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What was he looking for? she wondered, holding herself very still.

She could almost hear her own heart beating, and could definitely hear his breathing, steady but a little ragged at the edges.

Surely he's not in any doubt that I feel the way he does? I haven't tried to hide it. I haven't tried to hold back. Yet I hope I haven't been too eager either.

She studied him just as intently, taking in the slightly lived-in look of his face. A crease here and there, especially around his sensitive mouth, one or two tiny scars from childhood chickenpox, eyes that showed both pain and laughter in their misty grey depths.

'Are you going to kiss me properly, Malcolm?' she said softly, seeing enough in his face to give her the encouragement she needed.

'Definitely.'

'Good.'

His mouth came down on hers unhurriedly, tasting her like a connoisseur of fine wine, teasing her with the delicacy of its touch, then giving in once more to what they both wanted. After a few minutes there was no room for teasing any more. Their mouths ravaged each other hungrily, tasting the chocolate and the coffee and the brandy and the cream, until they were both swollen and tingling and dizzy and numb. Different sensations in different parts of them, adding up to one magical, sensual whole.

Mouth on mouth was not enough any more. She felt the strength of his arousal against her, and the straining eagerness of her breasts for his touch. His hand forced its way between their two bodies and she eased away from him, happy to give him the space he wanted.

'Buttons,' he murmured huskily, his fingers whispering against her collar-bone. 'I've always liked buttons. They create...' he undid the first one '...a wonderful sense of anticipation...' He undid the second, and the third, and the fourth, until her figure-hugging angora knit cardigan fell open to reveal her lacy silver-grey bra.

He could be in no doubt now that he'd aroused her. The tight nubs of her nipples puckered against the soft cups, and her breathing had unravelled into threads of irregular sound. Shamelessly, he let his gaze linger there and she hid nothing, just waited, forcing back her body's impatience, until he was ready to touch her.

And, oh, he was wicked about it! How could he be so wicked? To use just one finger like that, trailing down from her throat to the exposed and achingly sensitive valley between her breasts. Two fingers now, wandering a little from side to side, making every pore in her skin tighten and her chest heave as she abandoned any attempt to control her breathing.

'Hmm,' he whispered. 'Looks like I'm going to have to find my way around to the back,..'

He slid both hands, warm and wantonly exploring, around her body, deliberately brushing against the undersides of her breasts, until he reached the fastening of her bra. It took him a good minute to work out how to unhook it, using touch alone, and he laughed softly at his own clumsiness.

'Still,' he said huskily, 'I always feel it doesn't show a man in a very good light if he's
too
adept at this particular manoeuvre.'

Lucy laughed and nodded, her eyes half-closed like a cat's. 'I would do it for you, but—'

'But every man needs a challenge.'

'And every woman needs— Oh...!'

'This?' he said.

'Yes!'

His hands,
very
adept now, slipped the soft angora from her shoulders and flicked each bra strap down, too, so that within seconds she was bared to his touch. His patience suddenly evaporated, and hers was long gone. All they both wanted was his hands on her breasts, his silken fingers moulding their firm swell and the balls of his thumbs activating those hardened nipples until they throbbed. His mouth, too...

Her control was fast ebbing away, and her hands seemed to have a life of their own. They raked through his hair as he nudged and nuzzled against her breasts with heated lips. They kneaded the muscles of his back and drew shudders from him as she used her nails to lightly scrape the sensitive skin at his sides.

They wandered to the waistband of his jeans and slid around to the fastening at the front, and she began to conclude that a man had no right to complain about undoing a bra. Unzipping a pair of jeans when the owner of those jeans was in the state that Malcolm was in at the moment was—

He convulsed without warning and twisted away from her, doubling over and pushing her hands from his body at the same time.

'I'm sorry,' he gasped. 'This is— I didn't mean at all to let it get this far.'

'I did, and further, too,' she told him openly. 'At least, I hadn't planned it, but...I'm
not
sorry, Malcolm, and you don't need to be.'

He propped his feet on the rustic wooden coffee-table and hugged his arms around his knees.

