It snuck up on her one day that, along with everything else, she'd learned his footsteps. Their cadence in the hall, their seemingly contradictory loping swiftness. In them, Shelagh simply heard him. So many details she had begun to see she already knew - facets of his nature that she hadn't recognized yet for what they were: pieces belonging to the whole that made up Dr. Patrick Turner.

As the autumn blurred into a haze between being Sister Bernadette and becoming Shelagh Turner, there was much to discover, about herself and, to a greater degree, about the man she had fallen in love with so unexpectedly. These myriad small revelations, like their relationship itself, were somehow both gradual and yet intensely striking.

She turned at the sound of his steps crossing the tile hallway, and as expected, the whole man appeared. He stood in the doorway, a pile of brown folders in the crook of his elbow and a pleasant yet sheepish expression spreading across his adorable weathered features.

"It's far too quiet in Sister Julienne's office," was the half-mumbled excuse he offered, sounding amusingly like a certain cub scout being reminded of unfinished schoolwork.

"By all means," she said cheerily, welcoming him, as she motioned to the empty work table in front of her.

His eyes lit up, then clouded with a hint of suspicion. "I'm not disturbing you?"

"What is there to disturb?" she scoffed lightly, brushing off whatever invasion of her solitude he was considering more important than his own distraction.

It was hardly a sacrifice, and in a way she knew he needed the company more than she relished the time alone. His loneliness was one of the things she had realized, had really discovered, recently. The outward hints of things gone uncared for, frayed trousers and lost buttons, were only symptoms of the gaping holes left in the seams of his life. Spaces of blankness and nothingness that he could never hope to mend himself, only unskillfully patch over by outings with Timothy and plates of fried bread. Silence was a treasure to her, and yet to the man she loved, it was unnerving. Silence, to Patrick, meant grief. Her engagement, and their resulting closeness, had fostered a new sense of clarity towards him, similar, in a way, to having put on her new spectacles. He held her focus now; he and Timothy, and when regarded in this new light, they were suddenly fathomable.

'I'm not doing much of consequence. Really, Patrick. Just keeping up with the sterilizing. We've had quite an active night here, followed by an equally busy morning- and we don't want Sister Evangelina accusing anyone of clamp thievery again."

The previously boyish grin turned knowing, smiling at her joke and silently teasing her for her assiduous nature with regard to supplies. Her thin tawny eyebrows rose in contest, both in defense of herself and accusation towards him of the exact same tendency in general. They stared daringly at one another until the tediously balanced tension snapped and dissolved into laughter- her light airy giggle mixing with his low rich tone.

Patrick sat and began to read through the new files from the clinic, flagged by midwives and nurses alike as possibly troubling or needing advice. Shelagh wondered over his unruly black fringe for a moment as he leaned forward, then turned back to her own task.

A comfortable silence reigned, broken only by occasional queries and musings over case files by Dr. Turner and the clink of steel against the autoclave. Shelagh shut it, allowing it to fill with searing steam and turned to lean her weight against counter.

He felt her eyes on him. He had always been able to do that. Even before they had an understanding, he'd always known when she was looking towards him, offering an explanation or looking for assistance. Her eyes had followed him for ages after the birth of the Carter twins, causing him to realize he never wanted her to look elsewhere. As he glanced up from his work and met their gaze, both blue and green eyes filled with comfort and happiness, exceedingly content, in this moment, just to be breathing the same air as the person they loved. He wondered aloud into the space between them, "How is it that I didn't know? How did either of us miss this? And for so long?"

A small smile quirked the left side of her mouth as she blushed slightly, rounding the now rosy apple of her cheek. "We weren't looking," she said contemplatively, then slightly more definitively; "Things tend to fall into place when you least expect it. At least- that's been my experience."

They hadn't spoken of her past since that day it rained. The opportunity simply had not presented itself, but Patrick could not deny that the wonderful openness with which they now interacted seemed to be a direct result of it. He looked at her expectantly as he rested both elbows on the table and asked which experiences those had been.

