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The release of tension, the brief immersion in another universe of fabulous sensation, had been incredible for both of them. Immediately afterwards, however, she'd gasped out something he hadn't understood and had fled into her room. He hadn't seen her again that night.

He'd gritted his teeth for the task, and had asked her to leave the next day.

And she had. And now that he knew about Charlotte he felt to blame for that, too. Lucy had only been twenty-two. She'd nursed both Bronwyn and the baby with such tireless tenderness and commitment. He didn't know why she'd initially accepted his love-making that night. It could only be, surely, that she'd felt sorry for him.

But it must have confused the hell out of her! She wasn't the type that slept around, and he was eight years older, the one who should have been in control. So she'd fled home and rebounded into some doomed relationship with a local boy, and Charlotte was the result.

Yes, he could be in great danger of feeling very responsible for Charlotte's existence. And this at a point in his life where he'd been sure that he'd resolved all the issues of grief and guilt connected with Bronwyn's death a long time ago.

He hadn't resolved them alone. He'd had a close friend, Adam, who'd been training for the Anglican priesthood at the time, and Adam had helped to an incalculable degree. After hours of Adam's constructive listening on many occasions over several months, Malcolm had felt so—to use a current buzzword—
healed.
So at peace with himself about all that had happened, in fact, that when he'd first seen Lucy at her front door on Friday evening, as neat and attractive as ever in a pale green summery cotton skirt and a matching top, and had realised who she was, he'd felt more pleasure than anything else.

So Ellie's new best friend's mother was someone he knew and trusted! Marvellous! You had to be careful these days, and their phone conversation the day before had been impossible. He'd been somewhat concerned at knowing so little about where his daughter had been spending the afternoon. And it had been good to see how well Lucy Beckett was doing for herself, too. A pleasant house, a bright, healthy child...and a face and figure only a little changed in six years.

Oddly, Bronwyn had been the one, six years ago, to point out just how attractive Lucy Beckett had been. Many women might not have done so, but Bronwyn had always possessed such driving confidence in herself that it would never have occurred to her that it might have been dangerous to draw her husband's attention to another woman's charms.

'And it wasn't just confidence in herself,' Malcolm remembered, speaking the words under his breath. 'She had confidence in me, too. She made me believe in myself when we first got together at university years earlier, after that lonely, over-sheltered childhood of mine, in a way I'd never done before. That was one of the reasons I loved her...'

Bronwyn's confidence and her strong convictions, the most powerful features of her emotional make-up.

How terrific to have a really nice-looking nurse!' she'd said to Malcolm after they'd interviewed several candidate, chosen Lucy and had experienced her sunny efficiency and care for over a week. 'I'll tell her so when this is all over. Lovely trim, graceful figure.
Beautiful
green eyes. Really warm, sweet smile.'

'Yes, she does, doesn't she?'

'Her hair, too. It's only that insipid pale mousy brown, so it could be awful, except that she keeps it so clean and silky and bouncing, and tricks it up into all those pretty, imaginative styles with clips and combs and so forth. So far I don't think she's worn the same one twice, and it really looks nice. Don't you think, Mal? Don't you think it's going to help enormously in me keeping a positive attitude to have someone pretty and bright like Lucy around me all day long?'

There was a plaintive, fatigued and slightly desperate note to this last question. Bronwyn was losing strength and focus daily.

'Definitely,' he agreed, hiding his doubt—not about
Lucy's prettiness, but about the power of it to do Bronwyn any good.

'We must tell her not to bother with a uniform,' Bronwyn decided with her usual authority. 'I'd much rather see her in nice colours and softer styles. Wouldn't you?'

'It's up to you, Bronny.'

'Well, I would.'

So, after the second week, Lucy didn't wear a uniform, and Bronwyn had been right. Lucy's own clothing suited her far better, and she always looked fresh and nice.

'And if I hadn't been so concerned with Bronwyn and the baby, perhaps I'd have sensed that there was danger, that I had the capacity to find her attractive. Hell, I didn't think I had a particle of sensuality left in me then! If I'd seen it coming,
remotely
seen it coming, maybe I wouldn't have cracked that night...'

