MIRANDA had a quiet word with Janey and Marcia, then she and Nick left the medical centre and took the cool, silent walk across to his cabin. He didn’t touch her, and she somehow knew he needed to deal with Anna’s probable phone messages first, before they talked or did anything else.
Did he still have feelings for her, or was her presence in so many of their conversations about something else?
And then maybe he wouldn’t want to talk, in the end. Maybe those walls would come back up and he’d push her away. She could see all the possible bad endings leading off into the night, but still she walked beside him because something in her heart—and in his?—didn’t allow her to do anything else.
He went straight for the mobile phone on the kitchen bench-top once they were inside. ‘Yes, she called. Several times.’ He read a text. ‘Wants me to phone as soon as I get this, no matter how late it is.’
‘Does she mean that? It’s nearly three in the morning.’
He shrugged. ‘I’d better take her at her word.’
‘You’ll tell her about Josh’s attack?’
‘From any angle, it seems the right thing to do. I should have done it hours ago, as soon as we got to the medical centre. I shouldn’t have put it off. There’s no excuse. She’s his mother.’
But he was still fighting the idea, she thought. He certainly didn’t want to talk to her. His body was knotted tight as his thumb worked the numbers on the phone. He listened for a moment, then reported, ‘Switched off or out of range.’ He waited, then delivered a stilted message. ‘It’s Nick. Call back as soon as you can, any time. I got your messages.’
He flipped the phone shut and shoved it into his pocket, turning to Miranda as he did so. He had a helpless expression on his face that at once made her want to go up to him, kiss him, say all the right things—if she only knew what those were, if only she knew whether he wanted to hear them.
But she didn’t know, so she waited, and Nick spoke instead. ‘I’m wiped.’
‘So let’s sit.’
‘I want to go back to Josh soon.’
‘He’s sleeping. If he wakes up and wants you, Janey or Marcia will let you know straight away. Let me make you some hot chocolate or something. Do you have any?’
‘In the kitchen, on the bench,’ he said vaguely. ‘Josh would live on the stuff if he was allowed to.’
She nudged him in the direction of the couch and he laughed and told her, ‘I’m as helpless as a baby. You’ll have to undress me next.’
‘Well, I always like doing that…’
He laughed again, then added, ‘Holding yourself together is bloody tiring!’
‘So stop the holding.’
‘Yeah? How’s that done?’
‘Starts with the hot chocolate and a woman in your arms.’
‘Has to be the right woman.’
‘True.’
And the right woman is me…I think, I want…but there’s a long way to go yet…
She made two mugs of hot chocolate in the microwave and brought them over to the couch, where they sat and sipped in silence. She somehow knew it was better to wait for him, not to bother him with questions or words he might not want to hear tonight.
I’m not sure where we go from here, Nick. We told each other I love you ten years ago. I think we’ve discovered all of that intensity again this week, but can we really push through everything that’s in the way?
‘Do you know, my father’s business went belly up eight months before he told us?’ Nick said, when she was still following the implications of what had never, not for a moment, been simply an end-of-exams one-night stand, or, this week, a holiday fling.
The direction that his thoughts had taken surprised her into saying, ‘You haven’t told me anything about your father.’
‘No. Well.’
‘You get your reticence from him?’ she teased lightly.
‘Come here.’ He held out his arm to pull her close to him on the couch. Two empty mugs now sat on the coffee-table in front of them.
She went, having no choice about it. There was a night-follows-day inevitability about everything she felt for Nick Devlin, and if she was ever going to fight it, now wasn’t the time.
He held her as if he needed her down to his bones, turning to bury his face against her neck, wrapping his arms tight, breathing against her body, twisting her so they were locked together. ‘My dad was such a brute,’ he said, his voice rusty and reluctant. ‘But he was harder on himself than on any of us. I still believe some of the things he taught us, and it’s so hard to know what to keep and what to discard. I do keep too much to myself. I am too scared of really getting close. I’ve never hit Josh, but—’
The words startled her into speech. ‘Your father hit you?’
‘He believed it was the right thing to do. I don’t think he liked it. He administered it, you know? Like medicine. Planned and measured doses, on appropriate body parts, for selected offences. But he punished himself, too. Hell, did he ever punish himself! For eleven months, when I was sixteen, he struggled with the downturn in his business, not telling a soul—not my mother, not his employees—getting deeper into debt, putting together these doomed strategies to bail the company out, hiding paperwork, doing everything in secret because it wasn’t a man’s role to talk or seek help or share burdens. He shouldered everything on his own.’
