PROLOGUE
AS A cyclone hovered off the coast of North Queensland, threatening destruction to any town in its path, several hundred miles away a small boy sneaked on board a bus. Terrified that his father, who was arguing with the bus driver, would discover the dog he’d threatened to drown, Max ducked between the two men and climbed the steps into the warm, fusty, dimly lit interior of the big vehicle. Mum would sort everything out when he got to Crocodile Creek—the fare, the dog, everything.
Mum would like a dog.
‘Don’t call her Mum—she’s your flippin’ sister! Or half-sister, if you really want to know.’
Echoes of his father’s angry rant rang through Max’s head, but Georgie hadn’t ever minded him calling her Mum, and it stopped kids at school teasing him.
The kids that had mums, that was.
Mum would love Scruffy.
He shifted the backpack off his shoulder and hugged it to his chest, comforted by the squirming of the pup inside it, checking out the passengers as he made his way up the aisle. He’d been shunted back and forth across Queensland often enough to be able to pick out who was who among his fellow travellers.
The bus was nearly full and all the usual ones were there. A group of backpackers chattering away in a foreign language, a fat woman in the seat behind them—bet she’d been to visit her grandkids—bloke on the other side of the aisle—he’d be late back on the bus at all the rest stops—an old couple who looked like they’d been on the bus for all of their lives, and a tired, sad-looking woman with a little boy.
Max slipped into the seat behind them. He’d never told Mum and certainly wouldn’t bother telling Dad, but scary things could happen on a bus, and he’d worked out it’s always best to stick with someone with a kid, or to sit near a youngish couple, so he looked like part of a family.
Though with Scruffy to protect him …
He slid across the seat to the window, looking for his father, wondering if the argument was over—if his father had actually paid to get rid of him this time.
Wanting to wave goodbye.
The footpath was deserted, the bus driver now talking to someone in the doorway of the travel office. Twisting his head against the glass, Max could just make out a shambling figure moving through a pool of lamplight well behind the bus—walking away from it.
So much for waving goodbye.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ Max told himself fiercely, scrunching up his eyes and blinking hard, turning his attention to the zip on his backpack before thrusting his hand inside, feeling Scruffy’s rough hair, a warm tongue licking his fingers. ‘It doesn’t matter!’
But when you’re only seven, it did matter …
CHAPTER ONE
MIDNIGHT, and Grace O’Riordan lay on one of the examination couches in the emergency department of the Crocodile Creek Hospital and stared at an amoeba-shaped stain on the ceiling as she contemplated clothes, love and the meaning of life.
In truth, the meaning of life wasn’t overtaxing her brain cells right now, and she’d assured herself, for the forty-hundredth time, that the dress she’d bought for the wedding wasn’t too over the top, which left love.
Love, as in unrequited.
One-sided.
Heavens to Betsy, as if she hadn’t had enough one-sided love in her life.
Perhaps loving without being loved back made her unlovable. In the same way old furniture, polished often, developed a rich deep shiny patina, so loved people shone and attracted more love.
What was this? Sensible, practical, Grace O’Riordan indulging in wild flights of fancy? She’d be better off napping.
Although she was on duty, the A and E dept—in fact, the entire hospital—after a particularly hectic afternoon and early evening, was quiet. Quiet enough for her to have a sleep, which, given the frantic few days she’d just spent checking on cyclone preparations, she needed.
But she needed love, too, and was practical—there was that word again—enough to know that she had to get over her present love—the unrequited one—and start looking to the future. Start looking for someone who might love her back, someone who also wanted love and the things that went with it, like marriage and a family. Especially a family. She had been family-less for quite long enough …
This coming week would provide the perfect opportunity to begin the search, with people flying in from all over the globe for the weddings of Mike and Emily tomorrow and, a week later, Gina and Cal. Surely somewhere, among all the unattached male wedding guests, there’d be someone interested in a smallish, slightly plump, sometimes pretty, Irish-Australian nurse.
She pressed her hand against her heart, sure she could feel pain just thinking about loving someone other than Harry.
But she’d got over love before, she could do it again.
‘Move on, Grace!’ she told herself, in her sternest voice.
‘Isn’t anyone on duty in this place?’ a loud voice demanded.
Harry’s voice.
Grace slid off the table, pulled her uniform shirt straight, wondered, briefly, whether her short curls looked like a flattened bird’s nest after lying down, and exited the room to greet the man she was trying to get over.
‘If you’d come in through the emergency door, a bell would have rung and I’d have known you were here,’ she greeted him, none too warmly. Then she saw the blood.
‘Holy cow, Harry Blake, what have you done to yourself this time?’
She grabbed a clean towel from a pile on a trolley and hurried towards the chair where he’d collapsed, one bloody leg thrust out in front of him.
Wrapping the towel tightly around the wound to stem at least some of the bleeding, she looked up into his face. Boy, was it ever hard to get over love when her heart danced jigs every time she saw him.
Irish jigs.
She looked at his face again—as a nurse this time. It was grey with tiredness but not, as far as she could tell, pale from blood loss.
