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Grace looked at the pizza growing colder on her plate and understood why he hadn’t ordered it. But he’d been right, she had to eat some of it because not eating it would look suspicious. She picked up a slice and bit into it, recognising that the mix of flavours was indeed delicious, although the food seemed to be turning to sawdust in her mouth.
A car accident—losing a daughter. The poor man! And for all he was so perfect, she’d have to cross him off the list.
Although…
She thought it through, looking at the idea from all angles, finally coming to the conclusion that maybe what she was offering was just what Theo needed.
In the back of her head she heard her father warning her that her solutions might not always be what was best for other people, but that had been when she’d been dealing with some of the poor families at home, ruthlessly reorganising their lives into some semblance of order.
This was different.
A child that was yet wasn’t his.
No responsibility.
No need to get emotionally involved.
With either her or the child…
Yes, it could work.
‘Does he live somewhere nearby?’ she heard herself ask Jasmine, then, in case the question was too obvious, she added, ‘Perhaps someone should call in and see if he’s OK.’
Jasmine looked at her, then smiled.
‘He’s OK and even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t want anyone fussing over him,’ she said. ‘He’s a very private man, our Theo. I’d better tell you that he never gets involved with colleagues. Believe me, many have tried but none have succeeded. It’s kind of like a golden rule with him.’ Well, really! Grace thought, annoyed with Jasmine for assuming—quite correctly—that she was intersted in Theo, and horrified with herself for being so 0bvious about it.
‘It’s a good rule,’ she managed, realising some response was necessary. ‘Relationships at work can get very messy.’
‘Or can work brilliantly,’ Jasmine said, nodding towards Maggie and Phil, who were laughing together at the far end of the table. ‘We had three couples fall in love within the unit only last year, so don’t think you’ll be immune to love while you’re here in Oz.’
She paused and studied Grace for a moment.
‘Unless, of course, there’s a very special man back home in South Africa?’ she teased.
Grace thought of the very special man back home and smiled.
‘Oh, yes, there is,’ she said, but she didn’t add that it was because of him—well, partly because of him—that she was interested in Theo. Someone like Jasmine, recently engaged to the man she loved, would never understand Grace’s plan or the means by which she hoped to implement it…
CHAPTER TWO
THEO watched as Grace attached the PVC tube from the bypass machine to the cannula inserted into the right side of little Adelaide Matthews’s heart. She worked quickly but carefully, her movements so precise and economical he had to admire them.
With the ingoing tube attached to the cannula already inserted into the aorta, she stepped back to let Phil get closer.
‘On pump,’ Phil said, the order crisp and quiet, and Theo started the machine, watching closely to see that the heparin given to thin the blood had been sufficient to prevent clotting, watching the pressure—Adelaide was three and needed more pressure than a baby but less than a five-year-old—watching for anything to go wrong.
‘Plege on.’ Now Phil fed the cardioplegia—a potassium poison—into the heart to stop it beating. When it worked, in a matter of minutes, he could begin.
The operation, to correct a problem with the coronary arteries which had been repositioned during an earlier operation for transposition of the great arteries, shouldn’t have been difficult, but scans had shown that one of the coronary arteries had grown through the wall of the heart, like a hose going in through the side of a bucket then back out again, and needed total repositioning.
Aware it could take some time, Theo was overly conscious of his patient’s status, checking the monitors constantly, noting the various pressures, the ECG, coagulation values, blood gases and electrolytes. But mainly it was controlling the pump that absorbed him. Too little blood flow and the patient could suffer oxygen deprivation to her brain, too much and it could blow her delicate little blood vessels apart.
Why did a surgeon turn to this job? Grace had asked, but the satisfaction he found in getting a patient through an often long and complex operation in as good a condition as possible, was a source of enormous satisfaction, and already some of his refinements to the bypass machine were being used worldwide.
Why not?
He looked across at Grace—well, at the hooded, gowned, bespectacled figure he knew was Grace—and was sorry he hadn’t answered that particular question.
Wouldn’t have an opportunity now, having spoken so abruptly to her the previous evening…
‘Theo?’
Knowing what Phil was asking, he recited all the information he had to hand, adding that Adelaide was doing very well.
‘So why change from surgery?’
Three operations later, he’d just emerged from the shower in the theatre changing rooms, a towel wrapped around his waist, when Grace, in bra and panties—her figure was superb—asked the question he’d decided she would never ask again.
