Читать книгу Forbidden Nights With The Boss - Anna J. Stewart - Страница 13

THE flat was curiously empty when she awoke, feeling surprisingly refreshed, the next morning. Her tenant’s bedroom door was open, revealing the rose-covered spread drawn tightly across the bed—army training no doubt—but it was in the kitchen, where she went to get a glass of water, that the surprise awaited her. A plate of fruit, but set out like a smiley face, two cherries for the eyes, a slice of pawpaw for a nose, a curved banana for a mouth. Balls of orange rock-melon curled around the face, while her name was spelled out in carefully cut pieces of watermelon—a riot of colour, taste and nutrition.

Assuming he didn’t make himself smiley-face fruit breakfasts every morning, it meant he’d done it especially for her.

Wanting to get in good with her so he could stay on permanently?

Or simply because he was a kind and thoughtful man?

A little pang inside her suggested that she’d like to think it was because he liked her, maybe was a little bit attracted to her, but common sense prevailed and she took the plate through to her house, apparently undisturbed overnight, and ate the fruit as she got ready for work.

Work.

She had to contact the Bennetts to find out if they’d decided what they wanted to do about a sleep programme for Kaylin, talk to Cam about IVF and Helene, contact Tom and Lauren to see if Friday afternoon suited them for a meeting …

She’d walked onto the deck as she was finishing the fruit and considering the day ahead, and now she sighed, thinking of Cam out there on his board, wishing for the first time in years that she was out there too.

Which reminded her of Cam’s promise to young Aaron. She was pretty sure the baby boards on which she and Jill had learnt to surf were in the storeroom downstairs. She’d check on her way down to work. They’d be ideal for the two little boys, though Cam couldn’t handle both of them safely on his own. Would Jackie join in surfing lessons?

Now it was a squirmy kind of disturbance in Jo’s stomach. No, she wouldn’t help. Bad enough having to work with a man to whom her body was attracted, but out of office hours?

At the beach?

No way.

Never!

‘Can I help?’

The offer startled her as she was hauling the boards out from behind other cast-off rubbish in the storeroom beneath the deck, sorry she hadn’t left the task until after work, because her hands were filthy and she was covered with dust.

Her tenant, standing in the doorway, was also ready for work—but clean.

‘Thanks, but I’ve found what I was looking for,’ she told him, not that he appeared the slightest bit interested in her reply, for he was lifting her old board—the last board she’d had specially shaped to her own design before she’d stopped surfing—running his hands over its smooth lines, the delight on his face suggesting he’d just discovered hidden treasure.

‘It’s a Silver Crowne,’ he said, in awed tones. ‘I’ve heard of these boards but never seen one up close. Silver Crowne only made pro boards.’

The slight accusation in the final sentence made Jo stiffen, but she refused to answer him, passing him the small boards instead.

‘Mind your clothes, these are still dusty,’ she said, ‘although most of the dust seems to have transferred itself to me. I thought they might do for the Trent boys.’

Cam grinned at her.

‘Wow, great idea. Teaching them to surf is a far better idea than taking them for one ride on my board. You’ll help?’

No was the obvious answer, but somehow it failed to come out. Jo made a big deal of dusting off her clothes, then gave up.

‘I’ll just run upstairs, have a quick shower and change into something clean—tell Kate I’ll be down in a few minutes.’

He seemed to accept she wasn’t going to reply for he asked, ‘Will these boards be safe if we leave them out, or should we lock them back in your storeroom but near the front?’

Jo was halfway out the door when she realised he was still holding the boards—and she hadn’t thanked him for breakfast.

‘We’ll leave them just inside and if you could shut the door and close the padlock that would be great. And thank you for the breakfast, it made my morning.’

She looked into the blue eyes she’d been avoiding since he’d appeared in the storeroom and read kindness in them, nothing more, she was sure, yet her heart was skipping around like a wayward wallaby, and some stupid sector of her brain was whispering it might be more than lust.

Which was impossible.

Lust at first sight was possible—she had no doubts about that—but anything else?

