blue eyes she’d hidden behind darkened glasses for all the years she’d lived next door stared unseeingly at him.
Huge blue eyes framed by golden blonde hair tipped with silver here and there and softly tousled by sleep. The early beauty she’d tried to hide with shorn hair and the glasses had come to fruition. Even sleep-tousled, she was stunning.
‘Alex?’
She straightened up from the bed and frowned at him.
‘I’m Will, Will Kent—from next door to the Armitages, remember?’
The frown deepened and she shook her head, so obviously puzzled he had to smile.
‘You pinched my job,’ he added, remembering how he’d pretended to complain about losing the occasional babysitting he’d done for the Armitages.
‘Superman?’ she whispered, disbelief filling the words.
He flourished a pretend cloak and bowed low.
‘At your service, ma’am! But also head intensivist at the hospital. Your father’s in my care until he’s well enough to be transferred to the coronary care unit.’
He saw her face light up as things fell into place and she shot to her feet and advanced to give him an all-enveloping hug.
‘Oh, Will,’ she murmured, ‘it’s so good to see a familiar face.’
She eased back, looking at him, then laughed.
‘Not so familiar—you’ve grown up!’
‘Not even Superman can stay twenty-two for ever,’ Will said gloomily, and she laughed again, her face lighting up with delight—so gloriously beautiful Will felt his lungs seize.
Breathe, he told himself, and tried to remember how.
Fortunately, as his brain seemed to be similarly paralysed, instinct took over and his lungs filled with air while he tried to catch up with Alex’s conversation.
‘Intensivist? Weren’t you heading towards O and G when you left Port? What made you change your mind? It can’t have been the late night callouts, you’d get more of them in this job.’
‘Whoa!’
Will held up his hand, pleased to see his limb was obeying messages, although other parts of his body were obviously still in shock.
‘I’m on a ward round and really need to check your dad and the other patients.’
‘Can we catch up later?’ Alex asked. ‘I couldn’t get home before the op, but I’ve spoken to the surgeon who did the operation. He gave me the impression he wasn’t too positive about the outcome.’
As Will was still feeling startling and unfamiliar reactions to Alex’s hug, he wondered if this was wise, but she was entitled to ask questions about her father’s health.
But beyond that, he was intrigued. The damaged teenager who, in the beginning, would duck away if she saw him over the fence, and who’d shrunk back from any physical contact—even a simple handshake—had emerged, like a caterpillar from a cocoon, as this beautiful butterfly.
He wanted to know just how she’d managed the transformation—and how deep it went. He knew Isobel in particular had worked hard to restore Alex’s self-esteem, but there’d been a fragility about the teenager that couldn’t be hidden behind dark glasses and a dreadful haircut.
‘As far as your father’s concerned, the operation went well, but he wasn’t in the best of health before it. Other heart problems apparently. I only know this stuff from his chart but I gather that if it hadn’t been a necessity …’
He paused, wondering how to tell this woman he knew but didn’t know just how precarious her father’s health was.
‘Look, I should be through by eight and your father will still be sleeping off the anaesthetic until morning at least, so you might as well get out of here for a while,’ he said. ‘We could eat in the canteen but the food’s appalling. There’s a nice new bar and restaurant at the top of the old Royal Motel. It has a fancier name now—the motel, that is—which I can never remember. And it’s in walking distance. We could have a meal—give us time to catch up.’
She nodded her agreement as a nurse came into the room. Will’s attention, or ninety-five per cent of it, returned to his patient as he discussed Mr Hudson’s progress and checked the results the monitor was revealing by the second.
Alex had slipped away, for which he was truly grateful, although he felt a momentary regret he hadn’t looked at her more closely, if only to confirm his impression she’d blossomed into a startlingly beautiful woman.
Will Kent!
Alex stood in the little bathroom off the family waiting room of the ICU and smiled as she ran the name through her head.
But had the Will Kent she’d known had laughing brown eyes that crinkled with smile lines at the corners, and lips that seemed to be on the verge of a smile all the time? Of course, eighteen years ago, when he’d left Port to finish his studies, his eyes probably hadn’t been crinkled, and they’d been hidden behind the dark-framed glasses, and, anyway, in the state she’d been in back then she wouldn’t have noticed anything about any man. Certainly not his lips …
And she’d better not notice them now, she reminded herself. As she’d pointed out, Will was all grown up now, and undoubtedly married with children. In fact, throwing herself at him, hugging him, had undoubtedly embarrassed him no end, rendering him practically speechless.
Back then he’d been the Armitages’ next-door neighbour christened Superman by the twins—or probably their parents, given his surname. Self-effacing—that was how she’d have described him—but somehow he’d always been around in that first year she’d been with the Armitages. In and out of the house, borrowing textbooks from Dave or Isobel, seemingly always there if she’d needed him. She tried to remember.
He’d certainly helped her rescue Riain out of the tree one day, and had carried Rosi down to the doctor’s the day she’d fallen off the swing.
Superman!
She smiled at the memories and told herself that today, with all the emotions of her return home churning inside her, she’d probably have hugged any familiar face.
An image of Will as he was now, dark hair touched with silver, lips stretched in a surprised smile, continued to linger in Alex’s head, making her feel hot and embarrassed and somehow ashamed all at the same time.
Why had he suggested dinner?
He could have talked to Alex in the visitors’ room, or his office, but a bar?
Had a beautiful woman giving him a hug gone straight to his head?
Or had his mother’s gentle nagging—you’ve got to start going out again some time, Will—prompted the choice?
His mother was probably right!
He did have to start going out again.
