swallowed a sigh. So much for attempting a friendly connection with the man. ‘I do. Are you leaving the hospital now?’
He seemed to stiffen. ‘Yes. I have to pick my daughter up from daycare. They don’t like it when I’m late.’
‘I don’t suppose she likes it either.’
His eyes burned, emitting sparks of green. ‘You think I want Amber in daycare ten hours a day? She doesn’t have a choice and neither do I.’
The loud and terse words slammed into her like a punch to her solar plexus, making her heart race.
Made’s mother startled from her nap in the chair. ‘Apa yang salah?’ Mrs Putu asked anxiously.
Chloe didn’t need to understand the words to know that the mother was stressing that Luke’s raised voice meant something was wrong with her son. She reached out her hand to comfort and reassure the woman.
‘Semuabaik,’ Luke said softly. ‘All is well.’
‘Terimakasih, Dokter.’ The woman visibly relaxed and sank back in her chair.
Chloe turned back to face Luke, surprised at the ease in which the foreign language had rolled off his tongue but furious with him for upsetting Mrs Putu. For deliberately misconstruing her own words. Adrenaline pelted through her, sending rafts of agitation jetting along her veins, and she needed to work extra-hard to appear calm.
Choosing her words carefully, she shepherded Luke towards the door. ‘I’m not judging you about daycare,’ she said, sotto voce, ‘I was talking about the fact your daughter probably doesn’t like it when you’re late either.’
He stared down at her, his jaw tight, his height dwarfing her by a good thirty centimetres, and she caught the scent of his spicy cologne. His eyes, which at times could be bright green, were now a dark moss and filled with so many flickering emotions that it was hard to decode any of them over and above the dominant and glaring pain.
Tall, dark, gorgeous, brooding and tortured.
Her heart did a ridiculous leap, which had absolutely nothing to do with his indignation or her chagrin.
Oh, no, she told herself sternly. The man is grieving and you do not need to rescue him. You’ve just got your own life back on track. You’ve got a dog to love and be loved by.
Shimmering tingles taunted her, spinning through her with their intoxicating call. But it’s been so long…
No way in hell, Chloe! her ever-vigilant internal guard yelled. Keep it simple, remember?
She sucked in a long, deep breath, trying desperately to banish the delicious buzz of addictive warmth. ‘Everything’s fine here, Mr Stanley. Go and get your daughter.’
His eyes widened at her dismissal of him, and he rubbed his forehead with his fingers and his temple with his thumb as if his head hurt. ‘Goodnight, then.’
She watched him turn and leave without giving an apology and she tried not to let it rankle. After all, it shouldn’t bother her one bit because she was used to working with surgeons who believed all should bow down before them and kiss their feet. She also knew that apologies for bad behaviour were few and far between. Only Luke Stanley had always been an exception to that rule.
His reputation for skill and good humour had always meant that people had fallen over themselves to work with him. The nursing and auxiliary staff, from cleaners to occupational therapists, had loved him, and whenever he’d put together a team to go to Asia or Africa for a six-week stint with the foundation, repairing cleft lips and palates, there had always been more applicants than positions.
That man had utterly disappeared when his wife had died.
She wasn’t a stranger to grief, and she understood the pain of it all too well. She’d been lost in the midst of it once, for a year, floundering in the suffocating darkness that had become both enemy and friend. It had been her beloved brother Nick who’d hauled her unwilling teenage mind out of the black and treacherous morass and pushed her back into the light of life.
At the time it had hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced before or since and the battle not to let grief become a toxic legacy had been beyond hard, but she’d done it. Years later, when Jason had told her he wouldn’t marry her because she couldn’t give him a child, she’d teetered on the edge but she’d survived and learned. Today, she knew that even though her life now wasn’t anything like that she’d imagined for herself as a naïve sixteen-year-old, and neither was it the life she truly wanted, it was a life worth living and living well.
You could show him how to do it.
The thought clanged loudly in her head like the penetrating sound of a fire alarm and she wished she could put noise-cancelling headphones over her brain.
Yes, she was a nurse, a member of a caring profession, and, yes, she had the ability to recognise when someone needed help. Luke Stanley definitely fell into that category—he needed help big-time—but she was also a survivor. Helping a grieving man with a child would be more harmful to her than helpful to him and she wasn’t prepared to risk her hard-won stability.
No, it wasn’t her job to do the ‘hands-on’ helping stuff with Luke Stanley, but she’d talk to Keri and Kate. After all, they knew Luke a hell of a lot better than she did.
‘WANT BUNNY,’ Amber sobbed into Luke’s shoulder, her tears making a damp patch on his cotton shirt.
‘Hello, Amber, I’m Mr Clown,’ Luke said in a voice he thought might sound like a clown’s as he waggled the soft toy near his daughter’s face.
Amber’s hand knocked the clown sideways. ‘Want bunny!’
Luke’s head pounded with fury at himself and despair for Amber, which rumbled through him and reminded him he had so much to learn as a father. How had he forgotten to check that her beloved bunny had been in the backpack when he’d collected Amber from daycare?
Because you were thinking about Chloe Kefes.
His anger at himself was buried deep with sharp roots. How had he forgotten ever meeting her? Unlike most of his colleagues, he didn’t forget names and faces, especially when there was another connection, like her being Nick’s sister. But today he’d needed all her prompting to recall the iodine incident.
He hated that he’d forgotten as much as he hated the fact his mind kept repeating the way her plump lips curved into a smile. A generous, captivating smile, which dimpled her round cheeks and danced in her eyes. A smile that had faded under the onslaught of his bitter words—words generated by his own self-loathing and hurled out to land on the nearest target. It wasn’t Chloe’s fault that Amber was motherless and in full-time daycare. No, that responsibility lay solely at his feet.
Amber’s wails sounded even louder than before.
Damn it, he shouldn’t still be thinking about Chloe. What sort of a pathetic excuse for a father was he?
Poor Amber.
