just leave.’ Each word was enunciated with a frigid clarity that should have blistered his ears.
‘Yes, you can.’ For the first time he began to appreciate just how difficult the task he’d set himself was going to be. He took a slow deep breath. ‘I’ve spoken to Tony Costello—’
‘What? You’ve spoken to my boss?’ Her voice was still pitched low in deference to the patients in the ward, but her intensity rammed into him. ‘How dare you?’
‘Easily.’ He’d come too far to back down now. ‘You’re not to darken the hospital doors before tomorrow.’
If she had any idea of the scope of the discussions with Tony she’d be even angrier. He’d cross that bridge when he had to. Leaning on the counter, he willed his body to relax. The smile he forced to his mouth felt stiff with tension.
‘I’ve got things to do.’ Liz wore a hunted look as her eyes slid away from him to a pile of neatly stacked patient notes.
‘Yes, you sure do. You have to come home with me.’
Her gaze, dark and revealing, darted back to his. She was afraid. Of him? The notion punched his breath away. His Liz was fearless. Surely, he was mistaken.
‘Do I have to throw you over my shoulder, darlin’?’ He was relieved there was no trace of his turmoil in his voice.
‘In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t bend that way any more,’ she grated out. Any hint of fear was burned away as her eyes glowed gold with anger.
He allowed his gaze to drift down to the mound of her abdomen. His chest tightened in an unexpected rush of possessiveness. His woman. His baby. ‘No, I guess not. Okay, fireman’s lift is out. How about I sweep you up and carry you out in my arms? Should cause quite a stir.’
‘You wouldn’t.’ She scowled, pulling the edges of her white coat over her stomach and folding her arms.
‘Try me.’
He held her gaze for a long moment before she huffed out a breath and looked down at the desk, her lips clamped in a firm line. A pang of sympathy tweaked at his conscience. She was no match for him now that he’d had a solid five hours sleep.
Since he’d been up, he’d returned the rental car to the depot and shopped for groceries. On the back seat of Liz’s car sat half a dozen bags of necessities to stock the woefully depleted refrigerator he’d found at the house, at their home. He straightened, flexing his shoulders. Pregnant women needed to look after themselves. Or be looked after.
‘Very well.’ She straightened a pile of forms. ‘But I need to check on one of the patients before I go. So you’ll just have to wait.’
‘Don’t be long, sweetheart, or I’ll come and find you,’ he said softly as she rounded the desk to move past him.
The look she flashed him should have fried him on the spot. ‘I’ll be as long as I need to be.’
As he watched her moving down the corridor, her steps slower than normal, he knew he was doing the right thing whether she liked it or not. A peculiar mixture of emotions—exasperation, love, and maybe just a touch of anger?—churned in his gut as she disappeared into one of the rooms.
He expelled a long sigh. They’d had so many arguments about starting a family in the six months before he’d gone overseas. He’d finally faced the fact that he didn’t want to be a father. That the remnants of his paternal instinct had died more than a decade ago.
With Kylie’s betrayal. Kylie. He hadn’t thought about his teenage crush for years. The girl who’d told him he was going to be a father—only to dump him when she miscarried. And dump him hard, trashing his love and his fervent promises of marriage, support, fidelity. Even stripping him of his right to grieve for the lost baby with her confession that it wasn’t his.
Perhaps his past wasn’t as buried as he believed.
He rubbed a hand over his face and thought back to his last confrontation with Liz, on the day before he’d left. It’d been very cold, very civilised after the preceding months of hot words and hotter, hope-filled reconciliations.
But regardless of the physical passion that flared between them, he hadn’t been able to overcome the obstacle of Liz’s desire to have a family. His argument, that they had something special and didn’t need children to complete their relationship, hadn’t swayed her at all. He’d agreed to give Liz a divorce. He smiled grimly. Looking at it from Liz’s perspective, though, she’d been unable to overcome his entrenched resistance to becoming a father.
Stalemate.
Not that it mattered now. A moment’s careless pleasure and they were going to be parents. Though, in fairness to both of them, they hadn’t been careless, just unlucky. Their usual contraceptive regimen had failed.
Or had Liz been deliberately careless? The muscles of his scalp contracted, pulling at his already tense forehead. He shifted, paced a few steps, trying to shake the unwelcome thought away.
It was irrelevant. He preferred to deal with reality, with the present. And the pregnancy, deliberate or accidental, was a fact that had to be faced squarely. Besides, she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths…would she?
Liz ignored the faint tremor in her fingers as she studied Bob Smyth’s chart. His temperature had stabilised during the day. The new antibiotics were obviously doing the job, clearing his lungs, easing his breathing. Microbiology results on the sputum still weren’t back, but there was no sign now of the respiratory distress he’d been admitted with the day before yesterday.
She looked at the patient propped up on the pillows, his face relaxed in sleep, and toyed briefly with the thought of disturbing him. Hard plastic dug into her flesh as she pressed her palms on either side of the chart board. Why couldn’t Bob have been awake? She could have asked him a question, chatted for a few minutes about something, anything. Then she might have felt as though she was here for some purpose.
Instead, she had to admit to herself that she was avoiding the moment when she had to face Jack. Her husband…the father of her baby. Her heart squeezed painfully as she smoothed a hand over her stomach.
The unwilling father of her baby.
She hooked the chart on the end of the bed, her fingers fiddling with the clip for a moment longer. She was hiding, trying to delay the inevitable. Stupid because there was nothing she’d like more than to be able to go home and put her feet up, or perhaps wallow in a bath. If it weren’t for Jack being at the house, she’d probably have left the hospital hours ago.
With a small sigh of defeat, she turned to leave the room. Back at the front desk, she wrote up a request for physiotherapy for Bob and slipped it into a wire basket at the end of the desk.
She felt Jack’s gaze follow her as she went through to hang up her white coat and retrieve her bag from the locker.
‘I need to go to the supermarket on the way home,’ she said when she returned.
Jack fell into step with her. ‘What for?’
His hand came to rest in the curve of her back as he guided her down the corridor. The small, almost protective gesture sent her pulse into overdrive, scattering
