‘Which ones are yours?’ Laird asked, beside Tammy. ‘The kids, I mean.’

‘Oh. Which ones? All of them!’

‘All five?’

‘Yes.’ Was he turning pale? She wouldn’t blame him. People often did.

‘I somehow thought it was three,’ he murmured.

‘No, it’s five.’ She held up the correct number of fingers, just to drive the point home. ‘Three four-year-olds—’

‘Triplets!’

‘You’ve turned pale.’

He really had.

‘Five kids, including triplets,’ she went on. ‘That’s why I need five ice-creams.’

‘And you’re on your own with them.’

Was he horrified or impressed? She couldn’t tell.

He’d looked quickly down at his coffee, but somehow a memory had imprinted in his mind and he couldn’t seem to let it go.

I want her. In my bed. In my life.

Bestselling romance author Lilian Darcy has written over seventy novels, for Silhouette Special Edition, Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance and Silhouette Romance. She currently lives in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, with her historian husband and their four children. When she is not writing or supporting her children’s varied interests, Lilian likes to quilt, garden or cook. She also loves winter sports and travel. Lilian’s career highlights include numerous appearances on romance bestseller lists, three nominations in the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award, and translation into twenty different languages. Find out more about Lilian and her books or contact her at www.liliandarcy.com

Look out for a new book by Lilian Darcy next month!

A PROPOSAL WORTH WAITING FOR

is the next story in the fabulous mini-series

set in Crocodile Creek—available September 2008, only in Medical™ Romance!

THE CHILDREN’S DOCTOR AND THE SINGLE MUM

BY

LILIAN DARCY

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

‘WE NEED another nurse,’ Laird muttered.

He had one standing right beside him, checking the two resuscitaires, plugging in tubing for oxygen, laying out the plastic wrap that would help keep the twins warm once they’d been born. He could see the nurse mentally confirming that all the equipment on the resuscitaire trolleys was in place—laryngoscope, endotracheal tubes, Magill for-ceps—and she moved adroitly around the awkward positioning of various fixtures in the operating theatre.

She looked as if she knew exactly what she was doing.

All well and good, but one nurse wasn’t enough. The scrub nurse and circulating nurse adding to the crowd in the operating theatre would be fully occupied on the surgical side. They weren’t here for the babies themselves. This patient was about to have a Caesarean delivery.

Two paediatricians, one NICU nurse, two twenty-seven-weekers about to be born—it didn’t add up, especially when the babies had stage three twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. You really needed two medical people for each twin when they were going to be so fragile and small and ill and would need transfer to the NICU as soon as they were stabilised after birth. At least Sam Lutze was a good doctor, and the one neonatal nurse they did have seemed unfazed by the whole situation.

But she’d heard his muttered complaint.

‘Sorry, but there’s only me,’ she said, calm and matter-sof-fact, still checking her equipment. ‘Someone’s just gone off sick. We have a supernumerary and we’re shifting things around, but for now… Yeah. You’ve got me.’

‘It’s not good enough,’ he muttered again.

‘I know. But we have a whole NICU full of sick prems. Someone’s on the phone, seeing if there’s anyone we can transfer to another hospital. We’re doing our best.’ She glanced over at the operating table, where their pregnant patient was about to be delivered, by Caesarean. ‘Give Dr Lutze the recipient twin, if he’s the strongest, and you and I can take care of the donor. Would that be the way to go?’

‘We’ll see how it pans out. I haven’t met you before,’ Laird said.

He couldn’t help turning the statement into a challenge. It was one in the morning and Sam Lutze had called him in half an hour ago—Laird had only left the NICU two hours before that—when Fran Parry’s obstetrician had decided her labour was unstoppable.

Laird had seen the latest scans and tests on the babies. They would have needed an emergency delivery within the next few days anyway, because the recipient twin had heart problems developing, while the donor twin just wasn’t getting enough blood.

This woman…

What was her name? He discreetly checked her badge. Tammy Prunty. Was he reading that right?

She had better be more than competent at her job.

‘No, you haven’t met me,’ she answered. ‘But plenty of people at Royal Victoria NICU have. Dr Cathcart, Dr Leong, Dr Simpson. I was there for eight years, on and off, before I came here.’

Here being Yarra Hospital, several kilometres northeast of Melbourne’s city centre, while Royal Victoria was closer in.

‘Sorry, I wasn’t pushing for your résumé.’

‘Well, I can understand why you wanted it.’ She unkinked a cable, switched something on. She had a comfortable figure—some people might call it plump, others voluptuous—but her movements were fast, deft and sure, and Laird had the grudging realisation that she seemed to know her way around the equipment better than he did.

‘Don’t tell me this is your first shift here, though, please!’ He could hear all too well how crabby he sounded, but the prospect of staffing issues affecting a high-risk birth like this one always got to him.

‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Second.’

‘Oh, great!’

‘But so far it’s pretty similar to how we did things at RV. Everything’s the same colour!’

Her calm good cheer soothed his irritation, and his impatience seemed to have affected her like water on a duck’s back, thank goodness. Her disposable cap stuck out all around her head, like a cross between a pancake and a Madonna-blue halo, and her pale forehead was shiny above a pair of brilliant blue eyes. If she had hair, he couldn’t see it.

They were ready for the babies now.

Or as ready as they’d ever be.

‘Everything all right, Mrs Parry?’ asked her obstetrician, Tim Wembley.

‘I can’t feel anything now.’ Her voice sounded shaky, and her husband squeezed her hand and hissed out a tense breath. Both of them were understandably frightened and emotional. They were in their late twenties, which was starting to look young to Laird at thirty-four.

‘That’s the way we want it.’

‘Good to go here,’ the anaesthetist said.

‘Not long now,’ said one of the two theatre nurses, giving Mrs Parry’s shoulder a pat. She was circulating, not scrubbed and sterile like her colleague. Both women had kept up a cheerful stream of reassurance, explanation and general chat as preparations for the Caesarean birth were completed.

‘Dr Burchell, Dr Lutze, how are we over there?’ Dr Wembley asked.

‘We’re good,’ Laird answered, and Sam nodded, too.

Dr Wembley made the initial incision, working cleanly and with no fuss. When the babies were so fragile, they needed speed as well as a gentle touch. Being born could be a jarring process, even for a healthy baby at full term.

Laird watched, standing at the resuscitaire so that he’d be ready to work on the first baby as soon as he was freed from his mother’s womb. The latest scan suggested this would be the smaller and frailer of the two—the so-called donor twin.

The Parrys understood the terminology by now. Laird had seen them in his office last week after it had become clear that the amniotic fluid reduction procedures weren’t doing enough to help the babies.

They seemed like a pretty sensible couple. They knew that roughly fifteen per cent of identical twins developed TTTs, with varying degrees of severity, and that it occurred when the webbing of blood vessels in the babies’ shard placents grew unevenly, creating a circulation system that favoured one twin at the expense of the other.

