‘Hayley…I need this. Tonight. Now. With you, and no one else but you.

‘We’re going to my place and we’re going to bed. At least that’s if…’

He let her go abruptly, belatedly wondering if he had come on too strong.

He hadn’t.

‘Yes. It’s fine Byron. I—’ she took a shuddering breath ‘—need it, want it, as much as you do.’

Lilian Darcy is Australian, but has strong ties to the USA through her American husband. They have four growing children, and currently live in Canberra, Australia. Lilian has written over forty romance novels, and still has more story ideas crowding into her head than she knows what to do with. Her work has appeared on the Waldenbooks romance bestsellers list, and two of her plays have been nominated for major Australian writing awards. ‘I’ll keep writing as long as people keep reading my books,’ she says. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I love it.’

Recent titles by the same author:

THE PARAMEDIC’S SECRET

MIDWIFE AND MOTHER

THE SURGEON’S LOVE-CHILD

The Doctor’s Mistress

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ONE

AT THE wheel of the ambulance, Hayley Morris turned out of the station driveway into Halifax Street and activated lights and sirens. Beside her, Bruce McDonald consulted the map.

‘OK, yeah, it’s off Bennett Parade,’ he said. ‘Beach Road.’

He was a very experienced ambulance officer, though not a fully trained level-five paramedic as Hayley now was. Stocky and grizzled, he could lift a heavy, full-grown man as easily as he could gentle his voice to soothe a child.

Hayley nodded, keeping her eyes on the road. ‘I know Beach Road.’

‘They’ve extended it. Maybe this is one of those new houses.’

‘We’ll soon see.’

It was a Thursday in early February and the town was quiet at just after noon. Another turn brought Hayley to the Princes Highway and she headed north, taking advantage of the wide ribbon of traffic-free grey road to bring the vehicle up to a hundred kilometres per hour. She would go even faster once she was out of Arden.

Crossing a long, low bridge over the harbour, just where it merged into the Cammerook River’s tidal mouth, she sped past motionlesss fishermen, a waterfront restaurant, a children’s playground. The houses petered out, and the highway shimmered with mirages in the midday summer heat.

Two minutes later, she had reached the turnoff to Moama. Bennett Parade was quiet, too. Sixty years ago, Moama had simply been the name of a beach. Thirty years ago, it had been a string of rustic holiday homes, most of them made of fibro-cement or weatherboard and set amongst dense and fragrant eucalyptus forest.

Now it was a town in its own right, prices for beachfront property had sky-rocketed and there were some gorgeous new houses looking out along the coastline of white beaches and rocky headlands. In another ten years, Arden and Moama would be seamlessly joined by the mushrooming developments.

The ambulance radio crackled into life, down near Hayley’s left thigh.

‘Informant is a four-year-old child, Car Seven,’ said the dispatcher, Kathy Lowe. ‘Repeating that, four years of age. She’s sounding more and more distressed. Can I give her an update? Her name’s Tori, by the way.’

‘We’re turning into Beach Road now,’ Bruce said. ‘Tell her to listen and she’ll hear us coming. Tell her to open the front door.’

Hayley felt a prickle of apprehension. What was a four-year-old girl doing, reporting her own injury? Who was with her?

Kathy hadn’t been able to get a lot of detail, although she was experienced and adept at talking callers through all sorts of emergencies. A former nurse, she’d recently coached a dad through the delivery of his wife’s baby boy, over the phone, before the ambulance could reach the couple’s isolated property. And she’d once pinpointed the location of two lost and lacerated tourists by correctly identifying the tree into which their car had slid on a muddy side road that they hadn’t been able to name.

This time, Kathy had had to coax an address and other details out of a four-year-old. She was with her grandmother? Why wasn’t Grandma helping to cook that boiled egg? Oh, Grandma was having a little nap? Was that it?

‘She’s crying too much,’ Kathy had said. ‘I can’t get a good fix on what’s wrong. Something about the grandmother. Something about the egg. Sounds like a burn or a scald.’

Hayley hated burns. Hated any injury to a child. Particularly hated it when no one had the presence of mind to plunge the burn immediately into cold running water, but how could you expect a four-year-old to think of that? Or to understand when Kathy had suggested it?

As for the grandmother...

‘It’s number 154—one of the new houses.’ Bruce counted off. ‘OK—146, 148. It’s this one.’ He pointed ahead to a dramatically beautiful architect-designed place, painted cream with purple-blue trim. ‘Gee, look at the views it’s got!’

The driveway climbed steeply upwards from the street, before finishing in a flat apron of paved stone in front of a double garage.

‘I’m going to reverse in,’ Hayley said, silencing the siren.

She passed the driveway, veered out wide into the street, then threw the gearstick into reverse and swung the steering-wheel hard down to the left, accelerating as she did so. The heavy vehicle lumbered backwards up the driveway, its engine loud and strident. Hayley craned in the driver’s seat and managed the manoeuvre without difficulty.

Bruce was out of the car before it had even come to a stop. Hayley followed him through a sunny private courtyard newly planted with salt-tolerant shrubs and flowers and up the stone steps that led to a dramatic front balcony.

In the doorway stood Tori, a pretty child with a high ponytail of fair hair and brown eyes. Her pink cotton dress was wet all down the front and she was shivering and crying.

Shock? Hayley thought at once.

It was a possibility in a child of this age, if that water on her dress had started out scalding hot. The water must have hit...Hayley calculated quickly to give a very rough estimate...as much as eighteen per cent of Tori’s total body area, possibly including a portion of the sensitive genital area. The symptoms she displayed could be the life-threatening medical condition known as shock, or it could be simply the aftermath of the body’s adrenalin reaction.

Ahead of her, Bruce had picked the little girl up.

‘I can feel the heat,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Where’s the kitchen? I’ll get water on it before we ask questions.’

They went into the house, finding their way by instinct. Through a front hallway and a swing door straight ahead there was a large, ultra-modern kitchen and open-plan family room, overlooking a gorgeous rear deck and a gentle slope of garden, its lawn still just a tender new fuzz of green shading the carefully groomed earth.

Hayley overtook Bruce and found an American-style sink sprayer with an extendible hose and squeeze control. ‘First piece of good news,’ she said, pulling it out, turning it on and testing its temperature. It was fresh and cold, and the pressure was good.

‘Look, the stove’s still on,’ Bruce observed. ‘And here are two eggs cracked on the floor. And bread and butter fingers on a plate. You were trying to get some lunch, weren’t you, Tori? Doing a pretty good job.’

A half-empty saucepan of water rested at a precarious angle at the edge of the stainless-steel stove top as well.

‘Here we go, love.’ Bruce sat Tori on the granite counter top and peeled off her dress, and Hayley began to irrigate the area of the burn. On the child’s sandal-clad feet, she noticed two more patches of angry red and realised that there was further burning there as well. There were also some splashes on her thighs. Putting the plug in the sink, she let it partially fill to cover Tori’s feet, then took the sandals off beneath the water, wishing she had two more hands.

‘I know it hurts, sweetheart,’ she said. Mentally, she added another three per cent to her estimate of the total burn area. ‘This cool water will help, OK?’

‘I’m going to see who else is around,’ Bruce said. His voice dropped to an ominous growl. ‘Someone had better be.’

He’d been in the ambulance service here for twenty years, with level four advanced life support qualifications, and he often claimed that nothing could surprise him any more. Plenty could anger him, though. Accidents to children that would have been prevented or made less severe by adequate adult supervision came close to the top of his list.

He handed Hayley a cotton blanket which she draped around Tori’s narrow, shaking shoulders. The scalds needed to cool, but the rest of the child’s body needed warmth. She needed the comfort of a friendly arm, too. Holding her, Hayley felt the spray from the sink hose dampen her white uniform shirt. She would be saturated before this was finished.

Tori’s sobs had begun to subside into convulsive tremors. Her brown eyes were huge and tear-filled and she hadn’t yet said a word.

