The Most Precious Bundle of All

‘David, meet Bouncer. Bouncer, meet David.’ She grabbed Bouncer’s collar and tried to pull him off David’s lap, but the dog was having none of it. A bemused-looking David took hold of Bouncer, climbed out of his seat and deposited him in the back. ‘Stay there,’ he commanded.

To Olivia’s amazement, her dog, who would never do what she wanted unless bribed and coaxed, looked at David, blinked and lay down obediently.

‘How did you manage to do that?’

‘Dogs just need a firm hand, just like …’

Please, God, don’t let him say just like women and children.

‘Just like …’ He hesitated. ‘Just like horses,’ he finished, his eyes glinting. He yawned. ‘Think I might close my eyes again, if that’s okay?’

‘Sure.’ Olivia pointed the car in the direction of home and by the time she’d turned into her street David was asleep again.

When she pulled up outside her house, Bouncer leapt from the car. David opened his eyes and looked around sleepily.

‘Where would you like me to drop you?’ she asked.

‘Here’s just fine.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to take you all the way? You seem in urgent need of a good night’s sleep.’

David hid a yawn behind a fist. ‘I am. The truth is that the people I’m staying with—my friend and his wife—have a newborn baby. God! I never knew such a small thing could make so much noise. It’s just until I move into my own place. Trouble is that won’t be for another three weeks.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Do babies stop crying when they’re older? I sure hope so.’

‘Not actually having had a baby, or any nieces and nephews, I can’t tell you that.’ She was clearly in the mother category, as far as David was concerned. Why that should bother her as much as it did, she had no idea.

David stretched languorously. ‘Just as well I stayed in the hospital last night, though. Meant I was on the spot to deal with a brain injury from an RTA.’ He opened the door. ‘Thanks for the lift but I’ll run the rest of the way from here. At least being on the move will keep me awake and hopefully by the time I get home the little critter will have gone to sleep. But I sure could do with something to eat first. I don’t suppose you know of a place between here and my street?’

Olivia hesitated. She really didn’t want to spend any more time in this man’s company than she had to. But she recognised a starving, exhausted doctor when she saw one. Whatever and however he made her feel, he was a colleague. He needed food—just as she did—and then bed.

‘Look, I was planning to grab some dinner at a place I know just along the road a bit.’ She pointed towards the bay. ‘How about joining me? I’ll give you a lift home after we’ve eaten.’

‘No one waiting for you?’ David replied, looking puzzled.

Olivia faltered. She hated having to explain about Richard’s death and how she had come to be pregnant with his child, so she’d become adept at sidestepping people’s curiosity. ‘No, not any more.’

David looked at her searchingly and for a moment she thought he was going probe further. She returned his gaze steadily, willing him not to ask her any more questions. Almost imperceptibly, his intelligent eyes flickered, as if he’d read her mind. And then his by now familiar, lazy grin was back.

He turned his gaze in the direction she had pointed. ‘Does this place do steaks? I could murder a T-bone.’

Of course he was a steak man. Could he really be anything else?

‘No steaks, but they do a mean chicken pie.’

CHAPTER THREE

OVER dinner, chicken pie for him and a salad for her, and with Bouncer snoozing at their feet, they chatted about Mark. David was optimistic that he would make a full recovery.

Finally, he leaned back in his chair. ‘Coffee?’

‘Not for me. I’ll have a herbal tea.’

‘Herbal tea! Does no one in this state eat normal food? The Californians don’t know what they’re missing.’ However, he called over the waitress who had been smiling and dancing attendance since they’d walked in the door—the very same waitress, Olivia noted sourly, who normally had to be summoned at least three times before she deigned to attend to her. Unsurprisingly, their drinks arrived only moments after David had ordered them.

‘Anything else?’ the waitress asked, placing her hand on her hip and smiling directly into David’s eyes.

‘Thank you, but no.’

Olivia hid a smile at the waitress’s obvious disappointment. No doubt she’d been hoping to be asked for her number. The look she gave Olivia was less than friendly.

‘So,’ Olivia asked, ‘what made you move from New York, seeing as you like your steaks so much?’

‘The job here. I’d have to wait a year for an attending post to come up in New York.’

‘This is your first attending position?’ She was surprised. He seemed so self-assured when dealing with his patients.

‘Yep. Thought I may as well work in sunny Frisco for a year.’ As he took a satisfied gulp of his coffee, Olivia couldn’t help but notice his long, slim fingers. For a split second she imagined those same hands skilfully dancing along her skin and was instantly horrified. What in God’s name was she thinking? She forced herself to concentrate on what David was saying.

‘You’re not from these parts either, are you? English, I’m guessing. So what brought you to the US?’

She shifted in her seat, still feeling slightly unbalanced by her thoughts of a few moments ago. ‘I still have the accent, huh? Even though I’ve been here for years. My folks came over from London when I was a little girl and settled in Boston. That’s where I went to med school.’

‘Good choice.’ He tipped his head to the side. ‘They’ve got some of the best teaching hospitals. And then you moved out West?’

‘That’s about it.’ Olivia made a show of looking at her wristwatch. ‘It’s getting late. I’d better get home and Bouncer fed.’

David leaned forward. ‘I’m sure Bouncer won’t mind waiting another five minutes. What happened after med school?’ His eyes held hers, all signs of his earlier fatigue completely gone.

