Hearts Of Gold. Meredith Webber

      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

      ALEX could sense resistance in his companion as they made their way, with frequent stops, towards her house. Not resistance to his kisses—she was too honest and wholehearted in her response! No, it was to do with the past, and whatever it was it haunted Annie as she had haunted him.

      They reached her place and he took her to the back door and waited while she unlocked it, calling to Henry to quieten him.

      ‘Would you like a coffee now?’ she asked, but lack of sleep and an evening swim had taken their toll and Alex shook his head.

      ‘I’ll say goodnight,’ he said, and took her in his arms again, kissing her thoroughly, winning sweet, hot kisses in return. But although his body hungered to take things further, his head decreed caution, and he knew it was the right decision at this stage of their relationship.

      Especially if Annie was, as he suspected, trying to work out how to tell him it was over before it had begun.

      He said goodnight and walked home up the lane, wondering if he was at the two steps forward or one step back part of this relationship. He also found time to wonder why he, with his aversion to emotional dependency, wanted so badly to find out about Annie’s past. Wanted so badly to make things right for her.

      Wasn’t he better off just accepting the Annie of the present, enjoying a relationship with her and letting the past remain where it was—in the past?

      Yes was the answer to that question, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. If he had a relationship with Annie then it was already tied to the past.

      ‘Give it up,’ he told himself, letting himself in through his back door and bending to lift a delighted Minnie and hush her excited yapping. ‘Think about work!’

      He dialled the hospital, remembering as the phone rang at the other end that he hadn’t told Annie that Amy’s new catheter had worked and her kidneys were functioning if not perfectly then well.

      The report from the PICU was all good, and he went off to bed thinking of work, but with a twist of Annie, because he’d be seeing her there in the morning.

      ‘So you see my dilemma, Henry,’ Annie said, when she’d filled him in on the Alex situation over a very early breakfast the next morning.

      ‘Just tell the man about Dennis,’ her father said, coming in on the tail end of the one-way discussion. ‘For Pete’s sake, it doesn’t reflect badly on you.’

      Annie looked at her father. He’d been a policeman for over thirty years, yet he still had no real understanding of how victims of the crimes he’d fought—and now wrote about—felt. This wasn’t the first time she’d tried to explain it to him, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but still she tried.

      ‘Dad, you and I were closer than most fathers and daughters are—far closer—but it still took me four years to lift that phone and call you.’

      Four years and a stranger’s kiss, she amended silently.

      ‘I’ve known Alex for a week. I can’t talk to him about it, and even if I could, don’t you think he’d run a mile? What sane sensible man would want a woman with so much baggage?’

      ‘A man who loved you, that’s who,’ her father growled, then he wheeled himself away, not, Annie knew, because he was angry with her but because he, too, still found it hard to cope with what had happened.

      Annie said goodbye to her two protectors and walked to work, pleased not to have company because, after a weekend of emotional upheaval, she wanted to get her mind focussed back on the job. Especially as this would be the first week of full-time surgery, the patient first up this morning a young girl Alex had seen last week. Jamie Hutchins was a six-year-old with a previously undiagnosed atrial septal defect, or, in medical shorthand, an ASD, and Alex had scheduled a staff briefing for eight with the operation to start at nine. And because she wanted to be at the briefing, wanted to learn all she could about the work Alex did, here she was heading for work before seven.

      And beating Alex, she found when she checked in at the special care unit and learned both patients had enjoyed a peaceful night. But she wasn’t the first on duty. As she pushed open the door that led to the suite of open-plan ‘offices’ she and the doctors used, she saw the light was on, and though her heart skipped an anticipatory beat it was Maggie, not Alex, already at a desk.

      ‘You want a coffee?’ Maggie used the question as a greeting. She looked and sounded tired, which puzzled Annie, given the status of their patients.

      Annie said yes to coffee and watched Maggie as she poured, seeing tiredness in her actions as well.

      ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, and Maggie gave a weary smile.

      ‘When Alex offered me the job up here, I thought it would be a good chance to catch up with my sister, who shifted up here when she married, and get to know her family a bit better. So I asked if I could stay with them until I found somewhere to live.’

      ‘Not a good idea?’ Annie sugared her coffee and stirred it.

      ‘A