She wasn’t going to give the alternative ‘L’ word brain space.

Cam watched her dash away. She’d coloured as she’d thanked him for the breakfast that some fit of hitherto undiscovered whimsy had prompted him to make for her. Had he embarrassed her?

He didn’t have a clue. For some reason, all the useful information on how women thought, stuff his brain had collected from his sisters and his ex-fiancée, was no help at all in figuring out this particular woman.

Though why he thought it should when he’d only known her, what—less than two days.

And why it mattered …

He pondered these things as he made his way down the steps to the surgery, deciding in the end that it was because his body was attracted to her that his brain was confused.

Well, it would just have to stay confused, because he wasn’t going to act on the attraction. Honour was important in the army and how honourable would he be if he did act on the attraction? How could he have an affair with a woman when he was still getting over his experiences in the war, still getting vivid flashes of injured and dying young men, still hearing echoes of their cries in his ears, and not only when he was asleep?

He knew these flashbacks sent him into a kind of shock, making him withdraw, making him appear all the things Penny had said he was—remote, detached, morose—cutting him off from whatever company he was in.

Could he land some other woman with those mood swings?

Make her suffer as Penny must have to have broken off the engagement?

Best to stay unattached.

Jo heaved a sigh of relief when she saw Kate and one of the nurses in the lunch-room. No need for one-on-one again with Dr Cameron, although Cam wasn’t present and, no, she wasn’t going to wonder where he was. He could have been delayed with a patient, or gone shopping, surfing, anything.

Avoiding her as she would like to be avoiding him?

Her relief was short-lived.

‘Heard you and the new doc in town, our delectable Dr Cam, were dining together at the surf club last night,’ Kate said brightly, and too late Jo remembered Kate’s brother was the apprentice chef at the club.

Small towns.

‘We were eating together—late. It had been a long day.’ Jo hoped her repressive tone would stop further conversation, but she’d bargained without Kate’s persistence.

‘Moonlight on the water, was there?’

‘Where? When?’ Cam would choose that moment to come into the room. Not that he seemed interested in the answer, already delving into the refrigerator to check out the sandwiches on offer today.

‘Last night,’ Kate told him. ‘The view from the surf club. Romantic?’

Cam looked up at her and grinned.

‘Now I know what your boss means when she talks about small towns.’ He put enough emphasis on the ‘your’ to make Kate look a little uncomfortable. ‘For your information, we’d just completed an errand of mercy, it was late, and we were hungry. It was the surf club or fast food.’

He turned to look at Jo.

‘Was the moon out? Can you remember?’

Jo was so pleased he’d diverted the conversation she smiled at him.

‘Far too interested in my calamari to notice,’ she said, then she turned to Ellie, the nurse who did shifts at the surgery and the hospital, to ask about the babies’ sleep programme.

But she was aware that the community interest she’d foretold when she’d taken Cam on board was already rife, and with a small twinge of sadness accepted there’d be no more dinners at the surf club with him.

Or was she being silly?

She could handle talk, especially talk that had no basis in fact.

Although given the instant lust thing going on, there was probably a teeny, tiny basis …

‘Are you listening?’ Ellie demanded.

‘Of course,’ Jo told her, hoping her mind could rerun Ellie’s explanation for her. ‘You need at least four nights. If we could get Amy in over a weekend—starting Friday and running through to Tuesday—it might be easier for Todd to get help with the milking.’

‘If you left it until the school holidays—another couple of weeks—there might be a high school kid who’d be happy to have the work.’

Obviously Cam had been following the conversation better than she had, that he’d come up with such a sensible suggestion, although—

‘If Kaylin’s sleep avoidance is as bad as Amy suggested, another couple of weeks might be too long to wait,’ Jo told him.

‘What about an in-home arrangement?’ Coming from Cam, this second suggestion was so surprising Jo had to ask.

‘You’ve been in the army, not general practice, what would you know about in-home arrangements?’

He gave her a smug smile—but even smug it tickled her sensitive bits.