‘Is it not hurting so much now?’ Hayley asked gently. ‘Feeling a little bit better? We’re here now, and we’re going to look after you.’

She had a four-year-old herself. A boy named Max. Max’s father lived in Melbourne now. Their divorce had been finalised for almost three years. Being on their own together, herself and Max, created a special closeness between mother and child, and Hayley was protective of the time Max spent with Chris. Chris loved his son, but that wasn’t always enough.

Who loves this child? she wondered. Who is going to be devastated about this? Who is going to be guilt-ridden? Who is going to get blamed?

Above the sounds of Tori’s sobs—she still hadn’t spoken—Hayley heard Bruce’s heavy footfalls on the tiles of the front hallway.

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Anyone here?’

He went to the back door and surveyed the unfinished garden, then headed left along the corridor to the bedrooms.

‘We’re going to take you in the ambulance in a minute,’ Hayley said to the little girl. ‘We’re going to put some wet cloths on your tummy to keep it cool. Do you have a mummy or a daddy coming home soon?’

She was losing faith in the very existence of the grandmother, was beginning to believe that Kathy must have heard wrongly and that the child had been at home alone.

‘I’ve got a daddy,’ came a tiny voice at last, still shuddery and squeaky with sobs.

‘Where’s Daddy now, sweetheart?’

‘At work.’

‘Do you know where he works?’

‘At the hospital.’

Bruce came back along the corridor, and entered another room just to the right of the hallway. Its door had been closed. Hayley heard his loud exclamation, and a few moments later his voice on the two-way radio, talking to the dispatch office. His words carried through the hall as far as the kitchen, easily clear enough for her to make out the words.

‘Second car required at 154 Beach Road, Kathy. The grandmother wasn’t taking a nap, Hayley,’ he called, ‘She’s unconscious, and I’m going to check her out.’

‘OK, I’m handling things here,’ she yelled back to him.

It was axiomatic in the ambulance service—never leave the patient. That made things difficult in this case. They weren’t a large station, and only one crew was on station duty during the day. A second on-call crew would have to be brought in, which slowed response time.

Meanwhile, Bruce would already be checking out the most obvious possibilities. An ECG would confirm or rule out a heart problem, while a quick test of the woman’s blood-sugar level would indicate whether this was a diabetic coma.

After a few minutes, Bruce called to her again. ‘It looks like a stroke.’

‘You’re sure?’ Hayley asked. She continued to irrigate Tori’s burned skin.

‘The ECG isn’t right for a heart problem. Her blood sugar’s normal. But she’s still unconscious, just lying here on the couch. That suggests CVA rather than TIA.’

‘Yes, it does.’

She recognised the abbreviations. Cerebral vascular accident and transient ischaemic attack. The latter was sometimes called a mini-stroke, and rapid, complete recovery from this condition was much more common than from a CVA. The blocked blood vessel or leaking blood involved in the more serious event usually caused at least some permanent brain damage.

‘I’ve checked her responses,’ Bruce went on. ‘She’s reacting to pain and light. I’ve covered her and put her on her side, secured her airway. I’m going to keep talking to her, trying to get a response. How’s your little heroine? Hayley, I don’t want to leave until that second car gets here.’

‘No, obviously not,’ Hayley agreed, ‘but it’s difficult. She needs more than what I’m doing now, judging by her skin and her breathing.’

Tori looked clammy and pale, in contrast to her dark hair, and her breathing was too fast and too shallow. Her pulse was thready and rapid as well.

‘Has she said anything?’

‘She managed to tell me her daddy works at the hospital, didn’t you, darling?’

‘I wonder if he’s there now,’ Bruce said. ‘We’ve no idea who he is?’

‘No, but... Well, look at this fabulous house.’

‘Yeah,’ the older man agreed. ‘There are more great views from this room. It limits the options. He’s not the janitor. Doctor? Health Service Manager? I know him, and his kids aren’t this age.’

Hayley was pulling sterile gauze pads from an equipment kit as they batted these questions around. Tori had paled further and was silent now, no longer in tears. Suddenly, her shoulders and stomach heaved, and she leaned forward and vomited.

Hayley took it in her stride, soothing the little girl, holding her shoulders more firmly as two more heaves came and rinsing the mess quickly down the sink when it was done. She gave Tori a glass of water, and the child spat out two or three mouthfuls then drank thirstily. Hayley turned off the sink sprayer and draped the soaked pieces of gauze over the area of the burn.

It was already beginning to blister, suggesting a partial thickness burn. Fortunately, the red area stopped a few centimetres below Tori’s navel and her genital region had been spared.

‘I’m going to get her settled in the ambulance,’ she called to Bruce. ‘When the others get here, we’ll split crews, and Jim can drive me while Paul stays with you.’

She left the front door open and carried Tori to the ambulance, hoping the second car would get there soon. Tori looked tiny on the stretcher in the back of the car. Hayley covered her with a blanket at once. Next she inserted a drip, containing morphine for pain, and was alarmed rather than reassured by Tori’s lack of fight when the sharp prick came. OK, yes, she’d found a nice vein in the back of the child’s hand and the needle had gone in straight away, but she would have expected more of a protest.

She picked up the radio and spoke to the dispatcher. ‘Kathy, is there a second car on its way?’

‘Yes, Car Seven. Car Eleven just called in with a report on their status. It should be with you in a couple of minutes.’

‘OK, thanks.’ She turned back to Tori. ‘What does Daddy do at the hospital, darling?’ she asked. It would help if she could keep Tori alert and reassured.

‘He’s Dr Black,’ came a weak little voice. ‘He makes people better.’

‘Dr Black?’ Hayley echoed. She went cold.

Dear God, it had to be Byron! This was Byron Black’s daughter...

In the distance, the siren of the second car could faintly be heard. Meanwhile, Hayley’s mind raced. She’d seen him, what, twice, in sixteen years? They’d trained together in Arden’s competitive amateur swimming club in their teens. Most people had called him B.J. then, but they probably didn’t any more. She hadn’t used the nickname herself, even back then. She hadn’t felt that it suited him.

He was three years older than she was, but they’d both been backstroke specialists, tackling the sprint distances. This had meant a lot of cheering for each other, a lot of powering alongside each other in the pool and the growth of a friendship. They’d both been keen and competitive, thriving on the atmosphere, and they’d made it to the state championships twice.

Once, they’d even kissed. Lord, she hadn’t relived that delicious memory in years...

Then, when Hayley had been fifteen, Byron had gone off to Sydney to study medicine at Sydney University, and it had seemed as if he’d made a permanent life for himself in the city. He’d been openly competitive in the pool, and he was obviously ambitious about his career. He didn’t come from a professional background. His father worked in a local hardware store, and Byron had had to work hard towards each new goal. In hindsight, she had the impression that he gloried in a challenge, and she couldn’t think of any goal he’d set and failed to meet.

Hayley had run into him once on the beach around Christmas-time about seven years previously, in the company of a pretty, dark-haired woman. ‘This is my wife, Elizabeth,’ he’d said. She had introduced him to Chris that day, and the four of them had talked for a short while.

A couple of years later, they’d bumped into each other in the supermarket and had exchanged two minutes of superficial news. She’d heard a couple of things since. That Elizabeth had died in a plane accident of some kind. That they’d had a little girl.

Tori.

The sirens grew louder and the lower tone of the vehicle’s engine joined the noise as it grew closer. Then the sounds of sirens and engine both died. The second ambulance was here, parked in the street below.

Climbing out the back of her car, Hayley directed Paul Cotter up to the house. ‘Bruce is in the living room with the other patient. First door on the right,’ she told Jim Sheldon. ‘You’re driving this car. Let’s go.’

‘Righto, Hayley.’ Paul hurried up the steps, his black trouser legs a blur, to disappear inside and find Bruce.

Hayley climbed back into the car to Tori.