They’d asked him a whole lot of questions, which he’d done his best to answer. Unfortunately there’d been a couple of factors, including a badly positioned placenta, that had made laser surgery on the placental blood vessels a very risky option. This had meant that any treatment, including the amnio reductions and steroids to develop the twins’lungs, had only been an attempt to head off worsening problems, and had done nothing to deal with the underlying condition.

Scans showed that the donor twin—the one sending too much of his own blood into his brother—was undersized and passing too little urine, while the recipient twin’s heart was enlarged and working way too hard as it attempted to deal with the excess fluid.

The Parrys already knew that their boys were lucky to have survived this far, and that one or both of the babies could still die.

‘OK, here we go,’ Tim said. ‘Yes, this is the donor twin.’

‘Adam,’ said Chris Parry firmly. ‘His name is Adam, for heaven’s sake, not The Donor Twin.’

‘Adam,’ Tim echoed at once.

Parents were sensitive at a time like this. Laird had seen the racking emotions they went through over and over again, and it kept him humble. He wasn’t a father himself. Not yet. Or not ever? Insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion on that one.

From what he regularly saw in the NICU, parenthood seemed to him like the dramatic, uncharted territory of an undiscovered island—alluring and frightening at the same time. He wondered if he’d have the same strength he saw over and over in the parents of ill babies.

‘Nice. Look at that movement!’ Tim said. It was feeble, but it was there. The baby was very pale. ‘Hey, Adam, going to breathe for us?’

He wasn’t.

No surprise.

He was blue and so small, well under a kilogram at a guess.

‘What’s our other one’s name?’ Tim was asking. After the dad’s moment of anger and Tim’s own carelessness, he’d recovered his sensitivity. These parents needed everyone to treat these tiny, fragile creatures as beloved human beings right from the start.

‘Max,’ Fran Parry said.

‘Here comes Max.’

Laird didn’t waste time waiting to see whether Adam’s breathing would happen on its own. The NICU nurse took the tiny baby from the obstetrician’s gloved hands into the dry, pre-warmed towel she had waiting, then laid him in the heated resuscitaire and folded the nest of plastic wrap over him, leaving his head and umbilical cord exposed. Laird decided he didn’t need to suction the tiny nose and mouth. There was no evidence of meconium staining in the waters or blood visible at the baby’s mouth.

In the resuscitaire, baby Adam seemed lost in a wasteland of white mattress. The nurse dried his head and covered it with blue tubular bandage, while Laird began the resuscitation process. He found a pulse at the umbilical artery—roughly sixty beats per minute—and said after a moment, ‘We have a nice heartbeat.’ He heard tearful sounds of relief from Fran Parry. ‘We’re going to get some oxygen into you right now, little guy.’

He found the heart-breakingly small premmie intubation equipment ready for him right at the moment he needed it and took it from the nurse. He had already forgotten her name. Something a bit odd and comical, which belied her wonderful competence.

‘That’s nice. That’s good,’ he said, just to reassure the parents.

OK, here we go, tube going down. Such a tiny distance, seven centimetres, and the tube was only 2.5 millimetres wide. Gently…gently…

The nurse—Plummy, he was going to have to call her for the moment, in his head, even though he knew it wasn’t quite right—clamped and cut the cord, leaving several centimetres intact to allow umbilical line placement.

‘Max is going to need some help here…’ Tim was saying.

One of the theatre nurses took the recipient twin into a second warmed towel, laid him in the resuscitaire and wrapped him, while Sam Lutze checked his responsiveness on the Apgar scale. At a quick glance, Laird expected the one-minute score to come in at two or less. Adam’s had squeaked to three, and he wanted it higher soon. His colour had begun to improve, some pink radiating outwards towards his little limbs.

‘Swap,’ Sam muttered to Laird, about Max. The one-syllable request acknowledged Laird’s extra year of experience and his reputation for superhero skills at resuscitating the sickest babies. ‘Look at him, it’s his heart. And he’s floppy, no reflex. Give me Adam, he’s almost ready for transfer. Tammy, you’ll stay with Max and Dr Burchell.’

She nodded, finished what she was doing at Adam’s resuscitaire and switched straight to Max, wrapping the plastic, slipping the tubular bandage onto his tiny head with a couple of soft movements.

Laird devoted a critical few moments to repeating Tammy, Tammy, Tammy, over and over in his head, as he moved to the unresponsive baby. Max was a darker red than he should have been, filled with the excess of blood he’d innocently robbed from his much smaller brother. Thick blood, they often called it, because a baby’s tiny liver couldn’t process it and remove the waste. His heart had been struggling, and even without the TTTS the simple fact of prematurity could often present its own cardiac issues.

‘Right, let’s do this,’ Laird muttered. He understood the junior doctor’s reluctance. Max was going to be much harder.

He looked down at the baby, willing it to show some strength and fight, willing the parents’ love to make a difference, to have some power over life and death. Later on it would. Premature babies responded wonderfully to the familiar voice of their mother or father, and to the right kind of touch. Now, though, it was more about medicine than hope.

‘What’s happening? Is he OK?’ Chris Parry had sensed the increase of tension in the medical personnel, and he could probably see for himself that the second baby, although larger, wasn’t looking as good as his twin.

His wife moaned. ‘Max?’ she said. ‘Hang in there. Mummy’s here, and Daddy. We love you so much.’ Her voice cracked and she couldn’t speak any more.

‘Is he going to be OK?’ Chris asked again.

‘We’re going to do everything we can,’ Laird said. Terrible words. Yet false promises were even worse, he considered. ‘Tammy, start cardiac massage while I tube him.’

He hoped she’d sense when he needed her to get out of the way and that she wouldn’t need to be talked through it.

‘Adam’s looking good,’ Sam said, after a moment. ‘I’m getting 85 bpm, his chest’s moving. I’ll get an umbilical line into him now. Then you can go for a ride, little man.’

Laird heard more sounds from the Parrys. Relief and anguish. Then from Tim a suspiciously calm ‘All right, we’re going to have to pack this. Do we have some blood, Helen?’

Mrs Parry had begun to bleed too much, a reasonably common side effect following the procedures she’d had over the past few weeks to reduce her amniotic fluid. ‘What’s happening? What’s going on now?’ Chris demanded, distraught. Like his wife, he had fair, freckled colouring, which made him look very pale under the harsh lights. Fran’s lips were white.

Laird couldn’t spare a thought for them right now. Max needed him too much, needed the tube, needed the massage, needed treatment for that thick blood and some relief for his heart as soon as they had him stable.

At every moment, the Tammy nurse was there. Hands in the right place. Voice pitched low enough to soothe the baby but loud enough for Laird to hear. Fingers nimble and delicate. No unguarded exclamations of doom to scare the stricken parents. Laird spared her a glance and managed a muttered ‘Thanks.’ She nodded, and there was this odd little moment that he didn’t understand. More than mere relief at being paired with a competent colleague. More like…recognition?

