The Baby Gift. Alison Roberts
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A job when no one died or got maimed for life. The way through feeling like that was to talk about it, of course. He knew that. Debriefing was ingrained in anyone who worked in careers that dealt with this kind of trauma and degree of human suffering. It was a part of the job, really, to analyse everything that had happened. To take a quiet pride in things that had been done well and to learn from anything else so they could go out and do an even better job next time.
But he couldn’t talk to Julia about this. Not yet. Not when he’d been blindsided by memories and could see danger signs a mile high. Signs that warned him how easy it would be to fall in love with this woman. Hell, he was already quite a way down that track and hadn’t even noticed.
He couldn’t afford to let her anywhere near him right now, when the scab over that failure had been ripped off and he was feeling raw. Vulnerable, even, and Alan MacCulloch didn’t do vulnerable, thanks very much. Imagine if she wasn’t unimpressed with his history. If she accepted him, warts and all. He’d fall. Hard. In a way he’d managed to avoid for a whole decade. Nearly a quarter of his life, come to think of it.
She didn’t want that.
Neither did he.
Julia was looking at him. He could feel it. He could sense her concern, like a gust of warmth crossing the gap on the back seat in the back of this vehicle. She wanted to offer comfort but Mac didn’t want that either. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.
Well after midnight, they got back to the outskirts of Glasgow and the station they shared with a road-based ambulance service. They collected their packs from the back of the truck.
‘Cheers, mate,’ Julia said to the soldier who’d been their chauffeur. ‘Hope you get to go back to base and get some shuteye now.’
‘Not a chance.’ The young soldier grinned. ‘I’ve got to get back to the scene. We’ll be there until it’s all cleaned up.’
Cleaning up was exactly what he and Julia needed to do. Mac picked up his pack and swung it onto his back. From the corner of his eye he could see Julia struggling to do the same. She was so tired she could barely stay upright, poor thing. The urge to look after her was far too strong to ignore.
‘Here,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll take them. You go and hit the showers.’
‘No, thanks.’ The tone was cool. ‘I can manage.’
She gave up on lifting the pack to her back and just held it in her arms instead, turning away without a glance in his direction.
It was a slap he deserved so he had no right to feel hurt. Julia had done nothing wrong and hadn’t deserved to be treated the way he had treated her. God, how selfish had he been? Maybe she’d been the one who needed the debrief. Praise, if nothing else, for her extraordinary courage and endurance.
He’d made a mistake. A big one. How hard would it have been to talk about the job like they always did? Made a few jokes, even. The kind of black humour that diffused the dark space they were all in danger of slipping into with this kind of job. He could have made her smile and that would have made him smile and feel good. She would never have guessed that he’d been thinking of anything other than work.
He’d been stupid as well as selfish. Not only had he created an uncomfortable distance between himself and his partner, it had been the worst defence possible for himself. He’d had nothing to do but think for nearly two hours. Sitting there being so aware of the woman sitting beside him. Wanting her and pushing her away simultaneously.
God, he’d never felt this tired. Exhaustion was becoming confusion. A long, hot shower was what he needed and then he’d head home. Maybe it was better not to say anything more to Jules tonight in an attempt to put things right because, the way he was feeling, he would most likely make things worse. They were due for two days off now. By the time they had to see each other again, she might have forgotten his moodiness or at least forgiven his silence. They could just go back and pick up where they’d left off.
Being colleagues who respected and cared about each other. Julia had called the soldier ‘mate’ and it was what she often called him as well. That’s what they were. Mates. Comrades. Not quite friends because that implied something a lot more personal than they had. Dangerous territory.
The decision to leave things was a relief. The shower and change into warm, dry civvies was a comfort. Mac signed himself out and noted Julia’s signature already in the logbook. She’d left before him and that was good.
Or was it?
And why was her car still in the parking lot at the back of the station?
Maybe she’d gone into the messroom to talk to the crew on night shift. Mac battled, briefly, with the desire to retrace his footsteps and find her but solved the problem by turning towards his own vehicle—a hefty, black four-wheel drive that filled his allocated space. Overflowed from it, in fact, despite him nosing it in until the front bumper virtually touched the moss of the old stone wall surrounding this area. There were trees on the other side of the wall. Big, dark shapes that created such intense shadows he didn’t see Julia until he was about to pull his driver’s door open.
She was sitting on the wall. Wrapped up in a padded anorak and mittens. Waiting for him.
‘What the—?’
Julia jumped down. Her hood fell away and she wrapped her arms around her body as she took a step forward. And then another. Until she was close enough for him to see that her hair was still damp despite the protection the hood had given her from the drizzle. Close enough for him to smell the shampoo she’d just been using.
‘I couldn’t go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Not without knowing what rattled your cage so much tonight.’ Her gaze caught his and held it. ‘Was it something I did?’
‘Good grief, no!’ Mac was transfixed. By the smell of…what was it? A mixture of soap and…almonds, that’s what it was. Even more by the warmth he could feel radiating off this small, determined woman. Most of all, by the way her eyes seemed to catch the glow from the lights behind him in the parking lot. He knew her eyes were blue but right now they were just huge and dark and full of concern.
‘It…it was the job,’ he told her. ‘It…got to me.’
‘Of course it did.’ A tiny nod advertised that Julia had already come to that conclusion. ‘There’d be something wrong if it didn’t.’ She frowned now, glancing down and lowering her voice. ‘But why couldn’t you talk about it? Like we always do?’
Mac opened his mouth to offer the same excuse of exhaustion. Or to say he’d been asleep but it was obvious she knew he would be lying. She was looking up at him again and he could see plainly that she knew he hadn’t been asleep. She’d seen through him in the truck and she was seeing through him now. Right into his head. Into his heart. There was no escape and, suddenly, Mac didn’t want to find one.
‘That woman,’ he heard himself saying. ‘She…reminded me of someone.’
‘Ahh.’ The sound was long. It contained complete understanding that there was—or had been—a woman of great importance in his life. Far more important than herself.
Mac could actually see the thought process going on in the way she was standing so still she wasn’t even blinking. The almost imperceptible backing away he could sense. The way her lips were parted a fraction as her mind worked.
And that slight parting of her lips was Mac’s complete undoing.
She was so wrong to put herself down in any way but that was exactly what she was doing. She was convincing herself that she had been dismissed in favour of the woman he’d been thinking about. That she was somehow less worthy of his attention. So wrong, and there was only one way he could think to prove it as soon as he noticed her lips.
He had to kiss her.
She could have stopped him. Time seemed to slow down to a crawl. He looked at her mouth and then back to her eyes and he could see that she knew