‘We’re going now,’ she said, gently peeling back the blanket and replacing the gauze, warmed from Tori’s over-heated skin, with freshly soaked pieces. ‘We’re going to see Daddy at the hospital.’

‘Daddy...’ said a tiny voice.

A few weeks ago, Hayley had found out that Byron was coming back to Arden with his little daughter to oversee the accident and emergency department at Arden Hospital and act as Resident Medical Officer. He must have started work there already, judging by what Tori had said. He was replacing an older man who’d retired. But Hayley hadn’t seen him yet because she’d been in Melbourne for the past two weeks, giving Max some time with his dad.

Her heart did a familiar, uncomfortable flip. Chris had been his usual difficult self during her visit. He’d hinted at the possibility that the two of them might get back together. His wistfulness on the issue was a vindication of the way she’d suffered when he’d left, but beyond that... It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that perhaps she’d moved on.

‘You’re my best friend, Hayley,’ he had whispered to her. ‘Maybe that’s what really counts.’

Her reply had been stiff. ‘I’ll always be your friend, Chris.’

He’d been her first and only lover. He’d been her husband for seven years, and he was the father of her child. Aware of all his faults, she still cared for him. It wasn’t a particularly rewarding feeling but, with Max’s needs to consider, was she just being selfish to want more?

She had driven the eight hours back to Arden in a state of unsettled questioning and hadn’t given a further thought to that trivial yet oddly pleasant piece of news, a few weeks earlier, about Byron Black’s imminent return.

And now, here she was, on her second shift back, sitting in the back of Car Seven with Byron’s injured daughter. Dear God, he would be racked over this.

The driver’s door of the car slammed shut and Jim started the engine. ‘How is she?’ he asked.

‘Pretty shocked.’

‘And the other patient?’

‘Bruce didn’t have chance to give me much of a report. He’s pretty sure it’s a stroke. They’ll just have to see how it resolves once she’s admitted. She must be in her sixties.’ She would have liked to have said more, to tell Jim, She must be either Byron Black’s mother or his mother-in-law. How’s he going to feel?

But Tori needed her attention. It wasn’t the time for gossip and conjecture with Jim.

‘We’re on our way now, sweetheart,’ she said, taking the child’s soft little hand. ‘It won’t be long. I’m going to get Mr Sheldon to talk to the hospital and tell your daddy that you’re coming.’

But Tori didn’t speak. She had her eyes closed now. Hayley left her hand where it was.

‘Jim, I’ve worked out who she is,’ Hayley told him briefly and quietly, twisting towards the front of the vehicle. ‘Can you contact the hospital and make sure Dr Black is available in A and E?’

Jim whistled. ‘His daughter? The new guy? I handed over to him last week, another CVA. He seemed good—thorough, focused, not too arrogant—but he’s going to be a mess today.’

He was.

Hayley glimpsed him standing in the ambulance bay as they pulled in. He hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d seen him. He still had the broad shoulders of a swimmer, still wore his thick, soft hair short so that it would stand up in dark spikes when he towelled it dry...or when he ran his fingers through it in agitation, as he was doing now.

He had brown eyes. They weren’t puppy brown like Chris’s, however, but tiger brown with a glint of gold, an altogether more dangerous colour. He had a long straight nose, a wide, serious mouth and a broad forehead. Each of those features was stiff with tension now. They appeared to be etched more strongly than usual, as if the sculptor who’d made him—and any sculptor would be proud to have made a human form like Byron Black’s—had dug his tools in extra deep, manipulating them with force.

There had always been an aura around Byron, something that hinted at the capacity for deep-running passion and the capacity to contain that passion carefully inside him. Today it looked as if the passion was threatening to break free.

A nurse and an orderly appeared with a stretcher and a drip stand. Hayley opened the back of the car, unlocked the ambulance stretcher from its metal track and slid it out, extending the wheels down to ground level as she did so. Tori was light and little and easy to shift from one stretcher to the other.

‘Tori! Victoria!’ Byron said hoarsely, curving his long body over her.

He was in the way of the drip line, but Hayley managed to snake it around him. As she did so, the sensitive inner skin of her forearm brushed across the top of that dark, spiky head and his hair was as silky and clean as she remembered. With the hairs of her arm still standing on end, she passed the plastic bag of fluid across to the nurse, who hung it on her stand.

An orderly began to wheel the stretcher inside. Byron was still leaning over it, his long, strong legs working instinctively to keep up as they rumbled from concrete slab to vinyl flooring, through a set of automatic doors.

‘Daddy...’ came a little voice, fuzzy from the effect of the morphine. ‘Grandma wouldn’t wake up from her sleep.’

He went white, straightened like a released catapult and turned to Hayley, blind and helpless. Didn’t even recognise her. She wasn’t surprised. ‘What happened?’ he said. ‘What on earth happened?’

‘She has a partial thickness burn over twelve to fifteen per cent of her body.’ Hayley kept her voice calm and impersonal. He needed a clear report, not a lot of words wasted in sympathy. Not yet. ‘No facial or genital involvement. The other patient in the house with her appears to have had a CVA and she’s coming in a second vehicle. The other crew will be able to give you a better report on her status...’

‘A CVA? That’s my mother...’ Byron was paler than ever now. ‘Dear God, and the two of them were alone!’

They could all hear the sirens of the second ambulance now. Byron clearly didn’t know which way to turn next, his usual control and authority momentarily deserting him. His eyes looked wild, his lips were white, his fists were balled hard. Hayley ached with sympathy for him.

‘Tori must have been terrified,’ he whispered.

‘I think she wasn’t, Byron, not until she burned herself,’ she reassured him, using his first name without even thinking about it. ‘She was trying to make boiled eggs for lunch. She thought your mother was just having a little sleep on the couch.’

‘All right, yes. I guess that’s how she would intepret it, yes.’ His vision cleared suddenly, emphasising the golden glints in the depths of his eyes. ‘Hayley! Hayley Kennett! I’m sorry, I’ve only just...’ He gripped her arm.

‘It’s OK.’

She returned his gesture, squeezing the muscular forearm she’d seen so many times, tanned and dripping wet, at swim practice. With an arm like that, it felt as if he should be the strong one but, of course, he wasn’t today, not after what had happened. She didn’t waste time reminding him that she was Hayley Morris now. She hadn’t gone back to her maiden name after the divorce.

‘We don’t know how long she spent trying to rouse her grandmother,’ she said instead, as they covered the final few metres before entering the paediatric section of the emergency department. ‘Perhaps no time at all. She does seem to have taken the ‘‘nap’’ at face value. Her dress was wet all down the front, and there are burns on her thighs and feet, suggesting that she tipped boiling water over herself when she was trying to get the eggs out of the saucepan. We found the eggs broken on the floor.’

‘Mum’s all right?’

He stood back for a moment as they transferred Tori from ambulance stretcher to emergency department bed. Its fresh starched white linens were stretched smoothly across a firm mattress, and it was surrounded by equipment and supplies whose intimidating effect could only be partially offset by pictures of dinosaurs, landscapes and fairies on the walls.

‘She’s in the care of our second crew.’ Hayley repeated herself patiently. ‘Bruce McDonald is with her. He ruled out a heart problem and diabetes, secured her airway and was trying to stimulate her into waking up when I left. I can’t say any more than that yet.’

‘This is a nightmare!’ Byron muttered helplessly.

Then he turned to the A and E nurse, and was suddenly in complete control. Only on the surface, Hayley suspected. Only because he had to be.

‘Get whoever’s on call to come in now,’ he said. ‘We need a second doctor. Tori, Daddy’s here, sweetheart. OK, we need her on monitors. Hayley, how fast are you running that drip? You have her on morphine, right? How much? Tori, you’re fine, now. You were scared, weren’t you, and you were brave and just brilliant to phone the emergency number like that, and remember our new address. I’m so proud of you. Daddy’s going to have a look at your tummy and your feet now, OK?’

