A Magical Christmas

by Patricia Thayer

  ‘I should have brought my camera,’ he said to Neena, who smiled at him with the warm delight that made things buzz inside him.

  ‘You won’t forget it,’ she said. ‘It’s the kind of image that stays in your mind for ever.’

  ‘Like last night’s sunset,’ Mak said, then regretted it as the smile faded. She was obviously remembering the conversation that had preceded the sunset, and remembering he was—in her opinion—the enemy. But apart from being at least fifty per cent responsible for the pregnancy, what else did she hold against Theo and by extension his family? Had he made promises to her?

  Hurt her so badly she couldn’t forgive?

  But would she have kept the baby, in that case?

  Mak knew no matter how much thought he gave these questions, he wouldn’t come up with answers. One day, perhaps, he could ask her—after all, she’d been totally blunt with him…

  ‘Ah, nearly through,’ she said. ‘Now a kilometre or so. Drive fairly slowly—he might be in a paddock off the road. I’ll keep an eye out this side, you watch the other.’

  ‘Looking for a man lying in the shade of a tree?’

  ‘Looking for a man and a machine that should retain at least some resemblance to a very small helicopter.’

  ‘Got him!’ Mak said, only minutes later, pulling the car off the road and into the meagre shade of a gum tree. The strange machine was in the shade of the single tree in a bare paddock on his side. He looked along the fence-line for a gate.

  ‘We’ll climb through, have a look at him, then if we have to drive closer, we’ll cut the fence. Nick will have transferred the wire and fence strainers from my car to this one.’

  Mak had no idea what fence strainers were but he was reasonably sure no women he had ever known would know, either—let alone be able to use them. More education lay ahead, he could see that.

  At least he knew about barbed-wire fences and getting through them. He put his foot on the lowest wire and lifted the next one as high as he could to allow Neena to first throw her bag through then to clamber through herself. She turned to do the same for him, but things were never as easy as they looked and his shirt caught on a barb, and she had to lean over and free it, the faint scent of her body permeating his senses and stirring his libido.

  This had to stop!

  He picked up the bag and strode towards their patient, who was looking remarkably cheerful.

  ‘Think I’ve done me knee again,’ he said to Neena. ‘M’back’s okay and m’spine because I can wiggle my toes and move my fingers and my neck doesn’t hurt, but the darned thing came down so quickly I put out my foot without thinking and jarred m’whole leg.’

  Neena shook her head—what else could you do with an accident-prone cowboy?

  ‘Tom, this is Mak, Mak, Tom. Tom badly damaged his knee about twelve months ago, coming off a quad bike. He went to Brisbane where the surgeons put it back together again far better than any of us expected, but believe me, they’re not going to be pleased to see you again, Tom.’

  Mak was examining the injured joint, poking and probing, his long fingers pressing against the swelling, his eyes on Tom’s face as he looked for any signs of discomfort.

  ‘I think it might be nothing more than a bad sprain,’ Mak said. ‘But we’ll need to X-ray it to be sure. In fact, an ultrasound would be even better. Do you have an ultrasound machine?’

  ‘We do, indeed,’ Neena told him. ‘Now! In fact, it was a donation from Hellenic Enterprises. Some bloke came out a while back and asked what we needed and came up with the ultrasound.’

  Her voice trailed away and Mak guessed she was second-guessing this so timely donation. Seeing it now as a bribe?

  Which it could well have been, but it did explain the amount on Con’s expense sheet, and it would be invaluable today.

  ‘Then do we get him into the car and take him back to town?’ Mak asked, avoiding the subject of the ultrasound.

  ‘After you’ve checked the rest of him over. Would you do that while I bring the car through? There’s a cervical collar in my bag, whack that on him just in case.’

  Neena was glad to get away, even if escape from Mak’s presence was only temporary. She’d had to touch his body as she’d unhooked his shirt and all the attraction stuff that she’d first felt with Theo had come back—only worse—and if falling for Theo had been a big mistake then falling for his uncle would be even more disastrous.

