A Wedding in December Read online

  “I know what a pavement is.”

  “Yes. Of course you do.” Her breathing was fast. “He smashed into Emma, tossed her in the air like a rag doll, drove off without stopping. Can you believe that? He hit a girl, a human being, and didn’t stop.” Even after everything she’d seen in her life, she couldn’t accept what one person would do to another. She glanced at Jordan and saw the shock in his face. The fact that he found it shocking was comforting. He wasn’t judging her for not treating it as routine. “She was brought in to us—we had the trauma team ready, surgeons, everyone, but it was—” Why did she find it so hard to talk about it? “Her dad arrived at the hospital. Single dad. Looked after Emma since his wife died. She was his life. His baby. He begged us to save her. Begged us. Don’t let her die, don’t let her die.”

  Jordan reached out and removed her wineglass. Then he covered her hand with his. She didn’t even feel it. She was back there, with Emma’s blood all over her surgical gloves and a father’s desperate hope in her hands.

  “We couldn’t. Her injuries were—catastrophic.”

  “I’m sorry.” His hand tightened and this time she felt the firm pressure of his fingers locked protectively over hers.

  “Her father was distraught. I had to tell him. That was my job. And he was on his own. She was all he had in the world. His little girl.” His love, and his heartbreak, had been so palpable that she’d lived the agony with him. She’d hated her job then. Hated its limitations. Her limitations.

  “I can’t even imagine how hard that conversation must have been.”

  “It’s part of the job. The worst part.” She clung to his hand. “He couldn’t make sense of it, and there was nothing much I could say because how can you make sense of something that makes no sense?”

  “I’m guessing that was a particularly difficult conversation.”

  “We were talking, he was asking me for details. The police came. They’d found the car. One of the girls gave a description and—” she closed her eyes “—there was—they were able to identify the car because—DNA—traces of blood—it doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know.” She opened her eyes and looked at him. “You’re probably thinking that a good doctor should be able to detach from it.”

  “I’m not thinking that.”

  “He was drunk. The man who killed her. They picked him up and arrested him. I think that tipped the father over the edge. His baby, killed by a guy who should never have got behind the wheel. Senseless. Avoidable.” She felt the sympathy coming off Jordan in waves. “The police went to talk to the other girls, I was left alone with her father. I don’t know what happened. Everything changed in a moment. He was—deranged with grief. He picked me up by my throat and slammed me against the glass window of the relatives’ room. Kept saying, Why couldn’t you save her? Why?” She’d seen stars, then darkness, then his voice—call yourself a fucking doctor? “A nurse came into the room. Tried to pull him off, but he was too strong so she left the room to get help.”

  “He let you go?”

  “The glass behind me shattered. I think it shocked him. He let me go, people arrived to help—that was it.”

  Jordan swore and ran his hand over his face. If he’d looked shocked before, now he looked shaken. “You were badly hurt?”

  “Cut my shoulder. It was nothing. He lost a child. He lost his baby. I wanted them to show that drunken loser her broken body. I wanted him to see what he’d done, but of course that isn’t how it works.” She picked up her wine again and took a mouthful. Her hand shook. She’d told him. She’d told someone. “When you’re a doctor, you try to let things slide off you. If I allow myself to feel, I can’t do my job. That doesn’t make me callous, it makes me efficient.”

  “But you’re human.”

  It was a quiet statement of fact and it made her feel better. For the first time in weeks she wondered if, perhaps, she wasn’t such a failure. Perhaps she was human.

  She drained her glass. “That incident—that death—didn’t slide off me. It buried itself in me like a shard of that glass. On the outside, I’ve healed.” They’d removed pieces of glass, stitched her, told her she’d have a scar. She hadn’t even cared. Part of her even thought that maybe she deserved it. “I wanted to save his little girl. That’s why I became a doctor. I kept wondering if there was more we could have done to save that child, even though I knew there wasn’t. My brain keeps thinking of scenarios where she’d been brought in sooner, where the ambulance had taken five minutes instead of ten—I don’t even know that would have made a difference, but I haven’t been able to let it go.”

  “Flashbacks?”

  “All the time. If only. What if. Did we do everything? Did we try everything?”

  “Of course the real question is why he had a drink and then got behind the wheel.”

  “I know you’re right. But logic doesn’t make me feel better.” But Jordan did. He made her feel better, as if his thoughtful, carefully chosen words were stitching together those parts of her that had been torn apart.

  “Technically he assaulted you.” He let go of her hand and reached for the bottle of wine. “Knowing you, I’m guessing you didn’t press charges.”

  “No. The man was beside himself. He—” Her eyes filled. “It wasn’t the first sad, difficult case I’ve handled. I don’t know why that one got to me, but it did. I feel—I’ve lost confidence.”

  “Because you couldn’t save his daughter?”

  “Not only that. I should have seen how upset he was. I should have seen the risk. I misjudged it totally. It could have been one of my staff he attacked, and not me. It could have been worse. And then he would have been dealing with assault charges on top of grief.”

