Just One Last Night...

CHAPTER TWO

BRENT put everything, including the fact that Grace was a rival for his job, aside and gave her the full tour. When he’d been seconded to Melbourne Central he’d been far from enthusiastic about the change. After fifteen years at the Royal Melbourne he had been utterly dedicated to his old hospital.

He’d planned on taking the helm, keeping the ship running until they found the right candidate and then head back to the Royal.

But since moving into the brand spanking new Melbourne Central he’d changed his mind. He’d realised he’d grown stagnant staying in one place. Roots were all well and good but the challenge of heading a new department, if only temporarily, had been exhilarating. And working with top-notch equipment in state-of-the-art facilities had been a luxury he’d quickly grown used to.

He’d put his stamp on this place and he was proud to share it with Grace. To show her that the boy with dreams she’d once known had more than fulfilled his goals.

He showed her around the twenty cubicles and seven resus beds, introduced her to the staff and demonstrated the central monitoring and fully integrated computer system that was run from the central work station.

Afterwards he took her around the other side of the station and opened a door. ‘And this is my office.’

Grace looked inside. It wasn’t palatial. But it was big enough, with a decent-sized desk and a very comfortable-looking leather chair. She looked at him. ‘You mean my office?’

Brent gave a grudging half-laugh. ‘Okay, the director’s office.’

His laughter slipped over her skin like a satin nightgown—light and silky—and Grace smiled. For a moment. Before reality intruded. ‘What will you do if I get the job?’

Brent regarded her for a few moments, wondering whether to tell the truth. He decided to give her no quarter. The old Grace hadn’t liked to be mollycoddled.

‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I really don’t see that happening, Grace. I’ve been here since the beginning. They’re only advertising the role because they have to. It’s just a formality.’

Grace held his gaze. It was surprisingly gentle, considering the impact of his words, and had come over all tawny again. She appreciated his frankness. Hell, she’d suspected as much when he’d told her he was acting in the position.

Still, it irked. She needed it. Jobs like this at her senior level, with regular hours, didn’t grow on trees. She wasn’t just going to cede it to him.

‘Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?’

Brent saw the chin tilt again. ‘You want it that badly?’

‘I need it,’ she corrected.

Brent knew the concession wouldn’t have come easily to Grace and he saw in her gaze she was already regretting it. ‘Need it?’

She hesitated for a moment, already cross with herself for giving away more than she should have and hyper-aware that they were standing very close in the small doorway. She could smell his aftershave wafting towards her and memories of how good it had felt to bury her face against his neck assailed her.

She took a step back, out of the doorway. ‘More regular hours for the kids would be a blessing.’

Brent noted her withdrawal, pleased for the breathing space. It seemed twenty years hadn’t dulled her effect on him. ‘What are their names?’

‘Tash …’ Grace cleared her throat. ‘Natasha and Benji.’

He nodded liking the way her voice softened as she said their names. She sounded like a mother and it called to something primitive inside him. After all, he’d once hoped she’d be the mother of his children.

Children she hadn’t wanted.

‘You could still come and work here you know, if this position doesn’t come off. We’re always looking for staff. You could have a job with flexible hours.’

Brent surprised himself with the invitation. But good hospitals needed good doctors. And he knew she wouldn’t be being interviewed unless she was damn good. He wanted the best for the Central, for his department. Their history was immaterial.

He shrugged. ‘The offer’s there, anyway.’

Grace glanced at him, startled. That was a big call. And very generous. But it also had danger written all over it. Her life was complicated enough, without repeating past mistakes.

‘Thanks,’ she said, filing it in a mental bin. ‘So …’ she looked around ‘… is there a minor ops room somewhere?’

Brent stared at her for a moment longer then took the hint. ‘This way.’

They walked to a corridor that ran along the back of the department with several more rooms evenly spaced along its length.

‘That’s X-Ray through there,’ Brent said, pointing to the door at the far end of the corridor. ‘This here …’ he indicated, opening a door ‘… is for minor ops.’

