Melting the Argentine Doctor’s Heart

Meredith Webber

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Excerpt

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Epilogue

Copyright

‘It’s impossible that you stay here …

‘Find a hotel in the city. I will visit you both there. You spring this on me with no warning, but I’ll not deny my child. I will make arrangements, speak to lawyers, see she is—’

‘Financially secure?’ Caroline spat the words at Jorge, her fury a palpable force. ‘She needs your love, Jorge, not your money. Would that be too hard for you to offer her?’

Would it? He looked towards the child. Jorge found his heart was hurting again. Was the wall he’d built around his feelings crumbling so easily?

‘Come inside,’ he said at last.

About the Author

MEREDITH WEBBER says of herself, ‘Some ten years ago, I read an article which suggested that Mills and Boon were looking for new Medical™ Romance authors. I had one of those “I can do that” moments, and gave it a try. What began as a challenge has become an obsession—though I do temper the “butt on seat” career of writing with dirty but healthy outdoor pursuits, fossicking through the Australian Outback in search of gold or opals. Having had some success in all of these endeavours, I now consider I’ve found the perfect lifestyle.’

To my Argentinian relatives, the wonderful Daniela and Damian, with thanks

CHAPTER ONE

THE anger that had sprung to fierce life when Caroline had read the article about the clinic in Argentina continued to burn within her as her plane crossed the Pacific Ocean. It simmered nicely as she struggled with a three-year-old through Customs in Buenos Aires and onto the local plane for the short flight north to Rosario, where one Dr Jorge Suárez had set up a special clinic for people of the indigenous Toba tribe who had settled in the city at the end of the twentieth century.

One Jorge Suárez!

Unfortunately, as the taxi took Ella along endless tree-lined boulevards and past wide parks, which she knew from the guide book she’d read on the flight were called plazas, the anger began to fade. Doubts rushed in to fill the space where it had been. The fact that Ella was asleep beside her meant Caroline had nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.

And the thoughts were not good!

What if Jorge had actually meant what he’d said in that devastating, humiliating, soul-eroding email sent from France four years ago? What if she was wrong in assuming he’d sent it because his beautiful face, and probably his whole body, had been scarred and, proud man that he was, he’d feared her pity? What if he hadn’t ever loved her, and she’d been nothing but a convenience, someone to be lied to so he could get her into bed?

She hadn’t believed his words when the email had arrived; couldn’t believe that the overwhelming, all-conquering love she’d thought they’d shared had been nothing more than a farce; their talks of marriage a sham. Frustration had been her strongest emotion at the time, frustration because she couldn’t fly to his side and demand to know if his words were true. But news of her mother’s breast cancer had come through only a week before his accident and she’d been on the long flight back to Australia when it had happened.

By the time she’d gathered her wits and had organised for her mother to begin treatment, he’d changed his email address, and letters sent to him at the hospital to which he’d been airlifted after the accident had been returned unopened. That was when she’d been forced to wonder if she’d been deceived by a master of the love game.

Two months later, while supporting her mother through debilitating radiation therapy, Caroline had realised she was pregnant. She’d searched the internet until she’d found his father’s address in a suburb called Recoleta in Buenos Aires, and sent a letter to Jorge care of that address. After all, a man deserved to know he was about to become a father. That letter, too, had boomeranged right back to her.

The Spanish-accented voice of the cab driver—deep and rich, so like Jorge’s—told her she was close to her destination and now doubt turned to panic.

Why had she done this?

How could she have been so stupid?

To have dragged Ella all this way on an assumption made from a very blurry internet photograph—was she mad?

Fortunately, though not so fortunate for the people who lived here, the taxi had turned off the tree-lined boulevard, down a suburban street then into a small lane between makeshift homes.

‘Poor people who come from the north,’ the taxi driver explained. ‘The city builds them housing but more come before they can all have homes.’

The clinic looked exactly as it had on the internet, like an old corner store, painted white, and the small, brown-skinned people lazing around outside it might have been the same ones she’d read about in the article, mostly indigenous Toba people who lived in this overcrowded section of the big city of Rosario. The taxi stopped and though her stomach was knotted tightly and her lungs had seized so she could only gasp in short choppy breaths, she resisted the temptation to ask the driver to take her back to the airport.

Resisted, too, the panic that threatened to overwhelm her, reminding herself of the reason she had come.

Whatever she might feel—whatever might lie between Jorge and herself—her daughter deserved a father. Growing up without one herself, she had longed for someone to call Daddy. But worse than the longing—that hollow gap in her life—she knew how insecure it had made her around boys, and how uncertain she’d been about men.

Perhaps it even explained how easily she’d been seduced by Jorge’s declarations of love …

Refusing to acknowledge such a dread thought, she forced air deep into her lungs, shook her daughter gently awake, paid the cab driver, and muttered, ‘Here goes!’ to herself.

Yes, her voice had quavered and, yes, she had a momentary concern about bringing Ella to this obviously overcrowded area of what had looked a beautiful city, but having come all this way for Ella to meet her father, Caroline was not going to be stopped at the front door.

The sleepy child grumbled slightly when her mother lifted her, but as the little arms locked around Caroline’s neck, and the soft, thick, dark curls brushed her cheek, her tension eased, determination returning in its place. She was doing this for her daughter.

Jorge looked up as his helper and friend, Juan, came rushing into the room.

‘Taxi with lady and baby outside. Lady with baby coming in.’

Juan’s use of the word ‘lady’ was enough to tell Jorge that this was no ordinary visit. The woman obviously wasn’t one of the local people for whom he’d set up the clinic, so a taxi dropping off a woman with a child—an emergency, surely.

He was moving towards the door of his office as these thoughts chased through his head, and a couple of paces past that he was at the front door of the clinic, staring in disbelief at the tall blonde woman striding up the front path, a small, dark-haired child nestled in her arms.

His first fleeting thought was that this would be a really good time for lightning to strike him, but when the cloudless sky failed to deliver instant incineration, and he doubted a tsunami would sweep him away—too far from the sea—he was forced to confront the intruder.

‘Caroline?’

His voice made a question of her name but his gut, cramping uncomfortably, knew exactly who it was. Heat stirred in unfamiliar places, while his heart gave a bump in his chest and panic rattled his brain. Fortunately the doctor in him reacted with concern for the child and, automatically turning the good side of his face to the woman he’d once loved—once?—he let the doctor take over.