'I'm not,' he said. His tone was abrupt, but she recognised that he wasn't angry. It was the fact that he was engaged in such a titanic struggle for control. 'I'm not sorry it happened, but— Hell! We're really no good at making boundaries for ourselves in this area, are we, Lucy? I thought I could. I made one in my head. I had it planned when I kissed you— Stupid word! When my mouth drank you in, ravished you— No, there
aren't
words! This was going to be lazy, and easy, and nice, and wasn't going to get anywhere
near
the point where it would have to end in bed. But it did. So quickly!'

'Does it matter?'

There was a long silence. Finally, he turned to her, his eyes narrowed and glittering with emotion.

'Yes. It matters. I won't sleep with you, Lucy, without having anything to promise you at the end of it. I did it to you once before, in the worst possible way. You're such a generous person. I think you still don't realise how culpable I was that night, and
not
because I betrayed Bronwyn, but because I betrayed
you.
I had nothing to offer you. I was only taking. Using you— your energy, your warmth, your generosity, your strength. Hell, like some awful B-grade sci-fi film where parasitic aliens use humans as their hosts.'

'Oh,
Malcolm.'

'Are you
laughing?'

'Yes! Aliens? But, no... No, not really.' She was shaking, actually. Or was that him? Both of them, perhaps.

With his feet still propped on the coffee-table and his upper body twisting to face her, he looked awkward, angular. She longed to use her hands again to massage the tension out of him, like kneading a stubborn batch of dough, and as always,
always,
she only wanted to help him, to ease his pain and douse the smouldering fire of his damning self-judgement.

'Go to bed,' he ordered her gently.

'I—'

'Please
, Lucy. Let me take control here, to do what's right. Trust me, listen to me, and stop
giving.
That's an
order,
all right?'

She nodded, her neck feeling stiff and painful with the movement. 'All right.'

'Good.'

Her capitulation didn't seem to give him any pleasure. He looked grim and determined, as if his inner vision was fixed on some point in the far distance that he was desperate to reach despite incalculable pitfalls on the way. He hardly seemed to notice her preparations for bed, as she cleared away the remnants of their decadent supper, checked on Charlotte, drank a glass of water, switched on the outside light to guide her mother's feet up the front path.

Even when she said goodnight, it drew only a gruff, sketchy echo from him, and she ached, physically, with rejection as she lay in the twin bed next to her daughter's.

Full understanding was settling on her like a winter frost. He won't sleep with me because he knows I want more—the full package, commitment and marriage— and he knows he can't give it. That part of him died with Branny. He's trying to be kind. I wonder if he's right.

At the moment, burning for him like this, I'd rather take what he
does
have to offer, no matter how little it 'is, but maybe that would only make it worse in the long run when it came to an end. He said I was too generous. He's wrong. I'm greedy and grasping and I just want to grab as much of him as I can get!

She was still lying awake, with all this churning through her mind over and over again, when her mother let herself quietly into the house at twenty-five past ten.

Life
went on, merciless, marvellous process that it was. Dad spent two nights in hospital down at the coast, before being driven by patient transport up to Canberra on Monday morning. Mum followed in the car, and settled into the spare room at Lucy's.

Dad's coronary angiogram, done the next day, showed that the blockage in his arteries was minor. Then an angioplasty, performed by pushing a balloon catheter through the two partially blocked vessels, was successful in treating the problem. Mum looked ten years younger when Dad was discharged. They spent several more days with Lucy, before driving back home.

Charlotte and Ellie were both promoted to 'blue-spot' readers at school, and could count to ten in Japanese. Lucy followed them as far as five—
'Itchy, knee, san, she, go'—
and then gave up. They seemed to have dropped their little strategy of leaving things at each other's houses on purpose, but they certainly hadn't given up plotting and planning altogether.

On more than one occasion, Lucy came to Charlotte's room to call them both for an afternoon snack, only to hear their excited conversation abruptly end the moment she opened the tightly closed door.

'What's this all about?' she asked once, as innocently as she could.