She clasped her hands thoughtfully in front of her, calling back into her memory for an example, and made to smooth down her habit. A habit that was no longer there. He saw it, and somehow understood. She marveled inwardly once again, upon catching herself. "It's so instinctive, yet there must be somewhere that these things have their origin. Somewhere in all the many days where these things click, becoming permanent."

"They go by unnoticed," he mused, thinking of all the times he had worked so closely with this woman, and had felt only admiration and friendship for her.

"Most of the time I think they do." She motioned vaguely between them. "It came on so gradually, so naturally- how could we have seen it before?"

They were silent for half of a moment, in thought, and then Patrick's eyes grew somehow greener with excitement, and she smiled widely at his sudden impish expression. "What is it?"

"But I remember seeing it, Shelagh. I do. I know when I began to love you. I remember the first time I drove home, thinking of you, pulled into a million directions."

Shelagh could only stare blankly at him. "Wh-when?" she stuttered.

"The day we lost the Kellys' little boy." he remarked seriously, eyes greying.

She knew immediately what he was speaking of. "You asked me to take tea with you."

"I did - because suddenly I had to know more about you. I was so drawn to you. I forgot myself, your habit and everything else and just wanted you to tell me everything you had ever thought or never spoken. That small contrary statement, Shelagh. That was all it took."

"I was already in the middle," she murmured after a moment.

A nod. "Which is why you said no."

She admired him for his understanding. "I remember when I first saw you, Patrick."

"I don't think I remember our meeting, darling. I'm sorry." He grimaced at himself and she chuckled, shaking her head slightly. "No, actually, I can't recall that either- though it was likely with a laboring mother in the room, so that's not too surprising."

He laughed obligingly, bemused.

"I meant- well, it's something I began to do as a young nurse. When I first was assigned at the London the scorn of the Matrons and arrogance of the surgeons made me very nervous. Especially as I was already lying to them every single day." He nodded in understanding.

"So I tried to really see them. To glimpse their humanity. To look for wee clues of how they could be caring or fumbling that most other people wouldn't notice or mind- well, I found it helpful. It made me trust them, the small glimpses of contradiction."

"-And it was the same with me?" he asked, unsure.

"It was. I was a bit wary of you before I knew you properly- you seemed so sure of yourself, so kind and handsome and popular with your patients..." Shelagh played idly with her fingers, remembering days she had avoided his gaze, still too damaged to trust anyone but God and Sister Julienne, but so determined in her new mission- to serve the women of Poplar. What trouble her soul had known then.

Patrick interrupted the dark train of her thoughts. "May I ask what changed your mind?"

She sighed softly, thoughts moving to a much happier memory. "I saw you once with Timothy, when he was just a tiny wee thing. His mother had stepped into the clinic, no doubt to look for you, and she'd stopped his pram outside. You were just walking up as I was coming out to erase the blackboard and change the dates." She smiled softly before continuing. "You nearly walked past him, but you turned around. You stopped and crouched down to have a proper wee conversation with him, calling him old chap and green bean and silly little names, and after that- I- I felt I knew you. Your gentleness convinced me that I could trust you."

He held her gaze for as long as he dared, pouring out every emotion- he was touched again by the rarity of their relationship. How long they had respected each other, laughed together and even shared tragedies: all before realizing their feelings. He saw the future stretch out once more, full of all the same things, and so much more.

She blushed deeply and broke their connection to cast a distracted gaze at her small wrist watch. "Oh!" she exclaimed lightly as she turned to open the autoclave, realizing she'd left it far longer than she had needed to. A dense pervasive cloud of steam billowed from the open lid; the water had nearly evaporated in her absent-mindedness.

"They'll be very sterile indeed, I take it?" he teased.

She turned just to wrinkle her nose at him, and then turned back into the cloud of escaping steam.

"I remember the first time I did this too," she mused aloud after a long moment.

"Oh yes?"