‘What are you doing here? Is the child ill?’

His words halted her, but only momentarily, not enough for him to really study her, to see if she was still as beautiful as the vision he saw in his dreams.

Beautiful! She’d mocked him when he’d called her that, pointing out that her mouth was too big, her nose too thin, her eyes too wide apart, hair too fair—a dozen shortcomings listed as she’d shied away from his praise …

Caroline didn’t answer. She continued down the path until she stood directly in front of him—close enough to touch if his arms had moved from his side, if any part of his body would have obeyed an order from his stunned brain.

She studied him, her face betraying nothing as she took in the scarring down his right cheek. Now his brain was beginning to work again and he realised she could only have found him through the internet and the article that had appeared on it had shown his photograph, scar and all.

‘The child,’ she said carefully, her voice so taut he knew she was as tense as he was, ‘is your daughter.’

Dumbstruck! He knew the word yet had never understood its meaning until this moment. It was as if the lightning bolt that hadn’t come earlier had finally arrived, spearing into his brain.

At that moment, the child raised her head from her mother’s shoulder and looked around, smiling tentatively at him before shyly snuggling her face back into Caroline’s neck. The denial he’d been working up to died on his lips. As a small child, his mother had so loved his curls she’d refused to cut his hair, and he’d seen the face that looked at him in photographs of himself as a toddler.

He had a child!

He had a daughter!

The knowledge bounced around in his head in the blank space where his brain had once been.

‘Her name is Ella.’

Ella?

Caroline had called the child Ella?

Had she remembered it was his mother’s name?

Of course she would have! And the naming could be part of an elaborate con. The child—Ella—had kicked against restraint in her mother’s arms and was now on the ground, looking around her, eyes wide as she took in these new surroundings.

And unless Caroline had found a lover who looked just like him, maybe Jorge had to accept the child was his.

His daughter!

Ella!

He squatted down, holding up a hand to stop Caroline who looked as if she might swoop on the little girl.

‘Hello,’ he said, using the deliberately soft voice he used not only for children but for new patients at the clinic.

Dark eyes stared at him, moving across his face, pausing, then a tentative smile danced around small pink lips, and she raised a hand in a small salute.

‘Hi,’ she said, and as he squatted, immobilised by the smile, by her voice, she stepped forward and put the palm of her hand against his scarred cheek. ‘Sore? ‘

He couldn’t speak, the lump in his throat too hard to dislodge. How could this be? How could he comprehend it? The child was his? This child, who’d touched his face with baby-soft fingers? He reached out, shocked to see his fingers shaking, and brushed his hand against the shiny brown curls.

‘Not sore,’ he said gently, unable to tell her of the pain in other parts of his body, in particular his heart.

The child smiled, and patted his cheek this time, then, in the way of very small and easily diverted children, she turned to check out her surroundings.

Glancing up, he saw tears in Caroline’s eyes, but the reality of what she’d done took precedence over weakness, growing in enormity.

They couldn’t stay.

He wouldn’t get involved—couldn’t get involved.

For the last four years he had pushed the world away, hating the pity he saw in people’s eyes, happy only when he was working on a new project, doing something to help people worse off than himself, people who wouldn’t care if he looked like Frankenstein’s monster because he was willing to help them.

He knew it was pride—foolish, stupid pride—that had made him react this way—and if he hadn’t known then his father had told him often enough—but it was the only way he could cope with his injuries and with the continued pain they caused.

But now he had a daughter?

The child—Ella—was watching the game a group of children were playing beside the clinic, and anger rose again. He turned back to the woman who had brought this cataclysmic shock into his life, letting his anger override the surge of attraction just looking at her produced.

‘And you’ve come for what? Some grand display? Some macabre retaliation for me dumping you? You’d drag a child halfway around the world in order to punish me in some way? ‘

Now anger fired her eyes, Caroline’s eyes, as blue as the skies over the snow-clad mountains in mid-winter—or so he’d thought four years ago …

‘Not really,’ she said, speaking calmly in spite of that anger flashing in the blue. ‘I came to fulfil a pledge we made a long time ago. Maybe you remember it, although from what I’ve read you’ve taken it to extremes. One month a year, we pledged. One month a year we’d work somewhere in the world, treating people who didn’t have the resources for the medical facilities most people enjoy. Until now I’ve worked my month a year in outback communities at home, helping set up different strategies to maintain good health. But when I read your clinic was always looking for volunteer doctors, I realised I could kill two birds with one stone.’

Although smiling was the last thing she felt like doing at the moment—in all the hundreds of scenarios she’d pictured of this meeting, Jorge yelling at her for dragging Ella halfway round the world had been the last—Caroline managed a smile, and waved her hand to where the taxi driver had dumped her large backpack and Ella’s smaller, koala-shaped one.

‘As you can see, I’ve come prepared. I’m here for a month,’ she finished, and felt a rush of satisfaction at the astonishment—not to mention horror—on his face.

His face!

His poor face!

Although the photo had prepared her for the scarring, seeing it, the physical manifestations of what had happened, had hit her like a punch to her stomach. For something like that to happen to a man as handsome and proud as Jorge, it was unimaginable how he had coped.

It had seemed natural when she’d read about the injuries he’d sustained, and learnt that for a time he’d thought he might not walk again, that the first thing he would have done was deny his love for her. He would have pictured her reaction to his injuries, seen himself as a burden, her love as pity, and a man as proud as Jorge would never in a million years accept pity.

So he’d sent that email?

She’d been so sure, reading the article, that this had to have been the explanation for his rejection and, furious that he’d had so little faith in her, even more angry that he’d denied Ella a father, she’d begun to make plans to get them to Argentina as quickly as possible.

Seeing him now, seeing his anger, the doubts that had crept in while she had been in the taxi intensified, and nausea swirled in her stomach. Yet her body ignored his anger; it knew he was still Jorge—the man she’d loved, still loved, it told her.

His next words slammed against her, emphasising her body’s folly, making it crystal clear that he was far from delighted to see her.

‘You cannot stay. I do not want you here.’

His voice was flat, hard and furious, although the fury was thinly veiled, no doubt tightly reined in, in front of Ella, but Caroline was not going to be put off at the first setback, no matter how much this blunt rejection might hurt. Despite her body’s automatic reaction to seeing him, she had no idea what would happen between Jorge and herself in the future but, whatever developed, she was determined Ella would know her father.

