The Surgeon's Convenient Fiancée (Medical Romance) (21 page)

‘You’re just in time.’ She smiled at him, forcing a lightness. ‘We’re about to eat.’

‘I’ll just wash my hands. Hi, Fleur. How are you?’

‘I’m pretty good, Shay, thank you. Where’s Mark?’

‘That’s a long story, which I’m going to tell you in a while.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘Sure.’

When they were all eating, Shay put down his knife and fork and spoke into the expectant silence, getting right to the point. ‘The reason I didn’t bring Mark with me is that he’s gone out to dinner with his mother. She came back unexpectedly from New Zealand, without telling anyone except a couple of her old, close friends. She contacted Mark, then he called me at work today to tell me.’

‘Geez!’ Mungo said, forgetting to chew for a moment.

‘Is he happy about that?’ Fleur asked perceptively.

‘He seemed to be,’ Shay said carefully. ‘The test will come tonight, after he’s been alone with her for two hours or so. They always had a good relationship…’

‘Why did she go, then?’ Fleur said.

‘It was more to do with me than Mark,’ Shay said. ‘I was working too much and she couldn’t take it. I don’t blame her for that.’

Deirdre looked down at her plate, pushing her food around. She admired him for the straightforward way he was answering the kids’ questions, yet she felt she was
crying inside, as though she had found herself suddenly pushed aside in Shay’s life, in Mark’s life. That was silly, really, because she did not have any claim on Mark… and not much on Shay, she told herself.

‘Can we still see Mark?’ Mungo said, giving Deirdre a quick glance. ‘I mean, can we see him soon, and still be friends?’

Deirdre knew Mungo well, knew exactly what he was asking—whether the relationship between her and Shay was over with the return of his ex-wife, and thus their friendship with Mark, which they had hoped would be more than that.

‘Of course you can,’ Shay said. ‘He wants that. My former wife, Antonia, may be going back to New Zealand…she hasn’t made up her mind yet.’

Would she try to take Mark with her? That was the unspoken question hanging over them. They did not voice it, because it was clear that Shay did not know. Mark was old enough to have a say.

‘Eat up,’ she said to the children. ‘There’s apple pie after this.’

Deirdre forced herself to put a forkful of
food into her mouth, chew and swallow, then another, while Shay continued to talk to Mungo and Fleur. He was a good father, she thought again, would be a good father to Mungo and Fleur, who had never known their biological father. She found herself praying that this all indeed would work out, that he would eventually be a father to them.

At this moment, Mark would be with his mother, talking, making up for lost time. Perhaps they would both find, she speculated, that too much water had gone under the bridge for them to take up where they had left off. They would have to forge a newer, more mature relationship. There might be some resentment on Mark’s part, while Antonia would feel guilty for having gone, no doubt.

As Deirdre watched Shay across the table as he spoke to the children, loving him as she did, certain decisions were forming in her mind, as of their own volition.

‘I’ll clear up,’ she said to the children when dinner was over. ‘You get on with your homework.’

‘OK,’ Mungo said, as they both went to the
sitting room where they had dumped their knapsacks of books earlier, leaving her in the cramped dining room with Shay.

‘You’ve been very quiet,’ he said quietly to her, coming over to her and putting his arms around her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I’m in a state of shock. The past seems to have caught up with you, Shay.’

‘We never really shuffle off the past,’ he said, looking down at her, his eyes holding hers so that she had to look fully at him. ‘We can’t just switch it off and pretend that it didn’t happen, that it hasn’t affected us.’ He gently pulled her head against his chest, stroking her hair, and she felt tears gather in her eyes. It would be devastating to give him up, if she had to.

‘We can talk in the kitchen,’ she said, reluctantly breaking away from him, not wanting Mungo and Fleur to hear their personal exchange. Together they carried the dishes and plates out of the room. Always in her mind, since early afternoon, had been the image of Shay putting his arms around Antonia and hugging her. It was a simple, normal gesture
between two civilized people, she told herself again. After all, he did not hate her.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, turning to face him in the kitchen, ‘that maybe we should not see each other until the situation has been resolved between you and Antonia—although I hope that Mungo and Fleur can still see Mark, as they would miss him, and he them.’

