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She looked from the top of Lucy’s blonde head to Nick’s dark one and back again, visually tracing his profile as he laughed at something Lucy was saying. Then he straightened up and met her gaze, catching her out.
‘Th-thanks again for your h-help,’ she stammered, sure he’d see the inconsistency between her words and her desires, temporarily blind-sided by the discovery of a whole new side to herself. A side that, had circumstances been different, would have let him take her hand and take her anywhere, do anything, and have her begging for more. ‘I really did appreciate not dealing with that on my own.’
‘Don’t mention it. Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again under better circumstances.’ He didn’t seem to notice her confusion, her stammer or what she was sure was a wild look in her eyes. He held out his hand and Rosie took it. His grip was warm and firm, not too soft, not too strong. But more than that, there was a connection, just as she’d already known there would be, as though his touch had pushed a button in her palm. A button that went straight to her chest, making her heartbeat faster and her breathing more shallow. The connection travelled further, to the pit of her stomach, as though a thousand butterflies were there, fluttering madly towards an impossible escape.
She stood, her hand in Nick’s, completely unable to move away until Lucy, obviously tired of waiting now she no longer had Nick’s attention, said, ‘Come on, Rosie, we need to drop Matt’s dog off at his house on the way.’
It was only then that Rosie noticed Lucy was still holding the little white bundle of trouble. Somehow the dog had managed to come through the whole drama completely unscathed.
‘Right, of course,’ she said to her niece. ‘Goodbye, Nick.’
‘Bye, Rosie.’
Nick relaxed his grip, letting her hand go, and only then was Rosie able to get her legs working, although she was aware of her muscles fighting every step, protesting her departure. With every instinct screaming at her to stay, she followed Lucy and left Nick standing alone behind her.
Was walking away going to be a whole new source of regret? She knew the answer already. The most incrediblelooking man, who seemed kind and decent to boot, had asked her for a coffee and she didn’t have enough of a life that she could accept?
Balance.
She was missing any sort of balance. She glanced at Lucy, who was swinging on her hand, chirping away about her morning. She loved these two children, she had no qualms or doubts about taking care of them, but she’d scarcely drawn breath these last weeks. That’s all it was, that was all that lay behind her reaction. It made no sense to be overcome by fantasies of disappearing over the horizon with a perfect stranger. It was only because the equilibrium in her life right now was non-existent, otherwise, she’d have noticed Nick was good-looking but not given it another thought.
And yet, even with that perfectly rational explanation ringing in her ears, she had to struggle to leave.
‘We have to go down this street,’ Lucy told her as they reached the corner.
Rosie stopped just short of the corner, which loomed like the point of no return in front of her. If she continued into the side street, would Nick be gone for ever? She hesitated. They didn’t really have to go straight home. They could go back. Lucy liked him, too. Her niece would enjoy a few more minutes with Nick as much as Rosie would, so it wasn’t just her own out-of-character desire to run back to Nick that was causing her to linger on the corner. Right?
If Nick was watching them, she’d go back and have a coffee. If not, she’d keep going.
Turning around, she saw him talking to the policeman, obviously giving his version of events. He was concentrating on the conversation, his face in profile. He wasn’t looking in her direction. No doubt she was already far from his mind and she wouldn’t be given so much as another brief thought.
Rosie turned the corner, her disappointment acute.
Had she let a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slide through her grasp? Or was it really only a wake-up call to sort her new life out better?
She sighed and ruffled Lucy’s damp hair. He’d asked her for a coffee, nothing more than that.
None of it mattered anyway. She’d done the right thing by the children. She hadn’t followed the heady pull towards Nick. Sure, maybe that had only been by default but she’d stayed true to her commitment. Her focus was the twins. Her priority was solely their welfare and she wouldn’t be distracted.
A cup of coffee with Nick would have provided her with far too many distractions. Distractions she at least had enough common sense left to know she was in no way equipped to deal with.
Nick glanced up from his conversation with the policeman just as Rosie turned the corner. Good-looking women were a dime a dozen in Bondi but there was something about this one…What was it? Her general appearance wasn’t dissimilar to hundreds of other women who frequented Sydney beaches, slim, tall and blonde. It was something else telling him she was different.
She seemed a little misplaced in Bondi, was that it? Even the backpackers blended into the crowd but Rosie seemed almost to stand apart from everyone else.