She ploughed on over his arguments.

‘The article I read said you had accommodation for a visiting doctor and Ella’s used to sharing my bed when we travel,’ she told him. ‘I figured, being a clinic, there are sure to be some trustworthy aides or patients who won’t mind babysitting if Ella’s a nuisance. In fact, I thought, as I’ll be here, once you’ve introduced me around and shown me how you work, you can spend some time getting to know your daughter, maybe even think about introducing her to your father.’

She rattled off the words, hoping she sounded calmer than she felt, which was as if she’d somehow been dropped into a washing machine—churning, tumbling, swirling.

‘You can’t work here!’

The blunt statement brought her back to earth. That was good, as she was running out of words to cover the way she was feeling. On top of that, his flat declaration revived her fighting spirit and she wasn’t giving in this time without a fight, no matter how much seeing him again was tormenting her body.

‘Of course I can.’ She shot the words at him. ‘I’ve been learning Spanish for the last three years and although I don’t know the Toba language, I assume, as they have been settled here for a couple of decades, most will speak a little Spanish. I have a visa, my medical qualifications have been approved by your medical association, and I have permission from.’ she couldn’t remember the name of the organisation ‘.something to do with the medical officer of the municipality of Rosario to do volunteer work at this particular clinic for the duration of one month.’

‘This is my clinic!’

Even as the words escaped his lips, Jorge realised how stupid they would sound. He didn’t need to see the smile twitching at Caroline’s lips or hear her cutting ‘Oh, really?’ to know she’d read the pettiness of it, and realised it was totally out of character.

So she knew she’d rattled him but, then, that was what this stupid escapade must be about—rattling him.

In more ways than one, although she couldn’t know that—wouldn’t ever know that!

Uncertain where to go next, needing time to think before he said anything more—needing, more than anything, to get away from the woman who had reawoken sensations he’d never thought to feel again—he turned to see where the child, Ella, no, he couldn’t call her that—not yet—had gone.

Although staying within sight of her mother, she had wandered closer to where the Toba children played. She watched the game, probably unaware of the sensation she was causing among the locals—a small stranger in their midst.

A child?

His child?

No! There was no time for wonder!

‘You have done this deliberately,’ he said to Caroline, letting his anger run free now the child was out of earshot. ‘You have come here on some mad whim, dragged a child all this way, when a letter and a photo would have sufficed. So why, Caroline? To punish me for not loving you?’

She stepped back as if he’d struck her, then straightened for the fight. He’d seen her fight before, but usually with him, not against him, fighting for the rights of others, fighting for what she called a ‘fair go’ for people who couldn’t fight for themselves.

‘And you’d have opened the letter as you did all the others, including the one I sent telling you I was pregnant?’ Sarcasm curled like wisps of smoke around the heated words. ‘Or should I have written “Photo of your child” on the envelope so you didn’t just scrawl “Return to sender” on it and pop it back into the mail?’

She paused then stepped closer, her voice softer, the faint hint of the lemon shampoo she must still use moving in her silvery hair, floating in the air towards him.

Momentarily distracting him.

‘You, of all people, know how I felt growing up without my father,’ she continued. ‘You were the first person I ever opened up to about how inadequate I’d felt all through my teens, and the foolish things I’d done to win boys’ attention. This is not about punishment, Jorge, neither is it about you and me, or about the past. I’ve come because I thought you should know Ella exists, but more for her sake than for yours, because the one thing I don’t want for her is to grow up without knowing her father.’

She took a deep breath, as if the words, and perhaps the emotion behind them, had emptied her right out.

And remembering, he knew it could have, for he’d known her for six months before she’d talked about not having a father.

Yet even sympathy for her didn’t stop the disappointment that had seeped into him as he’d listened to the honesty of her explanation. Could he possibly have been thinking she’d come because she still loved him?

How likely would that be when his farewell email had been so deliberately cruel?

‘You should have written!’

It was weak, pathetic even, but all he could come up with as he struggled to regain some mental poise, even to find renewed anger, anything that would turn her away from here.

But in place of an objection, what flew into his mind was something she’d said earlier—something about staying here!

With him!

She intended to invade his home so she’d not only be working near him but living near him as well, her body a constant reminder, a constant distraction, a constant tease.

Now the anger came.

‘It’s impossible that you should stay here. Find a hotel in the city. I will visit you both there. You spring this on me with no warning, but I’ll not deny my child. I will make arrangements, speak to lawyers, see she is—’

‘Financially secure?’

She spat the words at him, her fury a palpable force.

‘Do you think for one moment that’s what I want? Your money? As it happens, Ella is already financially secure. The father I never knew died and left me more than enough money to keep her in luxury for her entire life, but I want Ella to have a father, Jorge, and I thought, by coming here, maybe over a month we could work out some way for that to happen.’

She stopped for breath again then added even more fiercely, ‘She needs your love, Jorge, not your money. Would that be too hard for you to offer her?’

Would it?

He looked towards the child—Ella—who was laughing as one of the children kicked a tattered ball towards her. One small foot lifted and a shiny purple shoe kicked the ball back. The Toba children all waved their arms and yelled their approval of the young, curly-headed stranger in their midst.

Jorge found his heart was hurting again.

Was the wall he’d built around his feelings crumbling so easily?

Even considering it heralded danger.

‘This is impossible! We cannot stand here, arguing. Come inside, not the clinic but my—my home.’

He emphasised the last word in the invitation to convince himself there was no shame attached to inviting guests into his rough adobe hut, but picturing it in his mind as he’d left that morning—an unwashed breakfast bowl and spoon on the sink; piles of books like mini-skyscrapers all over the floor; his bed unmade should anyone peer through the curtain that served as a bedroom door.

The child—Ella—surely would, though an unmade bed should mean little to her.

‘We’ll have mate, a kind of tea. Have you had time to try it?’

Now he sounded like a tourist guide, and though she was walking behind him, little Ella at her side, he knew Caroline had heard the falseness in his voice and was smiling as she replied, ‘We’ve come straight from the airport so we’ve not had time, although I’ve heard of it.’

She’d answered like a polite tourist, although when she added, ‘Of course, you used to tell me about it, Jorge, and long for a taste of it,’ her voice was soft and he could almost believe.

