He wasn’t an idiot. He’d been slapped once. It behoved a man to stay still and silent, and wait for her to make the first move.
‘I…I’m sorry,’ she managed at last.
‘It’s okay,’ he told her, striving hard to lighten what was an unbelievably heavy situation. ‘I was feeling guilty about Bonnie. Now I can feel virtuously aggrieved at being assaulted.’
‘And I get the guilt instead?’
‘Exactly,’ he said, and tried a smile.
She didn’t smile back. She looked up at him, and he thought, whatever had gone before, this woman wasn’t one to crumple. There was strength there. Real strength.
‘Hitting’s never okay,’ she said.
‘You were swatting flies,’ he said. ‘And missed.’
She did smile then. It was the merest glimmer but it was still a smile and it made him feel…
Actually, he didn’t know how it made him feel. Holding her, watching her…
Why was this woman touching him? Why did he look at her and want to know more?
It was Bonnie, he told himself. It was the emotions of almost losing his dog. That’s all it was.
‘Let me take you home,’ he said carefully, and took a step back, as if she might swipe him again.
The smile appeared again, rueful but there.
‘I’m safe,’ she told him. ‘Unarmed.’ She tucked her arms carefully behind her back and he grinned.
‘Excellent. Would you accept my very kind offer of a ride home?’
‘I’ll stain the Jeep.’
‘I’m a surfer. I have a ton of towels.’
‘I need milk,’ she said.
And he thought excellent—practicalities, minutiae were the way to get back on an even keel.
‘Because?’
‘Because I’ve run out,’ she said. She took a deep breath, steadying herself as she spoke, and he knew she knew minutiae were important.
She’d been in the abyss, too? There seemed such a core recognition, at a level he didn’t recognise, that it was an almost physical link.
But she seemed oblivious to it. ‘I’m on duty at six tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘I have no milk. How can I have coffee with no milk? And how can I start work with no coffee?’
‘I see your need,’ he said gravely. ‘And I’m trained for triage. Priority one, the lady needs milk. Priority two, the lady needs home, wash, sleep. I can cope with milk and home. Can you take it from there?’
It was the right thing to say. Setting limits. Giving her a plan. He’d used this with parents of his patients hovering at the edges of control, and it worked now.
There were no more arguments. She gave him another smile, albeit a weak one, and he led her to his car.
He climbed in beside her, but still he felt strange. Why?
Forget imagined links, he told himself. This was crazy. He didn’t do emotional connection. He would not.
Get this night over with, he told himself. Buy the lady some milk and say goodnight.
He drove a great vehicle for surfing. It was no doctor’s car, she thought as he threw a heap of towels on the front seat. The Jeep was battered, coated with sand and salt, and liberally sprinkled with Labrador hair. Any qualms she had about spoiling the beauty of one of the sleek, expensive sets of wheels she was used to seeing in most doctors’ car parks went right out the window.
Sam wasn’t your normal doctor.
He didn’t look your normal doctor either. He was sand-and salt-stained as well, with his sun-bleached hair and crinkled eyes telling her that surfing was something he did all the time, as much a part of him as his medicine must be.
But he was a doctor, and a good one, she suspected. She’d seen his skill at stitching. She’d also heard the transition from personal to professional as he’d coped with her emotional outburst.
Though there’d been personal in there as well. There’d been raw emotion as he’d seen Bonnie—and there’d been something more than professional care as he’d held her.
Well, she’d saved his dog.
She was trying to get a handle on it. She was trying to fit the evening’s events into the impersonal. Nurse saves doctor’s dog, nurse angry at doctor for leaving dog on beach, nurse hits doctor, doctor hugs nurse.
It didn’t quite fit.
‘I’m normally quite sane,’ she ventured as he pulled up outside a convenience store.
‘Me, too.’ He grinned. ‘Mostly. What sort of milk?’
‘White.’
His grin widened. ‘What, no unpasteurised, low-fat, high-calcium, no permeate added…’
‘Oi,’ she said. ‘White.’
He chuckled and went to buy it. She watched him go, lean, lithe, tanned, muscled legs, board shorts, T-shirt, salt-stiff hair—everything about him screaming surfer.
He was pin-up material, she thought suddenly. He was the type of guy whose picture she’d have pinned on her wall when she’d been fifteen.
She’d pinned these sorts of pictures all over her wall when she’d been a kid. Her parents had had a board they’d brought in to her various hospital wards to make her feel at home. She’d had pictures of surfing all over it. She would lie and watch the images of lean bodies catching perfect waves and dream…
But then Sam was back with her milk and she had to haul herself back to the here and now.
‘My purse is in my car,’ she said, suddenly horrified.
‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it back tonight.’
She knew he would. I’ll fix it.
She actually didn’t like it all that much. Other people fixing stuff for her…
She had to get a grip here. Getting her purse and paying for her milk were not enough to start a war over.
She subsided while he drove the short distance to the hospital apartment car park. The parking space he drove into indicated it belonged to ‘Mr Sam Webster. Paediatric Cardiology’.
Mr. That meant he was a surgeon.
Paediatric cardiology. Clever.
She glanced across at him and tried to meld the two images together—the specialist surgeons she’d worked with before and the surfer guy beside her.
‘I clean up okay,’ he said, and it felt weird that he’d guessed her thoughts. ‘I make it a rule never to wear board shorts when consulting. Hey, Callie!’
A woman was pulling in beside them—Dr Callie Richards, neonatal specialist. Zoe had met this woman during the week and was already seriously impressed. Callie was maybe five years older than Zoe but a world apart in medical experience. In life experience, too, Zoe had thought. She’d seemed smart, confident, kind—the sort of colleague you didn’t want to meet when you were looking…like she was looking now. She’d also seemed aloof.
But Sam was greeting her warmly, calling her over.
‘Callie, could you spare us a few minutes?’ he called. ‘We’ve had a bit of a traumatic time. Bonnie was hit by a car.’
‘Bonnie!’ Callie’s face stilled in shock and Zoe realised she knew the dog. Maybe the whole hospital knew Bonnie, she decided, thinking back to those trusting Labrador eyes. Bonnie was the sort of