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It didn't take long before he announced quietly, 'Your cervix has opened to three centimetres.'

'What does that—?'

'Well, not good news, I'm afraid, and the cramping isn't a good sign. Was this your first pregnancy?'

'Yes. And I knew it was too good to be true,' she said bitterly. 'We'd almost given up hope. I'd rather not have got pregnant at all than had that false joy two weeks ago when I did the test, and then this.'

'So you hadn't seen anyone for your antenatal care yet?' Dr Carter clarified gently.

'Not yet,' Jill Lewis answered. 'I'd made an appointment with the antenatal clinic, though. I'll have to cancel it...'

'We'll send you over to Pathology, and they'll take some blood to be tested for the levels of pregnancy hormone, just to make sure.'

'OK.' She nodded, while Dr Carter quickly scrawled on the necessary form. A minute later, he'd left to see the next waiting patient.

'Do I just get dressed now?' Mrs Lewis asked tonelessly.

'You don't have to,' Lucy answered, 'if you'd like to rest a little first. Shall I bring you a cup of tea?'

'Yes, please. I'm sorry I'm upset,' she apologised, and tried to pull herself together.

Lucy wanted to tell her, 'Don't! You needn't be afraid to cry and let it out.' Instead, she just patted Mrs Lewis on the shoulder silently.

'Do you have any children?' Mrs Lewis asked suddenly, just as Lucy was about to leave.

'A daughter. She's five.'

'You don't know how lucky you are.' She began to cry again.

Yes, I do, Lucy thought as she went to get the patient's tea. She swallowed against a lump in her throat and blinked twice as her eyes brimmed. I
do
know exactly how lucky I am!

At eleven there was a lull, and Kerry Anderson, who headed up the nursing side of the team, told her, 'Go over to Personnel
now
before we get busy again and I tell you that you can't. Thanks for jumping in the way you did.'

'It hasn't been hard,' Lucy answered. 'Are you still busy down the far end?'

An ambulance siren at that moment saved Kerry from having to answer the question and both women pulled faces.

'Did you feel that hot north wind this morning?' Kerry said. 'Worst weather for fires. But the change is due through late this afternoon from the south-west, with rain.'

'Thank goodness! Although the season isn't over yet.'

'We're always at the mercy of the climate in this country, aren't we?'

'You don't have to tell me! I'm a farmer's daughter.'

It took two hours to go through all the formalities that Personnel dictated to be necessary, and Lucy was finally free for a late lunch, which she ate quickly in the staff cafeteria, sitting alone as she tried to collate her first impressions. It hadn't been a typical day so far, but the signs were good, and there was that subtle, indefinable sense that the accident and emergency department was a happy one, and ran smoothly.

She wasn't surprised, since it had Malcolm Lambert at its head. He was the kind of man who knew when his staff were happy, and cared if they weren't.

He'd even found time to care today, she found a moment later as his shadow fell over her table and he pulled up a chair to sit down. 'Did Personnel terrorise you with forms?' he asked.

'A bit. And I'd forgotten to bring my tax file number.'

'You bad person!'

'I know. I have a mental block about my tax file number. Would a sensible person commit it to memory?'

'I've asked myself the same question in the past. I can reel off the first three digits of it, but somehow, to people who concern themselves with such things, that's never enough, and they want the whole nine.'

'Good heavens! How petty of them!' she teased.

'I know. Like us boring medical people insisting on knowing
exactly
what prescription medicine someone is taking, not just that it's "something for my heart". But, seriously, no problems so far?'

'None,' she answered him truthfully. 'It's a lovely hospital, isn't it?' she went on, perhaps too quickly. 'The setting, I mean. All surrounded by trees and wild bushland, yet so close to the centre of the city.'

'The only thing I regret about having chosen to work in emergency medicine,' he answered, 'is that A and E departments are always on the ground floor.'

'I think there's a reason for that,' she dared to tease again.

'I know.' He laughed. 'But every now and then I do envy obstetricians and cardiologists and renal specialists, who get to stroll around on the upper floors when they do their rounds and take in that glorious view of the surrounding trees and the mountains to the west through the windows of every ward.'