Shelagh hummed in affirmation. "I'd been scrubbing floors for a full month after I arrived in London, and was nearly beginning to despair of ever doing anything else, but of course I was diligent to my task. I thought I had to be twice as hard working- that I had to try doubly hard because I had so little practical experience. What I didn't realize was that, as a war-time volunteer, most of the other girls had just as little as I- or even less."

"And they didn't have your aptitude," Patrick tossed in rather absently; she blushed and stammered once more.

"W-well I wasn't perfect by any means. I was on the verge of losing my temper more times than I can count. I was constantly having what felt like a whole battalions of soldiers come through for visiting hours and ruin what I considered 'my' spotless corridors, which I found entirely exasperating."

She could still see her younger self, stood in the corner, fingers in her hair, mussing up the neat plaited bun underneath her starched cap, trying not to scream in frustration- and having no idea how little a concern mud on hospital floors would be to her in little over a year.

"I would catch myself about to whinge, but seeing the men comforting their injured comrades made me so ashamed. They had given so much, and there I was- dissatisfied with doing so little."

"You were nearly a child, Shelagh."

"Yes. I was, but they had no way of knowing that. Well- I say that, though there was a soldier who admitted his true age to me once, on his birthday, he'd faltered on how old he was. I can still see the grin on his face when I owned that I was a full two years younger than I claimed. He told me there were more boys than anyone would ever think lying about their ages. I went back to scrubbing floors with a renewed vigor- and for once, someone took notice."

His interest was piqued now. "Who?"

"Another nurse, Verena Hahn. She'd been there a year already and pointed my diligence out to a Matron, asking that I be assigned to help her. She was in charge of sterilizing. Rena is one of those people who tend to get what they want, so Matron reassigned me. It sounds odd, but I knew, the moment I met with my first batch of clean tools, that it was the job for me."

He grinned unseen behind her, be she could hear it in his voice. The teasing hidden within his genuine interest. "How's that?"

She breathed in deeply, placing another clamp on the fabric covered tray to cool. "I don't know, really. The steam has this wonderful clean humidity, have you ever noticed? And doctors rely on clean tools. The more perfectly clean each tool is, the closer a patient is to surviving. I realized I could stand in that room by myself, alone with my thoughts, and be helping every single person in the hospital do their job better." She realized herself then, blinking and tossing her head self-consciously. "I'm sorry, does that make any sense?"

He was silent, grinning widely into a folder, not hiding his amusement in the slightest. "More sense than you could ever know, my dear." He closed the file and set it aside, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands across his chest. "You've never mentioned a Nurse Hahn before. Was she a close friend?"

"I've never had a closer one in all my life. We even had a room together when we were training at The London just after the war. Trixie puts me in mind of her on occasion, because of her hair. Rena's golden curls would flash about and catch the light on the wards and all the soldiers would fawn and flirt, but she took absolutely no nonsense from them. I still think of her so fondly. As vivacious and brash as she could be, you'd never have met with anyone more unfailingly generous."

Shelagh turned as she voiced the last thought, wanting some air, and wiped a bit of steam from her temple. She stilled both hands in the pockets of her white, starched cotton apron momentarily and leaned against the edge of the table.

"We were like sisters," she reflected breathlessly, remembering how vivid their friendship had been, opposite souls knit together in shared service. "We talked constantly, never running out of subjects or handsome soldiers to gossip about. She knew how old, well I should say, young I was- and never told a soul. She guessed it once- and I just couldn't lie."

The room seem warmed by the happy memory as she smiled then, even if the true cause was the steam from the now open autoclave. Shelagh's small fingers fiddled in the cuff of her cherry red cardigan, unrolling a sleeve and tugging it down over one hand. She then pulled the sweater off completely, stepping forward as she did to hang it on a nearby chair. There was no point in pretending it was still cool enough in the room to wear it. Patrick, taking this gesture as a sort of permission, removed his suit jacket, heedlessly tossing it on the table next to him. He began to roll up his shirtsleeves, which Shelagh didn't blame him in the least for; but took the opportunity to return to her task, concentrating on the autoclave instead of- well, if the birth of the Carter twins had taught Shelagh anything, it was that Patrick Turner's forearms were extremely distracting. They set her off-balance in a way that she felt she shouldn't dwell upon for too long all at once. She was lightheaded enough with all the steam.

