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