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She purposely didn’t watch as he strolled across the grass towards her. Didn’t look up from the screen when she felt the bench she was sitting on take his weight. ‘That was nice of you,’ he commented.
At last. Something. ‘It’s easy to do when you know how. Didn’t take long.’
‘So it wasn’t nice at all, then.’
She looked up and he was grinning. His smile sliced through all her resolutions to appear unconcerned about whether he noticed her or not.
‘Do you have time to talk to me now?’
‘That’s what I wanted to say...’ The flash of uncertainty in his light brown eyes only made him more difficult to resist.
‘If you don’t, that’s okay. Just being here is telling me a lot about how the clinic operates...’ She broke off as he held his right hand out. ‘What?’
‘Can we start again?’ he asked.
She reached out tentatively.
‘Don’t look so suspicious. I’m trying to apologise.’
‘So that’s what this is. I generally find that “I’m sorry” works pretty well.’ Sam’s fingers were almost touching his. Not quite. Not yet.
‘Fair enough. I’m sorry. You’ve made time for us, and I’ll make more time for you from now on.’
Why did that sound like he was propositioning her? The tips of her fingers were trembling. ‘You’ve got your doubts about this project, haven’t you?’
‘It’s important to us. David needs some of the weight lifted from his shoulders...’ He gave a rueful grin. ‘Yeah, I do. But I’m listening now, and I’m open to being convinced.’
That was enough for now. She grasped his hand and gave it a little shake, trying not to notice the way his fingers almost caressed hers.
‘Hi. I’m Euan.’
‘Sam. Good to meet you, Euan.’
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_b6c1cbdd-207e-5b7a-aced-ef519af8f528)
SHE COULDN’T ACCUSE Euan of doing anything by half-measures. Watching him give his undivided attention to others had been frustrating and Sam was unable to deny that she’d been a little jealous. Now that she finally had that attention, it was making her knees wobble.
His quiet enthusiasm, as he showed her around the clinic, seemed to seep through her skin, warming her. The comfortable counselling rooms and the tranquil garden. The community room, where a small group was talking over coffee. People were coming and going all the time, and he had a smile to spare for everyone.
He saved his surgery, which doubled up as his office, for last. Now that they were away from the community areas he seemed more animated, propping himself against the side of his desk to talk, while Sam scribbled notes. ‘We’re in transition at the moment. When the new residential centre is up and running it’ll take some of the pressure off the clinics here, and allow us to extend our outreach services.’
‘When’s that going to be?’
‘In the new year.’
‘And you’ll extend your services how...?’
‘We’re planning to set up clinics and groups especially for users of party drugs. Amyl nitrates, ketamine hydrochloride, MDMA, methamphetamine... And we’re getting an increasing number of people coming in with steroid abuse problems, so we’re looking for someone who has experience of working with those kinds of body image issues.’
‘Will you be doing different things here than at the residential centre?’
‘Yeah. This place is ideal for clinics and groups, because it’s central and easy to get to. The residential centre’s out of town, so it’s good for weekend conferences and long-stay patients.’
‘And people will pay for the residential centre?’
‘If they can afford it, they make a donation. We don’t turn anyone away on the basis of money, and everyone’s treated the same whether they pay or not.’
‘It all seems so...’ Sam couldn’t really think of the right word. She’d expected the place to have more rawness about it. ‘So calm here.’
Euan chuckled. ‘Today’s a good day. We try to keep the atmosphere here relaxed, but it’s not always like this. Getting the better of an addiction is a long, tough process.’
‘But you guide people through that. Bring them back.’ She wanted to hear that Euan could single-handedly move mountains. Save the world. Someone needed to, because she couldn’t.
He was suddenly sombre, sitting down opposite her in one of the chairs reserved for his patients.
‘We can’t bring them all back. The clinic has a great success rate, but we can’t work miracles. Some of our clients will stop taking drugs altogether, some modify their habit and...some we lose.’
Her throat was suddenly dry. ‘But surely... Once someone wants to give up drugs, and they get help...’
‘That’s a great start. But addiction’s a powerful thing. Wanting to give up and getting the appropriate help is the first, all-important step on a very long road. Many of our clients have been through rehab more than once.’
