Summer in Sydney. Fiona McArthur
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too.’
It was a shame he didn’t have a steak because he’d have loved to stick his knife into it, because he could suddenly well remember the great Gregory Carmichael, holding court in the theatre, throwing instruments if a nurse was a beat too late in anticipating his needs. He remembered too how he had regaled his audience as he’d worked with the dramas in his home life, the wild teenager who answered back and did everything, it would seem, any normal teenager would, just not a teenager of Gregory’s, because, as he told his colleagues, he was once and for all going to sort her out.
‘What does he say about you doing nursing?’
‘He doesn’t like it, especially that I want to go into mental health. I used to work in a little shop on the beach, selling New-Age stuff …’
‘He’d have hated that.’
‘Not really,’ Ruby said. ‘They had no problem with me working at the shop, they gave me an allowance as well.’
‘It’s nice that they can.’
‘It’s all or nothing with them. I had to follow in his grand footsteps or have a little job while I waited for a suitable Mr Right. A psychiatric nurse isn’t something he wants me doing.’
‘Are you talking?’
‘Of course,’ Ruby said. ‘We didn’t fall out or anything. We talk, just not about what I do.’
‘So I’m guessing you can’t discuss with him the problems you’re having.’
She gave a tight shake of her head.
‘What about your mum?’
‘She’ll just say I should have listened to my father in the first place.’
‘What if I keep an eye out for you.’
‘How?’ Ruby said, because she knew it was impossible. ‘Can you imagine Siobhan if she gets so much as a sniff …?’
‘Why don’t you tell your friends?’ Cort suggested. ‘And you’ve got Sheila having a think … Don’t give it up, Ruby.’
They didn’t talk about it again, not till his car was approaching the turn for Hill Street.
‘Drive me down to the beach.’
‘It’s time to go home, Ruby.’
‘It’s two hundred metres,’ Ruby said, but she knew it wasn’t going to happen. He was a senior registrar and didn’t park his car by the beach like some newly licensed teenager, so he took her home instead.
‘Are you going to come in?’
‘No,’ Cort said, and his face was the same but had she looked at his hands she would have seen that they were clenched around the wheel.
‘Please,’ Ruby said, because, well, she wanted him to.
‘I’m not going into work in these trousers again,’ Cort said, because he knew she wasn’t asking him in for coffee. He thought of her room and the little slice of heaven they’d shared there last night, and then he told the truth, because aside from work, aside from the age difference, a relationship between them was the last thing he could consider now. There was so much hurt, so much blackness in his soul, he couldn’t darken such a lovely young thing with it. ‘We’d never work.’ He turned to her.
‘I know,’ Ruby said, because, well, they couldn’t. ‘You’re going to stop for a burger on the way home, aren’t you?’
‘Probably.’ Still he looked at her. ‘Are you going to go in tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ruby admitted.
‘Try talking to your friends,’ Cort said. ‘You don’t always have to be the happy one.’ He saw her rapid blink. ‘If they’re real friends—’
‘They are,’ she interrupted.
‘Then you can turn to them. Go on in,’ he said.
‘Don’t I get a kiss?’
‘Ruby, please …’
‘One kiss,’ Ruby said. ‘Just one …’ And she made him smile. Not a big grin, but there was lightness where there had been none. ‘Then you can go back to ignoring me.’
‘I’m ignoring you now,’ Cort said, and went to turn on the engine.
‘Just a kiss on the cheek.’ Ruby’s hand stopped him. ‘End it as friends.’
He leant over and went to give her a peck, just to shut her up perhaps, but his lips had less control than he did and they lingered there. He felt her skin and her breath and she felt his, felt the press of his mouth on her cheek and then his lips part and he kissed her skin, traced her cheek with his mouth and traced it again. He held her hair and then removed his mouth and kissed her other cheek till she was trembling inside and her mouth was searching his cheek. If her friends were kneeling up on the sofa, watching, they might wonder why they were licking cheeks like two cats, but it was their kiss and their magic and she wanted his mouth so badly that torture was bliss.
‘‘Night, then,’ Ruby breathed, and she turned to go then heard the delicious clunk of four locking car doors. She turned to him, to the reward of his mouth and a proper goodnight kiss.
And as it ended, he did the strangest, nicest thing. He pulled down her top just a little, and kissed the top of her chest, just above her breast but not on it, he really kissed that little area, so hard and so deep that as she pressed into the seat, as her hands buried themselves in his hair, she thought she might come, and then he lifted his head to hers.
‘I missed that bit last time,’ Cort said, and it would be so easy to accept the invitation in her eyes, to follow every instinct and step inside, except their one night together would turn into two and that was more than Cort was ready for.
‘Now, you really had better go.’
‘I had,’ Ruby said, because getting involved with the senior registrar of the department she was struggling so much in wasn’t the most sensible mix.
Sensible.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this,’ Ruby mused. ‘I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be this good.’
Cort gave a very wry smile. ‘You make a terrible one-night stand,’ he said, and it was very much a compliment, because she was more in his head than she was supposed to be.
‘So do you,’ Ruby said.
And that was that.
It had to be.
‘THAT was too much, Sheila.’ Cort looked at the NUM as Ruby walked out.
‘We can’t choose our patients,’ Sheila responded. ‘I can’t hand-pick what comes through the doors so that it doesn’t upset Ruby Carmichael.’
Cort hesitated, but just for a moment. Her surname was not the point, or the fact he might have slept with a good friend’s little sister last night.
The point was, if he said anything, he’d say way too much, and right now he had a grieving family to deal with.
‘Later,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’
He did.
Perhaps Sunday afternoon wasn’t the best time to do it, especially not with the day that they’d had, but by that time he should have been home hours ago. Cort was seething—not that anyone would really notice, he wasn’t the most sunny person at the best of times, but when his office door closed on Sheila there was no doubting