A Magical Christmas

by Patricia Thayer

  ‘Have you ever been married?’

  The question from the woman leaning negligently against the car fitted so well into his thoughts he wondered about ESP, then hoped she didn’t really have it as he’d been having some unlikely thoughts about her.

  ‘Phyllis not into divorced men?’ he asked, and she smiled at him.

  ‘I don’t think it’s an issue for her. In fact, I don’t know why I asked. I suppose because you’re older than the young unmarried male schoolteachers and nurses we get out here. Except for them, we don’t get a lot of single men coming to town, so it isn’t only Phyllis you’ll have to watch out for.’

  ‘Surely having the work crews here helped redress the imbalance,’ Mak said, then realised he’d probably hurt her as a fiery blush swept into her cheeks and she climbed hurriedly into the car.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MAK joined her, glancing sideways, wanting to judge her mood—wanting to apologise, but how?

  Her profile could have been carved from stone, so little did it reveal, but as they left the hospital grounds she turned left, off the road they’d driven in on, taking him in a direction he didn’t recognise. To his surprise there was a hill in what he’d thought a dead flat land-scape—a rough and rocky hill, the road winding up it to a lookout at the top.

  Neena parked the car and got out, determined to get things settled with this man. For the good of the town she had to work with him, so best things got sorted out right now.

  ‘This is our local lookout—that’s a lake fed by the bore below us, and up here, a few years back, the local council received some arts funding and had a camp of sculptors visit the town, producing the artworks you see along this walk.’

  Her house guest looked bemused but she didn’t care. This was a favourite place of hers, a place her father had always brought her when she’d been cross or out of sorts, frustrated by the way her world was working. Up here, with the wide red desert sands stretching to the horizon in all directions, she would find peace steal into her soul and her world would return to rights.

  She doubted that would happen this afternoon, but at least she felt the presence of her father here—some family support!

  She led Mak past the big sculptures, The Working Man, The Rainbow Serpent, The Shearer and The Drover, to the small statue at the end, a very freeform figure of a mother and a child, carved from the red sandstone of the hill and called simply Serenity. Not that she’d tell Mak that!

  She waved him down onto the seat beside the statue.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she began, her heart hammering against her ribs at the temerity of what she was about to ask. ‘Mak Stavrou, Greek name, Hellenic Enterprises, Greek business—is there a connection?’

  She watched him as she spoke, and saw the frown that puckered his forehead. Would he lie?

  And would she know if he did?

  Probably not, but she knew she couldn’t go on pretending that she believed his story when she had so many doubts. Doubts she wanted to dispel—just as she wanted him to assure her she was wrong…

  Mak considered what to say, sorry he hadn’t talked about this earlier—yet what time had there been? As they’d treated burns victims together? As they’d danced beneath the stars?

  He remembered that brief interlude with a pang, while he considered how to answer. No way could he lie. Even if she asked him to leave town forthwith, he had to tell the truth. It was better that way—no more deceit, no more discomfort about not being fully honest with her.

  ‘I was Theo’s uncle.’

  ‘And his mother sent you?’

  ‘No way! Well, the job came through her and it’s a genuine job—the company wants to help the town, and I have the qualifications to look at the medical services. As to the rest, well, the baby will be family, he will be my sister’s grandchild, my mother’s great-grandchild.’

  She turned towards him, but it was only a glance—a frowning glance.

  ‘Is it the family tie or the fact that Theo, for whatever reason, willed the baby shares in the company? Which brings you here?’

  Mak hesitated, wondering how to answer, again feeling that it was essential there was honesty between them.

  ‘We’re Greek, so family ties are very important, and to be perfectly honest with you, Neena, the family part of it was what prompted me to come. I’d like to think the baby knows his family—that he knows we’ll always be there for him—and for you, of course. Personally, I’d like to help you plan for his future—that’s probably something to do with the fact that I’m now the senior male in the family. As you might have gathered, family is something I feel strongly about.’

  ‘Is there a but following that very touching admission?’ she asked and he glimpsed the steel in this woman who carried such a load of responsibility on her own—steel she must need from time to time.

  Truth! he reminded himself, making a helpless gesture with his hands before answering.

  ‘There is now,’ he admitted. ‘The share situation has become complicated. How much do you know about the shares?’

  He saw her frown deepen, then she shrugged.

  ‘I had a letter from a solicitor saying Theo had been killed in an accident and had left his shares in the company to the baby. I was shocked to hear about his death—he was too young to die so senselessly. I filed the letter away somewhere and thought no more about the share thing.’

  He was too young to die so senselessly? Not ‘I was devastated,’ which was surely what she’d have said if she’d loved him? Was his suspicion that the pregnancy might have been her idea correct? Why did it keep recurring?

  Dragging his mind off that tangent—it was something he could think about later—he asked, ‘You’ve only received one letter?’

  She looked at him, still frowning, definitely perturbed.

  ‘No, there might have been more, but I’ve been busy so I just put them all into a folder to look at some other time—after all, the baby isn’t here yet, so the shares can’t be of any importance to him.’