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I have time, and I’d like to hear it.’

Olivia raised her eyebrows. ‘Sure you’re not stalling just so that you don’t have to go back to your friend’s apartment with the crying baby?’

‘Well, that’s part of it, sure.’ His lips twitched when she pretended to look shocked. ‘Look, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine by me.’

Olivia studied the man sitting opposite to her. Could he really be interested?

Yet the need to talk about Richard and their life together was strong. Maybe it was the intense way David was looking at her, as if she was the most fascinating woman he’d ever come across. It was dark outside and they were the only people left in the deli. The waitress had dimmed the lights and was huffily tidying up, making it clear that she thought it was time for them to go.

‘My husband—Richard—and I got together when we were both at college. We dated and then got married. I was doing my residency and, as you will know from your own experience, working all hours. As was he. He joined a large company and was put on the fast track. It meant we spent little time together, but we were happy. Richard, as expected, shot up the corporate ladder. I got a job at the hospital and I guess we continued as before. We moved to San Francisco when Richard was promoted to CEO of his company.

‘Then it became time to think about having a family. We had just started trying when Richard started getting these headaches. At first we put it down to pressure of work—he was busier than ever—but the headaches kept getting worse.’

David’s eyes were fixed on hers, his head tipped slightly to one side. She could see that his neurosurgeon brain was way ahead of her, but he said nothing. It was almost uncanny how still he was. Up until now he had been a mass of restless energy despite his evident exhaustion. This was no doubt the kind of focus he brought to surgery.

‘Eventually I persuaded him to see someone. You can imagine the number of tests he had to go through. And then, finally, the results.’

Her breath hitched as the memory of the pair of them sitting in the surgeon’s consulting room—the pity in his eyes as he’d told them his diagnosis. Imprinted on her memory was the look on Richard’s face. First the confusion then the disbelief.

‘He was diagnosed with a brain tumour.’

David shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It was the fastest-growing kind. I knew that Richard had a year, two at the most. I didn’t want to tell him the prognosis, but he made me. Richard was the kind of man who had to know exactly what he was dealing with.

‘I wanted to put having children on the back burner so we could concentrate all our energy on him—but Richard was determined to store sperm. He wanted to believe that he would be the person who survived the cancer but he knew that the chemo would make him infertile. So that’s what we did. We stored his sperm before he started treatment for his tumour.’ She shivered and smiled grimly. ‘As you can imagine, those were dark and difficult days. It didn’t help that Richard wasn’t the easiest of patients.’

She looked out of the window. Although over four years had passed since they’d learned of his tumour, it was almost as if she was back in that dark, dark time.

‘Against the odds, he went into remission. The chemo shrank the tumour and he was well enough to return to work, as I did. But he was still desperate for us to try for a baby. I guess he suspected it was our only chance of having a child together.

‘I went for IVF—not the most pleasant process, as you can imagine—but the first cycle didn’t work. Then Richard got sick again so naturally we put the IVF on hold.’ She sucked in a breath. ‘He died six months later. That was three years ago.’

Something shifted behind David’s eyes but Olivia was too caught up in her story to finish now.

‘A few months ago, I decided it was time to move on with my life.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘We had four frozen embryos left. I didn’t want to wait until I was in my forties to have a baby, so I went ahead with IVF, using one of the embryos we still had stored.’ She tried to keep her voice matter-of–fact, as if she was talking about someone else and not herself. She wasn’t going to share her loneliness since Richard had died, or the empty, crushing disappointment she’d felt when the first attempt at IVF had failed. Neither was she prepared to share her constant yearning to hold a baby in her arms and her fear that the second attempt would fail too—especially not with someone who was, after all, a stranger.

But, strangely, David didn’t feel like a stranger. Nevertheless, she’d already said too much.

‘So voilà! I’m pregnant,’ she finished. ‘Nineteen weeks and counting.’

‘And you’re doing this on your own?’

‘And why not? Thousands of women do.’

‘I don’t envy you. My friend’s baby might weigh only a few pounds, but there’s no mistaking who rules the roost in that house.’

Embarrassed that she’d been talking as if she were a leaky bucket, Olivia changed the subject.

‘What about you? I assume by the way you’re talking that you have no children of your own.’

‘Good God, no!’ He looked so shocked she almost laughed. ‘Children and I don’t quite … go together,’ he said. ‘And if I ever doubted it, after a couple of weeks at my friend’s place, I sure know it now.’

‘But you must have children as patients?’

‘That is entirely different. They’re not mine. I don’t have to deal with their crying and constant demands. Children and I are not for each other. Don’t get me wrong, little Alice is the cutest thing ever, but the best thing about her is that she is not my responsibility.’

‘Perhaps when you meet the right woman?’

He looked bemused. ‘What is it with women? You all seem to think a person can’t be normal if he or she doesn’t want children.’ He pulled out his wallet and when Olivia made to do the same he shook his head. ‘My treat. You were good enough to give me a lift. It is the least I can do.’ He yawned. ‘But you’ll have to forgive me, if I don’t get to bed soon, there’s every chance I’ll be spending the night with my head on this table.’

‘Come on, then, I’ll run you home. And since I have to go in to work for a couple of hours tomorrow morning I’m happy to give you a lift—if you like?’

He smiled. ‘I’d appreciate it. Don’t worry about picking me up, though. I’ll come to you.’

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