Hearts of Gold: The Children's Heart Surgeon

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Alex laughed, and Annie felt absurdly pleased that she could make him laugh.

‘Did your father spread the rumour?’ he asked, and Annie joined in his laughter.

‘I often wondered,’ she admitted, and with the tension eased between them they finished their meals, refused coffee and set out to walk home through the park.

‘Terrible lip disease all cleared up now?’ Alex asked, slowing their pace as they drew near a patch of shadow beneath a spreading, leafy tree.

‘I think so,’ Annie said, allowing him to turn her in his arms, wanting his kiss so badly she refused to think past the here and now. ‘And if it isn’t,’ she added softly, moving closer so he’d know she wanted to be kissed, ‘you’ve already been contaminated.’

He bent his head until only a breath of air separated them.

‘Not contaminated, Annie,’ he whispered into that tiny space. ‘Addicted.’

Annie’s lips responded first, remembering delight imprinted on them from the previous kisses, then her body warmed and heat glowed within it, and the longing grew so strong she knew there was no way she could resist a second date and then a third and whatever all of this was leading to.

And though doubt and guilt still existed in her head, what was happening in other parts of her enabled her to ignore them, offering up feeble excuses about Alex only being here for a year, and wasn’t it time she got some pleasure out of life, and why shouldn’t she enjoy his company for a while?

‘Ah,’ Alex said, a long time later, lifting his head and taking a deep breath. ‘I thought I’d lost you there for a while, but once you put your mind to a kiss, Annie Talbot, I can only say you do a first-rate job.’

He smoothed her hair back from her face, cupped his hand around her jaw and cheek and looked into her eyes, though she knew it was too dark for him to see more than a blurred outline of her face.

‘I’ve stopped kissing you and I’m making this ridiculous light conversation, because if that kiss had gone on for much longer, I’d have had to ravish you right here beneath this tree. And while I don’t know about Australian customs, public exhibitions of lovemaking are not looked on kindly by the police in most places where I’ve lived.’

‘No,’ she said, though not sure if it should have been a yes. Not that Alex seemed to care because he took it as an invitation to kiss her again, this time on the forehead, and temple, and on her eyelids now she’d closed them to enjoy the sensation of his lips against her skin.

‘So, where do we go from here? And I’m not talking about tonight, I’m talking about our dating, which, as I pointed out to you this morning, is going to get more complicated once Maggie moves in.’

His statement reminded Annie of his reaction to the news that morning, although what difference having Maggie in the house would make she wasn’t sure.

Unless, as Annie had once suspected, Maggie was interested in Alex. And why wouldn’t she be? He was good-looking, a top surgeon and, as far as Annie could make out, very nice. No signs of ruthlessness so far!

He was also a man, and he’d been in Melbourne for six months and busy at the hospital so most of the women he’d met would have been at or through work. Had he dated Maggie?

If he had, it could certainly get awkward!

‘Why will it get more complicated?’ Annie asked, thinking a direct question was the most tactful way of sorting things out.

Because she was still wrapped in his arms she felt rather than saw Alex’s shrug.

‘I don’t know exactly, except that relationships between colleagues can sometimes turn sour, then that leads to disharmony in the team.’

‘But if it’s things turning sour that worries you, then you and I shouldn’t be seeing each other at all, and Maggie living at my place makes no difference whatsoever.’

‘No, I put that badly.’ Alex pulled her closer. ‘I’ve worked with too many husband-and-wife teams that work perfectly to ever denigrate them. And, anyway, it was just an excuse—a stupid, thoughtless excuse. My bad reaction to the news was a man thing—the thing your father wrote so often on your list. It’s not all I want from you, Annie, you must know that, but, yes, one day I would hope our relationship progresses to a sexual one and, being a man, I think in practical terms of where that will take place.’

‘And you’ve got Phil at your place, so my place was the obvious answer, but now I’ll have Maggie at my place and it will be awkward.’

Annie put his thoughts together in the only way that seemed logical, but there were still holes large enough to drive a bus through.

‘But I have Dad at my place anyway,’ she began, then light dawned and she drew away from him.

‘You don’t mind Dad knowing you’re staying over at my place, but you don’t want other members of the team to know we’re seeing each other? Or is it that you don’t want them knowing we’re having sex?’

Alex tried to draw her close again, but when she stiffened he immediately released her.

‘Annie, it isn’t that. Well, I guess it is, but I was thinking of you as well as myself. I was wondering how you’d feel about me emerging from your bedroom and running into Maggie in the bathroom.’

‘I have my own bathroom,’ Annie snapped, angry with him but also understanding the problem and angry with herself for causing it.

But she couldn’t have not offered Maggie a place to stay!

‘Well, in the hall, or anywhere, just as it could be awkward for you running into Phil at my place. It’s an embarrassment factor, nothing else.’

He put his hands on her shoulders and applied just enough pressure to let her know he wanted to hold her. And this time she let him draw her close again.

‘I do understand,’ she muttered. ‘I’m just cranky that it’s all so muddled.’

She snuggled against his body.

‘Anyway, it might never happen. I like you, Alex—a lot—but for all kinds of reasons, including the bathroom scenario, this should be a first and last date. I’m really not a datable person. Too much baggage, too many secrets, and if there’s one thing I’ve carried with me from my father’s lists of behaviour, it’s the one about not having secrets in a relationship. I’m not talking little secrets, like being scared of snakes, but big secrets.’

