Dear Doctor, page 5
‘No. I need to clean up first.’
He understood and summoned the lift, still holding her elbow, but before it arrived, and straight after she’d assured Josh, for the twentieth time, that she was all right, the trembling started, bones and muscles all shaking so uncontrollably she was grateful when he put his arms around her and held her close.
His body pressed against hers, providing the support she needed, feeding assurance until the shakes began to lessen.
‘This is stupid. I’ll be OK, truly I will. And the lift’s here. I need to get out of this foyer.’
The words, muffled by suit material as her face pressed against his shoulder, were barely audible, but he must have heard, for he stroked her back and murmured, ‘Hush. We’ll go soon. When you’re ready.’
He was brushing little kisses—soothing kisses—on her hair, and his voice was so husky she knew he, too, had had a shock. But worst of all was the realisation that she was no longer pressed hard against Josh’s body because without it she wouldn’t be able to stay upright—but rather because it was where she wanted to be, and, now it had stopped shaking, her body was enjoying it enormously, thank you very much.
A word she rarely used echoed fiercely in her head.
You’re an engaged woman, the head voice scolded. You don’t need quizzes or etiquette books to tell you this is wrong. Get your act together here!
Feebly, because her body’s opinion was so at odds with her mind’s, she pushed away.
‘I’m OK now—fine. But maybe we could talk about those ideas some other time.’
Josh stepped away from her at the first sign of resistance, making her realise he’d only been providing support—while somehow holding the lift doors open? Maybe with his foot?
‘Of course,’ he agreed, leading her into the cubicle, pressing the requisite buttons, then ushering her out into the small fourth-floor foyer, ‘but I’m not leaving you like this. I’ll come in with you while you shower and get comfortable, then I’ll order our dinners and bring them up to your flat. That way I get to eat as well as keeping an eye on you for an hour or so—in case of a delayed reaction. You did hit your head as you fell.’
Kirsten combed her fingers through her hair, feeling for any sign that this might be true. There was a sore spot and a small bump developing—but bad enough for Josh to stay?
She knew she should argue, assure him she was fine, but remembering how good it had been to be held in his arms made her hesitate and the moment for saying no was lost. Besides, he’d taken her bunch of keys out of her still unsteady fingers and was trying each in turn in the lock.
And making so much noise it was only a matter of time before someone in the flat opposite came out to see what was happening.
And who was that someone likely to be?
Only Gabi, sister of the man to whom Kirsten was engaged, and confidante from the time when Kirsten had wept buckets of tears over this same Josh Phillips!
Kirsten’s stomach twisted. If she’d been able to render Josh invisible, she would have, because no matter how innocent all this was, she was ninety-nine per cent sure it wouldn’t look that way to Gabi.
‘You’re not all right!’ Josh said crossly, and Kirsten realised she was standing like a grubby statue outside her door, which Josh had finally opened and now held patiently. When she failed to move, he took over, grasping her elbow again, ushering her into the flat, murmuring encouragement.
Josh’s fussing was nice, even if he didn’t know the cause of the acceleration of her wreckage. But now, though saved from discovery in the foyer, she had to worry about Gabi visiting later—perhaps while she and Josh were sharing a cosy meal. Or Gabi meeting Josh when he was coming back up in the lift with dinner for two. How would that look to a fiancé’s sister?
Summoning all her scattered wits and reserves of energy, she straightened up, stepped away from Josh then turned to face him.
‘I’m OK now, really I am. Why don’t you go down and have a drink at Mickey’s and I’ll have a quick shower, change and join you in—say, fifteen minutes? I do want to talk about the unit and some of the things I’d like to suggest might have to be incorporated into the design of the rooms, so the sooner we discuss it the better.’
She all but pushed him out the door, which prompted Josh to wonder if she was expecting the man who’d paid big bucks for that ring to appear at any moment. But if that happened, how would she explain her sudden departure to meet him for dinner downstairs?
He puzzled over it as he made his way back to the bistro, then decided to put it down to typical irrational female behaviour. In fact, it was good they were eating downstairs for whatever reason, because as he’d held her in his arms earlier he’d somehow forgotten not only that she was engaged but that he couldn’t afford to be distracted by whatever magnetism drew him to her. And though he’d been…What had he been? Frustrated certainly. Aggravated—yes, that, too—and infinitely put out by her refusal to have a brief affair with him, he’d come to be thankful to her. Sensible reasoning, and a good dollop of hindsight, had convinced him that Kirsten Collins was definitely off-limits to a man who’d made a rational decision not to marry—or at least to put off marriage until he was forty.
Until then he’d enjoy the company of women who understood the rules of short relationships, which wasn’t hard, as his reputation as a man who shunned commitment preceded him wherever he went.
He was happy enough to live with that reputation, though it made more of his exploits than he’d actually enjoyed, and the relationships were usually ended by the women in question when they realised how much his working life interfered with socialising! But the question of marriage was different. His own childhood experience had proved how hard it was for a man to be a successful specialist and a father to a young family at the same time. He knew other people did it—and other specialists seemed to cope—but his family was genetically challenged when it came to doing two things well at once. Hopeless, in fact.