  He was silent for a moment. “You ask a lot of yourself, don’t you? You’re human, Katie. You feel. You have compassion.”

  “I was so busy feeling, I abandoned judgment. He was distraught, understandably. Angry, too. I probably should have anticipated the possibility of violence.”

  “You’re a mind reader? You’re supposed to be able to predict human behavior?”

  “To an extent, yes. I’m wondering if I was tired, if I wasn’t engaged enough in the job. Or maybe I’m not good enough. And now I can’t untangle any of it.”

  He topped up her glass. “You expect perfect. I bet you were a Grade A student all the way.”

  She managed a smile. “You’re a psychologist?”

  “No, but even I can see that you can’t apply that kind of grading system to a real life situation. You’re struggling to be detached and do your work. And you think, for some reason I’m not understanding, that makes you a bad doctor.”

  “I think I was doubting myself anyway and this has made me doubt myself even more. I’ve been on the edge for weeks. I’m on sick leave, did I tell you that? My family don’t know. They don’t know about any of this. I try never to cause them worry. It’s hell for a parent to worry over a child. I saw that anxiety in my mother’s face every time Rosie was taken into hospital. I saw it in my father’s face.”

  “So you force yourself to handle your feelings alone. It’s okay to lean on people, Katie. Everyone needs support.”

  She wondered who gave him support. Dan presumably. And other friends. His mother. “I’m going to be fine. Well, apart from the headache I’m going to have tomorrow from all this wine.” She breathed and put her glass down. “Who would have thought it would be you who made me feel better?”

  A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “I thought I was the most annoying man who ever lived?”

  “Turns out you’re not so bad.”

  His smile vanished and he took her hand again. “It’s not your fault, Katie. None of it.”

  She knew she should probably pull away, but she liked the way his hand felt on hers.

  “You don’t know that. You can’t know.”

 
“I know for sure that if I was ever injured I’d be lucky to have someone like you in charge of my care. You’re shivering.” Giving her hand a squeeze, he stood up and put another log on the fire. “I’m sure you’re a fine doctor, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry on doing a job that no longer works for you.”

  “To give up something I’ve worked this long and this hard for—” she bit her lip “—that would make me stupid, don’t you think?”

  He waited until the flames started to lick around the log and then sat back down next to her. “I would have gone with brave.”

  “Brave?”

  “The easy route would be to carry on doing what you’re doing and not question it.”

  “Yes, that’s the low risk option.”

  “To me the risk is that you look back in twenty or thirty years and regret that you spent your life doing something you didn’t love. But you could always take a break. Instead of making an immediate decision, take time to think it through.”

  It was an option she hadn’t considered. Her brain had been dealing with all-or-nothing scenarios. Why hadn’t she thought of a compromise? Why hadn’t she thought of taking a break?

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you occasionally talk sense, Jordan.”

  They were sitting close together. The only sound was the crackle of the fire and the howl of the wind beating against the walls of the cabin. What had felt cozy before, now felt intimate. Her leg was pressed against his and she felt a rush of desire that almost knocked her flat.

  She glanced at him and then looked away quickly, but not before she’d seen a response in his eyes. “How about you? Do you love what you do?”

  “Most days. And then sometimes I’m freezing off my fingers and toes in a blizzard—”

  “—and you think you’d like a nice, warm office job?” There was a shift in the atmosphere. She sensed he was aware of it, too.

  He gave a soft laugh. “That has never been the dream. I wanted to live and work in the mountains. That was the most important thing for me.”

  She envied the fact that he was so sure about what he wanted. “I can’t believe you built this place.” She stood up, drained from her own emotional outpouring and more than a little embarrassed.

  “Shaped every log and board myself. Lost most of the skin on my fingers in the process.”

  She tipped her head back and glanced up at the roof. “You have no TV and no Wi-Fi.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So how do you occupy yourself?” She turned her head and met his gaze.

  Humor glimmered there. “Are you propositioning me, Dr. White?”

  Her mouth felt dry. “I might be. Of course it could be the wine.” She’d probably read him wrong, in which case her embarrassment was about to triple. “As it doesn’t seem that I’ll be going anywhere tonight, can I change my mind and use your shower?”

  He stood up, too. “I’ll fetch you towels and leave some dry clothes on the bed.” The bed. One bed. The reality of it struck home. She was snowed in with Jordan.

  “Do you have blankets for the sofa?”

  “Yes, but I’ll take the sofa.” He disappeared, and reappeared moments later with towels. “Shower is straightforward.”

  She stripped off her clothes, put her underwear on the heated towel rail to dry off and stepped under the jets of water. It turned out to be a rainhead shower and she lathered her hair, soaped her body and realized at some point that she felt better than she had in a long time. Maybe it was the wine. Or maybe it was because she’d finally talked about it. Jordan, it turned out, was a good listener.

  Wrapped in a towel, she rescued her underwear and stepped across the hall into the bedroom. He’d laid out fleece-lined sweatpants, T-shirts and a sweater.

