Marion Lennox - The Doctors’ Baby

‘So forget you said it. You don’t mean it.’

She closed her eyes again. How could he be so blind?

‘I do mean it,’ she said at last. ‘I mean it more than anything I’ve ever said in my life. I didn’t mean to fall in love. I never intended it. It just sort of happened. So…so it wouldn’t work. Having half the cake but not the half I want most. I’d have a child and a husband-but a husband who treats me as a professional colleague.’

‘What more do you want, for heaven’s sake? How can you need more?’ He sounded angry, and suddenly so was she. He was so damned insensitive. So…

So Jonas.

‘I want it all,’ she told him simply, and her chin was still tilted at that dangerous angle that said she was taking on the world. Or she was giving it up. ‘I knew when I came here that my chances of having a husband and children were about nil. I accepted that. But now you’re offering half of what I want most in life, and I find…I find that I’d rather not have anything at all than constantly living-seeing-the other half. The half that’s out of my reach.’

Silence.

He looked baffled, she thought. He so totally didn’t understand.

‘You want Robby,’ he said.

‘I do.’ She was close to tears. ‘But you don’t want us.’ She bit her lip. ‘Oh, sure, you say you don’t want Robby to have to stay in an orphanage. So you’ll sacrifice yourself for us. Marry me. But I’m not prepared to carry that load of sacrifice. Not marriage, Jonas. Not…not without love.’

‘We don’t…love,’ he said slowly. His anger was fading as he saw the distress on her face. ‘Not my sister and I. We can’t. Em, I’m sorry, but we’ve had love knocked out of us from an early age.’

‘And you can’t get it back?’

‘I don’t want to,’ he said honestly. ‘It hurts too damned much.’

‘It takes courage.’

‘No. It takes courage to be independent. If you knew how much I wanted…’ He caught himself, and almost perceptibly drew back. ‘No! I’m sorry, Em, but that’s the offer.’

‘And is it all or nothing?’ she said bleakly. ‘Either I marry you on your terms or you’ll ride off into the sunset without a backward glance?’

He glanced down at Robby. ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. You really won’t marry me?’

There was only the one answer possible. ‘No.’

‘I still need a base.’

‘Not with me.’

He thought about that, and then slowly nodded, readjusting his thinking. ‘OK. OK, I’ll accept that. I think it’s stupid, but maybe if I stayed anyway we could work things out. If I told Anna I was staying here so you could adopt Robby, she’d accept that. She wouldn’t think I was just doing it for her.’

‘Are you doing it just for her?’ Em asked curiously, and then watched Jonas’s face change. He didn’t know himself, she thought. He was trying so darn hard to be independent, but he wasn’t independent at all.

He’d told himself he was making this offer for Anna, but a part of him wanted Robby-and a part of him wanted the sense of community he’d found in Bay Beach.

If only a part of him wanted her…

But he wasn’t admitting to that! Concentrate on Robby.

He was thinking that, too. He could persuade her by thinking of Robby. ‘You might still be able to adopt Robby, if I was here to help,’ he told her, thinking it through as he spoke. ‘If I could arrange the medical needs of the community so you had free time, then Tom might be swayed to let you keep him.’

He might. That was something at least. Em’s heart gave a tiny lift, but she looked across at Jonas and the spurt of joy faded. Jonas was so near. So close.

And she had to drive him away.

‘It’d be so much easier if you married me,’ he said, and waited.

This was her second chance.

But she couldn’t do it. Not for Robby.

And not for herself. Marriage without love was the way of madness.

‘No, Jonas, it’d be much harder,’ she told him gently. ‘For all of us.’

‘YOU are out of your mind!’

‘Sorry?’

‘You have turned down Jonas Lunn? Emily Mainwaring, you are nutty about the man. I have eyes in my head. You’re head over heels in love with him and you’ve turned down a proposal of marriage!’

Lori’s voice rose so high it was practically a squeak.

She plonked herself down on the chair beside Em’s desk and gazed at her friend in stupefaction.

‘All our problems would be solved,’ she said bleakly. ‘We’d have a new doctor for Bay Beach. We’d have parents for Robby. End of loneliness for you. Plus a sex life. And you turn the man down!’

‘He didn’t mention a sex life.’ Em said very carefully, staring at her prescription pad rather than at her friend.

That set Lori back.