Hayley answered his questions, darting her responses into his uninterrupted flow of words. After recognising her, he hadn’t looked at her again. He had pulled a chair up beside Tori’s bed and hadn’t looked away from his daughter since he’d released that brief, almost painful squeeze on Hayley’s arm.

She stepped back with a reluctance that surprised her. Her role in this was over, apart from writing up her reports, but she didn’t feel ready to let go. She wanted to look after Byron, which was strange when they’d had so little contact over the years. He was so big and capable, so determined, strong-willed and confident. It was unsettling, heart-rending, to see him this vulnerable.

She wanted to make promises and assurances to him that she had no right to make. Things like, It wasn’t your fault. They’re both going to be all right. Don’t knock yourself out.

But she was just a casual friend from years ago, someone he’d yelled encouragement to and slapped on the back in congratulation. Someone he’d kissed just once, in the corner on a couch in the dark at a party.

It had lasted for, oh, at least an hour—a first, wonderful taste of the primal intimacy that a man and a woman could find together. Then a couple of days later he’d turned up at her front door to say something awkward about his imminent move to Sydney and not wanting to get involved in a relationship at the moment.

To tell the truth, she’d been relieved to hear it. At fifteen, just a girl, not a woman, she hadn’t been ready for a serious relationship with a university-aged boyfriend who already seemed to know exactly what he wanted out of life. For a few months she’d had romantic dreams about meeting up with him again when she was a mature adult—say, seventeen or eighteen—but then those dreams had drifted into insignificance, as a young girl’s dreams so often did, and at nineteen she’d met Chris.

The automatic doors opened again as Bruce and Paul wheeled Mrs Black into A and E. A second nurse came forward to take formal charge of the new patient. As Hayley sat at the desk at the A and E nurses’ station, she heard Bruce giving a more detailed rundown on Mrs Black’s condition.

‘Blood pressure one-sixty over ninety. Pulse eighty-seven. Oxygen saturation ninety-eight per cent.’

When she was leaving, she heard Byron’s voice again. ‘Where do we have beds at the moment? High Dependency?’ Then a few seconds later, decisively, ‘No, I’m not sending her to Sydney. We can treat her here. I’m not letting her out of my sight.’

Jim had moved Car Seven away from the ambulance entrance. Hayley took the passenger seat and they drove away at the leisurely pace which came as a relief after the urgency of earlier.

‘Want to call Dispatch and tell Kathy we’ll take that patient transport now?’ Jim suggested.

‘Yes, we’re much later than scheduled,’ she agreed, then spoke into the radio. ‘Dispatch, this is Car Seven...’

The numbers of the cars implied a large ambulance fleet, but since the lower numbers belonged to vehicles now retired from service this was deceptive. This rural area didn’t need a large fleet. There was one crew on station duty day and night, seven days a week, with a second crew as back-up on call. Very often, the back-up crew wouldn’t be needed for an entire shift.

Hayley and Bruce had been diverted from the non-urgent patient transport job earlier when the urgent call-out had come.

The patient transport in this case was nearly a two-hour job, door to door. They went to a dairy farm about thirty kilometres from town where an elderly man was ready for the local hospice, in the terminal stage of his illness. After delivering him there and handing him over to the hospice staff, they returned to Ambulance Headquarters at three o’clock, and the rest of the day went by with no call-outs. Jim and Paul had gone home, while Bruce joined Hayley to finish their shift at the station.

‘Wonder how that little girl and her grandmother are getting on,’ Bruce said after they’d signed out for the day. He added before Hayley could answer, ‘Going straight home?’

She had showered and changed into black stretch jeans and a soft blue knit cotton top. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I’m going to phone and find out how Max and Mum are getting on. If everything’s all right, I’m going back to the hospital.’

CHAPTER TWO

THE sight of his daughter in sleep was something that Byron had treated himself to every single day since her birth four and a half years ago. There was so much trust displayed in the way a happy child slept. The skin around her eyes and across her forehead was completely innocent of tension, and she slept on her back as if always prepared for the brush of his good-night kiss.

Watching Tori sleep was like a compass point in his life, he sometimes thought. It kept him on course. After Elizabeth’s tragic death, when Tori had been just six months old, the sight had become even more necessary, and even more precious. Sometimes it was the only time in a whole day when there was stillness and quiet.

The time when he wasn’t run off his feet at work, juggling six things at once, always the one people looked to for answers and solutions. When he wasn’t trying to remember the items on the shopping list he’d left at home, or fighting hospital administration over budgets and legal issues. He wasn’t swamped by onslaughts of Tori’s irrepressible exuberance and curiosity.

He didn’t have to say, Sit down at the table, Tori, we don’t stand up on a chair when we eat, or Don’t jump on the couch, love. You’ll break it and you could fall and hit your head on the coffee table, or Time to put your toys away now. Yes, it is, it’s almost bedtime!

Every night when he came into her room before going to bed himself, just to look at the little form tucked under the covers, breathing so deeply and rhythmically and peacefully, he felt a fullness in his chest that was pure love.

He hadn’t thought there could be a stronger or deeper feeling for one’s child. Today, watching her in her white hospital bed in the high-dependency unit, with the summer light still bright and hot in the non-air-conditioned room at the end of the day, he discovered that he’d been wrong. There was a stronger feeling, and it came when love was mixed with fear. It weakened his limbs and made him light-headed and he hated it.

He’d almost lost her today. It reminded him too strongly of the way he’d lost Elizabeth four years ago in a tragic accident which for months had tortured and taunted him with pointless, impotent if onlys. He didn’t think that way about Elizabeth’s death any more.

Or not often, anyway. He’d accepted it.

She had received an invitation from her GP practice partner and his wife to fly with them in their light plane to Tamworth for a weekend of country music, line dancing and outdoor meals. Byron himself had insisted—maybe he’d been too high-handed about it—that she needed a break. She should go and he’d be fine with Tori, who had been a pretty exhausting child even then.

‘I’ll only go if I’ve expressed enough milk, and if we’ve practised with her taking a bottle from you,’ Elizabeth had said.

Don’t think about what would have happened if Tori had refused to take a bottle.

Tori had taken to the bottle with no trouble at all, and so Elizabeth had gone to Tamworth. There had been a mechanical failure. The plane had crashed into the wild country of the Dividing Range, near Barrington Tops. All five people on the aircraft had been killed instantly, but it had taken State Emergency Service volunteers and other rescue workers more than four days to locate the wreckage. When they finally had, it at least had provided a form of certainty and reality to the tragedy.

It had happened.

Now there had been another accident, and there was a new set of if onlys.

If only Elizabeth’s parents hadn’t decided to move north to Queensland to be closer to their other two children. Byron still felt uneasy about their move.

He wondered if Elizabeth’s mother had been unhappy about looking after Tori full time while he was working. If so, she should have said. Had that been the problem? It had seemed so sudden, and their reasons had been vague at best.

He had thought this many times over the past few months, hated this sort of powerless questioning at the best of times. He vastly preferred a situation where he could take action, and where he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

And was he wrong to have returned to Arden? It had seemed like the right thing to do. The obvious thing to do. An action he could take. He’d made his home and his career in Sydney mainly because that had been where Elizabeth had wanted to be. Theirs had been the kind of partnership where both of them had made willing sacrifices.

But then his widowed mother had been keen to see more of him and Tori, and had insisted that she’d be fine looking after her granddaughter while Byron was at work.

‘After all, she’ll be in preschool for three mornings a week this year,’ his mother had said. ‘I’ll get a break. And it’s not as if she’s still a Terrible Two.’

No, but she was a pretty full-on four and a half!

He should have insisted that it was too much for Mum. She’d looked so tired when he’d come home each day, but she’d kept saying that everything was fine, that she loved it, that Tori was no trouble. Since when had Tori ever been ‘no trouble’?

