Читать книгу Forbidden Nights With The Boss - Anna J. Stewart - Страница 11

‘I HADN’T realised how much more quickly we’d get through the day with two doctors.’

Jo had been chatting to the receptionist when Cam showed his final patient out. Now she walked with him back along the hall.

‘I phoned Lauren, who runs the refuge, earlier. The two families who are living there at the moment are having a “treat night” tonight, which means there’s no one at the house. We could go over later if that suits you. You could see the place and talk to Lauren about how it works and also about the men’s programme. Funding is always difficult—sometimes impossible. Originally we got the bequest to set up the refuge, but that’s not enough to keep it going these days so poor Lauren gets bits and pieces from different government agencies. One of the local service clubs has it as their main charity, but I can’t promise you’d be paid for running a men’s programme, although if you start it while you’re working for me, but then … ‘

She stopped and looked up at him, a worried frown knitting her eyebrows.

‘Of course you don’t have to come with me, you might prefer to go surfing or have other stuff you want to do but—’

‘Jo!’

Cam held up his hands as he said her name—a placating gesture, not surrender.

‘Calm down. We can’t change the entire world right now. Let’s take it one step at a time. I’m more than happy to go with you to see the refuge, and seeing it when no one’s there is an excellent idea. Do I have time for a quick shower and change of clothes before we go?’

She was staring at him, a bewildered look on her face, then he watched as she gathered herself together, shaking her head just slightly as if to get everything back into place.

‘I never blather on like that!’ she said, her tone so accusing he had to laugh.

‘Blathering’s okay,’ he assured her, but the worried look on her face told him she didn’t believe him. He diverted her by repeating his question.

‘Shower?’

‘Of course,’ she said, but he guessed it had been an automatic response, her mind still occupied by the blather business.

Jo was glad he’d left as soon as she’d agreed they had time to freshen up, because now, maybe, she could sort out what was happening to her.

The men’s programme was an excellent idea, and she had no doubt Cam, with his training and experience, would be just the man to set it up and run it.

And even if the refuge closed, the programme could still run, so it wasn’t that disturbing her …

Was it because he’d talked of staying on that she’d been thrown into a dither?

Had she somehow convinced herself that she could put up with the distraction he was causing her body for a couple of months but once the issue of his staying longer had arisen, her brain had gone into meltdown?

She couldn’t answer either of her questions so she locked her office door, said good-bye to Kate who was working Reception today, and hurried up the steps at the back of the surgery.

Maybe a shower would help her brain return to normal, but cold or hot she had no confidence in it doing anything to stop her body reacting to her temporary employee.

It was only a couple of months!

But could she let him live in his van in the caravan park if he stayed on to run a men’s programme?

She had the flat …

Best not to think ahead.

But for the second day in a row, she put on just a little lipstick.

Pathetic.

The refuge was behind one of Crystal Cove’s still functioning churches. It had been the minister’s house—the manse—once, but now the minister lived forty miles up the coast and served a flock spread over a wide area, holding services at the Cove once a fortnight.

‘It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?’ Cam asked as Jo pulled into the driveway.

She looked around at the high wire fence, the security cameras at the corners of the old wooden residence, the playground equipment out the back.

Turned back to Cam.

‘In what way?’

‘Well, I thought they had to be anonymous places, women’s refuges, hidden away—ordinary houses but their use not known even to neighbours.’

Jo smiled at him—he was so darned easy to smile at.

And she’d better think about that thought later.

‘In bigger towns and cities that might be possible and it’s definitely desirable, but in a town this size? As you’d surmised, towns this size don’t usually have a refuge. We’re lucky because the church not only lets us have the premises rent free, but they pay expenses on it—rates and such. The service clubs did a lot of renovations and they do any maintenance that’s required, so immediately you have several groups of people who know where it is and what it’s for. And it is only two doors from the police station so there’s never any trouble here. ‘

She frowned now as she added, ‘Am I blathering again?’

He grinned at her.

