Lily's Scandal

by Marion Lennox

  ‘I need to get to work,’ she said, with as much dignity as she could muster. She glanced at her suitcase in the corner. ‘Thank you for bringing my stuff. Would you mind giving me some privacy while I get dressed?’

  ‘You’re not getting dressed.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Me. And there’s no need. You’re not required at work again until Monday.’

  ‘Monday!’ She gasped. ‘Are you out of your mind? I’ve signed on for four weeks. If I don’t go to work tonight, I’ve broken my contract. No pay. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘The hospital’s paying,’ he said. ‘Their barrier nursing clearly isn’t working; they took out the controls too soon. The least they can do is pay you while you’re sick. I’ve already organised it. Standard leave for this bug is four days—barrier nursing requires it. They don’t want you back there before Monday but you’ll be paid regardless.’

  Whoa.

  No work until Monday.

  Four days with pay.

  She could sink …

  She couldn’t sink. She was in this man’s bed.

  ‘You’re looking paler every minute,’ he said conversationally. ‘You don’t want to be sick again. Put your head down and sleep.’

  ‘No!’ It was practically a wail.

  Why did he want her here? She was starting to feel like a white slave trader was standing at the end of her bed. His bed.

  ‘I’m not holding you here against your will,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you are.’ She was having trouble making herself speak. ‘If you won’t let me get dressed …’

  ‘Your baggage has been cavorting with bedbugs,’ he said, prosaically. ‘I’ll take it down to the basement and fumigate it while you sleep.’

  ‘But why?’ It was a wail this time—she was reaching the point where the world was starting to blur.

  He knew it. He took her hands in his before she could resist, his strong fingers holding hers. The strength of him was infinitely … masculine. Infinitely seductive and infinitely comforting.

  How long since someone had held her to comfort her?

  He wasn’t holding her to comfort her, she reminded herself, trying frantically to defuzz her thoughts. He was holding her to have his wicked way … although how he could want to have any sort of way with a woman who’d just stopped throwing up …

  ‘We can help each other,’ he said, quite gently, and she blinked and tried to think of something other than the feel of his hands holding hers. His gorgeous eyes; his gaze meeting hers, pure and strong. The strength of his jaw, the strong bone structure of his face, the shadow of a smile that was gentleness itself.

  He’d make a gorgeous doctor, she thought. He was a gorgeous doctor.

  ‘You’re already helping me,’ she muttered. ‘Your housekeeper gave me an egg and toast soldiers.’

  ‘Good for Gladys. I hope they helped.’

  ‘I kept ‘em down.’

  ‘All the more reason why you should help me back. Stay here for a month.’

  Her eyes weren’t working properly. They kept blinking.

  She was seeing him in soft focus. He was a beautiful man, she thought, and he was proposing that she stay with him for a month. Like a sheik and a desert princess.

  Princesses didn’t wear shabby nightgowns and smell of … She didn’t want to think of what she smelled of, despite her shower. A night on duty, followed by gastro …

  ‘I think you’re weird,’ she said. ‘Go find a princess, instead of—’

  ‘I’m not in the market for a princess,’ he said, the gentleness fading a little. ‘That’s why I want you.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  He sighed, looked down at their linked hands and carefully disengaged. The gentle look became grim.

  ‘I don’t do relationships,’ he said.

  ‘I see that,’ she said cautiously, casting a quick look round the sparse bedroom. This was such a male domain.

  ‘But everyone in the hospital wants me to.’

  This was important, she decided. She had to get to the other side of the fuzz. Figure out where reality and nonsense merged. ‘You don’t think that’s just a wee bit egotistical?’ she demanded, and his smile returned. It was a truly gorgeous smile.

  His smile could make a girl’s knees turn to putty—if a girl’s knees weren’t already putty.

  ‘Sydney Harbour Hospital is gossip central,’ he said. ‘Too much intense emotion, too many people working long hours, thrown together over and over … Everyone at the Harbour knows everyone else’s business.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said faintly. ‘I’d thought it’d be a huge, anonymous hospital.

