Emma said, looking up at him. ‘Is that what you see often in your work?’
He had no idea why he would talk of something he never mentioned. He shrugged and ladled a glass of punch, watched her take a sip and found himself talking to distract himself from her mouth. ‘I have seen many families suffer great losses but the safe delivery of one child can restart hope and life like nothing else.’
‘Angus said you began working with the rescue forces not long after he did.’
‘If not for Angus, I wouldn’t be here. Did he tell you he pulled me from an earthquake’s landslide? I’d been buried two days and all others had given up.’ Did he tell you I had been on a road to wasting my life before that?
She smiled gently, her eyes intent on his face. ‘Yes, but very briefly. Did you think he would tell me much?’
Gianni laughed, but without relief. ‘No. I suppose not. We do tend not to speak of what we see. And he spoke of his work even less than I do now.’
‘Which comes at a cost as tragic memories accumulate,’ she said with great insight. She returned to the thing he wished she’d forgotten. ‘Two days buried would give a lot of time for thought.’
‘Hmm.’ A long time to regret things in the past. He’d almost come to peace with those memories but perhaps they were covered under the new ones he’d collected.
She tilted her head and he felt her concentration not as curiosity but like balm to his hurts. ‘I like to think good comes of everything. Even something that seems horrible at the time. What good came of that, Gianni?’
He was distracted by the way she said his name. Softly, rolling the vowels as if savouring the strangeness of them. He supposed his name was strange in this place of Jacks and Johns and Joes. But she was waiting and he needed to think of his answer.
Normally he would have ignored such a question, not that it had been asked before, but for this Emma, strangely he found he could answer honestly. ‘It was a long time ago but, yes, it changed my life and created a need to do something useful. Like Angus did. I had been given back my life and I would not waste it again.’
She smiled at him. ‘Had you been so useless before?’
He thought of the fast cars, the wild and thoughtless men and women he’d peopled his life with after Maria’s death, but that was in the past and another tragedy—though one without a good result. ‘I fear so.’ His voice lowered as the memories returned. Memories he had to banish every time he was confronted with a similar event. ‘Lying there, unable to move, barely able to breathe as I listened to those around me grow silent, made me swear that life was too precious to waste.’
He shook away the memories and forced himself to smile at her, ‘But enough of me. You say you are a midwife. Have you always wished that? Like your little Grace has told me she has?’
‘Some of the best people I know are midwives.’ She grinned at him. Daring him to dispute a fact he knew little about. He had not known any midwives well enough to judge but he knew he liked this one.
‘Like Montana and Mia and Misty.’ She gestured with her hand at the colourful throng of people she worked with at Lyrebird Lake. ‘Wise women and wonderful friends,’ she went on. ‘Like them, I consider my work a privilege.’
He understood that but it was rare for a person to say it. ‘As I do mine.’ He shrugged. ‘So now we can be happy we have worthwhile lives, though I fear I may be a trifle too focussed on the excuse not to lead a more facetted life.’ He grimaced in self-mockery. ‘And what do you do for yourself, Emma?’
She glanced around for her daughter. ‘I am also a mother.’
He smiled down at her perplexed frown. ‘A mother, yes, and a good one, I think. And for Emma—the woman?’
She narrowed her eyes at him and declined to answer, preferring to fire it back at him. ‘What do you do for the man, Gianni?’
Someone called out to her and she looked away. And then she smiled at him and was gone. He watched her go. Couldn’t not watch her. An intriguing and magnetic woman he hadn’t expected to meet. But his life would never change.
Chapter Two
TWO hours later Emma found herself looking around for Gianni.
He would be gone tomorrow, which was as well because the fascination inside her seemed to revel in every brooding glance he sent her way. There was an escalating excitement in her stomach unlike anything she’d felt before, and as she checked on her daughter, she realised that she missed seeing Gianni in her peripheral vision.
She needed to remember he’d go back to the drama and tension of emergency rescue with the international taskforce that Angus had retired from five years ago and she’d go back to her work.
But her mind wasn’t ready to relegate Gianni to a past experience. And she rearranged the knowledge she had in her brain and teased at it as if she could glean more.
So Angus had dragged the barely conscious Italian from the rubble and inspired him. Well, it had certainly sparked an unlikely friendship between the two men. And there was at least a ten-year gap in their ages.
Where had she been ten years ago when that had happened?
At school certainly. Not a teen mother yet. Her own mother still well and oblivious to the cloud that would destroy her life and cast a shadow over her family. But she wouldn’t go there.
When this Italian intruder was gone, Emma would go back to life in Lyrebird Lake as if he’d never been, which was a good thing.
Ah. There he was. She found him talking to Angus and as if he’d felt her gaze he looked up. For a moment their eyes held and then Angus said something else and Gianni looked away. Hurriedly she walked on and berated herself for being drawn to him. But what could a girl do when she found herself so aware of a man?
Since their first conversation, whenever she’d moved to another group to talk, shortly afterwards he too would arrive to join the circle and always that thrum of awareness rumbled between them. He’d seemed no more than a few steps away from her all afternoon, despite the fact he barely spoke to her. She sifted through everything Angus had told her as she waited for him to come to her again. Strange how she knew he would.
‘So you’ll be gone tomorrow,’ she said without preamble when he appeared to stand beside her.
‘That is true.’
A tennis ball from the cricket game rolled to her feet like a faceless yellow bird and she picked it up and tossed it back to the bowler, glad of the distraction while she bolstered up her courage. ‘It’s a shame you can’t stay a while and see more of the area around Lyrebird Lake.’
His glance swept over her. ‘If I had known it would be so beautiful here I would not have made plans.’ He smiled. ‘Would you have shown me around, Emma?’
She could have found a little time. If he was that attracted to the place, why leave so quickly? ‘Perhaps. And your plans can’t be changed?’
He gestured fatalistically with his hands and she had to smile at the pure Mediterranean gesture. ‘I go to see my brother. It is arranged. We haven’t
