have to fake it—pretend to a platonic neigh-bourliness she was far from feeling.

‘The Frisky Fish is the best for fish and chips, or it was last time I bought any.’ She finished dressing Hamish and straightened up as Angus, his body now suitably covered, came to join them.

‘That one just across the road?’

Such a simple question but his accent really was to die for! She was thinking accents when she should have been answering but now it was too late, for he was speaking again.

‘I’ll buy our dinner,’ he announced. ‘I know what Hamish eats, what about you—a serve of fish and chips?’

The dark eyes were fixed on her face and Kate found it hard to pretend when just this casual regard made her feel warm inside.

‘I’m more a calamari person—not into fish at all—and could I have a battered sav, as well?’

‘Battered sav?’ Again man and boy made a chorus of the question, though Hamish added, ‘Oh, I want one of those, as well.’

‘Just ask for it, you’ll see,’ Kate told Angus, smiling at his bewildered frown. ‘Hamish and I will bag us a table.’

She took the excited little boy by the hand and they walked through the park until they found a vacant table.

‘I’m going to kindy tomorrow—Dad’s taking me,’ Hamish told her, and though he sounded excited there was a hint of anxiety in his blue eyes.

‘That will be such fun for you,’ Kate said. ‘Meeting lots of new friends, finding people to play with at the weekends. Maybe we can bring some of your friends to the beach one day.’

‘When I can ride the waves so I can show them,’ Hamish told her, and Kate wondered at what age children developed a competitive streak.

She asked about his friends back in America and laughed at the adventures he and McTavish had shared, so she was surprised to see nearly an hour had passed and Angus hadn’t returned. The Frisky Fish was popular and you usually had a wait while your meal was cooked, but this long?

‘Here’s Dad! He’s remembered drinks even though we didn’t tell him.’

Kate turned to see Angus approaching, holding white-wrapped parcels of food in one hand, a soft drink and a long green bottle in the other. He reached the table and put down the white parcels, gave Hamish his drink, then deposited the bottle on the table.

‘I haven’t a clue about Australian wines. I drank a fair bit of it in the U.S., but none of the names were familiar so I asked the chap behind the counter what went with battered savs.’

He was pulling two wineglasses from his pocket as he spoke, then he looked apologetically at Kate.

‘I do hope you drink wine. I didn’t think—should I have got you a soda, as well?’

‘I’d love a glass of wine,’ Kate assured him. ‘Especially a glass of this wine. The bloke at the wine shop saw you coming, and sold you something really special—really expensive, I would think!’

Angus smiled at her, destroying most of her resolution to pretend she felt no attraction.

‘Phooey to the price, as long as you enjoy it. We can both have a glass now and you can take the rest home to enjoy another time—it’s a screw-top.’

He poured the wine, then busied himself unwrapping Hamish’s dinner, showing him the battered sav.

‘It’s a kind of sausage called a saveloy that’s fried in batter,’ he explained to Hamish, who was squeezing tomato sauce onto it with the ease of an expert in takeaway food.

‘And don’t think you’ll get one too often,’ Angus added. ‘Full of nitrates, then the batter and the frying in oil—just about every dietary and digestive no-no.’

‘You’re just jealous you didn’t get one,’ Kate told him, biting into hers with relish, then she laughed as Angus delved into his white package and came up with one.

‘Well, I had to try it, didn’t I?’ he said defensively, but as he bit into it, he pulled a face and set it back down, deciding to eat his fish—grilled not fried, Kate noticed—instead.

‘They’re not to everyone’s taste,’ she said, ‘but my father was the food police like you and I never got to taste one as a child, so I became obsessed later on in life.’

‘Obsessed by battered savs?’ Angus teased.

‘Better than being obsessed by some other things I could think of,’ Kate retorted.

Her next-door neighbour for one!

Chapter Four

KATE stopped the car in the back lane outside their gate and watched the two males walk into their yard, the taller one looking straight ahead, although Hamish was chattering at him.

