TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.
The sign’s harsh warning sounded over in her head but Jess stayed where she was.
She was fighting for Frank.
And maybe she was fighting for something she didn’t understand herself.
She closed her eyes, searching for courage, and then walked into the house after him.
The first room was a massive kitchen, bigger than Jessie’s. Like Jessie’s, it had a vast slow combustion stove.
Niall was kneeling beside it, holding his waif of a daughter close-and his daughter was screaming.
The child was still in her nightclothes. Although held tight in her father’s arms she seemed unresponsive to his hold. Her frail body was held rigid and her distraught sobs were laced with terror.
What on earth was happening?
Jess stayed motionless. She should leave-she should-but there was some instinct within telling her to stay.
Her love of wild creatures…
It was what had driven her to be a vet in the first place. She couldn’t walk past an injured or distressed animal. And this child…
This child seemed to be just such a creature. Lost and bereft…
‘Niall, can I help?’ she asked gently. The child’s sobs were going right through her and Paige was holding herself frantically rigid in her father’s arms. Niall seemed helpless in the face of his daughter’s distress.
‘What the hell…?’ Niall swung to face her. ‘Get out of here,’ he snapped. ‘Now!’
‘Not before you tell me what’s wrong.’ Jess bit her lip, aware that she was intruding in the worst possible way-but also powerless to stop. There was something about this child that cut through her defences like a knife.
Niall wasn’t reaching his daughter. The child’s sobbing was bereft and frightened as if she didn’t know where she was or what was happening to her. She was lost…
The ugly callipers stuck out from the little cotton nightdress. The child’s hair was unbraided, flowing free round her red-blotched face, and her hands were tightly clenched fists. She was beyond responding to her father, her sobbing wild and terrified.
‘Let me try,’ Jess said, and walked toward them.
‘No.’ Niall moved his body in an instinctive act of defence. A hawk protecting his young. The child was pulled closer to him-but there was no comfort for her there.
‘I’m good with…with little ones,’ Jess told him. ‘Please…’ Ignoring his gesture of defence she stooped before Paige and held out her hands.
For a long moment Niall glared. His body was rigid with anger and his eyes were black with it-yet there was also a hint of helplessness. Of hopelessness. Of a man at the end of his tether.
‘Please,’ Jess said again and then, as though he had assented, she lifted the child away from her father and pulled her to her breast.
Jess didn’t say anything. Not a word. Instead, she gathered the sobbing child to her body and held her as close as it was possible for woman and child to be. Cradling the child against her, Jess walked over to a big armchair beside the stove. She sank into its depth, the terrified child still held tight.
‘Can you warm us some milk?’ she asked Niall briefly and then bent over the child.
She ignored Niall.
For ten long minutes she ignored Niall. Jess was conscious of him-totally conscious-of his dark, brooding presence as he heated the milk and watched the pair in the armchair. She had to put his presence away, though. There was only the child.
This was what she did with her wild creatures-her orphans-when she found them.
Their need was basic: warmth and contact with a substitute mother. No threats until they had learned to trust.
Normally, in the first few days after being found, Jess slipped the orphaned creatures into a pouch and carried them against her breast while she went about her work. This was what she’d have liked to do with this little one.
Impossible.
All she could do was to hold this tiny, sobbing girl close and wait.
Like this child, the animals when she first found them were rigid with terror. It was a matter of getting their trust.
A matter of time.
She held the tiny body close, the callipered legs dangling down but the little face held hard against her breast. Jess crooned softly to herself, a silly nonsense song that her mother had crooned to her long ago and which made no more sense now than it had then.
‘Hush, baby…Hush…’
Hush…
It took time but finally, finally, the terror receded. Jess felt the rigidity leave the child’s tiny frame and felt Paige slump against her, exhausted.
‘Hush, baby…Hush…’
Niall didn’t speak. He’d left the milk by the side of the stove, knowing instinctively that the time wasn’t right. Not yet. He moved around the kitchen, tidying, filling in time, watching Jess and Paige out of the comer of his eye.
Waiting.
The sobs ceased.
The child was limp in Jessie’s arms but her small hand had come up to clutch the blouse fabric at Jessie’s breast-and clutch it hard.
Like a lifeline.
Jess leaned over and kissed the top of Paige’s head.
‘I’d like some warm milk,’ Jess whispered softly. ‘What about you, Paige?’
There was no answer. There was a slight stiffening of the body and then Paige relaxed again as she grasped what Jessie had said. No threat there. Jess signalled Niall with her eyes and a mug of tepid milk was placed in her hands.
It seemed that Niall was taking a risk.
Trusting his daughter to a vet.
‘OK, Paige,’ Jess said gently. ‘Let’s get you wrapped round this.’ She held the cup to the child’s unprotesting lips and tilted.
And held her breath.
The child’s hand left the fabric of Jessie’s blouse; She clutched the mug with both hands and drank.
Jess let out a breath she hardly knew she was holding.
‘Now,’ she said unsteadily as the milk went down. The child’s body was almost relaxed, although she was still holding herself close to Jess-as if drawing warmth from her body. ‘What on earth is the trouble?’
‘Paige has nightmares.’ Niall spoke across the room. He was leaning back against the table, his arms folded, watching Jess and his daughter with troubled eyes. ‘She wakes…She wakes in terror.’
‘That’s some nightmare.’ Jess gave Paige’s thin body a squeeze. ‘Horrid.’
‘H-horrid,’ Paige whispered. The child held her empty mug away from her face and Niall moved to take it.
Paige flinched at his movement and shrank back into Jessie’s arms.
Phew…
Niall had seen the flinch. Jessie saw it in the man’s face-the sort of desperate hurt that cut deep.
‘How long have these nightmares been happening?’ Jess asked. She had a hard job to keep her voice steady.
‘I don’t know.’ Niall shook his head, his eyes still on his little daughter. ‘Paige was with her mother until…until five months ago. Then her mother…had to leave her and I collected Paige and brought her here.’
‘Collected her?’ Jess asked, startled. At the sound of her raised voice the child’s hand came up and clutched Jessie’s blouse again. ‘From where?’