‘Three sisters and at last count eight nieces and nephews. One of my sisters had terrible trouble with her second baby and she got someone to come in.’

He turned to Ellie.

‘It sounds as if you’re involved in the programme at the hospital. What exactly do you do?’

Ellie straightened in her chair and Jo realised she wasn’t the only one in the practice who was feeling the effect of the pheromones that had infiltrated the atmosphere with Cam’s arrival.

‘We put the mum to bed in a separate room and one nurse stays up with the baby, handling it when it wakes. We don’t use controlled crying, but use a coaching technique that we’ve found successful. It’s best with babies who’ve started solids three times a day, and usually it works in three nights, though we say four in case we need the extra night.’

Jo thought about it then nodded.

‘Kaylin’s six months old and she’s on solids. In fact, although she’s still being breastfed, I suggested Amy try her on them when she came in about sleep problems earlier.’

She was still thinking about Kaylin when Cam entered the conversation again.

‘If you’re doing this programme at the hospital, would you be willing to do it at their home?’

Cam realised he’d gone too far—taken the extra step when it was Jo who should be making decisions about her staff deployment.

He turned to her, hands up in the air.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t be making suggestions without consulting you, Jo. You’re Ellie’s employer, not me, but I get carried away.’

Fortunately Jo wasn’t put out, flashing him a cheeky smile before saying, ‘I was wondering when you’d remember that, but it’s an excellent idea. Ellie, if you’d be happy to do it, I’d be happy to pay you for the four nights—and days so you can sleep. What are your hospital shifts like? Could you fit it in some time soon?’

‘Next week,’ Ellie told her. ‘I’d love to give it a go. I don’t have hospital shifts next week because I refuse to work schoolies week. Tom gets contract nurses in, and I’m off duty here as well.’

Cam felt a surge of satisfaction out of all proportion to the small contribution he’d made—a surge that made him think maybe general practice in a smallish town would have a lot of rewards, and in this town he’d have the added attraction of fantastic surf.

If he could persuade Jo to let him stay.

Hmm, maybe not such a good idea, given how aware he was of her. Even sitting in a lunch-room with two other women, his body was conscious of every move Jo made, his mind considering changes in the inflections of her voice. Last night, knowing she was sleeping the other side of a fairly flimsy wall, he’d imagined things an employee should never imagine about his boss, no matter how attractive he found her.

Sleep had eluded him for hours, although that was probably just as well, given the aforementioned flimsy wall. He would have hated to have awakened her with his nightmares.

He tuned back into the conversation in time to hear Jo asking Ellie to phone Amy to make the arrangements, then, as Ellie and Kate left the room, he turned to the woman who’d so disturbed his sleep.

‘Can you afford to be paying Ellie to do the sleep programme? Will you charge the parents of the baby? Are such things covered by government subsidies?’

She turned towards and smiled—second smile in one lunch-break, not that he was counting.

‘Worried I won’t be able to afford your salary?’ she teased, then the smile slid off her face as she added, ‘I’m sure there are government subsidies, if I wanted to research them and then do the paperwork, but I can afford to pay Ellie for her time. If this works, we can find out about possible subsidies for the future, but for now, if we can provide four good nights’ sleep for Amy and Todd, I’m happy to cop the cost. If it succeeds, well, it’s worth more than money to the Bennetts.’

‘Four uninterrupted nights’ sleep,’ Cam said, wondering if he’d ever reach that blissful pinnacle himself. And thinking of that goal, he was less guarded than he usually was. ‘Are there sleep programmes for grown-ups as well as kids?’

She looked startled at first, his boss, then he read such compassion in her eyes he knew if he wasn’t very careful, he could easily drown in those green depths.

‘I wondered that myself after my sister died,’ she said softly, then offered him a third smile, and though it lacked the spark of the earlier smiles, it affected him more deeply than either of the earlier ones had.

She rested her hand on his arm.

‘For me, it did get easier in time and I’m sure it will for you. Are they nightmares you suffer? Dreams so vivid and horrific you really don’t want to sleep?’