‘I expect those planned and measured doses of his got bigger and more frequent, though.’
Silence. ‘Yes. That obvious?’
‘From the outside.’
‘So you’re saying I shouldn’t credit him with any courage? That he was taking out his failure on us as much as on himself?’
‘Oh, Nick, I wouldn’t presume to make those kinds of judgements. Not without knowing more.’
‘And, of course, he couldn’t keep it to himself forever. The whole thing came crashing down and he lost the business. Even then, he managed not to tell us until there was no choice. He ended up working the cash register at a garage for the last three years of his life, ringing up money for petrol and oil changes. He felt the humiliation and failure of it every minute of every day, but he didn’t talk about that either. He put up this angry, resentful wall so thick that I don’t think my mother could ever say to him, “You’re still a man in my eyes.” I don’t think they ever said that they loved each other. Not even when he was in the cardiac unit with his life hanging by a thread.’
‘He didn’t make it, did he?’
‘No, he died before they could get him stable enough for surgery.’
‘Were you there?’
‘No. By the time my mother phoned from the hospital…’ His voice went husky and trailed off. ‘I got there half an hour later. Practically cried on a nurse’s shoulder. I was nineteen. She was like you, a bit. Warm. Her heart in her eyes.’
‘Oh, Nick.’
‘Your—your parents are both still alive, aren’t they?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, seeing his desperate attempt to drag the conversation away from himself, away from the starkness of what he’d already said. She suspected he wouldn’t succeed—that there was a lot more—but gave him what he wanted, the safety of hearing her share some vulnerability, too. ‘They’re in their seventies now. Trundling around the country in a caravan.’
‘Are you close to them?’
‘I am. They’re lovely. I was an only child, though, and they were already in their late thirties when I was born. They worried a lot. They didn’t even want me to have a pet in case it died and broke my heart. It was a bit claustrophobic sometimes. I wanted…’
‘More freedom?’
‘More people to laugh with. More people to love.’
That was the word that made the seismic shift.
‘Oh, lord. Oh, hell. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Love. I—I expect Mum might have tried to say it—I love you, to Dad—but he wouldn’t have wanted to hear it from her.’
‘No? Not even when he was so ill?’
‘I honestly think his heart attack came from the pressure of feeling he’d failed in the real world and having no other measure of his own worth than that kind of financial success. And no outlet. For anything. Raising three sons didn’t count, maintaining a marriage didn’t count, all the years he had supported us, paid for private education, kept us in a comfortable house—none of that counted.’
‘Why are you telling me this now, Nick, do you think?’ she whispered. He was still holding her and she could feel the tension in him, still as tight as stretched wire after the long night of vigil over Josh’s asthma.
‘Because every time I catch myself echoing his behaviour, staying silent instead of talking, shouldering things alone instead of sharing…sharing so much with you this week, and years ago has felt—’ But he broke off, picked up where he’d been going before. ‘You know, yelling when I shouldn’t, being strict and angry with Josh when maybe he needs something different and I’m being blind to it—I think about Dad and I have this mix of anger and pity and regret…’ His voice cracked again. ‘He died when there was so much left that I hadn’t said…and that he hadn’t said…and that we probably wouldn’t ever have said, either of us, even if he’d lived another thirty years. And that’s so sad and so wrong.’
He sobbed against her body, big, shuddery, rusty sobs that he couldn’t control and that came from so far down inside him Miranda knew they’d taken him totally by surprise, even though she’d seen them coming for a while. Through that desperate little digression about her parents. For hours, in hindsight, ever since Josh had started wheezing on the beach and Nick had felt so powerless.
‘It’s all right. It’s OK,’ she whispered.
You just had to say it, no matter how inadequate it was.
It’s OK, because I’m here.
Which was pretty arrogant, if you thought about it. Did she really have any power at all to help him? Was she at all important?
She kissed his tears away before they fell, and the shudders stopped and the sobs ebbed until he was quiet. ‘Nick…?’ she ventured.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘You’re going to—And I don’t want it. Questions. Commentary.’
‘That’s not…’ Fair.
Pointless to say it. She had no expectation that he’d be fair, when he was already reeling and numb with shock at having made himself so vulnerable.
‘I just want to feel you and taste you and kiss you and forget,’ he said. ‘Can we do that, instead, Miranda? I’m…glad you’re here.’
