Hearts of Gold: The Children's Heart Surgeon

Annie breathed deeply, drawing the damp, salt-laden air into her lungs.

‘I love standing by the Pacific and thinking the next big lump of land it hits is America. I love the idea that the water in a wave I’m watching here might one day, depending on the currents, wash across a beach in California.’

Alex put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her body closer to his.

‘Should we talk about the big lump of land that is America? About North America in particular?’

Annie sighed.

‘We should, Alex,’ she said, relishing his warmth and closeness, wishing with all her heart this could be a real ‘first date’ so they were coming together with nothing but expectations of fun and pleasure—with no baggage from the past. ‘But I’m not sure that I can. Or ought to…’

She couldn’t go on, couldn’t come right out and say, I’m living a lie.

‘Then we’ll walk,’ he said, his voice strained. ‘But one day, Annie, I hope you’ll feel you can trust me well enough to talk.’

His disappointment in her was so obvious, it cut into Annie like a scalpel.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t even walk,’ she muttered, but Alex was already guiding her towards the smooth wet sand where the waves finished their journey across the Pacific. He released her for a moment to slip off his shoes and turn up the bottoms of his jeans, and she bent and took off her sandals. Then, with his arm around her shoulders once again, they paddled through the shallows to where the beach ended in a high tumble of rocks that stretched, like the humped back of some fossilised sea creature out into the waves.

And in the shadow of the rocks he turned her towards him and drew her body close to his, then bent his head and kissed her with a mastery his previous kisses had ensured.

Annie was surprised at how familiar his body felt, how at home she felt in his arms. And the kiss. It was a different kind of magic—sweet, gentle and seductively addictive.

Until the first easy exploratory moves were done! Then the attraction she felt for Alex fired a need so deep and filled with longing she couldn’t pretend, even to herself, that this was just a casual, first-date kind of kiss. This was a kiss that sent tendrils of desire spreading through her body, seeking out the deep-hidden places and bringing nerves and flesh to life with a tingling, trembling, pleading anticipation.

Somewhere there was noise. Loud noise. Annie hoped it wasn’t her making it—whooping and crying out as her body delighted in Alex’s embrace. Then Alex gently put her from him.

‘Someone’s in trouble,’ he said, sounding as breathless as she felt. At that moment Annie saw the source of the noise, a young man standing on one of the humps of rock, calling for help.

‘Someone swept off the rocks,’ she guessed. ‘Fishermen usually.’

They were both scrabbling towards the lad who was still yelling for help but not offering any more information until Alex reached him.

‘It’s Dad. He slipped and backwash carried him out. I can see him in the surf but I can’t reach him.’

Other beach-walkers were gathering on the sand at the base of the rocks.

‘I’ve called triple O,’ one said.

‘My wife’s run back to the lifesavers’ clubhouse. There’s usually someone there.’

Alex had pulled on his shoes and was accompanying the youth back to where his father had disappeared. Annie followed more slowly, barefoot, because her sandals would be worse than useless on the rocks.

‘I can see him,’ Alex told her, ‘but he’s being buffeted by the waves and hitting against the rocks. He needs to swim out beyond where the waves break and wait for rescue there.’

Alex called to the man, telling him to swim away from the rocks, but he either couldn’t hear or had already been injured and the best he could do was stay afloat. Before Annie realised what was happening, Alex was stripping off his clothes, thrusting first his shoes, then his trousers and shirt at Annie, telling her to hold them.

Then he walked out to a high, dry rock and was about to dive when Annie yelled at him.

‘Jump, don’t dive. It might be shallower than you think.’

So he jumped, while Annie held her breath, first until he surfaced then again until he reached the man and together they swam beyond the curling breakers. She refused to think about the sharks that cruised these shores, or of the way a freak wave could lift the pair and throw them up onto the rocks. Her mind concentrated on willing them both to stay alive.

Then she heard the roar of the jet skis and knew help was on the way, but she still watched tensely as the first jet ski stopped, the driver dropping a flotation device to Alex then lifting the fisherman onto the back of the seat. The driver of the second jet ski helped Alex aboard, and the two machines roared off towards the beach.

Annie followed more slowly, having to pick her way across the rocks, clutching Alex’s clothing to her chest. They smelt of him, she realised as she drew warmth and comfort from objects as mundane as a pair of jeans and a shirt. Then she shivered as her body lit again with excitement, imagining enjoying the scent of the man himself just as intimately.

Get real, girl! It’s not going to happen. It can’t happen.

Can’t it?

The mental argument took her to the clubhouse where Alex, wrapped in a blanket, was waiting for her.

‘Much quicker to get a ride back,’ he teased as she passed over his clothes. And seeing him there, alive and well and teasing, made her remember the clench of terror she’d felt when he’d gone into the water, and she had to bite back an urge to yell at him for being so foolhardy.

‘I’m OK,’ he said gently, taking her hand and pulling her close enough to drop a kiss on her hair. ‘I’m a strong swimmer and could see the safe way to approach the man, or I would never have gone in.’

‘OK,’ Annie conceded, but he wasn’t completely off the hook. ‘But don’t go doing that kind of hero stuff again! Not when I’m around anyway.’

She thought about it for a moment, then added, ‘No, not even when I’m not around. You’re far too important to too many people to be putting yourself in danger. And don’t bother telling me there was no danger. I was there. I saw it.’

He touched his hand to her shoulder.

‘I’ll grab a quick shower and get dressed. The lifesavers offered coffee. Do you want a cup?’

Annie shook her head. The words she’d just spoken about Alex putting himself into danger were echoing in her head, together with an insistent little voice suggesting she might be doing it herself—putting Alex into danger by associating with him.

Dennis dangerous?

To her, most probably, but to someone else?

She didn’t know.

Yet acts in their past and his persistence in trying to find her suggested it was a possibility. It certainly wasn’t to finalise divorce proceedings, because she’d started them herself and through a string of different lawyers, all protecting her confidentiality, had had papers served on him.

But all that had done had been to increase the pressure of the private investigators on the family she and her father had left behind.

‘Stop frowning. I’m fine!’

Alex’s return brought her back to the present.

‘Yes,’ Annie said, vowing inside herself that she’d have to keep things that way.

This resolution weakened somewhat when he drove his car into the garage behind his house then walked her home down the back lane, no doubt aware of the privacy its dark seclusion offered.

And when he kissed her, which he did at intervals all the way along the lane, Annie’s resolve weakened, and she found herself arguing, mentally, that everything would be all right.

CHAPTER SEVEN