She sighed, so happy in his arms, so sorry it couldn’t be for ever—or even for a year—but knowing it couldn’t.

Shouldn’t!

‘Apart from snakes, I doubt there’s much you’re scared of, Annie Talbot,’ he murmured, pressing kisses against her hair and her ear, teasing at the lobe, making Annie’s body squirm with delight.

But hearing the name that wasn’t her name—hearing the gentle way he spoke the words ‘Annie Talbot’—reminded her that what she’d said was right, and this relationship shouldn’t—couldn’t—be.

Until he kissed her lips again, seducing not only her body but her common sense as well.

It took a long time to walk home, and even longer to say goodnight in the shadows of the camellia bush.

‘I really must go,’ Alex said at last. ‘I want to slip up to the hospital. I know they’d page me if they needed me, but in a new situation, with staff that don’t know me and might worry about disturbing me, I like to check things for myself.’

‘Like whether the tubes and wires are all in the right place,’ Annie teased, knowing how insistent Alex was about the particulars of patient care.

‘Exactly,’ he said, lifting her hair and finding a new place to kiss, just beneath her ear, where the nerves must be connected directly to her nipples as they peaked in an exquisite agony of delight.

‘Go,’ she said, ‘or we’ll be embarrassing ourselves on my front porch.’

‘I could come back,’ he suggested, his voice hoarse with need, but without much expectation.

‘Best not,’ Annie said. ‘My father’s list didn’t exactly say “don’t put out on a first date” but I’m sure it was implied somewhere there.’

She spoke lightly, hoping Alex would accept it as a joke, but in her heart of hearts she knew that if she took this relationship with him any further she’d be lost—so under his spell, or the spell of the attraction between them, she’d never be able to push him away.

Alex grunted and kissed her once more on the lips, then touched his hand to her cheek again and said goodnight.

Annie leaned against the porch railing and watched until he disappeared into the shadows at the end of the road.

Her body ached with frustration while her mind churned with doubts and questions to which she had no answers.

Eventually, she unlocked the door and went inside. Seeing the light on in the kitchen, she found her father reading at the big table, Henry asleep across his feet.

‘Do you think Dennis is dangerous?’ she asked, the biggest question in the churn popping straight out.

Her father looked at her for a long moment, then he shook his head.

‘You worried about what you might be getting that fellow into?’

Annie nodded.

‘I think you’ve got reason to be,’ her father said, then he sighed. ‘Though I don’t know for sure, Annie. We’ve never known for certain why Dennis has been so keen to find you, but my experience and that of other people on the force, and people I’ve spoken to in Social Services who deal with this stuff—it all points to someone as persistent in trying to find you as Dennis has been, being at least borderline dangerous. What he’s done, with his private investigators roaming around the country, is tantamount to stalking. Stalking by proxy but still stalking. You took nothing from him—no money, clothes, passport, nothing—so it’s not as if he’s looking for you to get something back.’

‘Is he still looking do you think? Has Uncle Joe said anything?’

Her father looked surprised.

‘Why mention Uncle Joe?’

Annie smiled—a sad effort but a smile nonetheless.

‘Dad, did you think I wouldn’t figure out why you go off on your solo jaunts once or twice a month? Why you drive up to the Gold Coast or fly down to Melbourne? Why would you do it, if not to contact Uncle Joe from somewhere out of Sydney to find out how everyone is?’

‘Think you’re clever, I suppose,’ her father growled. ‘I assumed you’d think I’d headed off for a naughty weekend. But you’re right, I do keep in touch with Joe. I let him know we’re OK and find out what’s happening over in the west. I phone him at work—no way all the calls to the internal investigations division in Perth could be traced—but I phone from other cities just in case.’

He sighed.

‘Dennis is still looking. One of those PIs visited your grandmother just last week. A different firm this time. Your gran asked him to leave his card and whether his firm had contacts in the US because she hadn’t heard from you for a long time and she thought she might hire someone to find you.’

‘Good old Gran. I’m glad she knows we’re OK,’ Annie said, thinking of the tears she’d shed over not being able to contact her grandmother.

But right from the start, when a private investigator rather than Dennis himself had contacted her father, two days after she’d left the hotel, he’d been insistent she shouldn’t see or talk to anyone from her past. She’d been cared for by the wife of the policeman she’d first spoken to and then passed on to an organisation that miraculously looked after women in her situation.

Through them and, she was pretty sure, illegally, she’d eventually flown back to Australia, or rather Annie Talbot had flown back. Then a similar though much smaller organisation in Australia had helped her father disappear—though as a policeman he’d needed less help—to re-emerge in Sydney as Rod Talbot, and take up the writing he’d played at for years, scoring a hit with his first published novel.

‘But we’re off the subject. Am I putting Alex in danger by seeing him?’

She sat down on the floor by her father’s chair and rested her head on his knee.

‘I like him so much,’ she confessed quietly, ‘that I couldn’t bear for harm to come to him through me.’

Her father stroked her hair and Henry, perhaps sensing her deep need, moved so he could put his big head on her lap.

‘I can understand that, love,’ her father said. ‘But maybe it’s not your decision to make. Maybe you have to tell him all about it, and let him decide for himself.’

Annie thought about that for a while then shook her head.

‘That’s not going to work, Dad, because if we’re not absolutely certain there’s a risk to us, why would he think there’d be one to him? We don’t know