Читать книгу A December To Remember - Sue MacKay, Sue MacKay - Страница 10

CHAPTER TWO

‘KNOCK ME OVER,’ Luca muttered as he stood back for Ellie and Louise to enter the small room that would be El’s home for the next month. Ellie Thompson had popped up out of nowhere in full splendour, if a little bedraggled around the edges. All that thick, dark blonde hair still long and gleaming, while her eyes watched everything and everyone, though now there was a wariness he’d never seen before. ‘Your smile’s missing.’ Did he really say that out loud?

Ellie lifted those eyes to him and he saw her weariness. ‘It’s probably back in the third carriage of the overnight train I was on.’

Somehow Luca didn’t believe her exhaustion was all to do with her trip. It appeared ingrained in her bones and muscles as well as deep in those hazel eyes, even in her soul. So not the Ellie he used to know and had had a lot of fun with. What had Baldwin done to her? Played around behind her back? That had always been on the cards. The guy had never been able to keep his pants zipped, even when he’d first started dating Ellie. It had broken Luca’s heart when Ellie had told him the guy loved her and was over being the playboy since he’d asked her to marry him. The old ‘leopard and its spots’ story. But she hadn’t wanted to hear what he could’ve told her. Then his own problems had exploded in his face and he’d been too caught up dealing with Gaylene’s lies and conniving to notice Ellie’s departure.

Placing her bag on the desk, he turned for the door. ‘We’ll catch up when you’ve had forty winks.’

‘Make that a thousand and forty.’

‘You okay, El? Like, really deep down okay?’ he asked, worry latching on to him. They might’ve been out of touch but she used to be his closest friend. He’d never replaced her and would still do anything for her—if only she ever asked.

Her eyes were slits as that hazel shade glittered at him. ‘Never been better,’ she growled. ‘Now, can you leave me to settle in?’

‘On my way. Or do you want me to show you where the showers are?’

‘I’ll do that.’ Louise stepped between them. Putting a hand on his arm, she pushed lightly. ‘Go check up on little Hoppy.’ Then her phone rang and she stepped away. After listening for a few seconds she said, ‘Hang on. Sorry, Ellie, I’ll be a couple of minutes. Aaron left the shopping list in the kitchen.’

Ellie’s shoulders slumped as she watched Louise bustle away. ‘All I want is a shower and some sleep.’

Luca’s heart rolled over for her so he reached out for her hand and gently tugged her close. ‘Come on, grab your toiletries and that towel and I’ll show you where to go.’

She did as he said, silently. What had that man done? Or was this truly just jet lag and a sleepless night on the train making her like this? ‘El, while you’re showering I’ll make you a sandwich and grab a bottle of water. You must be starving.’

‘You still call me El.’ Now there was a glimmer of a smile touching her lips. ‘I’m fractionally shorter and nowhere near as beautiful as the model you wanted to compare me with. I’m fatter too.’

‘The hell you are. You’re thinner than I’ve ever seen you.’ And he didn’t like it.

The smile fell away, and she shivered. ‘I needed to lose weight.’

‘I’ll have to start calling you stick insect.’ He grinned to show he was teasing, something he’d never had to do before when they’d spent a lot of time together. But he needed to know what was going on. Something had happened to her. He’d swear it.

‘I’ve been called worse.’ Distress blinked out at him.

He opened his mouth without thinking about what he’d say. ‘Who by?’ When she winced he draped an arm over her shoulders to hold her in against him as they walked along the path to the ablutions block. ‘What did that scumbag do to you?’ he asked next, struggling to hold onto a rare anger.

Just like that, crabby Ellie returned. Her back straightened as she yanked her shoulders free of his arm. The face she turned on his was red and tight, her eyes sparking like a live wire. A dangerous live wire. ‘You haven’t told me if your wife’s living over here with you.’

She fought dirty, he’d give her that. Her being Ellie, that meant she was hiding something. Stepping farther away from her, he waved along the path. ‘Third door down are the showers. I’ll get one of the kids to put that sandwich and water in your room.’ He spun away to stride towards the clinic, where he could bury himself in patients’ problems and not worry about what might’ve happened to Ellie. Strange, but for a long time he hadn’t thought about what Gaylene had tried to do to him all those years ago, certainly not since he’d arrived here. It wasn’t as though Ellie and Gaylene went hand in hand, but the friendship he’d had with El had gone belly up at that time.

‘Luca.’ A soft hand touched his biceps. ‘Luca, stop, please.’

He turned midstride to face Ellie, and instantly his anger dissipated. It wasn’t her fault that he’d been made a fool of way back then. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me, too.’ Ellie huffed a long sigh. ‘I got such a shock seeing you across the room, and I don’t seem to have returned to normal since. I don’t want to fight with you. We were never very good at that, and starting now doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

‘I guess four years is a long time, with many things having gone down for each of us. Let’s go back to when we were happy being pals and downing beers as if it was going out of fashion on our days off.’ He’d like that more than anything right about now. A cold beer—with his pal. They had a lot of catching up to do. And not just the bad stuff.