Grace perused the layout and equipment before they moved on to several other rooms, including a storeroom, medication room and an examination room for eye patients housing an expensive specialised microscope.

‘Dokator Brent!’

‘Oh, hell,’ Brent groaned at the raised female voice from nearby floated towards them. He looked behind him at the trail of black scuff marks his shoes had left on the polished linoleum floor.

‘Dokator Brent!’

The heavily accented voice was closer this time, more insistent, and Grace looked at Brent, perplexed. ‘Who is that?’

‘That’s Sophia,’ he said, frantically scrubbing at the nearest mark with his shod foot. ‘She’s the department’s cleaner. She’s a dear old thing, has to be about ninety years old. Russian or Slavic or something like that. Salt of the earth but takes fanatical pride in her floors. Does not like having them besmirched, and these damn shoes always leave horrible marks.’

As Grace watched he moved on to the next black smudge. She stared at his shoes. They looked expensive—a far cry from the tatty sneakers he’d worn when they’d been young and in love.

‘I don’t usually wear them, except of course I had the interview today. She’ll give me a terrible tongue lashing,’ he groaned, the sole of his shoe erasing the marks.

Grace smiled. She couldn’t help herself. Brent Cartwright terrified of a little old lady. She laughed then, unable to stop herself. Twenty years fell away and she was back at uni with him, goofing around.

He looked up at her laughing face and it took his breath away. She was looking at him like she had back then, like the intervening years had never happened. Like they were still lovers.

‘Oh, you think it’s funny?’ He grinned at her, letting the years disappear. ‘Just you wait. Trust me, no one wants to be on Sophia’s bad side.’

She laughed again as he smiled and his foot scrubbed at the floor. Another ‘I vill find you, Dokator Brent’ came from very close by.

Brent stopped what he was doing, grabbed Grace by the hand. ‘Quick,’ he whispered, and pushed her through a nearby door, pulling it closed after them.

Grace didn’t register the small confines of the room or the fact that it stank of the cleaning products that weighed down its three rows of shelves. It seemed to be a supply room. Not much bigger than a cupboard really. She was laughing too hard to even notice how close they were standing.

‘Shh,’ Brent whispered.

Just then the door opened abruptly, pushing them even closer together as they huddled behind it to stay obscured. He put his hand over Grace’s mouth to help stifle her laughter. He felt the texture of her lip gloss as a waft of vanilla and honey drifted his way.

What was it called again? Honey something …

Sophia called out, ‘I know you here somawhere, Dokator Brent.’

The door shut again but not before Grace heard Sophia muttering under her breath in some strange tongue.

Grace pulled his hand aside and burst out laughing again. ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Brent.’ She grabbed his shirt as she leant forward a little, trying to catch her breath and laugh at the same time.

‘You should see your face. I can’t believe that the big important Dokator is afraid of a sweet little old lady.’

‘She isn’t so sweet when she’s pointing a mop at you.’

He grinned down her. She was so … familiar, so … Gracie it was impossible not to.

Impossible also not to be aware that her hand was warm on his chest and her breasts kept grazing the front of his shirt as laughter spasmed through her rib cage. Or the vanilla aroma of her lips, which somehow overpowered the smell of bleach and hospital-grade disinfectant. Or that his hand was firmly planted on one of her hips and all he needed to do was exert minimum pressure and she’d be pushed against him completely.

Grace slowly became aware of his fading smile and his growing silence and the fact that she was scrunching his shirt in her hand. He felt tense beneath her grip and he was staring at her mouth. He was big and warm and so very near.

So very Brent.

She eased her hold on his shirt and absently smoothed it with her palm. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, as she became aware of the heavy thud of his heart beneath her fingers.

‘I needed that,’ she said, to ease the growing silence.

Today had been stressful, and this unexpected laughter had been the perfect release. Still, the fact remained that she was in a cupboard with Brent, giggling like a teenager.

It was insane.

She straightened slightly and put her hand on his chest, levering some distance between them.

‘Pleased me and my shoes could be of assistance,’ he said, moving back, as much as he was able in the confined area, placing temptation further out of reach.

Grace smiled at his joke. ‘I think it’s safe to go out now.’ She checked her watch. ‘And my plane leaves in a couple of hours.’

‘That’s a flying visit. Are you not even dropping in on your parents?’

Grace shook her head. She hadn’t told her family. She didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up. ‘I saw them a couple of weeks ago,’ she lied. ‘I have to get home to the kids.’

There was Tash to deal with. And Benji hadn’t coped well with changed plans since his parents’ accident.

The kids. Brent still couldn’t wrap his head around that one. ‘Who’s looking after them now?’

‘The nanny.’

‘Very suburban mum,’ he murmured, as an incredible surge of something potent—jealousy, longing—clawed at his gut.

Grace felt the husky edge to his voice all the way to her toes. And all the places in between.

She straightened her clothes, finger-combed her hair, adjusted her glasses. ‘I have to go.’

Brent nodded as he watched her reach for the doorknob. ‘It was … nice … seeing you again, Grace,’ he murmured. His chest bubbled with absurd laughter at the irony of his understatement.

Grace’s hand stilled in mid-twist. ‘Yes. You too.’

Then she opened the door and walked out without looking back.

‘I hate you,’ Natasha said as the plane touched down at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport six weeks later.

Grace sighed. ‘Yes. I got that.’

They’d been over and over her decision to move them all back to Melbourne. She wasn’t about to have the same conversation in front of a couple of hundred strangers.

‘I love Jayden. He loves me. How could you rip us apart like this?’

Grace looked into Tash’s tear-stained face. Her heavily kohled eyes, the same colour as her hair, looked raccoonlike as her mascara ran. The twinkle of a shiny stone chip in her niece’s previously perfect nose winked cheerfully amidst all the teenage angst.

Somehow, it managed to look even more ridiculous.

Grace was sorely tempted to roll her eyes and tell her niece to stop being so melodramatic. That being in love at the grand old age of fifteen was absurd and, contrary to popular romantic myths, the world would not end.

Even though she’d been a scant few years older and had, in actual fact, felt exactly like the world was going to end when she’d walked away from the only man she’d ever loved.

But she just looked at Tash and said, ‘If he truly loves you, he’ll want the best for you. As do I. And this is the best thing for all of us right now.’

She wanted to say, Do you think I want this? Do you think I want to uproot myself and my career and sell my lovely house I slaved countless hours to pay off and leave my friends and a job that I love? Do you think it was my plan to upend my entire life to accommodate two orphans? So I could live with a pissed-off teenager and an emotionally fragile little boy?

Do you think I wanted my sister to die?

But she didn’t.

‘Look,’ said Benji, sitting on his haunches in the window seat, his nose pressed to the glass, ‘we’re here, Tash. We’re here.’

Natasha, mouth open and about to let loose what Grace felt was no doubt another embittered teenage diatribe, turned to her brother, scrubbing at her face and forcing a smile on her face. ‘Yep, Benji.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Grandma will be waiting for us and all the cousins.’

And in that instant Grace’s heart melted. Behind all that horrible teenage surliness and you-don’t-understand-me façade was a really great kid. Whose whole carefree existence had come to an end in a crash of twisted metal.

She sucked in a breath and reminded herself to be patient.

Grace felt unaccountably emotional as they walked up the sky bridge into the terminal to be greeted by her entire extended family. The Perry clan—her parents and eight siblings and assorted progeny—surged forward and Grace felt as if she’d come home.

After fleeing Melbourne twenty years ago she hadn’t expected to feel such a strong sense of homecoming. She’d happily made her life away from it all. And it had been a very good life. One that she’d been more than a little reluctant to leave behind.