‘And you wouldn’t miss me?’ he said, standing close but not touching her, his face pale and drawn.

‘Of course I would,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘but I can’t reconcile myself to the fact that you asked me to marry you but you don’t love me. Now that Antonia’s here I feel that I… um…need to be more certain about things. We need time away from each other.’

‘I don’t feel that I do,’ he said. ‘I enjoy being with you.’

Deirdre found that she could not, at that moment, voice her suspicions that he wanted her to strengthen his position against his former wife, even though things seemed cut and dried legally where Mark was concerned.

‘I…would like to stay away from you until
Antonia either goes back to New Zealand or something else is resolved between you. I’m not a part of what you have to decide…what Mark has to decide. Does she know about me?’

‘Not yet,’ he said grimly.

‘There you are,’ she said.

‘There hasn’t been time to tell her,’ he said. ‘Her priority is Mark, not me. I’m not an issue with her. You must see that.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said, still facing him, feeling as though she wanted to cry. ‘But that’s the way it is with me, Shay. I love you…but I’m not sure of you… It has to be right…’

Mungo came in, ostensibly to get a glass of water. ‘I hope you two aren’t quarrelling,’ he said, with the air of a wise old man.

‘We wouldn’t do that,’ Shay said. ‘We’re simply discussing a few issues.’

Mungo nodded sagely, really none the wiser, and went out bearing his glass of water.

They stood looking at each other, a tension of sadness in her vying with the intense attraction to him. Just then his pager went off, as though on cue, a tinny beeping that was the sound of duty calling.

Shay took it out of his pocket, looked at the number displayed there and then switched it off. ‘The hospital,’ he said. ‘Probably about one of my post-op patients. Could I use your phone?’

‘Sure,’ she said.

He pocketed the pager. ‘The twenty-four-seven man,’ he said cynically, with a twisted, self-deprecating smile. At that moment, Deirdre felt suddenly that she knew him better than she had before today. There were regrets in his life that she had not experienced herself, things that were not easy to live with. The phrase also served to bring Antonia somehow into the room with them, coming between them.

‘It’s in the nature of the job,’ she said, knowing that to be true.

When it was time for him to go, she and the children stood at the door to say goodbye.

‘We’ll see each other at work,’ she said, knowing that only he would understand that work was the only place where they would meet now, as they had agreed that they would
not see each other for a while in their free time.

Lying in bed later, restless, she felt that the bottom had dropped out of her newly created world, that she had somehow gone back to an ‘as you were’ situation. Yet it was not exactly like that. She had a fulfilling job now that she really liked, she was no longer a servant of Jerry, she had made decisions that had improved her life. The guardianship of Mungo and Fleur would only become an issue if Fiona died. Before long, her parents would be home.

What she wanted most in the world was still just beyond her reach.

* * *

There was a poignancy to everything she did at work after that. They worked together, talked, looked at each other longingly from a distance, it seemed. All the time, she waited for word about Antonia.

Mark came to their house several times, for supper and to hang out with Fleur and Mungo, during which time he talked a bit about his mother but did not say what she was planning. He did not seem exactly happy
that she was back. He seemed more thoughtful and distracted, Deirdre judged, and yet a little more relaxed. It was as though his longing for his mother, having been assuaged, had lost its hold on him. In the meantime, Deirdre watched and waited for something to happen.

‘It is ridiculous, Deirdre,’ Shay said to her one hectic morning, when they stood briefly together at the scrub sinks outside room one, ‘that we shouldn’t be seeing each other outside work.’ He looked haggard and stressed, as she often did herself these days.

‘It’s the best way, Shay,’ she said, crying inside, wanting so much to touch him. ‘It should be self-limiting.’

‘Mark wants to know,’ he said, ‘whether we can all get together, with his mother, to have a meal at a restaurant. Would that be all right with you? I get the impression that he wants to make an announcement.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

She had to go then, to push their patient on a stretcher into the operating room for their first case of the day. ‘We’ll talk later,’ she promised him, feeling that things were
coming to a head with Mark and his mother, and perhaps for her and Shay as well.