Even Elizabeth’s mother Monica, who was active and energetic and only fifty-four, would throw up her hands some days and say, ‘Take her home! I’ve had enough!’

Mum was sixty-eight.

In the bed, his daughter stirred and moaned, and Byron’s eyes pricked with stinging tears that he steeled himself not to give way to.

Victoria Louise Galloway Black had a personality even bigger than her name. She was so bright, so confident. Dangerously so, it had proved. She wouldn’t have thought twice about getting lunch on her own for herself and Grandma. Her favourite, of course, soft-boiled eggs with bread-and-butter fingers to dip into the runny orange yolk.

And he kept wondering about the ‘nap’, too. He knew that Mum and Tori watched children’s TV shows together on the ABC in the late afternoons. Play School and Madeline and Bob The Builder. Maybe today wasn’t the first time Mum had taken a nap on the couch. She often fell asleep in front of the television at night, he knew.

Did Tori regularly end up pottering around by herself, having ideas more ambitious than her small hands could manage, while Mum snoozed?

He should have insisted that it was too much...

Byron heard a soft movement behind him and turned, expecting it to be Tori’s nurse, come to carry out her scheduled set of observations. Instead, it was Hayley Kennett. Except, no, she wasn’t Kennett any more, he remembered vaguely. She’d married Chris someone. Only...wasn’t she divorced now? Someone had passed on that bit of news to him. So perhaps it was Kennett again, after all.

He ransacked his brain, trying to fill in the landscape of her life in more detail, but couldn’t do it. He also felt bad that he hadn’t recognised her at first today. She had always been one of the nicest girls at swim club—fun-loving, hardworking, competitive and zestful, with a body as sleek as a seal’s and no falseness in the way she’d congratulated those who’d been more successful than her.

He wasn’t surprised that she’d succeeded in the demanding career she had chosen. The NSW Ambulance Service often received over a thousand applications for every advertised trainee position. Odds like that wouldn’t have scared Hayley off.

‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘I wanted to see how she was getting on. And your mother.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you today.’ He touched her hand briefly. It was pleasantly cool.

She shook her head, and her dangling earrings caught the light. ‘You had other things to think about.’

‘Thank you for being there.’

‘I was just doing my job.’

‘You’re not doing it now, though. You didn’t need to follow up.’

‘I wanted to.’

‘I really appreciate it, Hayley.’

It was the sort of thing that you said anyway, but he discovered, as he tasted the words in his mouth, that he really meant them. What was this new feeling that had been nagging at him lately? Whatever it was, the sight of Hayley made it diminish immediately. Something uncoiled inside him, and the perpetual tightness at his temples and in the back of his throat slowly and fractionally eased.

‘How’s Tori?’ she asked.

They both looked down at the sleeping child. Byron knew that she was the most beautiful child in the whole world, with her creamy skin and long lashes and fine, blond-streaked light brown hair. He accepted that there was perhaps a tiny hint of parental bias in his opinion, and that other people didn’t think the same way, but that was their problem!

‘We pulled her through the real danger—the shock—and she’s stable now,’ he said. ‘Kidney output is good. We’re still giving her a lot of fluid, high pain relief. There’s very little full-thickness burning. She’ll only need a couple of small grafts, which I can take her to Canberra for. Thank heavens. I keep thinking, if she hadn’t known how to dial OOO... If she hadn’t remembered our address...’

‘But she did. Those what ifs are dangerous, Byron,’ Hayley said. ‘What if she hadn’t burned herself at all, and she’d gone on thinking that your mother was just having a sleep? Your mum could have lost her airway while she was unconscious and choked to death. Maybe Tori’s burns have saved your mother’s life.’

‘Don’t follow it any further.’ He shook his head, his closed mouth firm and tight, then added, ‘You’re right. I’m thinking too much, when action is what I prefer. I checked on Mum a few minutes ago, across the corridor, and she’s asleep as well. Otherwise I’d take you across, so she could thank you. I mean,’ he revised, ‘she’s not talking yet, but she was squeezing my hand earlier.’

‘That’s good.’

‘She’s looking a lot better than she did at first. Look, have you eaten? Would you like to grab something? What is it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just after six? We could...catch up, or something.’

Dear Lord, what was that odd little thread in his voice? he wondered. Was it shaking?

‘Uh, well, I was about to head home,’ Hayley answered him reluctantly.

She saw the disappointment in his face at once, and guessed its source. He was restless, anguished. He didn’t want to eat with just the company of his own tortured thoughts tonight.

‘But I could hold off on that,’ she added quickly. ‘Just for an hour or so. My son’s with my mother.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he answered. ‘No, please, keep to your plans.’

‘Look, I’ll phone her, OK? Max is probably fine to stay a bit longer. He’s very comfortable at Mum’s, and she was going to feed us anyway. I’m not rostered tomorrow, and I’m taking him to his first preschool session. He and I get to see plenty of each other.’

‘Tori’s starting preschool, too. Supposed to be,’ he revised in a bleak tone. ‘Is your son going to Arden North?’

‘Yes, it’s just around the corner from us.’

‘And it’s halfway between my place and the hospital. I live at—Well, you know where I live.’

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ she offered. ‘So dramatic and cleverly designed. You must have enjoyed getting it right, and once you’ve got the garden going...’

Byron shook his head. ‘It’s not beautiful to me at the moment. Stupid to blame the house for what happened!’

‘Pizza?’ she suggested, to change the subject. He looked as if he wanted to veer away from it—like a racing driver taking a tight turn.

‘Sounds good.’ It was automatic, and Hayley guessed that he didn’t care what they ate.

‘I’ll ring Mum and Max from my mobile when we get outside,’ she said. ‘Want to take my car?’

‘Whatever...’

She suspected he might have more male ego at stake on the issue normally, but tonight he either didn’t care or he realised, as she did, that he was too preoccupied to be safe at the wheel. The latter, probably. She somehow had the impression he’d become a man who kept pretty close tabs on his own emotions.

‘Something’s come up,’ she said to her mother on the phone. ‘Could you handle it if I’m not there till about seven-thirty or so?’

‘We’re fine. Not a problem, I hope?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

It was almost comical to watch Byron folding himself into her small car. Chris always refused to drive with her at all. ‘That thing? I’d rather walk! Come on, look at me! Do you think I’d fit? We’ll take my car.’

Byron was tactful enough not to comment on the dimensions of the car. Perhaps he didn’t care tonight. He had his knees tipped sideways and pressed hard against the door, and a painfully tight frown on his face.

Hayley didn’t try to talk to him as they drove. He probably wanted to make this quick, and he might well end up regretting that he’d asked her. She’d seen enough of the way people behaved in a crisis to know that moods could swing back and forth like the boom of a runaway yacht in a storm.

There were two pizza restaurants in Arden, and she picked the closest, able to park directly in front of it because it was early and a weeknight.

‘Whatever you like’ was his preference in toppings.

Helpful! But she didn’t want to push, didn’t want to waste time and energy over something that trivial. Suddenly remembered the pizza nights they’d had after swim meets and confidently told the man behind the counter, ‘Large ham and pineapple, please.’

‘Take-away?’

‘No, to eat here, thanks.’ There! Easily dealt with!

There were four tables at the back. Plastic tablecloths. Postcard-style prints of Sicily on the cheaply panelled walls. Red vinyl tiles on the floor. The place wasn’t glamorous.

And it could have been the bottom of a stairwell full of garbage cans for all Byron cared, Hayley realised.

She was swept with a churning wave of tenderness for him. Perhaps it was the kind of thing you could only feel for the man who used to be the boy who’d given you your first real kiss. They’d never had a falling-out. Life had just swept them off in different directions. Heaps of the girls at swim club had had crushes on him, but he’d been too focused on his goals to even know it, and too honorable to have taken advantage of those silly female hormones if he had.

And now he’d grown up. He was a man in every sense of the word. Thirty-four years old, successful in his profession, with a physique that had more than adequately filled its adolescent promise. He had known a man’s joys, and the unique grief of losing a spouse which didn’t touch most people until they were well into old age.

