THE sun had finally gone down when Jacinta left the hospital. Fizzy was resting comfortably and had been persuaded to stay in overnight, but only after Jacinta had rung the clinic and asked Mike to despatch Will and Dean to the hospital.
Now that the two boys were there, and had promised to stay until visiting hours were over, Jacinta was free to finish the job she’d started, however many hours ago it had been. At least Mike wouldn’t be there. According to the boys, they’d completed the painting then he’d driven them to the hospital in her car. He’d left it in the parking area with instructions to the boys to give her the keys, and had taken a cab, presumably back to his own car and then home.
She found the car, drove back to town and parked behind the clinic, glad of the security light her arrival activated. Unlocking the back door, she snapped on the lights in the passage and disarmed the alarm. The smell of paint was overwhelming. Hopefully it might dissipate a little by morning, or nauseous patients would regret coming in.
Another key opened the door to the waiting room, but this time she didn’t need to switch on any lights. They were on and what they revealed made her catch her breath in surprise.
‘I’m glad you came back. The security firm didn’t give me a key for any internal doors so if I needed a bathroom before I finished, I was going to have to find one up in the mall.’
Mike was at the far end of the room, an upended chair balanced on the floor in front of him.
‘Y-you came b-back?’ Jacinta stuttered. ‘Why?’
‘Same reason you did, I suppose. To finish the job.’ He waved his hand around in the air. ‘What do you think?’
But Jacinta was still taking in the man rather than the room. Thankfully, he was once again wearing a shirt.
And an old slipper with the toe cut out on his left foot.
Guilt smote her!
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t give you more tablets!’ she said. ‘If you’d kept taking them it would have been feeling better by now.’
‘It is feeling better now, thank you. Slightly better.’ His smile would have disarmed a terrorist! ‘I stopped at a friendly pharmacy on the way back from the hospital, showed ID and swore on a stack of pharmacology books I’d return with a completed script, then flashed my toe and got some tablets.’
‘I’ll write you a script now,’ she said, glad of something to do—something that would take her, even momentarily, out of the room, so she’d stop staring at him.
And remembering the smile.
‘You haven’t told me what you think.’
His voice stopped her escape and she turned, and this time did look around.
‘You’ve been doing the chairs,’ she said, although it seemed totally unbelievable that such a thing could be happening. She might have covered chairs to make the waiting room look better, but Michael Trent, should he have wanted the place looking better, could have ordered a dozen new chairs—two dozen, in fact, or twenty dozen. Michael Trent tacking suspect lengths of material over the old chairs? It simply didn’t make sense.
‘It looks fantastic,’ she said, because he seemed to be waiting for an answer, and because it did. As good as his word, he’d found a carpet runner which covered the worst of the paint stains, all the old green walls were now bright yellow and stacked against the end wall were what looked like a number of paintings or prints.
He must have seen her looking at them.
‘I thought, with such smart new walls, it would be a shame to put back the old posters of diseased lungs and immunisation schedules. We can put them in the consulting rooms, if you think patients need to see them, and hang a few cheerful pictures on the wall.’
‘Cross-sections of warts, I suppose?’ Jacinta teased. She’d been so bemused by his use of the pronoun ‘we’ it was a wonder she could talk at all.
He chuckled at her remark, and the deep, seductive sound restarted the tingle, only this time it wasn’t just in her stomach. It was in her skin, and in her chest, and down her arms and legs, and causing the curl thing again in her toes.
‘I’ll get you a script,’ she said, and hurried as fast as she could, without actually running, towards her consulting room.
Mike watched her scuttle—there was no other word for it—away, and wondered what he’d done to bother her. He hadn’t expected extravagant praise for his efforts and she’d finally offered the word ‘fantastic’, but only after he’d prompted her, and even then it had lacked a good deal in the heartfelt department.
Put out by her reaction, he attacked the next tack with unnecessary gusto, driving it into his forefinger instead of the chair.
Cursing his clumsiness—and the woman who’d suckered him into this job—he sucked at the blood, then realised it gave him a perfect excuse to follow her into her consulting room. Someone who kept a private supply of drugs—against the clinic rules—would doubtless be able to supply a sticky plaster.
She was over by the sink, rubbing a small hand towel across her face, a very disconcerting action from his point of view.
‘You haven’t been crying, have you?’
Warm brown eyes peered at him across the top of the towel.
‘Crying? Why on earth would I be crying? I’ve been running around all day with paint on my face—you told me so, remember—so I thought I’d wash it off.’
Jacinta was pleased the excuse sounded so reasonable. She could hardly have told him that splashing her face with cold water had been an attempt to cure the tingles.
And it hadn’t worked.
First his voice, accusing though it had been, then the sight of him, had brought them back a thousandfold.
She was battling the renewed attack when she saw the blood on the snowy white handkerchief he held in his hand.
‘Oh, heavens, I thought we’d finished with blood for the day.’
Setting all thoughts of tingles firmly aside, she crossed the room and took his hand in hers. Seeing the tiny pinprick, she shook her head.
‘You must have squeezed it to make so much blood come out. Is that why you came in? Do you need a plaster to make it better? Plain or coloured? I can even do a cartoon one, if I’ve any left. Barney Rubble or Fred Flintstone?’
Jacinta looked up at him, not really expecting a reply, and saw something in the grey-green, or possibly grey-blue now, of his eyes that stopped both the tingles and her breath. She was still holding his hand—couldn’t bring herself to release it—and her brain had stopped working.
Also her lungs.
And possibly her heart.
‘Fred Flintstone, if you’ve got one,’ he said, his voice huskier than a forty-a-day smoker’s.
It should have restarted normal functioning within her body, but the huskiness added to her confusion, so in the end Mike gently withdrew his hand and stepped away from her, breaking the spell he’d cast upon her.
Unwittingly, she hoped as she scrabbled through a drawer for the particular dressing she’d offered him. The man would be lethal if he could affect women like that at will!
‘How did you leave things with Fizzy?’ he asked as she ripped the protective paper off the dressing and steeled herself to approach—to touch—him again.
‘She was still a little dopy from the operation. The obstetrician did a D and C straight away as she was still bleeding quite severely, but she’ll be OK.’
‘Upset?’
She had taken his hand again so had to look up into his eyes. He seemed genuinely concerned and she set aside her preconceived notion of Michael Trent the cold-blooded corporate boss and responded to his expression.
‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly, sticking the little bit of plaster around his finger then releasing his hand so she could step away from him again.
‘I think in time she’ll be relieved, but she was on her own—on the streets—because she refused to have an abortion.’
Jacinta hesitated. How much could she tell him—and how much did he really want to know?
But Fizzy was one of the patients who’d convinced her of the need for Abbott Road to stay open, so maybe Fizzy’s story would help.
‘Let’s get back to the upholstery work. I’ll explain as we tack. If I don’t get some food soon I’ll collapse.’
He started to say something about going out for food, but she waved his protests away.
‘Finish the chairs first, then food, then I really should get back to the hospital. I want to see her before I go home.’
‘You’re a bossy little thing,’ he grumbled as he followed her out of the room, but Jacinta didn’t mind the insult. She was glad to be in the bigger space, where the power of Mike’s presence should be lessened by the space she could put between them.
And if she focussed on what she had to do…
Hard when the man was smiling at her as he organised the task.
‘Four chairs left, that’s two each, though I’ve got it down to such a fine art I’ll probably beat you. And I’ll let you use my hammer. I managed with the wrench until I took the boys up to the hospital, then I slipped home for a hammer.’
Mike passed her the hammer, a piece of material and a handful of tacks.
‘I’ve figured the secret is in doing one side first then pulling the material really tightly across the seat and holding it with two tacks on the other side while you get the rest of it right. The underside isn’t too neat but I don’t suppose many of our patients pick up the chairs to check the underneath.’
Did he sound as uneasy as he felt?
Or was the feeling more unsettled than uneasy?
And why should he feel uneasy? Or unsettled? Apart from the fact that this was his clinic—and these were his chairs—he was doing this woman a favour!
He glanced towards Jacinta, and saw the pink tip of her tongue held between her teeth as she hammered the first tack home. Her face might now be free of paint, but her clothes were still a disgrace, yet that pink tongue-tip, and the way her shiny brown hair, released from the protective cap, now fell softly to her shoulders, attracted his attention.
Attracted him?
‘You were going to tell me about Fizzy,’ he reminded her, and saw the tongue-tip disappear and a frown appear between her eyes as she glanced, briefly, his way.
‘She wanted the baby,’ she said, returning to work and hammering fiercely. ‘I suppose that translates to wanting someone to love—having someone of her own. Without understanding the reality of motherhood, the idea of a baby of their very own is very seductive for an unloved and abused young woman.’
‘Abused?’
He must have revealed a healthy dose of scepticism in the word for Jacinta flashed another frown his way.
‘She became pregnant by her stepfather. His abuse had been going on for years—which is why she finds it hard to sleep at night. She’d lie awake expecting—dreading—his arrival in her room. When she was younger, he told her he’d kill her if she told anyone, and he was—is—a violent enough man for her to believe him. When she did finally tell her mother, her step-father, naturally, denied it and it was Fizzy’s word against his.’
Mike felt physically sickened by the story Jacinta was relaying in flat, unemotional tones. Stories of childhood abuse appeared in newspapers so often these days he’d begun to wonder if all of them were true, or if digging into the past, for some people, might be a way of excusing their behaviour in the present.
But he’d met Fizzy, and what had happened to her wasn’t far enough in the past to be a distorted memory. What had happened to her—as far as the pregnancy was concerned any-way—was real.
‘But once she was pregnant? Surely then her mother must have accepted it?’
‘Why?’
Jacinta finished the chair she’d been working on, set it back on its legs and turned to look at him.
‘Because she’s her mother?’ she answered for him. ‘Do you think a woman who’s sworn to love, honour and cherish the man she married wants to believe he’s been raping her daughter—because that’s what it is. We call it abuse, and people think, Oh, so he yelled at her occasionally—but what’s been going on with that child is rape. He’s been raping her—regularly—and because her mother couldn’t handle that concept, she accused Fizzy of lying, of deceit and of promiscuity.’
She paused because her voice was shaking with the rage Fizzy’s story always caused and she didn’t want to make a complete fool of herself.
‘Then her mother kicked her out. Thirteen, pregnant and out on the streets. Will and Dean found her on her second night and more or less adopted her. They’d been on their own for a while and knew the shelters and how to get youth allowance, but they also knew she should have some kind of regular medical attention so eventually they took her to the Women’s Hospital. The sister who saw her first contacted social workers, who contacted her mother, who labelled her a runaway and took her home, where her stepfather belted her black and blue in the hope of causing a miscarriage.’
The loud oath from Mike told her what effect her story was having on him, and she looked up to see him shaking his head in disbelief.
‘We read about it,’ she said gently, trying to ease the physical revulsion she knew he was feeling, ‘see people talking about it on TV, but somehow we’re so inured to it we tend to cope with the concept of adults’ cruelty and misuse of children by not thinking too much about it, by telling ourselves it’s rare and the authorities are probably handling it.’
Mike nodded but didn’t say anything, so she hammered in tacks on the second chair, the sharp blows punctuating the words as she finished her story.
‘The boys saw her home address on the hospital form she filled out. They went to the house, guessing what was likely to happen. Fizzy came out at three in the morning, barely able to walk. The boys got her to a corner store where there’s a phone, rang me and I picked all three of them up and took them home.’
‘How come they had your number? Why would they ring you?’
‘Last one done,’ she said, tipping it up, then looking at the unfinished chair he had tipped upside down but wasn’t working on. ‘Here, use the hammer. You’re holding up the show.’
He took the hammer, but not the hint.
‘Why you?’ he repeated.
‘I’d met them before—the boys—and told them to ring if ever they were in trouble and needed me. I’d given them a phone card to use, so as long as they could find a public phone they’d be right.’
Mike hammered the last of the tacks into place. Fizzy’s story had sickened him, and he knew there was more to Jacinta’s tale of ‘meeting’ Will and Dean, but he’d heard the exhaustion in her voice and didn’t want to push for more.
Hell! He was exhausted himself, and he’d arrived hours after she’d begun the painting. And on top of the physical work, she’d had all the emotional stress of Fizzy’s miscarriage.
‘All done,’ he announced. ‘Now, tell me which painting you want where and I’ll get them hung. Then I’ll take you out to dinner before you go to the hospital.’
‘You don’t need to take me out to dinner,’ she protested, and he smiled to himself. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the women he knew would have used paint-stained jeans as an excuse, but Jacinta seemed to have as little regard for her appearance as she did for his opinion of her.
‘I know that, but we both need to eat and there’s a little wine bar up the road that used to have fantastic food. I know it’s still there because I parked my car near it and walked down the mall. I’d like to revisit it, and don’t want to eat alone.’
To him, this explanation was eminently reasonable—and it was, more or less, the truth. He did know the place, and the food had been good, and spending a little more time in Jacinta’s company made good business sense.
Wanting to spend more time in her company was a matter he’d consider later.
But in spite of all this reasonable reasoning, the look she’d shot at him while he’d contemplated his own incentives had been chock-full of suspicion.
‘If you mean Marco’s, the food’s still good, but he closes at nine on Sunday nights. If you want to eat there we’ll have to go now and hang the paintings later.’
‘I know you want to go back to the hospital so I can hang the paintings later,’ he heard himself offer. It wasn’t a whirlpool he was in but quicksand—and he was being sucked in deeper and deeper by the minute. Yet he found himself adding, with almost cheerful aplomb, ‘At least, once the nails are in place, you can change them around if they don’t suit.’
The second look he got had disbelief mixed with the suspicion, but Jacinta walked across to her consulting room and ducked inside. Within seconds he heard water running.
He’d won! She was coming to dinner with him.
Mike cooled his unexpected spurt of satisfaction by reminding himself she was coming to eat with him because she was hungry and in no way did she see this as anything more than convenience.
‘I’ll check the back is locked and set the alarm,’ she said a few minutes later, locking the door of the consulting room and turning to face him, the brown hair, brushed into shining submission, falling like dark silk around her face. ‘It’s easier to leave my car here and walk back for it later.’
She disappeared out the door, which was when he realised that instead of staring after her, thinking about dark silk, he should be following to wash his hands and check his own features for paint blobs before she locked the interior door.
Jacinta spent the time away from him lecturing herself on the fact that eating with Mike was an opportunity to tell him all that was wrong at Abbott Road—things that needed more than paint to fix. She was not to blow it by mooning over the man, or being distracted by eyes that were as changeable in colour as lake water. Neither would she be seduced into forgetting what was, after all, a duty by a voice that raised goose-bumps on her arms and caused stomach tingles just thinking about it.
Concentrating on this lecture to herself, even nodding her own agreement to each of her own points, it meant she wasn’t looking where she was going, so she walked full tilt into Mike as he emerged from the bathroom.
Then they did that silly thing people did when walking towards each other on the street—both went one way, then the other, until in the end he seized her gently by the upper arms and steered her around his body.
She was busy rubbing her arms to get rid of more goose-bumps when she heard his low, alluring chuckle.
‘Would you believe I’m going the wrong way now?’ He’d turned to follow her back to the waiting room. ‘All I was going to do was check you’d finished locking up.’
But Jacinta wasn’t going to be distracted by low alluring chuckles. As if the tingles weren’t enough, the goose-bumps had been a pretty good indication that spending time with this man was the folliest of follies—if follies came in degrees. Sure, there were things she needed to discuss, but now she’d met him she could get through to him on the phone—
No! Phones meant voices and his voice was part of the problem.
Surely her emails would get to him now they’d met. He must have—
She turned towards him.
‘Do you have a private email address?’
‘Trying to duck out of dinner, Jacinta?’ he asked, as if her motive were lit by a neon sign above her head. ‘My email address won’t do you any good. I’m not at home or at the office to collect a polite sorry-but-I-can’t-make-it email.’
Jacinta managed to look affronted—or hoped it was affronted she looked, not plain foolish!
Tried for dignity.
‘I was asking so I could let you know how Fizzy gets on.’ Had ‘blatant lie’ popped into the signboard above her head? ‘From past experience, emails addressed to you at head office fail to get through.’
She whisked out the front door, then realised she’d forgotten to arm the alarm and whisked back in again—bumping into the man for the second time in five minutes.
‘Seems I’m always getting in your way,’ he said, the deep voice stroking her nerves while his hands, resting again on her upper arms to steady her, set fire to her skin.
‘No, no! It was my fault. Not looking where I’m going. Not expecting anyone else to be here after hours.’
She was rambling, but that was only because Mike still had hold of her and, though totally impersonal, his touch was destroying whatever remnants of equilibrium she’d retained after this most confusing and emotional day.
‘But you are?’
Jacinta frowned up at him.
Are what? Couldn’t he hear?
‘Here after hours?’ he clarified, a slight pucker of the skin between his eyebrows threatening imminent disapproval.
‘Not often. Paperwork. You know.’
She tried for airy nonchalance and would have been more successful if he hadn’t still been holding her and she’d been able to step away from him—wave her arms about a bit.
Suspicion warred with a feeling Mike didn’t want to name. Calling it attraction would be ridiculous. He was intrigued by the woman, nothing more. And paperwork was a reasonable reason to work late—so why did she seem so wary about admitting it?
And he should let go of her, no matter how warm and velvety to the touch her skin might seem.
He forced his fingers loose.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered when he saw red marks on her arms where his hands had been. ‘I keep grabbing you, but it’s self-preservation—fear you might accidentally step on my toe.’
He hoped he didn’t sound as if he was mumbling—the words had seemed a bit uncertain in his head.
‘That’s OK,’ Jacinta said, so sweetly he wondered if he’d imagined the virago. ‘Why don’t you go on up the steps so there’s no possibility of an accident? I’ll stay here, set the alarm, lock up and then follow. It is a narrow stairway.’
Was she making excuses for him or teasing him? Mike wasn’t sure, but the suggestion was sensible, particularly as it removed him from Jacinta’s immediate vicinity on a temporary basis at least. He climbed the stairs, aware the dim light was all the entrance offered. He added ‘Better lighting’ to the list he kept forgetting to write down.
Maybe he was losing it.
He could see the headlines now. BUSINESS MAGNATE BURNT OUT AT THIRTY-EIGHT! CLINIC EMPIRE COLLAPSES.
‘I don’t suppose you know who Karen is?’ he said gloomily, when Jacinta joined him and they turned towards the wine bar.
‘Karen in your office? The one who’s just had the baby? Actually, I popped in to see her for a minute while I was at the hospital. Saw the baby, too! He’s a gorgeous little boy.’
She sighed as if seeing a baby was the most blissful occurrence in the world.
‘Does she handle your emails? Is that why you asked?’
Jacinta stopped walking and turned to frown at him.
‘Oh, no, that can’t be right. I know she’d pass on anything I sent to her. She’s been to Abbott Road herself—when her husband jammed his thumb in the car door and she came to pick him up because he couldn’t drive. Fainted at the sight of blood, poor man. Karen was sure he’d pass out during the delivery, but apparently he came through like a trouper.’
Mike folded his lips tightly together and gritted his teeth so he didn’t say anything stupid, but if he’d been disconcerted earlier about some of the things he didn’t know about his employees—about his business, in fact—he was now furious. Here was this woman, employed to be a doctor, nothing else, prattling on about someone who worked in his office, miles from the city, as if they were second-best friends. She not only knew who Karen was, but apparently knew Karen’s entire family!
If he could just place this Karen…
He closed his eyes and tried to visualise the staff in the big room he occasionally walked through on his way to see Barry or Chris or Jill. Could he see anyone in the picture with a bulging stomach?
‘Yow! Hell!’
He was vaguely aware of Jacinta starting as he yelled, but the pain in his toe was so excruciating he couldn’t worry about startling someone. He slumped onto the wrought-iron seat someone had placed practically in the middle of the mall, its legs at such an angle that any unsuspecting passer-by could stub his toe on it.
‘You must have seen it!’ Jacinta said, and he could hardly tell her about the red haze of anger, or about closing his eyes as he’d tried to picture Karen.
‘Well, I didn’t,’ he snapped, his hands clutching his slipper while the fire in his toe diminished slightly.
‘Did you take another tablet?’
Of course he hadn’t. He’d taken one at two, then one at four, but he’d been so busy, covering chairs, that six o’clock had come and gone.
‘Are they in your pocket? You can take one now. I can slip back to the clinic and get you some water. Then you should go home. Going to the wine bar was a silly idea when you’re in so much pain. What if someone trod on it?’
Going home was a sensible suggestion but he knew if he didn’t get answers to at least some of the questions this unusual day had thrown up, he would go mad.
He didn’t need all the answers, just some.
He wouldn’t ask anything more about Karen. He wasn’t about to admit to not knowing one of his own office staff. However, there were questions about Fizzy and the boys, and about Jacinta’s deliberately offhand reply to his question about her after-hours activities and, now he thought about it, he wouldn’t mind knowing if Adam Lockyer was her boyfriend.
‘We’ll go to the wine bar,’ he said. Telling himself his mind could conquer pain, he put his foot gingerly to the ground and tested it by putting weight on it.
‘Actually, it’s no worse than it was before,’ he said, surprised into admitting it. ‘Apparently it’s only when it hits something that it really hurts.’
Jacinta’s look suggested she didn’t believe a word he was saying, but she didn’t argue with him, though she did offer a hand to help him to his feet.
And he took it, not because he needed it but because he’d remembered just how small and fragile her hand had felt in his the previous evening, and he wanted to know if he’d imagined it.
He hadn’t, so he kept hold of it, pleased she didn’t try to pull it away.
Walking hand in hand with him is not a good idea, Jacinta told herself, but she was tired and it had been an emotional day, and to have someone to hold her hand was very comforting.
Or it would have been, if the hand holding hers wasn’t causing other problems—offering things that went far, far beyond comfort.