If Luke had known he might well have decided not to try and save his face, but without that immediate operation Jess would have been left with a lifetime of skin grafts. With a face that wasn’t his.
‘What sort of life would he have led?’ she whispered.
‘A life,’ he said flatly. ‘Any life. I can’t bear …’
And she couldn’t bear it either. She took his hands and tugged him around to face her.
There was more to this than a child dying, she thought. This man must have lost patients before. He couldn’t react like this to all of them. There was some past tragedy here that was being tapped into, she guessed. She had no idea what it was; but she sensed his pain was well nigh unbearable.
‘I killed him,’ he said, and for some reason she wasn’t sure he was talking about Jessie.
‘The dog killed him,’ she said, trying to sound prosaic. ‘You tried to save him.’
‘I should have—’
‘No. Don’t do this.’
He shuddered, and it was a raw and dreadful grief that took over his whole body.
Enough. She pulled him into her arms and held him. And held and held. She simply held him while the shudders racked his body, over and over.
This couldn’t just be about this child, she thought.
Something had broken him.
He was holding her as well now. Simply holding. Taking strength from her. Taking comfort, and giving it back.
A man and a woman, both in limbo.
The events of the past two days had left Lily gutted. Her mother … The vicar…. Losing her job. The judgement of the town.
The Ellis women.
She held to comfort, but he was holding her as well and she needed it.
Jessie’s death. The trauma of finding what her mother had done, planned to do. Forty-eight hours with little sleep.
If she could give comfort …
If this was what they both needed …
He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be holding this woman.
But he wasn’t thinking of now. He was thinking of Jessie, four years old and red-headed.
The past was back with him. Four years ago, walking into their apartment after surgery that had lasted for fourteen hours. Exhausted but jubilant. Calling out to Hannah. ‘I’m home. It’s over and she’ll live. Hannah …’
Walking into the bedroom
Ectopic pregnancy, the autopsy said. Fourteen weeks pregnant.
By her side, a letter to her mother in Canada.
‘Tonight I’m finally telling Luke I’m pregnant. I’ve been waiting and waiting—I thought a lovely romantic dinner, but there’s no chance. He’s been so busy it’s driving me crazy but now he’ll have to make time for us. I want a son. I’m hoping he’ll be red-headed like me. I want to call him Jessie.’
Tonight, four years later, he hadn’t been able to save a red-headed boy called Jessie.
The woman in his arms was holding him. She smelled clean, washed, anonymous, clinical.
But more. The scent of faded roses was drifting through, like some afterthought of a lovely perfume. The silken threads of her fair hair were brushing his face.
She was an agency nurse. She didn’t know him.
She was warm and real and alive.
He’d come in here to sit, to try and come to terms with what had happened. He had two hours before his morning list started. He needed to get himself under control
Jessie.
Hannah.
They were nothing to do with the woman who was holding him.
She shuddered and he thought, She’s as shocked as I am. He tugged away a little and searched her face.
Her sky-blue eyes were rimmed with shadows. Her shock mirrored his. She looked like she, too, was in the midst of a nightmare.
‘Lily …’ It was the first time he’d used her name and it felt like … a question?
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just hold me. Please.’ And she tugged him back to her.
He should back away.
He didn’t. He couldn’t. He simply held. And held and held.
A man and a woman—with a need surfacing between them as primeval as time itself.
Stupid. Crazy. Wanton?
It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.
His hands were slipping under her blouse, feeling the warmth of her, the heat. He needed her heat.
Her breasts were moulding to his chest. Skin was meeting skin, and conscious will was slipping. Their bodies were meeting, in a desperate, primitive search for …
What?
For life?
That was a crazy idea. He was crazy.
It didn’t matter.
For now, for this moment, he was kissing her, holding her, wanting her, with a desperation that was so deep, so real that nothing could interfere.
They were only kissing. They were only holding. They were only touching.
No. This was much, much more. This was a man and a woman come together in mutual need, giving, taking …
Holding desperately to life.
‘Luke …’
‘Just hold me,’ he ordered, and she did, she did. She held.
Fire to fire. Need to need.
They held—and two minutes later a junior nurse looking for something to read in her coffee break slipped into the room and saw two entwined bodies.
One passionate embrace.
The girl stared, dumbfounded, as she realised who it was. The solitary Luke Williams. Head of Plastic Surgery. A man who walked alone.
Kissing an agency nurse. Slipping his hands under her blouse.
And, oh, that kiss …
She gasped in disbelief and backed out, her magazine forgotten.
Who needed magazines when there was much better fodder right through the door? Boy, was this juicy titbit about to fly around the hospital.
CHAPTER THREE
LILY had signed up for four weeks at Sydney Harbour. That was approximately three weeks and six days too long. She knew it the moment she turned up for duty that night. Gossip reached her the moment she crossed the threshold.
From the lady in the florist shop on the ground floor, to the orderlies, to the nurses and interns working in Emergency where she’d been rostered, it seemed they all knew what had happened that morning.
They didn’t know her—many of them hadn’t even been working last night—but they knew Luke Williams and it seemed the gossip machine was in overdrive.
A mutual offering of comfort had turned to something stronger, and the hospital gossip machine had flamed the story to the next level. Even before she’d walked out this morning she’d realised the news was flying all over the hospital—that she and Luke Williams had indulged in wild sex in the on-call room.
It had taken sheer willpower to walk back into the Harbour tonight—plus the fact that, thanks to her