Whillimina de Groote and her brothers! They’d become the family he’d never had. Bill dragging him to her home after his first day at school, insisting her brothers teach the five-year-old Nick how to defend himself.
They’d taught him a lot after that …
Bill stood under the shower, the water so hot that steam was fogging the cubicle, but no amount of heat or water could wash away the uneasiness that lingered over her reaction to Nick.
To Nick as a man!
How pathetic!
She’d known him for close to thirty years, considered him her best friend in all the world, so why, now, would she be reacting to him as a man?
Maybe it was nothing more than the stress and tiredness engendered by their battle to save the teenager’s life.
She could only hope …
Accepting that the hot water wasn’t helping, she turned off the taps, dried herself hurriedly, rubbed at the tangled mess of red curls that topped her head and fell down past her shoulders, then pulled on an old bikini she kept in her locker, covered it with a voluminous T-shirt, grabbed her handbag and hurried out the staff exit, not wanting to bump into Nick before she’d had a good run on the beach and a swim in the limpid, tropical waters to clear her head.
Not before she happened to be on duty with him again, in fact, and if she spoke to the ER secretary who drew up the rosters, total avoidance might be possible.
Well, not total. He was back to see his gran, so they’d undoubtedly run into each other at Gran’s house …
But at least he’d come home.
She pulled up in the small parking area at Woodchoppers Beach and slogged across the sand dunes, glad the effort of crossing them made the beach the least used of the beaches around Willowby. Pulling off her T-shirt and dropping it on the sand, she began to run, slowly at first then, as her muscles warmed, sprinting faster and faster—short sprints then slow jogs, alternating the two, feeling the blood surge through her body, bringing it to life in a most satisfactory manner.
Two more lengths of the beach and then she’d swim.
‘You shouldn’t come here on your own—you never know who might be around.’
Nick’s appearance startled her.
‘Obviously!’ she snapped at him.
But as he ignored her comment and fell into stride beside her, she knew all the good of her run had vanished, and with it her peace of mind.
It’s only Nick, she told herself, but that didn’t seem to stop the awareness that prickled in her skin all down one side—the side closest to her jogging companion.
Veering away from him, she headed for the water and dived from ankle depth into the clear, green-blue sea, surfacing to breathe then diving again to porpoise along parallel to the beach, relishing the silken kiss of the water against her skin.
Had she always been this gorgeous?
Long, lean, and tanned in a way redheads weren’t supposed to tan?
Nick watched as she dived and surfaced in the water, only to dive again, her limbs flashing in the sunlight, her hair trailing behind her—a mermaid at play.
Was it because she’d always been a friend that he’d never seen her as a woman? Not that he could afford to see her that way now—they were friends! There’d be plenty of interesting and intelligent, even beautiful, women here in Willowby. It was only a matter of connecting up with some of them, and the thoughts he found himself having about Bill would disappear.
For all she joked about having escaped a fate worse than death when she’d dumped Nigel, she was the kind of woman who should be married—married with a tribe of red-headed kids clustered around her—because she’d always been a mother hen, adopting not only him but any fellow pupil in danger of being bullied or excluded from one of the childhood gangs.
He stripped down to his jocks and dived into the water, surfacing a little distance from her, uncertain enough about the strange reactions of the night to not want to be too close.
‘Race you to the rocks,’ she challenged, and started immediately, but his longer strokes and stronger kick soon had him catching up, so they swam together towards the smooth, rounded rocks that jutted into the water at the end of the bay until they were close enough for him to swim away, beating her by a body length.
Strange reactions or not, he wasn’t going to let her beat him!
‘Oh, that was good,’ she said, coming up out of the water, her hair streaming down her back. ‘I find it’s so much easier to sleep during the day if I have a run and a swim before I go home.’
She looked at him for a moment, her golden-brown eyes assessing.
‘And a hearty breakfast at the surf club back at the main beach. You up for that, or has your body become a temple so you can’t eat delicious crispy bacon, and beef sausages, and fried tomatoes, and all the other things that are loaded with cholesterol and fat?’
Nick shook his head in disbelief.
‘So you still eat like a navvy and stay as slim as a whip. Some metabolism you de Grootes inherited.’
‘Not all of us,’ Bill told him, smiling as she waded in front of him back to the beach. ‘Bob’s developed a most unsightly paunch, and Joel’s heading in the same direction. Too many business lunches and not enough exercise, that’s the problem with those two.’
Nick watched the way her butt moved as she walked in front of him and tried to think of Bill’s brothers rather than how those twin globes would fit into his hands.
‘Have you already moved into the apartment?’
She threw the question over her shoulder but it brushed right past him, his attention snaffled by the way the woman in front of him moved, and how her breasts hung low as she bent to retrieve her T-shirt from the sand, the bikini she wore barely covering her nipples.
‘Nick?’
Had she caught him watching her as she turned, her eyebrows raised as she waited for a reply?
What had she asked?
Had he moved in …?
‘If you call dumping a couple of suitcases in the bedroom and unpacking my wash bag as moving in, then yes,’ he responded, hoping the gap between the question and the answer hadn’t been too long. ‘It’s fully furnished so all I had to bring were clothes and personal stuff. I’d hardly begun to unpack when the hospital phoned to ask if I could work last night.’
Bill didn’t respond, so disturbed was she by the sight of Nick’s lean, toned body that casual conversation was beyond her. He’d shrugged as he’d mentioned unpacking, an unfortunate movement as it had drawn her attention back to his chest, with its flat wedges of pectoral muscles and clearly defined six-pack.
She wanted to ask if he’d been working out, but that would give away the fact she’d noticed and the way