The rustling of papers on the table behind her signaled that he too had resumed his research and notetaking. Some moments later he sighed, and she heard the chair creak as he leaned back again, clearly too disquieted to continue with whatever he had been doing.

"So what happened to her? Rena, I mean." She could feel him verbally tiptoeing around the obvious question while restlessly shifting his chair once more. She could understand why, with the things he'd recently learned about her loved ones. "Did she- well, did you lose her also?" He asked hesitantly, chair legs scraping the tile as he fidgeted.

"Oh no Patrick- nothing so bad as that," she was quick to reassure him. "I never lost Rena in the sense that she's still, to my knowledge, very much alive and well. We exchanged letters until a few years after she left nursing and married, and then there was just so little left in common between us that the once close relationship just simply faded away."

"Oh." The chair was still. He wasn't sure how to respond to such a blunt summation. She'd presented yet another contradiction- a gloomy ending that didn't seem to trouble her.

"It's okay, Patrick," Shelagh tossed casually over her shoulder. "My happy memories of Rena far outweigh the sadness of our friendship's fading. We grew together, and then naturally, at some point, we grew apart. It was a wonderful time of my life, and thats how I'll always think of it. Rena and I always had a laugh. We had the unfortunate tendency of getting into terrible scrapes together, but somehow we always explained our way out of real trouble."

She registered a satisfied hum and a distractedly affectionate "I'll bet you did." from behind her and smiled to herself, remembering the days after the Blitz ended. As the Allied cause had gained momentum in the latter part of the war, so too had her confidence, her friendships and her career. She had made up her mind to learn everything she could in the hospital, about medicine of course, but also about life- and what life could be. She had laughed at times, been horrified and disgusted and angry at moments, and still others had touched her deeply. It had been her only glimpse of adolescence, albeit an adolescence warped by a constant and terrible sense of foreboding, of the world at war and the faint hope that lost somewhere in that dark cloud was her father, alive and well and making his way back to her. A shiver coursed her spine, despite the warm heavy air and so she released the dark cloud of memory to float away, re-busying herself with the now clean clamps.

The shiver had not gone unnoticed. Patrick had given up on his notes long ago, choosing instead to meditate upon a finer form- that of his lovely fiancee. The cardigan no longer hid her arms, and he'd just noted their small freckles. When she shivered, he saw gooseflesh pass between them and then, suddenly, dissipate back into their original delicately patterned porcelain smoothness.

Also, the steam from the sterilizer was doing maddening things with a few tendrils that had escaped from the hair twisted and pinned above it. They curled up with the steam just to taunt him. Tantalize him with their silent provocation. His fingers twitched. He wanted to touch them. Just to see if they were as soft as they looked. Or so he rationalized.

Belatedly, he noticed that he'd stood from his chair and stepped around the side of the table. Shelagh had not reacted to his movement in the slightest. She'd just begun to tell him a story, something about Rena and a Matron they'd nick-named 'The Lemon', but Patrick wasn't exactly listening.

He moved closer still. He'd apologize later, of course, and have her recount the anecdote to his full attention, but right now he was concentrating. Concentrating, very hard, on the back of his fiancee's neck.

One step closer. She would register any instant now how close he'd gotten. He wasn't even sure if she had realized he'd abandoned his notes at the table ages ago.

The moment she realized he was there, he knew it, because her story died away without another whisper. She just stopped talking mid-sentence, something seemingly taking precedence in her thoughts and overwhelming her ability to speak. He understood a little of what she was feeling.

She could sense him now. He was close. What on earth was he doing? But it was too late.

Oh.

He had reached up and gently pushed his finger into one of the tiny ringlets, pulled it down to her collar and watched with delight as it bounced back to its original shape, just as he had predicted it would. So he did it again. Just to be thorough.

