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‘Don’t rub it in,’ Jake growled. ‘I don’t make a great speed dater.’
‘I don’t think you make an anything dater,’ Rob said, pouring another beer. ‘But you’ve met the lady properly today. What’s she like?’
‘Smart. Tired. Worried.’ And very cute, he thought, but he didn’t say it. Really sexy, despite those appalling clothes.
‘Tired and worried equals everyone up here in the hills,’ Rob said, not hearing his afterthoughts. ‘So we’re back to smart. How smart?’
‘She’s a vet.’
‘And?’
‘And she had the gumption to walk away from me when I was being an—’
‘I know exactly what you were being,’ Rob said, and had the temerity to grin. ‘Good for Tori.’
‘She practically told me to leave today, too.’
‘You’re kidding. It’s your property.’
‘Which she’s legally entitled to be on. Oh, she wasn’t rude. She evicted me in the most businesslike way. Maybe she’s a man hater.’
‘Not if she agreed to dating. So you’re interested?’
‘I’m not interested. I’m just concerned. Where has everyone else gone whose houses burned?’
‘Relatives, friends, or there’s a whole town of mobile homes—relocatables—set up further down the valley for anyone who needs them. You’ll have passed them on your way from the airport.’
‘She’ll go there?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’
‘It’s none of my business.’
‘So why do you want to know?’
He didn’t have an answer. He sat on, staring into the night, and finally Rob left him to his silence.
Leaving Jake alone with half a bottle of beer, a starlit sky and a silence so immense it was enough to take his breath away.
A faint rustle came from beside him. A wallaby was watching from the edge of the garden, moonlight glinting on its silvery fur.
‘Hi,’ Jake said, but the wallaby took fright and disappeared into the shadows. Leaving Jake alone again.
He should go inside. He had journals to study. He didn’t do…nothing.
But the stars were immense, and somewhere under them, alone up on the mountain, was Tori.
A woman with shadows?
She was nothing to do with him. So why did a faint, insistent murmur in his head tell him that she was?
Chapter Three
HE ARRIVED at the farmhouse at nine the next morning and nobody answered the door.
He knocked three times. The same van he’d seen yesterday was in the driveway but there were no sounds coming from the house. There was no dog on the settee.
He tried the door and it opened, unlocked and undefended. ‘Hi, Tori,’ he called. ‘It’s Jake.’
Still no answer.
She’d been expecting him.
Should he come back later? He hesitated and then thought maybe she was in the surgery again, doing something that couldn’t be interrupted. He went through cautiously—and stopped at the open door.
Even from here he could tell the koala was dead. The little animal was facing him, curled on her side, still. The cage door was open.
He crossed to the cage and stooped, putting his hand on her fur to make sure. But yes, she was gone. Simply, he thought. There was no sign of distress. The IV lines Tori had attached yesterday had been removed but were lying neatly to the side, as if they’d been removed after death.
She looked as if she’d hardly moved since yesterday.
She’d simply died.
He’d had patients who’d done this—just died. The operation had been a success, yet the assault on their bodies had been too great, their hearts had simply stopped.
Mostly it happened in the aged, where maybe there’d been a question of whether the operation should have been done at all, only how could you convince a patient that you couldn’t remove cancer because there was a risk of heart failure? Maybe you tried, but the patient could elect to have the operation anyway.
He hated cases like those. He hated this.
He knelt and saw, closer now and more dreadfully, the full extent of scar tissue. He thought about what this little animal must have gone through in the past six months and he knew that yesterday’s decision to operate must have been a hard one for Tori to make.
Where was she?
He glanced around, out through the window, and then he saw her. She was out at the edge of the clearing, and he knew what she was doing.
Hadn’t she cried enough?
She didn’t get attached to her patients. She couldn’t. Getting attached was the way of madness.
She was crying so hard she could barely see the ground she was trying to dig.
This was the first of the animals she’d tried to bury. Up until now there’d been volunteers taking away bodies of the animals she’d failed.
This was the end. Her last failure. If she’d known it would turn out like this she’d have euthanised her six months ago.
She’d had to make a decision. She’d got it wrong, and there were no volunteers left to bury her.
So much loss. So much appalling waste. Dad, Micki, one tiny baby with no life at all…
One little koala who somehow represented them all.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ she whispered and hit the ground with the spade. The spade shuddered back. Was she hitting tree roots?
She swore and hit the ground again. Three spade lengths away, Rusty flinched, as if the little dog felt every shudder.
‘You and me both,’ she told Rusty and shoved the spade uselessly down again. This was dumb, dumb, dumb, but she did not want to take the little koala’s body down the mountain to the veterinary crematorium. She did not.
All she could see was the Combadeen cemetery, two graves with brass headstones. Dad. Micki. Micki’s with a tiny extra plaque, white on silver.
No.
She shoved the spade down hard again, uselessly. She gulped back tears—and suddenly the spade was taken out of her hands.
Where he came from she didn’t know. She knew nothing, only that the spade was tossed aside, two strong arms enfolded her and held her close. And let her sob.
He’d never held a woman like this. He’d never felt emotion like this.