It was impossible and useless to conjecture on the subject. He could never truly know. And, until Friday, it had ceased to matter. It had been in the past.

Now, however...

He spent a few pointless moments rewriting reality. If Lucy could have found the
right
man to be Charlotte's father. If he'd encountered her on her doorstep on Friday evening as a happily married woman, then it would all be easy, wouldn't it?

At the heart of his complicated feelings about Lucy was simple gratitude—gratitude that she'd done so much to ease Bronwyn's death and dying, and to nurture Ellie's fragile new life. Gratitude that, whatever she'd felt that night in his arms, she'd somehow understood enough of what
he'd
felt to take herself out of his life with no drama.

If she'd been married to Charlotte's father, he could have evolved a casual sort of friendship with both Lucy and her husband, based on their daughters' friendship. As the situation stood, however, and with the prospect of seeing her frequently at work, he had the strong intuition that it wasn't going to be so easy.

'Look at me going underwater, Daddy!' Ellie commanded, then ducked beneath the water and held her breath for a whole five seconds.

'Fabulous!' Malcolm told her. 'You're getting so brave about that now. Remember last summer when you wouldn't do it at all?'

'I'd only turned
five
last summer,' she answered, scorning her younger self.

Malcolm hid a smile, and felt his priorities shift back into place. Ellie mattered. And if Lucy was going to matter in future, it would be as the mother of Ellie's friend. If he kept that fact in view, then neither of them...none of them...had anything to worry about.

Taking his mobile out of the beach bag, he dialled Jenny Boyd's phone number.

*

'Normally, you'd get a better orientation than this on your first day,' Malcolm apologised hurriedly to Lucy the following Monday morning at eight-fifteen.

He looked tired, the phone on his cluttered desk was ringing, and already there was a junior doctor in the doorway, anxious for his presence at a patient's bedside. It was typical of the man, Lucy considered, that he hadn't mentioned on Friday that he was, in fact, the head of this entire department.

He had over forty medical and administrative staff under his supervision, rotating to cover the full twenty-four hours, seven days a week. His department was the first port of call in any emergency, major or minor. Ultimately, when patients died here, as inevitably they sometimes did, he was the one who had to ask himself whether he and his staff had done everything they could.

'Dr Lambert...?'

'I'm coming,' he promised the young doctor.

'Look, I know about the bushfires,' Lucy told him.

'It's not only the fires, unfortunately,' he explained. 'There's been a serious crash involving a minibus and a van, and we've got another patient who's arrested twice in the past half-hour. I've been in here since two a.m. Look, I'm going to put you in the cubes and free up someone else to work the trolleys for today,' he went on quickly. 'If things get quiet, go over to Personnel, as you're supposed to do, and fill in all the forms and so forth, but meanwhile I just can't spare you—I'm sorry—and Personnel will have to lump it.'

'The cubes...'

'Non-urgent cubicles. Normally, given your experience, you won't be doing those, but as yet, since you don't know our procedures, our staff—'

'It's fine, Dr Lambert.'

'Malcolm, for heaven's sake!'

The sudden impatience in his tone told Lucy he really didn't have time to prolong this, so she repeated his first name quickly, suppressing her awareness of the memories it brought, then stood up and headed for the door. Before reaching it, she stepped aside to let him and Dr Brian Smith hurry through ahead of her.

They turned right, and ahead of them she heard the urgent voices of medical staff gathered around the patient who'd arrested. They were trying to shock his heart back into life with a defibrillator, and the scene was stark and shocking. A naked chest jumped and fell back each time the current pulsed through the twin paddles of the machine.

Turning left, she made the correct assumption that she was heading in the direction of 'the cubes'.

It meant that she wouldn't see much of Malcolm today. In his position as head of department, he would only oversee the non-urgent cases in the most general way. Much of his time would be taken up with administration, paperwork and liaison with other parts of the hospital, and his practice of medicine would be limited to the true emergencies—those patients who occupied the 'trolleys' in the high-tech, open area at the far end of the department.

