The Doctor's Mistress

Oh, he meant Tori, of course!

‘Nor Mum, for that matter,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping my aunt and uncle will come down from Harpoon Bay to see her tomorrow.’ He pushed back his chair. ‘Unfortunately my younger sister lives in London now.’

‘You haven’t finished your pizza.’

He waved it away. ‘Take it home with you, if you want.’

She asked for a box, and when they got back to the hospital she hunted up one of the nurses in the high-dependency unit and said, ‘Can you...kind of...remind Dr Black to finish this off during the night?’ She didn’t have to ask to know that he wasn’t planning to go home before morning. ‘Heat it up in the microwave for him even? Put it on a plate and shove it into his hands?’

‘Not looking after himself properly?’ the nurse guessed.

Hayley cannoned into the man himself in the doorway to this section of the unit. He’d checked that Tori was still asleep, and was about to cross the corridor to see his mother.

‘Still here?’ he said.

‘Your pizza’s in the fridge,’ she answered drily, earning his rusty laugh.

‘I thought it was your pizza,’ he said.

‘No, it’s definitely yours. I’m not all that fond of ham and pineapple.’ She added, before he could ask, ‘That was what we always used to get when we all went out after swim meets, remember? Mr Hazelwood didn’t used to give us a choice, or he said we’d have been there all night, making up our minds. I saw his point!’

‘And you never said you didn’t like it?’

‘I wasn’t going to be the only nuisance.’

‘You were always too nice!’

‘So were you. You used to wait before you took the last piece.’

‘Not very noble of me, since I knew Mum would have a second dinner waiting at home.’

‘You mean she didn’t know about the pizza?’

‘Hey, I was growing!’

They both laughed.

With one hand propped against the doorway, he leaned down and cupped his other palm against the back of her neck, his fingers nestling into the feathery texture of her short, dark hair. Instinctively, she lifted her face and their eyes met, and she saw an awareness in his gaze that she knew was mirrored in her own.

His pupils were wide and dark, and there was a new softness to the way he held himself. Now he was watching her mouth. Her lips parted on a sudden in-breath, her heartbeat quickened and then he released his hold and the moment passed.

It was a relief. She wasn’t prepared for something like this tonight.

‘I m-must get to Mum and Dad’s to pick up Max,’ she stammered. ‘Don’t lose touch now that you’re back.’

Big points for inanity on that one, Hayley!

‘I won’t,’ Byron said. He might have said more, but she was already striding off along the corridor.

He watched her for a moment.

It was visiting hour, and there were knots of people about, some of them looking distinctly uncomfortable in the hospital environment. Hayley took no notice of them, kept her head down and her walk rapid so that her delicate gold and jade earrings swung against her slender neck and caught the light. He’d noticed that before.

Speed seemed to suit Hayley, Byron decided. She had been fast in the pool, she was fast at the wheel of an ambulance and she was fast on her feet. Organised. Efficient.

Escaping.

He knew it. Was deeply glad she felt the same way he did about that little moment of heat in the doorway, and about the way their hands had kept straying together across the restaurant table as they’d talked. He’d always found her very attractive. She was compact yet strong, with gorgeously smooth skin and a constant sparkle of life and warmth in her dark brown eyes.

Of course they’d all been a mass of stimulated hormones at swim club, surrounded by all that slick, wet skin and smoothly honed muscle. He had fancied almost all the girls at one stage or another, even the ones he hadn’t particularly liked.

Perhaps that was how he’d learned so early on that you had to divorce physical attraction from emotional connection. When he’d met Elizabeth during his second year of medicine at Sydney University, their physical response to each other had been just one part of the package—the uniquely precious and complete package he knew he’d never find again. Didn’t even want to find again, in fact.

These days, he didn’t have that scatter-gun, adolescent approach to women. Only during those late teen years had he fancied anything and everything in a skirt. The sit-up-and-howl feeling came much less often, now. There was discrimination involved.

And yet he still found Hayley Kennett...or whatever her surname was now...very attractive indeed. Found that their long-ago kiss was surprisingly vivid in his memory. It unsettled him. Scared him, if he was honest.

No. Definitely. I don’t need it. I don’t want it.

It was an instinctive thing, and not something he wanted to analyse too closely. Wasn’t the reluctance enough? Did he have to work out why?

Yes. Perhaps he did. Take a deep breath and just do it, Byron.

He didn’t fully trust his judgement, or his reactions—that was part of the problem. It would be so easy to numb himself...assuage certain needs...with an affair, kidding himself that it was safe with Hayley because they’d known each other for so long. But what would happen when the affair ended and the numbness wore off? He’d be back to square one, and minus an old friend. Worse, he’d have lanced open the still-not-fully-healed wound of Elizabeth’s loss and the agony would be back.

No, if he was going to launch into any kind of new relationship, now that he was back in Arden, it wouldn’t be with Hayley, he decided firmly. It would be with someone much, much safer.

On that note, feeling relieved, he went in to see his mother.

CHAPTER THREE

‘MUMMY’S on roster today,’ Max told his preschool teacher, Karen, on a Wednesday morning in late March. ‘That means she’s staying all morning.’

‘I know. It’ll be fun having Mummy, won’t it?’ Karen agreed, smiling across the top of the little boy’s mid-brown head at Hayley.

‘What do you need me to do, Karen?’ Hayley asked. She hadn’t been the parent on roster at preschool before, although she’d done it several times the previous year when Max had attended a junior play school for two short mornings each week.

But before the teacher could answer, they were both distracted by the sight of Byron Black stepping up to the veranda, with his little girl’s hand in his. He was so tall that he almost had to duck to clear the low veranda ceiling, and there was something about him that had already drawn more than one pair of eyes.

‘Excuse me, Hayley,’ Karen said. ‘This is little Tori Black, and it’s her first day. She’s... uh...had a rather difficult time.’

‘That’s fine. I know Tori. And her dad,’ Hayley said.

She couldn’t help watching the pair as they came through the door. In the bright morning light, Byron looked anxious at first, as if wondering whether Tori was ready for this yet. His reaction made sense. It was six weeks since the little girl’s accident, and her burns didn’t show, but beneath her pretty purple sundress there would still be significant scarring, as well as areas of reddened skin like latticework where she’d recently had her grafts.

Karen went forward to greet them, while Hayley dropped to the carpet to help Max with his jigsaw puzzle of a cat. She was well aware that her thoughts were focused on Byron and Tori more than on the wooden pieces scattered over the carpet in front of her.

‘I did this one every day last week,’ Max said. ‘I know it off by heart.’ Which explained why he didn’t actually need her help at all. ‘Ear. Tail. Other ear. Head. Paws,’ he said, his fingers snapping each piece unerringly into place.