They'd always been able to talk easily like this, Lucy remembered as he got up to leave a few minutes later. He'd eaten hungrily and fast—she suspected this was breakfast as well as lunch for him today—and hadn't slowed himself down with tea or coffee. He'd insisted that she do so, however, so she had time to think after he'd gone.

Which wasn't, perhaps, a good thing. She thought about
him
, and all those times six years ago when they'd sat quietly together over meals. She realised only now, for the first time, just how strong a foundation they'd laid, during those times, for what had happened afterwards. She realised, too, how little either of them had understood about the danger.

And she wondered if it would have happened if Malcolm hadn't been drinking. She wondered if it would have happened if she'd realised earlier that she'd been in love with him then.

They'd been standing outside Gabrielle's—Ellie's— door. There had been a nightlight plugged into a power outlet in the hall at ankle level, giving the thickly carpeted space a dim golden glow. He'd smelled—not unpleasantly—of the red wine he'd been drinking, and she'd already made a mental note to herself: headache tablets and B vitamins and lots of fluids for him in the morning.

Her heart had ached for him so badly. Perhaps that had been why she hadn't guessed much sooner how she'd truly felt. She'd had such overwhelming reasons for sympathy that she'd thought that was all it had been.

Even standing there, watching in some alarm as he'd lurched against the wall of the corridor to shore himself up and given a hiccup that had been far more like a sob, and feeling her hands literally ache and itch to reach up and smooth the unkempt dark hair from his forehead, or massage the lines of tension and pain from his face, she'd thought of her touch on his skin purely as healing, not as sensual.

She even started to lift her hand. Somehow, they were standing very close. She could have reached him without moving. Did that mean that
she
was the one to initiate what happened? Unconsciously, with just that one tentative and uncompleted gesture?

Because her hand never got as far as his forehead. Instead, a second later, it was crushed between her chest and his as he pulled her desperately into his arms and started to kiss her. Oh, those kisses! Hungry, frantically sensual, trembling, moist, passionate. They swamped her at once, almost threatening to drown her.

She was hardly able to breathe...and then she didn't want to. Even unshaven and smelling of wine as he was, his kisses were like heaven. She'd never been kissed like that before.

Or since.

If she'd had any idea beforehand that he would feel so good, so right, perhaps she'd have been able to summon the strength to resist, or the mental space to work out how wrong and impossible this was. But she hadn't, and there was simply no room in her whirling brain for anything but sensation, wonder and growing physical arousal.

He wasn't a very gentle or patient lover that night. The whole thing plunged along like a runaway horse, swift and unstoppable. Hands everywhere. Sobs of hunger and desperation. Torn fabric. If there was any chance to pause for thought or words or breath then one of them might have been able to call a halt.

She didn't care that he wasn't gentle, though, and he didn't hurt her. He just closed his eyes and disappeared into the same turbulent world of the senses that she was experiencing.

And when it was over, and she was still gasping and pulsing with its aftermath, she didn't pause either. She pulled away from him, too stunned and overwhelmed to touch his heated skin any longer.

She scrambled to her feet and gabbled, 'I'm going to have a shower.'

Which she did in the small
en suite
bathroom that opened off her bedroom, standing under the hot needles of water for a good ten minutes as if this might have the power to wash the clock backwards and undo what she and Malcolm had just done.

How is he going to feel in the morning? she thought over and over again. Just how much is he going to hate himself? And me? How much wine did he have? Enough that he won't remember at all? Oh, please, let it turn out that he doesn't remember! I can live with it, but can he? I must do whatever is necessary so that this doesn't add to everything he already feels about Bronwyn and Gabrielle.

Six years later, and that huge need to protect him, to spare him, hadn't gone away. What it meant now was very simple.

There are only two ways he must think of me—as a nurse, and as Charlotte's mother. And that's how I must think of him, too—the head of the department I'm working in, and the father of my little girl's best friend.

Malcolm
stopped Lucy in the A and E entrance the next afternoon, just as she was leaving.