* * *

A week later Deirdre, Mungo and Fleur all filed into The Joker restaurant. Deirdre, carefully dressed to look casually sophisticated, looked up at the name ruefully. That was appropriate a lot of the time for what life handed out to you. She couldn’t complain. Life had been more good than bad to her over the past weeks. Her paralysing dilemmas had somehow unravelled, and she felt now that the initiative was hers with regard to whether she and Shay would be together.

Nonetheless, she felt a nauseating apprehension at meeting Antonia, forcing herself to move forward, to keep her face serene.

Mark, Antonia and Shay were already seated at a table for six when she and the children came in. As she moved towards them she thought it was appropriate that they should be here again, where Shay had brought them when she had been at her lowest ebb, where he had rescued them, so to speak. Yet here he was with his former wife, and they looked like a family. Once you had
a child, she thought, you were always a family of sorts, even though the formal relationship had been dissolved.

A mixture of intense emotions occupied her mind as she went forward, with no time for her to identify them before Shay and Antonia were standing up to greet them.

‘Deirdre,’ Shay was saying, ‘this is Antonia. Tony, this is Deirdre, Mungo and Fleur.’

They all said hello. In a daze Deirdre allowed her arm to be taken by Antonia and drawn forward to a seat beside her. ‘Come and sit next to me,’ Antonia said, her voice soft and her accent a mixture of Canadian and New Zealand.

Obediently Deirdre sat down, while Mungo and Fleur sat on either side of Mark, who was smiling at them, obviously very happy to have them there—his surrogate brother and sister, Deirdre thought, staring across the table at them. Shay’s eyes met hers, and he seemed to be giving her the message that this was Mark’s show.

A waiter having placed a menu in front of her, Deirdre turned to Antonia, looking at the tired face of the other woman, whose tanned
skin was criss-crossed with fine lines around the eyes, as though she had been exposed to a lot of sun. The beautiful woman of the photograph had remained beautiful, had matured gracefully and naturally. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a delicate knot at the nape of her neck, giving her a sophisticated air.

‘It’s good to meet you, Deirdre,’ Antonia said. ‘Mark’s told me a lot about you and the children…and Shay has, too.’ She sounded nice—reasonable and nice.

‘I can’t say that they’ve told me a lot about you,’ Deirdre said with a nervous laugh, wondering if Antonia knew that Shay wanted to marry her.

‘No…well…’ Antonia said softly, while the others engaged in lively conversation. ‘I’m the black sheep, the breaker-up of the family. But really, you know, families break up long before the members actually leave each other. Once the emotions are disengaged, that is the real end.’

Deirdre stared at her, amazed that she should be so frank so quickly. She swallowed nervously. Could she match that?

‘We haven’t much time,’ Antonia said,
as though Deirdre had voiced her surprise. ‘There isn’t much point now in procrastinating about things. I’m so pleased that Mark likes Mungo and Fleur, that he talks about them as though they were his siblings. He’s needed that. I suppose Shay told you that he had a problem with drugs at one point?’

‘Yes,’ Deirdre said, dazed.

‘That seems to be over now, thank God. I’ve missed Mark like hell…wanted him to be with me. He knows that more fully now, I think, and doesn’t blame me as much. He knows that I love him, and always will. I’m negotiating with John—that’s my partner—to spend a lot of time here in British Columbia, and the rest of the time in New Zealand. He’s looking into buying land here and a winery. In New Zealand he has a wine-growing business and a sheep farm, two things that he could also do here. Mark needs me around a lot for at least another five years.’

Deirdre nodded. Antonia seemed to be a very nice person. Deirdre had the feeling that Shay had lost something worth having in her. That thought elicited a sadness in her, a mourning. Perhaps that was why Shay could
not love her…or could not say that he loved her. She did not know that she could be a match for Antonia. What to do? What to do?

‘I hope it works out,’ she said. ‘I know that Mark would be happier with you in the same country, not too far away.’ She forced herself to say the words, even though she did not know what those events would mean for her personally. All she knew at that moment was that the story, the ongoing saga, was not hers alone. In fact, she was on the periphery really, with no past that involved them. The absent John would also very obviously have a say. He must be an accommodating man to be willing to live in two places.