Shelagh blushed hotly, swallowing hard. His fingers hadn't touched anything but her hair. She couldn't be completely sure she wanted him to, however, the idea fearlessly presented itself- , so somewhere in her muddled thoughts she must be longing for him to continue. The steam was filling her lungs and drowning out the air. The heat of it made things confusing; she had thought her cheeks were flushed already.

"Patrick?" she giggled breathily. He could hear her nervousness. "What are you doing?"

His fingers pulled another little curl, stretching it out, feeling it slip from their grasp and spring back to its former coil.

"Your hair curls in the steam." She could feel his breath on the back of her neck, and he saw another slight shiver run the length of her spine. "Just here."

He felt her breathing ease, only slightly, and she chuffed a little at his discovery. "Oh that. You should see it..." She stopped herself, biting her lip shut, realizing what she had been about to say about her hair in the bath would only have made this situation a good deal more tenuous than it already seemed to be. "...well," she swallowed, "...actually never mind."

But he didn't need to know what she'd been about to say, the mere thought of more steam than already swirled through the room was intoxicating. He was as close as he could be without actually pressing up against her, breathing in the steam over her shoulder. Not that he needed its warmth, however; he was already burning up, despite his rolled up shirtsleeves and casually loosened tie.

Shelagh attempted to push his closeness out of her mind momentarily, making herself used to it, finding that she enjoyed the feeling of safety. Patrick was like a wall at her back, a bastion of protection from the prying eyes and ears of Poplar. It was with this comforting thought that she leaned her head over the autoclave once more, bent on removing the last few sterilized tools before being thoroughly distracted by the person she could honestly call the biggest distraction of her young life.

One last thing had slipped Patrick's notice. Her neck. Well, her collar had been loosened from the start. That's what had started him on this dangerous track. Being able to gaze at the slender graceful curve of it as she bent over her work. He hadn't been able to properly catalouge it that awful day he'd examined her. But there was something else now. Something he'd only have seen from this very vantage point. Closer than anyone else had ever been.

Her flawless skin, save another freckle or two he'd just committed to memory, was absorbing the steam. He could see innumerable tiny dewy droplets clinging to its luminescence.

And before he even really thought about what effect he would cause, he'd already run a smooth fingertip down the side of her neck, from her hairline, following the curve almost to where it would become her shoulder.

CLANG.

Neither of them jumped at the sound. Shelagh didn't hear it. She hadn't even registered herself dropping the last clamp into the shallow steaming water. She was no longer aware of anything but him. His touch had scalded her.

Abstractly Patrick was on some level glad she wasn't facing him, because she would have seen him smirk slightly, and that probably would have interrupted this uh, interesting chain of events.

In the name of scientific inquiry, he drew another soft line with his index finger, slightly forward, until he ran into the perfect little obstacle that was her collarbone, then drew it back up the same way, ending just behind her ear.

Shelagh was trying to remember what she had been doing, saying or thinking just a second ago, but the fog of the steam, the tall heavy presence of temptation standing less than an inch from her and the burning trails down the side of her neck screamed in tandem for all of her focus.

As his fingertip neared her ear he heard her breath hitch, saw the tips of her ears flame red, and he had to shut his own eyes and swallow some very definite impulses that were currently forming in his brain. He'd certainly found something there. So there was some method in this madness after all. Some conclusion to be drawn from this dangerous experiment.

Pushing his luck, and placing a bet, he lowered his head slightly and blew gently across the area he'd just discovered.

Shelagh shivered in response, but not for any chill, it was more that her entire skin was trying to flip itself inside out. His breath rippled warm and heavy across her neck once more, past the underside of her chin, into the starched white collar of her uniform.

Which is when she started praying.

Begging might have been more the word, because though she was still wholly unsure of what was happening, Shelagh was completely certain she'd rather boil up into searing hot steam herself than have it stop. This man was either a miracle, or she had been missing out something quite miraculous for all of her life. Possibly it might have been both.