Without thinking about how he might interpret the gesture, she stretched her arm across the table and covered the back of his hand with her palm and fingers, chafing his warm, smooth skin gently.

‘She must be an amazing little girl, Byron,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her properly at preschool. Maybe Max will have met his match at last.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it!’

He laughed and gave his hand a half-turn so that his fingers met Hayley’s and actively returned her touch. He squeezed her fingers, then stroked the ball of his thumb back and forth over her knuckles. It was slow and hypnotic. Shouldn’t have been erotic as well, but it was, and suddenly Hayley remembered in exact and vivid detail just how good that kiss of theirs had been, sixteen years ago.

Slow, questing, exploratory. Not a prelude to a more intimate goal, but the goal itself. Just to kiss. Just to hold each other. Just to melt inside. She had mussed up his hair. Those short, dark strands weren’t spiky at all, but soft and slippery and clean.

He had slipped his hand beneath the hem of her top and the waistband of her jeans to touch her skin. It must have taken him half an hour to reach her breast. He’d caressed the neat, firm swell the way he was caressing her fingers now, slowly and without demands.

‘It’s good to see you again, Hayley,’ he said at last. It sounded as if he meant it, but it was clearly an effort all the same.

‘Mmm, it was a good time in our lives, wasn’t it?’ she answered. ‘Those years in swim club? We had fun.’

‘Do you still see any of the others? Any people from that group of us who went to state championships two years in a row?’

‘Craig’s still around. Samantha. Rob.’ She sketched a summary of their lives, and mentioned one or two others as well who’d left Arden and moved to bigger places like Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra.

‘And what about you?’ he asked. ‘You and—?’

‘Chris and I are divorced,’ she came in quickly. For some reason, it was important to get this across very clearly. Important for whom? Byron? Or herself?

‘I’d heard, I think.’ He nodded.

Their pizza arrived, giving Hayley the excuse—she suddenly needed it—to pull her hand away. She felt disloyal to Chris, touching another man’s hand and enjoying the sensation so much. It was crazy. Chris had been the one to leave. He had wanted to ‘find himself’. He hadn’t been able to ‘handle being a father’. She’d ‘sprung it on him’.

His problem. All of it.

She had seen some signs, on her recent trip to Melbourne, that Chris was growing up at last. Maybe he had ‘found himself’ now. He’d started a self-defence school the previous year, called the Cee-Jay International Tae Kwon Do Academy, and was working hard to recruit students. If he kept it up, the school would provide him with a decent income. He still couldn’t manage his accounts or his taxes, but she didn’t mind helping him out with those from time to time. She didn’t want to see him fail. Which meant she still cared. Enough to—?

‘Yes, it’s tough,’ Byron said.

She jumped at his words, and realised she’d been miles away, hardly tasting the salt of the ham and melted cheese and the juicy sweetness of the pineapple. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘I get the impression that the break-up wasn’t your idea,’ he clarified.

‘Uh, no. No, it wasn’t. I’m...stubborn. I don’t like to let things go, or admit defeat before I’ve given it everything I’ve got. And I have Max’s needs to consider.’

He nodded and didn’t pursue it, which she was relieved about. Why had she told him all that?

‘I’m not brilliant company tonight, am I?’ he said instead.

‘I wasn’t expecting you to be.’

‘Thanks for that.’ He pressed his palms against his eyes and let out a gust of breath. ‘When something like this happens—I mean, I miss Elizabeth badly enough at the best of times, but when something like this happens...’

‘I know.’ She nodded.

Although she didn’t, of course. Not truly. A divorce wasn’t the same thing as a death. The pain was focused in different places.

‘I’ve stopped looking for it to go away,’ he said. ‘I used to try and measure it. I’d think, It’s less today than it was a month ago. I’m healing. But I’ve stopped doing that. Because it’s not linear, is it?’

‘No.’ That she could agree with, in full understanding. ‘Not at all.’

‘It goes up and down like—like share prices on a stock-exchange index or something.’

‘Bad today,’ she guessed, and out came her hand again, reaching across to his.

‘Pretty bad,’ he confirmed, and returned her touch for the second time. ‘Four years! Some people have married again after four years.’

He shook his head.

‘Do you think you’ll ever remarry?’ It should have been an intrusive question, but somehow it wasn’t.

Byron shook his head again. ‘No, I don’t expect so. Just can’t imagine that I could ever find that...that totality again. Bits of it, maybe. The physical part. Or the friendship. But not the whole of it, not the certainty of it, not in one person. Not the same.’

‘No, it wouldn’t be the same,’ she agreed, out of that same tenderness she’d felt for him before.

‘I’ve had it, though. I’ve been lucky. A lot of people don’t even get it once.’

‘No...’

Their hands separated and they each ate a little more pizza in silence.

Hayley thought, He’s romanticising. But who wouldn’t, after what he’s lost? He obviously did love her very much, and now that she’s gone, he’s forgotten the tensions they must have had, the disagreements, the disillusionments. Everybody has them!

It was one of the things which made her wonder—uncomfortably—if she and Chris could still have a future together. She understood him, she cared about him, he was Max’s father. What more did she want?

‘I’ve been away from her long enough,’ Byron was saying, and for a second Hayley thought he was still talking about Elizabeth. ‘I don’t want her to wake up when I’m not there.’

Oh, he meant Tori, of course!

‘Nor Mum, for that matter,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping my aunt and uncle will come down from Harpoon Bay to see her tomorrow.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘Unfortunately my younger sister lives in London now.’

‘You haven’t finished your pizza.’

He waved it away. ‘Take it home with you, if you want.’

She asked for a box, and when they got back to the hospital she hunted up one of the nurses in the high-dependency unit and said, ‘Can you...kind of...remind Dr Black to finish this off during the night?’ She didn’t have to ask to know that he wasn’t planning to go home before morning. ‘Heat it up in the microwave for him even? Put it on a plate and shove it into his hands?’

‘Not looking after himself properly?’ the nurse guessed.

Hayley cannoned into the man himself in the doorway to this section of the unit. He’d checked that Tori was still asleep, and was about to cross the corridor to see his mother.

‘Still here?’ he said.

‘Your pizza’s in the fridge,’ she answered drily, earning his rusty laugh.

‘I thought it was your pizza,’ he said.

‘No, it’s definitely yours. I’m not all that fond of ham and pineapple.’ She added, before he could ask, ‘That was what we always used to get when we all went out after swim meets, remember? Mr Hazelwood didn’t used to give us a choice, or he said we’d have been there all night, making up our minds. I saw his point!’

‘And you never said you didn’t like it?’

‘I wasn’t going to be the only nuisance.’

‘You were always too nice!’

‘So were you. You used to wait before you took the last piece.’

‘Not very noble of me, since I knew Mum would have a second dinner waiting at home.’

‘You mean she didn’t know about the pizza?’

‘Hey, I was growing!’

They both laughed.

With one hand propped against the doorway, he leaned down and cupped his other palm against the back of her neck, his fingers nestling into the feathery texture of her short, dark hair. Instinctively, she lifted her face and their eyes met, and she saw an awareness in his gaze that she knew was mirrored in her own.

His pupils were wide and dark, and there was a new softness to the way he held himself. Now he was watching her mouth. Her lips parted on a sudden in-breath, her heartbeat quickened and then he released his hold and the moment passed.

It was a relief. She wasn’t prepared for something like this tonight.

‘I m-must get to Mum and Dad’s to pick up Max,’ she stammered. ‘Don’t lose touch now that you’re back.’

Big points for inanity on that one, Hayley!

‘I won’t,’ Byron said. He might have said more, but she was already striding off along the corridor.

He watched her for a moment.