Ellie nodded slowly. ‘That’d be great. A friend is what I really need more than anything.’

Don’t ask. ‘Done.’ He followed through on his previous thought. ‘Get some shut-eye and tonight we’ll go to a bar in town for a reunion beer or two. Then you can catch up on some more sleep before you start to get to know your way around here. How does that sound?’ He held his breath.

At last. A full-blown Ellie smile came his way, like warm hands around his heart. ‘Perfect.’ She started to move past him.

Luca suddenly felt the need to tell her. To get it out of the way, because it would hang between them like an unsolved puzzle if he avoided the issue, and he didn’t want that. ‘I never married her.’

She nearly lost her balance, and when she raised her face to him her eyes were wide. But she kept quiet, waiting for him to finish his story.

As if that could be told in thirty seconds, but he supposed he could give her the bones of it. ‘She terminated the baby. Said she’d met someone else and didn’t want to take my child into that relationship.’ If it had been his child. She hadn’t exactly been monogamous with him. He would’ve insisted on a DNA test being done but he’d been trying to trust her and accept what had happened.

He’d always been supercareful about using condoms during every liaison. But no child of his would ever grow up without his father at his side, and that edict had taken him straight into Gaylene’s hands—until she’d found a richer man. Luca’s hands fisted on his hips, as they always did when he thought about that selfish woman. The only good thing she had done was remind him exactly why he had no intention of ever, ever getting married or having children.

‘You always said you weren’t going to marry or have children. I was surprised when I heard about the circumstances of your wedding, but so many people get caught out by an unplanned pregnancy.’ Ellie leaned against him. ‘I should’ve phoned then.’

But by then he’d told her what he thought of her marrying Baldwin. He got it. She’d still been angry with him. ‘We were both tied up with our careers and finishing exams, not to mention other things. There was a lot going on.’ I wouldn’t have told you anyway. Like I’ve never told you about my father and my grandfather and how they let down those nearest and dearest big time. How my father took his would-be father-in-law’s propensity for deserting his wife and children to a whole new level. Some things were best kept in the family.

Ellie nodded. ‘Our friendship was under a fair bit of strain, if I remember rightly.’

‘You do.’ But he wouldn’t raise the subject that had come between them again. Not today anyhow. ‘Go shower and head to bed. Your eyeballs are hanging halfway down your face. I’ll warn everyone to be quiet around your room.’

‘Nice. How come I didn’t scare the kids, then? I must look very ugly.’ Her smile slipped as a yawn gripped her.

‘They’re a lot tougher than you’d guess.’ Luca felt his usual sadness for these beautiful and gentle people who dealt with so much, then he glanced at Ellie and brightened. ‘But they’re also very like kids anywhere in the world when you buy treats or play cricket with them.’ Things he was always indulging in.

He felt his heart lurch as Ellie stepped through into the ablutions block and shut the door. El. His dearest friend. Damn, but he’d missed her, and he was only just realising how much. No one quite poked the borax at him the way she had whenever he’d got too serious about something she’d deemed to be ridiculous. She was usually spot on too. But now something was definitely not right. He’d never seen her so beaten, as though all the things she held dear and near were gone. Somehow, sometime, over the coming weeks he’d find out, and see if he couldn’t help her to get her spark back.

* * *

Ellie woke to knocking on her door. Where am I? She looked around at the children’s drawings covering the walls and it all came back in a hurry. Vientiane. The amputee centre. She stretched her toes to the end of the bed and raised her arms above her head. She’d slept like the dead and now felt good all over, ready to start her job in this country that was new to her.

Knock, knock.

‘Who is it?’

‘Chi. Luca said you have to get up. I’ve got you more water.’

Luca. So that hadn’t been a dream. She’d be excited about catching up with him if she didn’t know he’d want all the details about her failed marriage. He wasn’t going to get them but he’d persist for days; she just knew it. Then again, he had told her why he wasn’t married. What a witch that woman had turned out to be. Terminating their baby with no regard for its father. That was beyond her comprehension. But then she’d never faced a similar situation. Freddy had made certain she didn’t get pregnant.

‘Ellie?’

‘Sorry, come in.’ Ellie shuffled upright and leaned back against the wall as Chi entered.

‘Luca said you’re going out at seven o’clock.’ The girl spoke precisely and slowly as if searching for the right words.

Damn, she’d forgotten Luca’s suggestion of a beer in town. Taking the proffered bottle of water from Chi, she snapped the lid open and said, ‘Thank you, Chi.’

The girl beamed as Ellie poured the cool liquid down her parched throat.

‘What time is it?’ she paused long enough to ask.

