‘You little—’ he began, then he, too, smiled—and moved towards her, holding out his arms, so it seemed natural to step into their sheltering arc and tuck her body hard against his.
‘We’ll both be wet,’ he murmured when the first heated kiss had stolen so much breath they’d had to break apart or faint from lack of oxygen.
‘I don’t care,’ she told him, snuggling closer so at least the dampness was warm from body heat.
She lifted her head for another breath-defying kiss.
‘Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?’ he asked, when they paused again.
Kirsten snuggled even closer.
‘I don’t seem to care about that either,’ she muttered, content just to remain in his arms.
This time she kissed him, initiating the touch of mouth to mouth, the exploratory moves of tongue on tongue.
She’d decided kisses weren’t enough and was wondering what the full complement of staff would think if she dragged him down the corridor to her room when he eased himself away again, and with his hands on her shoulders, holding her steady, he said, ‘We need to talk. I want to explain, but first I need to see my father. Is he still here? Or was he well enough to leave?’
I need to see my father. The simple sentence told Kirsten most of what she wanted to know. Her heart began a mad cavorting in her chest and the quivers were so bad she wondered she could stay upright without support.
‘He’s still here,’ she began, then realised how late it was and looked up into Harry’s dark eyes. ‘In the morning would be better. I know you can’t want to wait, having come all this way to see him—having decided—but he’s—’
Harry stopped her with a finger to her lips, and a smile that made her think the sun had suddenly come out.
‘Frail,’ he finished gently. ‘Yes, I know. I dumped my kit at the motel. I’ll come back in the morning.’
He drew her close again.
‘Dry,’ he added in her ear, and she could tell he was still smiling.
But he was also telling her that was all for now. Telling her she must wait. And while most of her understood—for in telling his father who he was he would be rediscovering himself—she was human enough to want more.
She could feel his lips teasing in her hair, his hands warm on her back, and she smoothed her fingers across the wetness of his shirt and tried to make them tell him how she felt.
‘I love you, Kirsten,’ he whispered into her curls. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
Do I?
‘And everything will be all right,’ he continued, without waiting for her answer. ‘With the hospital, the town, Elizabeth and the farm. I’ll need to learn so much, to feel my way, but…’ he eased her back again and looked down into her face ‘…with you by my side I could move mountains, pretty doctor. Will you be there for me? Stand beside me? Let me join your battles, be your ally? Perhaps, in time, be more than that?’
And although the words were those of reassurance, his voice became uncertain so Kirsten had to kiss him again to answer, at the least, the last of his questions.
‘If I don’t go now, I’ll never go,’ he warned her, when she broke off to take a breath.
And much as she wanted to opt for the ‘never’, she knew it would be wrong.
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she said, then, unable to be parted quite so quickly, walked down the hill with him, past the grassy slope where, not so long ago, the mushroom tents had sprouted in the rain.
Harry came at eight next morning and spent the day with Martin Graham. Kirsten took in snacks and meals herself, leaving the trays and walking out again, unwilling to intrude lest she disturb the delicate balance on the tightrope of emotions the two men must be walking.
At five, Harry emerged, almost grey with fatigue.
‘You’d better see to him,’ he said to Kirsten. ‘I didn’t want to exhaust him but I couldn’t leave. There’s so much to say, to learn about each other. I find I need him, Kirsten, just as much as he needs me.’
Kirsten put her arms around the man she loved and held him close for a moment.
‘Go upstairs,’ she suggested. ‘Now we’re back to normal staffing, I’m sleeping in the room you had. Have a rest there. I’ll come up later.’
He nodded and moved away, either too exhausted or too emotionally wrung out to argue with her.
In Martin’s room, Kirsten took her patient’s pulse, checked his blood pressure, listened to his breathing and said nothing. The old man needed time and rest.
‘I’d like to put you on the respirator overnight,’ she suggested, but he shook his head.
‘I’ll take it easy. Use the oxygen when I need it.’ Then he took Kirsten’s hand. ‘He says he doesn’t want the farm, but he’ll give Elizabeth any help she needs. Do we believe him, Kirsten? Can we take all this on trust?’
Kirsten thought carefully before she answered.
‘That’s something you have to decide,’ she said. ‘But from what I know of him, he has so many of your fine qualities that I’d be inclined to believe him. Not that it matters, because you can tie up the farm in such a way that it goes to Elizabeth and the children.’
Martin Graham looked shocked at the suggestion.
‘And cut my own son out of my will?’ he spluttered.
Kirsten smiled at him.
‘Haven’t you just answered your own question?’ she said gently. ‘And anyway, now’s not the time to talk of wills or anything so far into the future. I have it on excellent authority he doesn’t know one end of a cow from the other—which won’t matter much as you run sheep, not cows. But if he’s to be any use to Elizabeth you’d better stick around for a while to teach him the basics.’
She saw the glimmer of a smile around the old man’s lips, and as he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep she wondered if the day’s emotions hadn’t taken far more out of Harry than they had out of his father.
An hour later, she was done—off duty unless called for an emergency. She went upstairs, thinking of a shower, a change of clothes—Harry had never seen her dressed in anything but work clothes—then perhaps they could have dinner downtown in one of the town’s two post-flood renovated restaurants.
She opened the door quietly in case he was sleeping, but he was sitting on her bed, studying the postcards he’d sent, which she’d ranged in order along the wall above her desk.
He smiled at her and patted the bed, and when she sat down beside him, he put his arm around her shoulders and held her close.
‘Did you work it out?’ he asked, still smiling.
