The Nurse's Special Delivery Read online

  In hindsight, they’d had a bad run of Christmases all round.

  But for the first time in a long time she didn’t well up at the thought of Michael missing another one. Sure, sadness still came in waves, but she knew now that no amount of wishing was going to bring him back. She had to move on. She’d never forget him, but she was going to make the most of every day.

  Cal was watching her as she hung the bauble up.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, his voice quiet and concerned, but loud enough that she could still hear him over someone dreaming of a white Christmas. The lights twinkled on the tree and she wondered if Michael was looking down from somewhere and whether he was happy she’d found Cal, even for a few weeks, or whether he’d be disappointed, or sad. And then the tears did threaten.

  Make the most of every day.

  ‘Yes. Surprisingly. I am. I’m fine. Thank you for doing this. It’s lovely.’ Fine, but she didn’t want to dwell on things. She also wasn’t sure whether she wanted to walk into his arms to hold him, one last time, and what kind of reaction she’d get if she did. So she held back, even though every atom in her body was tugging towards him. ‘What kind of Christmas will you be having back home?’

  He shrugged. ‘Knowing Finn there’ll be a lot of booze; we usually go to our neighbours’ house for turkey and the trimmings. We’ve known them all our lives.’

  ‘What about your parents? Won’t they be around?’

  ‘Mam died a couple of years ago, just before the accident, thank God, because she’d have been so upset by that. She had a bad stroke and never recovered. Dad left us years before that. We don’t see him. Don’t even know where he is.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’ So they had no family close to support them. No doubt that was why he took the job of looking after his brother so seriously. There wasn’t anyone else to do it.

  ‘It is how it is. Can’t change things.’ He reached deep into the bottom of the box and pulled out a rather bedraggled angel with bent wings, which he handed to her, because clearly he knew exactly where that was going. The very top. She took hold of it in her sore hand, forgetting that it was so bruised, and winced. ‘Angel Gabrielle, yes, I know...’ She cringed. ‘I couldn’t think of a better name when I was six. She has been passed down in the family since for ever. I will never ever have anything else on top of my tree.’

  He held her good arm as she stood on a dining chair and placed Gabrielle on the top. ‘Funny how everyone has their own traditions. We have a few silly ones too. Or did have—me and Finn can’t be bothered these days.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Ach, you know...putting coins in the pudding, dousing it in whisky and setting fire to it, you know...’

  ‘You should keep those traditions going.’ Easy for her to say when she’d avoided Christmas altogether for the last few years. ‘Although, do be careful with the setting-fire thing. And do you really not cook at all?’

  ‘No. Mam was the heart and soul of the village, so everyone’s only too happy to make sure we don’t starve and there’s no end of invitations. You can’t ever be lonely in Duncraggen, believe me.’

  Abbie stepped down from the chair and there was a moment again where her body seemed magnetically attracted to his, and she was sure he was feeling the same because his eyes misted the second they touched. All he was doing was steadying her, but she needed a little more than a strong hand to shift her equilibrium back.

  It was no good. It didn’t matter how much she told herself to forget him, she just couldn’t. She wanted to kiss him. And more. She wanted to...calm down. He was leaving—dammit; he was talking about the place he was going back to.

  ‘It sounds lovely. I imagine Christmas in Scotland will be very snowy and magical, like something out of a film.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’ He was quiet for a moment. ‘It’s because of the people in the village that I’m here at all. They clubbed together and paid my fare and we made a roster of who was going to look after Finn while I wasn’t there.’

  She sensed they were heading into emotional territory and wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d clammed up again, because that was his way. But she so wanted to know what had happened, to understand him, to help...possibly. She didn’t even know why. Why did Callum have such an arrow straight to her heart?

  Even though her fingers had hovered again and again over the keyboard, she hadn’t looked him up. It was almost killing her, but she’d stayed true to her word. She wandered over to the window seat and sat down, trying to sound nonchalant and not too intrusive, while hoping he’d open up just a little. ‘So the accident was two years ago? That’s still very fresh, then.’

  He came over and waited while she shovelled the parenting magazines onto the floor, then he sat next to her, leaning against the corner between the window and the wall. ‘Aye. It’s why I’ve made sure we have a SARS team now in the village and why I’m here to learn as much as I can and take it back to them.’

  ‘So what did happen?’

  ‘A blizzard, a white-out. We lost our bearings and he fell. It took them a while to find us. The roads were all cut off and visibility was so bad they couldn’t get the helicopters in. It was too risky for anyone to come find us at first. A total disaster.’

  ‘So how long were you up there? What the hell were you doing all that time? Finn was injured? How badly?’

  He shook his head, his eyes drifting to the mountain peak, still covered in snow. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She shuffled forward. ‘Actually, it does matter. It matters to me. It matters to Finn. And clearly it matters to you. Tell me?’

  ‘Why? It only brings it all up. I don’t talk about it. Full stop.’