But the events of the last eighteen months had been climactic and Grace felt like she’d been slowly sinking in quicksand.

And it was now up to her neck.

It felt good to know her family were throwing her a lifeline.

‘Welcome home, darling,’ her mother said, wrapping her in a tea-rose hug. The scent of her childhood.

‘Mum,’ she said, hugging back, holding on tight.

Her mother had aged so much since Julie’s death. For a woman with ten kids she’d always been remarkably spry. Full of energy and lust for life. Grace had constantly marvelled at how she did it—goodness, she herself was exhausted just trying to keep track of two!

But Trish Perry was greyer now, more pensive, less energetic. The sparkle in her eyes had been replaced by shadow. The spring in her step had disappeared completely.

And the same for her father. They were just … less.

Grace stood back to let her parents hug their grandchildren. A lump rose in her throat as a tear slid from behind her mother’s closed lids. A spike of guilt lanced her. Had it been wrong for her to take the two most tangible connections to her sister so far away?

But Natasha had desperately wanted to get away from Melbourne. Sure, she’d made a song and dance about always having wanted to live in the Sunshine State but no one had bought that. They’d known that she had wanted to get far away from the memories.

And, in the end, they’d all agreed that it might be for the best.

How were any of them to know it had been an unmitigated disaster?

‘Come on,’ Trish said over the general din, wiping at the tear before disentangling herself, all mother-of-ten businesslike again. ‘Let’s get you all home. I’ve made roast lamb, your favourite, Benj, and for you, young lady …’ Trish ruffled Tash’s hair ‘… I made chocolate crackles.’

Grace tensed and waited for Tash to primp her hair back into place or scoff at her grandmother’s offering. The way she had when Grace had made a batch the week the kids had come to live with her—after a particularly harrowing night shift—because she’d known that they were her niece’s favourite.

Tash’s vehement ‘You’re not her’ had been cutting and Grace had been walking on eggshells ever since.

‘Cool. My favourite,’ Tash said.

Grace expelled a breath. Teenagers!

The next couple of weeks were crazy busy. Grace re-enrolled the kids in the school they’d been in prior to moving to Queensland—the school she herself had attended a million moons ago—and spent a small fortune on books and uniforms and all the assorted paraphernalia.

The school was local to the Perry family home, and was also attended by the current generation of Perry children. None of Grace’s siblings had flown too far from the nest, all setting up house within a ten-kilometre radius of the family home and sending their kids to the same school they’d attended.

She had been the only black sheep.

With the kids settled, Grace went house-hunting. Her parents wanted her to continue to stay with them and she was happy to until she found somewhere else. But Grace had been independent for too long to move back home at the grand age of thirty-nine.

Her brothers and sisters may have been happy to stay close but Grace had always wanted more. And while she was grateful to have the amazing support of her family after doing the whole mother thing alone, she needed her space too.

Her parents’ home was just too chaotic—even more so than it had been growing up—with thirty grandchildren from babies through to teenagers coming and going at all hours of the day and night.

Grace had missed the love and laughter but not the sheer noise of it all. She’d forgotten how loud and busy it always was. And how everyone was in everyone else’s business.

That was something Grace hadn’t missed.

In short, she needed privacy. A place that was quiet. Still. A place that was hers.

It had been tempting to look at real estate on the other side of the city, close to her new workplace. Had she moved back to Melbourne in different circumstances it would have been exactly what she would have done. Found a dinky little terraced cottage in the inner city close to cafés and shopping.

But the point of coming home was to be close to family. Was to have them as an extended support system. Multiple places the kids could go and stay when she invariably got stuck at work. Always someone to pick up the kids if she couldn’t. Cousins to have sleepovers, share homework or catch a movie with. Aunts and uncles to spoil them and take them places and keep an eye on them. Grandparents to babysit.

No more nanny.

