fascinated.
Remember Robert, she told herself fiercely. Remember her parents, Rory, a life committed to medicine.
Plus remember that this man was married. With kids. His girls…
‘So exactly how desperate are you?’ she tried cautiously, and his smile faded a little, as if he was weighing what he ought to tell her.
‘Pretty desperate.’
‘I can look after Angus.’
‘He needs a nurse here,’ Jake said slowly. ‘But I was thinking…’
‘Wow. Can I watch?’
The smile appeared again. A truly excellent smile. Well worth working for.
‘Enough impertinence. I have an idea.’
‘Another!’
‘Shut up, you.’ He was grinning. There’d been lines of strain around his eyes since the first time she’d met him, and suddenly they were lightening. It made her feel good. Great even. She found she was grinning back, and she had to force herself to get back to the issue at hand.
‘Tell me your idea.’
‘My girls…’ he said cautiously, and she stopped feeling like smiling. Which was dopey. How could she be jealous of the family of someone she’d known for less than twenty-four hours?
‘Tell me about your girls,’ she managed.
‘I have a housekeeper.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said cautiously, and once again got that flash of laughter.
‘It is nice,’ he told her. ‘But it gets nicer. Margie Boyce is a trained nurse. She’s in her sixties but she’s very competent. She could come out here during the day and stay with Angus and Susie.’
There were things here she wasn’t quite understanding. ‘You can manage without her?’
‘No, but-’
‘What about your girls?’
‘That’s just it,’ he said patiently. ‘They could come, too.’
‘Your girls could come here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What about your wife?’
He sighed. ‘I don’t have a wife.’
There was a moment’s silence. ‘No wife.’
‘No.’
‘But girls.’
‘You really are nosy.’
‘I am,’ she agreed, and beamed.
Her smile seemed to take him aback. He dug his hands in his pockets and stared at her like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of her.
She continued to smile, waiting.
Hospice work was a hard training ground, Kirsty thought reflectively. She’d spent the last few years working with terminally ill patients, and one thing she’d learned fast was not to mess around trying to find the right way to frame a question. The people she worked with had little energy and less time. She worked to get things as right for them as she could in the little time she had available, and she didn’t do it by pussyfooting around hard questions.
So maybe it made her nosy. What did she have to lose?
‘I’m divorced,’ Jake said grudgingly.
She gave a grunt of what might be sympathy and went back to looking out at the garden. That was another trick she’d learned. Give people space.
‘So the girls are your daughters?’ she asked at last.
‘That’s right.’
‘How old?’
‘Four.’
‘Both?’
‘They’re twins.’
‘Twins are great,’ she said, and smiled.
He gave her a sideways look. Hmm. She stopped smiling, looking away, and he dug his hands deeper into his pockets. She thought that was the end of information but instead he started speaking again, carefully, as if explaining something distasteful.
‘Laurel and I met at med school,’ he said flatly, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should be saying it, but now he’d started he wanted to get it over with fast. ‘I became a surgeon, she was a radiologist, and I’m not even sure why we married now. I’m guessing we were too busy with our careers to look at anyone else. We were both hugely ambitious-fast movers in the career stakes-and our eventual marriage seemed more an excuse for a party than anything else. A party where we asked the right people. But suddenly Laurel was pregnant.’
‘Not planned?’ she queried gently, and he winced.
‘Of course not planned. As far as Laurel was concerned, it was a disaster. She only agreed to continue the pregnancy on the understanding that we’d use childcare from day one.’ He hesitated. ‘And maybe I agreed with her. I was an only child with no concept of babies. But then…then Alice and Penelope were born.’
‘And became people,’ she said gently.
He looked surprised, as if he hadn’t expected such understanding. ‘I fell for them,’ he conceded. ‘My girls. But the reality of life with twins appalled Laurel. She hated everything about our new life, and she hated what the twins were doing to me. She issued an ultimatum-that we get a live-in nanny or she’d leave. That I return to the life we had pre-kids. So I was forced to choose. Laurel or the twins. But, of course, she knew my response even before she ever issued the ultimatum. The girls are just…too important to abandon to someone else’s full-time care. So that was the end of our marriage. Laurel took off overseas with a neurosurgeon when the twins were six months old and she hasn’t been back. So much for marriage.’
Ouch. That almost deserved being up there with other life lessons, Kirsty thought. All the reasons why it was dumb to get involved.
‘So what did you do?’ she probed gently.
‘I moved to the country,’ he said, almost defiantly. ‘My career in Sydney was high-powered. I knew I’d see little of the twins if I stayed there and I had some romantic notion that life as a country doctor would leave me heaps of time with the kids. Pull a few hayseeds from ears, admire the cows, play with my babies…’
‘It hasn’t worked out quite like that, huh?’
‘Well, no. But the problem is that I love it. The people are great. Alice and Penelope are loved by the whole community. They might not have as much of me as I’d hoped, but they have huge compensations.’
‘And you? Do you have compensations?’
‘Now we’re getting too personal,’ he said, stiffening as if she’d suddenly propositioned him. ‘I don’t do personal. The only reason I’m telling you this is because of Margie Boyce. As I said, Margie’s a housekeeper-cum-nurse. She also acts as my babysitter. She’s married to Ben, who was a gardener here before his arthritis got bad. Ben and Angus are old friends. What I’ve suggested to Angus in the past is that he has Margie and Ben stay with him, but of course he won’t agree. He knows Margie looks after my girls so I’d need to find someone else, and the thought of Margie fussing over him when he wants to die is unbearable. But now…’ Jake looked thoughtfully over to the two heads discussing pumpkins. ‘If we tell Angus that a condition of Susie staying here is that Margie comes out to care for her during the day…bringing the girls with him… He may well agree.’
She thought that through. It sounded OK. ‘That’d leave me doing nothing,’ she said slowly.
‘That’d leave you working with me,’ he said bluntly, and gave her a sheepish smile. ‘I’ve nobly worked it all out to stop you being bored.’
She tried to look indignant-and failed. She needed to be honest, she decided. She’d been kicking her heels in Sydney for the last month, waiting to see whether Susie went into premature labour, and by the end of that time she’d been climbing walls. Dolphin Bay was a tiny coastal village, and exploration would here be limited. She’d be
