And entranced was a good way to describe his father. Hugo was enchanted by this vivacious slip of a girl. She was soaking wet, her soft brown curls were lying in dripping tendrils around her face, her eyes were dancing…
‘You know six-packs,’ she told Toby, seemingly unaware of the riot she was causing in Hugo’s solar plexus. Or somewhere. Some nerve centre he’d hardly been aware he possessed. ‘Six-packs are cans of beer tied up together. You look at your daddy’s chest and tell me if it doesn’t look just like that?’
Good grief!
It was as much as Hugo could do not to blush. He swallowed, tried to think of something to say, couldn’t, so did the only thing he could think of.
He dived straight under the water and left them alone.
He stayed out of their way for about a quarter of an hour. It’s the equivalent of a cold shower, he told himself, and that was what he needed. He swam and he swam, using the rhythm of his strokes to try and settle his brain.
What was happening to him? Rachel was a married woman. She was a colleague who’d been trapped here by the fire. As soon as the wind changed and the fires burned back on themselves she’d be out of here. He had no business to think of her as he was thinking.
He had no choice. He was definitely thinking.
He swam.
It had to end some time. It had been a huge day and a man could only swim so far, regardless of what demons were driving him.
Toby and Rachel had taken themselves up the beach and were engaged in building the world’s biggest sandcastle. As Hugo towelled himself dry and strolled up the beach to join them, Rachel shifted back to admire their handiwork. She glanced up at his face-which he was still trying to control-and she chuckled.
‘Hey, don’t get your knickers in a twist by a comment on a six-pack.’ She grinned. ‘It’s what we women put up with all the time. That was the female equivalent of a wolf whistle.’
He stared. ‘Sorry?’
Her smile widened as his discomfiture deepened. ‘Sorry yourself. OK, I’m sorry about the six-pack remark but you did get personal first.’
‘So I did,’ he said faintly. ‘So I guess I’m sorry, too.’
‘Actually, I’m not sorry,’ she said with a sideways, very thoughtful look. ‘For the expression on your face-it was well worth it.’
Had it been worth it? He stared down at her and she smiled back, enigmatic and lovely and thoroughly confusing.
It couldn’t last. He might be directionless but Rachel at least was focused. Toby was lifting a football from the bottom of the picnic basket and was kicking it across the sand without much hope.
‘Given up on the sandcastle?’ Rachel asked him.
‘Yeah.’ The little boy looked down at his plastic football and sighed. ‘I brought this with me tonight ’cos Bradley Drummond says I can’t drop-kick. I gotta learn how to drop-kick and Dad can’t drop-kick for nuts.’
‘You can’t drop-kick?’ Rachel stared at Hugo, amazed.
‘I played basketball,’ he said in explanation, and she looked at him as if it wasn’t an explanation at all.
‘I can’t believe it. A man who plays basketball… What use is a six-pack in basketball?’
‘Hey!’
‘Say no more.’ She wiped her hands on non-existent trousers, and wriggled her shoulders-a player prepared to launch into a tackle. ‘A basketball player… Good grief. Toby, lad, give me the ball.’
‘Can you drop-kick?’ he asked shyly, and she nodded.
‘I was taught by the best. My husband was the world’s absolutely top drop-kicker. Or so he told me and who am I to doubt it? And he taught me.’
‘Gee,’ Toby, said, impressed.
‘Gee is right. So there you go. Drop-kick lessons coming up. And you, Dr McInnes, stop worrying and have some dinner,’ she told him. ‘You’ve hardly eaten anything.’ She flashed him a look that was almost a warning. ‘Sausages and lamingtons and grapes. Eat. For heaven’s sake, Hugo, let’s keep life simple.’
Keep life simple? He didn’t know what she was talking about.
Or maybe he did, but he sure as heck didn’t want to admit it.
It had gone way past being simple but at least it was peaceful. Miraculously his cellphone stayed silent. It might be the calm before the storm but for these few hours there seemed no medical need, and no need at all for them to rush their picnic and head for home.
With their drop-kick lessons completed to their mutual satisfaction, Rachel and Toby turned their attention back to food. They polished off sausages with gusto.
‘It’s our second dinner,’ Rachel declared, ‘and it’s much nicer the second time around.’ They ate their fill of lamingtons and finished off with a Thermos of coffee, with lemonade for Toby, and then Toby snuggled down on beach towels beside them and drifted toward sleep. One six-year-old had had a truly excellent day.
‘We don’t do this often enough,’ Hugo said ruefully, running his fingers through Toby’s sand-and salt-stiff hair. But he wasn’t totally focused on his son. He was still letting Rachel’s words drift around his head.
He didn’t want to think about Rachel’s husband.
And it seemed Rachel’s thoughts were travelling on a similar route.
‘Christine doesn’t like the beach?’
‘Christine?’ His gaze jerked to hers, startled. ‘What’s it got to do with Christine?’
‘She is the lady you intend to marry,’ Rachel said gently, and watched his face.
He said nothing.
Christine… That relationship had been on the backburner for so long that he hardly knew. When had it started? This assumption that he’d end up with his sister-in-law?
He didn’t know when it had begun. She’d just been there. Even when Beth had been alive, Christine had done the organising, acting as go-between in their increasingly turbulent marriage, suggesting, steering…
Oh, there had been nothing untoward in their relationship during the marriage. There was nothing untoward in it now. It was just drifting…
Toward marriage? Maybe. And why? Because it was easier. Because the town was waiting.
Christine was waiting.
‘It’s been six years,’ Rachel said softly. ‘Isn’t it about time you married the woman?’
‘Who told you we were getting married?’
‘Christine did,’ Rachel told him. She glanced down at Toby who was sleeping now, deeply unconscious. ‘Tonight. When I told her we were coming to the beach. I was told in no uncertain terms to keep myself to myself. I’ve never actually been given the scarlet woman treatment before, but I copped it tonight.’
For heaven’s sake. Hugo’s face set in anger. Of all the stupid… She had no right.
Did she have a right?
He hadn’t given her reason to think otherwise, he admitted to himself. Lately, Christine had taken to kissing him goodbye, and a few weeks ago he’d let himself kiss her back. Not as he’d kissed her in the past, brother-in-law to sister-in-law, but more. Man to woman.
Hell, why?
He knew why. He’d needed to so much. Just to feel the touch of a woman in his arms.
But it had still felt wrong, even though Beth had been dead these six years. So he’d pulled back. Apologised. But Christine had smiled and he’d known that she was waiting.
And he hadn’t said no. He hadn’t said it could never work. In truth, he’d been wondering…
Six years was a long time and this was a tiny town. In this confined environment he couldn’t look at a woman without that woman getting the wrong idea. Affairs were impossible. He was so damned lonely and he was hungry…
He wasn’t hungry for Christine, he conceded to himself, looking at the woman in front of him and accepting