He didn’t have time to think about it now.

Chris had tears streaming down his cheeks. Fran was pressing her dry lips numbly together and clamping a death-like grip on her husband’s hand.

‘Come on, darling,’ Tammy cooed to the baby. Her fingers seemed to flutter against his miniature sternum, and her voice was delicious, soft and musical and honey sweet. ‘Come on, sweetheart, let’s see what a big strong boy you are. Let’s try really hard…’

‘OK, he’s tubed,’ Laird finally said. Like Tammy, he’d almost been holding his breath. He saw her nod and look of relief. She cared. ‘Heart rate’s coming up. Not counting chickens…’ he added quietly.

She understood. ‘Want the umbilical line?’

‘Can you? I’ll give a first dose of adrenalin via the ETT, but let’s have that UVC.’

She got the line in with incredible speed and dexterity and he delivered a carefully calculated dose of adrenalin through the endotracheal tube. Next, Tammy nested the baby in a rolled and warmed towel and adjusted the radiant heat setting.

Time had passed, ceased to have meaning. All of this took longer than a non-medical person would expect.

‘Let’s move him now,’ Laird murmured. ‘We need to get him stable and quiet, get him under bili lights to get his blood sorted out, and this is torture for the parents.’

‘I know.’

He raised his voice a little, and told them, ‘We’re ready to move him to the NICU now.’

‘Can Chris go with you?’ Fran asked feebly. Tim was still packing her uterus to stop the haemorrhaging and she looked very pale and weak, alert through sheer force of will and a desperate need to know how her babies were doing.

‘Chris, it’s better if you stay here until Fran’s in Recovery,’ Laird said. ‘Then you should be able to come and see both babies and let her know how they are.’

It would be an enormously stressful time for her, he knew. This first hour. The first day. The first week. No guarantees, yet, as to if or when she’d be taking her babies home—her own process of recovery from the stressful pregnancy, the surgery and blood loss almost an afterthought.

The journey to the NICU was short, and there was an incubator already set up for Max at thirty-six degrees Celsius and eighty-five percent humidity. Little Adam had a nurse working over him, checking his temperature, setting up more lines and monitors, applying a pre-warmed soothing and moisturising ointment to his skin.

They moved Max from the resuscitaire into a second incubator, weighed him in at 830 grams, took his temperature and began to set up and secure his lines. The Tammy nurse with the beautiful voice went looking for a bili light and Laird put in an order for blood for Adam, who weighed just 580 grams. Sam was called to the other end of the room to assess one of his patients whose oxygen saturation levels had fallen.

‘Just need to tell you, Tammy, I’m going home, taking a break,’ announced a mother some minutes later, coming over to her after she’d returned with the phototherapy equipment. The woman spoke too loudly and seemed not to notice tiny Max in his humidicrib or that Tammy was now busy making notes in the baby’s brand-new chart. Again, Laird had lost track of time, except as it related to observing Max.

Tammy looked up from her notes. ‘That’s sensible, Mrs Shergold.’ She took the woman’s arm and led her gently away from Max. She spoke quietly. ‘You were only discharged this morning, weren’t you?’

‘I know. I wanted to stay another couple of days, but no go. It’s just wrong, isn’t it? It’s the insurance companies, and the government. Do they have any idea?’ She still spoke too loudly, hadn’t picked up on the soft cue given by Tammy’s lowered voice.

Laird caught an angry glance in the woman’s direction from an exhausted-looking blonde mother in a nightgown and slippers, who was bending over her own baby’s humidicrib.

One of her own babies’ humidicribs, he corrected mentally as he took in who she was. She’d had IVF triplets. Twenty-nine-weekers. Another Caesarean delivery. Five days old. All three babies were very, very fragile and ill. The mother moved gingerly, her incision still fresh and sore, making way for a nurse who was due to give another session of clustered observations and medication.

‘How’s your baby doing?’ Tammy asked the loud woman, still pitching her voice low.

Again the woman ignored the cue regarding her own volume. ‘Oh, she’s great, she’s so beautiful! It’s so hard to see her like this!’ She burst into noisy tears. ‘But she’s coming off the ventilator tomorrow!’

Tammy led her farther away towards the corridor. The mother of triplets checked her babies’ oxygen saturation levels on the monitor. ‘Look, they’ve dropped,’ she said, low and angry, to the babies’nurse. Clearly she blamed the disruptive and self-absorbed presence of the other mother, and quite possibly she was right.

When Tammy came back, she patted the triplet mum—Alison Vitelli—on the shoulder and asked, ‘How’s Riley?’

‘Oh…the same, Dr Lutze says.’ She didn’t look as if she’d brushed her hair that day, and even her skin looked tired. ‘Tammy, can you, please, please, keep that horrible woman away from here?’

‘Well, she has a sick baby of her own.’

‘A thirty-two-weeker!’ Mrs Vitelli said angrily. ‘She keeps crowing about Rachelle’s progress, and how she’ll be graduating out of here in a day or two to the special care unit, as if we all care. As if any of us care! We would care, if she was nicer. But hasn’t she noticed how ill the rest of our babies are? I hope Rachelle does get better fast, because if her horrible mother is around here much longer…’ She trailed off into silent, desperate sobs, and Tammy hugged her and soothed her, stroking her back below the unbrushed tangle of blonde hair.

‘I know, I know,’ she murmured. ‘Try to tune her out, if you can. She’s not important. People can be insensitive sometimes.’

‘Just her,’ Mrs Vitelli sobbed. ‘I hate her! I really hate her! She’s appalling. And I’m going home tomorrow, and I don’t want to leave my babies…’

Tammy looked over Mrs Vitelli’s shoulder and caught Laird’s eye. She was still patting the woman’s back and making low, soothing sounds of agreement, caring—he thought—more than she really should. He read the questions in her face. Is this OK? Do you need me? How is Max?

He made a gesture that said, Stay with her till she’s feeling better, and Tammy nodded. ‘How about you go back to your room and get some sleep now, before morning, Alison?’ she said gently. ‘Your babies don’t need you to get this tired…’

It took Tammy several minutes to soothe Mrs Vitelli’s sobs away and persuade her that sleep was the sensible thing, then she came back to Max and noted the next set of figures in his chart. ‘Oxygen saturation is up,’ she said.

‘Hovering at 93 per cent,’ Laird answered. ‘CO₂ is within range. I changed the settings a little, as you can see. So far he’s handling the sedation. And he peed.’

‘Wonderful! Adam hasn’t…?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Let’s hope.’ She cast a practised eye over the monitors, checking the relationship between the various settings. Any time she came near the babies, something changed in the way she moved. She became even gentler, even calmer—but it was more than that. Laird couldn’t put his finger on it.

‘You must have managed a fair bit of practice with some of this stuff over at Royal Victoria,’ he said, curious to know just how lucky he might come to consider himself, professionally, that she belonged to Yarra Hospital now instead.