His grandfather had started the tradition, stowing his wife and children on a property outside town but living in town himself and visiting at weekends. So Josh’s own father had seen nothing wrong in acting the same way, though his duty visits, as his sons had grown older, had become less and less frequent until his parents would have to have been considered separated.
Was it because he was the youngest child that he’d picked up on his mother’s unhappiness? And why, when it hadn’t seemed to bother his older brothers, had he missed having a real father, someone there more of the time, someone who showed love in other ways than occasional visits to the hospital, where the Phillips heritage was pointed out? A father whose sole contribution to Josh’s struggle through adolescence had been ‘Don’t mess with redheads’?
From an early age Josh had known he was expected to follow his forebears and brothers into medicine. But he’d also figured out that his children, if he had them, would have a very different kind of father.
The way he planned it, by the time he was forty he’d have achieved what he wanted to in his career, kept faith with tradition, and he could go into teaching and cut back on patient time. Then, maybe, he’d consider having children because then he’d be able to give them the kind of love and attention he’d found so lacking in his own childhood.
And with his children thus relegated to the future, he reinstated his image of the ‘perfect wife’—a calm, controlled, quiet, intelligent and undemanding woman—blonde, or maybe brunette—back into his head. She would fit into his life as unobtrusively as well-made furniture, caring for the children, entertaining his colleagues, running his home with the smooth, unruffled efficiency he liked in his life.
It was laughable to imagine the bright but erratic star that was Kirsten in such a role—impossible!
Having sorted all that out—again—Josh walked into Mickey’s in a buoyant mood, secure in the knowledge that common sense had won out again.
Though common sense had a battle remembering all the plus factors in this theory when Kirsten joined him. She’d showered and her hair was wet around the edges, so strands of it clung damply to her skin around the hairline, framing her face and making her seem so much younger than her twenty-eight years. And lack of makeup gave her an air of innocence that caused strange spasms in his gut—or maybe that was hunger.
Whatever it was, it was preferable to the definitely sexual stirrings in another part of his anatomy—responding, as it had in the lift, to the lush, shapely body, decently covered yet somehow revealed by a dress that skimmed over it like a second skin, clinging to the fullness of her breasts, the rounded arc of her hips, ending far too soon so legs as long as tomorrow couldn’t help but claim his attention.
‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked, gulping down the last of the light beer he’d ordered and wishing it was something stronger.
She shook her head, the dry bits of the red-brown hair swinging out a little with the movement, then she greeted Mickey with a smile and asked what specials he had on offer, displaying no more interest in Josh the man than she had in the barstool she’d settled on.
‘Arabella’s photos gave me the idea,’ she said, firing more disappointment in Josh’s chest as she launched straight into business once they’d both ordered meals.
‘The kids love having photos and cards and pictures, but in the most sterile of rooms they’re not allowed. You have the walls and ceiling which can be painted, but paintings are static. What if we had a video machine, the kind they have in discos, showing the latest music videos up on a wall? The rooms already have a control unit with the bed and call button controls. We could scan pictures of the patient’s family, or his or her favourite books, into the machine and with different channels to choose from, the machine could direct personal photos or pictures into each room.’
‘Could they move the pictures—throw them onto the ceiling as well as the wall?’ He was hooked. Her idea might prove expensive but it was definitely better thinking about money than remembering how much he’d longed to get Kirsten into his bed. And wondering what it would have been like if…
‘Are you listening?’ she demanded, then she shrugged her shoulders and rolled her eyes. ‘Honestly! Men! You ask a question then go off into another world instead of listening to the answer. Do you want to know more about it or don’t you?’
Embarrassed that his mind had strayed so far so quickly, Josh straightened on the stool, shoved the memories back into the attic of his mind and tried valiantly to remember the question he must have asked.
‘Can you move the pictures? That’s what you asked, and as I’ve already explained once, I don’t see why not. I think they could also manipulate the images, maybe change the colours or enlarge particular sections. Because it’s all computerised, they should be able to do anything that you can do on a computer, and if the images were controlled by touching a sensor pad then the lightest of movements from even the weakest of little fingers could manipulate them.’
He was more than hooked now because he could feel the first glimmers of excitement—work-related this time. Depression was a big problem with very ill children, and when sick and isolated they could lose the will to live that had brought them through the initial stages of their disease.
‘Do you want to move to a table?’ Mickey asked, gesturing to the other side of the bar where small tables overlooked the building’s pool and garden area. ‘Your meals are ready.’
Kirsten slid off her stool and moved around the bar, the sway of her body reminding Josh yet again of what they’d almost shared.
Was it because it was an almost, not a done deed, that he was still so attracted to her?
Well, it was too late. That ring she was flaunting held a serious stone, and he guessed she wouldn’t have committed herself lightly.
Kirsten approached their table with a dark cloud of disaffection settling around her shoulders. Josh’s enthusiasm for her ideas had been underwhelming at best. In fact, he’d drifted off to some other place halfway through the conversation, then had stared at her as if trying to work out who she was for the rest of it.