And what about the little girl with her? Rosie had no rings on her fingers and the girl had called her by her name, not Mum. She was a trained doctor so he guessed she wasn’t the au pair. Maybe Rosie was the partner of the girl’s dad? It seemed the most likely scenario. Pity, he would have liked to have had a coffee with her and he’d been hoping when he looked up she might have changed her mind and been heading back to him.
‘One last thing—’
The policeman had stopped scribbling in his pad and Nick had to turn his attention back to him.
Maybe he and Rosie would bump into each other again if she lived around here.
Then again, he told himself as he finished with the policeman and headed down to the beach for his swim, any involvement with a woman was the last thing on his to-do list right now. She was the first woman he’d met in a long time to really pique his interest and he wasn’t sure a coffee would sufficiently cool that interest.
There were places and times for everything in life. He didn’t doubt there would come a time and a place for a woman in his life again one day.
But right now wasn’t the time. Or the place.
Then how to explain this lingering feeling that a chance encounter on the beach might have shown him the woman?
Madness. He’d taken temporary leave of his senses due to…work stress? That was it. Work stress, life stress. So naturally his body wanted some female distraction, right at the very time he least needed it, when he was so close to finally realising his goals.
He waded into the waves, the cool of the sea hitting his shins before he dived in, striking out for his ritual Sunday swim. The water, slick on his skin, was as stimulating as it always was.
Pushing himself to go harder, faster, he willed the water to wash away the image of a certain woman from his mind.
Any form of temptation was madness. And that’s all this was. Nothing more.
CHAPTER TWO
LUCY raced inside, eager to tell her brother all the morning’s news, while Rosie headed for the kitchen, where her mother was doing the last of the breakfast dishes.
‘What happened? Are you all right?’
Rosie followed her mother’s gaze, looking down at her sundress that had started the day clean and white but was now covered in blood and dirt.
‘I’m fine. It’s not my blood. There was an accident, a pedestrian was hit, a boy from Lucy’s school.’ Rosie pulled out a kitchen stool and collapsed onto it. She should probably take over the dishes from her mum but she didn’t have the energy.
‘Is he okay?’
‘Some broken bones but he’ll be fine. It was a bit crazy.’
‘I’ll put the kettle on, you look like you could use a cup of tea.’
The old ritual of a cup of tea as a cure-all. Funnily enough, it did always seem to help. Maybe because it made you stop and catch your breath? Then again, in the two months since her brother and sister-in-law had died, she’d had so many cups of tea she sometimes felt she was one big tea bag herself.
Half-heartedly, she started sorting through the stack of mail, including her own redirected post, that had been dumped in a teetering pile on the kitchen bench. One more task that seemed to be getting away from her, one more task she started on routinely but never completed. Was that a key part of the definition of parenthood? She was starting to wonder.
Her mum slid a cup of tea over the counter. ‘Ally phoned while you were out, she said something about going out tonight. Do you need me to watch the children?’
‘Thanks, but no. I wasn’t planning on going.’
‘Are you sure? It’d do you good.’
‘What do you mean?’ Rosie put aside the mail.
‘How many times have you been out since you moved back to Sydney? Twice? For coffee with Ally, nothing more at my count.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m often out.’
Her mum pushed a strand of hair out of her face and shook her head. ‘Going to the supermarket and dropping the twins at school doesn’t count. You need to see your friends and it’s not good for you or the children if you spend all your time with them.’
‘I want them to know I’m here for them, that they’re not alone.’
‘They know that, sweetheart.’
‘Do they? I know they worry when I go out in the car without them. The last time they saw their parents was as they were driving off for their weekend away. They haven’t expressed that, but it’s what they’re thinking about, it’s in their eyes,’ Rosie explained.
‘I understand what you’re saying but you can’t let that make you a hermit,’ her mother pointed out.
‘The twins need time, especially Charlie. So far we’ve somehow managed to stop his mutism worsening because at least he’s still talking to our immediate family, but if he starts to doubt he’s safe with me, what then? And I need time, too. For one thing, I’m not sure how, or if, my old life and my new life can coexist. I’m just trying to give myself space to fit the pieces together.’
‘Space is one thing, shutting friends out is another,’ her mother insisted.
‘Mum, I’m not intentionally doing that. To be honest, as pathetic as it sounds, I don’t have the energy to get dressed and make conversation.’ She could have added that she didn’t have anything to make conversation about. No one she knew had children. Right now, that was all she had to talk about. When had she last managed to stay awake to see the end of a TV show? Ditto for reading. She’d been on the same chapter of the same book for over three weeks. Within minutes of settling down, she nodded off. Night after night.