He stared at her, debating whether to answer, but as everyone else was gone—he always stayed back to ensure personally that the machine was properly sterilised and sealed—there was really no reason why he shouldn’t tell her.
Particularly as she was pulling on a crisp white shirt, buttoning it up, drawing his attention to her breasts in a way that was totally out of order—he changed with women all the time and never looked at their breasts!
‘I injured my hands—for a while I couldn’t operate—but the world of paediatric cardiac surgery had been my focus as I trained, through basic surgery, then cardiac surgery. I’d finally made it as a registrar on the paeds cardiac team and I didn’t want to leave it. Probably out of pity, my old boss, the chief surgeon at the hospital, suggested I have a go at perfusion while my hands healed. I did a course, learned even more from the woman who had run the machine for our team, then began to see possibilities of improving the system, which was when I became hooked. To me, keeping a child as stable as possible while on pump—and even more importantly while on ECMO—has become my obsession.’
‘So much so you never considered going back to operating?’
He paused, looking at his hands.
‘My hands were burnt, the tendons damaged, and although they healed, it worried me that they had probably lost some sensitivity.’
He paused, remembering the pain of those years—so much pain, the least of it physical.
‘I wondered if I would still have the feel you need to put a stitch the size of a pinhead into a vein with the diameter of a hair. I decided I couldn’t take the risk.’
‘That’s an incredibly honest answer,’ she said, looking puzzled again.
‘Did you think I’d lie?’ he demanded angrily, his emotions already stirred up with memories. And on top of that, it was the puzzled look he caught on her face that gave the impression of vulnerability despite suspecting she was about as vulnerable as a slab of concrete.
Although more shapely…
She grinned at him, totally disarming him.
‘No, I suppose not, but it’s the kind of thing I might have said and I’m forever being told I should pretty things up more. Too blunt, too abrasive, too intrusive—I’m all those “toos”!’
‘You are too,’ he said, suddenly liking her, for all the intrusiveness and abrasion. Although she didn’t smile at his feeble joke and he wondered if he could really like someone with no sense of humour.
Grace knew she should have smiled, but it was a feeble attempt at a joke and she had just put him back onto her list of possibles again. In fact, it was hardly a list—his being the only name on it.
‘And being blunt and abrasive…’ she said, deciding it was better to get things out into the open as soon as possible. That way she’d know where she stood. ‘I wondered if I could ask you something.’
‘You didn’t ask if you could ask before asking me all kinds of personal questions yesterday,’ he reminded her, leaning back against the doorjamb in a way that made all the muscles of his chest stand out so all of a sudden he was an extremely sexy man as well as a colleague.
Sexy man? What was she thinking?
She forced her mind back to her problem.
‘Well, this is really very personal to me and very private so I have to believe that if I ask, you won’t repeat it.’
He didn’t answer, which she took for assent, but the words she needed were jammed in her throat.
Not easy words to say in any circumstances and she’d got off on the wrong foot with this man…
Make amends first?
‘Are you finished for the day? I feel after last night I owe you a meal. I ruined your dinner, firstly by ordering your favourite pizza, although you could still have ordered it, then by asking intrusive questions. Could we go there again—or somewhere else—and I’ll pay?’
What was with this woman? Theo watched her as she pulled on a skirt, tucking the shirt she’d put on earlier efficiently into the waistband. Even the way she dressed said a lot about her—neat, classy in an understated way, yet still…prim was the only word! But the questions she’d been asking didn’t go with that image any more than the classic but boring clothes could successfully hide her sexy body.
Although if he hadn’t seen her nearly naked, might he have been quite so aware of it?
And was it because of the sexy body or because of the inconsistencies he kept finding in her that he heard himself agreeing to have dinner with her?
‘An early dinner—I want to spend some time at the hospital later this evening.’
He wasn’t sure why he’d added the stipulation. True, he liked to spend time at the hospital but he often came late at night when the unit was quiet and most of the parents were sleeping as fitfully as their hopes and fears for their child would allow.
‘Now?’
He studied Grace. Of course he knew why he’d added the stipulation! He was suspicious of her—and doubly suspicious of her interest in him. Most women, even in these enlightened days, were happy to let the men make the running in a developing relationship—and most women were adept at reading the ‘not interested’ sign he hung around himself at work.
