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Phil saw her safely to her door, said goodnight, took a couple of steps towards the gate, then turned.
‘I’m sorry it was Alex called away, not me,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t do much relaxing and I think an evening with you would have been just what the doctor ordered for him.’
He grinned at her, then added, ‘Just what this doctor would have ordered, anyway.’
He hesitated, as if expecting her to say something, and when she didn’t, he spoke again.
‘Are you interested? In Alex?’
Another pause during which he maybe realised he’d overstepped some invisible boundary.
‘Not that it’s any of my business,’ he added quickly. ‘But I kind of like the chap and I’d like to see him happy. Not that he’s not happy. Lives for his work. But that’s hardly a balanced life.’
Annie beat down the excitement this conversation had generated, and said quietly but firmly, ‘I don’t think we should be discussing Alex behind his back.’
Phil seemed surprised, but he took it well, shrugging his shoulders and repeating his goodnight. Then he walked off up the road, not turning in at his gate but going on to the hospital.
Where little Amy was fighting for her life!
Annie wanted to call Phil—tell him she’d go with him—but there was nothing she could do up there, and Amy was in the best possible hands.
But knowing that didn’t help her sleep, and at five she gave up, got out of bed, showered and dressed and walked up to the hospital.
The first person she saw in the ward was Alex. An exhausted, unshaven-looking Alex, who greeted her with a tired smile.
‘You know, you’re admin staff now and don’t have to be here all the time,’ he teased, and she was pleased to hear the words, certain he wouldn’t be making light-hearted comments if Amy hadn’t survived the night.
‘She’s all right?’ Annie asked, needing the verbal confirmation.
‘She’s one tough little lady,’ Alex said. ‘It’s an infection, not a haemorrhage—thank heaven.’
Then he rubbed his hands across his face.
‘Fancy thanking heaven for an infection in so frail a child, but I doubt she’d have survived another operation. We’ve done a culture and now have gram specific antibiotics running into her, and she’s slowly improving. I’m worried about fluid retention. The kidneys are susceptible to damage when a patient’s on bypass, and I hate to think we’ve added kidney problems to her other burdens.’
‘Catheter OK?’ Annie asked, remembering a child she’d nursed who’d had every test imaginable for bladder and kidney problems, and in the end the trouble had been with his catheter.
‘I like your thinking,’ Alex told her. ‘They’re such tiny tubes for infants, they could easily block or kink. I’ll check that now.’
Annie stayed and talked to Amy’s father, who came out of the room while Alex watched the intensivist on duty remove the old bladder catheter and insert a new one.
‘He’s been here all night,’ Mr Carter told her, nodding towards the glass-enclosed room where they could see Alex bending over the bed. ‘I doubt my wife would have gone away to have a rest if he hadn’t persuaded her and promised he’d stay himself until she got back. You don’t get many specialists like that.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Annie agreed, feeling ashamed she’d regretted him being called away, though it had hardly been a date with Phil there. Then she wondered just when Mrs Carter would get back. Alex, too, needed to sleep.
Annie went into the next room, where small Alexander Ross was now off the ventilator. An older woman—one of the brace of grandparents, no doubt—was dozing in the chair beside his bed.
‘He’s doing well enough to be going to the ward tomorrow.’
Annie swung towards the speaker, and then regretted it, because she wanted nothing more than to run her hands across his face, smoothing away the lines of tiredness.
‘That’s wonderful,’ she said instead. ‘His recovery’s going far better than we’d expected, isn’t it?’
Alex nodded then led her out of the room.
‘Far better,’ he confirmed. ‘Are you going back home now you’ve checked on your two patients?’
‘I suppose so,’ Annie said, ‘though Dad will still be in bed so I thought I might stop at the canteen for breakfast. They do a wicked big breakfast here.’
‘I obviously didn’t feed you enough last night,’ Alex said mournfully. ‘But now you mention it, a big breakfast might just hit the spot. Mrs Carter is back with Amy so, come, let me escort you to the canteen.’
He bent his arm and held it towards her and Annie could hardly refuse to tuck her hand into the crook of his elbow. What did surprise her, though, was the way Alex then drew her hand close to her body and, in so doing, drew her body close to his.
‘Story of my life,’ he said conversationally as they walked along the corridor to the far lift that would take them directly down to the canteen. ‘Phil and I entertaining a beautiful lady, and he gets to take her home.’
