Zac found himself waiting outside the door to maternity, despite his intention not to. It was funny how he was aware he’d rediscovered the emotion of anticipation, which he’d lost for the last year. He shouldn’t be doing this, but Ava the midwife warred with his common sense, even though Alice Springs was nestled 2700 kilometres away from Sydney.
The connection with Ava he’d felt on the flight, and definitely after that, had been incredible, but he knew he should be letting her go. He needed to find the peace he’d come here to find and go home unencumbered. This was not a good place to find his heart open and expect his blonde sprite to follow him home. But last night had made him rethink that strategy.
So here he was, leaning against the wall outside the ward with his inner voice demanding, You’d better get your backside into gear and see what today brings, because you might just have to work out the rest as you go along.
He thought about Roslyn, and how when she’d hung suspended in a coma for those last twelve months, his fidelity and focus on her had remained rock solid. These short two months since she’d passed had been the same.
Until the flight.
It was just too soon for a blue-eyed ‘desert midwife’ to have smiled her way to his core. In one day and one night together, not counting work last night, which had strengthened the bond. A one-night stand with a woman he’d bonded with more closely than the best friend he’d been married to for five years.
Guilt draped thick, disapproving tendrils over him until he almost lifted his hand to wave them away. To make it worse, he’d already been unfair to Ava – asking her to lie to everyone here, to pretend they hadn’t spent the previous night together. He had thrown her generosity back in her face. Even as they’d worked together, he’d told himself the previous night had just been a fling.
Yet here he was. Making it a two-day fling. And he suspected he’d want tomorrow as well, because his gut had sunk when he’d heard she’d be gone in a couple of days.
Maybe it wasn’t a fling? Maybe it was a tumbling, stumbling, impossibly crazy love-at-first-sight situation with a woman from another world? After the night they’d shared, the rapport he’d found again, the attraction he felt for her despite his guilt, the thought of not having her body next to his when he went back to his hotel this morning had driven him to stand here. Waiting. In full view of everyone.
Where was the voice whispering hints that he was overreacting?
Where was the voice saying stop?
Nowhere.
The door from maternity opened and Ava’s chin lifted at the sight of him. A beam of mischievous promise swirled in those blue eyes as a tingle of recognition and reciprocation zinged along his not-so-tired-now limbs and down into his gut. With a look?
As she came closer, he held up his hand with a hint of apology. ‘Can we meet for breakfast? My hotel? Maybe talk?’
Her brows twitched. ‘Talk? As in, tell me we’re both going to work in the same ward and pretend we don’t know each other?’ He heard the scepticism, but he didn’t miss that her beautiful mouth lifted at the corner. He had to give her that one. It had been a shock. And there was the distinct possibility that talk might not happen at all if they spent time together.
But she hadn’t finished. ‘And promising me food again?’ She smiled.
He warmed under the promise of her curved lips and couldn’t help smiling back at her. ‘I guarantee I’ll supply breakfast this time. We both need the sustenance.’ And he needed to talk to her. Get to know her. Hell, he hadn’t asked any real questions about her family, her life. He promised himself they would eat before he took her back to his bed. If she’d come.
She’d crinkled her eyes at him in disbelief when he said ‘breakfast’. But she did say, ‘Sure. Your shout.’
His gut kicked with a different kind of hunger as she slid into place beside him, her hips swinging next to his as they walked a little too quickly towards his hire car. His heart pounded like a young jock’s, not like one belonging to a widower of thirty. Desperately, daringly, his fingers itched to take her hand. But he didn’t.
Ava was the opposite to Roslyn: sun-blonde hair, not black; thick, sensible ponytail holding the masses of unruly hair away from her face instead of sculptured helmet style; and blue eyes that soothed the world, which he could lose or find himself in.
So self-sufficient. Self-reliant. Self-everything. He’d never seen anybody so quietly, unobtrusively confident and competent regardless of the disasters being enacted around her. Even those disasters he set in place.
Like now? his inner voice asked. What did he expect? That in a month’s time he would forget her? Or that she would come back with him to his brash world of corporate hospitals and city life and just be with him? Or that he would stay here?
He shouldn’t be doing this, but darn it felt good to watch her walking beside him. He could feel the smile tug at his lips, easing the emotional exhaustion he’d been dragging around like a two-tonne rock since the accident.
If he was sensible, instead of savouring the joy of the moment like a kid with a lollypop, he’d be thinking how to explain about Roslyn. How to explain that he felt bad about having slept with someone else so soon after his wife’s death, and that, because of where they each lived, they had no long-term future.
Some of the joy seeped away and he glanced down at Ava. She looked up at him and smiled, and he forgot all that and tasted sweetness again.