Madison jerked away from him. ‘That’s taking things too far.’ The cooler night air was soothing on her flaming skin. Not enough to calm down and become rational again, but it was a start. Heading in the direction of the perimeter, she began striding out fast, her chest rising and falling rapidly.
Sam stuck by her side. ‘Glad you’re seeing things my way.’
‘I don’t need a chaperon.’
‘I could do with stretching my legs, too.’
For the first few minutes Madison said nothing, her fists beating the air as she jabbed them up, jerked them down, up, down. Dust lifted at every step she stomped. Her skin was soon hot and sticky. ‘This is stupid,’ she huffed through a dry mouth.
‘You don’t like silence?’ So light and chatty. Nothing was rattling the man.
So she tried a different tack. ‘Did you always want to be a doctor?’
‘No. That came after the fireman craze at six, a cop driving fast cars at ten. I finally thought being a doctor would be cool when I was fourteen.’
She huffed a lighter breath. So far so good. ‘Find me a small boy who hasn’t wanted to do those things.’
‘Who said I was small?’ he quipped. ‘What about you? A princess, a dancing queen, then a doctor?’
Because there was no insult in his tone she let him off with his quip about being a princess. ‘Just as predictable. A vet, as many of the girls in our science class wanted to be.’
‘What happened? You’d have easily gotten into vet school. Top girl of our year, and all that.’
He remembered? Wow. ‘Vet school’s hard to get into, and the end of many students’ dreams. When I told Dad I wanted to be a vet he made me get a job at the SPCA at the weekends and at a vet clinic cleaning cages after school. Said I needed to learn vets weren’t all about cute puppies and kittens but dealing with their pain and suffering.’
‘A wise man, your dad.’
‘Yep. I couldn’t handle it when any dogs came in injured. Their pain was my pain, in an over-the-top teenage kind of way. As Dad had known, that made me realise I couldn’t do the job. Those dogs, and the cats, at the SPCA would look at me with their big, trusting eyes, as I got them ready to visit the vet. Sometimes they didn’t come back. I always felt as though it was my fault if they were euthanased because I’d been the one to prepare them for their visit.’
‘You don’t feel the same about humans?’ Sympathetic amusement crackled between them.
‘Of course I do, but it’s different. Don’t ask me how, it just is.’ She’d fallen to bits when her dog had had to be put down after being hit by a car. She’d refused to replace him. She could still drag up a mental picture of Buster’s big trustful eyes on her as she and her father had taken him to the vet. ‘I don’t have to put down my patients.’
‘No regrets?’
Madison shook her head. ‘Not at all. I like helping people as much as I adored attending to those animals. Being a surgeon suits me, although it is quite intimate in a way.’
‘The invasiveness of it?’ Sam nodded. ‘I’m always awestruck by how people who know nothing about me are willing to trust me enough to operate on them.’ They’d reached the mess block. ‘Ready for something to eat?’
‘I’m still not hungry.’ But that hyper feeling had quietened down. ‘Think I’ll head for my barracks.’
‘Have a drink with me and we can share a plate of fries.’ He held open the door leading inside the mess.
‘Do you always boss everyone around like this?’ she asked as she slipped past him into the bright light of the nearly empty mess, her stomach winning over the need to put distance between them.
‘Only people who beat me at physics.’
‘Did I?’ Laughing, she sat down on a stool at the bar and said, ‘Why did you go to Auckland to do your training? Were you running away from Christchurch?’
CHAPTER SIX
YES, IN ONE way Sam had been running away. ‘I won a scholarship to Auckland University.’ He still filled with pride at his achievement. ‘I was determined to go to med school and a scholarship made it a lot easier.’ The money he’d made filling shelves in the local supermarket after school hadn’t exactly been overwhelming. Moving to Auckland hadn’t been cheap but there had been no shadows lurking in dark corners, no memories of his mother at the local shops or in the library there.
‘Why medicine?’
Ah. More back story coming up. He wasn’t used to talking about his past, or anything close to him, come to that, but it seemed he couldn’t help himself around this woman. At least he’d soon be out of there and not likely to bump into her again. ‘Mum was chronically ill for as long back as I can remember. She was a diabetic, an asthmatic, and had Crohn’s disease. Living in poverty didn’t help her situation.’
‘That’s so unfair, copping all those illnesses.’ The sympathy in Madison’s voice could undo him if he wasn’t careful.