Even this, she knew, was a huge admission, huge progress.
‘Yes, we can do that,’ she whispered, and barely got out the words before his mouth found hers.
He didn’t kiss her like a vulnerable man, he kissed her with a strength and certainty that made her stomach flip and the blood beat in her ears. He claimed her body with every touch, his fingers brushing across her tightened nipples through her clothing, his weight pressing against her. He muttered her name, over and over, and even though he didn’t tell her he loved her, she believed that he did.
She had to believe it.
On any other night, it would have gone much further, with Nick leading the way, grabbing her and pulling her towards the heights. They would have ended up in bed together in the dark within minutes, their bodies pressed skin to skin, setting each other on fire with their hands and their mouths. Miranda wanted it. Her body throbbed for it. But she didn’t think it wasn’t going to happen.
Sure enough, he tore himself away at the most impossible moment, just when she’d begun to think that it would be the best thing they could possibly do—make love, give themselves to each other and forget everything else.
‘I can’t do this.’ He slumped against the back of the couch and covered his face with his arm.
‘I want you to,’ she whispered.
‘I’m a mess.’
‘This isn’t messy.’
Silently, he shook his head, still hiding his eyes, and Miranda faced her choices. Let him go, or…
No, she wasn’t going to let him go tonight. She wasn’t going to let him run from his own nakedness. She wasn’t going to be nice.
‘This is not messy,’ she repeated softly. ‘This is right. This is us. Making love. Because we want each other. Because we love each other. Because Josh is safe and we’ve had a terrible night.’
She didn’t wait for him to answer. And she didn’t care if he couldn’t tell her that he loved her in return. Better to play with the kids on the beach and then say goodbye, rather than not play with them at all. Well, Shakespeare said it better. To have loved and lost…
She caressed his arm and drew it gently away from his face and down to his side. Then she straddled him on the couch, her knees on either side of his thighs and her body poised over him. She began to kiss him again, bending to find his mouth, anchoring it right where she wanted it with the curve of her palm against his jaw.
‘It’s OK,’ she whispered. ‘It really is.’
Because if they didn’t do this, she wasn’t convinced there was any way…any chance…that they’d find a connection when morning came. He’d be lost to her. He wouldn’t know how much she cared. Words weren’t enough. Words weren’t nearly as powerful and irrevocable as he thought.
‘Miranda…’ His voice was edgy, tense.
‘That’s not the way to say my name. Say it how you said it before.’ She stroked his neck and ran her fingers through his hair.
‘Miranda…’
‘That’s better. Getting better.’ She kissed him more deeply, teasing him with her parted lips and the languorous brush of her tongue.
He groaned and pushed on her shoulders, still fighting her and fighting himself, but the movement turned into a caress. His hands slipped down her body and closed over her breasts, cupping them through her clothing, stroking them until her nipples burned.
She peeled off her top, unhooked her bra and dropped both garments on the floor. He barely waited. His hands were there ready to brush over her breasts again at once. He wasn’t fighting any more.
‘Oh, Nick…’ But she’d claimed victory too soon.
‘I can’t.’
He already was.
She didn’t listen to his protest but began to unfasten the buttons on his shirt instead, opening it to run her hands over the hard heat of his chest. He groaned again, and she almost thought he was shaking. ‘Miranda…’
If he was asking her to stop, his body was saying something very different. She felt the upward thrust of his hips against her crotch and then he pulled her against him and her breasts pressed into his chest. ‘OK,’ he whispered. ‘You win.’
Only now did he take control, twisting so that he could lay her against the couch, her head pillowed against one of the bright cushions that sat against the arm. He kissed the shallow valley between her breasts, then moved his mouth down as he unfastened her shorts and dragged them over her hips and down her legs. Her whole body was throbbing, wanting him.
He discarded his own clothing and found the protection they needed with the same sinuous speed, and when he came back to bury his face in her neck, his eyes were closed. She lifted her hips and moved them against his body, asking for him, needing him. He gave her what she wanted, and they were locked together until she lost all sense of time and space. Every touch and every movement delivered a message of love, if he wanted to hear it.
But there was no lazy aftermath like they’d had the past two nights.
‘I have to get back to Josh.’ Nick dragged himself away and onto his feet, pacing halfway across the room in a matter of seconds as if needing to put in the most distance he could.
He found his discarded clothing on the floor and dressed before Miranda had even moved. She struggled to catch up to him, found her underclothing and her shorts but couldn’t find her top until Nick held it out for her.
