Dating The Millionaire Doctor

He didn’t for a while. They shared their food. They both had soda-he’d have liked a beer but Jancey’s catheter might mean he’d be called out again. They listened to music. She liked his music. That was something the decorator hadn’t chosen.

‘What time’s your plane tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Late afternoon. I figure I’ll sleep in.’

‘No more sightseeing?’

‘I hear Soho’s good,’ she said. ‘But maybe not. You need to go to work, right?’

He did. He’d been trying to figure out how not to need to go to work, but case lists for Monday were always the most complex. If he cancelled, patients would be sent home.

‘You can’t let them down,’ Tori said softly, and he knew she understood.

He was doing a rapid assessment of cases in his head but it wasn’t helping. He’d seen Jack Carver in the cardiac ward on Friday. Jack had severe ulceration on his legs, so severe amputation was becoming an option. He needed shunts to restore blood supply back so they could heal, but he had a cardiac condition and diabetic complications as well. When Jake had done the initial assessment-something he usually avoided but he seemed to be doing it more in the weeks since he’d met Tori-Jack’s wife had been holding her husband’s hand as though if she let go he’d drown.

‘Please,’ she’d said to him. ‘Jack’s all I have. Make him well.’

The risk of Jack losing his leg-or worse-was increasing every day he waited. He couldn’t reschedule, Jake thought grimly. No matter what he wanted personally, he needed to be there tomorrow.

And Jancey would be watching the door, waiting for him. He couldn’t let Jancey down.

‘I could have done with some warning of your visit,’ he growled, but Tori shook her head.

‘I suspect you’d still be as busy even if you were expecting me, and I didn’t want to interrupt your life. I don’t want to interrupt your life. Soho will just be shops. I might go on my own or I might just sleep, but either way, I can take a cab to the airport. I don’t need your company.’

But her voice wobbled a little at that, and he noticed her fingers crept to the chain at her throat.

‘You should stay,’ he said strongly.

‘I need to go home. I need to start my life as I need to go on.’

‘Why not stay here?’

‘We already talked about that.’

‘I’d like to marry you.’

There was a sharp intake of breath. But… ‘You’ve said that before,’ she whispered, still touching her chain. ‘Just because I’m having your baby, it doesn’t make it any better.’

‘I think I love you.’

She gazed across the table at him, seemingly bemused. Seemingly astounded. ‘You think?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Hell, Tori, I haven’t done this before.’

‘Done what?’

‘Become involved.’

‘You sound like it’s happened against your will.’

‘Well, what do you think?’ he said, raking his hair. ‘I don’t have a clue how I’m feeling. But we’re going to be parents. You need to rebuild anyway. You’ve lost everything…’

And finally she reacted with something apart from shock. ‘I haven’t lost everything,’ she retorted, and she tilted her chin and met his gaze levelly and calmly.

‘Okay, you’ve got your dogs,’ he conceded.

‘I’ve got my home.’

‘A relocatable.’

‘I have my community.’ The emotion now was suddenly pure, unmitigated anger. ‘I have my work,’ she said, struggling to stay calm. ‘You have your work, too. It’s important, as my work’s important. But I have more. I have place. My parents lived and worked at Combadeen and so do I. I know every family rebuilding on the ridge. My parents are buried in the Combadeen cemetery. I’ve buried my dogs behind our house. Okay, I’ve been stunned, shocked, gutted by the fires and their aftermath but I’m handling it. And I’m moving on to make a home for myself, in my place, not in some sterile, grey, designer shoebox on the seventeenth floor of a thirty storey tower block.’

‘It’s not-’

‘A shoebox? Yes, it is,’ she retorted. ‘They’re all shoeboxes. It’s what’s around them that matters, and what’s in them. Here, you’d be at work all day every day, and the shoebox would close in on me.’

‘You could work part-time. We could get somewhere a bit bigger. Hell, Tori, you need looking after.’

‘I don’t need looking after.’

‘You’re pregnant.’

‘And I still don’t need looking after.’ Her anger was building rather than subsiding. ‘I have a community who cares. I have friends and I have colleagues. You’ve seen me at a point where I was at my lowest, where the resources of the whole district were stretched to the limit, but don’t judge me on that. Don’t judge Combadeen by that. There’s not one person in Combadeen who’d suggest I live in a grey monument to solitude and go crazy!’

‘You wouldn’t go crazy.’

‘I would if I lived here,’ she said, rising and glowering. ‘So would you, but you don’t live here either. You use it to crash or to study or to take a shower. No one lives in places like this. Living… Jake, you don’t know what living is, and I’m surely not raising my child teaching him this life is normal.’

She closed her eyes then, and she swayed. He was on his feet in an instant, surging around the table to hold her, but her eyes snapped open and she stepped away.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t?’

‘Don’t touch me,’ she whispered. ‘I was a fool to come. The truth was I wanted to see you, as well as needing to tell you about our baby, but it was wrong. You and me… No. There’s no you and me.’

‘Tori…’

‘You’re alone,’ she whispered. ‘And that’s the way you want it. But if I’m alone I’d curl up and die. I need people. I need dogs. I need…life.’

She sighed then and steadied.

‘I’m sorry, Jake,’ she said. ‘Getting angry was dumb. Yelling at you is dumb. You’re doing the best you can.’ She shook her head as if clearing fog. ‘Okay, here’s confession time,’ she said. ‘I’m trying desperately not to fall in love with you. You say you might love me? Well, maybe I know that I could love you. And you know what that means? If I came here, then you’d risk me clinging.’

He didn’t understand. ‘Why would you cling? You have your work.’

‘I’m not talking about my work. I’m talking about needing you, and you needing me. You’re fine with the idea of looking after me. Could you ever admit that you need me?’

‘I…’ There was deathly silence.

‘No,’ she said, and she was fighting now for the composure she’d lost. ‘Enough. This is dumb talk, and we both know it. We’re two mature professionals-we can handle this. Your work is waiting, and my life is waiting. So please, Jake…’

She took a deep breath. ‘Please, Jake,’ she said again. ‘I’m exhausted and I need to go to bed. Thank you for a wonderful day.’ Her fingers crept once again to her Celtic knot. ‘Thank you for my chain. I’ll keep it for ever. But now…’ Another deep breath.

‘Now I’m going into your bedroom,’ she said softly, steadying. ‘And I’m going to bed. Alone. That’s the way it has to be. We both know that. I guess when I wake up in the morning you’ll be gone to work. So I’ll get on my plane tomorrow and I won’t look back. Yes, you’ll want to see our baby. We can work that out later. But we need to do it in a way where I can be normal and civil, and the fact that I had the best night of my life with you, and I’m thinking entirely inappropriate thoughts, can be forgotten. Please, Jake, that’s what I need. So goodnight.’

And before he could guess what she intended, she took three swift steps towards him. She took his face in her hands and she kissed him, fast and hard, on the mouth. Then, before he had a chance to respond, before he could hold her as he needed to hold her, she pushed herself away.