‘No way. That was a most sensible explanation, very to the point and concise.’

The grin was her undoing. Any good the shower might have done was undone with that grin—a quirky, amused, sharing kind of grin.

Good grief! How could she possibly be thinking this way?

Analysing the man’s grin?

‘Let’s go,’ she said, opening her door and leaping down from the high seat of the four-wheel drive that had been her Christmas present to herself last year.

Good thing, too, she thought, patting the car when she’d shut the door. Having Cam in the big vehicle had been bad enough, she could only imagine how uncomfortable it would have been if they’d been squashed together in a small sedan.

Lauren Cooper, blonde, beautiful but far too thin and with dark shadows of worry under her eyes, came out of the house to greet them.

‘You have to take some time off,’ Jo scolded her best friend.

‘I’ll have plenty of time off if we have to close,’ Lauren reminded her quietly, but her dark eyes lit up as she took in the man Jo was introducing to her.

‘Well,’ she teased after she’d shaken Cam’s hand, ‘you’ll certainly be a great addition to the male talent in this town.’

‘All six of them?’ Jo countered.

‘In our age group,’ Lauren agreed, counting on her fingers as she listed the local, older, unattached men. ‘Mike at the police station, Tom at the hospital, that new schoolteacher—’

‘He’s got a partner,’ Jo protested, before adding firmly, ‘Anyway, that’s enough. Cam’s already likely to get a swollen head because I’ve been praising his idea of the men’s support programme. We’re here to see the refuge and to talk about how we could run a men’s programme—not to mention whether men might come.’

‘It could be court mandated,’ Cam offered, pleased the conversation had shifted from male talent in the town. His body might have reacted to his boss and landlady but after Penny’s fairly brutal rejection, he’d accepted that until the mess in his head was sorted out, it would be unfair to get involved with any woman.

Although a woman with killer green eyes …

‘Wow!’

His exclamation was involuntary, and his mind right back on the refuge as Lauren led them first into what she called the playroom. Obviously it had been set up with kids in mind, but whoever had conceived and carried through the idea had done an amazing job. Blackboard paint had been used to adult waist height on all the walls so there were chalk drawings everywhere. At one end of the long room—a closed-in veranda, he suspected—was a sitting area with comfy armchairs and bean-bags in front of a television set with a DVD player on top of it. Beside that a cabinet held what must be at least a hundred DVDs.

The other end of the room was obviously for very small people, blocks and jigsaw puzzles neatly put away on shelves, plastic boxes of farm animals, zoo animals, dinosaurs, toy cars and little dolls stacked further along the shelves.

‘It’s incredibly well stocked,’ he said, ‘and so tidy.’

‘Well-stocked but not always so tidy,’ Lauren told him. ‘We’ve instituted star charts. Stars for putting away the toys, stars for cleaning teeth, stars for just about everything you can imagine. Once you get a certain number of stars, you get a treat—like dinner at a fast-food outlet of your choice, which is where everyone is tonight. They left early as they’re going on to a movie after their meal. Everyone’s been really good this week!’

Lauren showed them through the rest of the house, allowing Cam a glimpse into the three big bedrooms that could accommodate up to five people in each.

‘So you can have three women with children—no more?’ Cam asked.

‘Well, we could arrange to take more if it was necessary, squeeze in a woman on her own, for instance, but the turnover is fairly rapid.’

‘So no one is here long term?’ Cam asked.

Lauren smiled at him, the smile lifting the tiredness from her face and making him wonder why this beautiful woman—smiling at him—had no effect at all on his body, while the small, pert redhead who was usually frowning, glaring or arguing did.

Not that he needed to give it much thought—he was moving on.

And even if he stayed, he’d be moving out.

And then there was the baggage.

And his lost passion …

‘Four weeks.’

He’d missed the beginning of whatever Lauren was saying but assumed she’d told him the time limit on stays as she led him into the communal lounge, the dining area and finally a well-equipped kitchen.