  She looked along the fence-line, hoping to see a gate, but as there was no sign of one and she knew the paddock ran for kilometres, it was going to be a cutting job. Cutting the fence was the easy part—the strands of barbed wire springing away so she didn’t have to move them out of the way of the car to drive through without damage to what paintwork it sported.

  Mak had bound the wounded knee and splinted it with a stick—instinctive medicine or a bushie in the making?

  ‘We’ll lift him between us,’ she suggested, moving to Tom’s side.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mak said, then he bent and easily lifted the lanky cowboy in his arms. ‘You open the back door.’

  Unused to being given orders, Neena hesitated, but only for a second—Tom must be getting heavier and heavier in Mak’s arms.

  He did allow her to help settle their patient so his legs were stretched along the seat.

  ‘We’ll drive back to the road then fix the fence,’ she told Tom. ‘See if you can fit the seat belt around you somehow while we’re doing it.’

  ‘We’re doing it?’ Mak said.

  ‘It’s easier with two,’ she said, and grinned to herself—back in control. He’d know nothing about fixing fences!

  She stopped just beyond the fence and got out her small roll of wire, two pairs of thick leather gloves, pliers and the handy fence strainer.

  ‘May I ask why you carry all this gear? I can understand the gun I saw in there—no doubt it’s to put injured animals out of their misery—but fence-fixing equipment?’

  Neena was already twisting a length of her wire to one side of the severed barbed wire.

  ‘It might take an hour to drive to the homestead and then another hour to get back to where Tom was, if we followed roads and tracks and went through gates. They run to huge paddocks out here, so sometimes it’s just much quicker to go through the fences rather than around. But leave a fence down in this country and some other person with a rifle in the back of his or her car might shoot you.’

  Mak, gloved and ready, started on the lowest strand of wire, using a second pair of pliers to attach a new piece, but his mind was more on his companion than on twisting wire. The more he saw of this woman, the more impressed he was, and he didn’t want to be impressed by her. He didn’t want to feel anything for her, or even get to know her better.

  Yes you do!

  The voice in his head was so loud he looked around, thinking maybe Neena had said the words as part of a conversation he’d missed. But she had fitted some contraption to the top wire, and was ratcheting the two ends of the fence towards each other, her lips were pressed tightly together while a small frown of concentration furrowed her brow.

  ‘Let me do that,’ Mak said, standing up and reaching out to take the handle from her.

  ‘No, you twist the ends,’ she told him and he saw that the strainers had pulled the barbed wire close enough for him to twist the end to the new piece Neena had inserted. ‘That needs strong hands.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ he said, when they’d repeated the process four times and now had the whole fence back together.

  ‘Wonderful indeed,’ Neena said, ‘and although I’ll let the property owner know about the mend so he can do a proper job, I’m betting our makeshift patching will still be here when this kid has grandkids.’

  She patted her stomach in a gesture Mak hadn’t seen before, and for some reason it moved him immeasurably. In fact, he wanted to give the bump a pat himself.

  What was he thinking?

  ‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked, wanting
to distance himself from the emotion he’d felt.

  Neena grinned at him.

  ‘Want to show Tom how good you are at driving through cattle?’ she teased, and more emotion roiled inside him. ‘Go for it,’ she said. ‘I’ll finish my lunch.’

  Fortunately Tom took over the conversation, asking Mak about himself, then talking about his own life, working on the property next to the one where he’d grown up.

  ‘And did you build the gyrocopter?’ Mak asked, not quite believing what Neena had been saying earlier.

  ‘Yes, it’s my third and all of them have crashed, but you get enough good bits left over to start again.’

  ‘Why would you want to start again?’ Mak asked, and Tom laughed.

  ‘You get on a bike behind a mob of cattle and you’ll understand,’ he said. ‘At least up in the air, even if it’s only ten feet, you don’t get half the dust. Besides, the girls all think it’s cool that I’m a helicopter pilot.’

  ‘Without a licence,’ Neena reminded him.

  ‘Don’t need it for the ones I fly,’ Tom retorted, ‘but the girls don’t know that.’

