‘I was on mothering duty this morning,’ she said, pulling out her purse to pay for her latte.
Ben did a double take. ‘I didn’t know you had a kid.’
‘I don’t,’ she said, checking the Perspex around her heart and not letting her mind travel to a memory that always brought a troubling combination of sadness and disappointment seasoned with an unsettling soupçon of relief. ‘I’m looking after Shaylee while my parents are whooping it up in Melbourne celebrating thirty-three years of wedded bliss.’
‘Crikey.’ Ben’s expression was a priceless combination of respect and horror. ‘I can’t imagine what that would be like. My brain refuses to go there.’
‘I know, right? They got married at twenty-three and are still going strong. It’s terrifyingly impressive.’ So much about her parents and their achievements was impressive that she was often left feeling daunted by her own choices. How did one even start to live up to their high-set bar?
He placed the metal jug under the steam jet, frothing the milk for her brewing coffee. ‘I think I’d find marriage claustrophobic.’
Was this her opening? Come on, be brave. Be a millennial woman like the ones you read about and take what you want. ‘Sexually or otherwise?’
He shot her a quizzical look as if he was testing the lie of the land. ‘A bit of both, really. What about you?’
‘Post-divorce, I’ve had a total rethink.’ She swallowed and forced herself to look him straight in his sea-green eyes. ‘What’s your opinion of friends with benefits?’
‘I’m an enthusiastic supporter.’ He capped her coffee with a plastic sippy top and gave her a grin. ‘And we’ve been friends for a while now.’
‘We have.’ For some reason her heart was just beating away normally: lub-dub, lub-dub. Shouldn’t it be bounding wildly out of her chest at the fact that the gorgeous Ben was on board with the idea of the two of them tumbling into bed?
He handed her the coffee and swept the coins she laid on the wooden counter into the till. ‘Call me whenever, Lauren. I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Great!’ She heard herself saying, sounding far more enthusiastic than she felt. For some—probably antiquated—reason, she’d assumed Ben would be the one to contact her. Yet this way he was letting her call the shots and after two disastrous relationships, wasn’t that what she wanted? Demanded even?
Gah! Perhaps she wasn’t as twenty-first-century evolved or as ready for casual, no-strings-attached sex as she’d thought.
* * *
Charles Ainsworth—‘Boss Doc’ to the islanders, Charlie to his friends and on very infrequent occasions to his family—swore as the lights in the operating theatre flickered. ‘Bert filled the generator, right?’ he asked as he slipped a ligature around a bleeding vessel.
‘No worries, boss.’ A dark eyed man with a bush of frizzy hair gave him the thumbs-up from the door. ‘I fill ’em up. No be in the dark this time.’
‘Excellent.’ Charlie might be in what travel magazines called ‘paradise’—a string of tropical, palm-dotted coral islands floating in an aquamarine sea—but from a medical perspective, he was in a developing country and a disaster zone. During the recent cyclone, he’d had to perform emergency surgery on a boy who had been pierced by a stake that had been hurled into his chest by the terrifying and mighty force of the wind. Mid-surgery, they had predictably lost power, but he hadn’t foreseen the generator running dry or him finishing the surgery with Bert and Shirley holding LED torches aloft.
Just another tough day in paradise but at least the kid had survived and only half of the hospital had flooded. If the Red Cross managed to deliver desperately needed medical supplies today, he might be able to breathe more easily. As it was, air was skimming in and out of the tops of his lungs without going deeper and his body was coiled tight, ready to react to the next disaster. He’d been in a constant state of high alert for two weeks.
It’s been longer than that.
He shook away the thought. Emergency aid work was, by definition, disaster management, and he had the dubious honour of being an expert. Once the powers that be recognised someone with the skills they needed, they locked onto them and never let them go. Not that he wanted to be let go—he lived for being busy. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
He stepped back from the antiquated operating table that even on its highest extension was too low for his height, stripped off his gloves and rubbed his aching back. ‘Wake him up,’ he said to his current anaesthetic nurse, a local islander who had blessedly trained in Melbourne. ‘And keep a close eye on the drainage bottle.’
‘Sure thing, Charlie,’ Shirley said, her teeth a flash of white in her dark and smiling face. ‘You get some sleep now, yeah?’
He laughed; the sound as far removed from jolly as possible. ‘I’m going down to the wharf.’
‘I see your eyes close. You need sleep.’ She gave an islander shrug—the one that implied it will be what it will be. ‘You can’t will the boat to come.’
‘I can try.’ He wasn’t about to explain to Shirley that there was no point in trying to sleep, because sleep no longer came. If insomnia had been a visitor in the last few months, it had taken up residence since the cyclone had hit. For the last two weeks he’d only cat-napped. An hour here, a half-hour there, all squeezed in between medical emergencies, general hospital work and helping the islanders clean up the havoc Cyclone Samuel had wrought on them. Although some aid had arrived, it was going to take months for the replacement of vital infrastructure. Not that he’d be around to see it. By then he would have been moved on, dispatched to another place of need and leading another team.
He walked into the basic change room that all the staff shared and stripped off his scrubs. He was shoving his left leg into his shorts when the room shifted and he shifted with it, banging hard into the old metal lockers and jarring his shoulder. What the hell! Was it an earth tremor? He righted himself and listened keenly for rumbling but all he heard was birdsong. He was no rookie at natural disasters and birds didn’t sing when there were tremors. Nothing sang then; every animal and insect went deathly silent—the anthem of impending doom.
Trying again, he lifted his right leg, aiming it at the leg hole in his shorts. This time silver spots danced in front of his eyes and then the floor shifted again. He flung out an arm to steady himself and sat down hard on the bench seat. Sucking in some deep breaths, he closed his eyes and waited for the floaters to vanish.
‘You okay, boss?’ Bert asked, suddenly appearing in front of him. ‘You don’t look so good. You need a smoke?’
‘Don’t tempt me, Bert.’ Charlie gave him a grim smile. ‘I just need to eat.’ But just the thought of food made him feel queasy, let alone trying to eat any.
Men’s shouts rent the air, sliding in through the open window, and Charlie’s empty stomach fell to his feet. He didn’t understand a lot of Bislama and his French was tourist-competent, not medical literate, but the last time he’d heard a commotion like this they’d found an islander who’d been trapped under rubble for three days. Despite the joy in finding the man alive, Charlie had been faced with the task of amputating the patient’s crushed leg in the hope of saving his life.
‘Grab my medical kit.’ Charlie lurched to his feet, taking a moment for his head to stop spinning.
‘No, boss!’ Bert grinned at him. ‘This good news. Come on.’
He followed Bert’s brightly coloured shirt through the door and down a short corridor until