Meredith Webber - The Spanish Doctor's Convenient Bride

Misery swamped her, providing a partial antidote to the flutters she still felt when she looked at Emmaline’s father.

Get with it, woman, the inner voice ordered, and Marty tried.

‘I should be going,’ she said, standing up, acting positive and in control, but still waiting until his pacing took him away from the door before heading in that direction herself.

Just in case the antidote wasn’t working…

He moved a different way, blocking her path.

‘I’ve kept you from your dinner. Do you have far to go to your home?’

Politeness?

Or did he want more from her?

Positive! In control!

‘Dinner can wait,’ she said lightly, waving her hand in the air in case he hadn’t picked up the nonchalance in her voice. ‘And, no, my home’s not far. Walking distance actually. I live in an apartment by the river in a parkland area called South Bank.’

Explaining too much again, but the antidote wasn’t working—not at all—and the man’s proximity—his body standing so close to hers—was affecting her again, making her feel shaky and uncertain and a lot of other things she hadn’t felt for so long it was hard to believe she was feeling them now.

‘South Bank? The hospital administrator to whom I spoke earlier was kind enough to book me into a hotel at South Bank. You know of this hotel?’

Only because it’s across the road from my apartment building! How’s that for fickle fate?

‘I know it,’ she said cautiously.

‘Then, perhaps you will be so kind as to wait while I collect my backpack then guide me on my way.’

He was a visitor to her country so she could hardly refuse, and to flee in desperate disorder down the corridor might look a tad strange.

‘Where’s your backpack?’

‘It is in the office on the ground floor, behind the desk where people enquire about patients or ask for directions. A kind woman on the desk offered to look after it for me.’

‘Of course she would,’ Marty muttered, then she remembered this man had super-sensitive hearing and was wise to mutterings. She’d better stop doing it forthwith.

‘I’ve got to change so I’ll meet you in the foyer,’ she suggested, leading the way out of Gib’s office and along the corridor to a bank of staff lifts. ‘If you turn left when you come out on the ground floor, you’ll find the information desk without any trouble.’

Positive! In control!

She was moving away, intending to sneak a few minutes in the NICU before changing—not one hundred per cent in control—when his hand touched her shoulder and she froze.

‘Thank you,’ he said, though whether his gratitude was for her directions, her explanations or her kindness to his daughter, Marty had no idea. He’d lifted his hand off her shoulder almost as soon as it had touched down, and then stepped into the lift and disappeared behind the silently closing doors.

They collected his backpack and she led him out of the hospital, into the soft, dark, late January night. Humidity wrapped around them as they walked beneath the vivid bougainvillea that twined above the path through the centre of the park, while the smell of the river wafted through the air.

Usually, this walk was special to Marty, separating as it did her work life from her social life—if going to the occasional concert, learning Mandarin and practising Tae Kwon Do could be called a social life.

But tonight the peace of the walk was disturbed by the company, her body, usually obedient to her demands, behaving badly. It skittered when Carlos brushed his arm against her hip, and nerves leapt beneath her skin when he held her elbow to guide her out of the path of a couple of in-line skaters. If this was attraction, it was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before, and if it wasn’t attraction, then what the hell was it?

She was too healthy for it to be the start of some contagion, but surely too old, not to mention too sensible, to be feeling the lustful urges of an adolescent towards a total stranger.

‘This is my apartment block and your hotel is there, across the road.’

Given how she was reacting to him, it was the sensible thing to do but as she stood there, banishing this tired, bereaved, confused man to the anonymity of a hotel room, she felt a sharp pang of guilt, as if her mother was standing behind her, prodding her with the tip of a carving knife.

‘You’ll be OK?’ she asked, then immediately regretted it. He couldn’t possibly be all right after all he’d been through. But he let her off the hook, nodding acquiescence.

‘I will see you again,’ he said, before shifting the weight of his backpack against his shoulders and crossing the road to the hotel, a tall dark shadow in the streetlights—a man who walked alone.

She turned towards her apartment building, free to mutter now, castigating herself for feeling sorry for him, but also warning him, in his absence, that the ‘seeing you again’ scenario was most unlikely.

Emmaline had a family now—there’d be no need for her to provide that special contact all babies needed. Emmaline’s father was best placed to do this for her and it was up to him to decide where the little one’s future lay.

Her heart might ache as she accepted these truths, but it was time to be sensible and make a clean break from the baby who had sneaked beneath her guard and professionalism, and had wormed her way into her heart.

She rode the lift up to her floor, then opened the apartment door, walking through the darkened rooms to stand on the balcony and look out at the river, reminding herself of all the positives in her life—a job she loved, a great apartment, interests and friends—but neither the river nor her thoughts filled the aching emptiness within her, and she hugged herself tightly as she went back inside to find something for her dinner.