‘You’re really well set up,’ he said, not bothering to keep the admiration out of his voice.

‘That’s what makes the thought of it closing so hard.’

He heard the pain in Jo’s voice, but it was the content, not the pain, he had to think about.

‘But as long as you’re fighting the closure you’ve got a chance of keeping it open,’ he protested. ‘I thought it was because of the refuge you were employing another doctor. The fortyish woman, remember.’

He won a slight smile.

‘I was employing her—or you—to ease my load at work so I could put more time into this, time for paperwork mainly, applying for grants, and so on. As I told you yesterday, the refuge began with a bequest and the building itself is available to us free of charge, but ongoing funding for residential staff—the people here every day, including the child-healthcare worker—has to come from the government. The government is forever issuing new guidelines and procedures and so-called measurements of success—criteria we have to meet before they’ll give us money.’

‘Sounds like the army,’ Cam said, ‘but I thought women being saved from abuse would be counted as successes.’

‘You’d think so,’ Jo told him, ‘but they like “projects”.’ She used her fingers to put the word in inverted commas. ‘That’s why a men’s programme would be fantastic, and we could do more work in schools. It would be such a waste to have to close it now, when we’ve come so far.’

She smiled, but it was a weak effort.

‘The thing is, we’ve worked so hard for the women who need us to accept us and on top of that we have the most wonderful local support,’ Lauren explained. ‘People from all walks of life help out in different ways. The local bakery gives us its unsold bread at the end of each day—not to mention buns and bread rolls. We get a discount at the butcher’s and the supermarket, and the fruit shop in town also hands over any produce they aren’t able to sell.’

‘Which is a blessing,’ Jo put in, with a far better smile, this time broad enough to gleam in her eyes, ‘given that the back yard has a virtual zoo, with rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens and a duck with one leg that someone gave us. At one stage there was a lamb but it turned into a sheep and the neighbours complained about the noise it made.’

Cam looked at the smiling woman who did affect his body and regretted mentioning a programme for abusive men. Much better if he moved on at the end of the holidays. He didn’t need to get involved in the problems of the refuge, did he? There were other towns with good surf. In fact, he had thousands of miles of coastline to choose from.

But no snappish, elfin-faced, green-eyed doctor …

‘If there’s a programme up and running in Port, maybe I could go down and speak to whoever runs it,’ he heard a voice say.

He was reasonably sure it was his voice.

A buzzing sound made him turn towards the woman he’d been considering, and he watched as she pulled her mobile out of her pocket.

She walked through the back door and spoke quietly, but not so quietly he and Lauren didn’t hear her end of the conversation.

‘I’ll come at once,’ she said. ‘Pack just what you need, and don’t forget any medication and the little bundle of papers that were on the list I gave you. We’ll be fifteen minutes getting there, but if you feel unsafe leave the house now—go to a neighbour and phone again from there.’

‘New tenant?’ Lauren asked as Jo came back into the kitchen.

‘Jackie Trent, I talked to you about her.’

Lauren nodded and followed Jo, who was hurrying towards the front door.

It was a case of trailing along behind.

Cam trailed, then four of the words Jo had spoken were suddenly clear in his head.

If you feel unsafe, she’d said.

He stopped trailing and hurried ahead, reaching the passenger side as she clambered in behind the wheel, his presence obviously forgotten.

‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

‘You don’t need to,’ she replied, her attention on fastening her seat belt. ‘You can stay and have a coffee with Lauren and learn more about the house—talk about the men’s programme. I’ll collect you later.’

‘No, I’ll come,’ Cam told her, fastening his seat belt in turn.

‘She’s scared,’ Jo said, not arguing exactly as she started the engine, put the vehicle into gear and backed out of the drive.

‘I won’t scare her more,’ Cam assured her, not adding that the woman must have reason to be scared and if she did then Jo, also, should be scared. There was no way he was leaving two scared women with no protection.

