Love interest?’ he asked.
‘As if!’ Bill snorted. ‘Not that he’s not a nice young man, and not that he wouldn’t like there to be something, but …’
She hesitated, finding her reluctance to date hard to put into words.
‘No spark?’
Nick had found the words for her.
‘None at all,’ she said, ‘and it seems a waste of my time and unfair to him just to date for the sake of dating.’
‘Very noble of you,’ he teased, then he smiled again.
This smile was better than the first one, and her reaction more intense.
Weird when this was Nick, but she didn’t have time to consider it as he was speaking again and, anyway, maybe the reactions were nothing more than tiredness and the aftermath of stress.
‘There must have been a spark with Nigel,’ he was saying. ‘What really happened there? You could have married him, the Great God of Surgery, and been taken away from all this. You could be down in the city, doing social stuff, running fundraising balls, lunching for good causes, decked out in designer gear instead of bloody scrubs.’
‘Now, there would be a fate worse than death!’
The words were lightly spoken but pain pierced her heart as she remembered it had been that same ‘Great God’ who’d ordered her to have an abortion a month before their wedding because he didn’t want people thinking they’d got married because she was pregnant. She breathed deeply, aware that too much bitterness still leaked into her veins when she thought of that disastrous time.
The realisation that the man she’d loved had been nothing more than a shallow, social-climbing pretender had rocked her self-confidence and made her question her judgement about people, particularly men. The miscarriage two months later had exacerbated her loss of self-worth and it had taken years, back here in Willowby with her family and friends, to rebuild it.
Although now she’d grown a thicker skin and heavier armour to shield her fragile heart …
Nick heard the change in her voice and wondered how much damage her broken engagement had done to her trust—to Bill herself, given she was the most trusting person he had ever known. It worried him that he didn’t know the background to the break-up—didn’t know a lot of things about his friend.
His best friend!
What did the kids call it these days? BFF? Best friends for ever?
‘Anyway,’ she was saying, while his mind had drifted back to the past, ‘if we’re going to talk of what might have happened in our lives, you could have married Seraphina or whatever she called herself when she fell pregnant, and gone swanning off to New York to live off her earnings as a top supermodel.’
That was better, more like old times, Bill taking the fight to him!
‘Serena,’ Nick corrected. ‘You’re muddling her up with Delphina, who was the one before, and, anyway, I did offer to marry Serena but she wanted none of it, not me, not a child and definitely not marriage.’
Silence fell, the ghosts of dead children lying between them among the empty packaging and blood.
Bill reacted first, pushing herself up off the floor, stripping off her soiled apron and flinging it into a bin, then bending to begin collecting the rubbish off the floor.
‘I’ll do that.’
The young wardsman who appeared, mop and bucket in hand, waved her away and although she picked up a few more bits of rubbish, she was happy to leave him to it, following Nick out of the trauma room to find the big open area of the ER eerily quiet at six on a Monday morning.
‘Everyone’s sleeping in,’ Andy, the duty ER manager, told them. Newly arrived on shift, he was spic and span, his face alert, his smile bright. ‘Go home, both of you.’
‘Got to dictate some notes on that last case,’ Nick said.
‘And I’m having a shower then heading for beach,’ Bill told them. ‘I need some sea air to clear my head before I can think about sleeping.’
Would she go to Woodchoppers? Nick wondered, not wanting to ask in front of Andy but aware he’d like to join Bill at the beach. Weird name for a beach, but it had been their favourite swimming beach growing up, Bill and her six brothers declaring it their personal fiefdom, keeping it free of any less desirable elements, particularly those pushing drugs to impressionable teenagers.
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