‘I MAY join you?’

Had he been watching for her that she’d barely left her apartment when Carlos appeared by her side? A shiver ran down Marty’s spine, not because he might have been watching but because of the way his voice curled into her ears.

She turned to look at him in daylight—to see if a night’s sleep had softened the hard angles of his face. If anything they were sharper, while the skin beneath his eyes was darkly shadowed. The man looked more strained than he had the previous day.

Not that dark shadows under his eyes made any difference to her internal reaction to the man. Looking at him caused more tremors along her nerves than listening to him.

Determined to hide these wayward reactions, she went for professional.

‘Didn’t sleep much?’ she diagnosed, and saw a flicker of a smile.

‘The hotel is comfortable, but there was much to think about, and air-conditioned air—how do people sleep in it?’

Marty took it as a rhetorical question and didn’t try to explain that for a lot of people it was the only way they could sleep in the hot, humid summer.

The major question was, why was he here?

Had his sleepless night convinced him of his responsibilities?

Could he be interested enough in his daughter to be visiting her at seven in the morning?

‘You’re going to the hospital?’

‘I am.’

Maybe everything would work out for Emmaline! But Marty had barely registered her delight for the baby when he squelched it with his next statement.

‘I arranged things when I spoke to the administrator. For the next month I will be working there. Not for money, but for useful things to take back with me—equipment the hospital no longer uses because it has been superseded. No equipment is too old-fashioned for us as long as it works.’

The information about the equipment was interesting and she’d have liked to ask what kind of things he found most useful, knowing there were store-cupboards full of obstetrics gear that no one ever used tucked away at the hospital.

But something he’d said at the beginning of the conversation needed following up before she started donating old bedpans.

‘Working at the hospital? I’m sure if you asked they’d give you whatever they didn’t need anyway, so why would you want to work? Haven’t you heard of holidays?’

And shouldn’t you be spending your time getting to know your daughter—making arrangements for her care?

‘I try to work at other hospitals whenever I’m on leave, but not only in the hope of getting some useful equipment. My specialty is surgery and I have plenty of accident experience but there is always a time when I realise how little I know and when I wish I’d learnt more of other specialties. Your own field, obstetrics, is one of my weaknesses. Oh, I can do the basics but in Sudan I’m not needed for basics. There, the women look after each other and have good midwives, so mainly I’m needed for emergencies and this is where I fail my patients.’

‘You can hardly be held responsible for failing patients with complicated obstetrics problems,’ Marty told him. ‘Even obstetricians do that at times.’

‘I should know more,’ he said, refusing her excuses. ‘So, at the hospital I will work in the A and E Department and take the obstetrics patients, assisting, of course, a specialist such as yourself.’

Great! Flickering along her nerves she could put up with if it only happened occasionally, and was time-limited—like for a day or two! But a month? When he’d be around all the time?

Maybe she’d get over it.

She sneaked a look towards him, catching his profile as he turned to watch a pelican skid to a landing on the river’s surface, and knew she probably wouldn’t get over it. Whatever was happening inside her body was getting worse, not better, which was weird to say the least, because she wasn’t sure she even liked the man.

‘And Emmaline?’ she asked, knowing if anything was going to put her off him, his attitude to his child surely would.

‘I will have a month to think about the situation. As you said, the doctors want to keep her in for another fortnight, so the need to do something isn’t urgent. At the moment—well, at the moment I don’t know.’

His voice told her the subject was closed, but this was Emmaline, so as far as Marty was concerned it had to be reopened.

‘Don’t know if you want her, or don’t know what to do with her?’ she persisted.

‘How could I want her? I knew nothing of her existence! And a baby—it is impossible to fit a baby in my life. But she is my responsibility and I will make such arrangements as I see fit!’

‘She’s a child, not a responsibility!’ Marty muttered, forgetting that muttering was out.

And he did hear her, for he turned towards her, his face harsh with anger.

‘You are wrong, Marty Cox, and you are allowing emotion to cloud your thinking. A child must be the greatest responsibility a person can have.’

‘You’re right as far as that goes,’ Marty conceded, ‘but surely a child is a responsibility that should be considered with love, not just as a duty. Emotion has to come into it.’

‘Never!’ he argued, his deep voice rolling out the word with such certainty Marty frowned at him. ‘Emotion clouds too many issues—it makes us stupid, that’s what emotion does. A parent would be neglectful if he allowed emotion to sway the decisions or arrangements he makes for his child. He would be irresponsible.’

Was that true?

Should emotion be set aside in responsible decision-making?

Surely not, when how you feel about something at a gut level should always count in a decision. And wasn’t gut-level thinking emotion?

But, then, how could she, who had no child, argue that point?