  How to explain? Mak took a deep breath.

  ‘Not to him, but they are important within the context of the company,’ he began, although he doubted she would care about a company of which she knew so little. ‘The share situation became complicated when my father died before Theo. Although my father’s sisters’ sons have always been part of the company, Theo was the designated heir.’

  Mak hesitated, wondering how she would take the revelation he was about to impart. If monetary gain had been her aim all along, she would surely be delighted, although probably too smart to show it.

  He took a deep breath and told her.

  ‘Your unborn baby is now the majority shareholder of Hellenic Enterprises.’

  She stared at him, then shook her head and stood up, her body stiff with tension as she paced around the stone statue nearest to them. ‘I can’t even begin to consider the implications of that, although now all the strange offers I got from Theo’s mother make more sense.’

  Neena folded her arms across her chest and glared down at Mak.

  ‘She was trying to buy me—trying to buy my votes—and I thought it was just the baby she wanted!’

  He wanted to protest, to tell her Helen wanted the child to be family just as he did, but how could he when the complication of the shares—and Helen’s fears they’d lose control of the company—made the situation look so bad?

  ‘The baby will be her grandchild,’ he reminded Neena. ‘He or she will be all she has left of her son. He will be family.’

  ‘He will not necessarily be part of that family!’ Neena spat the words at him then took another turn around the statue.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she finally announced. ‘I just can’t get my head around it at the moment. I’ll think about it all some other time.’

  She stared out over the lake. The revelation about the number of shares—could the bump beneath her rib cage really be the majority shareholder of the company?—was too startling to take in
right now, although she was more suspicious than ever of the man who had come into her life.

  The same man she’d thought might kiss her.

  She felt the presence of the stone woman and child close beside her, but today the serenity she usually found in this place was missing, not only because of the conversation but because her awareness of Mak’s body claimed all her senses, tingling in her skin, prickling at the short hairs on the back of her neck, heating her body, although the sun was sinking towards the horizon and a cooling breeze was whispering across the lake.

  Was she mad?

  How could she possibly be attracted to this man?

  And if it was attraction, then surely common sense dictated she send him away—far, far away?

  Now she knew who he was and why he was really here, she’d be justified in asking him to leave.

  But how could she send him away if the town could gain from his visit—and the town would gain if he was genuine in his desire to assess the needs.

  If…

  ‘That family’. She spoke of his family in the same way Helen had spoken of her—’that woman’. The conversation, in spite of the fact that there was now no deceit between them, had made Mak feel distinctly uneasy. If he had a scrap of common sense he’d leave town right now, riding off into the sunset—or maybe it was the sunrise from here—like a defeated cowboy in the old movies. But the thought of leaving town held no appeal whatsoever.

  And if he was perfectly honest with himself, his reluctance had less to do with the shares, or Helen and her grandchild—even his mother’s grief—and more to do with a growing fascination with the woman by his side, a woman to whom he felt an undoubted attraction, but, worse than that, in whom he felt a deepening interest. She was beautiful, yes, and that accounted for the attraction, but beyond the beauty he sensed a strength and determination and commitment that made her something special.

  But hadn’t he thought Rosalie special at one time?

  If he thought about it deeply enough, he knew he’d probably have to answer no. She had been beautiful and intelligent and fun to be with, certainly physically attractive to him, but special?

  He let out a long sigh. As if this particular woman, special or not, would want anything to do with him of all people!

  ‘The sun’s setting, we have to shift to the other side of the statues,’ the special woman said, standing up and walking away from him.

  He followed, but didn’t walk far, for as he passed the strange carved shape labelled Serenity, he saw the colours of the sunset, brilliant, vivid stripes of purple and vermillion, of hot orange and a lurid pink, all somehow working together to paint a vision the likes of which he’d never seen.

  ‘That’s unbelievable,’ he managed to murmur as the colours faded to mauves and dusky rose.

  ‘We do good sunsets,’ his companion said, still watching the colours change, her back straight, her body still, as if movement might spoil the magic of the moment.

  The following day began predictably enough. After breakfast, bacon, eggs and sausages served by Ned, who had obviously never heard of cholesterol, and a visit to Albert, who had to be the funniest-looking small animal Mak had ever seen—all legs and lips—Neena took him to the surgery.

  ‘As you no doubt discovered on Saturday, we’ve two consulting rooms,’ she’d said, as she introduced him to ‘the girls’ who ran the practice on weekday mornings, ‘so what if you take all the male patients? A number of them will be thrilled to have a male doctor to talk to.’

  Mak nodded, still trying to get his head around a medical receptionist who looked at least eighty and a practice nurse who wasn’t much younger.

  And so they worked through the morning; the three men from the power plant were the first patients he saw, their wounds healing well. After examination, he had them re-dressed by the septuagenarian nurse.

  They broke for lunch, freshly cut sandwiches, platters of fruit, tubs of yoghurt, provided by a cheerful, fresh-faced young woman from the local café.

  ‘If you want something hot, you only have to tell me,’ she said to Mak. ‘Dr Singh, not Neena but her dad, liked a hot lunch.’