She didn’t wait for a reply, simply tightening her fingers on his arm as she added, ‘That cliché about time being a great healer isn’t just a trite expression—we know that in our work.’

Cam looked down at the small hand, pale against his tanned skin, and felt an urge to hold it for ever—to let it haul him out of where he’d been and into hope and life and …

Love?

Surely not.

They’d finished seeing patients by five in the afternoon, making Jo remember the time when she’d worked with her father, the pair of them taking turns to have free afternoons, he to sail with Molly, his new-found love, while she had worked with Lauren on plans for the refuge.

‘So, surfing lessons for the little boys?’ Cam suggested as they left the surgery.

Jo considered protesting but with daylight saving they had three full hours before sunset, and the sun still held enough heat to make the thought of hitting the surf very attractive.

Not that she’d surf, just help the boys as they tried the boards in the water—teach them how to balance on the boards.

‘I’ll phone the refuge and speak to Jackie,’ she told Cam as he strode up the steps beside her. ‘The key to the storeroom padlock is—’

‘Above the door?’ he guessed, and she felt her face heat.

‘I know it’s stupid—I’ll stop doing it. It’s just that growing up here, no one locked their doors and if you drove down the road for a bottle of milk, you usually left your keys in the car while you popped into the shop. Small towns were safe places.’

‘For everyone?’

She knew exactly what he meant. Violence against women in some form or another had probably been around for ever.

‘Probably not, although I wonder if the more hectic pace of life that we lead now and the expectations we put on ourselves might not have made abuse within relationships more prevalent.’

‘Who knows? But it would be interesting to find if there’s documented history of it anywhere.’

Jo smiled, suddenly seeing a different side of the man who’d come to work for her, a side not unlike a side of herself—the bit that always wanted to know more, to delve deeper.

‘I think I’ll concentrate on the now—on keeping the refuge open—and leave the history for my retirement.’

His reply was one of his quirky smiles, lighting up his face, easing the strain that lined it in repose.

‘I’ll change and get the boards,’ he told her. ‘Say half an hour? Will we need to collect the boys or will someone drive them to the beach?’

‘I’ll get them—well, we’ll get them—silly to take two cars. I can put the boards, your board as well, on the top of my car. I think the southern beach will be the best this afternoon. It will be less crowded and there should be some white wash close to the shore. That’s best for beginners.’

Cam’s smile widened, but this time it wasn’t anything to do with their previous conversation—more to do with his passion for riding the waves.

‘Great—I haven’t surfed there yet.’

‘You’re going there to teach the boys,’ Jo reminded him, although when she’d seen the smile and heard the passion in his voice she’d felt a pang of longing.

‘I’ll have to show them, too,’ he reminded her, before turning to unlock the storeroom and retrieve the small boards.

How had he inveigled her into this? Jo wondered as she drove Cam and two excited little boys down the track onto the southern beach, then along it on the hard sand near the water, looking for a spot that would be good for the lessons?

‘Do I need a permit to drive my van along here?’ Cam asked. ‘I checked out the beach near the headland, where it’s accessible, and saw vehicles driving south, but didn’t know if anyone could do it.’

‘You need a permit but they’re easy to get. You can apply at the local council office.’

She pulled up where a lagoon had formed close to the beach, the surf breaking on a sand bank further out. The little boys tumbled out of the vehicle, their faces white with sunscreen, rash shirts covering their chests, arguing over who got what board the moment Cam lifted them down onto the sand.

‘We start on the beach,’ Jo told them. ‘Board on the sand, then lie on it, rise up to kneel on it, then stand and balance on it. The fin will make it a bit wobbly but not nearly as wobbly as it will seem on the water. Left foot in front, right foot behind unless you’re goofy footers—’

Both boys laughed, pointing at each other and calling each other goofy footers while Jo explained the term for surfers who put their right foot forward.

‘Now, feet in place, knees bent to keep you balanced, arms held out like this.’

‘Here,’ Cam said, dropping his board in front of her, ‘if you’re being Teach, you should show them.’