  He was retreating again, shutting down, and she didn’t want him to. It wasn’t good for him. Or her. ‘So help me out a little. There are so many gaps in this story and I’m filling them with my own bleak thoughts.’ She watched as he shook his head and turned away. ‘It’s okay. Honestly, I don’t need to know. I understand you might not want to dredge all those things up again. But, even if you don’t want to talk to me, you need to talk to him. Definitely you need to talk to Finn. One thing I learned with Michael was that we needed to communicate about how we were feeling. Otherwise you end up guessing. Guessing’s no good. You need to know if someone needs your help getting through stuff, not be shut out.’

  She thought he might recoil at the mention of Michael in amongst all of this, as if they were having a competition about who’d suffered the most, but he didn’t.

  ‘We’re all different, Abbie. We don’t all have to put our feelings out there to be stamped on. It’s not my way.’

  She pressed her good palm onto his hand. ‘I know. But right now you can’t even say the words. That can’t be healthy, right?’

  ‘But if I start I might not stop. If I don’t even go there, I get to control what happens in here.’ He tapped his head, then looked embarrassed at his outburst. He shrugged. ‘It’s difficult.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was going to be easy. But you’ll be surprised how much it helps to give voice to those feelings—they do tend to float away for a bit.’

  ‘I want them gone for good.’

  ‘So make a start. You were on the Munro, right? It was snowing, you got lost.’

  His eyes rolled as if he was being pressed into something he really didn’t want to do, but knew he couldn’t get out of it. Worse, actually, his tone was emotionless, as if he’d subsumed all feeling. She guessed it was the only way he dealt with this. ‘Ben Arthur. The mountain. It’s usually not too difficult in the summer. But we thought we’d have a challenge and go up in January. It’s a scramble at the top, challenging, but anyone can do it with a bit of care.’

  He stared out of the window, his features hollowed out somehow as he retreated into his memories. ‘Going down’s alwa
ys the tricky bit. You know? I mean, the uphill always hurts the most, but, when you’re tired after all the exertion, it’s the going down that can be the most dangerous. We were pretty high, though. We’d got up in record time; it had been an easy stroll. We were chatting about what we were going to do that evening to celebrate when it suddenly started to snow. Not little wisps, I mean huge flakes, thick and fast, that were sticking to the ground. So we upped our pace. Nothing to worry about. But after a few minutes we couldn’t see anything around us; we were in the snow cloud. It was freezing and it was like we were walking blind. We couldn’t see our outstretched hands, never mind the path, and we must have wandered off somehow. It’s easy to get disoriented in those conditions.’

  ‘Yes. It’s scary too.’ She gave words to the feelings she thought he might have, hoping that to name them would help him acknowledge them. They were easier to let go that way.

  ‘We argued over which way to go. He wouldn’t listen to me. I wouldn’t listen to him. Things got pretty ugly.’

  He sucked in a deep breath and she didn’t know how to respond to any of this so she just let him go on. ‘I insisted we should go one way. He disagreed, told me I always thought I was right... I pulled at him to listen, there was a bit of rough. Brother stuff. Nothing and everything; panic rolled into sibling rivalry and then some. Then the next thing, he disappeared. Just disappeared in front of my eyes.’

  ‘God, that’s horrific. I can’t imagine.’

  ‘There was a steep drop, a sheer cliff, and he just fell over it. I mean, how could that happen?’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t mean to...’

  ‘To what?’ Her heart was thundering now.

  He didn’t answer her. ‘I could just about make him out at the bottom, motionless, I didn’t know what the hell to do. All my training just faded from my head and I just shouted. Like an idiot. I’m shouting into the air for someone to come and help us. To save us.’

  At least with Michael they’d had help, so much help. They’d been frightened, but there had been no end of assistance and advice and love. Being alone on a mountain and unable to do anything must have been desperate.

  His voice was still completely flat. ‘You know the rest. The snow, the delay. I managed to climb down to him using some rope we’d taken with us to do some rock-climbing practice before we started the hike. And he was just...cold. So cold.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how you must have felt, what you thought.’

  ‘He was so badly broken I thought he was going to die. I made my peace with him. I promised him that if he held on then I’d do everything to help him get better. He kept his side of the bargain and I kept mine.’

  ‘I’d say you did more than that.’

  ‘Hell, yes. He should never have gone over in the first place.’

  There was something in his tone that she didn’t understand. ‘You’re saying that was your fault?’

  Cal looked broken, bleak. ‘I’m saying that if we hadn’t tussled and I hadn’t been so cocksure which way we were heading, he’d still have two damn legs. Yes.’

  ‘You can’t possibly put blame on anyone. It was an accident.’

  ‘That could have been avoided. I, more than anyone, know that.’

  He needed to understand—believe—that there was either no blame, or equal blame. ‘He walked up that hill just the same as you did. Don’t tell me he doesn’t feel responsible too.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have suggested we took that route.’

  ‘It was dark, snowing. You couldn’t see. Who knows what might have happened if you’d just stayed where you were. You could have died of hypothermia.’

  He shook his head. ‘He might have two working legs.’

  ‘And he might be dead. So might you.’

  They sat in silence for a while as they both went over the events of that night. It had scarred him very deeply, and clearly he wore that responsibility like a brand.