  ‘The Harbour?’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Anonymous is not us. Big or not, we’re made up of individual teams. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, sometimes I think right down to the jocks we wear. Actually, that may well be the literal truth; Mrs Henderson does my washing. This apartment block is home to at least half a dozen Harbour medics who also use Mrs Henderson, so I guess that’s public knowledge as well. But since my wife died four years ago …’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s history,’ he said harshly. ‘But that’s the problem. The hospital, the grapevine, the whole gossip network has decided it’s time for me to move on. Even my boss keeps pushing women at me.’

  ‘Gee,’ she said cautiously, her interest caught through the fuzz. ‘So you’re being besieged with women. That must be tough.’

  ‘I’ve been married,’ he said, maybe more harshly than he intended because he paused and softened his tone. ‘What I mean is that I have no intention of going there again. I’d like everybody to lay off. You’re in Sydney for a month?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then where are you going?’

  ‘Brisbane?’ It was the first place that came into her mind. It sounded a lot more fun than Lighthouse Cove.

  ‘A month would give me head space,’ he said. ‘I’ve told them we’ve been in a relationship for a while.’

  ‘You did that?’ The fuzz was thickening.

  ‘It protects your reputation.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She didn’t feel like saying thank you. She felt … like she didn’t know what to say.

  He was being businesslike, a surgeon outlining an action plan. ‘Apart from protecting your reputation, if we let everyone know what happened yesterday was the result of a long-term relationship, it helps me. I’m having four weeks with you and then you can go to Brisbane, you can do anything you like, but from my point of view you can be my absentee girlfriend for as long as I can carry it off. I’ll tell them you need to care for an ailing mother or something similar. I can tell them we met on holiday a couple of years ago. That you come to the farm whenever you can. That I’m a very loyal lover. I’m thinking I might get two years out of this.’

  ‘Two years …’

  ‘Two years without matchmaking. Two years where I’m left alone.’ He ran his fingers through his already rumpled hair and sighed. ‘Believe me, in this hothouse, that’s worth diamonds. And in return you get board for a month. You have to admit anything’s better than that dump you were staying in. So … deal?’

  The fuzz was everywhere, but his gaze was on her. Firm. Businesslike. Like what he was suggesting was reason itself. ‘Platonic,’ he said. ‘No sex. Promise.’

  ‘Of course there’d be no sex, but …’ But her head was spinning. This was crazy. She’d be a pretend lover?

  He was proposing an affair of convenience. No sex.

  He really did have the most beautiful … pillows.

  Oh, she was tired.

  ‘You,’ Luke said, with a certain amount of contrition, ‘are wrecked. You need to sleep. I have another bathroom off the living room. We’re independent. You sleep your bug away and then settle in for a month of businesslike contact. Would you like anything before you go to sleep?’

  What was happening?

  Sense was telling her to get out of this man’s be
d now; get out of his life.

  If she did, she’d have to leave the pillows.

  And … He’d just asked her if she’d like anything. What she wanted more than anything else in the world …

  ‘Another cup of tea?’ she murmured, figuring it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  He grinned. ‘Your wish is my command.’

  And five minutes later she was tucked up in his bed with a fresh cup of tea, plumped pillows, a spare blanket, the night settling in over the apartment. Five minutes later she was Luke Williams’s Lover of Convenience.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE slept for almost twenty-four hours. Mrs Henderson popped in during the day with sympathy, tea, more eggs and toast soldiers, and some gentle probing.

  Where had she come from? How long had she known ‘our lovely Dr Williams’? Were they engaged?

  She acted shy. She acted sleepy, which wasn’t all that hard.

  She slept.

  The events of the last week had left her exhausted. In truth, the events of the last few years had left her exhausted.

  She’d been her mother’s keeper. It had been a full-time job.

  Right now, her mother didn’t know where she was and she couldn’t contact her. When Lily left town she’d stopped at the headland overlooking the bay and tossed her cellphone as far as she could throw it.

  If her mother had a drama—and she would certainly have a drama—Lily wouldn’t even know about it.

  She could guess.

  Would the vicar stay with her? Would her mother be able to ride out the town’s condemnation? Would her mother be able to operate the microwave?

  Her father had treated her mother like a Dresden doll. He’d died when Lily had been twelve, and Lily had promised …

  Enough.

  She lay in Luke’s bed with no cellphone, no way her mother could know where she was, and she felt … weightless.

  She could even manage pretending to be Luke’s lover for this luxury, she told herself. And Luke was serious about what he wanted. He’d slept in the living room, then carefully packed everything up before he’d left for work, checking and rechecking so Mrs Henderson would have no hint they’d slept apart.

  Mrs Henderson supported her into the shower, clucked over her and helped her into a clean nightgown. Apparently Luke had gone through her baggage and given instructions that everything should be cleaned. She should be offended but she didn’t have the energy. She lay in the vast bed on the crisp linen Mrs Henderson had insisted on changing. She gazed out of the windows at the glorious vista of Sydney Harbour.

  Four days of nothing, nothing and nothing.

  Apart from being Luke Williams’s pretend lover.

  ‘Wouldn’t your mother want to know that you’ve been ill?’ Mrs Henderson asked as she bustled back in to say goodbye for the night.

  ‘No,’ she said sleepily. ‘I don’t want to worry her.’

  And her mother wasn’t worrying her. Luke Williams’s lover wouldn’t have mother worries.

  Luke William’s lover didn’t.

  ‘So how long has this been going on? Why haven’t we heard about her before this? Where have you been keeping her? And where is she now?’

  To say he was besieged was an understatement.

  Luke’s Thursdays were always frantic—it was the day he did his kids’ list, birth defects, procedures that took all his skill and emotion. Today he was doing graft work on Ruby May Ellington’s left thigh. Ruby May was four years old. Born as a conjoined twin, her sister had died at birth. Her sister’s death had meant there had been no hard ethical decisions to be made, but the surgery to separate them had been performed urgently. There’d been no time for preparation of excess skin flaps, and the grafting still was ongoing.

  Luke had been working on this case when Hannah had died. The day she’d died, his team had saved Ruby’s life.

  The medical imperative tore a person in two. Like now, when he was concerned about the woman he’d left in his apartment. She was suffering from gastro but instinct told him it was more. She was too thin. Too tired. Too … shadowed.

  She was running from something, he thought, but what?

  He worked on, but the questions kept coming.

  And they kept coming from the people around him.

  Who was this Lily he’d kept so dark?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ The head of paediatrics, Teo, a Samoan with a heart almost as big as his body, had been involved in Ruby’s care from the beginning and, like Luke, he was willing the little girl a good outcome. It wasn’t, however, deflecting him from hospital gossip. ‘You’ve had this woman for how long?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘Hey, this is the Harbour,’ Teo said mildly. ‘Everything’s everyone’s business. And now you’ve installed her in Kirribilli Views … You expect to keep her to yourself?’

  ‘Until she’s better, yes.’

  ‘You have the next three days off, right?’ With the procedure over, Luke was stripping off his theatre garb. Teo had hitched himself up onto the sinks and was regarding him thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes.’ What was coming?

  He knew what was coming. Teo had a huge extended family and he treated the hospital as part of it. He shouldn’t be a paediatrician, he should be a party organiser.

  ‘I’m having a party on the beach on Saturday night,’ Teo told him. ‘My aunties are bringing food. You’ve knocked me back now one hundred and seventeen times …’

  ‘A hundred and seventeen?’

  ‘I’ve been counting,’ Teo said. ‘You disappear every time you have time off, and now we know why. But since you’ve introduced your Lily into the medical team, the least you can do is bring her along.’