Any pondering upon that thought was quickly abandoned as a new sensation cascaded into her awareness. A soft yet incendiary touch, she sank into it, desiring it, acquiescing to it's perfection. The touch grew bolder, lingering, moving forward on her neck. In a distracted hazy moment of enlightenment, she registered the cause. He was kissing her neck, slowly impressing his lips into her flesh, once, twice, three times- following the soft flushed sinews underneath, discovering it.

The heavy wet air causes his lips to adhere slightly to the salt of her skin. The consequent soft, delicate stick as he peels them from her flesh is as if their skin, finally joined, is bonded and does not wish to part. Her breath seizes within her throat as they do finally come away; her own lips part as if to speak, and yet no air passes between them. Her words are stolen away by every other every inch of her as it sings to the vibration of his touch.

A mangled whisper follows in a voice that isn't even recognizable as her own.

"Oh, help."

It's somehow both an encouragement and a warning sign.

She leant fully backwards, trusting his support as her shoulders encountered his chest, and one of his hands came instantly to her waist to steady her. She felt him smile into her her shoulder and would have wanted to slap him if she could have mustered any emotion other than this all-consuming desire, any feeling other than his touch on her bare skin.

His caresses were emboldened, and if possible, more exquisite for their thorough slowness. He worshipped her with his attentions, trying to catch the precious drops of condensation between his lips like he was a man dying of thirst and she his only hope to quench it. She had learned to crave this new feeling so immediately. She was lost to it, and felt dizzied by it, light-headed, nearly to fainting from the quickening of her already short breath. Her heart felt as if it was trying to beat its way right out of her chest and she could feel against her shoulders that his was as well. Could he possibly be feeling what she was? Was this the madness that caused her so much work day after day? This overwhelming wave of need that crashed through her obliterating whatever fragments of thought she attempted to cling to?

She needed something to hold on to, some sort of ballast, and so moved her hand to clasp his where it rested lightly on her side. He took it, their fingers interlaced, and suddenly she had her anchor. It was like a life-preserver on a rolling sea. She was still dazed with the continued sensation of his touch, but with his hand steady in hers she felt the freedom to enjoy it.

His lips moved to the other side of her neck, while the fingers of his other hand tiptoed and tickled their way playfully up her bare forearm and came to rest just under the edge of the short blue sleeves. Each of his fingertips were alive with the frantic cadence of his pulse, or was it hers? She realized she didn't even care anymore and she laughed aloud, finally unrestrained.

She felt him grin once more against her neck and this time it only made her giddier. She pressed her own lips together with a little hum of satisfaction and closing her eyes, decided to change the game.

It seemed like no presumption at all for the former nun to reach her unoccupied hand back to clutch at the nape of her fiance's neck, to tangle her fingers into the short hairs there. Now that she had her mainstay, she was going to keep him.

And a happier kept man had never existed as he upped the stakes himself, parting his lips and placing them around the shell of her ear, dragging them oh so heavenly-slowly to trace the ivory curve of it. Her fingers clutched, attempting to fist into the dark bristles that grazed his collar, then flattened and brushed upwards. She felt his entire body shudder in response and thrilled at it, not only merely that she had caused it, but the ultimate revelation that she could. None of this was forbidden to her, there was no guilt in this scalding succession of touches any longer. If only she had been able to feel a glimmer of this glorious harmony the day he had first kissed her hand, what comfort it would have brought her in those long months of solitude.

Her train of thought, much disrupted, was again gone when his lips reached her earlobe and lightning shot across the entirety of her skin as she felt his teeth sink into it, worrying it just a little between them. Her arm went completely limp and fell back to her side as she strangled the noise rising in her throat, turning it to a half-murmured moan of his name. It seemingly encouraged him all the more, as he whispered her name into her skin after lowering his head to kiss her neck lightly once more.

Somewhere in the distance, down a long hallway, a world apart from the couple enraptured in one another, the front door to Nonnatus House opened to allow a boisterous clique of midwives entrance, then shut again.