  She tied the waist of the sweatpants and turned up the bottoms so she didn’t fall over them. Her own sweater had somehow stayed miraculously dry so she pulled that back on.

  She wasn’t going to win any fashion contests but at least she was warm and dry.

  The bedroom was dominated by the large bed and the fireplace. Like the rest of the cabin, the focus was on the quality of the wood and the workmanship. The floor was heated, the bed draped in soft layers to keep the chill out on cold nights. There were books stacked on both nightstands, and the soft glow of a lamp sent a shaft of light across the bed. It was more rustic than elegant, but there was something about the place that made her want to crawl into that bed, sink against the pile of pillows and read until her eyes drifted shut.

  Instead she dried her hair and joined Jordan in the living room. He was seated on the sofa, his legs stretched out as he stared into the fire.

  She sat down next to him and picked up her glass. “Now I understand why you’ve been so protective of Dan. He’s like a brother to you. You think of him the same way I think about Rosie.”

  “Not exactly, but yes—” he shrugged “—there’s a similarity.”

  “Do you think the marriage will work? Are they rushing things?”

  “Unlike you, Dr. White, I don’t do a risk assessment on every situation, or try to predict every outcome. I tend to let life happen.”

  “I envy you. But what’s your best guess?”

  “My marriage lasted six months, so I don’t consider myself qualified to comment or advise on anyone else’s relationship, but I know what rushing looks like and I don’t think I’m seeing it here.”

  “But your own experience hasn’t made you cynical about relationships. If it had, you’d be warning Dan off marriage.”

  “It was a long time ago. We were eighteen. Dan is nothing like me. And, as I said before, I don’t believe one person’s relationship experience has relevance to someone else’s. We’re all different. How about you? Engaged? Seriously involved?”

  “Neither. I never get in that deep with people. That time when you threw me over your shoulder? That’s the most action I’ve had in a looooong while.”

  “Any particular reason for that?”

  She sat up and put her glass down on the table. “Yes. I’m a coward. There. I said it. I’m a coward. Every time you love someone you risk getting your heart beaten to a pulp.”

  “Cheerful thought.”

  “I’m risk averse. I’m not brave. You were wrong about that. I can’t handle that bone-deep anxiety that comes from loving someone. I only understood that recently. So apparently I’m now a psychiatrist as well as a specialist in emergency medicine. The one thing I’m not good at is relationships, but hey we can’t all be good at everything.”

  “But you must date.”

  “Usually I see a man once. No one calls me a second time.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “It could be because I always hand out a fake phone number.”

  His eyes narrowed with amusement. “Dr. White, you shock me.”

  “I also give them a fake name. And I have no idea why I just told you that.”

  He started to laugh. “Tell me the name. No. Let me guess—you go by the name of Tiara. Or maybe Aurora. Geranium?”

  “Karen.”

  “No. I don’t believe you. No way are you a Karen.”

  “Karen. Is there any more wine? If this is confession time, I’m going to need it.”

  “Yes, Karen.” He topped up their glasses. “Sorry, but you are not a Karen. Guys in London must be stupid.”

  “How about you?”

  “I don’t have a fake name. Never seen the need.”

  “I mean, do you date? You must have been involved since your wife.”

  “I guess I’m pretty wary, too.”

  They were side by side on the sofa, elbows touching, thighs touching. She was acutely conscious of him.

  “Jordan?”

  “What?”

  “The other day, I lied.”
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br />   “About what?”

  “When I told you the earth didn’t move.” She turned her head and found he was already looking at her. Her stomach curled.

  “It moved?”

  “It might have moved. A little.”

  His gaze slid to her mouth. “You’re not sure?”

  “The wine has made things a little hazy.” She inched a little closer. “If I kissed you now, would you be shocked?”

  “Try it and I’ll let you know.”

  The last of the daylight was fading and the only light came from the flickering fire. It was as if nothing existed beyond the wooden walls. The cabin had become a cocoon.

  She sat up and put her glass down on the table. Then she did the same with his.

  “I can see you’re focused,” he murmured. “A woman on a mission, seeking an answer to the question of whether the earth is going to move.”

  “This is a controlled, clinical trial. Nothing more.” She lowered her mouth toward his and then stopped, her breath mingling with his. “To clarify, if the earth should happen to move, you’re not going to ask for my number, are you?”

  He slid his hands into her hair, holding her head close to his. “Not much point, since I already know it will be fake. Karen.”

  Their mouths hadn’t touched, but she was excruciatingly aware of him. Those blue eyes, veiled, watching her. His fingers, strong as steel, gently cupping her face.

  The teasing atmosphere had vanished, leaving only delicious tension.

  Was this a mistake? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she was sick and tired of feeling bad and being with Jordan felt good. Rosie said she’d forgotten how to have fun. She needed to know that part of her was still alive and well.

  She moved her mouth even closer to his. “You can still stop me.”

  “Why would I stop you?”

  They moved at the same time, mouths colliding, hands seeking. She’d intended it to be a kiss, that was all. One kiss. But the moment his hand stroked down her back she knew one kiss was never going to be enough.