He was a good father, Angus, Kate told herself as she pulled into the shed that did service as a garage for Molly, but she sensed that something was amiss in his relationship with his son. Back when she was young, she’d felt guilt—blamed herself—for her family’s disintegration, thinking that if somehow she had managed to save Susie, everything would have been all right. It was this, she knew, that had led her to accept that, although her father loved her, there would always be a wall between them, so even when he was dying they couldn’t talk about the past.

Had his wife’s death built the same kind of wall between Angus and Hamish, or had Angus simply shut himself off from all emotion to shield himself from further pain?

And just what did she think she was doing, pondering such things? she asked herself as she closed the double doors of the shed. Why was she considering the convoluted emotional state of someone she barely knew?

Because you’re interested in him.

The answer was immediate and so obvious she felt a blush rising in her cheeks and was glad that Angus wasn’t around to see it. A dead giveaway, her blushes.

She thought of Clare instead, of the dark-haired beauty, and reminded herself that if Angus McDowell decided to be interested in a woman on their team, then Clare would surely be the number-one choice.

Kate grumped her way inside, a depression she rarely felt dogging her footsteps, but as she showered she thought of baby Bob and realised how little she really had to complain about.

Refreshed, she opted not for lounging-at-home clothes—in her case a singlet top and boxer shorts, her pyjamas of choice—but for respectable clothes—long shorts and a T-shirt, reasonable hospital visiting clothes. She’d just pop up and check not only on Bob but on Mr and Mrs Stamford, as well, to see how they were coping.

‘There’s something wrong? You’ve been called in?’

The panic she’d felt when she saw Angus by Bob’s crib was evident in her voice, but when he turned and smiled at her she realised she’d overreacted.

‘Did you think you were the only one who likes to check on patients, even when there’s no reason for alarm?’ he said.

Damn the blush.

‘Of course not,’ she managed stoutly. ‘It was just that seeing you there with him gave me a shock. Mr and Mrs Stamford?’

‘Gone to get a bite to eat. I said I’d stay.’

Was there an edge of strain in his voice that the statement pinged some memory in Kate’s head?

‘I got the impression you didn’t like getting too involved with patients and their parents?’

He frowned at her but she was getting used to that.

‘I think a certain degree of emotional detachment is necessary in our job.’

But even as Angus said the words he knew it hadn’t always been that way. He also knew that it was seeing Kate Armstrong’s empathy with Mrs Stamford that had broken through a little of his own detachment, enough to lead him to suggest he stayed with Bob while the couple ate together.

Was this good or bad, the breakthrough?

He was so caught up in his own thoughts it took him a moment to realise Kate was talking to him, pointing out the oxygen level in Bob’s blood, suggesting they might be able to take him off the ventilator sooner, rather than later.

Dragging his mind back to his patient, he nodded his agreement.

‘The operation is so much simpler when the coronary arteries are good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking the same thing about the ventilator when you came in. Maybe tomorrow morning we’ll try him off it.’

They stood together beside the crib, Angus so conscious of the woman by his side he knew he had to be very, very wary of any contact with her outside working hours. Admittedly, her taking them to the beach, her offer to lend her car at the weekend, were nothing more than neighbourly gestures, and he wouldn’t want to rebuff her or offend her, but every cell in his body was shouting a warning at him—danger, keep clear, problems ahead.

Kate felt him closing off from her and wondered if he’d been offended by her comment earlier—the one about detachment. But if he was closing off from her, well, that was good. It would be easier for her to pretend that’s all they were, neighbourly colleagues, in spite of how her body felt whenever she was in his company.

She felt hot and excited and trembly somehow, physical manifestations she couldn’t remember feeling since she was fifteen and had had a crush on the captain of the school’s football team. Not that he’d ever looked at her, nor even stood close to her.

She stepped away from the crib, turning to greet the Stamfords, who’d returned from their dinner.