‘Can you make it into an examination cubicle or will I ring for help?’ she asked, knowing full well he was so stubborn he’d refuse help even if she called for it. But when he stood he wobbled slightly, so she tucked her shoulder into his armpit to take some of his weight, and with her arm around his back for added support she led him into the room.
He sat down on the couch she’d occupied only minutes earlier, then, as she pushed at his chest and lifted his legs, he lay down.
‘What happened?’ she asked, as she unwrapped the towel enough to know there was no arterial bleeding on his leg, then wrapped it up again so she could check his vital signs before she examined the wound.
‘Carelessness,’ he muttered at her. He closed his eyes, which made her wonder if his blood loss was more serious than she’d supposed. But his pulse was strong, his blood pressure excellent and his breathing steady. Just to be sure, she slid an oxygen saturation meter onto one of his fingers, and turned on the monitor.
‘What kind of carelessness?’ she asked as she once again unwrapped the towel and saw the torn, bloodstained trouser leg and the badly lacerated skin beneath the shredded fabric.
‘Chainsaw! Does that stain on the ceiling look like a penguin to you?’
‘No, it looks like an amoeba, which is to say a formless blob.’ She was using scissors to cut away his trousers, so she could see the wound. Blood had run into his sock, making it hard to tell if the damage went down that far. Taking care not to brush against his wound, she took hold of his boot to ease it off.
‘You can’t do that,’ he said, sitting up so quickly his shoulder brushed against her and his face was kissing close.
Kissing Harry? As if!
‘Can’t take your boot off?’ she asked. ‘Is there some regulation about not being a policeman if you’re not wearing both boots?’
He turned towards her, a frown pleating his black eyebrows, his grey eyes perplexed. ‘Of course not. You just wouldn’t get it off.’ He tugged and twisted at the same time and the elastic-sided boot sli
d off. ‘I’ll get the sock, too,’ he added, pulling off the bloodstained wreck, but not before Grace had noticed the hole at the top of the big toe.
In a dream where Harry loved her back, she’d have mended that hole—she’d like doing things like that—the little caring things that said I love you without the words.
‘Lie back,’ she said, dream and reality coming too close for comfort with him sitting there. ‘I’ll flush this mess and see what’s what.’
She pulled on clean gloves and set a bag of saline on a drip stand. She’d need tubing, a three-way tap, syringe and a nineteen-gauge needle to drip the liquid onto the wound while she probed for foreign particles.
Packing waterproof-backed absorbent pads beneath his leg, she started the saline dripping onto the wound, a nasty contusion running eight inches in length, starting on the tibia just below the knee and swerving off into his calf.
‘The skin’s so chewed up it’s not viable enough to stitch,’ she told him, probing a few pieces of what looked like mangled treetrunk, or possibly mangled trouser fabric, from the deepest part. Organic matter and clay were among the most likely things to cause infection in tissue injury. ‘Ideally it should be left open, but I guess you’re not willing to stay home and rest it for the next few days.’
‘You are joking!’ Harry said. ‘I need it patched up now, and maybe in three days’ time, when we know for sure Cyclone Willie has departed, I can rest it.’
‘Harry, it’s a mess. I’ll dress it as best I can but if you don’t look after it and come in to have it dressed every day, you’re going to end up with ulceration and needing a skin graft on it.’
She left the saline dripping on the wound while she found the dressings she’d need and some antibiotic cream which she would spread beneath the non-adhesive dressing once she had all visible debris removed from it.
Harry watched her work, right up until she starting snipping away torn tatters of skin, when he turned his attention back to the penguin on the ceiling.
‘Would you like me to give you a local anaesthetic while I do this? It could hurt.’
‘It is hurting,’ he said, gritting his teeth as a particularly stubborn piece of skin or grit defied Grace’s efforts to be gentle. ‘But, no, no needles. Just talk to me. And before you do, have another look—maybe the stain looks like the little engine on a cane train.’
Grace glanced towards the ceiling but shook her head as she turned back towards him.
‘Since when do a penguin and a cane train engine share similarities in looks?’
‘It’s a shape thing,’ he said, grabbing at her hand and drawing the shape on the back of it. ‘Penguin, blob, train engine, see?’
‘Not even vaguely,’ she told him, rescuing her hand from his grasp then changing her gloves again before she continued with her job. ‘And I can see right through you, Harry Blake. You’re babbling on about penguins and cane trains to keep me from going back to the question you avoided earlier.’
She stopped talking while she spread cream across his leg. He didn’t feel much like talking either.
Grace sealed the wound with a broad, long dressing, and bandaged over it with crêpe bandages, then pulled a long sleeve over the lot, giving it as much security and padding as she could because she knew he’d be putting himself in situations where he could bump it.
‘That should give it some protection from physical damage, although, with the cyclone coming, who knows what you’ll be called on to do? Just make sure you come in to have it checked and re-dressed every day.’
‘You on duty tomorrow?’
Grace smiled sadly to herself. Would that he was asking because he was interested!
‘You already know the answer to that one. I finish night duty in the morning and have three days off so I can cope with the wedding and the cyclone preparations without letting any one down here at the hospital.’