Now he recalled why he never talked about this stuff. But he’d started, couldn’t seem to stop. ‘When I was old enough to understand that Mum couldn’t get out of bed some days because of her health and not because she was the lazy cow my father called her, I tried to do everything possible to help her. It wasn’t much.’
‘You were only a kid. It was your father’s responsibility to care for her, surely?’
‘You’ve got to be there to do that. He left when I was four. Just upped and walked away one day after the beer ran out and Mum couldn’t find the energy to drag herself to the liquor outlet to get him some more.’
‘Oh, Sam. You got a bad deal.’
He glugged down some of his water. ‘Yes. And no. We were dirt poor but I was always sure of Mum’s love. She struggled to hold down a job because of her health and that made me feel bad because I knew she only went to work to give me things.’
‘She was a good mum.’
When Maddy’s hand covered his, Sam struggled to hold back the sudden tears welling up. Damn her, he did not need this. He hadn’t cried for his mother since her funeral. But seemed that now he’d started he wanted to talk about the rest. ‘It wasn’t until she went to work at that school and hooked up with Ma Creighton again that she stayed in the same job for more than a year. I suspect Ma Creighton stuck up for her whenever the school board talked of getting rid of her.’
‘Friendships can be the best thing out.’ Her hand tightened on his.
He didn’t want friendship with Madison. She’d want more of him than he was prepared to give. Pulling his hand away, he continued, now in a hurry to finish his story. ‘From the day Ma and Pa Creighton took me in and made their home mine I was determined never to give them any reason to regret their generosity. They were exceptional, kind and considerate, and at the same time they never went soft on me.’
Yet, except for a couple of brief phone calls, he hadn’t spoken to them in a long time. All part of his withdrawal from being too near to anyone. People he got close to tended to desert him one way or another and he couldn’t risk losing the two who’d stepped up for him when he’d been a confused and angry teen. Guilt waved at him again, cramped his gut. He missed them so much, thought of them most days. Next week, he knew, he should finally visit them.
‘You want another of those?’ Madison tapped his water bottle.
Letting him off the hook? Had she sensed his pain, known to back off? ‘I’ll get it.’ He should walk away from her while he still could. But it was nigh on impossible when Maddy managed to wind him up and soften his stance all at the same time. During the past day and a bit he’d thought more about his future, and his past, and Madison, than he had in two years. It was as if she’d taken a chisel to those tight bands around his heart and created a gap through which his real emotions were escaping. Emotions such as need, want, love, and—dared he admit it?—excitement. He couldn’t afford to give in
to these feelings. Another shiver; deeper this time. It had been too long since he’d believed there might be someone special for him out there. The risk was huge, but right this moment it was hard to deny himself a glimmer of hope. Seesawing between two worlds, he swung towards Madison, went with keeping the conversation light and chatty. ‘I did have a blast in Auckland.’
‘Has the city recovered?’ she asked with that cheeky glint he enjoyed more than a cold shower on a hot day.
Though a cold shower might soon be necessary to cool the heat banking up internally as he watched her shift her curvy backside on the stool, unconsciously letting off fireworks in his belly, further lightening the weight wedged there since she’d turned up on his patch. ‘I hope so.’
Sam tilted forward, halving the gap between them. Her scent floated on the air, instantly transporting him back to the peach tree in the yard of the only home he’d had with his mother and father. Large, ripe, succulent peaches. It had been the year he’d turned four and he’d spent hours under that tree in summer, playing in the dirt, shaking the branches to bring down the fruit to shove in his mouth and feed his hungry belly, sticky juice sliding down his face. Dad used to sit there, reading the paper, smoking, drinking beer, pushing a toy truck around when he could be bothered. At the end of summer his dad was gone, out of his life for ever.
Sam jerked back. Stop this nonsense. He didn’t do thinking about the man who’d fathered him and then discarded him easier than last week’s bread.
When he next looked at Madison he found her deep gaze fixed on him, almost as if she was searching for something he wasn’t sure he wanted found. She sure had him thinking about things he’d long buried. Another diversion was needed. ‘What about you? You stayed on in Christchurch?’
‘Yep. I’m close to my family and my girlfriends went to Christchurch University as well.’
‘Why the army?’ Never had he asked so many questions of someone. What was in the water?