It was visiting hour, and there were knots of people about, some of them looking distinctly uncomfortable in the hospital environment. Hayley took no notice of them, kept her head down and her walk rapid so that her delicate gold and jade earrings swung against her slender neck and caught the light. He’d noticed that before.

Speed seemed to suit Hayley, Byron decided. She had been fast in the pool, she was fast at the wheel of an ambulance and she was fast on her feet. Organised. Efficient.

Escaping.

He knew it. Was deeply glad she felt the same way he did about that little moment of heat in the doorway, and about the way their hands had kept straying together across the restaurant table as they’d talked. He’d always found her very attractive. She was compact yet strong, with gorgeously smooth skin and a constant sparkle of life and warmth in her dark brown eyes.

Of course they’d all been a mass of stimulated hormones at swim club, surrounded by all that slick, wet skin and smoothly honed muscle. He had fancied almost all the girls at one stage or another, even the ones he hadn’t particularly liked.

Perhaps that was how he’d learned so early on that you had to divorce physical attraction from emotional connection. When he’d met Elizabeth during his second year of medicine at Sydney University, their physical response to each other had been just one part of the package—the uniquely precious and complete package he knew he’d never find again. Didn’t even want to find again, in fact.

These days, he didn’t have that scatter-gun, adolescent approach to women. Only during those late teen years had he fancied anything and everything in a skirt. The sit-up-and-howl feeling came much less often, now. There was discrimination involved.

And yet he still found Hayley Kennett...or whatever her surname was now...very attractive indeed. Found that their long-ago kiss was surprisingly vivid in his memory. It unsettled him. Scared him, if he was honest.

No. Definitely. I don’t need it. I don’t want it.

It was an instinctive thing, and not something he wanted to analyse too closely. Wasn’t the reluctance enough? Did he have to work out why?

Yes. Perhaps he did. Take a deep breath and just do it, Byron.

He didn’t fully trust his judgement, or his reactions—that was part of the problem. It would be so easy to numb himself...assuage certain needs...with an affair, kidding himself that it was safe with Hayley because they’d known each other for so long. But what would happen when the affair ended and the numbness wore off? He’d be back to square one, and minus an old friend. Worse, he’d have lanced open the still-not-fully-healed wound of Elizabeth’s loss and the agony would be back.

No, if he was going to launch into any kind of new relationship, now that he was back in Arden, it wouldn’t be with Hayley, he decided firmly. It would be with someone much, much safer.

On that note, feeling relieved, he went in to see his mother.

CHAPTER THREE

‘MUMMY’S on roster today,’ Max told his preschool teacher, Karen, on a Wednesday morning in late March. ‘That means she’s staying all morning.’

‘I know. It’ll be fun having Mummy, won’t it?’ Karen agreed, smiling across the top of the little boy’s mid-brown head at Hayley.

‘What do you need me to do, Karen?’ Hayley asked. She hadn’t been the parent on roster at preschool before, although she’d done it several times the previous year when Max had attended a junior play school for two short mornings each week.

But before the teacher could answer, they were both distracted by the sight of Byron Black stepping up to the veranda, with his little girl’s hand in his. He was so tall that he almost had to duck to clear the low veranda ceiling, and there was something about him that had already drawn more than one pair of eyes.

‘Excuse me, Hayley,’ Karen said. ‘This is little Tori Black, and it’s her first day. She’s... uh...had a rather difficult time.’

‘That’s fine. I know Tori. And her dad,’ Hayley said.

She couldn’t help watching the pair as they came through the door. In the bright morning light, Byron looked anxious at first, as if wondering whether Tori was ready for this yet. His reaction made sense. It was six weeks since the little girl’s accident, and her burns didn’t show, but beneath her pretty purple sundress there would still be significant scarring, as well as areas of reddened skin like latticework where she’d recently had her grafts.

Karen went forward to greet them, while Hayley dropped to the carpet to help Max with his jigsaw puzzle of a cat. She was well aware that her thoughts were focused on Byron and Tori more than on the wooden pieces scattered over the carpet in front of her.

‘I did this one every day last week,’ Max said. ‘I know it off by heart.’ Which explained why he didn’t actually need her help at all. ‘Ear. Tail. Other ear. Head. Paws,’ he said, his fingers snapping each piece unerringly into place.

Being superfluous to Max’s puzzle-doing, Hayley felt less guilty about her continued awareness of Byron and his daughter. She had gone to the hospital to visit Tori and Mrs Black one more time, two days after the accident, and had given Tori a three-dimensional puzzle set, but Byron hadn’t been there at the time. The handovers she’d made in the A and E department since then had been made to other members of staff.

She’d heard some news of him, though, via another ambulance officer who had also known him during their high school years.

‘He’s started going out with Wendy Piper, who’s my wife’s GP,’ Paul Cotter had said. ‘Good luck to them, and I hope he likes horses!’

‘Dr Piper’s my GP too,’ Hayley had replied cautiously. In Arden’s compact health-care system, this meant that Dr Piper also worked at the hospital in certain capacities, including regular rosters in the A and E department. ‘But I hadn’t heard about her and Dr Black.’

‘Oh, she and my wife are friends as well. Rhonda’s agisting a horse for Wendy at the moment, too, so they meet up in a muddy paddock sometimes. Have a good gossip, I expect.’

Karen showed Tori where to hang her small pink backpack, where to put her piece of fruit and where the toilets were. Byron hovered just behind them, alert for any potential problem. Leading the little girl over to the puzzle shelf, the preschool teacher then said encouragingly, ‘Why don’t you choose one and your dad can help you with it?’

‘I’m good at puzzles. I love puzzles. I don’t need help, but he can join in,’ Tori corrected firmly.

‘Would you like to join in, Dad?’ Karen said, with a smile in her voice.

‘Love to!’

There! He’d also smiled now at last and it was amazing how much it changed his face. The warmth was something you could have heated your hands by. There was a generosity in it, too. Share my pleasure, it seemed to say. Love and loss weren’t the only emotions that touched this man through and through. Hayley found that she was smiling as well, although he hadn’t even looked at her yet.

Byron managed to find a space on the carpet that was big enough to accommodate his long legs and sat down, while Tori chose a puzzle. He caught sight of Hayley and they both said hello. Max noticed, and informed Byron, ‘Mummy’s on roster.’

‘Will she need some help?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you staying?’ Hayley guessed.

He shifted a little closer, and spoke quietly. ‘Yes, it’s probably not necessary, but her graft sites are still tender, and—Well, I just wanted to stay for her first day, that’s all.’

‘You can cut up the children’s fruit,’ Hayley suggested, ‘and then it won’t feel as if you’re just hovering.’

‘That’s a good idea.’ He looked relieved. ‘It’ll be good to be involved, at least this once. Mostly she’s going to be brought here and picked up by her home day-care mother.’

‘Is that working out well?’

‘Wonderfully well. She’s been going to Robyn’s for two weeks, and I’ve heard only glowing reports from both of them. I even,’ he confessed, ‘dropped in unannounced last week. You know, you hear stories about bad childcare...’

‘I know.’ Hayley nodded.

‘But Robyn had Tori and the other two she looks after, plus her own little boy, out in the sandpit, making roads and gardens out of twigs. All their sunhats were on, and she was making them a healthy snack. I felt like a heel for checking up on her in such an obvious way.’

‘Hadn’t you thought of an excuse for your visit?’ she teased.

‘No.’ He grinned wryly. ‘I’d squeezed it in between working out next month’s A and E doctors’ on-call roster and following up on a problem we’ve been having with some equipment. I had to take time off work because of Tori’s burns, and things have been hectic since I started back, so I just wasn’t thinking. Kicked myself for not at least handing over a spare pair of socks or something.’

‘Since the day-carer is a parent herself, she’ll understand.’

‘She did understand! Instantly! Might have been less embarrassing if she hadn’t! Doting father, caught red-handed in an act of flagrant worrying.’