Believe what?

That after four years she still felt something for him?

Imbécil! Was he so stupid that he was thinking this way?

They’d reached his hut. His hut? He’d thought of it that way since the project had begun but it was never destined to be his for ever, or even for much longer. Soon it would house volunteer doctors.

Volunteer doctors! The board set up to run the clinic had agreed they would still accept volunteer help when it was offered, as well as paying a permanent doctor. Caroline must have made the arrangement through the board and somehow dates had become mixed up, which would explain why he hadn’t received notification.

He shook his head at the bureaucratic bungling that had thrust him into this situation and continued towards the hut.

At least now it had a front door, though not much of one, cut from a bigger, thick timber door one of his helpers had found in a second-hand yard. Cutting the door, like the other tasks he’d undertaken in building his hut, had reminded him how little he knew about manual labour—how easy and privileged his growing up had been.

‘Great door!’

Caroline was smiling at him, running her fingers along the rough edges where the plane had bitten too deep into the wood.

‘All your own work? ‘

He fought the urge to smile back—and the even stronger urge to put his fingers over hers. To smile at her would be to lose, to touch her would be to surrender, and although he wasn’t sure of the battle taking place, its rules or even the battleground, he wasn’t going to lose.

‘I built the hut with some of the unemployed young men in the area, so we could all learn the traditional way of building. We try to reuse wood where we can. We cannot stop deforestation taking place, not only here but in so many rainforest areas throughout the world, but at least we should be aware that we need not add to it.’

Her smile grew softer, gleaming in her eyes where anger had been earlier, and his heart bumped once again in his chest.

Danger—that was what the bump meant. It was as good as a flashing sign saying, Beware! He straightened up, feeling the skin on his body tighten and momentary pain. Pain was good as it reminded him that he couldn’t let a smile breach his defences.

‘Did the building project help the young men get work?’ she asked.

She was worming her way into his confidence but he couldn’t let a smile divert him, any more than he could let Caroline’s apparent interest in his building project distract him from the fact that she was here to disrupt his life.

Yet politeness meant he had to answer.

‘For some of them, it led to work.’ He kept his voice carefully neutral, and looked at a spot over her shoulder as he spoke so he didn’t have to see the so-familiar curve of her cheek, the blue of her eyes, the silver of her hair, but he’d lost her attention anyway, the child coming dangerously close to the piles of books.

‘Don’t knock them over!’

Caroline’s cry diverted his attention from battles, danger, smiling eyes and building projects, but it had come too late to stop Ella spilling one of his piles of books.

‘Not reached the bookshelves-page of your how-to-build book?’ Caroline teased, kneeling to help Ella rebuild the pile.

And this time, perhaps because she was kneeling and might not see it, he did smile.

‘Furniture is a different world, far too complex for an amateur like me to tackle,’ he said, amazed he was able to have this ordinary conversation when his insides were churning and his mind battling to reject that this was happening. ‘We were gifted some furniture, not a lot, but enough.’

Caroline finished tidying the spilt pile of books and stood up, leaving Ella wandering around the stacks in much the same way as a child might play in a maze. Although every sinew in her body was tight, the tension in the room palpable, she had to keep pretending—to keep up her end of what was really a bizarre conversation, given the circumstances. She and Jorge together after four years and they were discussing building projects!

Better than arguing, she told herself, but at the same time her heart ached for the time when she and Jorge would have laughed together over this strained and formally polite behaviour.

Laughed, hugged, kissed, made love?

But it was her turn to talk, not think!

‘Is there a big unemployment problem in the area?’

She left Ella with a warning not to touch things and crossed the room to the little kitchen nook, where he waited by the single gas ring for the kettle to boil. Picking up the gourd in which he had put the chopped-up leaves—were they called yerba? She tried to remember—for the tea, she turned it in her hands, cupping it and appreciating how snugly it fitted her hand, stirring the chopped dry leaves with the metal straw.

Eventually he answered, taking his turn in this painful pretence.

‘It’s a problem among the young people—the ones who choose not to go on to higher education,’ Jorge replied, though his inner reaction to her closeness and his fascination with the movement of her hands had delayed his reply too long. ‘In the beginning, working with the boys to make the mud bricks for the walls, I found it was a more satisfying form of physical therapy than working out in a gymnasium. Gradually it became a challenge to all of us, to build something with our own hands—something we could feel pride in. Yes, the hut is rough, the door is rough, but it is our hut and our door, and I, for one, cannot open it without a sense of perhaps not pride but satisfaction that I could, with only a little help, make myself a shelter.’

‘You started by making the bricks?’

Disbelief and admiration warred in her voice but the shrill whistle of the kettle stopped the conversation. He took the gourd from her, turning it upside down a couple of times to move the finer leaves to the top, then tipping it from side to side. That done, he poured in cold water to saturate the leaves and let it sit a minute on the table. The mechanical movement of his hands as he made the mate gave him time to think—time to tell himself her admiration wasn’t personal. She would be equally admiring of any man she knew had built his own dwelling.

Any man she knew?

He glanced at her left hand, certain he’d see a wedding ring.

No jewellery at all, but, then, she’d always shunned what she called fripperies. And if she’d married, Ella would have a father figure in her life, and there’d have been no reason for her to come.

He tipped the gourd once more so the leaves settled on one side of it, and carefully added the boiling water.

And while it steeped he shrugged off her admiration, making light of what had been a mammoth task.

‘It’s how people used to do it, and I cannot spend all my spare hours reading.’

‘Spare hours,’ Caroline replied. ‘I remember them, though the memory is hazy.’ She looked towards her daughter, then added, ‘Not that I’d swap Ella for even one spare hour.’

The remarks bothered Jorge, for all he was trying to do was keep the conversation determinedly neutral—coolly polite, nothing more. She’d sounded wistful, as if genuine regret lurked somewhere behind the words.

‘You have so little time?’ he asked, dropping a silver straw into the mate then pausing for an unseen guest to try it before handing the gourd to Caroline.

She lifted the gourd, and sipped through the straw, grimacing slightly at the taste, or perhaps the heat of the drink.

‘I pass it back to you, is that right?’ she said, and, knowing she’d remembered something as simple as the mate ceremony of sharing made his heart go bump again, but though the barriers he’d erected around his heart were as rough as the walls of his hut, he knew he had to keep them intact, heart-bumps or no heart-bumps!

His mind tracked back to the previous conversation—the question Caroline hadn’t answered.

‘You have so little time?’ he asked again.

It was all too weird, Caroline decided, standing in a little hut not unlike the one they’d shared in Africa—although that one had been round and roofed with palm fronds, not corrugated iron—with Jorge beside her, asking polite questions—exactly as it had been when they’d first met.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE shook off the memory and steeled herself against the attraction that still tingled along her nerves when she looked at him or heard his voice. Best to consider his question—to answer him.

Best to forget the past and all its joy and pain …

‘I work, I come home, and I try to be a good mother. Like all working mothers I feel guilt that someone else spends more time with my daughter than I do, so I probably overcompensate. Then, when Ella goes to bed, there are always business things to take care of, or articles to read or write—you know how it is, keeping up with the latest developments, hoping you’ll find something to help a patient you’ve seen recently.’

He turned to face her so the scar on his cheek was fully visible and it was only with an enormous effort she resisted the urge to lay her palm against his damaged skin, as Ella had done earlier.

‘You said your father left you money. You must have no need to work.’

She smiled at him and waved her hands around the hut, pleased to have such a bland, harmless topic of conversation to occupy her mind and distract it from the suggestions of her body—suggestions like moving closer, touching him.

‘And I’m sure you’re not so impoverished you needed to build your own hut, so you, at least, should understand. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort to train me for the job I do. I wouldn’t feel right to just stop doing it, especially when there are areas where doctors are still desperately needed. I’ve been working in an inner-city practice where patients are a mix of trendy twenties, urban aboriginals, homeless youths, prostitutes, Asian migrants and long-term street people. Probably not unlike this area you work in, although, from the article I read, most of your patients are the indigenous Toba people, so you don’t get the same mix.’

Pleased with herself for answering as if the tension in the air between them wasn’t twisting her intestines into knots, she kept going. Talking was better than thinking. Unfortunately for this plan, Ella chose that moment to knock over a second pile of books.

‘Oh, blast,’ Caroline said as she hurried towards the mess, but Jorge was there before her. ‘I really should control my daughter better.’

The words were no sooner out than she realised how stupid they had been.

‘Our daughter,’ she amended, but knew it was too late. She was kneeling now, directly in front of him, looking into Jorge’s deep brown eyes, eyes she’d once fallen right into and drowned in, losing her heart, soul and body to the man who owned them.

And because she was looking, she saw the pain, read it as clearly as words written in white chalk on a black background.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, though for what she wasn’t certain.

For the lost years?

For him not knowing he had a daughter?

For hurting him by not showing enough love that he could have depended on it four years ago, depended on it enough not to have written that email?

Though surely pride had written that email—his pride, not her lack of love.

She didn’t know.

He stood up without a word, walking back to the kitchen where the mate sat on the small kitchen table. Leaving Ella to restack the books, Caroline followed him, picking up the gourd and taking another sip, trying to get back to polite conversation because anything else was too painful.

‘It must be an acquired taste,’ she said, handing the gourd over to him and hoping he’d think she’d been considering mate, not love and the pain it caused as she’d sipped. ‘And obviously very popular! We saw people drinking it everywhere—walking along the street in the city, even waiting at bus stops.’

‘It is a custom not only in Argentina but all over South America.’

Caroline smiled but she knew it was a sad effort, memories of the past hammering in her head as they both tried gamely to keep the stupid conversation going.

‘Strange, isn’t it,’ she said quietly, ‘that we who talked about everything under the sun should be reduced to tourist-talk? But now that Ella has found her land legs after the journey, perhaps it is time for you to meet her properly.’

She turned, calling to her daughter, who’d selected a book with a red cover, settled herself into a tattered armchair and was reading herself a story from it. As it was almost certainly in Spanish and quite possibly a lurid medical text, Caroline wondered what Ella would choose to make of it. At the moment she was hooked on The Three Robbers, which also had a red cover, so possibly that was the story she was telling herself.

‘Ella!’

The little girl looked up from the book as Caroline said her name.

‘Come over here and meet Jorge properly.’

Caroline pronounced his name as best she could, although she’d never fully mastered the deep-throated ‘h’ sound that was more like an x than the English pronunciation of g.

Ella came to stand beside her, her lips moving so Caroline knew she was trying out the name.

‘Hor-hay?’ she queried, and to Caroline’s surprise Jorge knelt in front of her and politely shook her hand.

‘It is a hard name for you to say,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps before long we can find something else for you to call me, something easier.’

‘My name is easy,’ Ella, ever confident, ever up for a chat, told him. ‘It was my grandma’s name—the grandma I didn’t know. I knew my other grandma but I don’t really remember her very much because she went to be a star in heaven when I was only two.’

The child’s innocent remark made Jorge glance up at Caroline and saw pain whiten her cheeks, the wound of her mother’s death still raw, but the child—Ella—was talking again and he turned back to her, fascinated by the resemblance to his younger self, captivated by a small person who was now telling him about the big plane that had flown up in the sky.

‘Not high enough to see my two grandmas who are stars,’ she explained seriously, ‘but too high to see down to the ground except when we went over some mountains before the plane came down again. Mummy says you used to go walking in those mountains and maybe when I’m a bit bigger I could go too.’

Not all the words were crystal clear but her story still came through, each syllable tightening a band around his chest, the innocent chatter of the child all but suffocating him.

‘Mummy talked about me?’ he asked, though he knew it was wrong to question a child this way.

‘She told me lots of stories about her friend Hor-hay who worked with her in—’

She broke off to look up at Caroline.

‘Where was it, Mummy?’

‘Africa,’ Caroline supplied, and the restraint in her voice suggested she’d have preferred to put her hand over her daughter’s mouth to stop the revelations rather than helping out with the conversation.

‘Afica!’ Ella declared triumphantly, then she pointed at the gourd, still in Jorge’s hand. ‘Can I have some of that?’ He passed the gourd to her, letting her hold it but keeping his hand on it as well. He was vaguely aware of Caroline’s anxious ‘Is it cool enough now?’ but mostly he was swamped by unnameable—even unfathomable—emotions as, for the first time, he shared mate with his daughter.

‘Yuk!’