Beneath the blue halo of her cap, she grinned. ‘They even let us loose on real babies sometimes.’

Laird still hadn’t seen her hair. He had a horrible feeling he might not recognise her if he saw her in another part of the hospital, garbed in street clothes. Her colouring and features were average—Scottish skin, those amazing blue eyes, pretty-ish, from what he could tell, in a nursy kind of way. In his experience, women didn’t go into nursing if they looked like they could be models—which was probably to the benefit of both professions.

Keeping his voice low, he asked, ‘Why did you make the move?’ He waited almost smugly for some line about the fantastic reputation of the NICU at Yarra. He’d felt fortunate to win a position here himself, and intended to bring the profile of the place even higher as he worked his way into a more senior role.

‘It cuts seventeen minutes off my commute,’ she answered at once, without smiling.

He smiled in response, though, and conceded, ‘Question too personal for this time of night? OK. That’s fine.’

‘No, I’m serious.’

‘You changed hospitals to cut seventeen minutes off your commute?’

‘Seventeen minutes each way, four or five days a week, that’s more than two hours. You can get a lot done in two hours.’

‘I suppose you can. A couple of routine Caesareans, a good session at the gym, a DVD with a glass of wine.’

‘The vacuuming,’ she retorted. ‘Two casseroles ready to freeze. Three parent-teacher conferences and a stock-up at the supermarket. Nuclear disarmament, that could be doable in two hours, I reckon, if I really pushed. At least, it sounds easier to my ears than getting the garden in shape. And then there’s…sleep.’ She uttered the word with longing.

He laughed. ‘Those things, too.’ He belatedly registered the fact that she seemed to have three children and realised he was in the presence of a genuine dynamo—one of those women who’d explored the wild island of parenthood and survived intact.

Then one of Max’s monitor alarms went off, they both took it as a signal to get back to work, and he didn’t think anything more about her for the rest of the night.

‘Mum-mmee-ee!’ All three triplets cannoned into Tammy within three seconds of her arrival in the kitchen via the back door. Having braced herself for the onslaught, she withstood it, bent down, hugged three four-year-old bodies—two sturdy, one still a little smaller than his sisters, as he probably would be until puberty.

‘Leave Mummy alone, guys,’ said Tammy’s mother, who wasn’t yet dressed, just wrapped in a towelling robe over a floaty nightgown and boat-like slippers. What time had the kids woken her up? The crack of dawn, as usual?

‘It’s fine,’ Tammy told her. ‘I have seventeen extra minutes now, remember? Nineteen, if I get a really good run and hit all the green lights.’ She’d resisted leaving Royal Victoria for a long time, reluctant to lose the familiarity and the friendships, but the shorter commute had won out in the end.

‘Well, spend eight of them with the kids and the other nine on extra sleep,’ her mother drawled, as if she shared Dr Laird Burchell’s opinion of the value of seventeen minutes. She should know better! ‘You’re back there at three, aren’t you?’

‘And an eight-till-eight on Saturday. But then I’m off until Tuesday night.’ Tammy had been very firm with the hospital about not working daytime shifts on weekends.

Mum could come in from her garden flat at the back of the house and handle the kids when they were at school and pre-school during the day, or when they were asleep at night, but it wasn’t fair to ask her to babysit regularly on weekends in daylight hours when they were all home or shuttling around to soccer and swimming.

Not when there were five of them.

Not when the army had transferred Tom to Darwin two years ago, giving him the excuse he’d been looking for, for the past five years, to cut himself off from their lives. He hadn’t seen the kids since the Christmas before last.

The money he sent as part of their divorce settlement was just regular enough and just generous enough to keep Tammy from taking him to court, but was nowhere near enough to cover what five children and a hefty mortgage really cost. With a generous gift from Mum, she’d managed to buy out his share of the house, but had nothing in savings now. They lived from pay cheque to pay cheque.

So, yes, physically, Tom had been gone from their day-to-day lives for two years. Emotionally, he had been absent since the day he and Tammy had found out that her planned third pregnancy was going to deliver three babies instead of one, following the births of Sarah and Lachlan who had then been aged four and two.

She and Tom had been formally divorced for three years.

Sometimes she still found it hard to understand how he could have done it, how his panic at the prospect of triplets could have brought such an ugly, self-absorbed side of him to the surface. How much had he simply been looking for a good excuse to bail out? How long would their marriage have survived even without the triplets?

Don’t go there, Tammy, she told herself. Not when you’re this tired.

She’d been angry and deeply wounded by his betrayal for a long time. Mostly, she was over it now. Sometimes, though, on a bad day—on the way home from work at close to midnight or when the money was stretched so tight she expected something to snap—yes, she took a backward step and got angry again. It was like what parents said about the NICU. A roller-coaster ride. Three steps forward, two steps back.

‘How was work, anyway? An easy night, I hope,’ Mum asked.

‘I wouldn’t recognise an easy night in the NICU if it jumped up and bit me. But we managed to get two fragile little twins through their first six hours. I’ll have my fingers crossed for them all day.’

‘You won’t,’ Mum retorted. ‘Because you’ll be asleep.’

‘True.’ She yawned, aching for her bed the way some women ached for a lover.

Her mother decreed, ‘Someone else can cross their fingers.’

‘Sounds good.’ She thought about Dr Burchell again. He might cross his. He seemed to care. Well, neonatology wasn’t a field you went into if you didn’t.

She had a sudden flashback to the time he and she had spent getting Max stable in the delivery room, bending their heads over the little boy, reaching past each other. He’d looked at the baby with a kind of intensity that had almost generated heat, and there hadn’t been a moment where she could have doubted his skill or his attitude.

‘Going to eat something before you sleep?’ Mum asked.

‘Nah. Not hungry.’

‘You’ll fade away to a shadow.’

‘Yeah, right!’ She patted her backside, principal storage facility for the extra kilos she’d packed on over the past few years. They were her best friends, those kilos. They wouldn’t let her down. They would be there for her through life’s ups and downs, solid and real, keeping her very, very safe. After all, what man would even think of getting close to a woman with five kids, no money and this much padding on her frame?

I am not on the market, the extra kilos said on her behalf, which meant she could focus on what really counted.

Making ends meet.

Being a good mother.

Getting enough sleep.

‘I’ll just make their lunches, then head upstairs.’ She yawned, wondering what was still in stock on a Friday, the day before shopping day. Any biscuits left? Any fruit? Her stomach rebelled. She was way too tired to think about food.

‘I’ve already done their lunches.’

That brought her close to tears. ‘Oh, lord, Mum, what would I do without you?’ They hugged each other, and Tammy could almost feel through Mum’s body heat all the things she wasn’t letting herself say about Tom.

Ten minutes later, with the alarm set for two-twenty that afternoon when a couple of weeks ago she’d had to set it for two o’clock, she sank into sleep.

