A Mother for Matilda (5 page)

L
AWSON
woke to a finger lifting his eyelid. ‘Daddy, why are you sleeping on the couch?’

Considering he’d not long closed it, Lawson almost groaned out loud. ‘Morning, Tilly.’ It took a superhuman effort but he managed to force the other one open. He glanced at the clock. Three minutes to six. This time he did groan.

Why couldn’t his daughter have been one of those kids that he’d heard mothers talking about at school? The ones that required a crowbar to lever them from their beds?

‘Did you fall asleep watching TV?’

Lawson sat up. His chest was bare and he’d undone the top two buttons of his fly. He rubbed his hands across his face. ‘No, Victoria is sleeping in my bed.’

Matilda’s face lit up like Guy Fawkes Night. ‘Vic’s here?’ She jumped up and down clapping, making little happy noises at the back of her throat.

He winced as her excited reaction bordered on a squeal. ‘Shh.’ He placed his fingers on Matilda’s lips. ‘She’s…not well.’

‘Can I go wake her up, Daddy?’

‘No, you may not.’ He ruffled his daughter’s blonde curls, the only thing she’d inherited from her mother. The rest was all him. ‘She had a big day yesterday with Ryan. She needs her sleep.’

Matilda’s enthusiasm waned. ‘Will she be awake before I leave for school?’

Lawson prised himself out of the lounge and stretched his back out as he rose. ‘I doubt it.’ If she was anywhere near as tired as he’d been last night, as he was right now, she’d probably be in his bed all week. His thoughts drifted to her innocent sort-of kiss last night before he could put it firmly from his mind.

‘Phooey.’ Matilda pouted. ‘I wanted to ask her how many more sleeps it is.’

‘Eighty-nine.’ The answer fell from his lips automatically. He’d been privy to the countdown for the past twelve months. It was as if the numbers had been engraved on his soul.

Matilda put her skinny arms around her father’s waist. ‘I’m going to miss her, Daddy.’

Lawson smiled down at his daughter. ‘We all will, Tilly.’ He hugged her for a moment, his mind drifting to
that
kiss again. That non-kiss kiss. Or whatever the hell it was. ‘Come on, let’s get breakfast.’

For the next couple of hours he and Matilda went about their usual morning routine. Not that there was anything usual about it with Victoria sleeping soundly in his bed the entire time. He’d tried to keep Tilly’s noise to a minimum but sometimes that was like trying to keep a wave on the sand. Especially when his daughter’s motives weren’t exactly pure. Despite Tilly’s best efforts, Victoria kept sleeping.

When it came time to take Matilda to school he picked up his shirt where he’d discarded it last night, right next to Victoria’s shoes, and threw it back on. It was creased but it wasn’t as if he had to get out of the car and it beat the alternative—tiptoeing into his room to retrieve a fresh one.

Tilly chatted non-stop on the drive to school about her teacher and her spelling and the excursion coming up in a few weeks’ time. She reminded him of Victoria, who also seemed to think silences were there to be filled.

‘Have you got the tuck-shop bags I did up for you?’ he asked.

Matilda nodded. ‘And the excursion forms. Don’t forget to ask Vic’s dad for some time off next week to come and see me play my recorder at assembly.’

Lawson nodded. He handed her the library book that had been due back yesterday and he’d turned the house upside down looking for after they’d got back from the hospital, finally locating it in the hammock outside.

‘Can Maddy come over this afternoon? We’re doing our pirate project together and she doesn’t have any Internet at her house.’

Lawson groaned inwardly. He was so tired he could sleep for a week. The last thing he wanted was the presence of giggling Maddy. ‘Sure. I’ll check with her mum before pick-up this afternoon. I think her number’s on the phone tree on the fridge.’

He pulled into the set-down zone in front of the school and Tilly kissed his cheek. ‘You’re the best.’

Lawson chuckled. ‘Yeah, yeah. Get out of here.’

He watched as she met up with Maddy and they skipped into the grounds without a care in the world.

He couldn’t believe how eight years had flown by as if they’d been mere seconds. He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on his daughter. She’d been wrapped in a little pink bundle. Everything about her had been pink, from her booties to the tiny pink bow in her hair. She’d been two weeks old when Deb had handed her over and said
I can’t do this.