  ‘So you gave up your job to look after him? Moved back home?’

  ‘Aye. I was going places in Edinburgh, you know, in the ambulance service. Promotion, awards... But I’m okay with going back to Duncraggen. Really. It’s a lot smaller, but I love being a paramedic and I can give so much back to the community that saved us...that saved Finn’s life.’

  But he took that responsibility very seriously now, that was clear; he’d given up his career to care for his brother.

  There were a few more moments of quiet and she waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He just stared out of the window at the mountains, and her heart contracted a little. Because she knew how he was feeling—that he was trying to make sense of something and he couldn’t.

  Because life happened and sometimes it was amazing and sometimes it broke your heart into tiny little pieces and you just couldn’t put them back together again. She imagined him up there making all those promises to his brother, to himself, staring death right in the face. Wishing he’d made better decisions. Wishing it had been him who had fallen. And her heart started to break a little more.

  She reached out to his arm, stroking and stroking, and after a while his shoulders relaxed and he breathed deeply. After a few moments he covered her hand with his and looked at her, smiling and shrugging off the emotion and the memories.

  He sat forward and reached out to her hair, ran a stray lock of it through his fingers. ‘So that’s the tale of the infamous Baird Boys.’

  ‘Thank you for letting me in.’ She found him a smile. ‘Feel better?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ As he let the lock of hair drop he glanced down at her legs that she’d pulled up onto the seat cushion. His fingers trailed over her ankle, drawing tiny circles in the little dimple on the inside of her foot. She knew she should have pulled away, but it was so delicious to have his hands on her again. To feel the sadness evaporate and to see his gaze change from haunted to heated. To know that she did that to him.

  She knew, oh, she knew a zillion things, but she didn’t say a word about any of them, or about the decisions she’d made about calling a halt to all this.

  When he leaned in and tilted her chin up she let him.

  And when he slid his mouth over hers she let him—no, she encouraged him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close so she could feel the beat of his heart against hers, so she could breathe him in and feel his heat. So she could tell him with her body and her sighs that she wanted him, that he wasn’t to blame, he’d saved his brother’s life. Because, hell...she wanted him to kiss her, to make love to her, to hold her into the night.

  One thing she’d learned was that there were few moments in life that were truly beautiful, and this was one of them. This was one that she didn’t want to let go, one she didn’t want to forget. So she kissed him back, hard and deep until she didn’t just want him inside her, she needed him there.

  When he pulled away he was breathless, his eyes glittering with more than just desire. ‘Abbie, tell me to stop if you don’t want this.’

  ‘I don’t want you to stop, Cal. I know it’s crazy. We shouldn’t do anything more, because I know this can’t go anywhere, but I can’t stop.’

  ‘You and me both.’ His fingers ran down the opening of her dressing gown. ‘Tell me the truth, lassie. I woke you up, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you did.’

  ‘So, you want to go back to bed, aye?’

  She’d never been outright asked before, not like that. Heat pooled low in her gut. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Because I want to take you to bed and kiss every inch of you.’ He gave her a wry smile by way of explanation and the mood got lighter. ‘You did say I should voice my feelings.’

  ‘You’re talking about sex, not feelings.’ Sex. Yes. Sex was good. Simple. Animal. Natural. Sex.

  And now it was her turn not to want to acknowledge the emotions sw
irling around her chest.

  His forehead was against hers. ‘You want me to lay my heart out for you, do you?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. It’s so hard, Cal. One minute I think I know what I want, then I get confused.’ She didn’t want to lay her heart out to him the way he just had to her; to admit there was a raw heat under her ribcage and it was all mixed up with images of him desperately trying to save his brother. Of his kisses that were so consuming. Of the thought of him getting on a plane and never coming back.

  ‘Okay, Abbie. Let me tell you what I want.’ He pressed a kiss to the dip at the base of her throat, making her shudder with desire. ‘I want you like I’ve never wanted anyone before.’

  Another kiss to her collarbone, a trail of little presses to her shoulder. ‘I want to peel these clothes off you. I want to take you to bed and watch you come. I want to hear you sigh. I want to kiss you from head to toe. I want to be inside you, hell...more than that. So much more.’ He closed his eyes and swallowed. When he opened them again they were burning with heat. Over the top of her robe he palmed her breast, his breathing ragged. ‘Just sex is something different altogether.’

  And so what did all this mean? Was he hers to take and have and then give up?

  The thought of him leaving made her gut curl and her head hurt. The thought of keeping him here, just for now, was so overwhelming, so delicious she couldn’t contemplate any other outcome. She pressed her palm against his chest, felt the strong, fast beat of his heart, ran her fingers up to his neck, his jaw, tried to make light of something that was very, very momentous indeed. ‘I will, if you will.’

  ‘No more games, Abbie. Not this time. This time we both get to win.’ He took hold of her broken wrist and kissed along her knuckles so gently it made her heart contract.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’ She’d never felt more certain about anything in her life. She wanted him and she wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that. Because tomorrow, later, for the rest of her life she would be Abbie the mum, Abbie the widow, Abbie the nurse, Abbie the friend...