CHAPTER TWO

LAIRD WAS late getting to Tarsha’s elegant townhouse in Kew to pick her up for their Friday night date.

Little Adam Parry had given them a scare this evening. Alarms going off. The wrong numbers rising or dropping on his monitors. Laird had had to spend an extra twenty minutes at the hospital on his way to his evening out, adjusting medication doses and ventilator settings, and answering several anguished questions from the parents.

Chris and Fran Parry had wanted the kind of certainty that he couldn’t truthfully give them, and yet it would be disastrous if they sank into hopelessness. There were some parents who detached themselves from their baby emotionally if they thought it wasn’t going to live, in a desperate kind of defence mechanism that they didn’t consciously choose. But premature babies needed their parents. The sound of a mother’s soothing voice could raise their oxygen saturation when it dropped in the presence of medical staff. Even when they were so tiny, they seemed to know when they were loved, and to respond.

He’d found himself looking for the Tammy nurse several times during his visit to the unit, as if she might have been able to bail him out with the Parrys, phrase things better than he could himself, help the couple find the right balance between love and hope and realism. Someone had mentioned her name, but apparently she was on her break and he’d left again before she returned.

Tarsha greeted him at her townhouse door in a cloud of expensive perfume, her model’s figure immaculately clad and her flawless face beautifully made up as always, to make the most of her dark hair and brown eyes, but when he leaned forward to kiss her—cheek or mouth, he hadn’t made up his mind—she pulled back and he saw that she was tense.

‘What’s up?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing…’

‘Come on, Tarsh.’

‘We’ll talk about it at the restaurant.’

‘We’ll talk about it now.’

‘Must we?’

‘Yes. Have some pity for a weary man with fraying patience and don’t play games.’

‘All right…all right.’ She sighed, and tucked in the corners of her mouth. ‘You win.’

They’d known each other for a long time as their parents moved in the same well-heeled social circles and were friends. They had first gone out together more than twelve years ago while Laird had been a medical student, but then Tarsha had chosen the lure of modelling in Europe and they’d called it quits, with no hard feelings on either side. There’d always been something missing at heart.

‘What is it, Laird?’ Tarsha had said once, back then. ‘It’s like a hundred-dollar bill that you know is a forgery. It looks right, but something still tells you it’s not.’

Maybe they just hadn’t been ready at that point. Too young. Too ambitious. Not enough time for each other.

A few months ago, after a successful modelling career, followed by several years spent working in the field of public relations in Paris, Tarsha had come home without the intended notch of a fabulous marriage on her belt. She was now in the process of starting her own modelling agency in Melbourne, which involved a lot of networking and schmoozing, as well as getting the right faces and bodies in her stable.

Laird had the vague idea that something had turned sour for Tarsha in Europe—that she was running away from a professional or personal disaster—but so far she hadn’t shared the details with him.

Some conniving between their two mothers several weeks ago had led to a choreographed cocktail party encounter— ‘You remember Laird, don’t you, darling?’—and Laird had understood at once that he was supposed to pick up again with Tarsha…no, not quite where they’d left off. People changed in twelve years.

Close, though.

The prospect had appealed on some levels. There was something out there that he hadn’t found yet—a core of happiness and stability that he saw in the best couples and that he wanted in his own life. Maybe this time with Tarsha, the timing would be right. It was hard to question a relationship that was so perfect on paper, especially when it had been so neatly deposited in his lap, gift-wrapped.

Before Tarsha’s timely return to southern shores, and after a long and carefully selected series of suitable girl-friends, his mother had asked him in exasperation a couple of times, ‘What are you looking for in a woman, Laird, that you haven’t managed to find yet?’

‘Is that a rhetorical question?’

‘You’re thirty-four!’

He hadn’t attempted to give her a list of attributes, but had half-heartedly tried to come up with a private one for himself.

He couldn’t.

Somebody different. A breath of fresh air.

Not exactly a precise description.

‘I’ll know it when I see it,’ he had predicted to his mother, confident and a bit grumpy.

Suddenly, looking at Tarsha’s set face, he realised that this relationship…this woman…wasn’t it.

It turned out she knew it as well as he did.

‘I’ve realised this isn’t working, Laird,’ she said. ‘Us, I mean.’ And when he was silent for a fraction of a second too long, she went on quickly, ‘To use the old cliché, it’s not you, it’s me. Something happened in Europe. A man. I’m not ready, and you’re not the right person. And you know it, don’t you?’ She gave him a narrow-eyed look, and then she laughed. ‘Hell, you really do know it! I can see the relief in your eyes.’

He couldn’t deny it. ‘I like you very much, Tarsha.’

‘And I like you.’ But she hadn’t yet relaxed. He wanted to put an arm around her purely for reassurance, didn’t quite know why she was turning this into a problem, as it was clear neither of them had any regrets.

‘So we’re fine, aren’t we?’ he said gently. ‘We’ve both realised. We both feel the same. We can forget dinner tonight, if you want.’

‘No, you see, that’s what I don’t want.’ She took a deep breath, gave a big, fake smile.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The it’s-not-you-it’s-me thing was the easy part.’

‘Pretend I’m not getting this, and explain.’

‘Laird…look at me!’ Were those tears she was blinking back? ‘I’m not the kind of woman who goes out with her single women friends in a big group and doesn’t care what anybody thinks. I want to be honest with you about this. Pathetic and needy, but honest. Can we still go out sometimes? Would you be the man on my arm when I need one? I’m setting up this agency, I have to look good, I have to be seen. That’s all. I just need a part-time, very presentable man.’

She spread her hands, did that dazzling pretend smile again and he realised how vulnerable she was beneath the glamorous façade, thanks to this unknown man in Europe. He realised, too, how little value beauty could have to a woman in the wrong circumstances.

He told her sincerely, ‘Sure, Tarsh, I can be your presentable man, occasionally. I don’t see anything getting in the way.’

She nodded and kissed him quickly, not on the mouth, but close. ‘Good. And if I haven’t made this clear, sex is not included in the deal. I—I…’ Still smiling, she blinked back more tears. ‘Somehow—and, please, don’t grill me on the details here—I turn out to be a lot more monogamous than I would have thought.’

And that was that.

At the restaurant Laird and Tarsha had to wait for their table, wait for the menu, wait to be asked for their order and then wait for it to arrive. Neither of them seemed to have much to say, having dealt with the principal matter of interest between them before they had even left her house.

Laird fought hunger, irritability and fatigue, and Tarsha finally appealed to him, ‘Talk to me, Laird! Talk shop, if you want, rather than the two of us sitting here like this. It’s what you’re thinking about, isn’t it?’

He admitted that it was. ‘We have some very fragile babies in the unit at the moment. Delivered two of them last night, and we were short-staffed. Fortunately, we had a terrific new nurse. I don’t think both babies would have made it out of the delivery suite without her. She was fabulous. Down-to-earth, unflappable, knew her stuff inside out.’

