style="font-size:15px;"> She frowned now as she added, ‘Am I blathering again?’
He grinned at her.
‘No way. That was a most sensible explanation, very to the point and concise.’
The grin was her undoing. Any good the shower might have done was undone with that grin—a quirky, amused, sharing kind of grin.
Good grief! How could she possibly be thinking this way?
Analysing the man’s grin?
‘Let’s go,’ she said, opening her door and leaping down from the high seat of the four-wheel drive that had been her Christmas present to herself last year.
Good thing, too, she thought, patting the car when she’d shut the door. Having Cam in the big vehicle had been bad enough, she could only imagine how uncomfortable it would have been if they’d been squashed together in a small sedan.
Lauren Cooper, blonde, beautiful but far too thin and with dark shadows of worry under her eyes, came out of the house to greet them.
‘You have to take some time off,’ Jo scolded her best friend.
‘I’ll have plenty of time off if we have to close,’ Lauren reminded her quietly, but her dark eyes lit up as she took in the man Jo was introducing to her.
‘Well,’ she teased after she’d shaken Cam’s hand, ‘you’ll certainly be a great addition to the male talent in this town.’
‘All six of them?’ Jo countered.
‘In our age group,’ Lauren agreed, counting on her fingers as she listed the local, older, unattached men. ‘Mike at the police station, Tom at the hospital, that new schoolteacher—’
‘He’s got a partner,’ Jo protested, before adding firmly, ‘Anyway, that’s enough. Cam’s already likely to get a swollen head because I’ve been praising his idea of the men’s support programme. We’re here to see the refuge and to talk about how we could run a men’s programme—not to mention whether men might come.’
‘It could be court mandated,’ Cam offered, pleased the conversation had shifted from male talent in the town. His body might have reacted to his boss and landlady but after Penny’s fairly brutal rejection, he’d accepted that until the mess in his head was sorted out, it would be unfair to get involved with any woman.
Although a woman with killer green eyes …
‘Wow!’
His exclamation was involuntary, and his mind right back on the refuge as Lauren led them first into what she called the playroom. Obviously it had been set up with kids in mind, but whoever had conceived and carried through the idea had done an amazing job. Blackboard paint had been used to adult waist height on all the walls so there were chalk drawings everywhere. At one end of the long room—a closed-in veranda, he suspected—was a sitting area with comfy armchairs and bean-bags in front of a television set with a DVD player on top of it. Beside that a cabinet held what must be at least a hundred DVDs.
The other end of the room was obviously for very small people, blocks and jigsaw puzzles neatly put away on shelves, plastic boxes of farm animals, zoo animals, dinosaurs, toy cars and little dolls stacked further along the shelves.
‘It’s incredibly well stocked,’ he said, ‘and so tidy.’
‘Well-stocked but not always so tidy,’ Lauren told him. ‘We’ve instituted star charts. Stars for putting away the toys, stars for cleaning teeth, stars for just about everything you can imagine. Once you get a certain number of stars, you get a treat—like dinner at a fast-food outlet of your choice, which is where everyone is tonight. They left early as they’re going on to a movie after their meal. Everyone’s been really good this week!’
Lauren showed them through the rest of the house, allowing Cam a glimpse into the three big bedrooms that could accommodate up to five people in each.
‘So you can have three women with children—no more?’ Cam asked.
‘Well, we could arrange to take more if it was necessary, squeeze in a woman on her own, for instance, but the turnover is fairly rapid.’
‘So no one is here long term?’ Cam asked.
Lauren smiled at him, the smile lifting the tiredness from her face and making him wonder why this beautiful woman—smiling at him—had no effect at all on his body, while the small, pert redhead who was usually frowning, glaring or arguing did.
Not that he needed to give it much thought—he was moving on.
And even if he stayed, he’d be moving out.
And then there was the baggage.
And his lost passion …
‘Four weeks.’
He’d missed the beginning of whatever Lauren was saying but assumed she’d told him the time limit on stays as she led him into the communal lounge, the dining area and finally a well-equipped kitchen.
‘You’re really well set up,’ he said, not bothering to keep the admiration out of his voice.
‘That’s what makes the thought of it closing so hard.’
He heard the pain in Jo’s voice, but it was the content, not the pain, he had to think about.
‘But as long as you’re fighting the closure you’ve got a chance of keeping it open,’ he protested. ‘I thought it was because of the refuge you were employing another doctor. The fortyish woman, remember.’
He won a slight smile.
‘I was employing her—or you—to ease my load at work so I could put more time into this, time for paperwork mainly, applying for grants, and so on. As I told you yesterday, the refuge began with a bequest and the building itself is available to us free of charge, but ongoing funding for residential staff—the people here every day, including the child-healthcare worker—has to come from the government. The government is forever issuing new guidelines and procedures and so-called measurements of success—criteria we have to meet before they’ll give us money.’
‘Sounds like the army,’ Cam said, ‘but I thought women being saved from abuse would be counted as successes.’
‘You’d think so,’ Jo told him, ‘but they like “projects”.’ She used her fingers to put the word in inverted commas. ‘That’s why a men’s programme would be fantastic, and we could do more work in schools. It would be such a waste to have to close it now, when we’ve come so far.’
She smiled, but it was a weak effort.
‘The thing is, we’ve worked so hard for the women who need us to accept us and on top of that we have the most wonderful local support,’ Lauren explained. ‘People from all walks of life help out in different ways. The local bakery gives us its unsold bread at the end of each day—not to mention buns and bread rolls. We get a discount at the butcher’s and the supermarket, and the fruit shop in town also hands over any produce they aren’t able to sell.’
‘Which