The promised change had come earlier than expected the day before, and the sense of tense anticipation had subsided. Casualties from the bushfires had been fewer than feared, and the hospital had treated only two cases of serious burns and one of smoke inhalation. Still, there was a lot of fuel around for fires, and the bushfire season was by no means over.

'Thank goodness!' Malcolm said. 'The boss wouldn't have been too happy if I'd had to report I'd just missed you.'

'The boss?' Lucy frowned. Was this some administrative problem delivered from on high, concerning her employment conditions or something?

'Yes.' He grinned. 'The female who makes my life miserable on a daily basis, who dictates everything from what we have for breakfast to the city we live in—Miss Gabrielle Lambert.'

'Oh, of course.' She smiled back. 'I should have realised.'

'That I'm under Ellie's thumb?' he suggested.

'That you're not under the thumb of anyone here.'

'Don't let Kerry Anderson hear you say that. She'll rise to the challenge and prove you wrong.'

'Is Ellie demanding another play-date, then?' Lucy asked, making a deliberate decision to return to the issue at hand. She was wary of the fact that they could bat mildly clever lines back and forth like this so easily. It wasn't what she wanted.

'Worse than that, I'm afraid,' he answered. 'She's salvaged that half-hearted commitment we made on Friday to share a meal, dusted it off and polished it up into a pristine, shining promise.'

'Oh, I was afraid of that...'

'So, for the sake of my life expectancy, I said I'd ask you if you and Charlotte were available tomorrow evening. Charlotte can come home with Ellie and Jenny after school, you'll have a couple of hours to yourself and you can join us at my place at about six-thirty when, with any luck, I'd have been home just about long enough to pretend that I cooked the meal myself.'

Of course, Lucy had to laugh at that and, of course, she had to accept, although he helpfully offered some suggested ways of backing out. 'For example, if you were washing the cat, or taking your hair to the vet, or something.'

'Do you want me to be?' she returned, after another laugh. He hadn't been this funny six years ago. How could he have been? 'If so, I can arrange it, I guess,' she went on. 'Haven't actually
got
a cat, but the RSPCA might oblige.'

'No, I don't want you to be,' he said. 'We may as well let our daughters dictate the pace. There are worse things than being roped into a friendship between two little girls.'

'There are.'

'Then it's agreed. Good. Is Charlotte fussy about her food?'

'Nothing with mushrooms, please. Other than that, just keep it simple.'

'Hamburgers?'

'Perfect!'

They were already sizzling in a pan on his stove when she arrived the next evening.

Malcolm only lived about three kilometres from her own house, in an area that was somewhat more expensive and exclusive but not intimidatingly so. It wasn't where he and Bronwyn had been living six years ago, of course.

His house was set high on a steep block of land, backing onto the wild lower slopes of Black Mountain. Lucy found that she actually had to go under one cantilevered wing of the house, through a lush garden of shade-loving ferns, to reach his front door.

'Isn't it an exciting house, Mummy?' Charlotte whispered after an exuberant hug. 'The garden is just like a jungle. Come and look out this window, then come and see Ellie's room.'

Lucy threw an apologetic glance at Malcolm. 'You have a new hostess, apparently. Charlotte, love, Ellie's dad might not want you showing me his house as if it belongs to you.'

'Actually, it's fine.' He laughed. 'Because I got home a little early today and foolishly attempted a rather ambitious salad. You'll distract me if we get talking, and I'll forget to put something vital in the dressing.'

Somehow, Lucy didn't quite believe that. She'd already witnessed several examples at work over the past three days of Malcolm Lambert's ability to do six things at once. She couldn't imagine that merely two—cooking and talking—would throw him off stride. Perhaps it was an excuse. He'd prefer it if she spent the time until dinner with Ellie and Charlotte, rather than with him.

Did he feel more awkward about this whole situation than he showed, then? At work, she wouldn't have guessed that. But at work, of course, there was far too much else going on.

'Do show me, then, Char,' she said brightly to her daughter, and was taken on a very talkative and very detailed ten-minute tour, picking up Ellie on the way.

'This is Elbe's asthma inhaler, Mummy.'