‘Pretty?’

He thought for a moment, and remembered the shiny forehead and the unflattering angle of Tammy Prunty’s disposable cap. ‘Um, I don’t think so. Not really.’

Tarsha’s attention had wandered. ‘Is this ours?’ she murmured, watching a waiter with laden hands. ‘No, it’s not…’

Laird was still thinking about the fact that he’d just completely slammed the Tammy nurse in the looks department. He felt guilty and impatient with himself, which was ridiculous. ‘Although I never saw her hair,’ he said, wondering about it, remembering the blue of her eyes. ‘I have an idea she’ll be a redhead, though.’

‘She will be?’

‘When I see her without her cap.’ He looked forward to resolving the question, for some reason.

Tarsha fixed him with a suspicious look that he didn’t understand, and then their waiter came towards them at last.

* * *

‘And it was green, and we thought, Good grief, what is this? I mean, neon green newborn milk curds. The intern went pale. Poor thing, it was his second day, he didn’t have a clue. He’s about to call the senior surgeon, who has no patience with new doctors.’

‘None of them do!’

‘And then we see an empty bottle on the floor, and it’s not from the baby at all. His big brother had one of those athletic power drinks, those “-ade” ones, and he’d spilled some of it, right on top of where the baby had spat up, only he was too scared to say.’

There was a chorus of laughter, cutting off a little too quickly when the three women in the staff break room saw Laird.

Red, he thought.

Just as he’d suspected from her colouring. Tammy Prunty had a magnificent head of gleaming bright carroty, goldy, coppery, autumn-leafy hair with a natural, untamed wave that would absolutely require full confinement beneath a cap any time she was anywhere near surgery or vulnerable babies. No wonder he hadn’t been able to glimpse it before.

She smiled at him, her face receptive, friendly and polite and her blue eyes still alive from her recent laughter. The eyes and the hair went together like burnished gold and lapis lazuli in a piece of Ancient Egyptian jewellery, and the smile was so warm and dazzling it rendered him temporarily without words.

He’d heard her voice, coming past the break room, and had decided to settle the question of her hair now, at the first opportunity, because it had been nagging at him after he and Tarsha had talked about it on Friday night. He hadn’t expected to feel so awkward, standing in the break room doorway the following evening.

The three nurses waited for him to get to the point. What did he want them to do? Which of them did he want to yell at? What information was he seeking?

‘Just checking something,’ he murmured vaguely, and left again, unsettled.

He heard the chorus of female voices pick up before he reached the end of the corridor, and had a weird desire to go back, make himself a coffee and sit down to join in. He would sit across the table from Tammy, so he could try to work out just what it was that he found so appealing about her colouring when he hadn’t thought her pretty before.

He resisted the impulse, squared his shoulders and got on with his life instead.

Back in the NICU, the Parry babies had lived through their first two days but still had a long way to go. No one was even thinking about discharge yet. And they had a new thirty-four-weeker, Cameron Thornton, delivered via Caesarean and now five days old.

He wasn’t on a ventilator and was only here because he had a bright, vocal mother and because, despite the recent scarcity of beds, several babies had been upgraded, transferred or discharged since Thursday night so the NICU now had two places spare, while the high dependency unit and special care unit were overflowing.

‘Something’s not right,’ the mother had been saying since a few hours after his birth, even though he was breathing and feeding and doing all the right things.

Many six-week prems required almost no medical intervention and could be discharged within days of birth. According to Mrs Thornton’s dates, he should have been a thirty-six weeker but a range of well-defined developmental signs had led Dr Lutze, who’d been on hand at the birth, to lower the estimate to thirty-four weeks or even a few days less, and Mrs Thornton had admitted she might have got it wrong.

She didn’t think she was wrong about her current sense of concern, however. ‘He’s my sixth child. A mother knows.’

And sometimes they did.

This mother, Laird wasn’t sure about. The baby’s dad, Alan Thornton, was a senior administrator in the Faculty of Medicine at Yarra University, which meant he had contacts and influence. The mother was supposed to go home tomorrow, and Laird wondered if, with such a large family awaiting her attention, she simply wanted another night alone with her baby, or more time to rest in the relatively cushy environment of her private hospital room.

She did seem genuinely anxious, however. She was hovering over the baby, watching every change in his breathing and in the numbers on his monitor. Alison Vitelli, the mother of the triplets born at twenty-nine weeks, gave her a couple of the same resentful looks she’d given the other mother in here on Thursday night.

It had begun to look as if one of Alison’s babies wouldn’t make it, although two of them were doing better now. The smallest at birth, little Riley, had a whole raft of cascading problems, including a serious bleed in the brain, and Alison was again finding it very hard to deal with a mother whose child seemed barely unwell at all.

This mother wasn’t making a song and dance to earn Mrs Vitelli’s disapproval, however. She sat quietly, very sensitive to the presence of other babies and parents around her.

‘How’s he doing, Mrs Thornton?’ Laird asked her in a murmur.

‘His temp is up—37.8 degrees.’

A tiny bit higher than normal, Laird registered, but a baby wasn’t considered febrile until its temp went over 38. The little guy still had nasal oxygen prongs for several hours each day, but the rate had been turned right down. They’d increased his periods of weaning from the machine, and he should be safely on room air by tomorrow.

Laird felt somewhat annoyed with Melanie Thornton, even though he was possibly being unfair. ‘A mother knows’, plus a tiny elevation in temperature, on top of a low-risk level of prematurity. How could he justify a barrage of expensive or time-consuming tests on that basis? If the NICU hadn’t been, briefly and unusually, the only place with a spare newborn bed, this baby wouldn’t even be here at all.

‘I think you’re worrying too much,’ he told her, managing to keep his voice gentle.

‘He’s my sixth child.’

‘So you’ve said.’

‘Don’t you think I’d be worrying less after five babies?’

‘Not if this is your first premmie. Of course it must feel different. He’s smaller, his skin is thinner, his lungs are less developed, he tires more easily when he tries to feed, all sorts of things.’

‘It’s more than that,’ she insisted. ‘I just feel it.’

Tammy Prunty was back from her break and ready to swap places with Eleanor Liu, who’d briefly taken over care of the Parry twins. Laird experienced an exaggerated wash of relief when he saw her coming, her hair now back under the unflattering blue pancake of its cap, which as usual made the smooth skin of her forehead look too shiny and white. He intercepted her before she reached Eleanor, and lowered his voice.

‘Listen, can you do something about the Thornton baby? Or the Thornton mum, really. She’s bugging me with her earth-mother intuition, and I’m really not convinced anything is wrong.’

‘Do something?’ She made a face. Her mouth went crooked, which drew Laird’s attention to a detail he hadn’t noticed until now. She had the most beautifully shaped lips, soft and smooth and pink.

‘Work out what’s going on,’ he said, as if it should be easy.