Pete Stamford eyed her with suspicion, and she wondered if he was worrying again, thinking the presence of two doctors by his son’s crib meant there were problems.

‘It’s a habit,’ Kate was quick to assure him. ‘I find I sleep better if I do a final check of my patients before I go to bed.’

Pete nodded and Mrs Stamford, who still hadn’t offered them the use of her first name, shook her head.

‘Maybe all the horror stories we hear about health care are exaggerated,’ she said, and Kate knew it was an apology for her anger of the morning.

‘I don’t think the news channels would attract an audience if they didn’t exaggerate a bit,’ she said, then she said goodnight to the couple, including Angus in the farewell, and left the PICU.

Angus caught up with her in the elevator foyer, and though he’d told himself he should linger with the Stamfords until Kate was well away from the hospital, he felt uncomfortable about her walking home on her own this late at night.

‘Oh, I do it all the time,’ she said when he mentioned the folly of a woman walking the streets on her own. ‘There are always people around near the hospital. Cars and ambulances coming and going, police vehicles—we’re not quite in the middle of the city, but we’re close enough and the streets are well-lit.’

‘There’s that dark park across the road,’ he told her, stepping into the elevator beside her and wondering if it was the enclosed space, or her presence within it, that was making him feel edgy.

‘The park’s well-lit, as well,’ she told him, smiling up at him. ‘I’m not totally stupid, you know. I wouldn’t take any risks with my personal safety, but around here, well, you’ll see.’

And see he did, for there were plenty of people around as they walked down the street towards their houses. People, cars, ambulances and, yes, police vehicles.

Too many people really.

Far too many!

The thought jolted him—hadn’t he just decided that Kate was nothing more than a neighbourly colleague? But the light steps of the slim woman by his side, the upright carriage and slight tilt of her head when she turned towards him…something about her presence was physically disturbing. So much so he wanted to touch her, to feel her skin and the bones beneath it, to tilt her head just a little bit more, run his fingers into the tangled red hair and drop a kiss on lips so full and pink they drew him like a magnet.

Attraction, that’s all it was. He could cope with it, ignore it. And tomorrow he had a full day of appointments, no operations, so he wouldn’t see her. All he had to do was walk her home, say goodnight and that was that.

Except that Hamish was sitting in her front yard on the discarded yellow couch!

Admittedly Juanita was beside him, but still Angus felt the anger rise inside him.

‘You should be in bed,’ he told his son, his voice stern enough to make the child slide closer to his nanny.

‘McTavish is sick,’ Hamish whispered, and the woman Angus was ignoring reacted far more quickly than he did. She knelt in front of his child and took him in her arms.

‘It’s probably just the water here in Sydney,’ she assured him. ‘I get sick when I go to different cities and drink different water. But the sickness doesn’t last. It’s always over in a day or two.’

Was this why children needed a mother?

Because women reacted more instantly—instinctively perhaps—to a child’s misery?

His mind had gone to McTavish’s health, to wondering what could be wrong with the dog. And to the other puzzle Hamish’s presence presented. He went with that because it was useless to speculate about the dog’s illness.

‘And just why does that mean you’re sitting in Dr Armstrong’s yard, not at home in our living room?’

‘Because Kate has a car and she said I could call her Kate!’

For a very biddable little boy there was a touch of defiance in the words and Angus found himself frowning, though at Juanita this time.

‘What exactly is going on?’ he demanded.

She shrugged her thick shoulders.

‘It’s as he says. The quarantine office phoned to say McTavish wasn’t eating and there was nothing for it, but Hamish had to visit him, although I told him we couldn’t see him tonight. He insisted he come and wait for his friend, sure she’d take him to see the dog.’

Angus could imagine what had happened, and understood that if Juanita had tried to insist on Hamish going to bed, the little boy would only have grown more upset, and with the move, and missing his dog, he was already emotionally out of balance.