Jake was chief anaesthetist in a specialist teaching hospital in Manhattan. Once upon a time he’d spent time with patients, but that seemed long since. Now he handled only critical cases. Patient interviews and examinations were done by his juniors. His personal contact with patients was confined to reassurance as they slipped under anaesthetic, and occasional further reassurance as they regained consciousness.
If there were problems during an operation, it was mostly the surgeon who talked to the family. As anaesthetist Jake took no risks. He did his job and he did it well. There were seldom times he needed to talk. Now, as he faced Tori’s real and dreadful grief, he realised he actively kept away from this type of anguish.
His mother had cried at him all of his life. He’d done with tears.
And this was just a koala.
Just a koala. Even as he thought it, he recalled the limp little body lying alone down at the house, the scar tissue, the evidence of a six-month battle now lost. He looked around him and saw the blackened skeletons of a ravaged forest. His mother had cried for crying’s sake. He knew instinctively that Tori’s tears were very different.
So much death…
Tori was trying desperately to pull herself together, sniffing against his shirt, tugging back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she managed. ‘This is stupid. It was a risk, operating on her. I should have put her down. I should have…’
‘You weren’t to know what you should or shouldn’t have done,’ he said gently. ‘You did your best. That’s all anyone can ask.’
‘No, but she was wild. She’s been through so much.’
‘You didn’t add to that. Tori, you had to give her every chance.’
‘But was I operating for me?’ she demanded, sounding desperate. She’d managed to pull back now and was wiping her hand furiously across her cheeks. ‘I named her! How stupid was that?’
‘You told me you didn’t.’
‘I told everyone I didn’t. All the volunteers I’ve worked with. The nurses. The drivers. The firefighters who brought animals in. I told them we can’t afford to get attached. There are so many. If we get attached we’ll go crazy. Let’s do our best for every individual animal and let’s stay dispassionate.’
There was nothing dispassionate about Tori. She looked wild. Her face was blotched from weeping. The spade she was working with was covered with ashes and dirt. Her hands were filthy and she’d wiped her hands across her sodden face.
She looked like someone who’d just emerged from this burned-out forest—a fire victim herself—and something inside him felt her pain. Or felt more than that. It hurt that she was hurting, and it hurt a lot.
He wanted to hug her again—badly—but she was past hugging. She had her arms folded across her breasts in an age-old gesture of defence. Trying to stop an agony that was unstoppable?
This was much more than the death of one koala, he thought, as bad as that was. There were levels to this pain that he couldn’t begin to understand.
‘Keep yourself to yourself.’ His mother’s words sounded through the years. ‘Don’t get involved—you’ll only get hurt.’
Wise advice? He’d always thought so, but right now it was advice he was planning to ignore.
‘What did you call her?’ he asked, and she hiccupped on a sob and tried to glare at him. It didn’t come off. How could it?
‘Manya’
Why was she glaring? Did she think he’d mock?
Maybe she did. He knew instinctively that Tori was assessing him and withdrawing. As if he’d think she was stupid—when stupid was the last thing he’d think her.
‘Why Manya?’ he asked, searching for the right words to break through. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Just…“little one.” It’s from the language of the native people from around here. Not that it matters. It was only…I talked to her.’ She sounded desperate again, and totally bewildered. ‘I had to call her something. I had to talk to her.’
‘I guess you did,’ he said. And then, as she still seemed to be drawing in on herself, he thought maybe he could make this professional. Maybe it’d make it easier. ‘Do you know why she died?’
‘No.’ She spread her filthy hands and stared down at them, as if they could give her some clue. She shook her head. ‘Or maybe I do. She’s been under stress for months but I thought we were winning. I knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to the wild, but there are sanctuaries that’d take her, good places that’d seem like freedom. And she was so close. But one tiny abscess…It must have been the last straw. She was fine when I checked on her at seven, and when I checked at eight she was dead. Everything just…stopped.’
‘It does happen,’ he said softly. ‘To people, too.’
‘Have you had it happen to patients?’ she managed, and he knew she was struggling hard to sound normal. Her little dog nosed forwards and she picked him up and held him against her, shield-like. He licked her nose and she held him harder.
The dog was missing a leg, he saw with a shock, and his initial impression of him as an old dog changed. Not old. Wounded.
As Tori was wounded.
Have you had it happen to patients? Tori’s question was still out there, and maybe talking medicine was the way to go until she had herself together.
‘Not often,’ he told her, ‘but yes, I have. That it hasn’t happened often means I’ve been lucky.’
‘As opposed to me,’ she said grimly. ‘I’ve lost countless patients in the past six months.’
She looked exhausted to the point of collapse, he thought. Had she slept at all last night?
When had she last slept?
‘Your patients are wild creatures,’ he said, and he felt as if he was picking his way through a minefield, knowing it was important that she talk this out, but suspecting she could close up at any minute. ‘My patients are the moneyed residents of Manhattan. There’s no way a rich, private hospital will cause them stress, and there’s the difference.’ He hesitated. ‘Tori, let me dig for you.’
‘I can do it.’ She put the little dog down and grabbed the spade again.
‘Can you?’
She closed her eyes, gave herself a minute and then opened them. ‘No. This is dumb. I accept that now. The ground’s one huge root ball. I’ll take her down the mountain and get her cremated.’
‘But you don’t want to.’
