Goodbye Evie. Don’t try and find me.
After all they’d been through—he’d reduced their relationship to seven words.
‘Evie!’ Richard demanded again, at his daughter’s continuing silence.
She glared at her father, who was regarding her as if she was two years old and deliberately defying him, instead of a grown woman. A competent, emergency room physician.
‘The state of play between Finn and I is none of your damn business.’
‘Au contraire,’ he said, his brows drawing together. ‘What happens at this hospital is my business.’
Richard Lockheart took the business of Sydney Harbour Hospital very seriously. As its major benefactor he worked tirelessly to ensure it remained the state-of-the-art facility it was, carrying on the legacy of his grandfather, who had founded the hospital. Sometimes she thought he loved the place more than he’d ever loved his wife and his three daughters.
Evie sighed, tired of the fight already. She was just so bloody tired these days. ‘Look,’ she said, reaching for patience, ‘I’m not being deliberately recalcitrant. I really don’t know where he is.’
She turned back to the view out the window. His brief impersonal note had been the final axe blow. She’d fought the good fight but there were only so many times a girl could take rejection. So she’d made a decision to forget him and she’d navigated through life these past five months by doing just that. By putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to think about him.
Or what he’d left behind.
But there’d only ever been a finite amount of time she could exist in her state of denial and the first flutterings this morning had brought an abrupt end to that. She couldn’t deny that she was carrying his baby any longer.
Or that he deserved to know.
She turned back to her father. ‘I think I know somebody who might.’
Evie had spent the last three afternoons pacing back and forth outside Marco D’Avello’s outpatients rooms, waiting for his last expectant mother to leave, summoning up the nerve to go in and see him then chickening out each time as the door opened to discharge a patient.
Today was no different. It was five o’clock, the waiting area was empty and his door opened and she sprang from the seat she’d not long plonked herself in for the hundredth time in half an hour and headed for the lift.
‘Evie?’
His rich, beautifully accented voice stopped her in her tracks. Evie had to admit that Emily, his wife and a midwife at the hospital, was an exceptionally lucky woman to wake up to that voice every morning. Not to mention the whole dark, sexy Italian stallion thing he had going on.
Just waking up with the person you loved sounded pretty good to her.
He walked towards her. ‘I have been watching you outside my door for three days now.’ His voice was soft. ‘Would you like to see me?’
Evie dithered. She wasn’t sure what she wanted. She didn’t know what an obstetrician could tell her that she didn’t already know. And yet here she was.
‘Come,’ he murmured, cupping his hand under her elbow.
Evie let herself be led. Why couldn’t she love someone like Marco? Someone who was gentle and supportive?
And capable of love.
She heard the door click behind her and sat in the chair he shepherded her towards. ‘You are pregnant. Yes?’ he said as he walked around to his side of the desk.
Evie startled gaze flew to his. ‘How did you …?’ she looked down at her belly, placing her hand over the bump that was obvious on her spare athletic frame if she was naked but not discernible yet in the baggy scrubs she wore at work.
Marco smiled. ‘It’s okay, you are not showing. I’m just a little more … perceptive to this sort of thing. I think it goes with the job.’
Evie nodded, her brain buzzing. She looked at him for long moments. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m here.’
He didn’t seemed perturbed by her strange statement. She was pregnant. He was an obstetrician. It was where she should be. Where she should have been a lot earlier than now.
He just seemed to accept it and waited for her to talk some more.
‘I haven’t told anyone. No one knows,’ she said, trying to clarify.
‘How many weeks?’
‘Eighteen.’
Marco frowned. ‘And you haven’t seen anyone yet?’
‘I’ve been … busy.’ Evie felt her defences rise, not that Marco seemed to be judging her. ‘It’s always crazy in the emergency department and … time gets away …’
She looked down at her hands still cradling her bump because what excuse was there really to have neglected herself, to have not sought proper antenatal care?
She was a doctor, for crying out loud.
‘You have been well?’
Evie nodded, dragging her gaze back to Marco. ‘Disgustingly. A few weeks of vague nausea in the beginning. Tired. I’ve been really tired. But that’s it.’
She’d expected the worse when she’d first discovered she was pregnant. She’d figured any child of Finn’s was bound to be as disagreeable as his father and make her life hell. But it had been a dream pregnancy to date as far as all that went.
Which had only made it easier for her to deny what was really happening to her body.
‘We should do some bloods,’ Marco said. ‘Why don’t you hop up on the couch for a moment and I’ll have a feel?’
Evie nodded. She made her way to the narrow examination table and lay staring at the ceiling as Marco palpated her uterus then measured the fundal height with a tape measure. ‘Measurements seem spot on for eighteen weeks,’ he murmured as he reached over and flipped on a small ultrasound machine.
‘No,’ Evie said, half sitting, pulling down her scrub top. ‘I don’t want to … I don’t want an ultrasound.’
She didn’t want to look at the baby. Not yet. She’d made a huge leap forward today, finally admitting the pregnancy to someone else. She wasn’t ready for a meet and greet.
And she knew that made her all kinds of screwed up.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised. ‘That’s probably not the reaction you’re used to.’ She couldn’t explain why she didn’t want to see the baby—she just knew she didn’t. Not yet.
Marco turned off the machine and looked down at her and Evie could tell he was choosing his words carefully. ‘Evie … you have left it too late to … do something about the pregnancy.’
Evie struggled to sit up, gratefully taking Marco’s proffered hand as she sat cross-legged on the narrow couch. She had thought about termination but as with everything else pregnancy related she’d shoved it determinedly to one side.
She’d spent the past eighteen weeks not thinking about the baby—her body aiding and abetting her denial by being virtually symptom-free.
She looked at Marco. ‘I know. I don’t want to.’
She stopped. Where had that come from?
Termination had been an option and one, as a doctor and a woman, she firmly believed should be available, but suddenly she knew deep down in the same place that she’d known she loved Finn that she loved his baby too. And that nothing would come between them.
He may not have let her in, let her love him, but there would be no distance between Finn’s child