‘Half past six. Are you still tired?’

‘A little bit, but eight hours is more than enough for now. I wouldn’t have slept tonight if you hadn’t woken me.’ As Chi sat down on the chair in the corner Ellie asked, ‘Where did you learn to speak such good English?’ The girl looked so cute in her oversize shirt and too-small trousers.

‘Here. The doctors and nurses teach me.’ Pride filled her face, lightened her eyes.

‘How long have you been in the centre?’ To have learned to speak English to a level she could be understood without too much difficulty she must’ve been around the medical staff a long time.

‘I was this high when I came with my brother.’ Chi held her hand less than a metre above the floor. Ellie guessed she was now closer to one hundred and twenty centimetres. ‘Long time ago. My brother was this high.’ Half a metre off the floor.

‘Is your brother still here, too?’

Chi blinked, the pride gone, replaced with stoic sadness. ‘He died. The bomb cut off his leg and the blood ran out.’

Ellie shuddered. Reality sucked, and was very confronting. Flying fragments of metal did a lot of damage, and were often lethal. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to come here. When she’d heard about Sandra’s family crisis she’d thought about the weeks looming with nothing to keep her busy before she took up her next job and put her hand up. Helping people in these circumstances was so different from working in an emergency department back home, where life was easier and a lot of things like medical care taken for granted. Here people, many only young children, were still being injured, maimed or killed by bombs that had been left lying around or shallow buried decades ago.

‘Louise and Aaron adopted me. My mother and father are gone, too.’

How much reality should a child have to deal with? Leaping out of bed, she scooped the girl into a hug. ‘I’m so happy to know you, Chi.’

‘Knew I couldn’t trust a female to get my message across without stopping to yak the day away.’ Luca stood in the doorway, his trademark grin including both her and Chi in that comment.

With sudden clarity Ellie understood how much she’d missed that grin and the man behind it. Missed their conversations about everything from how to put a dislocated shoulder back into its socket to which brand of beer was the best. They’d argued, and laughed, and fought over whose turn it was to clean the house. They’d cheered each other on in exams while secretly hoping they did better than the other.

She ran to throw her arms around him. ‘I’m glad I’ve found you again.’

‘I’m glad, too, because tomorrow’s your turn to do the washing.’ He laughed against the top of her head.

His hands were spread across her back, his warmth seeping into her bones and thawing some of the chill that had taken up residence on the morning she came home from work to find Freddy and Caitlin in her marital bed, doing what only she should’ve been doing with her husband. She breathed deep, drawing in the scent that was Luca, her closest friend ever, and relaxed. Friends were safer than husbands and sisters, the damage they wrought less destructive.

‘I have missed you so much.’ I just hadn’t realised it. How dumb was that? Who forgot someone important in their lives because they’d fallen out about a man? Not any man, but Freddy. Luca had been right about him, but she wasn’t going to acknowledge that. She couldn’t bear to see the ‘I told you so’ sign flick on in his eyes again. Not yet anyway. Even if she could laugh because he’d won that argument there was too much pain behind it for her to be ready to make light of what had happened. That day would probably never come. ‘We should never have stopped texting or emailing even when we were in different cities, no matter what we thought about what the other was doing.’

Luca swung her around in a circle, her feet nearly taking out the bed and then the chair with Chi sitting on it. ‘I do solemnly swear never to stop annoying the hell out of my best buddy, Ellie, ever again.’

‘Look out.’ Chi leaped on top of the chair out of the way of Ellie’s legs. ‘Ellie makes you crazy, Luca.’

Ellie was put back on her feet and then Luca grabbed Chi and swung her in a circle. ‘You’re right, she does. I’d forgotten how to be crazy until today.’

Chi giggled and squirmed to be put down. ‘Ellie, can I be your friend, too? I want to be crazy.’

‘Absolutely. We’ll be the three crazies.’ Ellie reached for the girl and hugged her tight, trying hard not to let the lurking tears spill. What a day. What a damned amazing day. She’d found Luca, gained a new friend and was starting to feel a little bit like her old self. A teeny-weeny bit, but that was a start.

‘Okay, crazies, time Ellie got ready to go out. Chi, I’m sorry but you’re too young to go to a bar, but I’m sure we’ll find somewhere else to take you while Ellie’s here.’ Luca cleared his throat and when Ellie looked up she’d swear there was moisture at the corners of his eyes, too.

It was all too much to cope with. Seeing Luca get all emotional wasn’t helping her stay in control. ‘Go on, shoo, both of you. I’m going to take another shower and get spruced up.’

‘It’s a bar in Vientiane, no need for glad rags.’ Luca grinned. Then slapped his forehead. ‘Oh, I forgot. Lady El won’t be seen anywhere in less than the best outfit.’

She picked up her pillow and threw it at him. ‘Get out of here.’