He was holding her too firmly for Annie to pull away, and she hoped he didn’t feel the blush that spread through her body.
‘Beautiful lady, indeed!’ she scoffed, as they reached the foyer and were waiting for the lift. ‘Look at me! Straight out of bed into jeans and trainers—slept-in hair and no make-up.’
But if he heard the last part he gave no sign of it, saying only, ‘I do look at you, Annie,’ in a voice that made her toes curl in the tips of the maligned trainers. ‘All the time.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘WHAT do you mean?’
Her voice seemed to come from a long way off, and it wavered slightly, but she got the question asked.
Alex looked down at her and a smile shifted the lines in his tired face.
‘Just that,’ he said. ‘I find myself looking at you—or looking for you if you’re not around. Part of it’s to do with a ghost who’s haunted me for the past five years, but more to do with the flesh-and-blood woman who came into my life less than a week ago. Crazy, isn’t it?’
The lift arrived and they squeezed in, Alex still holding her close. The lift was full of staff heading for breakfast, and various acquaintances greeted Annie. Hospital gossip being what it was, she was glad she was working in the unit now and not out on a ward where she’d have been teased unmercifully about such blatant behaviour as standing arm in arm with her boss.
But the press of bodies also saved her answering Alex—had she had an answer—and they travelled in silence, then discussed food options as they stood in the queue, everything so back to normal that Annie thought they were safely past the conversation until, once seated at a table in a quiet corner of the room, Alex reintroduced it.
‘You must think I’m crazy, and maybe I am. If this conversation embarrasses you, please write it off as lack of sleep, but yesterday in the park I spent so much time assuring you that dinner would just be a colleague-with-colleague thing—emphasising the casualness of it—and then I had to leave you with Phil last night. Phil with his charm and his good looks and his success with women! I was caught up with Amy and there you were with Phil—that’s when I realised.’
He stopped, perhaps realising now that he wasn’t making a lot of sense, and looked across the table at Annie. Then he shook his head, and this time his smile was tiredly rueful.
‘What I’m trying to say in my inadequate way is that I like you, Annie Talbot. I’m attracted to you, and if it’s OK with you, I’d like to get to know you better.’
Excitement vied with apprehension, but beneath both these emotions was a longing so deep Annie was shaken by it.
It was a longing for love in the biggest, widest, most wonderful sense of the word. A longing to be part of a couple—to share a little of another person’s life, to give and take support, to have someone to laugh and cry and rejoice with, to have someone to hug, or to give a hug to when a hug was needed.
‘What really rocks me is that I thought I’d got over wanting someone in my life,’ she said, looking at Alex as she spoke, knowing he probably wouldn’t understand, as she was no better with words than he had been. ‘I’ve built my life as a single person and, truly, Alex, I’ve enjoyed it. I do enjoy it. I have company when I need it, a job I love, I’m career-focussed and happy that way.’
Alex watched her carefully choosing words and putting them together. He listened to them and though they didn’t spell it out, he was reasonably certain she was telling him she was no longer quite as happy with her chosen path, which, as far as he was concerned, was tantamount to admitting she was as attracted to him as he was to her.
‘Eat your breakfast before it gets totally cold,’ he told her, though he smiled so she would know it wasn’t an order.
She smiled back and a little of his tiredness lifted. Somehow they’d muddled through a very awkward conversation and reached a place where he was pretty sure they could go forward.
Together.
On a kind of trial basis.
He felt an insane urge to shout or clap or otherwise celebrate this breakthrough in the Annie-Alex relationship, but then he remembered other relationships he’d had and the dismal hash he’d made of them. He watched Annie cut a piece of bacon then spear it on her fork, and more doubts assailed him.
Not doubts about Annie and wanting to get to know her better, but doubts about his ability to make her happy—to chase away the shadows he sometimes saw in her eyes.
Was he, with his antipathy to and avoidance of emotional dependency, the right kind of a man for Annie? Could he give her the kind of unconditional love she would need to heal whatever wounds she carried from the past? And wouldn’t wrapping Annie in the kind of love she needed mean unwrapping the protective barriers he’d erected around himself? How else could he bring her close?
And had she actually said she was happy to get to know him better? No, she hadn’t. She’d waffled on as badly as he had, and hadn’t really said anything at all when you got right down to it.
Because she wasn’t sure?
Wasn’t sure about exposing herself to love and perhaps to whatever hurt it had brought to her before?