‘I’ll walk you to your cabin first,’ he said. ‘Don’t argue, Miranda, will you?’
‘If you don’t want me to.’ She smiled. ‘Although I think I’ve just proved I can put on a pretty good argument if I have to.’
‘I’m not playing games.’ His mouth looked tight and tired, and so did his eyes.
‘I know that.’ She wanted to reach up and touch his face, smooth the tension away, but sensed that he wouldn’t let her. He’d already begun to push her away and, even though she’d expected it, the speed of it and the reality of it still hurt.
‘Thank you.’
‘You don’t need to thank me, Nick.’
But he said it again when they reached the steps up to her veranda. ‘Thank you, Miranda.’
He squeezed her hands but didn’t kiss her, and she went inside not knowing if he’d ever let her get close to him again. Anna would probably arrive on the weekend. Was Anna important? Whether she was or she wasn’t, Nick would be going home. Miranda would be Josh’s doctor again, and it would be so easy for Nick to run away from anything more than that, if he wanted to. She watched him from the cabin window as he walked across to the medical centre, his height and strength doing nothing to take away from the solitary appearance of his figure receding into the darkness.
‘I’m not going to let him push me away this time,’ she vowed out loud. ‘Whatever it takes, I’m not.’
Josh looked so much better when Miranda went in to see him at seven in the morning, you would never have known how ill he’d been ten hours earlier. He wanted breakfast, and when it arrived from the camp kitchen on a tray, with lids covering the dishes, he lifted the lids and greeted each item as if it were a birthday gift.
‘Strawberry yoghurt! Eggs and bacon and hash browns! Banana muffin!’ He ate it all, then wanted to know, ‘When am I going back to my cabin?’
‘Sweetheart, not yet,’ Miranda had to say. His chest didn’t yet sound as clear as she wanted it to be, and she knew how hard it would be for Josh to stay quiet once he was back in the company of the other children. ‘Maybe this afternoon, but I’ll still want to keep a close eye on you.’
‘Oh, I always have a close eye on me,’ Josh said. ‘Mummy keeps very close eyes.’ Was that a sigh?
‘I bet she does,’ Miranda said neutrally. ‘She loves you very much.’
Where was Nick?
Josh must have read her mind. ‘Dad’s gone to get breakfast.’
‘Oh, OK.’
She wanted to see him, wanted eye contact, wanted to know what kind of a fight she was facing today, what kind of a future she had to prepare for. The promise she’d made to herself in the early hours of the morning seemed glib now. Sometimes one person’s determination wasn’t enough.
‘It takes two,’ she said under her breath, and in the bright light of day, after too little sleep, she didn’t know if there were two people who really wanted this.
‘Nick!’ Anna reached him on the phone as he sat in the camp dining hall, gulping down his breakfast so he could get back to Josh.
‘What’s happening, Anna?’
‘I’m flying up today.’
‘Today?’
‘Louise and Bron are here.’ Anna’s sisters. Anna herself was the middle one of the three. ‘Both of them.’ She gave a laugh, sounding a little bemused about it. ‘They flew down from Sydney on Wednesday afternoon, and they’re going to look after Mum for ten days. I’m a bit…’The sentence trailed off. Anna didn’t seem to know how she felt about her sisters being there.
‘I wasn’t expecting you until the weekend. Sunday.’
‘So, yippee,’ she drawled, ‘you’re off the hook two days early.’
‘That’s not what I meant, damn it, and you know it.’
‘You would have known my plans sooner if you’d returned my calls. I was getting frantic last night. I could have killed you.’
‘And you could have called sooner. I was waiting half the day.’
‘I—I know. I’m sorry about that. How is Josh? Is he fine? Is he still having a good time? Is he eating right? I—It feels weird being this out of touch. Having to ask these questions. Not seeing him. Like vertigo.’
And, of course, he had to tell her, no point in trying to hedge or soften it. Even knowing this, he said the words with slow reluctance. ‘He had a pretty major attack last night.’
‘Pretty major? What does that mean?’
Her slight air of bewilderment—vertigo, she’d just called it—disappeared. She was instantly on the alert, ready to judge him and find him wanting. He could feel the sizzle of her sudden anger down the phone like electricity, and in an odd way it put both of them on more solid ground.
Because it was so familiar.
And because he knew, now, what he wanted instead.
‘How the hell could that happen with Miranda around? A pretty major attack?’ She swore. ‘How major? When? What did you do, Nick?’