‘Work what out?’ she demanded. ‘Your stupid messages, or the invisible ink? If you’d told me you were in the secret service, I might have tried.’
‘I love it when you’re fiery,’ he said, and dropped a kiss on her nose. ‘No, the postcards. No secret ink—the pictures!’
Kirsten studied them again.
Holdsworthy Base—his first stop after Murrawarra. The big barracks and some other cards from Sydney. The Health Department one, and the private hospital.
Which reminded her.
‘That last one sent me crazy!’ she said, turning so she could pummel him gently in the ribs. ‘I thought it meant you were in hospital. I even rang them up to ask how you were, what had happened to you. And they said you weren’t a patient but to try some place down the road.’
‘Rosevale Private, its opposition, and the girl on the switchboard wouldn’t have connected a request for information on a patient called Harry Graham with me—even if she’d known my name.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Kirsten demanded, stopping the pummelling and rubbing her fingers across his chest instead.
He stood up and plucked the final postcard from the wall, then handed it to her.
‘Read the sign,’ he said.
‘I’ve read it,’ Kirsten told him. ‘It says, “Purvis Private Hospital”. That’s why I panicked, you stupid man!’
‘And it
didn’t ring a bell?’ he persisted.
Kirsten frowned. It had rung a bell, but she hadn’t caught the flash of recognition quickly enough to track it down.
‘I’ve heard the name,’ she said cautiously, and the infuriating man she loved grinned at her.
‘I told you it,’ he said smugly. ‘It was my mother’s name.’
‘Should all this mean something to me?’ she demanded. ‘Are you telling me this was the name of the man your mother murdered and he owned the nursing home?’
Harry gave a great shout of laughter and sat down so he could scoop his edgy, tetchy, thoroughly confused darling into his arms.
‘The murders only existed in my imagination, but the hospital is real enough. My mother was a nurse. She founded it. She persuaded a group of businessmen and doctors to put money into excellence and they provided the backing. It’s now run by a company with competent business and medical administrators and has three sister hospitals—are hospitals female, do you suppose? Anyway, possibly soon it will have four.’
The tetchy darling detached herself very deliberately from his arms and rose to her full five feet five.
‘Are you telling me you own four private hospitals?’ she demanded. ‘That your mother left Martin, changed her name, took herself to Melbourne and founded not just one but four private hospitals?’
‘Not all at once,’ he said hurriedly, although he wasn’t quite sure why this news was so upsetting to Kirsten. ‘And, in fact, the fourth one we’ve bought since she died. She’d been negotiating for it when she became ill so it seemed the only thing to do.’
‘We’ve bought?’ she echoed. ‘You’re involved in those decisions?’
‘Well, I’m a shareholder and I’m on the board. I don’t know much about the medical things, but the administrators brief the board.’ Harry spoke apologetically, aware that the way he’d planned to say all this wasn’t working out. Also aware that his other plans, which had included a long night of loving, were fading fast.
‘I can follow simple logic and do know some business principles,’ he pointed out, ‘though why the hell I’m justifying myself to you I don’t know. I thought you’d be pleased!’
‘Pleased you own a string of private hospitals?’ Kirsten spat out, so enraged she could barely speak. ‘So you could bestow on me a job should I ever need one, I suppose.’
The scathing tones suggested long nights of loving couldn’t have been further from her mind.
‘I thought you’d come back because you were going to stay in Murrawarra,’ she continued. ‘Help Elizabeth on the farm, be an uncle to her kids, a son to your father. I’d even thought you might help me save the hospital, but if you’ve already got four of your own a little operation like Murrawarra can’t mean much to you.’
Harry raised his eyes to heaven, then heaved himself to his feet, grabbed the little termagant by the shoulders and gave her a gentle shake.
‘Will you stop jumping to conclusions, shut those lovely lips for a moment, and let me explain?’
He reached out and took the first postcard off the wall.
‘My base,’ he said. ‘I saw my commanding officer and explained I wanted out of the army for family reasons.’
‘But the army’s your—’ Kirsten began, and he silenced her with a kiss.
‘The army was my life,’ he corrected her, his hands gentler now, stroking her body and firing sensations that made it difficult for Kirsten to focus on the next postcard he held out to her.
‘The headquarters in Sydney where my discharge is being sorted out.’
He kissed her again, although she was too tense with wanting him to argue any more.
‘The Health Department where I’ve been arguing with bureaucrats about joint ventures between private and public hospitals, about private hospitals taking public patients on a “government pays” basis which will work out cheaper for the government than running smaller hospitals themselves.’
Kirsten looked at him, certain the relief she felt must be shining in her eyes.
‘You can save the hospital?’ she asked.
He smiled at her.
‘Is that all you have to ask? Is that your only concern?’
She felt the frown lines creasing her forehead and remembered another worry she’d had about Harry and Murrawarra.
‘But what will you do?’ she asked.
He grinned at her.
‘You mean when I’m not learning farming from my father, or doing dogsbody work out on the farm for my sister, or being an uncle to the kids, or checking on the running of my latest acquisition, and the continued operations of the other four?’
Harry rubbed his chin, and mischief gleamed like golden candles in his eyes.
‘I guess I could make love to my girlfriend, perhaps get married. Have some kids so Anthony, Meg and Libby could have cousins. What do you think?’
Kirsten stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips.
‘How soon could we start on the first part of that suggestion?’ she whispered, and heard his laughter echo around the little room as he took her in his arms and swung her in the air.
ISBN: 978-1-4603-5641-8
HEART’S COMMAND
First North American Publication 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Meredith Webber
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