‘How do you deal with that?’ Sam could hear an edge of desperation in her voice. For the last two years she’d thought that if only Sally had said something about her drug-taking, everything would have been okay. It hadn’t been much of a comfort, but it had been something to hold onto in a world of ever-shifting pain, and now Euan was snatching it away.
He leaned forward, his gaze searching her face as if he was trying to fathom out what she was really asking of him. ‘Sometimes I don’t. There are times when not being able to deal with something might be the most appropriate reaction.’
Sam would have to think about the implications of that statement. Later. ‘But you’re still here.’
‘Yep. So are you.’
Touché. Sam had her own reasons for that, and clearly Euan did too. She picked up her pencil and tried to think of a less demanding question.
‘What time does the clinic stay open until?’
‘Eleven o’clock. But my shift ends in ten minutes. I’m on call, but only for emergencies.’ His lips twitched into a smile. ‘Do you like Chinese?
That sounded like a trick question. ‘It depends...’
‘In that case, you’ll like the place I’ve booked for dinner.’ He grinned at her discomfiture. ‘A working dinner.’
‘Oh, so you’re going to make me sing for my supper, are you?’ Almost against her will she smiled back at him.
‘Were you thinking of clocking off yet?’
No, she wasn’t. Working too many hours was a way to keep from thinking too much. And if she fell into bed exhausted every night, that just meant that she slept a bit better. She did have to eat, though.
‘Am I okay to go as I am?’ Sam looked at her cargo pants and sneakers.
‘You want to show me up?’ He placed a hand on his chest, laughing. ‘Although you can if you want. This place doesn’t have a dress code.’
It would be impossible to show Euan up. He could ruffle his hair all he liked, wear whatever leapt out of his wardrobe at him, and still look good. His broad shoulders and the show-me-more ripple of muscle under his casual shirt attested to the fact that he’d already put in all the work he needed to on his appearance.
‘I left my tiara at home. I’ll show you up next time.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
* * *
When he ushered her out of the building he seemed to take a deep breath, sloughing off the cares of the day. They strolled down to the seafront together, walking along the promenade for half a mile, until Euan turned inland towards the centre of town.
‘Do you always go via the seafront?’ Sam was still getting her bearings, but she had an inkling that they probably could have cut ten minutes from their walk by taking a more direct route.
‘Usually.’ He grinned. ‘No point in living by the sea if you don’t grab as much ozone as you can.’
Sam jerked her thumb back towards the sea. ‘That’s the English Channel out there. I didn’t know there was any ozone...’
He chuckled. ‘Probably not. I like the beach, though.’ He made a sharp left, and opened the door of a glass-fronted restaurant, motioning her through.
Inside, there was already a hum of activity. Euan was clearly a regular, and the waitress who came to their table greeted him by name and handed Sam a menu, chatting to Euan while she scrutinised it.
Perhaps he brought his girlfriends here. No one seemed much interested in her, and Sam imagined he probably turned up with a different woman on a fairly regular basis. If he had a regular partner, she would have attracted more attention, and Euan was the kind of man who was unlikely to go short of female company...
‘Decided yet?’
Sam jumped and focussed her eyes back on the menu. ‘Um... What’s the Kung Po chicken like?’
‘Good. Very good,’ the waitress replied.
‘I’ll have that, then. With some rice and...’ The waitress nodded, scribbling her order down in Chinese characters on her pad.
‘Something to drink?’
‘Water, please. Sparkling.’ Sam never drank when she was working, and although tonight fell into a grey area somewhere between work and socialising, she needed to be careful around Euan. His job involved getting people to talk about how they felt, and he was obviously good at it. It would be horrifyingly easy to tell him her darkest secrets before she’d even realised it, and she wasn’t here for that.
He didn’t seem to make such distinctions, though. His work was intimately personal to him, bound up with feeling and hope and dreams. Even his discourse on health and safety procedures seemed more intimate than it should have been. Leaning across the table so that they could hear each other in the ever-increasing din of the restaurant, lost in the compelling magic of his eyes, it almost felt like a tryst.
‘So tell me something about yourself.’ They were waiting for their coffee now.