She hadn’t arrived in the best-looking outfit, even if she’d started out looking swanky back in Bangkok after a shower at the airport. But hey, in the interest of her self-esteem she wasn’t going out in a sack, either. Though maybe here where the temperatures were so hot and the humidity high and everything definitely casual she could let go some of the debilitating need to be perfect. After all, there was no one here that she desperately had to please. Not even her friend. Luca had always accepted her for who she was, even if he did tease the hell out of her at times.

Suddenly she realised she was only dressed in a T-shirt and knickers; her bra lay on top of her discarded trousers. This might be Luca, but she had some pride. Glancing at him, she was dismayed to see his gaze was cruising down her body, hesitating on her breasts. She couldn’t read the look in his eyes, but it was different from how he’d ever looked at her before.

Ellie shivered—with heat and apprehension. What was going on? ‘Get out of here. I’ll see you shortly.’ She needed a shower, a very cold one.

* * *

‘Like your dress,’ Luca told her an hour later as she perched her backside on top of a high stool and leaned her elbow on the bar. ‘When did you start wearing red?’ His eyes held the same expression they had back in her room.

She chose to ignore it. ‘Since I found the most amazing saleswoman in a very exclusive boutique.’ It was true. That lady was very skilled at her job and her shop was Ellie’s favourite, though lately there hadn’t been any call for beautiful dresses.

The one she’d slipped into tonight was a simple sheath that was casual yet elegant. Her new look, she decided there and then. No more going for the tailored, exquisite clothes her husband had demanded she wear even to cook dinner. She’d miss the amazing clothes because she had loved them but hated the criticism rained down on her for not looking perfect enough. But, hey, she wasn’t in that place anymore. She was with Luca in Vientiane. Ellie grinned. A real, deep all-or-nothing grin. Life was looking up. Strange glances from Luca or not.

‘What’s up? You look as if you won the lottery,’ Luca pushed a glass of Beer Lao towards her.

The condensation on the glass made her mouth water and that was before she’d tasted the contents. ‘As good as, I reckon. I’m starting to unwind and enjoy myself.’

‘Things haven’t been so great for you recently?’ There was a guarded look in his eyes as though he was afraid of overstepping the mark. Something they’d never had to worry about in the past.

A deep gulp of beer and then, ‘You were right. Freddy was an a-hole. I left him and now I’m trying to decide what it is I really want from my life.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

No gloating, thank goodness, or she’d have tipped her beer over his head. And that would’ve been such a waste. It was delicious. ‘You know what? I’m not sorry.’ It had only just occurred to her but, no, she was not sorry that episode of her life was over. Now all she had to do was pack it away completely. If that was possible considering her sister’s role in it. Hopefully, being so far removed from the complications of her family, she might find some inner peace. Though she might never learn to trust anyone after what had been done to her.

‘Then, find that smile again.’ Luca placed his hand on top of hers on the counter. ‘You look better when your eyes light up with pleasure.’

Turning her hand over to clasp her fingers around his, she said, ‘Seeing you makes me feel good. I couldn’t believe it when you said my name.’

‘You were surprised? I got a helluva shock considering you weren’t the doctor we were expecting. How was that for coincidence? Or was it our stars aligning or some such babble?’

‘You’ve been here too long.’ As laughter bubbled up Ellie’s throat something strange was going on with her hand. The one covered by Luca’s. She could feel heat and a zinging sensation that had nothing to do with the weather and all to do with— No way. She jerked her hand free, folded her arms across her chest and rubbed her arms vigorously.

‘Ellie? You’re going weird on me.’ Luca locked his eyes on her.

Looking into those grey eyes, she searched for recognition of what had just happened but found nothing. Seemed her imagination was running riot. ‘I’m fine,’ she croaked.

‘Phew. For a moment there I thought you were changing on me.’ His gaze was intense, as if he was checking her out.

Zing. She felt it again. This time it was as if someone were lightly dancing down her spine. Tearing her eyes away from Luca, she snatched up her glass and drained the beer in one long gulp. The glass banged back on the counter and she stared around the bar, looking at everything and everyone but Luca.

‘I’ll get you another.’ His hand scooped up her glass. The fingers that wrapped around the moist receptacle were long and strong, and tanned. Not that she understood why she was noticing.

Ellie’s mouth dried, despite all the fluid she’d just swallowed. They’re only fingers. Luca’s, what’s more. She shivered, as though it were cold, except the temperature was beyond high and her skin was on fire. What had just happened? She had to get herself under control. Getting wired over Luca was so not a good idea, let alone sensible. And despite her mistakes she was usually sensible. Or had that attribute flown out of the door and floated away on the Mekong just across the road?

Guess it had been so long since she’d been close to any man that her body had reacted without thought. But this was Luca. Down, girl, down. He was the last man on earth she should be having feelings about that had nothing to do with friendship and all to do with sex.