A basket of washing waited on the steps. Sure, it was clean, but there was more waiting in the laundry. Newspapers for recycling were lying by the back door and Lucy’s half-finished school project was scattered over an entire end of the kitchen table. Everywhere Rosie looked there were half-completed tasks, testament to her difficulty in getting on top of things. She couldn’t blame the children’s interruptions for a lot of it, although having Charlie home sick for the past two days with yet another bout of tonsillitis hadn’t helped. What she needed was another pair of hands and, failing that, a better system.
‘Honey, I’ve got to dash but ring me if you change your mind. I can head back in an hour or so after I’ve done my errands,’ her mum said.
She wouldn’t change her mind, she already knew that. Besides, Ally’s idea of an evening out would last into the early hours of the morning. Rosie couldn’t have asked that of her mum even if she’d wanted to.
Besides, who could go out socialising when there was a mountain of washing to do and nothing to talk about? And right now, she decided as she waved goodbye to her mum, if she gave in to demands and let the twins watch their favourite DVD, she had a precious hour to tackle folding the laundry.
Well into the hour, she realised she’d thought about nothing except a certain doctor in boardshorts, her mind leaping from question to assumption to imagery, all focused on him. It was the longest stretch of worry-free time she’d had since moving to Sydney from Canberra.
None of which left her any wiser about what she really wanted to know: would she see him again?
Or had walking away been the biggest mistake made by any single girl in Sydney this weekend?
On Tuesday morning, Rosie dropped Lucy at the school gate with ten minutes to spare and treated herself to a mental Woo-hoo! It felt like a major achievement and gave her a spark of hope that her attempts over the last few days to start developing a better time-management system were paying off. She watched as Lucy waited for a friend then gave one final wave to Rosie before she disappeared through the school gate, chatting happily.
She checked Charlie still had his seat belt on before pulling into the traffic.
‘Do you think we’ll make it in time?’ she asked. Charlie’s specialist appointment was in half an hour and, even though the clinic was in Bondi, Sydney traffic wasn’t the best at this time of the day.
In the mirror she watched as Charlie shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dr Masters will still see me if we’re late, he’ll probably be running behind anyway,’ he told her.
He had a point, but she didn’t want to arrive late, particularly when the specialist was fitting Charlie in as a favour. ‘Have you thought some more about having your tonsils out? Dr Masters might suggest it today.’
‘I don’t want them out.’
Ah, so he hadn’t budged. With Charlie’s history of recurrent tonsillitis, it was only a matter of time before his tonsils had to come out. She was convinced these infections were exacerbating his other speech problems.
‘There’d be no more sore throats, and you wouldn’t have to miss so many Nippers’ trainings.’ Junior surf-lifesaving was one activity Charlie loved. She suppressed a twinge of guilt that she was using it to convince him to have the operation. ‘Remember, I had my tonsils out when I was your age and I can still remember how much better I felt afterwards.’
‘Yeah, but I don’t like jelly.’
‘What do you mean?’ She glanced in the rear-view mirror to see Charlie pull a face.
‘You told me you had jelly and ice cream in hospital. I don’t like jelly.’
Who would have known jelly and ice cream would be a deal-breaker, not a deal-sweetener? ‘They won’t force you to eat jelly. Let’s see what Dr. Masters has to say,’ Rosie said as she pulled into the clinic car park, hoping she’d solved the jelly objection. What would he think of next?
The specialist suites were part of the Bondi Paediatric Medical Centre, a clinic Rosie had heard of but never visited. Charlie had been here before, but that had been with his parents. She pressed the button for the lift and looked around the ultra-modern foyer. There was a café on one side of the lifts and a pharmacy on the other. The building itself looked new, and the foyer and café were both brightly decorated in primary colours. Signs pointing down a corridor indicated directions to Physiotherapy and a hydrotherapy pool. The tenant directory beside the lift listed Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, General Practitioners and Psychology. There was a constant stream of families through the door.
Rosie and Charlie squeezed into the lift with a dozen other people and popped out at the third floor in front of the reception desk for the specialist suites. The girl directed them to the waiting room at the eastern end of the building and Rosie wasn’t surprised to find the area had a magnificent view over the famous beach. Charlie immediately made himself comfortable in a bean-bag chair positioned in front of the enormous glass windows and settled down to watch the weekday surfers carving up the water.