‘Not much to tell, really.’ She grinned at him. ‘I was born. I went to school, then university...’
‘Computer sciences?’
She nodded. ‘When we were at university together, my best friend and I had an idea. After we graduated, we thought we’d lose nothing by seeing if we could make something of it. We started off working from Sally’s parents’ spare bedroom.’
Even best friend didn’t cover it. The two girls had been seven years old when Sally had asked Sam back to her house one day, after Sam’s mother had become unavoidably detained by a bottle and some bad company and it had slipped her mind that she even had a daughter. With the benefit of hindsight, Sam could see that Sal’s mother had only needed to take one look at her to divine the situation, but she’d said nothing. Just laid an extra place at the table and made sure that Sam got home safely that night. After that, Sal’s family had become hers. And the two girls had been inseparable, like the closest of sisters.
‘And you made quite a go of it.’ Euan was nodding her on, and Sam realised that she’d fallen silent.
‘Yeah. Sal was the creative one, she had the ideas, and I did the programming. We made a good team.’
‘But you sold up?’ The look in his eyes told Sam that he wasn’t falling for the sugar and spice version of the story.
‘Yeah. Things change.’
He didn’t ask. Maybe he was thinking about it, and maybe he realised that she wouldn’t answer if he did ask. He paused, as if to allow her to reconsider her decision, but she couldn’t.
A tone sounded and he pulled his phone out of his pocket, giving her a mouthed apology before answering it. ‘Yeah, Mel. What’s up?’ His face darkened as the relief doctor at the clinic spoke at the other end of the line.
‘Okay. Yeah, that’s all right. Leave it with me.’ He cut the line, shoving his phone back into his pocket. ‘I’m sorry, Sam.’
‘That’s okay. We have to go?’
‘I have to go.’ He stood, pulling some notes from his wallet and beckoning to the waitress. ‘You have coffee. Call this number...’ he put a card from a cab company in front of her ‘...and tell them to put the fare back to the flat on the Driftwood account.’
‘I’m coming with you.’ Where the hell had that come from?
‘This is not part of your job...’
‘It’s what you’re all about, though, isn’t it? Give me a chance to at least see that.’ Sam was overstepping the mark, and she knew it. But here, at last, was the whole point of the infrastructure, the policies and the software. She’d found her way down to the heart of what made Euan tick.
He paused, clearly grudging even the two seconds that it took to think about it.
‘Give me a chance, Euan. I won’t get in the way, and I’ll do as you say. I promise.’
‘Okay.’ He pushed the notes into the waitress’s hand and she took them, clearly used to Euan leaving abruptly. ‘We need to hurry.’
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_5c65e4c5-76e4-54e3-8876-b5228224339a)
EUAN MUST LIVE close by, because his car was only two streets away in a quiet backwater of a road. Sam didn’t have much chance to take in the neighbourhood, because her lungs were bursting from their dash to the car.
His one concession to her presence was to open the passenger door of the black SUV for her before he got behind the wheel and started the engine. They drove in silence while Sam caught her breath and Euan negotiated the traffic through the centre of the town.
‘Where are we going?’
‘It’s only another couple of miles. Mel’s heard about someone who might be in trouble...’ He caught her questioning look and puffed out a sharp breath. ‘The clinic’s a community. People look after each other and they’ll often come to us before they go to the authorities if they think there’s a problem.’
There was obviously a great deal more to it than that, but Euan was keeping his own counsel. ‘They come to you before they go to the police, you mean.’
‘Yeah. Which doesn’t mean that we won’t refer things on to the authorities if we need to.’
‘Must be a hard line to tread.’
He shrugged. ‘Not really. We abide by the law. We don’t abandon those of our clients who fall foul of it to the system, though.’ The car slowed as he turned off the ring road. ‘Look, Sam, I want you to stay in the car...’
No. She’d got this far, she wasn’t staying in the car. ‘Perhaps I can help.’
‘If everything’s okay, I won’t need you. If it’s not, then...it may not be the place for you.’
It was the only place for her. Sally had died alone, as a result of drugs abuse. Sam would have given anything to be able to go back and be there for her friend, but that wasn’t possible. Maybe being there for someone else would help her sleep at night.
