Free Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit by Meredith Webber Page B

she’d take him to see the dog.’
    Angus could imagine what had happened, and understood that if Juanita had tried to insist on Hamish going to bed, the little boy would only have grown more upset, and with the move, and missing his dog, he was already emotionally out of balance.
    But knowing how this had come about didn’t help him in deciding what to do, although now Kate Armstrong seemed to have taken things into her own hands. She was sitting on the couch beside Juanita, holding Hamish on her lap.
    ‘Juanita’s right,’ she was telling Hamish, ‘we can’t visit McTavish at this time of night because if we did all the other dogs and cats and birds and horses there would be disturbed and upset and they would want their owners to be visiting them, as well. But your father can phone them and ask them how McTavish is now. Perhaps he can tell them what McTavish’s favourite food is, and the people who are minding him can try to coax him to eat a little of it. They have vets—animal doctors—at the quarantine centre who will be looking after him, just as your Dad looks after the babies at the hospital.’
    ‘My mother died.’
    Angus’s heart stopped beating for an instant and a chill ran through his body. He’d never heard Hamish mention his mother, but it was obvious the little boy assumed Jenna had been ill before she died, and now he was thinking McTavish could also die. He knelt in front of his son and lifted him from Kate’s knee.
    ‘McTavish won’t die,’ he promised, knowing the assurance was needed, although he also knew he couldn’t guarantee such a thing. ‘Kate’s right, let’s go inside and phone the quarantine centre and tell them that he really likes—’
    What did the dog really like?
    ‘Biscuits,’ Hamish told him, his fears forgotten in this new excitement.
    ‘Not exactly a dietary imperative,’ Angus muttered, but if biscuits could coax McTavish to eat, then he’d certainly suggest them.
    He carried his son towards the house, pausing for Juanita to catch up with them and to nod goodnight to Kate. But the image of her sitting on the old yellow couch, his son in her arms, remained with him long after his conversation with the quarantine office and the reassuring return phone call that, yes, McTavish had eaten some biscuits and even eaten some of the dried dog food the carers had mixed in with the broken biscuits.
    The image of her accompanied him to bed, aware of her in the house next door, so close, too close.
    Any woman would have comforted Hamish in that situation, he told himself, but some instinct deep insidewas telling him she wasn’t just any woman, this Kate Armstrong. She was special—special in a way no woman had been since Jenna.
    Which was another reason he had to avoid her…
    It proved, as he’d known it would, impossible, for the teams met regularly. He operated with her, and discussion of patients was inevitable. But he managed to avoid her out of work hours until the day he came home early enough to attack the hedge around the garden gate.
    Kate had been sensible in suggesting that if Hamish wanted to adventure he do it in her backyard, so freeing the gate had become a necessity. He’d bought a pair of hedge trimmers at the local hardware store and, some three-quarters of an hour of reasonably hard labour later, had cleared his side enough to push the gate open. Now all he had to do was trim her side.
    Should he phone her first to ask if it was okay to come in and do it?
    Phone her when she lived next door?
    Well, he wasn’t going to go over and ask; just seeing her each day at work was enough to tell him the attraction was going to take a long time to die.
    He was debating this when Hamish returned from his job of stacking all the cut-off hedge branches in a pile near the back fence.
    ‘Oh, look, we can get into Kate’s garden.’
    He ran through the gate before Angus could stop him, calling back to his father in even greater excitement, ‘And here’s Kate,