‘Work it out? Just like that?’ It was cheerful, just a tiny bit reproachful, as if he was presuming too much on very slight acquaintance, which he probably was. Just because they’d saved a life or two together a couple of days ago. How dared he make the assumption that she was that good at her job? said the twinkling blue eyes.

‘I’ll buy you coffee,’ he said, surprising both of them, then added, to make it clear he’d been joking…half, anyway, ‘Provided your diagnosis is correct, obviously.’

She kept it light, too. ‘Deal! Coffee it is. And not bad coffee in a paper cup either, or it doesn’t count. The proper stuff, in good china. You want me to diagnose via the laying on of hands? Or are we more into reading animal entrails at this hospital?’

‘You’re good with that?’

‘I was seconded to the animal entrail department at Royal Victoria for a whole week.’

‘Mmm, and I’ve heard their facilities are state of the art.’

‘I’ll do what I can, Dr Burchell, but, you know, apparently this hospital does do tests occasionally.’ Her blue eyes were still teasing him, inviting him to share the joke. ‘You could order a couple of those.’

OK, time to reassert his authority before this whole exchange got out of hand. ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, ‘when I’ve narrowed down the options. That’s what I need you for.’

Great, Tammy thought. What have I just promised? And why did I keep smirking at him like that, and trying to make him laugh?

Because you wanted to see him smile, said a sneaky little voice inside her.

He’d smiled at her just now from the doorway of the break room, and she’d smiled back, as if they knew each other quite well. She hadn’t noticed in the delivery suite on Thursday night how good-looking he was—not exactly male model material, because he was too seasoned for that and he frowned too much, she could tell from the lines that had begun to etch into his forehead, but definitely at the more attractive end of the male doctor spectrum.

She had only looked after the Thornton baby during Eleanor’s break, and hadn’t taken much notice of little Cameron or his mum, except to note that he looked far too big and strong for this unit, while Mrs Thornton looked too experienced and sensible to be worrying this much.

Hmm. So maybe that meant that she was right.

As a mother of five herself, Tammy trusted the great unwritten rule of paediatrics—listen to the mothers. She’d known her third pregnancy was different two days after she had missed her period. And she’d picked up Ben’s prematurity-related eye problems when his next follow-up test was weeks away.

The day around six years ago when Sarah, her eldest, then aged almost three, had innocently entertained herself by heaping three thick feather pillows on top of four-month-old Lachlan in his bassinet while Tammy had been in the bathroom, something about the quality of the silence coming from the baby’s bedroom had alerted her. She’d stopped mid-moisturise, so to speak, with three blobs of white goo dotted on her face.

She’d raced down the passage and snatched the sound-muffling pillows out of the bassinet, while Sarah had started to giggle at such a funny joke—Mummy looked so silly, throwing the pillows on the floor—to find the baby red-faced and screaming healthily, thank heaven, before any damage had been done.

Yes. Very often, a mother knew.

But what did Mrs Thornton know?

She couldn’t say. ‘Something,’ she repeated stubbornly.

Tammy began to understand why the highly intelligent, highly capable, highly non-vague and non-intuitive Dr Laird Burchell had found this particular mother so irritating and why he had opted for the doctor’s privilege of passing the problem on to a lower hospital life form such as Tammy herself.

The Parry boys were behaving themselves at the moment, and she had a window of eight whole minutes before their next clustered care routine. She decided to stop for a chat beside Cameron’s special premmie crib.

The rest of the unit was humming along in its usual way, the bulky pieces of medical equipment with their lines and screens and alarms dwarfing the tiny babies over whom they kept guard. There were softening touches, though. A bright toy nestled in a humidicrib or a picture taped to the transparent sides. Cards and balloons. A wall of photos of their ‘graduates’—smiling toddlers who couldn’t possibly have ever been so small.

‘How was the pregnancy, Mrs Thornton?’

The mother nodded, understanding the intention behind the question. She was an intelligent woman. ‘It was trouble-free.’ She was standing, too, and rubbed her lower stomach as she spoke. She still seemed fairly sore and stiff after a powerful labour that had been abruptly ended by the emergency Caesar. ‘We were in Japan for the first half of it, though, if that makes any difference.’

‘Wow, Japan. That must have been interesting!’ Tammy said sincerely. She’d been as far as New Zealand, on her honeymoon ten years ago, but that was about it. ‘And not easy, with five kids.’

‘It’s a fascinating country. There was a lot to love, and a lot to adjust to, especially with the kids, as you say.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘Alan—my husband—had a sabbatical. Someone organised a terrific house for us, out in the countryside. He commuted into the city. When we discovered I was pregnant again, we found a doctor who spoke English, but I found him difficult to understand. And I don’t think he understood me much either.’

‘Was the prenatal care similar to what we have here?’

‘Mostly. As I said, it was an easy pregnancy. I only saw the doctor three times, I think, for routine checks, then we came back here when I was at about five months. I did have an ultrasound there.’

‘At eighteen weeks, like we do here?’

‘Yes, just under.’ Mrs Thornton frowned. ‘Actually, I guess it was more like fifteen weeks, if Dr Lutze was right that Cameron was at thirty-four weeks when he was born, not thirty-six weeks, like we thought. I should change his nappy,’ she added.

She looked tired and uncomfortable, and Tammy found herself offering to do the change, even though she usually breathed a sigh of relief whenever a parent’s help lightened the workload.

‘Thanks,’ Mrs Thornton said. She sat down, and confessed, ‘I skipped the postnatal exercise class this morning. I’m slack!’

‘You know all too well what’s waiting for you at home.’ Tammy grinned. ‘I have five kids myself.’ She was working as she spoke, deftly untaping the sides of the nappy, gently lifting the little legs and bottom.

‘Then you understand!’ Mrs Thornton said with feeling.

The nappy felt very light. You became pretty skilled at estimating urinary output by the weight in your hand. Dry, versus slightly wet, versus nicely soaked. This one felt dry.

‘When did you last change him?’ she asked his mother.

‘Oh, it would be a couple of hours ago. What’s the time now?’

‘Almost seven-thirty.’

‘That late! In that case, it’s about four hours since I changed him.’

‘Was he very wet then?’

‘The nurse weighed the nappy. Just a few mils, she said. I think she wrote it down.’ She didn’t ask if the low output could be a problem, but Tammy could see she’d gone on the alert.

‘Let’s get you into a new one, little man,’ she murmured to the baby, wondering if this could be the source of Mrs Thornton’s nebulous worry. He shouldn’t be dehydrated. There was no obvious distension in his lower abdomen. And newborns often didn’t pee very much at first.

Still… She took his temperature, although he wasn’t due for it, and found that it had gone up a few points—38.1 degrees Celsius. He was officially febrile now, and fever in a premmie newborn wasn’t something you ignored.