  His Lily? ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  Finn walked in and Teo turned to him. ‘He’s not cooperating,’ he complained. ‘Tell him letting us in on this lady is in his contract.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Finn said shortly, and Luke glanced sharply at his boss. Was he in pain? His voice was tight, tense. Luke had seen a lot of pain in his professional life. There was something wrong.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Finn snapped before Luke could get any further. ‘He chose to flaunt his woman once, it doesn’t mean he has to do it again.’

  ‘I didn’t … flaunt,’ Luke said, and Teo grinned.

  ‘Having it off in the on-call room? I’d call it flaunting. Bring her on Saturday. You’re going to spend the whole weekend fending off visitors anyway. Word is Ginnie Allen’s already figured out she’s Lily’s new best friend. She’ll be knocking on the door asking for a cup of sugar right now. So … party it is.’

  ‘Party it isn’t,’ Luke growled.

  ‘Are you taking Mariette to Teo’s party on Saturday?’

  Finn Kennedy groaned. Surely as Surgical Director he should have privacy. He’d been back in his office for a whole two minutes and now Evie Lockheart was leaning on the doorjamb, surveying him with sardonic amusement.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’ She raised her brows. ‘Just as well. Everyone’s tiptoeing around you but maybe someone ought to let you know David Blackmore, the new paediatric intern, is breaking his heart over Mariette.’

  ‘What does that have to do with me?’ The pain in Finn’s shoulder was driving him nuts and this woman was driving him nuts. She had no power in this hospital. She was one cog in a very big machine.

  Her family money meant she could lean on the doorjamb and look … sardonic.

  She also looked concerned. ‘Is there something wrong with your arm?’

  ‘No. Butt out.’

  She butted, but only so far. ‘Mariette’s afraid to break things off with you because she’s scared you’ll sack David.’

  ‘I won’t sack David. And Mariette …’

  ‘Has a reputation,’ Evie said evenly. ‘Which is why you’re using her. You don’t use women you can hurt. All I’m saying is that David’s smitten and Mariette’s worried enough to be not b
acking off from you for his sake. David might be the making of her. They say love cures all …’

  ‘You’re telling me this why?’

  ‘Just so you know,’ Evie said blithely. ‘You’re the ogre around this place. No one stands up to you.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘And Luke,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘There’s another case in point. Love conquers all. He has a lady and he’s taking her to the farm this weekend. I’m thinking we should change the quarantine rules so neither can come back to the hospital for a week. It wouldn’t hurt to give them a push.’

  ‘If you think I have time to waste …’

  ‘On romance? I know you don’t,’ she said, and straightened. ‘Just saying. Just going. Think about Mariette, though. She’s a good kid at heart. And as for interfering with Luke’s hot weekend—’

  ‘I have no intention—’

  ‘Excellent,’ Evie said. ‘I do like a man with no intentions.’

  Every second Friday Luke had off. Every second Friday was tomorrow.

  Luke’s normal routine was to work for eleven days straight. He was happy to be rostered on public holidays, Christmas and Easter; in fact, he preferred it. But at the end of every two weeks he had three days off for the farm. For his sanity.

  His farm was his place, his sanctuary, his solitude.

  Solitude? Lily?

  The entire hospital now believed he was taking Lily there.

  In the brief moments he’d had to himself since settling Lily into his apartment, he’d decided that he’d go to the farm as usual this weekend and that she’d stay where she was. Only now he’d started a lie.

  Lily was deemed his long-term lover. He’d hardly go away to the farm the moment she arrived.

  If he did, everyone at Kirribilli Views would know she was ‘home alone’, and what’s worse, he wouldn’t put it past them to drop in on Lily. To sympathise? To check on her for him?

  He could see Teo dragging her to his party whether she willed it or not. The man’s charm was legendary.

  He didn’t mind if Teo’s charm was second to none, he told himself, but …

  But his thoughts wouldn’t go further than that one word.

  One lie and a whole skein of deception had appeared.