But knowing how this had come about didn’t help him in deciding what to do, although now Kate Armstrong seemed to have taken things into her own hands. She was sitting on the couch beside Juanita, holding Hamish on her lap.

‘Juanita’s right,’ she was telling Hamish, ‘we can’t visit McTavish at this time of night because if we did all the other dogs and cats and birds and horses there would be disturbed and upset and they would want their owners to be visiting them, as well. But your father can phone them and ask them how McTavish is now. Perhaps he can tell them what McTavish’s favourite food is, and the people who are minding him can try to coax him to eat a little of it. They have vets—animal doctors—at the quarantine centre who will be looking after him, just as your Dad looks after the babies at the hospital.’

‘My mother died.’

Angus’s heart stopped beating for an instant and a chill ran through his body. He’d never heard Hamish mention his mother, but it was obvious the little boy assumed Jenna had been ill before she died, and now he was thinking McTavish could also die. He knelt in front of his son and lifted him from Kate’s knee.

‘McTavish won’t die,’ he promised, knowing the assurance was needed, although he also knew he couldn’t guarantee such a thing. ‘Kate’s right, let’s go inside and phone the quarantine centre and tell them that he really likes—’

What did the dog really like?

‘Biscuits,’ Hamish told him, his fears forgotten in this new excitement.

‘Not exactly a dietary imperative,’ Angus muttered, but if biscuits could coax McTavish to eat, then he’d certainly suggest them.

He carried his son towards the house, pausing for Juanita to catch up with them and to nod goodnight to Kate. But the image of her sitting on the old yellow couch, his son in her arms, remained with him long after his conversation with the quarantine office and the reassuring return phone call that, yes, McTavish had eaten some biscuits and even eaten some of the dried dog food the carers had mixed in with the broken biscuits.

The image of her accompanied him to bed, aware of her in the house next door, so close, too close.

Any woman would have comforted Hamish in that situation, he told himself, but some instinct deep inside was telling him she wasn’t just any woman, this Kate Armstrong. She was special—special in a way no woman had been since Jenna.

Which was another reason he had to avoid her…

It proved, as he’d known it would, impossible, for the teams met regularly. He operated with her, and discussion of patients was inevitable. But he managed to avoid her out of work hours until the day he came home early enough to attack the hedge around the garden gate.

Kate had been sensible in suggesting that if Hamish wanted to adventure he do it in her backyard, so freeing the gate had become a necessity. He’d bought a pair of hedge trimmers at the local hardware store and, some three-quarters of an hour of reasonably hard labour later, had cleared his side enough to push the gate open. Now all he had to do was trim her side.

Should he phone her first to ask if it was okay to come in and do it?

Phone her when she lived next door?

Well, he wasn’t going to go over and ask; just seeing her each day at work was enough to tell him the attraction was going to take a long time to die.

He was debating this when Hamish returned from his job of stacking all the cut-off hedge branches in a pile near the back fence.

‘Oh, look, we can get into Kate’s garden.’

He ran through the gate before Angus could stop him, calling back to his father in even greater excitement, ‘And here’s Kate, she’s right up a ladder!’

Right up a ladder?

A child suddenly calling out?

She could be startled!

Fall!

Angus dashed through the open gate to find his son confidently climbing up a very long ladder, at the top of which stood the team anaesthetist, a measuring tape, a pen and a notebook clamped in her hand.

She was peering down uncertainly, no doubt partly because Hamish’s enthusiastic attack on the ladder rungs was making it wobble.

‘No, Hamish dear,’ she said gently. ‘You can’t have two people on a ladder at once. It might tip over.’

Once again the first thought, beyond the anger fear had wrought in his chest, was that this woman would make a wonderful mother. She was always fair. She always explained in a common-sense way that a child would understand.

Although, Angus realised a little belatedly, the child in question hadn’t taken much notice and was still six rungs up the ladder and teetering there a little uncertainly.

Angus rescued him, set him on the ground, then looked up at the woman above him.

‘And just what are you doing up there?’

He’d meant it as a neighbourly question, but it came out as a demand because the ladder seemed old and highly unstable and she was at the roof level of a two-storey house.

‘Possums,’ she replied, apparently not taking exception to his tone. ‘I wouldn’t mind the little beggars living in the roof if they’d just stay in one place, but it seems they live on one side and feed on the other so they’re galloping across my ceiling in what sound like hobnail boots all night.’

‘Possums?’

He realised there’d been a lot of conversation after that, but his mind had stuck on the word.

‘Little furry animals, big eyes and long tails, cute as all get out but not much fun if they’re living in your ceiling.’

‘Oh!’

The word was obviously inadequate but Angus wasn’t certain where to take the conversation next, and the uncertainty was only partly to do with the fact that Kate appeared to be wearing very short shorts, so from where he stood her pale legs went on forever and he found it hard to focus on anything else.

Fortunately Hamish was less inhibited.

‘Possums!’ he shrieked. ‘Can I see them? Can I, Kate, can I?’

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Just let me finish here and I’ll come down and explain.’

Angus found himself wanting to order her down right away—wanting to tell her he’d do whatever it was she was doing—but having no notion of possums’ habits, nor of what she could be arranging for them, he knew he’d be making a fool of himself if he said anything at all. So he stood and held the ladder steady, and not, he told himself, so he could watch her as she climbed down it. In fact, he turned resolutely away, determined not to have his resolve weakened by long pale legs in short shorts.

Kate told herself that of course she could climb down a ladder that Angus was holding; after all, hadn’t she been successful in avoiding him these past few days, limiting their encounters to purely work contact? But her legs trembled as she came closer to where he stood and it took an effort of supreme will not to climb back up the ladder and perch on the roof until he grew tired of standing there.

‘What exactly were you doing?’ he asked as she passed him, very close—close enough to see a beard shadow on his cheeks and lines of tiredness around his eyes.

Wasn’t he sleeping well?

She wasn’t exactly enjoying night-times herself, finding it hard to sleep when images of him kept flitting through her mind.

He was so close…

‘There’s a hole,’ she said, reaching the ground and backing away from him, lifting a hand to stop him moving the ladder. ‘That’s how they’re getting in and out. I had to measure it.’

‘So you could make a door for them?’ Hamish asked, dancing around with excitement at the thought of a possum door.

‘Not exactly,’ Kate admitted, ‘although I suppose you could call it a door, but I intend to keep it locked.’

‘You want to lock them in?’ Angus asked. It must be something to do with the air in Australia that so many of the conversations he had with Kate had a feeling of unreality about them. Battered savs came to mind…

‘So I can keep them out,’ she replied, speaking to him but squatting down so her face was level with Hamish’s. ‘There are plenty of other places the possums can live, think of all the trees here and in the park. That’s where possums should live—in holes in the trunks and thick branches of trees. Once I fix my hole, they’ll find somewhere else very easily.’

Hamish nodded his understanding, then asked the obvious question.

‘But how will you get them out?’

Kate smiled at him, though Angus imagined there was sadness in the smile. Was she hurting for her own lack of children? Were they so very important to her?

Maybe one child would do her?

Hamish—

The thought shocked him so much he straightened his spine and clamped down on his wandering mind, thinking he’d go and cut the hedge on this side, departing forthwith, but she was talking again, explaining to Hamish, and Angus couldn’t help but listen.

‘I’ve been feeding them every night since I came back here to live,’ she told Hamish. ‘Are you allowed to stay up until eight o’clock because that’s when it starts to get dark and they come out of the roof and down here to the garden to eat the fruit I put out. There’s a whole possum family—a mother and a father and two little ones that sometimes ride on their mother’s back but who are learning to climb themselves now.’

‘Can I come and see, can I, Dad?’

The excitement in his son’s voice meant Angus had to look at him, really look at him, something he usually avoided as Hamish’s resemblance to Jenna was like a knife blade going through his skin.