Gold Coast Angels: A Doctor's Redemption

‘I…That’s great,’ she whispered. ‘If it’s okay with you, I might leave you to it.’

‘Yeah, you look like a bomb site,’ Doug said bluntly. ‘Take her home, Sam, and then come back. Bonnie’ll take a while to wake. I won’t leave her and you can be back before she needs reassuring.’

‘I have my car…’ Zoe said.

‘I’ve seen your car and I’m looking at you,’ Doug said drily. ‘You drive through town looking like that you’ll have the entire Gold Coast police force thinking there’s been an axe murder. Leave the keys here. I’ll park it round the back and you can fetch it tomorrow. Where do you live?’

‘The hospital apartments,’ she said. ‘They’re only two blocks away. I can drive.’

‘You tell me those legs aren’t shaking,’ Doug retorted. ‘You’ve done a magnificent job, lass, but now you need help yourself. You have some great staff, Sam. You were damned lucky to have your colleague on the beach.’

‘My colleague…?’

‘You realise Bonnie arrested?’ Doug went on. ‘Heart stopped twice. With blood loss like that it’s a wonder she made it. A miracle more like. If Zoe hadn’t got her here…Well, if she cops a speeding fine for her trip here, I’m thinking you ought to pay it.’

‘I’d pay for more,’ Sam said, stunned—and confused. ‘You’re not a vet nurse?’

‘I’m a nurse at Gold Coast City,’ she managed. ‘I’d rather go home by myself.’

A nurse. A human nurse. One of his colleagues?

‘Take her home, Sam,’ Doug told him. ‘Now. Take a gown from the back room, Zoe, so you look less like a bomb victim, but go home now. You deserve a medal and if Sam doesn’t give you one I’ll give you one myself. Go.’

‘I’ll be giving her a medal,’ Sam growled. ‘I’ll give her a truckload if she’ll take it. What you’ve done…’

‘It’s okay,’ Zoe managed. ‘Enough with the medals. Doug’s right, I just need to go home.’

She wanted to go home but she didn’t want this man to take her.

She wanted, more than anything, to slide behind the wheel of her car, drive back to Gold Coast Central, sneak in the back way and find a bath and bed.

But there was no ‘back way’, no way to get back into the hospital without attracting attention, and Doug was right, she and her car were a mess.

Sam was taking her home?

He ushered her outside where his Jeep was parked next to her car and she thought…she thought…

This guy was a doctor? A colleague?

He was still only wearing board shorts. Unlike her, though, he didn’t look gruesome. He looked like something from the cover of one of the myriad surfing magazines in the local shops.

The Gold Coast was surfing territory, and many surfers here lived for the waves. That’s what this guy looked like. He was bronzed, lean, ripped, his brown hair bleached blond by sun and sea, his green eyes crinkled and creased from years of waiting for the perfect wave.

He was a doctor and a surfer.

Where did dog owner come into that?

He grabbed a T-shirt from the back seat of his Jeep and hauled it on. He looked almost normal, she thought, even after what had happened. His dog was fixed and he was ready to move on.

She glanced down at her oversized theatre gown and the bloodied jeans beneath them and something just…cracked.

For hours now she’d been clenching her emotions down while she’d got the job done. She looked at the mess that was her car, her independence, her freedom, she looked down at her disgusting jeans—and control finally broke.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, but she shook her head.

‘What were you thinking?’ she managed, trying hard to keep her voice low, calm, incisive, clear. ‘Leaving her waiting on the beach? Leaving her alone? To be so far out and leave her there…If I hadn’t been there she’d be dead. You have a dog like Bonnie and you just desert her. Of all the stupid, crass, negligent, cruel…

‘Do You know how lucky you are to have a dog? Of course you don’t. You’re a doctor, you’re a healthy, fit, surfer boy. You can buy any dog you want, so you just buy her and then you don’t care that she loves you, so she lies there and waits and waits. I was watching her—and she adores you, and you abandoned her and it nearly killed her. If I hadn’t been there it would have! She nearly died because you didn’t care!’

So much for calm, incisive and clear. She was yelling at the top of her lungs, and he was standing there watching, just watching, and she wanted to hit him and she thought for one crazy moment that it’d be justifiable homicide and she could hear the judge say, ‘He deserved everything that was coming to him.’

