He stepped into the room and crossed the floor, and Rose held her breath.
She was vaguely aware that Lila’s giggles had stopped and out of the corner of her eye she saw Lila turn her head as she noticed the man’s movements.
‘Daddy!’
This was Lila’s father?
He reached his daughter’s bed and bent over, kissing her on the forehead. ‘Hello, princess.’
Princess. Rose’s father used to call her that. But she forgot all about her father as this man straightened up and looked at her.
Her breath caught in her throat, stuck behind a lump that had lodged there.
Now that father and daughter were side by side Rose noticed that they had the same eyes. Dark and serious. His chocolate eyes were intense, probing and forceful and she felt as if he could see right into her soul.
* * *
Mitch straightened up and looked again at the woman who sat by his daughter’s bed. He’d noticed her as soon as he’d stepped into the room. He’d heard his daughter giggling, a sound he didn’t hear enough of, but he’d been distracted by the woman sitting beside Lila’s bed. She was not the type to go unnoticed.
He thought he’d imagined her at first. She didn’t look real. Her face was round and serene, perfectly symmetrical. Her green eyes were enormous and iridescent. Her mouth was wide and her nose small. She looked like a woman from a Renaissance painting. Maybe that Botticelli one, the one of the young Madonna with the baby Jesus and the two angels. The light from the window bounced off her golden hair, making it shine like spun silk and making him forget that he hated hospitals, making him forget that he wished he and Lila were a thousand miles away. She was absolutely beautiful, but he had no idea who she was or why she was by his daughter’s bedside.
She was watching him now, staring, silent, frozen like a deer in a spotlight. There was something fawn-like about her. Innocent. Young. Maybe it was her huge, luminous eyes.
Who was she?
She wasn’t a nurse. She had a hospital ID badge hanging around her neck but she wasn’t wearing a uniform and unless things had changed considerably since his last foray into a hospital he was pretty certain nurses didn’t have time to sit idly at patients’ bedsides. Unless the patient was critically ill, which he knew Lila wasn’t.
A feeling akin to dread flooded through him as it occurred to him who she might be. ‘Are you from social work?’ he asked. The social worker had left several messages for him on the station answering machine but by the time he got in at the end of the day it was well past office hours and too late to call back. He knew he could have returned to the house during the day to make a call but he’d been nervous. Worried about what the social worker might want. Worried she might want to talk about what had happened two years ago. That she might want to talk about Cara. He had refused counselling before and had no qualms about doing it again. They didn’t need it. They were all fine.
‘I meant to call you back,’ he fibbed.
She was frowning. A little crease had appeared between her green eyes, marring the perfect smoothness of her brow.
‘I’m not a social worker,’ she replied.
Mitch relaxed; expelling the breath of air he hadn’t even been aware of holding.
‘I’m Rose,’ she continued. ‘I’m just here to keep Lila company.’ She stood up. Her hair fell past her shoulders and she lifted her hands and gathered it all, twisting it into a long rope and bringing it forward to fall over one shoulder.
Now it was his turn to stare. Her movements were fluid and effortless. She’d obviously done this a thousand times before but to Mitch it was one of the sexiest things he’d ever seen and he was transfixed.
‘But now that you’re here, I’ll get going,’ she said, and before he could find another word to say she had stepped past Lila’s bed and was on her way out of the ward.
He couldn’t stop himself from watching her go and his eyes followed her out of the room.
She was slim but under her dark trousers he could see the two, full, round globes of her buttocks. They bewitched him as she stepped out of the room. She wore a soft white top that floated around her torso and reinforced his first impression of her as a golden angel.
Or maybe a golden rose.
Rose who? he wondered. She had left without a decent explanation of who she was and why she was there.
She was young and pretty and her name was Rose. That didn’t seem like enough information. He wanted more. But just thinking about her made him feel old. He couldn’t remember ever feeling young. He felt like he’d always been old. He knew he’d only felt that way since he’d lost his wife but he struggled to remember how he’d felt before. So now it felt as if he’d been born old.
His life was defined by before Cara died and after Cara died. But the more time that passed the harder it was to remember the before. He was so busy running the station and trying to figure out how to be a single father that he never seemed to have time to stop and sit and remember her. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow at night and up at dawn and he didn’t stop all day.
If he had time to stop he might realise he was lonely but this was not something he noticed on a day-to-day basis. He had got used to life on the station and the absence of his regular weekly trips into Broken Hill and he only noticed his loneliness when he visited the city. At the cattle station, despite its isolation, he was surrounded by people who knew him; some of the staff had worked for him for close to ten years. But in the city no one knew him and he knew no one. He could go all day without talking to a soul. Despite the fact that there were hundreds of people around him in the city he was alone with too much time on his hands.
He didn’t enjoy the city but he was going to have to keep returning until he could take Lila home. Maybe he should make an effort to make some connections with people. Talk to people, to complete strangers. In the country he wouldn’t hesitate but city people were different. He’d been one of them once but now he just felt disconnected. They seemed busier, more caught up in their own lives, existing close together but without any meaningful interaction. He was so used to sharing his day, his life, with his workforce. At least until dinner was finished but after that he put his children to bed and was now in the habit of spending his nights doing the bookwork before going to bed alone. It was becoming a sad existence. A self-perpetuating cycle.
His mind drifted back to Rose. Thinking about her was a pleasant distraction from the dozens of other things that had been occupying his mind of late. It had been a long time since a pretty woman had caught his eye. It wasn’t as if he met a lot of new women in Outback Australia and he’d just about given up noticing. He was tired and jaded, so it was a pleasant change to notice a pretty woman and he almost felt human again. But he knew he didn’t have time for anything more than an appreciative glance. His days were busy, too busy for romance.
And despite the pleasure that seeing a beautiful woman had given him, he couldn’t imagine ever falling in love again. It wasn’t worth the risk. He would have to recover as best he could and move on. Alone.
Next time he came to the city he would bring the boys with him, he decided. They wanted to see Lila, they were missing her, and now that she was on the road to recovery he knew she would like to see her little brothers too. He’d bring the boys and they would provide him with company. Then he wouldn’t need to think about young, blonde, Botticelli angels called Rose. He wouldn’t have time to wonder if he’d see her again.
‘IS SHE ASLEEP?’ Rose asked as her sister walked into the kitchen.
Scarlett