And even though she was eating with him for purely business reasons, and in a public place, she was still suffering niggling jabs of guilt. Probably because, try as she might to escape or dampen or otherwise diminish it, her body still lusted after the wretched man.
Maybe if they’d gone one week past the month before he’d told her about his anti-commitment stance—if they’d actually had sex—she’d have got it out of her system.
Studying him across the table as he thanked Mickey for their meals, she felt a shiver of anticipation rush down her spine, the result of a stray and quickly quashed thought that maybe that was the answer. Sleep with the man and get him out of her system.
No! her head yelled practically before the thought had formed into words.
‘Is there something wrong with it?’ Josh asked, and she came back to the present to realise she was toying with her pasta, twisting her fork through the strands of linguini but not lifting any of it to her mouth.
‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, and far too hurriedly forked some into her mouth. So, of course, it dripped everywhere and strands dangled dangerously downwards, no doubt making her look like a drooling idiot.
‘Tricky stuff,’ Josh teased, and the gentle smile he gave her sent her heart into panic and her pulses racing.
She couldn’t be feeling like this about another man when she was engaged to Grant! But as she listened to Josh extolling the deliciousness of his meal, her heart continued to ignore orders to behave, while her fingers showed an alarming desire to creep across the table and rest, for just a moment, on his arm. Right there, on the bit of tanned and slightly hairy skin revealed below the cuff of his white shirt…
Blot both the thought and the image from your mind!
Concentrating on the meal helped, and the pasta was behaving so badly she needed to concentrate.
‘I never order stuff in strands for just that reason,’ Josh remarked, battling a smile as a tangled forkful of pasta slid traitorously back into her bowl.
‘I can usually manage it quite well,’ Kirsten told him, though it was better to be making a fool of herself eating uncooperative linguini than running her forefinger over tanned wrist-skin.
Infinitely better than throwing herself into his arms and demanding he take her to bed so she could get him out of her system and get on with loving Grant. ‘And aren’t we supposed to be discussing the new unit, rather than my lack of finesse with pasta?’
‘You’ve more ideas?’ he said, and she frowned at him.
‘You don’t have to sound so surprised. Even good-time girls—I think that was what you called me—can hold a couple of thoughts together at one time.’
Though with difficulty at the moment!
She concentrated harder.
‘My original idea, before I saw Arabella’s pictures and considered scanning personal items into a computerised video, was that with the same kind of control a child might be able to alter a light source so it changed the configuration of the room. I’d have to work it out on my computer, but say we painted the walls in geometric patterns, using different colours, then with a simple manipulation of light he or she might be able to make animals or objects appear.’
‘I know what you mean, but it sounds complicated.’
Kirsten shrugged.
‘So, the older kids could do it, and it would be challenging for them, and with the younger ones, perhaps a visitor could change the lights and leave different pictures showing at different times of the day.’
‘I’ve a cousin who’s a computer whiz. I’ll put it all to him and see what he has to say. He’d also know what equipment would be needed and how complex it will be.’
Josh smiled at her as if the conversation had been satisfactorily concluded—at least for the moment. Aware of the dangers of silence settling between them, Kirsten picked out the olives and sun-dried tomatoes from her linguini while searching her mind for a new topic to keep thoughts of more personal matters at bay.
‘So, when do you expect to be able to start? And do you want me to do pre-procedure stuff with the kids? Most of them are used to all the needles, drips and other paraphernalia of hospitals, so is there anything different you’ll be doing?’
Josh studied her for a moment, as if wondering why she was asking, then he lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug and said, ‘I thought we might have ended the evening with a bit of light social banter—maybe sharing the latest hospital gossip and scandal.’
‘I’ve been away for a fortnight so I don’t know any gossip and scandal. Besides, we’re only eating together to discuss the new unit.’
Again he paused before answering, and she could almost feel the blue eyes touching her skin as his gaze swept across her face.
‘Yes, I guess we are,’ he said softly. ‘It’s not as if we’ve anything else in common.’
His voice was low and husky, and it was its timbre as much as the words themselves which made her heart shiver in her chest.
CHAPTER FOUR
BUT when Josh spoke again, he was all business.
‘We touched on this at lunch yesterday when I talked about counselling. I’d like you to be an informal liaison person with the parents. You’ll be on the ward, doing recreational activities with the other children, or with our special cases before pre-treatment starts, so the parents will be able to talk to you, ask questions, in a less formal way than in the talks I have with them about the actual procedure. It’s not counselling as such, but it could be a way of helping the families come to terms with what’s happening, and maybe a way for us to gauge how the parents are thinking and feeling about it.’
Kirsten understood what he meant. Most parents tended to see the nursing and medical staff as very busy people, so avoided questioning them too often, and while they could make an appointment to see a counsellor, the meeting would take them off the ward—away from their child. But the OT was seen as someone there merely to play with the kids, and she could direct play and talk at the same time.