She found Dr Burchell at the far end of the unit, studying the notes of a baby girl with a serious heart defect, and told him, ‘I’m not sure if this earns me that coffee you mentioned…’

‘Good coffee, right? Freshly brewed, in a china cup.’

‘That’s the one… Could there be a kidney problem? He doesn’t seem to be putting out much urine.’

‘Newborns don’t.’ Dr Burchell’s mind was clearly still on the heart baby, whose blood gases were getting worse.

The tiny girl needed surgery, Tammy knew, but she really wasn’t strong enough. They’d wanted to get her weight up higher, but it was going in the opposite direction, and her little body was exhausting itself getting that tiny, damaged heart to work.

‘He’s five days old,’ Tammy persisted, even though she understood Dr Burchell’s tight face and the frustrated way he paged through the notes and looked at the heart baby. He wanted to focus on the more serious case. ‘He’s started feeding. And his temp’s over 38.’

OK, she had his attention now. Hopefully he wouldn’t ask how much over 38 degrees. His grey eyes—a deep, liquid grey—fixed themselves on her cap, narrowing with something that was probably annoyance, and she wondered if bits of her hair were making an unauthorised escape bid. They often did.

‘You’re thinking there’s a partial blockage, and he’s having urinary reflux?’ he asked. Grey eyes, but possibly with some chips of green in a different light, Tammy mentally revised.

‘Giving him an infection, yes, that’s what I’m wondering.’

He was already looking back down at the heart baby. ‘Look, we’ll do an ultrasound. Rule it out.’

Rule it out.

His faith in her diagnostic skills clearly wasn’t high. It didn’t look as if she was getting that coffee any time soon.

‘Thanks, um, Tammy,’ he added.

‘No worries,’ she told him cheerfully, and went back to her charges, prepared to think no more about it.

Eleanor had returned from her break and was gently urging Mrs Thornton to have a relaxing shower. Little Cameron’s next nappy would probably weigh twice as much as a dry one, and Tammy would feel like an idiot for her rash diagnosis.

Yeah, that would be good.

She had a nagging suspicion that the kilos on her butt, the zeros in her bank account and the five kids at home might not be quite enough to keep her safe from a man like Laird Burchell. Tall, broad-shouldered, lovely neck, not a hint of a receding hairline, intelligent and caring and capable…and then there were those deep, perceptive eyes.

He was—if you had time to take notice of such things—gorgeous. If he decided she was an idiot, therefore, so much the better.

CHAPTER THREE

THE sprawling acreage of the Yarra Valley Garden and Landscape Centre on a Sunday morning was one of Tammy’s favourite places when she’d really, seriously, drastically run out of ideas and energy at home, didn’t want to spend much money, and when the playground down the road had earned a moaning chorus of, ‘But we’ve been there three times this week.’

Mum was taking a break today, leaving her little flat behind Tammy’s house temporarily empty. She deserved it about five times over, and had gone to Tammy’s brother’s place in Healesville for a barbecue lunch and a peaceful afternoon. His two boys were quiet lads in their late teens, and his wife—Tammy’s sister-in-law Jeannette—was a terrific person and spoiled Mum rotten. She would return refreshed, and probably bearing leftovers.

The kids had a good time at the garden centre, and Tammy was able to get some time alone, even though it was only in her thoughts. But when you’d spent over an hour letting the kids chase around the big glazed pots and orchard trees and ornamental fountains, or playing name-that-flower games, or swinging your four-year-old triplets on the swings in the designated kids’ area, you really owed it to the garden centre management to buy a plant.

Tammy always found it a terrible hardship to have to buy a plant.

In a more perfect world—a world where counting every penny occupied a much smaller portion of her time—she would have bought at least twelve.

That kaffir lime tree, for example. Or a pair of those cyclamens in bright lipstick colours. Some drought-tolerant grevilleas or bottlebrush. A lemon-scented eucalyptus. Oh, and herbs. She loved herbs.

She decided on a little punnet of lemon thyme, and accepted that five ice creams on sticks would have to be added to the bill. The spring sunshine had grown quite hot, and the kids were getting hungry and thirsty. The ice creams would reward them for good behaviour, and tide them over until she could get them home and make some lunch.

In the herb section, she saw a familiar figure—Laird Burchell, the last man on earth she would have expected or wanted to see here, with the possible exception of her ex-husband—and unfortunately he saw her before she could veer in the direction of the summer annuals and get out of his way.

He was wearing jeans, a blue polo shirt, a pair of scuffed work boots and a broad-brimmed Akubra hat, which made him look like a farmer. There was an air of relaxed satisfaction hovering around him that she hadn’t seen on him in the NICU.

Some doctors played with their investments during their time off.

Dr Burchell apparently preferred to play at being a man of the land.

He came up to her with arrow-like directness while she stood there with garden-centre potting mix leaking out of the holes in the bottom of the lemon thyme punnet, dirtying her hands. In the background Ben knocked over a standard rose bush, and Tammy hoped she’d get a chance to set it upright again before either the garden centre staff or Laird Burchell realised that Ben was hers.

‘Convenient, seeing you here,’ he said.

‘Oh, is it?’ She smiled.

‘I owe you a coffee.’ He’d completely skipped hello.

She understood at once. ‘You mean something did show up on Cameron Thornton’s ultrasound?’

‘I sent him down late last night, but you’d gone by the time he came back. There was a marked dilatation in the left kidney, suggesting a significant ureteral obstruction. He’s on antibiotics, and we’ll do a pyeloplasty on Monday. Mrs Thornton is not even trying to resist telling me that she told me so.’

‘Well, we did take a while to trust her intuition. She’s allowed to be smug.’

‘But I’m hoping you’ll resist telling me that you told me so, if I make good on the coffee deal.’ He gestured behind him to the garden-centre building, where there was a pretty café section overlooking the greenery.

He meant coffee right now, Tammy realised.

Well, you could get it here in paper cups, to go.

‘No paper cups, right?’ he said, as if reading her thoughts and challenging them. She remembered her joking insistence that it had to be good coffee, in a china cup.

‘That is, if you want to,’ he added, just as a man who could conceivably have been her husband picked up a punnet of parsley and one of basil and moved in Tammy’s direction.

‘Would you rather get it over with?’ she teased, letting Dr Burchell think what he liked about her relationship to the herb hunter—who wasn’t her type at all.

She would have a latte, she decided, and she could sip it on one of the garden benches out the front, while the kids ate their ice creams. She’d tell Dr Burchell he didn’t need to stay and keep her company. He could buy his pair of matching maidenhair ferns, or whatever, and go home to put them on his glassed-in townhouse balcony.

Meanwhile, Lachlan was trying to help Ben to set the rosebush straight. There was only a little bit of spilled soil on the ground, thank goodness. But the thorny branches of the fallen rose caught in the next rosebush as Lachlan pushed it too hard, and three of the bushes fell in a heap. They’d outgrown their pots and were top-heavy. ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ he mouthed, wincing.

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