So he’d have to be mighty careful! Mighty sure that nothing he did would put her in more emotional jeopardy.
‘Aren’t you going to eat yours?’ she asked, drawing his wandering thoughts back to the here and now.
‘I’d better, hadn’t I?’ he said. ‘Or I won’t have the strength to walk you home.’
He watched her as he spoke and saw the shadows he’d been thinking of chase across her face, and he felt a steely resolve to do whatever he could to chase those shadows away.
‘It’s not commitment, Annie,’ he said quickly, not wanting to lose her before the relationship had begun. ‘Just a “getting to know you” kind of relationship. A “let’s see where it goes” experiment.’
The shadows cleared and she smiled at him.
‘In the interests of science, of course,’ she teased, and Alex felt the tension drain out of his body. Yes!
He didn’t punch the air, not physically, but in his head he saw his fingers clench and his hand go up in triumph.
Because she’d tentatively agreed to get to know him better?
Come on, man!
But he couldn’t curb his inner excitement, though he hoped it wasn’t showing on the outside.
He attacked his breakfast, barely noticing it was less appetising than it would have been if eaten hot, but before he’d finished his pessimism had surfaced again, reminding him he was a stranger in a foreign land, in a city he didn’t know. Where was he going to take Annie for a first date? First dates should be special.
‘What are you worrying about now?’ she asked, reminding him he had company at the table.
‘How do you know I’m worrying?’
‘Your eyebrows knit together.’ She softened the blow with another smile. ‘And your lips go tight.’
He tried loosening his tight lips with an only slightly tight smile, and admitted his dilemma.
‘I don’t know where to take you. For our first date.’
He’d expected understanding, but not laughter. She laughed and laughed, the sound so joyous he couldn’t help but enjoy it, though he was a little disgruntled that he could cause such mirth.
‘It’s not a cardiac operation,’ she said when she’d controlled herself enough to speak. ‘It doesn’t have to be planned to the nth degree. We can go to the beach—or for a walk around the harbour foreshore. We can eat at the Thai restaurant down the road from where we live, or at the little Italian place on the other side of the park.’
And why are you suggesting places to go with this man when you know full well you shouldn’t be seeing him at all? Annie’s head asked her, but the longing had won out over caution, and already she was excited about going to the beach or walking the foreshore with Alex.
If he ever had any time off, she amended as a buzzing sound had them both reaching for their pagers.
‘It’s mine,’ he said, pushing back his chair and standing up. ‘It’s the ward. I’ll phone from over there…’ He nodded towards the house phone on the wall. ‘But if it’s the unit, I’ll have to go.’
He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then reached out and touched his hand to her hair.
‘May I call and see you later? When I’ve slept and showered and shaved?’
Big moment this, but Annie barely hesitated.
‘I’d like that,’ she said, then she looked up into his face. ‘But if you don’t make it, I’ll understand. You need to catch up on your sleep. That’s far more important than visiting me.’
Alex smiled at her.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ he said, then he lifted a strand of hair and gave a gentle tug. ‘See you later, Annie Talbot!’
Annie Talbot! If only she was Annie Talbot! Annie Talbot could certainly have a ‘getting to know you’ relationship with Alex. Or run with a ‘see where it goes’ experiment.
After all, the man was returning to the US in a year. It wouldn’t be a for ever and ever kind of relationship.
She worried about it all the way home.
‘So, what do you think, Dad?’
Her father was breakfasting with Henry in the kitchen, and as he had so willingly gone into exile with her—had, in fact, arranged a lot of it—she’d had to share this new development with him.
‘You like him?’
‘I do,’ she admitted, then she took a deep breath. ‘But there’s more to it than liking and more complications than a quick romance with a nice man. Remember I told you about dancing with the man on the terrace at the hotel? The night I left Dennis? The night I phoned home?’
‘I remember too much about that night,’ her father growled. ‘Too bloody much!’
Annie reached out and squeezed his shoulder.
‘It’s all behind us, Dad,’ she said. ‘We’ve moved on. Anyway, he’s the man. Alex is. He’s the man I danced with that night.’
‘Then I should like to shake his hand,’ her father said, not seeing the point Annie was trying to make.
‘You will, and maybe soon, but you won’t say anything. That’s the problem, Dad. Don’t you see? He moves in the same circles as Dennis. You’ve done so much to hide me from him and his private investigators, and by getting close to Alex I could wreck all that.’