Harry sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, ready to leave.
‘Not so fast,’ she warned him. ‘I need to check your tetanus status and give you some antibiotics just in case there’s some infection already in there.’
She paused and her wide blue eyes met his.
‘And you’re not leaving here until you tell me how you did it.’
Harry studied her as he debated whether to tell her. Tousled curls, freckled nose—Grace, everyone’s friend.
His friend, too. A friendship formed when he’d been in need of a friend in the months after Nikki’s death. True, he’d had friends, good friends, among the townspeople and the hospital staff, but all the locals had known Nikki since she’d been a child while the hospital staff had all drawn close to her as they’d nursed her through the last weeks of her life.
And though these friends had all stood by him and had wanted to offer support, he’d avoided them, not wanting sympathy, needing to be left alone to sort out the morass of conflicting emotions warring within him.
Grace had arrived after Nikki’s death, so there was no connection, no history, just a bright, bubbly, capable young woman who was willing to listen if he wanted to talk, to talk if he needed conversation, or just to share the silence when he didn’t want to be alone.
A true friend …
‘I’m waiting!’
She had her hands on her hips and a no-nonsense look on her face, but though she was trying to look serious a smile lurked in her blue eyes.
A smile nearly always lurked in Grace’s eyes …
The thought startled him to the extent that confession seemed easier than considering what, if anything, noticing Grace’s smiling eyes might mean.
‘I hit my leg with the blade of a chainsaw.’
‘And what were you doing, wielding a chainsaw, may I ask?’
‘A tree had come down, out along the Wygera road, but part of the trunk must have been dead because the saw bounced off it when it hit it.’ He waved his hand towards his now securely bandaged leg. ‘One wounded leg.’
‘That wasn’t my question and you know it, Harry. It’s one o’clock in the morning. You’re a policeman, not a rescue worker. The fire service, the electricity workers and, or when requested, the SES crews clear roads. It’s what they’re trained to do. The SES manual has pages and pages on safe working with chainsaws.’
‘I’ve been using chainsaws all my life,’ Harry retorted, uncomfortably aware this conversation might not be about chainsaws but uncertain what it was about.
‘That’s not the point,’ Grace snapped. ‘What if the accident had been worse? What if you’d taken your leg off? Then who’s in charge here? Who’s left to co-ordinate services to a town that could be struck by one of the worst cyclones in history within the next twenty-four hours?’
‘Give over, Grace,’ he said, standing up on his good leg and carefully putting weight on the injured one to see how bad it felt.
Very bad. Bad enough to make him feel queasy.
‘No, I won’t give over.’ No smile in the blue eyes now. In fact, she was glaring at him. ‘This is just typical of you, Harry Blake. Typical of the stupid risks you take. You mightn’t care what happens to you, but you’ve got family and friends who do. There are people out there who’d be deeply hurt if you were killed or badly injured, but do you think about them when you pull on your superhero cape and go rushing blindly into danger? No, you don’t! You don’t think of anyone but yourself, and that’s not noble or self-sacrificing or even brave—it’s just plain selfishness, Harry.’
Harry heard her out, growing more annoyed every second. He’d had a shocking day, he was tired, his leg hurt and to accuse him of selfishness, well, that was just the last straw.
‘And just what makes you think you have the right to sit in judgement on me?’ he demanded, taking a careful stride towards the cubicle curtain so he could escape any further conversation. ‘What makes you think you know me well enough to call me selfish, or to question my motives in helping people? You’re not my mother or my wife, Grace, so butt out!’
&n
bsp; He heard her gasp as he headed out of the cubicle, across the deserted A and E waiting room and out of the hospital, limping not entirely because of his leg but because he was only wearing one boot. The other he’d stupidly left behind, and that made him even angrier than Grace’s accusation. He looked up at the cloud-massed sky and wanted to yell his frustration to the wind.
Perhaps it was just as well there was no one around, although if he’d happened on someone he knew he could have asked that person to go back in and retrieve the boot for him. The hospital was quieter than he’d ever seen it, with no one coming or going from the car park.
He was contemplating radioing the constable on duty to come over and collect it for him when he heard the footsteps behind him.
Grace!
Coming to apologise?
‘Here’s your boot, and some antibiotics, directions on when to take them on the packet. And in answer to your question about rights, I thought, for some obviously foolish reason, I had the right of a friend.’
And with that she spun on her heel and walked briskly back into the hospital.
Wonderful! Now Grace had joined the throng of people he’d somehow managed to upset, simply because they refused to let him get on with his life his way.
Alone! With no emotional involvement with anyone or anything.
Except Sport, the three-legged blue heeler cattle dog he’d rescued from the dump one day.
And his parents—he liked his parents. And they’d known him well enough to back off when Nikki had died …
He climbed into his vehicle and slumped back against the seat. Was the day over? Please, God, it might be. On top of all the damage and power disruptions caused by the gale-force winds stirred up by Cyclone Willie, he’d had to handle traffic chaos at the fishing competition, an assault on Georgie Turner, the local obstetrician, