Midwife in the Family Way. Fiona McArthur
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Maria’s death, but that was in the past and another tragedy—though one without a good result. ‘I fear so.’ His voice lowered as the memories returned. Memories he had to banish every time he was confronted with a similar event. ‘Lying there, unable to move, barely able to breathe as I listened to those around me grow silent, made me swear that life was too precious to waste.’
He shook away the memories and forced himself to smile at her, ‘But enough of me. You say you are a midwife. Have you always wished that? Like your little Grace has told me she has?’
‘Some of the best people I know are midwives.’ She grinned at him. Daring him to dispute a fact he knew little about. He had not known any midwives well enough to judge but he knew he liked this one.
‘Like Montana and Mia and Misty.’ She gestured with her hand at the colourful throng of people she worked with at Lyrebird Lake. ‘Wise women and wonderful friends,’ she went on. ‘Like them, I consider my work a privilege.’
He understood that but it was rare for a person to say it. ‘As I do mine.’ He shrugged. ‘So now we can be happy we have worthwhile lives, though I fear I may be a trifle too focussed on the excuse not to lead a more facetted life.’ He grimaced in self-mockery. ‘And what do you do for yourself, Emma?’
She glanced around for her daughter. ‘I am also a mother.’
He smiled down at her perplexed frown. ‘A mother, yes, and a good one, I think. And for Emma—the woman?’
She narrowed her eyes at him and declined to answer, preferring to fire it back at him. ‘What do you do for the man, Gianni?’
Someone called out to her and she looked away. And then she smiled at him and was gone. He watched her go. Couldn’t not watch her. An intriguing and magnetic woman he hadn’t expected to meet. But his life would never change.
Chapter Two
TWO hours later Emma found herself looking around for Gianni.
He would be gone tomorrow, which was as well because the fascination inside her seemed to revel in every brooding glance he sent her way. There was an escalating excitement in her stomach unlike anything she’d felt before, and as she checked on her daughter, she realised that she missed seeing Gianni in her peripheral vision.
She needed to remember he’d go back to the drama and tension of emergency rescue with the international taskforce that Angus had retired from five years ago and she’d go back to her work.
But her mind wasn’t ready to relegate Gianni to a past experience. And she rearranged the knowledge she had in her brain and teased at it as if she could glean more.
So Angus had dragged the barely conscious Italian from the rubble and inspired him. Well, it had certainly sparked an unlikely friendship between the two men. And there was at least a ten-year gap in their ages.
Where had she been ten years ago when that had happened?
At school certainly. Not a teen mother yet. Her own mother still well and oblivious to the cloud that would destroy her life and cast a shadow over her family. But she wouldn’t go there.
When this Italian intruder was gone, Emma would go back to life in Lyrebird Lake as if he’d never been, which was a good thing.
Ah. There he was. She found him talking to Angus and as if he’d felt her gaze he looked up. For a moment their eyes held and then Angus said something else and Gianni looked away. Hurriedly she walked on and berated herself for being drawn to him. But what could a girl do when she found herself so aware of a man?
Since their first conversation, whenever she’d moved to another group to talk, shortly afterwards he too would arrive to join the circle and always that thrum of awareness rumbled between them. He’d seemed no more than a few steps away from her all afternoon, despite the fact he barely spoke to her. She sifted through everything Angus had told her as she waited for him to come to her again. Strange how she knew he would.
‘So you’ll be gone tomorrow,’ she said without preamble when he appeared to stand beside her.
‘That is true.’
A tennis ball from the cricket game rolled to her feet like a faceless yellow bird and she picked it up and tossed it back to the bowler, glad of the distraction while she bolstered up her courage. ‘It’s a shame you can’t stay a while and see more of the area around Lyrebird Lake.’
His glance swept over her. ‘If I had known it would be so beautiful here I would not have made plans.’ He smiled. ‘Would you have shown me around, Emma?’
She could have found a little time. If he was that attracted to the place, why leave so quickly? ‘Perhaps. And your plans can’t be changed?’
He gestured fatalistically with his hands and she had to smile at the pure Mediterranean gesture. ‘I go to see my brother. It is arranged. We haven’t spoken in years. It is time.’
More snippets of the man. ‘Did you fall out? Is he married?’
‘Such questions.’ But he smiled as he said it. ‘He too has lost his wife now, so the reason for our disagreement is past.’ That sounded even more intriguing and just a little tough on the poor wife, but she hesitated to persist. She was glad she hadn’t offended him with her inquisitiveness.
But everything about him spoke of a different culture, a different life experience, and sometimes she despaired of ever experiencing a world away from Lyrebird Lake. She’d begun to think that she’d pinned her lack of experience of the world onto Gianni’s multiculturalism and that was what was drawing her to him. It was as good a reason as any.
Maybe it was the fact that he was going that gave her permission to try and peer into that other world. She couldn’t ever remember being so fascinated by a man as this Gianni. ‘Tell me what it was like, growing up in Italy. Tell me about your parents.’
She suddenly realised how bold that sounded. ‘I’m not normally nosy. But you intrigue me.’ She frowned at herself and shook her head again. ‘Please don’t answer if you prefer not to.’
He smiled sardonically and raised his impossibly black eyebrows. ‘And if I don’t, will you walk away?’
She almost said maybe, and then corrected herself. She had never been a coquette. Why lie? She smiled. ‘Of course not.’ He was too compelling.
He shrugged his impossibly broad shoulders as if to say he couldn’t imagine why she would be interested but he would humour her. ‘Then I will tell you a little. My parents were both doctors but died in a boating accident when I was a teenager. I was held above the water, unconscious, by my brother until help came.’
‘That must have been heartbreaking for two teenage boys.’
He nodded. ‘If I had not hit my head, perhaps we could have saved them both, but that is all in the past.’ The bleakness was back in his eyes and she’d wished she could retract her question about his parents. Not all of those memories were in the past. She resisted the urge to touch his shoulder in sympathy.
But he went on, almost as if he too was aware time was running out for both of them. ‘Leon, older by two years than I, runs the Bonmarito Private Hospitals in Rome. In our family it is our custom for the sons to attend medical school and then marry the wife chosen by the family.’
She couldn’t imagine being married to a man she barely knew, especially one as blatantly masculine as this man, but bizarrely she had no problem picturing the scenario.
‘So you and Leon did that? Yours was an arranged marriage?’ When he nodded she shook her head. What must his wife have thought as he’d approached the marriage bed? Or had she been glad he had been young and handsome?
‘Si. And no prospect of divorce if it didn’t work in the beginning.’ He watched her shock with a flicker of sardonic amusement. Even at her expense, she was glad to see him lighten his mood a little. ‘The statistics for good