‘You mean…’

‘I mean, after you left we stayed in exactly the same positions-him on one side of the room and me on the other-while we talked technicalities about how a marriage would work. He thought it was a really sensible business proposition. In fact…’ She took a deep breath. ‘In fact, I think he might even let himself get fond of Robby. But from a distance.

‘He’s not that tough,’ Lori said weakly, but Em bit her lip.

‘He is. He’s been taught the hard way how to be impersonal-tough, as you say-and he’s not about to unlearn it. Just because…’

‘Just because you love him?’

‘Just because I love him.’ Em raised her face and met Lori’s concerned gaze. ‘That’s it in a nutshell, Lori. I love the guy.’

‘And it’d drive you crazy to be married to him when he doesn’t love you.’

‘You do understand,’ Em said gratefully. ‘If Ray didn’t love you…’

‘I’d go quietly insane,’ Lori told her. ‘I didn’t realise until I nearly lost him. That’s one of the reasons I’m here. We’re getting married in a month’s time and I want you as my maid of honour. Will you do it?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘But there’s no chance of you marrying first? Of you being my matron of honour?’

‘Lori, I can’t.’

Lori looked at her friend over her surgery desk and knew that Em spoke the absolute truth.

And she also knew that her friend was breaking her heart.

‘I don’t want him adopted by a single mother.’

It was Robby’s aunt. She was facing Tom and Em in Em’s surgery, and she was angry. ‘What’ll people think? That I let my sister’s kid be adopted by a single mum when I should take care of him myself?’

Tom’s hands clenched on his knees. Em could see them from where she sat. As the director of the children’s homes, Tom was accustomed to all sorts of family dramas, but he still had the ability to be emotionally involved. And who could help being moved by Robby’s situation?

‘Laura, you’re saying you don’t want him, but you also demand that he must stay in Bay Beach and he must be adopted by a married couple?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But he’s badly scarred,’ Tom said gently. ‘There’s ongoing injury. You know that. Robby has years and years of skin grafts ahead of him. He needs constant medical attention. Em wants to give him just that-and a mother’s love as well. I don’t think you’ll find anyone else to take him on. Not with his injuries.’

‘Then he stays in the children’s home,’ Laura said obstinately. ‘You’re not blackmailing me into anything else. I know what my sister would want if she was alive to tell me.’

‘Surely she’d just want someone to love Robby.’

‘But she wouldn’t want the community to say I’d shoved my sister’s kid off onto a single mum. Dr Mainwaring can look after him short term if she likes,’ she added diffidently. ‘I can say it’s a short-term arrangement until he’s better and people will see that it’s sensible. In fact, I don’t care who does the short-term caring as long as he’s treated properly. But no adoption. Unless she’s married. No way!’

‘That short term is likely to become long term,’ Tom warned. ‘Which is unsatisfactory for everybody. Robby needs permanence.’

‘Then find him a family. Here. A family who’ll accept him, injuries and all.’

And that was that.

Em went back to Robby that night, cuddled him to sleep and thought about what she was doing. No adoption…

It meant she could care for Robby for now, but he could be taken from her at any time.

It couldn’t matter. She was all he had, for now.

Bernard was lying at her feet. Amazingly, the big dog lifted his head and stirred his tail, looking up at her with soulful eyes that told her he was missing the noise and excitement of Anna’s kids, and he didn’t understand where they’d gone.

And in the next room Em could hear Jonas moving around, getting ready for bed.

‘We have all the pieces of a jigsaw-puzzle,’ Em told her ancient dog. ‘What we need now is a miracle-worker to put them together. And somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen. Miracle-workers are a bit thin on the ground around here.’

Next door Jonas was telling himself he needed no such thing as a miracle. What more did they need than the elements they had right now?

Em was being pig-headed, he told himself. His vision of their marriage could work for all of them. If only she could forget this stupid need for emotional involvement.

He couldn’t give what he’d never been taught, he thought. He couldn’t give what scared him to admit even existed.

But what was happening now was ridiculous. Holding each other at arm’s length-not being permitted to adopt Robby-it was silly. It was crazy, and it was all because Em had this damned fool idea that she was in love with him.

It was stupid!

And he couldn’t go down her road, he told himself over and over. He couldn’t. He wanted this family-he wanted to hold it together and marriage would be the binder-but Em wanted more.

She thought love had to be present to hold them.

Love…

He was prepared to love, he thought-in an abstract sort of way. He just…