He was so close—his nose, too, white with cream, his chest, at the moment, modestly covered with a tattered T-shirt, but so big, so male!—she felt a shiver of pure, yes, lust run through her. But could lust be classified as pure?

She stood on his board, demonstrating the stance, thinking that if she’d brought her board she could have used it on the sand and Cam could have surfed—well away from her. But the image of the water droplets on his chest came vividly back into her head.

Just as well he wasn’t surfing …

‘This is too easy!’ Jared’s complaint brought her back to earth.

‘Okay, we’ll try it in the water, and for this first lesson you probably won’t be standing up. We’ll be in the shallows, showing you how to catch the wave.’

Jared began to argue, silenced only when Jo pointed out that there was no point learning to stand up on a board if you couldn’t paddle to catch the wave in the first place.

She bent to lift Aaron’s board, but Cam stopped her.

‘Nothing doing,’ he said. ‘Surfers always carry their own boards, don’t they, boys?’

He showed them how to tuck the boards under their arms, holding them about midway to balance them, then, a little boy on either side of him, the tall man headed for the water.

Thankfully still with his broad chest decently covered.

Jo slipped off the long T-shirt she’d pulled on over her bikini, hoping she wasn’t wiping off all the sunscreen she’d slathered on her pale body.

She was feeling a squirmy kind of embarrassment at appearing so skimpily dressed in front of a virtual stranger, and an employee at that, but it was far too hot to wear a wetsuit, so her bikini had been her only option.

Exactly as he’d pictured her—the curvy body, and pale, pale skin—Cam’s heart skipped a beat then Jared butted him with his surfboard, probably accidentally but definitely bringing Cam’s attention back to the surfing lesson.

‘I’ll hold your board, and Dr Jo will hold Aaron’s,’ he said. ‘When you’re actually surfing, you don’t stand around on your board, you sit on it, waiting for a wave, legs dangling over the side, then you lie on it to paddle onto the wave, so we’ll start sitting then lying down paddling to catch a wave. Once you’ve done that a few times, you can try standing up, but usually that’s in your second lesson.’

Jared, of course, wanted to stand immediately and fell off innumerable times before he agreed that maybe paddling to catch waves was fun as well. Jo’s pupil was more wary, perhaps a little scared, but he had plenty of determination, working his little arms furiously through the water as he paddled to put his board into the white wash of the waves.

‘Enough lessons for one day,’ Jo eventually said to the boys as the sun dipped low enough to throw shadows from the dunes across the beach. She turned to Cam. ‘Why don’t you catch a few waves while I run the boys back to their mother and have a chat to Lauren about the meeting? I’ll drive back and collect you in an hour.’

‘You don’t have to do that. I can go home and get the van.’

‘But you can’t drive down the beach without a permit,’ she reminded him.

Beyond the lagoon, the surf was so tempting Cam gave in, paddling out through the breakers to the calm beyond them, aware that at this time in his life he was more at peace out here on the ocean than anywhere else in the world. Out here the world was forgotten, his only thought which of the set of waves coming towards him would provide the best ride.

Except that today peace, as he’d come to know it, eluded him. He was studying the sets, as usual, picking out the likely waves, but images of Jo kept intruding so he missed the first wave he’d picked out, no amount of paddling enabling him to catch it.

He caught the next one, paddled back out, but after missing another curling green beauty he gave up, sat on his board, legs dangling, and thought about distractions. His psychology studies had taught him that humans are programmed for flight or fight. Adrenalin would pump into the body to help either option. Instinct told us to look out for danger, to predict it and in so doing work out how to avoid it.

Wouldn’t that work with emotions as well as physical situations? He knew the attraction he felt towards Jo represented danger—not physical danger but it put at risk his immediate plan, which was to get his head sorted. And having predicted the danger, shouldn’t he avoid it—get away from the woman who was distracting him so much?

For her sake more than his!

Yes, he should flee.

And leave her without a second doctor at the busiest time of her year? Very valiant that would be!