So she didn’t take to it, but that mattered little. She would, in time, grow accustomed to the taste.

In time?

Was he seriously considering getting involved in this child’s life?

How could he, living as he did, virtually a hermit?

But even as the objection surfaced he remembered that his bare existence in this place where he felt most at peace was coming to an end—and soon. Nine days from now the local government was taking over the clinic, and he was returning to Buenos Aires to be with his father, to live with the man who had first taught him the strength of love.

Ella was telling him an involved tale about a doll Caroline had made her leave at home, but the words barely penetrated, his brain swamped by the revelation that peace might be achievable in other places if the right elements were in place—elements like a wife and a child…

Not without love, common sense reminded him. In his search for peace after the accident he’d tried relationships without love, and peace was the last thing they had brought him.

Impossible, too, that Caroline could love him. Not after the way he’d treated her. Uncertain of his future, thinking he might be an invalid for life and not wanting to tie the woman he loved to him, he’d deliberately worded that email to kill whatever love she’d felt for him, driving a spear of harsh, hurtful words into her heart.

Caroline’s heart ached as she watched father and daughter together. With her usual sunny disposition, once Ella had felt comfortable in the hut she was chatting away to Jorge as if she’d known him for ever. If only she had! If only Jorge had been there to share the early joys and triumphs, though he’d have been there for the bad times too, in that case, the endless sleepless nights, the time they’d battled croup, her mother’s death.

Don’t think about that now—think positive, think forward. There are obviously two bedrooms in this hut, so I will work with him. One month isn’t long but surely it will give me time to learn if what he said was true, or if it was his stupid pride that split us up.

‘Caroline?’

His voice suggested he’d spoken while she’d been lost in her own determined thoughts, but she’d missed whatever question it might have been.

‘Jorge?’ she responded, feeling almost light-headed with the sheer delight of being close to him and saying his name again. Not that she could let such pathetic reactions show. She, too, had pride, and she wasn’t going to fling herself at this man and be rebuffed again. No, time would tell her if any of the fire that had flared between them still existed, and until she’d seen some hint of his, she would have to keep hers well tamped down.

‘I was saying you can’t stay here, but there is a hotel not far away. It is clean, the food is excellent, and there is a big plaza—a park—with a children’s playground just across the road. If you insist on this foolish notion of working in the clinic, there is a bus you can catch each day, a small commute.’

She found a smile, knowing it would hide the hurt caused by him pushing her away, although it was only what she’d expected.

‘No, I’ll stay here,’ she said, picking Ella up to cover her hesitation before replying. ‘The information on the internet said there was simple accommodation for visiting doctors and simple is okay with me. We’ve got a sleeping mat and sleeping bags. We’ll be fine. Also, staying here, eating meals with you, Ella will get used to you and when you have time off, she’ll be happy to be with you.’

Ella joined the conversation at this stage, putting her hand on Caroline’s cheek to turn her face.

‘Are we really staying here, Mummy, in this little house? With the kids outside to play with?’

Jorge heard the words and knew he’d lost the first battle of this war he didn’t fully understand. But looking at the child clinging to her mother, he wondered just how hard it was for Caroline to be parted from the little charmer who was her daughter, to go to work and leave Ella in someone else’s care.

And was he thinking this to stop himself thinking about the pair of them living here, sharing his house, his meals, always there, tormenting him with their closeness? It would be bad enough being near Caroline while they worked, but to have her in his home as well?

A totally inappropriate excitement sizzled to life within him but he ignored it, using the image that confronted him in the mirror each morning to douse it. Most normal women would react with revulsion and although he doubted Caroline, who had seen the worst things people could do to each other, would be revolted, what he feared most from her was pity.

As if to remove himself from his thoughts, he reminded himself it was only for a couple of weeks—nine days to the handover and a few more days after that to settle the new doctor into the clinic. He crossed to the front door.

‘I suppose if you insist on staying I can hardly throw you out. I’ll get your bags.’

But once outside he simply looked at the bags, not wanting to lift them, not wanting to carry them into his home, fighting the anger rising once again at Caroline’s intrusion into his life, for all it was probably justified.

Was his apparent co-operation prompted by a genuine desire to get to know his daughter, Caroline wondered, or was there some deeper ploy behind him giving in?

Whatever! At least he was gone for a while and she could breathe normally again. She gave Ella a hug and set her down, telling her she could go outside and play with the children, but not to wander off. She’d already checked she could see the children from the window, so she could keep watch unobtrusively.

A shadow darkened the doorway and she glanced across to see not Jorge but a younger man, carrying the two backpacks into the hut.

‘Jorge remembered an appointment in the city, he was already late,’ the young man explained. ‘I am Juan, his assistant, a kind of nurse now but studying medicine at the university.’

Politeness insisted Caroline cross the room to shake his hand, but she couldn’t help casting an anxious glance out the door at the same time.

‘Do not worry about the little girl,’ Juan told her. ‘My grandmother is there, she watches the children all day. Some of them, their mothers work, but others just come to play. My grandmother says it keeps her young to be with the children.’

‘I’m sure it does,’ Caroline agreed, ‘but it is a great kindness she does as well, for it’s hard for mothers to leave their children to go to work. I know it!’

Juan smiled shyly and was about to back out the door when Caroline realised that with Jorge gone and Ella happily playing, she was at a loose end.

‘Would it be all right if I visited the clinic?’

Before Juan could answer, Jorge appeared.

‘Did Juan tell you I have to go? I’m sorry, but the appointment is with a government official and I’m already late.’

‘Juan explained, and I was asking if I could visit the clinic.’

She saw the reluctance in his face but as the purpose of the article on the internet had been to attract volunteer doctors to the clinic, he could hardly refuse to let her work there.

‘Your vaccinations are up-to-date?’ he queried, impatience edging the words.

‘Hep A, Hep B, typhoid and yellow fever. We’ve both had them, as Ella was able to handle them now she’s over two, although I’m reasonably sure they were only precautionary.’

Ha! she thought, savouring a moment of triumph that he couldn’t turn them away for health reasons.

Jorge hesitated.

‘Go to your appointment, I’ll be fine,’ she told him. He frowned at her and turned away. He’d probably have liked to growl as well, although in front of Juan.

