Starting now.’
He kept to his word.
For the next few weeks, while Kirsty’s battered body healed, while she came to terms with what had happened and while her world righted itself on its axis, Jake left talk of marriage alone.
Firstly he was her doctor. One of the fractured ribs was displaced, with sharp rib ends protruding toward the lung, and when the air ambulance took Angus to Sydney it took Kirsty as well. She needed specialist thoracic surgery. ‘You were so lucky you didn’t pierce a lung,’ Jake growled when he showed her the X-rays. The fragmented bone was so close. So close…
He strapped her with professional care, he handed her over to the care-flight doctors with clinical efficiency, and only at the last minute did he stoop and kiss her, hard, briefly, lovingly, on the lips.
He didn’t ring her in Sydney more than a concerned family doctor might have. A very caring doctor…
She’d spent a week in Sydney. A kindly anaesthetist had given her an intercostal block. Out of pain, she’d slept and slept, and her doctors had looked at the amount she’d been sleeping and decreed that she take as long as she needed.
So when she returned-by road ambulance this time- Angus was ready to return with her. His bypass had been gloriously successful. He still had his pet-dog-oxygen-cannister with him, but his breathing was easy, his eyes were alive with excitement and he beamed all the way home.
He had Susie to go home to.
For Susie would stay as long as the old man had left, Kirsty thought. Susie had rung her over and over while she’d been in Sydney. She had described the perfection of her daughter. She had described how much better her walking was without the burden of pregnancy. And Kirsty was no sooner back at the castle than she was taken out to be shown Spike.
‘Jake’s been replenishing his IV drip every day,’ Susie told her. ‘He’s been wonderful.’
‘Is he still staying here?’
‘He took the girls home this morning,’ Susie said-with no more than a sideways glance at her sister. ‘He said you and Angus needed to rest and you’ll rest better without the twins and Boris around all the time. Margie has arranged for her sister to help with the housework until we’re all fit again.’
Which would be soon, Kirsty thought, watching her sister cradling her baby daughter, watching her laugh with Angus, boss Angus, boss Kirsty into resting… She’d dreaded the baby’s birth, fearing postnatal depression. Instead, the birth had catapulted Susie to the other side.
‘So Jake will come…when?’
‘He said he’ll come tonight and every night while we still need him,’ Susie told him. ‘For Angus.’
For Angus.
And it was for Angus. Jake arrived that night and he spent half an hour with the earl. He came downstairs and chatted to Kirsty and Susie, and if his eyes were warm and loving as they looked at Kirsty…well, they were warm when they looked at Susie as well, and also as he looked down into Rosie’s cradle and smiled and gave the tiny baby his little finger to hold.
Kirsty walked him to the door afterwards and tried to thank him, but he took her shoulders in his hands and kissed her-lightly on the lips but still far too lightly for her liking-and put her away again.
‘Don’t thank me for loving, Kirsty,’ he told her. ‘It’s all coming together.’
For both of them. She knew it. But it was as if they both needed time now, space to come to terms with what they knew was inevitable. She knew the townsfolk were looking at them, but she didn’t mind. She knew Susie was big with questions but she didn’t mind that either.
One day soon it’d be right but not yet…not yet.
Her job back home was still waiting for her. She made no irrevocable decision, but she did phone Robert and tell him that he should find someone else.
‘It’s a shame,’ Robert said. ‘We’ve always been such good friends.’
Yes, but I’ve found more, she thought, but she didn’t say it. She hardly dared say it herself.
She didn’t think of the future.
As her ribs healed she did a little medicine-she ran a few clinics, she went out to see Mavis and spent quite some time at that lady’s bedside.
Like Susie, Mavis wasn’t asking questions. She was almost totally pain-free now, and her bright, inquisitive mind was working at full capacity-but she made no comment about Kirsty and Jake.
It was time out. It was a time of knowing that happy ever after was just around the corner but not to be rushed…not to be rushed…
And then came Harvest Thanksgiving.
Harvest Thanksgiving in Dolphin Bay was huge. From the moment Kirsty had entered the town she’d known that this was the biggest festival on the calendar. It took the form of a fete, a two-day celebration where fun and laughter and affirmation of life was the order of the day.
It was also Spike’s moment of glory.
The district’s best jams and jellies, most obedient dog, highest sponge-and widest pumpkin-were all on show.
Angus was to open the proceedings.
He fretted for days beforehand. ‘I couldn’t be doing it last year,’ he told them. ‘I had pneumonia. But I’ll be getting there this year if it kills me.’
It almost did. He spent two hours getting into his full Scottish regalia and at the end he had to have a wee lie down. Kirsty went into his bedroom and found him gasping without oxygen.
‘If you think you can open the festival dead, you can think again,’ she told him, hooking up his oxygen tube and swiping his hand away as he tried to protest.
‘The Laird of Loganaich would never have anything as sissy as an oxygen cylinder,’ he told her, and Kirsty gazed around the room, saw a discarded sash and wound the offending cylinder with the Douglas clan.
‘There,’ she said. ‘The Laird of Loganaich would find it impossible to leave his loyal and appropriately clad companion behind.’
‘You’d be as bossy as your sister.’
‘No one’s as bossy as Susie.’
‘Susie’s staying on,’ Angus said in quiet satisfaction. ‘She’s promised. How about you, lass?’
Kirsty fiddled, adjusting the tartan.
‘You’re marking time,’ Angus said softly. ‘Waiting for what?’
‘To be sure,’ she whispered.
‘He’s sure.’
He was. Every day Kirsty saw Jake’s certainty grow. He still didn’t push her. He was simply her friend-the friend who laughed with her, who talked to her of her patients as she grew more enmeshed in this little community, who shared the love and laughter of his little girls…
‘You can’t be keeping him waiting for ever,’ Angus said, and Kirsty nodded, tying the sash with a defiant tug.
‘I know.’
‘So what’s holding you back?’
‘It’s like…I’ve been so self-contained for so long,’ she whispered. ‘But now I’m happy.’
‘You’d be fearful that if you take the next step you’ll compromise what you already have?’
‘My mother’s death tore my family apart,’ she told him. ‘My parents were in love, but after Mom died, Dad just…stopped. And Susie-she gave herself completely, and when Rory died she came close to dying as well.’
‘So you’ll not go that last step.’
‘I…I will.’ She knew she must. She loved Jake so much. But this last step…
‘It’s a hard hurdle,’ Angus told her, between deep breaths that replenished his oxygen-starved lungs. ‘But it’s part of life, lass. You love and risk losing, or you don’t love at all and then you’ve lost already. Deirdre and I had the best fun. Here I am left with just a bunch of plastic chandeliers and old Queen Vic in the bathroom-but I wouldn’t be having it any other way. I had forty glorious years of my lovely Deidre, and here I am falling in love all over again with a wee mite called Rose who’s twisted around my heart like…’