  As Mak had by now worked out that the previous Dr Singh had been dead for at least eighteen years and this young woman looked about that age, he did wonder about this information.

  Wondered aloud!

  ‘We’ve always got our lunch from the café,’ Mildred, the receptionist, told him. ‘And the same family still run it. Young Keira will take it over from her parents one day. Her brothers aren’t interested. They’re on the rodeo circuit.’

  Mak had to smile.

  ‘Imagine growing up where going on the rodeo circuit was a job opportunity!’ he said, as Neena came to join them in the lunchroom.

  ‘Or helicopter mustering,’ she said. ‘Have you had your lunch?’

  She was wrapping a couple of sandwiches in a paper napkin as she asked the question, then she found a cool-bag and popped them in, added a tub of yoghurt and a bottle of water and headed back out the door.

  ‘Come on,’ she said from the doorway. ‘You can drive while I eat.’

  ‘But the afternoon patients?’ Mak queried.

  ‘They’ll wait. They know I only go out to emergencies and one day it might be one of them that needs me.’

  Mak followed her out of the room.

  Helicopter mustering? Had the helicopter crashed?

  He asked this as he caught up with her and was handed the car keys.

  ‘It’s more a gyrocopter,’ she said. ‘A small, light one-seater. Often home-made, which makes them, in my opinion, far more likely to come crashing down out of the sky. Unfortunately he’s been working behind a herd of bullocks coming into town for the cattle sales so there’s no nearby airstrip. The fellows with him don’t think he’s too badly injured but know not to move him, so we’ll go out and if we need the flying doctors we’ll contact them from there. We take the road west then the turnoff is exactly twelve kilometres on the right—we should be able to see them from there.’

  Neena hoped the explanation and directions covered everything her colleague would need to know, as she’d just as soon not have him asking questions. For some reason the timbre of his voice and the intonation of his phrases had lingered in her head and made sleep difficult all night. Bad enough his image was imprinted on her eyelids so she couldn’t avoid checking it out from time to time, but to have his voice whispering in her ears—that was too much!

  But no worse than having him sitting beside her in the close confines of the car. He drove smoothly and efficiently—as he did everything, she suspected—but though she tried to concentrate on the delicious sandwiches Keira had supplied, her body was so aware of Mak’s she felt embarrassed about it.

  It had to be something to do with her hormones being out of kilter with the pregnancy. Maybe they were working overtime, and that was causing the way her skin was thirsting for a touch.

  She gulped down some water, unable to believe where her mind had travelled.

  Skin thirsting for his touch, indeed!

  She must have read that somewhere.

  And given the revelations of the previous evening, he was the last man in the world with whom she should get involved.

  ‘We’ll see them from here?’ her tormentor asked as he turned onto the gravel road as directed.

  ‘Check out that cloud of dust in the distance. They’ll keep the mob moving and as they’re coming down this road—and along the verges beside it—we’ll have to drive through them.’

  She paused and studied him for a moment, although she didn’t need to look at him to remember just how good-looking he was.

  Or why he was really here!

  ‘You have to drive very slowly through the herd, and some will nudge against you, but the men will have dogs and bikes and will help all they can.’

  He turned towards her, frowning now.

  ‘We drive through a mob of cattle, nudging some of them? What happens if we kill o
ne?’

  She had to laugh.

  ‘If we do happen to have a fatal accident with one, then we could cut it up for meat.’

  He glanced her way again.

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she said, still smiling. ‘They’re good fat bullocks on the way to market—someone would certainly cut it up for meat. See, here they come.’

  She pointed ahead and Mak saw the cloud of dust she’d mentioned hazing the blue sky, but in front of it, like a red-brown river in flood, moving inexorably across the land, came the herd of red cattle, the stream as wide as the road and verges, maybe a hundred metres across, moving slowly, slowly, slowly, but gaining on them every second.

  ‘Slow!’ Neena reminded him, not that he’d needed reminding. The beasts were looking bigger by the moment and the thought of driving through them was challenging, to say the least.

  A dusty cowboy on a motorbike pulled up beside the car and Mak let down the window.

  ‘We left Tom where he fell. He’s in shade and got water, about a kilometre behind us now.’

  Neena seemed to think this was not unusual information, thanking the man and telling him she’d be in touch when she’d seen the patient.

  ‘You okay to drive through?’ the man asked Mak.

  ‘I reckon so,’ he said, then wondered if he’d already been in Wymaralong too long, ‘reckon’ being one of Ned’s favourite words.

  The cowboy rode off, taking a wide arc around the cattle, and Mak moved the vehicle forward, surprised at how little fuss the cattle made as he drew closer. Most moved sideways so a pathway was opened up, although every now and then one beast refused to give way and they had to wait for it to move, or try to edge around it.

  ‘They’re worked with bikes and vehicles these days so they don’t object to them,’ Neena said, while Mak looked around in wonder. It seemed to him they’d reached the middle of the herd, for as far as he could see in all directions were slowly moving cattle.