Only, of course, she couldn’t hit him. Somehow she had to get herself under control. She hiccuped on a sob and that made her angrier still because she didn’t cry, she never cried, and she knew she was being irrational, it was just…it was just…

The last few days had been crazy. She’d spent her whole life in one small community, closeted, cared for. The move here from Adelaide might seem small to some, but for Zoe it was the breaking of chains that had been with her since childhood.

It was the right thing to do, to move on, but, still, the new job, the new workplace, the constant calls from her parents—and from Dean, who still couldn’t understand why she’d left—were undermining her determination and making her feel bleak with homesickness.

But she would not give in to Dean. ‘You’ll come to your senses, Zoe, I know you will. Have your fling but come home soon. All we want to do is look after you.’

Aaagh!

She did not want to go home. She did not want to be looked after.

But neither did she want to yell at this stranger or stand in a theatre gown covering a bra and jeans, looking disgusting and feeling tears well in her eyes and rage overwhelm her, and know that somehow she had to get back into the hospital apartments, past strangers. Plus she’d intended to buy milk on the way home and…and…

And she would do this.

She fumbled under her gown to fetch her car keys. She had to lift the thing but what the heck, this guy had seen her at her worst anyway. She grabbed her car keys from her jeans pocket but Sam lifted them from her hand before she could take a step towards the car.

‘We go in my car,’ he said in a voice that said he was talking her down, doctor approaching lunatic, and she took a step back at that.

‘I’m not crazy. I might have yelled too much but you deserve it.’

‘You think I don’t know it? I love Bonnie,’ he said. ‘I deserve everything you throw at me and more, apart from the accusation that I could just buy another dog because I never could. I am deeply, deeply sorry for what happened. The fact that Bonnie has been watching me surf since she was a pup twelve years ago doesn’t mean it’s okay now. The fact that it’s a secluded beach and the guys in the buggy were there illegally doesn’t mean it’s okay either. Years ago Bonnie would have watched the whole beach. Tonight she just watched me and she paid the price. Zoe, you’re upset and you have every right to be but I can’t let you go home alone.’

‘You can’t stop me. It’s my car. Get out of the way.’

‘Zoe, be sensible. Get in the car, there’s a good girl…’

He sounded just like Dean—and she smacked him.

She’d never smacked a man in her life.

She’d never smacked anyone in her life. Or anything. Even in the worst of the bleak days, when the first transplant had failed, when she’d heard the doctors telling her parents to prepare for the worst, she’d hung in there, she’d stayed in control, she hadn’t cried, she hadn’t kicked the wall, she hadn’t lashed out at anything.

Not because she hadn’t wanted to but it had always seemed that if she did, if she let go of her relentless control, she’d never get it back. She’d drop into a black and terrifying chasm. She was far better gripping her nails into her palms until they bled and smiling at her parents and pretending she hadn’t heard, that things were normal, that life was fine.

And here, now, the first week of her new life, standing in the dusk in a veterinary surgeon’s car park, with a doctor from the hospital where she wanted to start her new life…

She’d hit him.

The chasm was there, and she was falling.

She stared at him in horror. The yelling had stopped. There was nothing left in her and she couldn’t say a word.

His face stung where her hand had swiped him in an open-palmed slap. The sound of the slap seemed to echo in the still night.

She was staring at him like the hounds of hell were after her.

It didn’t take a genius to know this woman didn’t normally slap people. Neither did it take a genius to know she was on some sort of precipice. She was teetering on the edge of hysteria. She was hauling herself back, but she was terrified she wasn’t going to make it.

What did you do with a woman who’d just slapped you? Walk away, reacting as he’d been taught all his life to react to people who were out of control?

Her eyes were huge in her white face. She was dressed in an oversized theatre gown and blood-splattered jeans and she looked like something out of a war zone.

And he could tell that there were things in this woman’s life that lay behind even the appalling events of the last few hours.

She’d hit him and she was looking at him as if she’d shot him. In his private life he avoided emotional contact like the plague. But with this woman…What was it about her?

Walk away? No.

He took her hands in his and he tugged her forward. He folded her into his arms and held her, as he’d not held a woman for years.

She’d slapped him.

He didn’t care. He just…held.

One minute she was out-of-control crazy. The next minute she was being hugged.

She was rigid with shock, but maybe rigid was too mild a word for it. She felt like she was frozen.

If she moved…But there was no if. She couldn’t move. She didn’t know who she would be if she moved. She would be some out-of-control creature who screamed and hit…

She had to apologise. She had to pull away and say she was sorry, but her body wouldn’t obey. Tremors were starting, shudders that ran all through her. If she pulled away she’d have nothing to hold her. All she could do was let this man—this stranger—keep her close and stop her crumpling.

She was falling into him and he was holding her as she had to be held. She was moulding to him, feeling the warmth and strength of him, feeling the steadiness of his heartbeat, and it was as if in some way he was giving hers back.

She was delusional. Crazy. She needed to pull herself together, but not yet, not yet. For now she could only stand within his arms while the world somehow righted itself, restored itself to order, until she finally found the strength to pull away and face the consequences of what she’d done.

Sam specialised in paediatric cardiology. He treated children and babies with heart problems. In his working life he faced parents on the edge of control—or who had tipped over into an abyss of grief. He never got used to it. He’d learned techniques to keep control of his emotions. To express quiet sympathy, to offer hope when hope was possible, to listen when listening was all he had to give.

But he’d never felt like he did now.

This made no sense. Yes, his dog was hurt. Yes, it had been an appalling evening but if this woman was a trained nurse…For her to collapse like this…

For him to feel like this…

Why? What was it with this woman that was making his heart twist?

He held her and felt her take strength from him. He felt the rigidity ease, felt her slump against him, and he felt her quietly gather herself.

He should move her away but his rigid protection of personal space wasn’t working right now. She was so vulnerable…and yet what she’d done, how she’d acted, had taken pure strength. There was no way he could let her down now, and when finally she found the strength to tug away he was aware of a sharp stab of loss.

She hadn’t cried. She was still white-faced, but she was dry-eyed and drained.

She shoved her hands through her curls, tucking stray wisps behind her ears, and he felt an almost irresistible urge to help her. To fix a tiny curl that had escaped.

He wasn’t an idiot. He’d been slapped once. It behoved a man to stay still and silent, and wait for her to make the first move.

‘I…I’m sorry,’ she managed at last.

‘It’s okay,’ he told her, striving hard to lighten what was an unbelievably heavy situation. ‘I was feeling guilty about Bonnie. Now I can feel virtuously aggrieved at being assaulted.’

‘And I get the guilt instead?’

‘Exactly,’ he said, and tried a smile.

She didn’t smile back. She looked up at him, and he thought, whatever had gone before, this woman wasn’t one to crumple. There was strength there. Real strength.

‘Hitting’s never okay,’ she said.

‘You were swatting flies,’ he said. ‘And missed.’

She did smile then. It was the merest glimmer but it was still a smile and it made him feel…

Actually, he didn’t know how it made him feel. Holding her, watching her…

Why was this woman touching him? Why did he look at her and want to know more?

It was Bonnie, he told himself. It was the emotions of almost losing his dog. That’s all it was.

‘Let me take you home,’ he said carefully, and took a step back, as if she might swipe him again.

The smile appeared again, rueful but there.

‘I’m safe,’ she told him. ‘Unarmed.’ She tucked her arms carefully behind her back and he grinned.

‘Excellent. Would you accept my very kind offer of a ride home?’

‘I’ll stain the Jeep.’

‘I’m a surfer. I have a ton of towels.’

‘I need milk,’ she said.

And he thought excellent—practicalities, minutiae were the way to get back on an even keel.

‘Because?’

‘Because I’ve run out,’ she said. She took a deep breath, steadying herself as she spoke, and he knew she knew minutiae were important.

She’d been in the abyss, too? There seemed such a core recognition, at a level he didn’t recognise, that it was an almost physical link.

But she seemed oblivious to it. ‘I’m on duty at six tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘I have no milk. How can I have coffee with no milk? And how can I start work with no coffee?’

‘I see your need,’ he said gravely. ‘And I’m trained for triage. Priority one, the lady needs milk. Priority two, the lady needs home, wash, sleep. I can cope with milk and home. Can you take it from there?’

It was the right thing to say. Setting limits. Giving her a plan. He’d used this with parents of his patients hovering at the edges of control, and it worked now.

There were no more arguments. She gave him another smile, albeit a weak one, and he led her to his car.

He climbed in beside her, but still he felt strange. Why?

Forget imagined links, he told himself. This was crazy. He didn’t do emotional connection. He would not.

Get this night over with, he told himself. Buy the lady some milk and say goodnight.

He drove a great vehicle for surfing. It was no doctor’s car, she thought as he threw a heap of towels on the front seat. The Jeep was battered, coated with sand and salt, and liberally sprinkled with Labrador hair. Any qualms she had about spoiling the beauty of one of the sleek, expensive sets of wheels she was used to seeing in most doctors’ car parks went right out the window.

Sam wasn’t your normal doctor.

He didn’t look your normal doctor either. He was sand-and salt-stained as well, with his sun-bleached hair and crinkled eyes telling her that surfing was something he did all the time, as much a part of him as his medicine must be.

But he was a doctor, and a good one, she suspected. She’d seen his skill at stitching. She’d also heard the transition from personal to professional as he’d coped with her emotional outburst.

Though there’d been personal in there as well. There’d been raw emotion as he’d seen Bonnie—and there’d been something more than professional care as he’d held her.

Well, she’d saved his dog.

She was trying to get a handle on it. She was trying to fit the evening’s events into the impersonal. Nurse saves doctor’s dog, nurse angry at doctor for leaving dog on beach, nurse hits doctor, doctor hugs nurse.

It didn’t quite fit.

‘I’m normally quite sane,’ she ventured as he pulled up outside a convenience store.

‘Me, too.’ He grinned. ‘Mostly. What sort of milk?’

‘White.’

His grin widened. ‘What, no unpasteurised, low-fat, high-calcium, no permeate added…’

‘Oi,’ she said. ‘White.’

He chuckled and went to buy it. She watched him go, lean, lithe, tanned, muscled legs, board shorts, T-shirt, salt-stiff hair—everything about him screaming surfer.

He was pin-up material, she thought suddenly. He was the type of guy whose picture she’d have pinned on her wall when she’d been fifteen.

She’d pinned these sorts of pictures all over her wall when she’d been a kid. Her parents had had a board they’d brought in to her various hospital wards to make her feel at home. She’d had pictures of surfing all over it. She would lie and watch the images of lean bodies catching perfect waves and dream…

But then Sam was back with her milk and she had to haul herself back to the here and now.

‘My purse is in my car,’ she said, suddenly horrified.

‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it back tonight.’

She knew he would. I’ll fix it.

She actually didn’t like it all that much. Other people fixing stuff for her…

She had to get a grip here. Getting her purse and paying for her milk were not enough to start a war over.

She subsided while he drove the short distance to the hospital apartment car park. The parking space he drove into indicated it belonged to ‘Mr Sam Webster. Paediatric Cardiology’.

Mr. That meant he was a surgeon.

Paediatric cardiology. Clever.

She glanced across at him and tried to meld the two images together—the specialist surgeons she’d worked with before and the surfer guy beside her.

‘I clean up okay,’ he said, and it felt weird that he’d guessed her thoughts. ‘I make it a rule never to wear board shorts when consulting. Hey, Callie!’

A woman was pulling in beside them—Dr Callie Richards, neonatal specialist. Zoe had met this woman during the week and was already seriously impressed. Callie was maybe five years older than Zoe but a world apart in medical experience. In life experience, too, Zoe had thought. She’d seemed smart, confident, kind—the sort of colleague you didn’t want to meet when you were looking…like she was looking now. She’d also seemed aloof.

But Sam was greeting her warmly, calling her over.

‘Callie, could you spare us a few minutes?’ he called. ‘We’ve had a bit of a traumatic time. Bonnie was hit by a car.’

‘Bonnie!’ Callie’s face stilled in shock and Zoe realised she knew the dog. Maybe the whole hospital knew Bonnie, she decided, thinking back to those trusting Labrador eyes. Bonnie was the sort of dog who made friends.

‘We think she’ll be okay,’ Sam said hurriedly, responding to the shock on Callie’s face, ‘but I need to get back to the vet’s. This is Zoe…’ He looked a query at Zoe. ‘Zoe…’

‘Payne,’ Zoe said. She was on the opposite side of the Jeep from Sam and Callie, and knowing how she looked she was reluctant to move.

‘I know Zoe,’ Callie said, smiling at her. ‘New this week? From Adelaide?’

That was impressive. One brief meeting in the wards, doctor and nurse, and Callie had it.

‘Yeah, well, she’s had a baptism by fire,’ Sam said grimly. ‘I was out in the surf when Bonnie was hit, and she saved her life. We’ve just spent two hours operating and Zoe rocks. But now she’s covered in gore and she’s got a bit of delayed shock. I don’t want to leave her but I need—’

‘To get back to Bonnie—of course you do.’ And Callie moved into caretaker mode, just like that. ‘Go, Sam, I’ll take care of Zoe.’

‘I don’t need—’

‘Let Sam go and then we’ll discuss it,’ Callie said, and Zoe hauled herself together—again—and gave a rueful smile. Sam handed Callie Zoe’s milk, as Zoe climbed out of the Jeep. Then, he was gone.

Callie was brisk, efficient and not about to listen to quibbles. She ushered Zoe into the lift and when it stopped on the first floor to admit a couple of nurses she held up her hand to stop them coming in.

‘Closed for cleaning,’ she said, and grinned and motioned to Zoe. ‘Or it should be. Catch the next lift, ladies.’

The lift closed smoothly and they were alone again.

When they reached the apartment Zoe realised her keys were in her purse. No problem—one phone call and Callie had the caretaker there, and he didn’t ask questions either. There was something about Callie that precluded questions.

Or argument. Zoe gave up, let herself be steered into the bathroom, stood for ten minutes under a steaming shower and emerged in her bathrobe, gloriously clean. Two plates of toast and eggs were on her kitchen counter with two steaming mugs of tea, and Callie was sitting over them looking as if this was completely normal, like they were flatmates and it was Callie’s turn to cook.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘But I’m starving, and there’s nothing in my apartment. I was going to ring for pizza but you have enough to share.’

Zoe smiled and slid into a chair and thought she should protest but she was all protested out.

And the toast smelled great. She hadn’t realised she was hungry. They ate in what seemed companionable silence. Zoe cradled her tea, her world righted itself somehow and when finally Callie asked questions she was ready to answer.

‘How’s Bonnie?’ she asked first, and Zoe thought she was right in her surmise that Bonnie was a beloved presence in this hospital.

‘She has a fractured leg, now plated. Lots of lacerations and two broken ribs, but Doug—the vet—seems confident that she’ll be okay.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Callie said. ‘Half the hospital would break its collective heart if she died—not to mention our Sam. Those two are inseparable.’

‘He left her on the beach,’ Zoe said carefully, trying not to sound judgemental, ‘while he surfed. She was hit by a dune buggy.’

Callie closed her eyes. ‘Damn. But that beach is closed to anything but foot traffic.’

‘You know where we were?’

‘Sam always surfs at the Spit at the Seaway. The surf’s great, dogs are permitted off leash and it’s the safest place for Bonnie.’

‘He still shouldn’t have left her,’ Zoe said stubbornly, and Callie shrugged and started making more tea.

‘Okay, I’ll give you some back story,’ she said. ‘You need to get used to this hospital, by the way. Everyone knows everything about everybody. If you want things kept private, forget it. I don’t normally add to it, but tonight you’ve earned it. Bonnie was Sam’s fiancée’s dog. According to reports, Emily was wild, passionate and more than a little foolhardy. She surfed every night—they both did. With Bonnie. When Emily bought her as a pup Sam tried to talk her into exercising her and then leaving her in the car while they surfed, but Bonnie was Emily’s dog and Emily simply refused.

‘So now Bonnie’s in her declining years but what she loves most in the world is lying on the beach at dusk, waiting for Sam to come in. If Sam leaves her at home, or in the Jeep, she’ll howl until the world thinks she’s being massacred. For months she howled because she missed Emily and Sam decided he couldn’t take her beach away from her as well.’

‘So…what happened to Emily?’ Zoe asked.

‘Killed by carelessness,’ Callie retorted. ‘Not that Sam will admit it, but there it is. They went down to the beach to surf but the waves were dumpers, crashing too close to shore. Sam knew it, they both knew it, but Emily went out anyway. Word is that she simply did what she wanted. She was clever and bright and she twisted the world round her finger.