‘Took him to the medical centre.’ There! At the hint of a suggestion that it might be his fault, he’d immediately distanced himself, withdrawn, given her the bare minimum.
‘You know that’s not what I mean!’ Her voice rose higher. ‘Why won’t you ever give me the details?’
Because anything I say you turn around and use as a weapon, so I use weapons of my own—silence and withdrawal.
He wouldn’t have said it, even though he’d started to understand it so much better, but she didn’t wait for his answer anyway.
‘How could you let it happen, Nick? You know his triggers, you know how fast it can get serious if he has a major exposure.’ Her tone changed again, turning wooden and cold. ‘You weren’t even there, were you?’
‘Look, wouldn’t you rather hear how he is now than how it happened in the first place?’
She gave a shocked moan. ‘How he is now? You mean—?’
‘He’s fine,’ he cut in quickly, not really wanting to punish her to that extent. ‘He had a good night, and he’s hungry. He accidentally breathed in some fine ash from someone’s campfire. He was stirring it up with a stick and it was still warm and just flew up into his face.’
She made another sound.
‘Miranda was brilliant, and so were the medical centre staff.’ He didn’t tell her how scared he’d been, couldn’t control the way his voice softened as he spoke Miranda’s name.
‘So he’s with you? Are you in your cabin? Dr. Carlisle’s always good, Nick, you sound as if it’s something miraculous. Josh adores her. I wouldn’t have let him go up there if she hadn’t been going. Can I speak to him?’
‘He’s still at the medical centre. It’s a small hospital, really, they have good equipment on hand. Brand-new, after the cyclone.’
‘And you’re there with him, right?’ she asked, an ominous note building again in her voice as she readied herself for raising her righteous anger by several notches. ‘Nick, even though Dr Carlisle is brilliant, she can’t give him the same attention as a parent.’
‘She would. Always.’
‘Always?’
‘She would.’
‘For heaven’s sake, I cannot believe this.’ She stopped suddenly, and sighed. ‘OK. OK. Just tell me you’re with him, that’s all!’
Nick felt the familiar stubbornness overtaking his best intentions and didn’t answer her challenge. ‘When does your flight get in?’
‘Early afternoon, but I want to speak to Josh.’
‘What time? I can meet you at the airport.’
‘I want…to speak…to Josh!’ she articulated with cold precision. ‘For a man who claims to love his son—’ She broke off suddenly, and he thought he heard her sisters’ voices in the background, sounding impatient. ‘I—I—Just a minute, Nick,’ she said in a different tone, then put her hand over the phone so her words to Louise and Bron were muffled. ‘OK, OK,’ he faintly heard. ‘I do see. Yes, I can hear it. I’m not perfect. I can’t work miracles on myself. Give me a chance.’ The phone clattered and he heard, crisp and clear, ‘Sorry, Nick.’
‘Don’t worry. Josh and I will phone you back,’ he told her, and cut the connection because he wasn’t confident of his own ability to stay civilised and in control of himself if they kept talking.
Enough with breakfast.
His appetite had gone.
Miranda would probably have come to see Josh at the medical centre by now, and he felt his pulse leap at the thought of seeing her. What time had it been when he’d said goodbye to her at her cabin steps? Three-thirty in the morning? Less than four hours ago, but it felt like a lot longer.
He wanted to hold her in his arms, promise her the world, protect her and laugh with her and slake his doubts with their two bodies moving together. He wanted to tell her about Anna’s phone call, about the repertoire of too-familiar accusations, about the tangled layers of mistrust and miscommunication, and that odd note of bewilderment that had crept into Anna’s voice a couple of times. He wanted to hear Miranda promise him something different—faith in each other, shared understanding that happened with words and without them.
But then as he came up the ramp to the medical centre, he saw her through the side window, laughing at something Grace had just said. Miranda tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and her nose wrinkled when she smiled. To a stranger’s eye, from this distance, she could have been little older than seventeen with her lithe build and bobbing ponytail and innocent face, free of make-up.
Grace was laughing, too. The two women looked oddly similar for a moment, although their colouring was not in the least alike. Still, there was something—in the way they laughed, in their sensible approach. They were both the kind of woman that would be a man’s best friend, as well as his lover, and who gave too much sometimes.
Nick wanted Miranda with his whole heart and his whole soul at that moment, but the understanding soured as soon as it formed.
With all his baggage, with all his blocks, why on earth would she want to be a part of his life?