A current of the early November air drafted its way through the convent heralding their arrival, stirring the fringes of handmade cushions and drifting into successive rooms. The last thing it did before dissipating entirely was chase off the cloud of steam that blanketed Patrick and Shelagh, awakening them both to the idea that they would not be alone much longer.

Shelagh froze, and Patrick sighed as the footsteps and chatter of their approaching colleagues became audible. He placed a last kiss just under her ear, squeezed her fingers one final time in concession, then stepped around her to a much more proper distance, leaning an elbow against the wall, looking down at the autoclave that had unintentionally started this, uh, inquiry.

The midwives happened into the room less than a minute later: Trixie, Cynthia and Sister Evangelina were returning from two separate deliveries. Their heavy leather bags deposited firmly onto the table, they greeted nurse and doctor in turn.

"Oh! Dr. Turner! Why, fancy seeing you here," trilled the platinum blonde excitedly, with an undertone of insinuation that no one could have mistaken. Patrick shoved his hands into his pockets, feeling himself blush slightly. For once, Trixie was rather closer to the truth than she knew.

The Sister grunted a sufficient acknowledgement, and Nurse Miller said a kind hello; then inquired whether he had been able to go over the notes she'd left on the Thompson case.

"Oh, well, yes I read through them. I think we should discuss it further with the couple themselves, however, so let's go and..." Patrick stopped, suddenly realizing he was getting carried off with work and hadn't yet even made so much as eye contact with his betrothed since releasing her. He was a little worried he'd gone too far, made more of an advance than she was ready for. Shelagh had since resumed and finally finished her task, the little canvas bags set to the side, ready to be used once more. Neat and tidy, so opposite to what he was feeling, as if his skin was somehow too big for him, and he swam about in it trying to gather himself back together. He looked again at Nurse Miller, who was awaiting the end of his answer. "...we'll have to set up an appointment with them sometime this week. Would you mind phoning them to see when? I'll be along with the notes in just a moment." The small brunette midwife smiled pleasantly and nodded her accession, turning on her heel.

He made to get his notes, but stopped mid-step, feeling a little powerless, this wasn't how he had wanted that heady moment to end. He'd envisioned- well, something rather different.

Shelagh looked up at him then. He wanted to explain himself to her, to apologize for having been so forward. Upon meeting her gaze, however, Patrick felt even more helpless than before. Instead of guilt or anything resembling an accusation, the turquoise depth of her eyes twinkled amusement and some sort of mad vindication. She was laughing at him? He then understood that she'd been watching him all the while, and bearing witness to how unbalanced he was. For she was as steady as the sun now, flush gone from her cheeks and neck, emanating a delicate radiant glow of contentment, and he was still everywhere, riding the aftershocks of an earthquake he'd been the one to originate.

Shaking off the last residual heat of the preceding moments, he tried to clear his head. Whatever dangerous lesson it was that he had begun, she had mastered it. Shelagh bit her coral lower lip in her teeth, holding back an enterprising grin, as her gaze dared him once more, like the curled tendrils of her hair had in the first place. He blinked hard in opposition to the myriad images her boldness created suddenly in his fevered imagination, which cleared, leaving only her, just Shelagh, in his mind's eye. Why was he surprised? In all the years he had known her, he'd seen it countless times. Whatever this woman made up her mind to understand, there really was no stopping her. Patrick smiled a wry yet contented farewell, which was returned with a sparkling eye and half a quiet laugh.

He gathered up his notes and stepped out into the hall, still marveling at the pitch of her learning curve; the deliberation and hesitance in each successive step echoing back his every emotion to the one person who could understand them.

But there are

Richer entanglements... the crown of these

Is made of love and friendship, and sits high

Upon the forehead of humanity.

All its more ponderous and bulky worth

Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth

A steady splendour; but at the tip-top,

There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop

Of light, and that is love: its influence,

Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense,

At which we start and fret; till in the end,

Melting into its radiance, we blend,

Mingle, and so become a part of it,—-

Book I