So Grace very sensibly looked only at houses for sale in the immediate vicinity of the school. The market was much more inflated in Melbourne and Grace was shocked at the prices. Luckily she’d made a good return on her investment with her place back in Brisbane and she calculated she could afford a three-bedroom house without going into a hideous amount of debt.

Julie and Doug had provided for the children’s expenses in their wills but they’d been heavily in debt at the time of the accident so there hadn’t been much money left. And what there was Grace hadn’t wanted to touch. It belonged to Tash and Benji and she knew her sister would have wanted the money to be put towards the kids’ university educations.

By the end of the second week she finally found what she was looking for. It was about a kilometre from the school in one direction and even less from her parents’ in the other. It was a post-war, low-set brick with a small backyard. It needed a little TLC—the décor definitely needed modernising—but it was of sturdy construction and she could afford it.

Tash had stared aghast at the lurid shagpile carpet in the hallway and the childish wallpaper in her room the day Grace had taken them to visit their new home. She’d also been completely unimpressed that she was going to have to share a bathroom with everyone else.

Benji had been kinder, his interest lying only in the fact that due to the backyard a puppy might be in the offing. Grace had fobbed him off, promising to think about it for Christmas.

But maybe, Grace thought as she signed the contract, she and the kids could work at modernising it together? She could let them make over their rooms—involve them. Working part time would be very conducive to a DIY project.

She had to try and engage Tash somehow. She’d hoped her niece would get over her resentment at being forced to move from Brisbane but it was just one more thing for Tash to hold against her. She was stubbornly recalcitrant where Grace was concerned. She was pleasant enough with everyone else but cut Grace no slack.

It broke Grace’s heart. She’d always been Tash’s favourite aunty. Cool Aunty Grace. Whenever Grace had come back for holidays Tash had been Grace’s shadow. They’d chatted on the phone every few days since Tash had been old enough to speak.

But those days had long gone.

‘Be patient,’ her mother had said.

Except patience had never been a virtue she’d mastered.

She was losing Tash. And she couldn’t bear it. But she just didn’t know what to do. How to reach her. She was a fifteen-year-old girl who had lost her parents and shut herself off from the one person she’d once been closest to.

The one person who could help her the most.

And with all this weighing on her mind, Grace would have expected there to be no room for thoughts of Brent Cartwright.

But she’d been wrong.

It had been eight weeks since she’d seen him, since that awkward moment in the supply room, and tomorrow she had to face him again.

And every day after that.

A heavy feeling had been sitting like a lead lump in her stomach ever since she’d accepted the job. Nervousness. A sense of dread.

And that she could cope with.

It was the rather contrary bubble in her cells and the fizz in her blood that made her uneasy.

Very, very uneasy.

CHAPTER THREE

‘ANXIOUS about today, darling?’

Anxious? Grace was so nervous she could barely pick up her cup of tea without it rattling against the saucer.

Why her mother was the only person on the planet not to have switched to mugs was a complete mystery.

She looked around at the expectant faces at the table. It had been nice to slip back into the family breakfast ritual but this morning she could have done with a little less companionship.

The kids were inhaling cereal like they’d never eaten before. Her father was reading the paper. Her brother Marshall had called in on his way to work to drop off his two kids and was currently eating his second breakfast of the day.

‘No.’ Grace shook her head and forced down the toast that her mother had insisted on making her.

The food was in imminent danger of regurgitation but at least it gave her something to think about other than Brent.

Chew. Chew. Chew. Swallow.

Chew. Chew. Chew. Swallow.

‘You’ll be fine once you get stuck in,’ Marshall added.

‘I have a five-day hospital orientation first. Boring stuff like fire lectures and workplace health and safety stuff, so I won’t be getting stuck in until next week. But at least its nine to five.’

‘I hate starting a new job.’ Marshall shuddered.

Trish nodded. ‘It’s always hard starting over somewhere new.’ She squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘I know you’re my oldest and you haven’t been little for a very long time, but I’ll still worry as if it was your first day at kindy. It’s not easy walking into a place where you don’t know a soul.’