Tamed By The Renegade. Emily Forbes

now she saw why.

      He was asleep.

      Her eyes swept over his face. His cheekbones were wide and his nose was perfectly straight and narrow, flaring ever so slightly where it ended just above full lips. His eyebrows and lashes were a shade darker than his hair and she could see the beginnings of a darker beard on his jaw. A couple of little scars marked his face, one below his eye, another on his lip, but they did nothing to detract from his looks. His dark blond hair framed his face but one stray strand lay across his cheek. Ruby was tempted to reach out and brush it away but she was afraid of waking him. He looked like he was sleeping comfortably and she didn’t want to disturb him.

      He had a face she suspected she could look at for hours but she could hear the nurse’s footsteps moving around Rose’s bed. Ruby ducked out of the cubicle before she was caught being somewhere she had no business to be.

       Monday, 15th December

      Sitting by Rose’s bed wasn’t achieving anything. Ruby had spent the whole day in ICU and nothing had changed for the better.

      The doctors had confirmed that Rose had pneumococcal meningitis but if anyone expected a diagnosis to make a difference they were disappointed. Rose’s condition hadn’t improved and the doctors were now worried about her declining kidney function as a result of the blood poisoning. Her condition and treatment remained the same and the family just sat and waited for a sign, for anything, to indicate that she was recovering.

      Ruby had chatted to Scarlett, Jake and her mother when they’d all been at Rose’s bedside and when she and Rose had been alone she’d read to her and kept one ear peeled for the sound of the voice of the motorbike man next door, the man with the devilish grin and the voice like distant thunder, but it seemed he wasn’t in a talkative mood today.

      There was a lot more activity in the ICU and Ruby knew that there wasn’t a moment when they were alone but she was disappointed he hadn’t even tried to strike up a conversation with her. By the end of the day she had learned nothing further about him. She still didn’t know who he was and he’d had no visitors, not a single one. He’d had no one to talk to other than the doctors and nurses and Ruby hadn’t learnt anything interesting from them.

      Where was his family? Where were the people who cared about him?

      She supposed she could have asked him, should have asked him, but whenever she had gone in or out of Rose’s cubicle there had been one of the medical staff with him and she hadn’t been able to do more than smile at him.

      She should have tried harder. She should have worked on her timing but she was nervous, which was something quite out of character for her. Holding back was not in her nature. Normally, if she wanted something, whether it was information or an introduction, she would make it happen. But the butterflies that took flight in her stomach whenever they made eye contact were enough to make her hesitate.

      If they’d been in a social setting she would have walked straight up to him so perhaps it was the fact that he was at a disadvantage physically that made her hesitant. He didn’t know that she’d stood at his bedside the night before and watched him sleep. She thought that might freak him out so she was keeping her distance. He had no way of getting away from her if she encroached on his personal space. He wouldn’t be able to avoid her and she hated to think that she wouldn’t know if he was pleased with her attention or not. She didn’t want him to feel obligated to be nice to her just because he was confined to a bed.

      She didn’t consider that he could easily be blunt and tell her to leave him alone—something about the way he smiled at her made her think he wouldn’t be rude, but she didn’t want to put him in an awkward position. So she said nothing.

      * * *

      By late afternoon she was tired of staring at the same four walls. Tired of pretending everything would be fine. Rose had made it through another twenty-four hours but that was all that had happened. She supposed that was better than the alternative but she had reached her limit of being cooped up. She knew she wasn’t doing a very good job of being supportive but she couldn’t stay inside the hospital for a minute longer.

      Lucy was coming to take over the bedside vigil from her so Ruby arranged to meet her friend Candice for dinner. The last time she’d been back to Adelaide several months earlier had been for Candice’s wedding. It was strange to think that had been when Jake had been persistently pursuing Scarlett and she’d been trying to fend off his advances but not doing so very successfully. Now, months later, it was hard to imagine them not together.

      Ruby and Candice had nursed together in Melbourne but had both grown up in Adelaide. In typical Adelaide fashion there were only ever three degrees of separation. Ruby and Candice had worked together, now Candice worked as a theatre nurse for emergency surgery in this hospital, where Scarlett was an anaesthetist and Jake was about to be an intern, and Candice and Jake had grown up together as family friends. If anyone understood what Ruby and her family were going through at the moment, it was Candice.

      As they selected their dishes from the Thai menu Ruby filled her friend in on Rose’s status before Candice moved the conversation on to ‘other business’, as she called it.

      ‘So, are you bringing a plus one to Scarlett’s wedding?’

      Ruby shook her head.

      ‘Why not? I know you have one, you always have one. I used to wonder how you found so many.’

      ‘You don’t wonder any more?’

      ‘Not now that I’m married.’ Candice laughed. ‘It doesn’t bother me any longer that you seem to have more than your fair share of men. Now that I’ve taken myself out of the marketplace you can have as many as you want, but I do like to meet one of them every now and again. Who’s the latest?’

      Ruby paused. She didn’t think there was actually that much to say but it would be nice to talk about the things they always used to discuss. It would be nice to get her mind off Rose’s medical predicament for just a while.

      ‘I’m not sure that there is a latest,’ she admitted.

      ‘You’re between boyfriends?’

      ‘I’m not sure exactly.’

      ‘How can you not be sure? What’s going on?’

      ‘Mitch was asleep when Scarlett rang me about Rose in the middle of the night. The phone call didn’t wake him. I left him a note.’ Mitch was a musician, a drummer, and his band had been playing at one of the local pubs that night. He’d got home late and hadn’t been asleep long when Scarlett’s phone call had woken Ruby. But Mitch had slept through all of that and Ruby hadn’t thought it necessary to wake him. It wasn’t any of his business. She hadn’t thought about Mitch since she’d walked out.

      ‘You left him a note?’ Candice’s tone let Ruby know exactly what she thought about that. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

      Ruby shook her head. ‘He hasn’t called me either,’ she said defensively. ‘We don’t, didn’t, have that sort of relationship.’ They hadn’t been like Scarlett and Jake. Or Candice and her husband, Ewan. They had both found the person they wanted to spend the rest of their life with. They had found the person who came first. Ruby had no idea what that was like.

      ‘Well, if neither of you are prepared to pick up the phone, you’re probably perfectly matched,’ Candice decided, ‘but it’s kind of ironic ‘cos now you’ll never know.’

      ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ruby said with a shrug. ‘I’d never planned to bring him home to meet my family and certainly not for Scarlett’s wedding. We wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. I’d been seeing him for almost two months.’

      Two months was her self-imposed time limit on relationships. Any longer than that and there was the chance that one of them could start to think the relationship was serious and that was something Ruby had always taken pains to avoid. A serious relationship meant sharing bits of your soul with another person. Letting them see deep inside you.