But when he and Juan had left, Caroline forgot about visiting the clinic and sank down into an armchair, taking a deep, replenishing breath. She was so far from fine she wondered if she’d ever reach such a place again. Physically and mentally exhausted, her body aching with the effort of pretending Jorge meant nothing more to her than the father of her child, she now had to wonder, seriously, if this was not the very worst decision she had ever made.

From the first moment she’d set eyes on him, all the love she’d felt for him had come rushing back. Oh, it had been there all along, in a dull ache somewhere inside her, sharper pain at times like Ella’s birth, her mother’s death, and silly times, like when Ella had taken her first faltering steps, but seeing him again, hearing his voice, watching as he moved his hands in conversation, the longing to go to him and hold him in her arms had been so great she’d only barely managed to hide it.

Or she hoped she’d hidden it.

She closed her eyes but his image was graven in her mind, chiselled as deeply as the gouges he’d made in the door. Thinking back over the encounter—surely there was a more appropriate word for such a cataclysmic moment in her life—she began to believe her doubts had been more realistic than her original excitement. Jorge had shown no sign—not a glimmer—of the kind of love she still felt for him.

So maybe the email had been the truth, not the hurtful outpouring of stupid pride!

Which left her where?

Her determination that Ella would know her father and that he should play some part in her upbringing remained. By working here with him, she, Caroline, could get a sense of the man he had become and perhaps make a feasible plan for the future. Part of her decision to come had rested on the fact that with her mother dead and her small estate finalised, she and Ella had had nothing to keep them in Australia. She’d accepted that if Jorge’s life’s work was here, then here was where they’d have to live.

Oh, she’d hoped for love, hoped she might be able to break through whatever barriers he’d built up to protect himself, but she wasn’t going to beg or plead and in doing so make a fool of herself if his love had been a lie all along.

A sense of utter helplessness brought tears to her eyes, but she’d cried enough for Jorge in the past. Now was the time for action. Ella’s future was more important than her own pathetic need for love, so she would have to focus on that—on finding a way to stay somewhere close to Jorge, so he could be a father to his child.

And you? her heart mocked. You’ll be able to see him regularly and not reveal the love you still feel for him?

She’d have to! That was all there was to it.

And having made the decision, she went to the doorway where Juan had dropped their backpacks. She heaved hers onto her shoulder, picked up Ella’s little koala pack and walked into what she assumed was the spare bedroom, blinking in surprise when she saw the elaborate, wooden, four-poster bed and the polished wooden chest of drawers squeezed in beside it.

Like the old but so comfortable leather armchair, bizarre furnishings for the simple hut Jorge and the young men had built.

Thinking of him toiling in the broiling sun, determination pushing him through the pain of tight healing muscles and recalcitrant tendons, she put her hand against the wall, feeling its warmth and with it the warmth of the man she’d loved.

Was he still there, inside the scarred skin and mended bones?

And if he was, would she be able to find him?

The cry came from behind the hut, not from the direction of the clinic, and the pain in the sound had Caroline reacting automatically. A child lay on the dry, rusty-red ground, gasping for breath, and, unable to understand what the excited children were telling her, she felt first for an obstruction in his mouth.

Juan came running from the clinic, speaking to the children, while a woman Caroline assumed was his grandmother herded the little ones together, taking hold of Ella’s hand as she kept them back from the fallen boy.

‘He just fell down, the children said,’ Juan told her.

Pleased he was there to translate for her, she asked if the boy was an epileptic—did he have a history of seizures? When the answer was no, she asked about allergies—did the children know if the boy had been bitten by something?

The child was breathing, but the harsh rasping sounds of his breath suggested it was an effort. Caroline lifted him in her arms and though Juan protested, she insisted she could carry him to the clinic, hesitating only long enough to turn to the woman who held Ella’s hand and receive a reassuring nod in reply.

‘I’m just going to give this boy some medicine,’ she said to Ella, ‘I’ll be back soon. You stay with—’

‘Mima,’ the woman said, while Ella, who’d obviously been told, echoed the word.

‘Mima,’ Caroline repeated.

Inside the clinic she set her patient down on an already prepared table and began a proper examination. His blood pressure was low, and a redness appearing on his skin suggested an anaphylactic reaction, though to what she didn’t know.

Juan had produced an oxygen mask and was fitting it to the child’s face, before adjusting the flow.

‘Do you know if you have epinephrine in the clinic?’ Caroline asked her helper. ‘The adrenalin solution used for anaphylactic shock.’

‘We have adrenalin solution,’ Juan told her.

He unlocked a tall metal cabinet on one side of the small room and delved around in it, returning to Caroline’s side with a tray on which he’d placed a box of ampoules and a syringe, swabs and antiseptic and a little metal kidney dish, something Caroline hadn’t seen for years. She checked the medication and the dosage on the ampoules before breaking one open and drawing up the solution. Asking Juan to tell the boy what they were doing, she took a swab from the tray Juan had carried and swabbed the boy’s thigh, then slid the needle in, forcing the liquid slowly into the muscle.

‘We’ll give that five minutes and take his blood pressure again. If it hasn’t improved, he might need more.’

Before Juan could reply there was a clamour outside and a woman burst into the treatment room, already near capacity with the patient, treatment table, a chair, the cabinet and two workers.

‘This is his mother,’ Juan explained, before speaking rapidly to the woman.

Caroline acknowledged the woman with a smile, but her attention was all on her patient. Was he breathing more easily now? Had it been so simple? She began a full examination of the boy’s skin, beginning with the parts she could see as she didn’t want to disturb him too much by turning him over.

‘Ah!’ She pointed to a raised red welt just below her patient’s right ankle. ‘It’s a strange place, very low, for a wasp or bee sting, but perhaps you have ants here that cause this reaction.’

Juan seemed to consider this. He spoke to the mother once again.

‘I do not know of ants that can do this and his mother says he has been bitten by ants before. But she says the boys have been playing near the jacaranda trees and sometimes bees crawl into the bells of the fallen flowers.

He may have angered a bee by stepping on a flower and accidentally stepping on the bee as well.’

‘Ah!’

It seemed a logical explanation, and as the little boy was obviously more comfortable now, the drug must have worked.

‘He will need to stay here for some hours,’ she told Juan. ‘Could you explain to the mother we need to watch him in case he gets sick again?’

