‘Difficult?’ Ben supplied, his smile wry, and Josh grinned.
‘He probably wasn’t quite as polite as that.’
Ben gave a grunt of grudging laughter. ‘Yeah. But that’s all behind us now.’
‘Is it? I passed Jack on the way into Resus, and he was steaming down the corridor with a face like the Grim Reaper. I take it they’d had words?’ Josh waited, but Ben obviously wasn’t being drawn. He capped his pen and pushed his chair back, changing the subject.
‘Nice job, Josh,’ he said. ‘The ex-fix. Very neat. You’re going to be an asset to the department.’
He took the hint. ‘Thanks. Let’s hope I can convince them all.’
‘Giving you a hard time?’
He shrugged. ‘Some of them. Not all. I’m the new boy. They’re suspicious.’
‘Well, they don’t need to be. I’ll have a word.’
‘No, leave it. I’ll win them round—I’ll bring in doughnuts and smile a lot, work a bit late, you know the routine. A little of the blarney thrown in for good measure…’
‘Well, don’t expect it to impress me, I know you better than that, and they won’t be fooled by it. Stick to what you’re good at. Save a few lives—that’ll win them round.’
‘I’ll do that for an encore,’ Josh said with a lazy grin, happy that Ben, at least, seemed pleased to have him there. Shrugging away from the desk and putting the Tremayne family out of his mind, he went off to conquer some of the sceptics.
How could the time pass so slowly?
Kate watched the hands crawl round the clock face—a minute, two. She shifted yet again on one of the padded plastic armchairs, resting her head back against the wall with a fractured sigh.
‘He’ll be all right, Kate,’ Nick said, for the hundredth time, and she just nodded slightly and flexed her ankle.
It was enough to make her wince, and she felt him shift beside her.
‘Give me the arnica gel’
She handed it to him and pulled up her trouser leg a little, kicking off her shoe, and he squeezed a blob onto his fingers and crouched in front of her, so she could rest her foot against his lean, hard-muscled thigh. That was all the running and walking he did, mile after mile over the moors, trying to outrun his demons. She could feel the muscles flex beneath her sole as he shifted his position slightly, and the open neck of his shirt gaped so she could see the pulse beating in the hollow of his throat, hard and fast, driven by the adrenaline that must be coursing through his body as it was through hers.
She lifted a hand and laid it against his shoulder, and he went still. ‘Thank you, Nick,’ she murmured. ‘For everything.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m not. Nick, we need to talk.’
He squeezed more arnica gel onto his fingers and smoothed it gently over the top of her other foot where a small bruise was starting to show.
‘About?’
‘Did you get my letter?’
He said nothing for a moment, just kept rubbing her foot, round and round until the skin was all but dry, then he stood up again and washed his hands in the sink in the corner.
She wriggled her feet back into her shoes, wondering how long the leather would take to dry, how she could have got so wet. Standing in the rain, of course, watching while they’d cut Jem out.
‘Nick?’
He dried his hands, then like a caged lion he started pacing, from one side of the small waiting room to the other, then back again, ramming his hand through his hair and rumpling it further. It suited him, she thought randomly. The steel grey threading through it made him look distinguished, setting off his strong features—the features Jem had inherited from him. He was going to be a good-looking man, her son—their son.
Nick’s son.
Finally he stopped pacing, sucked in a long, slow breath and turned back to her, scanning her face for clues, but there were none. Her warm, golden-brown eyes met his calmly, giving nothing away, as usual. She never gave anything away unless she meant to, and then it was usually disappointment in him. ‘May I ask why you’re going?’ he asked, his voice carefully expressionless.
‘Why? I would have thought it was obvious, Nick. I can’t just be here for ever waiting for you to sort yourself out. Did you think I would? That I’d stay, to let you see your son a few times a year, in carefully arranged, apparently casual circumstances, so you can keep in touch without having to tell him you’re his real father? Or, more to the point, so you didn’t have to rock the boat and tell your other kids that we made love while their mother was still alive?’
‘Once,’ he said flatly. ‘Just once. It’s not as if we had an affair, Kate.’
‘No, you’re right. It was nothing so premeditated, was it?’ she acknowledged gently, as if he needed reminding about anything that had happened that hellish night. ‘We just reached out, to someone we could trust, someone who could trust us. But we were married—well, I suppose technically I was probably widowed at that point, but you weren’t. And we did make love.’
And they’d made a child. Until Ben had told him about the blood group, there had still been an element of doubt in his mind, of disbelief. But not now. Not any more.
He looked away from the shrewd, understanding eyes that saw too much. ‘Neither of us was thinking that night.’
‘And you’ve done your level best to avoid thinking about it ever since,’ she murmured. ‘So I’m going to make it easier for you. Easier for all of us. I’m taking Jem away, and we’re starting a new life.’
‘With Rob?’ he made himself ask, even though he’d heard it was off, but maybe it was back on, maybe that was why. ‘Is he going, too?’
A flicker of distress crossed her face. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘He deserves better than me. I’m like you, Nick. Scarred, broken, emotionally bankrupt. I’m no good to anyone. He’s a good man. He was very kind to me, and to Jem.’
He said nothing. After all, she was right. Rob Werrick was a good man, a decent man, who’d stood by her last year during her treatment for breast cancer, who’d supported her through the most dreadful days of fear and uncertainty, a role Nick had sorely wanted to play, but all he had been able to do was sit, isolated from her, and pray for her. And Rob was the man who’d taken Nick’s son to his heart and made room there for him, when the man who was his father had found he was unable to do so.
‘So was it you or him who called it off?’ he asked in spite of himself.
‘Me. He asked me to marry him, and I said no. I don’t love him—I can’t love him, not in the way he deserves to be loved.’ Her brown eyes were reproachful, her voice tinged with sadness. ‘So I’m going, and we’ll start again, and we’ll be fine.’
His heart felt as if it was being crushed in a giant fist, but if this was what she wanted, to go, to leave, then maybe she was right. Maybe it was for the best. Easier all round. And away from the shadow of this guilt they both carried, perhaps she’d find happiness with another man.
He ignored the little twist in his chest and nodded. ‘You’re right. If that’s what you want, then go, Kate. I won’t stop you—’
‘You can’t stop me, Nick.’
‘True. What about Jem? Will I ever see him?’
She gave a mocking little laugh that gave his heart another little wrench. ‘What about him? He’ll be fine. He doesn’t know you’re his father, it hasn’t done him any harm not to know, so it won’t in