Tess wouldn’t budge from that position, and in the end he accepted it. He had no choice. It was crazy, he thought. She was wrong.
Oh, she wasn’t wrong in that she thought he’d blame himself if he was distracted. What she didn’t see was that he needn’t be. With Tess as another doctor, surely there need never be a time when she’d stand in his way.
Meanwhile, though…life was still infinitely sweet. He and Tess worked side by side. The workload in the valley was magically halved. He had time to raise his head from work, and whenever he raised his head Tess was there, ready and willing to slip into his arms.
With his granddaughter as his chief medical specialist, Henry Westcott improved beyond any expectations. Five weeks from the time they’d found him, Tess and Mike prepared to take the old man home.
‘I’ll need to stay on the farm from now on,’ Tess told Mike seriously on the Friday night before Henry was due for discharge. This would have to be their last night together. Both of them knew the difficulties now. The farm was too far from the hospital for Mike to be on call, even if he wished to stay with Tess.
He didn’t. Even though Mike’s body screamed its need for Tess, Mike knew Henry well enough to know that Tess sleeping unwed with Mike in Henry’s house would upset the old man enormously.
But Tess was right. She had to stay.
‘So we need to marry.’ Mike smoothed the curls away from Tessa’s face and kissed her deeply on the lips. ‘Soon. Strop’s going to miss you, and I’ll miss you worse. Marry me.’
‘Nope.’
‘Nope?’
‘Nope. You haven’t had your disaster yet.’
‘I’m not intending to have a disaster.’
‘It’ll happen. I’ll tell you what, though.’ She kissed him back, feather kisses that started on the tip of his nose, descended to his throat and kept on going. ‘If you haven’t had your disaster by the time I’m fifty, I’ll marry you regardless.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘Don’t you want to marry me when I’m fifty?’
Mike groaned. Her kisses were brushing his naked skin, down across his chest. Down…down…
‘I may not live until you’re fifty. I may not live another ten minutes. Tess…’
‘It’s a perfectly good offer. Take it or leave it.’
‘Tess…’
‘I’m serious.’ She stopped kissing him for long enough to rise and brush the hair back from his eyes and meet his look with all gravity. ‘Mike, it’ll happen. I know it will. Let’s just take this one day at a time and go from there.’
So on Saturday afternoon they borrowed the hospital car and Tess and Mike and Strop took Henry home, with Tess and Mike trying hard to act as though they were friends and not lovers. It didn’t quite come off, but if Henry knew better he didn’t let on. His joy at being home-at seeing Doris and her babies, and greeting his goats and sitting in his own armchair before the kitchen fire-was too great to let Mike’s occasional stiffness mar it.
He sat and gazed around at their handiwork in delight.
‘It’s a bloody wonder,’ he told her. ‘Eh, Tess, girl…’ His voice broke in rough emotion and Mike found himself feeling almost as choked up as Henry.
He had to leave. He’d had fallen into the habit of dropping in to see Stan Harper every Saturday evening so now he helped check out Henry’s use of the walking-frame and his ability to get from the bathroom to the bedroom and back to the kitchen, and then it was time to go.
‘Tess will take good care of you, sir,’ he told Henry. ‘And the district nurse will drop in on a daily basis.’
That was what they’d arranged. Also Matt, Jacob Jeffries’s eldest lad, was coming each weekday morning- ostensibly to do some work on the fences around the house but in reality to keep a quiet eye on Henry for the first few weeks of his convalescence. That meant Tess could keep her morning clinic going and, as Henry grew stronger, she could take on more.
‘You’re not staying now?’ Henry demanded, pulling himself out of his pleasurable haze to realise what Mike intended. ‘Hell, you have to stay, boy. I asked Tess especially to cater for all of us. She’s cooking a roast.’
‘I am, too,’ Tess said proudly. ‘Roast pork.’
Mike’s eyebrows hit his hair. Pork? Surely he’d still counted eight babies.
‘You’re kidding!’
Tessa’s eyes crinkled in laughter at his tone. ‘Don’t even think it,’ she told him. ‘Perish the thought. This is a nice anonymous leg of pork bought from a nice anonymous supermarket. Donated, I’m sure, by a nice anonymous pig. I brought it in at dead of night so Doris wouldn’t see, and I swear I’ll bury the remains at dead of night, too.’
‘Very wise.’
‘So you will stay?’ Tess grinned down at her grandfather and then back to him. ‘I’ve bought a can of dog food for Strop, and for us I have everything Grandpa ordered. Apple sauce. Butternut pumpkin. Roast potatoes and fresh peas, with lemon meringue pie to follow…’
‘Lemon meringue pie…’ Both men were now staring at her, their faces reflecting disbelief, and Strop was looking just plain hopeful. Bother the dog food!
‘Hey, I’m not just a pretty face.’ And then Tess relented and chuckled. ‘Well, to be honest, Mrs Thompson made the pie for me, but the rest is mine. Do stay, Mike. We’d both like you to.’
He hesitated, but he was lost. Lemon meringue pie… Lemon meringue pie and Tessa… And Strop would break his heart if he hauled him away from these smells.
‘Stan only needs a social visit,’ he said slowly. ‘I guess I can drop in tomorrow.’
He couldn’t.
At eleven the next morning he finally arrived at Stan Harper’s farm-and Stan was dead.
‘It must have been a massive infarct,’ Tessa said softly. It was Monday morning. She stood back from the autopsy table and looked across at Mike. She’d insisted on doing this. There was no way she was letting him do the autopsy on his own. ‘There’s no doubt,’ she told him now.
‘No.’
‘Time of death, late on Saturday night?’
‘How about late afternoon Saturday,’ he said heavily, and Tess winced. ‘No. There’s no way we can say that.’
‘There’s no way we can say it was definitely later.’
‘OK.’ Tess crossed to the sink and started washing, watching him out of the corner of her eye. ‘I’ll accept that. It might have happened late Saturday afternoon.’
‘When I should have been there.’
‘By the look of this damage, there’s no way you could have helped, even if you had been there,’ she told him. ‘The artery’s completely blocked. You know as well as I do that this wasn’t a minor, recoverable heart attack. If he’d been in the best-equipped hospital in the world, I doubt he’d have been saved.’
‘But there were no signs… Apart from the pain, which we couldn’t pinpoint. The electrocardiograph was normal. I tried to get him to go to Melbourne and see a specialist but he wouldn’t.’
‘That was his choice.’ Tessa’s voice was flat and devoid of emotion. Her eyes were calmly watchful.
‘I should have insisted.’
‘And he would have refused.’
‘At least I should have been there.’
Here it was. The crux of the whole matter.
‘Are you saying if you’d been there you might have saved him?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ He turned his face away and stared sightlessly at the bare wall. ‘Who can say? He’d run himself down. He wasn’t eating. If I’d spent more time there…bullied him into eating…’
‘Instead of spending time with me,’ she said softly.