'Our birthdays,' Ellie answered, far too quickly. The child
could
think
on her feet, no doubt about that!

So could Charlotte. 'Yes, we're going to have the most
fabulous
parties,' she said.

But hers wasn't until November, and Ellie's was in January, both many months away. Hmm.

Work had its ups and downs, too. Two patients provided a satisfying feeling of closure which was often lacking in an area like emergency medicine.

First, on a windy morning in mid-May, Mary Sisley turned up in the waiting room with her niece and acted, rather endearingly, as if she owned the place. She must have been a model patient in rehab, as she was managing her new prosthesis beautifully, and a long, voluminous and very pretty skirt ensured that no one would have guessed it wasn't her own leg.

'I told her, Black Mountain Hospital, Accident and Emergency Department,' she explained loudly to Wendy Boyle, who was triaging each patient that day, as she had been on the day when they'd first met Mary. 'Lots of bleeding. Don't muck about. That needs stitches, my girl. Sister Lucy Beckett and Dr Malcolm Lambert. So here we are!'

'I cut it on a can of cat food,' the younger Mary explained to Lucy, once she'd been taken to a cubicle. She showed Lucy the pad of flesh below her thumb, where a nasty-looking gash was rapidly soaking a makeshift wad of bandage.

'It
does
need stitches,' Lucy agreed. 'Dr Lambert will be here in a minute.'

Normally, he wouldn't have handled a routine case like this, and neither would Lucy, but things were relatively quiet and Wendy had murmured to Lucy, 'I thought you'd both like to have a chat to her and see how she is. I'll never forget that day!'

'I did have a nightmare about it a couple of weeks ago,' Lucy admitted.

To Mary Jones, in one of the treatment cubicles, she explained, 'You'll have a local anaesthetic, which will sting a bit, but the stitches themselves shouldn't hurt. It looks like a clean cut, so I doubt whether Dr Lambert will suggest antibiotics. He'll use something topical on the wound itself.'

Mary's aunt patted her arm condescendingly and said, 'See!' It was as if her own visit to A and E had been an unqualified success and little black guns hadn't entered the affair at all.

Malcolm came in. 'Ah!' he said. 'Our friend Mrs Sisley. How are you getting about, Mary?'

'Oh, I move like the breeze.'

'Yes,' retorted her niece with a good-humoured frown. 'You moved like the breeze right into me in the kitchen this morning, and that's how I cut my hand!'

'But I make myself useful...'

'Oh, you do, Auntie Mary, you do,' the younger Mary said soothingly. 'She's split a
huge
pile of kindling for our slow-combustion stove over the past two weeks.'

'I did it sitting down!'

'We're set for the whole winter now.'

The cut hand was soon carefully stitched. There was no muscle or tendon damage, and the two Marys went on their way.

'Strong characters, both of them,' Malcolm commented to Lucy.

'I know. It's not everyone who can live with mental illness the way Mary's niece is.'

'And you can see how hard Mrs Sisley is trying. She appreciates the support. I doubt whether she'll do anything to jeopardise it—like stopping her medication—if she can possibly help it.'

Their second familiar patient, a week later, was also dealing confidently yet realistically with his condition.

'I remembered what you said about Chiari symptoms,' Sam Ackland said. 'And I think this is them. My doctor's on holidays at the moment, and I don't know his locum, so I thought I'd rather come to you. If it
is
Chiari, then I'll probably need to be admitted anyway, won't I?'

'I expect so,' Malcolm agreed, while Lucy stood by in case she was needed. 'What are the symptoms?'

'My legs feel weaker than usual, and tighter, too. My scoliosis has got worse quite quickly, even though I try to do my exercises.'

'Hmm. That doesn't sound like Chiari.'

They were both using the medical shorthand for a brain malformation common in spina bifida patients. Lucy didn't know much about it, only that it meant part of the brain was too low down towards the neck. It was named after the German pathologist who had discovered it over a hundred years earlier. In many cases it could be treated, and it could manifest itself unpredictably. In Sam's age group it was usually the result of a problem with the shunt that drained excess cerebrospinal fluid.