Rosie flicked through a pile of magazines, all current issues, but the lure of the morning sunshine bouncing off the water was too enticing and she gave up on the magazines, instead choosing a chair where she could watch the beach too.
Movement to her left caught her attention and she turned to see a family coming through a doorway. The mother and daughter didn’t hold her attention but the man behind them was a different story.
Nick.
The attraction she’d felt on Sunday had been strong, so strong she’d let her imagination run off in all sorts of directions. She’d entertained the possibility he’d be married with children but, still, her disappointment when she saw him with a family of his own surprised her.
From the safety of the anonymity of a crowded waiting room she let her gaze linger. There was no harm in looking. Or, at least, no harm in looking if no one knew.
Nick was dressed far more smartly than the other day but looked just as handsome. His dark grey trousers with a fine pinstripe and a crisp white cotton shirt looked simple but expensive. Quality. Style. The sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his forearms and face were tanned golden brown. She sighed, daydreams of time with Nick fading into nothingness in view of the woman at his side.
He came to a stop just past the doorway and the woman and child continued on, saying thanks. He looked around the waiting room and at that moment Rosie realised he wasn’t part of the family. This was his workplace. Visions of going with him, wherever he wanted, surged through her mind again. It was madness. Wholesale craziness. She knew that.
But it was a madness that left her tingling in such a delicious way it left her in no doubt that guardian aunt was not the only side of her still alive and kicking. She was still a woman, with desires and wants and needs, even if they had almost no chance of being satisfied in the near future. It was nice, though, very nice, to be reassured she hadn’t totally disappeared, as a woman, during the events of the last months.
As he scanned the room, his gaze locked with hers and he lifted a hand in greeting as he broke into a broad smile, his cupid’s-bow lips opening to reveal a set of perfect white teeth. Her response was automatic, the rush of warmth spreading upwards from deep in her belly until it gave her away with the blush that stole over her cheeks. She smiled through her embarrassment, still looking into blue-grey eyes that sparkled their pleasure at seeing her. All up, the exchange was only seconds. Certainly no one around them had noticed anything odd. People had their heads down in magazines, were murmuring to one another or were distracted by the demands of their children. For Rosie, though, it could have been minutes, hours even, that they’d looked at one another across the waiting room.
And Nick?
Nick had obviously remembered he was there to work and had broken the gaze after one more nod of his head and was scanning the waiting room. ‘Charlie Jefferson?’ Nick spoke softly but his deep voice penetrated through the general noise of a dozen waiting room conversations.
Rosie’s eyes widened in surprise.
Nick wasn’t just any doctor.
He was Dr Masters, Charlie’s specialist.
Charlie appeared from his hiding place in the depths of the bean-bag where Nick hadn’t had a hope of seeing him, and stood up at the sound of his name. Grabbing Rosie’s hand, he tugged her to her feet. The pressure of his grip was enough to snap her into action and she followed Charlie as he crossed the waiting room.
‘Hi, there, Charlie, nice to see you again.’ He greeted Charlie first and the little boy smiled shyly at him, which was something, but, as expected, didn’t speak. ‘Rosie!’ He held out a hand and shook hers briefly, his grip warm and sure, pleasure in his eyes. ‘For a moment I thought you’d come to claim that cup of coffee I offered at the beach.’
Rosie saw Charlie look from her to Nick and back again, a frown creasing his forehead. He was still holding her hand and his fingers tightened on hers. She knew he was wondering how his aunt knew his specialist but his curiosity was not sufficient to get him asking questions.
‘I didn’t realise you were an ENT specialist,’ she blurted out.
‘We didn’t have time for that conversation, it was a busy morning.’ Nick’s tone didn’t change; he obviously didn’t seem nonplussed as he led them along a short corridor, walking just in front since all three of them couldn’t fit abreast and there was no way Charlie was letting go of his aunt. ‘But, for me, things are now starting to fall into place. Lucy is Charlie’s twin and you are their aunt.Yes?’ He glanced back at her and she nodded in confirmation. ‘Charlie’s GP told me what happened.’
At her side, she felt Charlie relax a little, his fingers no longer clenched on her hand. Apparently he was satisfied that his aunt knowing his doctor was above-board. Perhaps he’d thought they’d been discussing him behind his back? Being talked about was something Charlie detested.