Caroline had to wonder what Juan had said, for the woman seized both of Caroline’s hands and pressed a kiss on each of them, her ‘Gracias’ and ‘Muchas gracias’ so fervent they would have broken through any language barrier.

‘Is there somewhere we can put the boy where he’d be more comfortable and his mother could perhaps sit by his side?’ Caroline asked.

‘I will fix,’ Juan told her. ‘Are you one of the new doctors who are coming here to work?’

The question made Caroline realise that at no stage had Juan questioned her right to treat the child or her competency to act in the emergency. Obviously Jorge attracted enough foreign helpers for Juan to accept Caroline without question, which was a good thing as far as her campaign to stay was concerned. Knowing Jorge, she guessed that throughout his appointment part of his mind would be fixed on how quickly he could move Caroline out of his life. Now he’d had time to think, he’d have come up with some excuse or strategy, of that she had no doubt, but this was one battle she wasn’t going to lose.

She left Juan to move the little boy, and took a look around. The room they’d been in was apparently the only treatment room, and in front of it was another room, little more than a lobby, where a few patients might be able to wait out of the sun. There were three chairs, a small table and tattered magazines, while all the walls were covered with posters, familiar in context although the messages appeared to be in a language other than Spanish. Probably the Toba language?

The posters adjured people to wash their hands, immunise their children, use sunscreen—or maybe it was insect repellent mothers were wiping on their children’s arms. Another poster showed vegetables and fruit, piles of grains and milk, presumably suggesting good dietary habits—so nothing much changed in this wide world, Caroline decided as she peered into another small room that opened off the lobby.

It must be Jorge’s office, for it had an old table and chair—obviously scrounged from somewhere—with papers piled across the surface of the table and more papers and files on top of the battered-looking filing cabinets that lined the walls. After visiting his house, Caroline wasn’t surprised to see his medical textbooks in tall towers on the floor. In fact, she smiled, for although so much up-to-date information was available to doctors through the internet, she, too, liked to open a textbook when she was checking something.

Beyond the treatment room on one side and office on the other was a wide room that took up the whole of the back section of the building. There were three beds on one side and Juan was settling the little boy into one of these. An old man lay sleeping in the next one, while the third was empty. A stack of mattresses in the far corner on the other side of the room suggested that at times the ‘hospital’ could cater for more than three patients.

Juan must have seen her studying the stack as he came to her side and explained, ‘In the worst of summer sometimes people come from far up north to visit their families who live here now. They come from their homes in the bosque impenetrable—the impenetrable forest—but their families have no room for them so Jorge says they can sleep here. Sometimes they are sick, even with TB, but they are afraid of treatment. Sometimes he can give them treatment, once he gains their. Is trust the English word?’

Caroline nodded, but she was thinking about Juan’s explanation. She had read of the land covered with thorny trees and jungle where many Toba people still lived, a place where she could imagine armadillos still mooching along the ground and jaguars hiding on the branches of the trees, and where exotic birds still made their homes.

They must be tough, the Toba people, to have survived in that environment, and knowing that she understood a little more of why Jorge would wish to help the little community of them who had settled in Rosario but were having trouble making the transition to city life.

Having satisfied the city official that the handover of the clinic was proceeding according to plan, Jorge could hardly avoid driving back to the clinic. The handover might be going according to plan, but his life had been flung so far off track he wondered if he’d ever get it back to somewhere approaching normal.

He drove reluctantly out of the city, through the leafy suburbs towards the close-packed settlement of the Toba.

Where the woman he’d thrust out of his life four years ago awaited him?

He ran his fingers over the scarring on his right cheek, remembering his shock and horror when the bandages had come off, telling himself it didn’t matter, knowing it did because the scars were only the visible signs of the damage to his body—damage that could well have been permanent.

Emailing her.

Now she was back, and he knew her well enough to understand that nothing short of an earthquake would move her, and as the region was relatively stable an earthquake was just as unlikely as the tsunami he’d wished for earlier. Not that he’d welcome either one—he’d not welcome anything that would put anyone in danger.

Perhaps he could pay someone to put a python in her bedroom—maybe even a giant anaconda. He sighed as he dismissed this new idea—knowing Caroline, instead of being frightened away, she’d strangle the creature and cook it for dinner.

Maybe—

Dios mio! Why was he thinking this way? Had the woman’s appearance totally addled his brain? Was finding out he had a daughter turning him crazy?

Caroline was here, and here she’d stay, at least until she’d got what she’d come for.

Which was?

Estupido! The exclamation wasn’t aimed at Caroline but at himself, for as he’d asked himself the question a jolt of desire had rattled his body. Of course she wasn’t here to see him—well, not as the lover he had been, although memories of the love they’d shared, the passion, the heat and the fire set his body alight.

He could see her body now, shadowy as it had always been in the dim light of the small round hut, welcoming, enveloping, becoming one with his—sharing the journey to oblivion with him as they tried to blot out the horrors they had seen during the day.

CHAPTER THREE

FRUSTRATION reawoke his anger. Love-making would be the furthest thing from Caroline’s mind. She had come to shock him into doing what she wanted, come without warning. Come to ensure her daughter had a father.

Could he do that?

Be a father to the child?

At least the questions diverted him from thoughts of Caroline’s motives and the impossibility of love.

He had the greatest example of fatherhood in the world, his father having been behind him all his life, teaching him, encouraging him, backing him in all he wished to do, but most of all loving him with an uncritical and unstinting devotion. His father was the rock he’d clung to when he’d returned from hospital in France, broken both physically and emotionally.

Everyone should have such a father!

But could he emulate the man he loved—be as good a father to Ella as his father had been to him?

Somewhere inside him a determination to do just that was beginning to grow, but weighed against it was the fact that involvement with Ella would mean involvement with Caroline, and if seeing her once had brought such chaos to his mind and body, how would he react to being with her on a regular basis?

No, best he knocked the whole thing on the head right now. Caroline was beautiful. She’d find a man and marry, thus providing a father figure for Ella.

Some other man being a father to his daughter? Guiding her through life, winning her love?

A pain he barely understood shuddered through him.

There had to be an answer, and it was up to him to find it, and soon, before gossip, which, although they were separated by hundreds of miles, inevitably reached his father. Once his father laid eyes on Ella, she would be his princess, the answer to all his dreams, the one gift he’d wanted so badly from his son but had accepted he might never be given.

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