He remembered looking at Deb, whom he’d slept with on only a handful of occasions several months prior, as if she’d gone mad as she’d thrust the pink package at him, trying to compute what she was saying. That their liaison had yielded a child. That her baby was his baby. That he was a father. And it was up to him.

But it had only taken an instant for Matilda to totally capture his heart. One glimpse at her little bow mouth and tiny pink nose and he’d been a complete goner. In one glance Matilda had become his everything. And he wouldn’t have traded the steep learning curve, the single-father juggling act, the sleepless nights or giggling Maddy for anything.

Matilda turned before she disappeared from sight completely and gave her father another wave. He smiled, returning it, her cheeky grin pulling at his heart-strings. A short toot of a horn behind him reminded him he’d lingered too long in the drop-and-go zone and he pulled out.

He smiled to himself as he rejoined the traffic, proud and relieved that his little girl was a happy, carefree child. Heading home now to Victoria, he was very conscious of the fact that at eight years old, the same age as Matilda, Victoria had lost her mother and had become default mother to her newborn twin brothers.

He and Bob had been partners when it had happened and he still remembered with chilling clarity the devastation of that time for both Bob and Victoria. Tilly might never have known her mother, and he had no doubt that she might go through a stage where that affected her more deeply than it did now, but being motherless was all she’d ever known.

He would do anything, whatever it took, to protect his daughter from the kind of devastation Victoria had faced. Which was one of the reasons he’d chosen to eschew any involvements in the last eight years. He’d never risk Tilly’s heart—which was huge and generous and tender—on something that might not work out.

Victoria’s tear-stained face at her mother’s funeral was too potent a reminder. While he could still draw breath, he would inoculate his daughter against life’s rocky road. Because he loved his little girl more than he’d ever thought possible to love another human being.

And because that was what fathers did. The good ones, anyway.

Lawson pulled into the driveway ten minutes later. Victoria’s car was still parked on the street. The house was stuffy, already warm from the early heat of the day. There was silence. No evidence that Victoria had risen while he’d been gone. His door was still closed; there was no extra coffee mug in the sink.

He yawned, still dog-tired from his sleepless night trying not to think about the kiss and Victoria all-but-naked in his bed. Telling himself it was wrong to think about his partner like that unfortunately hadn’t helped and it hadn’t been until exhaustion had finally overcome him at dawn that he’d slept.

He’d like nothing more than to go back to bed for a few hours in his dark, cool room. Maybe even sleep until it was time to pick Tilly up from school. But, as that wasn’t possible and he hung over the edge of Matilda’s bed, the couch was his only option.

Lucky he was too tired to care about the light and the air-conditioner would take care of the heat. He pulled his shirt off again and dropped it on the floor near Victoria’s shoes. He undid his top couple of fly buttons, flicked the air-con on with the remote and collapsed onto the lounge. Blissfully, sleep pulled him under immediately.

Vic woke slowly, momentarily disorientated by the gloom. Then she remembered. She was in Lawson’s bed. She gave a half-laugh. How many times had she fantasised about that over the years?

She turned her head—nope, he wasn’t there beside her. Her gaze fell instead on the red digital numbers of his bedside clock. Ten-thirty.

‘Crap.’ Vic vaulted upright. Ryan. She should have been at the hospital by now. Why the hell had Lawson let her sleep so late?

She stumbled out of bed and reached for the blind, inching it up a little so she could see what she was doing. She found her clothes and threw them on. She had to go home, ring her father, have a shower, change into fresh clothes and get to the hospital.

Vic bolted out the door wondering where her bag and shoes were and desperately needing coffee but knowing she didn’t have time to linger. Her head swivelled from side to side—where had she left her things?

She headed for the lounge room, rounded the couch and
pulled up short. A bare-chested Lawson lay passed out on the three-seater. She froze for a moment, hoping she hadn’t woken him. And then, with the very distracting sight of all that skin goading her, she let her breath out slowly and allowed her gaze to wander over all his maleness.