So what was with Grace? Was she so inexperienced—at thirty-five?—that she didn’t know the rules, couldn’t read the signs? Or did she have some agenda of her own?
Well, yes to the latter, she’d told him as much, but she wasn’t giving off ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ vibes, so what other agenda could it be?
‘Of course now, if that suits you,’ he said, wondering what he was getting into, suspecting his assumption of her inexperience might be true and intrigued in spite of himself. ‘I was always curious.’
She gave him a sharp, assessing look—no fool, this woman—then shrugged.
‘I don’t mind that,’ she assured him. ‘In fact, it might be a point in my favour.’
Not smiling so it wasn’t a joke—but a point in her favour? In favour of what?
‘Shall we continue this mysterious conversation all evening, or should we discuss something else—there’s always work—until we’ve eaten?’
Now she did smile, and although the expression held a degree of uncertainty it confirmed his initial reaction to her—she was beautiful.
But beautiful women usually radiated confidence, and although Grace gave the impression of being in control, and certainly seemed confident in her work, he kept getting the feeling that her personal confidence was something she’d manufactured, like a cloak, that she wrapped around herself to protect the person she really was.
Or was he being fanciful? Seeing something of his own self-protective instincts and habits in her?
They left the hospital and walked down the road, bypassing Scoozi by unspoken but mutual consent and wandering towards a little brasserie, far enough from the hospital to be less populated by medical people.
‘Is there pizza on the menu here?’ Grace asked, hesitating on the footpath beside the trellised outdoor garden.
‘I don’t only eat pizza and, in fact, this place does the best moussaka outside my aunt’s house in Melbourne.’
Grace glanced at him and he waited, expecting more questions, but none came and he realised that although she was looking at him, her mind was elsewhere.
On the question she wanted to ask?
It was looming larger and larger in his mind, so surely it was swooping around inside her head.
‘We’re going in?’ he asked, and she nodded, though she indicated the outdoor area with a wave of her slim, thin-fingered hand.
‘Could we sit outside?’
He was still thinking about her hands—he’d noticed them in Theatre, where, even gloved, they’d looked… aristocratic somehow.
‘Of course.’
The waitress seated them at a corner table, close by a rambling vine that drooped tiny purple flowers, dropping them when the wind rustled through the leaves so a vagrant few rested in Grace’s golden hair like tiny amethyst gemstones.
Theo opted not to tell her, sure she’d be annoyed by such frivolous beauty and brush them out.
‘I’ll have the lamb,’ Grace announced, one minute’s perusal of the menu enough for her to make up her mind. The decisiveness fitted what he knew of her. He ordered moussaka—wondering if she could tell as much about him from his order. A man of habit—that’s about all she’d gather.
‘So, the question?’ he prompted when the waitress had disappeared to the kitchen with their orders.
She seemed startled, then, to his surprise, she blushed.
‘It should be easy for a person as blunt and plainspoken as I am,’ she muttered, looking more embarrassed by the second, ‘but it’s not that kind of question.’
‘Oh?’
He wasn’t going to help her. He was already regretting agreeing to this dinner. Getting even mildly entangled with a particular member of the team wasn’t on his agenda. His private life was just that, private, and he wanted to keep it that way.
‘It’s personal—very personal—and you’ll think I’ve got a cheek, a terrible cheek. And presumptuous—very presumptuous.’
She stopped and tried a smile that failed dismally, although something about the pathetic attempt struck Theo as brave—valiant.
‘Perhaps if I explained, just a little about myself—no, that won’t work, it’s better just to ask. The thing is, you see, I badly want a child. I’m thirty-five and running out of time, and while I’m here in Sydney is the ideal time to get pregnant and I wondered, if you’d mind—if you had no objections and I know it’s a totally outrageous thing to ask, but you’re everything that would be fantastic—I wondered if I could use…’
The floundering stopped as suddenly as it had started and, scarlet-faced, she stared at the far corner of the courtyard, swallowing convulsively.
‘Don’t mind me,’ she managed a little later. ‘I’m an idiot! Let’s just forget all about it and eat.’
‘Except our meal hasn’t arrived,’ he told her, speaking quietly and gently for he could see she was genuinely upset. Somehow she’d convinced herself that whatever it was she wanted to ask was OK, yet when it came to saying it, she’d baulked.