  They’d reached the dust cloud of the slowly moving mob of cattle once again and as Mak realised that driving through them this way was a very different matter, he glanced towards Neena, who was smiling at him with such sheer delight he knew she’d been waiting for the truth to dawn.

  ‘They have their backs to me,’ he said, although he’d guessed that was the cause of her amusement.

  ‘So you have to nudge them aside,’ she told him.

  Fortunately, before he’d worked out how to nudge a four-hundred-kilogram beast with a two-tonne vehicle and not kill the animal, the cowboy on the motorbike appeared again by his window.

  ‘I’ll push through them, you follow,’ he said, so Mak steered the car through the cattle, keeping close to the bike as it thrust its way through the herd.

  ‘Was that some kind of test?’ he asked Neena when they were once again on the main road into town.

  She smiled at him.

  ‘No, I really did want to eat my lunch, but if it had been a test then you’d have passed with top marks.’ She turned to the patient in the back seat. ‘He’s done well for a townie, hasn’t he, Tom?’

  ‘Not bad. He here to stay?’

  ‘No, just passing through,’ Neena replied, and Mak felt a flutter of something that couldn’t possibly be disappointment that she’d written off his presence so casually.

  I could stay, he wanted to say, but that was ridiculous.

  But if the company funded another doctor…

  And what about your career? Your dedication to emergency medicine? Your teaching ambitions?

  It must be the heat, although the vehicle was air-conditioned, but for some reason he kept having these arguments in his head—or had voices telling him things he really didn’t want to know.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked as the faded Christmas decorations strung across the streets announced they’d reached town.

  ‘How are you at working an ultrasound machine?’ Neena asked, then before he could reply she added, ‘Actually, if it’s foreign territory for you because you’ve got radiologists who do it, we’ve nurses at the hospital trained to use it. I’d like you to drop me back at the surgery, then take Tom up to the hospital. If you drive around the side you’ll see the emergency entrance and someone will bring out a wheelchair for him. If it’s just a sprain we’ll keep him here and do the RICE thing for twenty-four hours, but if it’s more badly damaged, get the hospital to contact the flying doctors and we’ll get rid of him.’

  ‘Hoy! That’s me you’re talking about,’ Tom complained. ‘And what’s this RICE thing?’

  ‘I thought you’d have been injured enough times to know it,’ Neena told him. ‘Rest, ice, compression and elevation. We’ll keep you in so the nurses can make sure you are resting and you are keeping it elevated and they’ll ice it for twenty minutes every hour.’

  ‘Well, that’s okay, and if Mak thinks it’s only sprained he’s probably right.’

  ‘Because he’s a man?’ Neena asked, and the warning note in her voice made Mak smile, though he hid it as he waited for Tom’s reply.

  ‘Well, he’s probably had sprains himself,’ Tom said, digging himself a deeper hole.

  ‘Whereas girls never sprain things?’ Neena’s voice was quiet but Tom must have caught on.

  ‘Oh, sorry—that was a sexist thing to say, wasn’t it?’ he said, reaching over to pat Neena on the shoulder. ‘You know I didn’t mean anything. Everyone knows you’re as good as any man—Whoops, it’s getting worse.’

  He gave her shoulder a squeeze with the hand that Mak felt had already lingered too long on her person.

  ‘Friends?’ Tom said, and she turned and smiled at him.

  ‘Always friends, Tom,’ she said, patting the hand that still rested on her shoulder.

  Mak pulled up outside the surgery and before he had the car in park she was out the door. At least that meant she was out of Tom’s reach! Now she leaned back in, bending so he could see a hint of a full cleavage in the V-neck of her T-shirt.

  ‘You know how to get to the hospital?’she said to Mak.

  ‘I can show him if he doesn’t,’ Tom reminded her, which was just as well, as Mak’s mouth had gone dry and words were beyond him.

  Reacting like that to a hint of cleavage?

  She was pregnant—of course she’d have full breasts!

  He drove off, thinking he’d drop Tom at the hospital then go and sit with Maisie in the orchid house until he’d got some sense back into his head.

  And some control back over his body!