He truly was a magnificent specimen of man. Tall and broad-shouldered. Well-formed pectorals segueing into the bony ridges of his ribcage, rising and falling with each deep, measured breath. Further down the hard muscularity of perfect abdominals were very easy on the eye. His thighs, hugged by denim, were bulky, strong, his hips lean, his legs long.

One hand rested on a muscular thigh, the other arm flung above his head was bent at the elbow, his forearm covering his eyes and half his face. She noticed the soft hair under his arm was the same that surrounded his flat male nipples, dusted his stomach and narrowed towards his waistband.

His half-open fly caught her attention and, involuntarily, she rose up on her tiptoes and angled her head to see if she could ascertain whether he was commando beneath the denim. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough revealed to tell and she lowered her heels back to the floor extraordinarily disappointed.

Still, as she took him all in once again a surge of feminine appreciation rippled from somewhere in the vicinity of her womb and flushed through her system like a shot of vodka on an empty stomach. Her nipples were painfully hard and she actually felt her pelvic floor contract.

There was something almost primal about the way he affected her. His body, even relaxed in sleep, oozed
virility. It said,
I’m strong, tough, capable. I am man.
And tens of thousands of years of evolution and a hundred years of feminism were wiped out in the blink of an eye.

He turned his head slightly and she froze again. His face was now angled towards her, his lips nuzzling the fat pillow of bicep covering his eyes.

Frantic signals from her brain flashed multicoloured warnings.
Stop ogling shamelessly and get out of here!

Finally sense made it through to her muscles and she dragged her gaze away from him to search the floor for her shoes. They were beside the sofa and she crouched to retrieve them.

But that just brought her closer to him and when she turned her head his face was right there. Even covered with his arm it was obviously a man’s face. Craggy and interesting—lived in. His scar-ravaged lips were a testimony to this.

A shard of a memory pierced her consciousness and the scene from last night, kissing his scar, came crashing back in full Technicolor detail. She pressed her finger to her mouth as the memory of his stubble grazing her lips tingled as if it had just happened.

She shut her eyes.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
. What must he have thought?

But even in the cold light of day, his lips within reaching distance, the temptation to do it again was a living, breathing animal inside her. She opened her eyes. His lips were slack, slightly parted, and for a fleeting second her hand actually crept towards him.

Then she caught herself. In eighty-nine days she was out of here. She’d kept her crush secret for five years—
she could certainly go the next few months without blowing it.

Steadfastly ignoring Lawson and his mouth, she scooped up her shoes and got the hell out of the house.

A few days later, on their first day shift back from nights, Lawson and Vic were sitting at the station when their pagers activated. They’d not long returned from transporting a dislocated finger from a rather vigorous game of lawn bowls to the mainland and Vic had taken her first sip of coffee.

‘“Near drowning at Wattle Beach,”’ Lawson read. ‘“Twenty-year-old male.”’

Vic looked at her coffee longingly, took another sip and stood. ‘We’d better take the four-wheel drive.’

The island had three ambulances. Two were standard vans and were the transport of choice on a daily basis. The other was a heavy-duty vehicle expressly used for beach jobs because it allowed them to drive on sand directly to the patient. It stayed at the station ready to go if needed.

Vic opened the driver’s seat door. It was her turn today to be Patient Care Officer, which would normally mean he would drive, but on cases like this, with Lawson’s intensive care stripes, she happily yielded to his superior experience.

She didn’t need to consult with him. It was natural, unspoken between them. The patient might need intubating, a procedure she wasn’t yet qualified to perform, so Lawson was the best paramedic for the job.

In a precisely executed manoeuvre she swung up into the cab. Her short legs made the seat a long way up
and she often felt as if she were doing some sort of modified pole-vault routine. She reached under the seat for the lever and hauled it forward. With the twist of her wrist the engine started with a roar, chugging diesel fumes into the ambulance bay, and she inched the vehicle out.

Lawson pushed the responding button on the vehicle computer system to alert the coms centre to their departure and they were off.

‘Do you suppose it’s a tourist?’ Vic asked as she flipped on the siren.

She’d grown up in this small island community and the downside of being a paramedic here was that, too often, she knew the people she was sent to help. Which was one thing she was looking forward to about her upcoming move to London—in eighty-five sleeps—total anonymity.