‘She’s talked about leaving for the last six months,’ Jo told him. What she didn’t tell him was that in her heart of hearts she was very pleased to have his support on this rescue mission. ‘Apparently he’d always arranged every detail of their lives, but Jackie had seen that as part of his love for her, but then, just last year, he hit her. She was pregnant at the time. She fell, and a few hours later she lost the baby. It wasn’t necessarily the fall that caused her to miscarry, it could have happened anyway, but the two things were definitely connected in her mind. She was so upset about it she told me about him hitting her … ‘

‘Did you believe it was the first time?’ Cam’s barely disguised anger at the thought of a man hitting a woman was so genuine Jo put the memory of Jackie’s misery out of mind and found a smile. She was only too aware that there was little to smile about right now, but she was pleased her new employee knew enough about abuse to ask the question. Had he always known or was that why the light had been on in the flat until the wee hours of the morning?

Research?

‘It might have been, although while she was in hospital overnight—I did a D and C after it—I met him a couple of times. He straightened everything on the bedside cabinet, ordered her dinner for her, and checked his watch when she went to the bathroom. I realised he was keeping himself under rigid control because I was there, but you could tell he ran her life down to the last detail—a totally controlling man.’

She heard Cam sigh, and saw him shake his head.

‘From what I’ve read,’ he said, confirming her guess he’d been studying up on it, ‘the first thing to do is persuade the men to accept responsibility for their actions. If they can do that, then they can move on to the next step of learning other ways to resolve problems—other ways to handle anger. The depressing thing from my research seems to be that many will never change, is that right?’

‘I think a good percentage do, especially those who have ongoing involvement with a group or a mentor,’ Jo replied.

‘Even though most men blame the women for their reactions?’ Cam said. ‘“It’s her fault—she started it” kind of thing.’

Jo smiled.

‘You have been reading up on it,’ she teased.

‘Of course,’ he said, sounding slightly put out. ‘Wouldn’t you have expected me to?’

Jo was pulling into Jackie’s street, driving slowly, alert for any parked cars or other vehicles approaching.

‘Maybe not quite so soon,’ she said. ‘This is the house. There’s no car here but we won’t park in the driveway. That’s one of the golden rules of a rescue. Don’t make it too easy for someone to block you in. Not that there’s any great danger. According to Jackie, her husband’s gone to indoor cricket so he shouldn’t be home for a couple of hours.’

Jo turned off the engine and although she was sure Jackie was right, she still made sure the interior light was off before she opened the door and slid out. The evening was still and strangely silent, and suddenly she was very glad to have Cam as back-up, right there just a pace behind her as she walked up the path.

Jackie was out the door before Jo reached it, hustling her two children in front of her, both of them wearing pyjamas and backpacks, Jackie towing two suitcases.

Crying.

Cam helped the two boys into the back of the big vehicle, detaching them from their backpacks first. He slid the second one into the middle seat, explaining he’d sit in there with them.

‘Mum’s crying again,’ the older one said.

‘She’ll be okay,’ Cam told him. ‘Now, let’s introduce ourselves. I’m Cam, and you are?’

‘Jared,’ the older one replied, then he nudged his brother. ‘Tell ‘im your name, stupid!’

Cam felt the sigh inside him this time. Okay, so it might be normal childish behaviour but the way the little fellow whispered his name, ‘Aaron’, Cam had to wonder if the culture of abuse had already been passed from father to son—to the elder son at least.

He’d been helping the kids to keep out of Jo’s way as she looked after their mother, but now, before getting into the car with the kids, he glanced around. The two women had disappeared.

Cam lifted the two suitcases they’d left behind into the rear compartment, and had shut the tailgate when they reappeared, Jo hustling Jackie down the path.

‘But he gets so angry if I leave a light on after I leave a room,’ Jackie was explaining, and Cam realised for the first time the hold abuse could have on a person. Here was a woman literally fleeing for her life and she’d gone back into the house to turn off a light to avoid the anger of the man she feared.

The man she was fleeing.