Hayley laughed. Despite that fleeting look of anxiety as he’d entered the preschool, he seemed a hundred times more relaxed than he had been six weeks ago. More confident, too—confident enough to mock his own feelings. The softer, happier expression suited his face, and the confidence suited his voice. It was lazy, deep and rich, lacking the harshness of fear and agitation she’d noticed that day in February.

‘How is your mother?’ she asked.

His face fell a little. ‘She’s still in rehab, but progressing well. Taking a few steps with a frame. Saying a few words. Feeding herself, left-handed. It’s going to be a long road, and we haven’t made any plans yet, but she’s motivated and that’s a huge plus.’

‘It is,’ Hayley agreed.

‘Your mother looks after Max, you said?’ His interest seemed genuine, and she remembered that from the past as well. He probably wouldn’t have described himself as a good listener, but he genuinely was.

‘Yes, and Dad pitches in, too,’ she explained, ‘with bedtime stories when I’m on a late shift, and trips to the playground. I couldn’t manage a paramedic’s hours without them.’

Chris’s parents lived locally, too, but unfortunately they weren’t very interested. Even during her marriage, Hayley had never been very close to them.

‘They’re in good health, obviously,’ Byron said, still talking about Hayley’s own parents.

‘Very, thank goodness,’ she answered. ‘Dad’ll be sixty next year, but you wouldn’t know it.’

‘My in-laws are like that,’ he said. ‘Monica’s coming for a visit next week. Tori can’t wait, and I’m looking forward to it, too. She’s a terrific woman.’

There wasn’t much time to talk after this. The children packed away their puzzles and had group time and news. With a preschooler’s short attention span, these things didn’t last long. Then it was time for ‘activities’—all the craft and play tasks which were so important in building a child’s fine motor skills. Karen asked Byron if he could help one child at a time on the computer as they learned to manipulate the mouse and played a shape-matching game.

Hayley was fully occupied in writing names on paintings and pegging them out to dry, as well as helping Karen and her assistant in encouraging the children’s ideas and reminding them to take turns and share. She was still aware of him in the room, however, his deeper voice a low counterpoint to the high-pitched tones of children.

More aware than she wanted to be, if she was honest. He’d already betrayed the fact that any attraction on his part was reluctant. Not wanted. With Chris still talking on the phone about ‘getting back to what we had’, Hayley didn’t—shouldn’t—want this awareness either.

Next came a session of singing and drama, and Byron asked Hayley, ‘Where’s this fruit I’m supposed to cut up?’

‘There, on the sink in a bowl. Ask Karen about how to do it, because some things get peeled and some don’t, and there are particular ways she likes it cut.’

‘Who knew fruit was this complicated?’ she heard him mutter to himself at the sink a few minutes later, as she was wiping down the craft tables. She had to smile.

Yet he didn’t look nearly as out of place as many fathers she’d seen in a setting that was mainly the province of women and young children, despite his height and imposing build.

Chris, for example, didn’t always find the right tone. He tended to use a high-pitched, overly sweet voice, and say, ‘Wow! That’s incredible!’ a lot, when he didn’t really mean it.

‘It’s just a block tower, Daddy,’ she’d heard Max say to him once. ‘I can make much better ones than that.’

‘Talk to him like a person, Chris, for heaven’s sake!’ Hayley had lashed out at him one day.

‘OK, I know. I’m not used to it, that’s the trouble. Every time I see him, he’s grown. I never said I’d be good at this, did I? You sprang it on me. That’s why the whole thing fell apart. We weren’t planning on having kids for another five years.’

‘It takes two, Chris.’

‘Are you saying you weren’t the one who got careless?’ he’d answered, his voice rising.

That’s right, she remembered now. Her criticism had led to one of their worst arguments and, though she’d fought hard for her own point of view, she had to concede he had been right about some things. Unconsciously, she had got careless, hadn’t she? She’d foolishly thought that a baby wouldn’t be a problem for them.

Complicated. Love, parenthood, divorce. All of it was complicated.

At the end of the preschool session, Hayley saw an attractively dressed woman with red-brown curls waiting outside the gate, and realised that it was Dr Piper.

‘How’s the play-dough?’ Wendy Piper said to Byron.

‘Sticky.’

‘Yuck!’ It was cheerful, but there was an edge.

Tori looked up at Dr Piper gravely, holding her father’s hand. She didn’t say hello until prompted by her father. Hayley slipped past them with Max, who said a cheerful, ‘Bye, Tori.’

‘Bye, boy!’ she answered, and added in a stage whisper to Byron, ‘I haven’t learned his name yet. I’ll learn all their names adventurely.’

Oh, ‘eventually’! In Tori’s innocently self-important tone, it had been a cute mistake.

‘I’m going to show you my horses today, Victoria,’ Dr Piper said, with bright yet distant friendliness. ‘After we’ve been to a nice seafood restaurant for lunch. Do you like prawns?’

‘No, they have feelers and eyes.’

Hayley suppressed a giggle. Perhaps she ought not to be enjoying the miscommunications between doctor and four-year-old, but she was!

‘Let’s go home, Max,’ she said, ushering him to her car and getting out her keys.

She wasn’t due at Ambulance Headquarters for her shift until just before six that night. Her service worked a standard ‘four on, four off’ roster—two day shifts, followed by two night shifts, and then four days’ break. It was workable, as a single parent, but only with her own parents’ tireless support.

‘Bye, Hayley,’ Byron called out after her, as she strapped Max into his seat belt. Dr Piper echoed his words with a brief, uncertain smile in Hayley’s direction. Possibly Dr Piper hadn’t recognised her out of context.

‘Thanks for the wisdom about the fruit,’ Byron added. ‘Apparently I still did the banana wrong, but I think Karen’s forgiven me.’

‘What was that about?’ Wendy asked him in a possessive yet lightly amused tone.

But Hayley didn’t hear his answer, because she’d closed the car door.

* * *

The strident ring of the hotline at Ambulance Headquarters broke into what had been a quiet shift. Hayley had been watching television and getting sleepy at almost eleven o’clock. She hadn’t been able to decide whether to head off to an uncertain night’s sleep in one of the stand-down rooms, or to curl up in the reclining chair where she currently sat.

The hotline suggested she wouldn’t have to make the choice.

Bruce got there first, and reported succinctly when he’d put down the phone, ‘A prang on the highway near the state border.’ Their station covered the isolated area that straddled the border between Victoria and their own state of New South Wales. ‘It sounds serious. One car, two injured.’

Hayley fought off sleep and lethargic muscles, pulled up the overalls she’d peeled down to her waist and was ready to go. Bruce took the wheel, and she was happy with that. It was an isolated, winding stretch of highway. Not an easy drive in the dark.

‘What else do we know?’ she asked as they pulled out of the driveway, sirens already whooping.

‘A passer-by phoned it in on his mobile, but he had to drive a fair way beyond the crash scene to get within signal range. He’s going back to the scene now, so he can flag us down. Says the car’s hard to spot from this direction. He didn’t actually witness the crash and isn’t sure how long ago it happened.’

‘So it might have been several minutes before he even got there.’

‘Longer, on that stretch of road, on a weeknight.’

‘Did he check them out?’

‘He has no first-aid or emergency training so he was reluctant to do anything.’

‘Which was the right thinking. How near the border?’

‘Don’t know. Dispatch didn’t have any more details. They’ve got the second crew on standby. We’ve got road rescue and police on the way, too.’

‘So it could be forty kilometres?’

‘Fifty, if ‘‘near the border’’ means on the Victorian side.’

‘I hate that stretch of highway!’

Hayley shivered. She’d driven it many times over the past couple of years, taking Max to visit his father in Melbourne.

Once out of town, on the Princes Highway, heading south, Bruce brought the car’s speed up to the edge of safety. It was a Thursday night, just over a week after Tori Black’s first day at preschool, and the road was deserted. The shadows of the eucalypts reared strangely in the powerful headlights, and the road’s many bends made it anything but a relaxing drive.

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