‘I’m on my way.’
She woke and he was right beside her. Luke Williams, plastic surgeon. He looked like he’d just seen death.
The on-call room was tiny, one big squishy settee, a television, a coffee table with ancient magazines and nothing else. She’d curled into a corner of the couch and fallen asleep. Until now.
The man beside her wasn’t seeing her. He was staring at the blank television screen, gaze unfocused.
She’d never seen a man look so bleak.
‘What’s wrong?’ she breathed, and touched his arm.
He flinched.
‘What are you doing here?’ His voice was harsh. Breaking. It was emotion that had woken her, she thought. Raw grief, filling the room like a tangible thing.
‘I don’t get into my boarding house until ten,’ she told him. ‘So I’m camped out, waiting. But what is it? Jessie?’
‘He died,’ he said, and all the bleakness in the world was in those two words. ‘Cardiac arrest. He had a congenital heart problem and no one thought to tell us. As if we had time to look for records. The admission officer didn’t even read the form, she was too upset. We patched him up, we made him look like he might even be okay, and all the time his heart was like a time bomb.’
‘There was no choice,’ she managed, appalled.
‘There was a choice. If I’d known … I could have taken the flap off, thought about grafts later, concentrated on getting his heart stable first.’
She took a deep breath. What to say?
This man’s anguish was raw and real.
A congenital heart problem …
If Luke had known he might well have decided not to try and save his face, but without that immediate operation Jess would have been left with a lifetime of skin grafts. With a face that wasn’t his.
‘What sort of life would he have led?’ she whispered.
‘A life,’ he said flatly. ‘Any life. I can’t bear …’
And she couldn’t bear it either. She took his hands and tugged him around to face her.
There was more to this than a child dying, she thought. This man must have lost patients before. He couldn’t react like this to all of them. There was some past tragedy here that was being tapped into, she guessed. She had no idea what it was; but she sensed his pain was well nigh unbearable.
‘I killed him,’ he said, and for some reason she wasn’t sure he was talking about Jessie.
‘The dog killed him,’ she said, trying to sound prosaic. ‘You tried to save him.’
‘I should have—’
‘No. Don’t do this.’
He shuddered, and it was a raw and dreadful grief that took over his whole body.
Enough. She pulled him into her arms and held him. And held and held. She simply held him while the shudders racked his body, over and over.
This couldn’t just be about this child, she thought.
Something had broken him.
He was holding her as well now. Simply holding. Taking strength from her. Taking comfort, and giving it back.
A man and a woman, both in limbo.
The events of the past two days had left Lily gutted. Her mother … The vicar…. Losing her job. The judgement of the town.
The Ellis women.
She held to comfort, but he was holding her as well and she needed it.
Jessie’s death. The trauma of finding what her mother had done, planned to do. Forty-eight hours with little sleep.
If she could give comfort …
If this was what they both needed …
He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be holding this woman.
But he wasn’t thinking of now. He was thinking of Jessie, four years old and red-headed.
The past was back with him. Four years ago, walking into their apartment after surgery that had lasted for fourteen hours. Exhausted but jubilant. Calling out to Hannah. ‘I’m home. It’s over and she’ll live. Hannah …’
Walking into the bedroom
Ectopic pregnancy, the autopsy said. Fourteen weeks pregnant.
By her side, a letter to her mother in Canada.
‘Tonight I’m finally telling Luke I’m pregnant. I’ve been waiting and waiting—I thought a lovely romantic dinner, but there’s no chance. He’s been so busy it’s driving me crazy but now he’ll have to make time for us. I want a son. I’m hoping he’ll be red-headed like me. I want to call him Jessie.’
Tonight, four years later, he hadn’t been able to save a red-headed boy called Jessie.
The woman in his arms was holding him. She smelled clean, washed, anonymous, clinical.
But more. The scent of faded roses was drifting through, like some afterthought of a lovely perfume. The silken threads of her fair hair were brushing his face.
She was an agency nurse. She didn’t know him.
She was warm and real and alive.
He’d come in here to sit, to try and come to terms with what had happened. He had two hours before his morning list started. He needed to get himself under control
Jessie.
Hannah.
They were nothing to do with the woman who was holding him.
She shuddered and he thought, She’s as shocked as I am. He tugged away a little and searched her face.
Her sky-blue eyes were rimmed with shadows. Her shock mirrored his. She looked like she, too, was in the midst of a nightmare.
‘Lily …’ It was the first time he’d used her name and it felt like … a question?
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just hold me. Please.’ And she tugged him back to her.
He should back away.
He didn’t. He couldn’t. He simply held. And held and held.
A man and a woman—with a need surfacing between them as primeval as time itself.
Stupid. Crazy. Wanton?
It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.
His hands were slipping under her blouse, feeling the warmth of her, the heat. He needed her heat.
Her breasts were moulding to his chest. Skin was meeting skin, and conscious will was slipping. Their bodies were meeting, in a desperate, primitive search for …
What?
For life?
That was a crazy idea. He was crazy.
It didn’t matter.
For now, for this moment, he was kissing her, holding her, wanting her, with a desperation that was so deep, so real that nothing could interfere.
They were only kissing. They were only holding. They were only touching.
No. This was much, much more. This was a man and a woman come together in mutual need, giving, taking …
Holding desperately to life.
‘Luke …’
‘Just hold