Cam held the door for Jackie, acknowledging Jo’s introduction before climbing in the back with the kids.

‘Cam’s come to work with me,’ Jo said, adding, ‘over the holidays,’ just late enough to give Cam a little hope that the job might turn into something more permanent.

Although if he continued to feel physical disturbances whenever he was around her, maybe the couple of months’ trial period would be more than enough.

And he hadn’t wanted anything permanent anyway.

Had he?

A slight disturbance beside him took his mind off his boss. Aaron’s body was shaking, the little boy in tears.

‘Sook!’ his brother said, but under his breath so his mother didn’t hear.

Aware it wasn’t his place to chastise the older boy, Cam settled his arm around the little fellow and drew him close.

He’d seen too many children cry, and that quivering little body spiked memories into his heart, hurting it so badly he had to take a deep breath and force his mind back to the present.

What he needed was a diversion.

‘Can you swim?’ he asked Aaron. ‘Do you go to the beach? I’m a surfer and I go there most mornings. Maybe one day, if your mum says its okay, I could take you out on my surfboard.’

‘Me too?’ Jared demanded, and Cam agreed he could take him as well.

‘As long as you’re a good boy and look after your little brother.’

He had been going to say ‘look after your mum’ but remembered just in time something else he’d read the previous evening. According to research children were mostly left alone in domestic abuse situations, unless they tried to protect the person suffering abuse—usually the mother.

‘I can swim real well,’ Jared told him, while young Aaron snuggled closer, warm against Cam’s side, and whispered that he, too, could swim.

Cam’s arm tightened around him, the feel of the small body pressed to his warming some of the cold places inside his body.

Inside his heart?

It was always the kids who suffered.

They’d reached the refuge, and Cam was pleased that the ‘treat’ lot were still out. It would give Lauren time to settle Jackie and the two boys into the vacant room.

‘Do we hang around?’ he asked Jo, aware now the activity had died down that he was starving. He glanced at his watch—nine o’clock—no wonder.

Jo saw the glance and as her own stomach was grumbling she knew what he was thinking.

‘We can go,’ she told him. ‘In fact, it’s best we do. Lauren will settle Jackie in before the others come home.’

She was uncertain what to say next—sure Cam wouldn’t have had time to do much shopping and not knowing how much food he could keep in his van. Fortunately he broke the silence.

‘Well, it’s too late to be cooking dinner,’ he told her, ‘and I’m fairly short of supplies in the van, so, is there somewhere good we can eat?’

His smile caused what were becoming customary disturbances inside her, and she was about to protest that she’d be fine—after all, he could find himself something to eat—when he spoke again.

‘Come on, what’s the absolute best place to eat in town?’

‘Surf club,’ she replied automatically, definitely not thinking things through. Things like eating at the surf club looking out at moonlight on the ocean, with a man to whom she didn’t want to be attracted.

‘Although it could be closed by now,’ she finished, but not quickly enough.

‘Closed by now?’ Cam echoed. ‘It’s only nine o’clock!’

He sounded so disbelieving Jo had to smile at him.

‘Country hours,’ she explained, then to escape, or perhaps to hide the smile that didn’t want to go away, she added, ‘I’ll just let Lauren know we’re going.’

She slipped away, relieved to be out of Cam’s presence, although she’d been pleased to have it earlier. And she was stuck with him for another hour or two, depending on how long it took to order, get served and eat a meal.

Stuck with him and the moon and the ocean …

Perhaps clouds had covered the sky while they’d been inside.

That wish wasn’t granted. As she pulled into the car park she had to acknowledge that it was a near perfect late November evening. The moon—yep, almost full—was shining down on the ocean. The clubhouse, tucked away from southerlies behind the headland, looked north across the bay and out to sea.

Unbelievably beautiful.

Picture-postcard perfect.

Romantic.

How could the sudden advent of one man into her life start her thinking of romance?

Was she so needy? Frustrated? Desperate for love?

Love?

Now, where had that word come from?