Cardiac arrests would command his attention if the more junior doctors, training as emergency specialists, needed his help. Also, he'd see acute asthma attacks, serious road trauma injuries, severe unexplained pain, dangerous bleeding, life-threatening overdoses...

All the cases, in other words, which needed urgent stabilisation before they could be admitted to the relevant ward or sent for emergency surgery. But he wouldn't see the sort of 'GP cases', as they were some-' times known, which she would be dealing with today.

Perhaps it would help to have this first day to orientate herself without the added complication of his presence.

She'd had the weekend to think about it, and had basically found that nothing in her attitude to Malcolm Lambert and what he represented had changed in the past six years. She'd always known exactly how appalled and guilty Malcolm had felt about that one desperate eruption of passion between them. Now, as then,
she
was
going to do all she could to protect him from the need to relive it, dwell on it, bring it into the present.

There
was
no need! Who would benefit after all this time? No one! Things were best left as they were. Dismissing the subject, and hoping for the sort of day that would keep her mind busy and her hands filled, she focused on work instead.

It was a little strange to be working at a large facility like this again after her years at Brewarra Base Hospital in far western New South Wales. They dealt with plenty of emergencies in Brewarra, but not all at once, and things weren't so strictly divided into urgent and nonurgent cases there.

Brewarra Base Hospital had no triage nurse to prioritise the treatment of each patient, and its staff turned back and forth between an acute asthma attack, a peanut up a toddler's nose and a major heart attack in the same way that the owner of the town's sprawling and eclectic general store turned back and forth between selling a chocolate bar and selling a ride-on lawnmower.

Here, the set-up was a little more intimidating. The hospital was modern and well equipped, and staff, as much as patients, ran the gamut of human personalities.

For the next two hours, as she'd hoped, Lucy didn't have time to think about Malcolm. There was a steady stream of Monday morning patients—those who'd done something to themselves on the weekend and had decided overnight that perhaps it really did need treatment, those who'd left it too late to get an appointment with their GP today and those who'd partied hard on the weekend and had been too tired to avoid careless accidents as a result.

Lucy dressed some minor lacerations, made an old lady comfortable while she was waiting for the doctor, took some blood and gave a local anaesthetic. She comforted a crying young woman, distracted a toddler while his ear was syringed, did a pregnancy test and took numerous blood pressures and pulses.

It was routine, familiar work, and work that she enjoyed. Time always seemed to pass quickly when there was one thing after another like this, and when every patient was so different. The stoics and the complainers, the demanding and the docile, the chronically ill and the 'never needed a doctor before in my life' types. You had to be a student of human nature to get the most out of nursing.

With several people she shared a laugh, with a couple more she listened to problems which had nothing to do with the medical issue that had brought them in. And once she almost cried.

'Everything was normal. I was at work,' the thirty-eight-year-old woman said tearfully. 'I felt some cramping pains and I went to the bathroom. I thought it was a stomach upset. But then I just started to bleed.'

'Are you here on your own?' Lucy asked. The patient was shaking and very upset as she lay back on the examining bench in one of the cubicles.

'Yes. A friend from the office drove me, but she had an important meeting to get back to and I told her to go. My husband's away until tomorrow.
Is
it a miscarriage?'

'It may very well be,' Lucy had to say. 'The doctor should be here any minute to examine you properly. If you could take off your lower clothing and lie down. Here's a sheet to put over you.'

She left the room for a few minutes to give the patient her privacy, then entered again in the wake of second-year resident Andrew Carter. He seemed like a good and caring doctor, pleasant in manner, freckle-faced, quite good-looking, but ultimately powerless to ease this situation for his patient.

Reaching his gloved hand beneath the sheet, he did an internal examination and Jill Lewis winced and tensed and held her breath. 'Just try to relax, Mrs Lewis,' he murmured, and she nodded and began to take deep breaths instead as he felt her cervix.