  Not that he could. He had to do the ultrasound on Tom’s knee then, without a radiologist in town, read the results and work out if it was just a sprain. Would Tom’s faith in male doctors be completely shattered if the knee turned out to be broken?

  And while that shouldn’t matter at all, Mak found himself hoping he was right, and not only for Tom’s sake…

  Neena all but ran into the surgery, so relieved to be out of Mak’s presence and away from the curious vibes his body caused in hers that she greeted her afternoon staff with wide smiles.

  In contrast to her morning staff, her afternoon staff were practically babies. In fact, both of them had been delivered by the practice nurse who worked mornings, and although both were younger than Neena, they were both married with children, working afternoons while their mothers collected the kids from kindergarten and minded them until dinnertime.

  ‘New man in town, huh, Neena?’ Louise, the younger of the pair, greeted her.

  ‘Good-looking one, from all accounts,’ Lisa added, smiling knowingly at her boss.

  ‘Okay, you two, I don’t need the double act. Who’s first?’

  ‘Charlie Weeks,’ Lisa told her. ‘After you called me from the car, I phoned all the patients who were cancelled earlier and he was the first to come back. Some said it wasn’t important and re-booked for tomorrow, so you’ve only got three to see.’

  ‘Which is a pity,’ Louise complained, ‘as it means we won’t have to call in Dr Wonderful as back-up. Is he really here to see if we need another doctor?’

  Neena picked up Charlie’s file and nodded in reply.

  ‘And if he decides we do, will he be the one who stays?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘Definitely not,’ Neena replied. ‘He’s some hotshot ER doctor from the city, currently doing a master’s degree. Can you imagine someone like that wanting to work out here?’

  But as she spoke she felt a sadness deep inside her, which was ridiculous as she barely knew the man, and she certainly didn’t need another man messing up her life. If she managed to get another doctor, she’d make sure it was a woman!

  ‘Come on in, Charlie,’ she said to her patient, and she led him into the examination room, her mind switching from trivia—for that’s all it was—to work in an instant.

  Or most of her mind! As she opened her emails to check
on some blood-test results for Charlie she found the email from Hellenic Enterprises telling her that Mak was on his way…

  ‘These internet messages aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, Charlie,’she said, while his blood-test results printed out. ‘Supposedly it’s instant information, but if there’s a hitch in the system the information can come too late.’

  ‘Too late for what, Neena?’ Charlie asked, sounding extremely puzzled, as well he might have been.

  ‘Too late for me to high-tail it out of town,’ she said, then she showed him the test results, explained how his elevated PSI count was an indication of trouble with his prostate, but as it hadn’t gone up any higher in the six months since the last test there was no need to worry about it.

  ‘We talked about all this when you first found the trouble,’ Charlie reminded her. ‘And we decided, at eighty-four, even with the problem, I’d probably get another ten years and doing nothing meant the ten years would be good years, while having an operation and chemo with no guarantee of longer than ten years, I’d be sick and sorry for myself.’

  He paused, then added, ‘It’s okay—it doesn’t bother me, so don’t you be worrying about it.’

  Neena smiled. So many of her patients felt they should be the ones comforting her, not the other way around.

  ‘Hear you got yourself a young camel. I’ve got some good lucerne hay at the moment and I brought in a half bale for when he’s ready to try something solid. I’d drop it at your place, but I’ve got to get back home and Ned always chats, so can I leave it here?’

  ‘I’ll come out and get it,’ Neena said, as she finished examining the old man, noting down his pulse and blood pressure, aware as always most patients came in for a chat, but needing to keep records of their health all the same.

  She walked out with Charlie, told him in no uncertain terms that she was quite capable of lifting a half bale of hay, and proceeded to do just that, tugging it up by the strings until it was resting on the sides of the utility before lifting it into her arms. She was sorry her car wasn’t there so she could transfer the bale of hay straight into it. Charlie’s ute was parked at the front of the car park and she’d just lifted the bale free when Mak drove in. Guessing the hay wasn’t for the surgery, he pulled up beside her, leapt out and seized the bale from her hands.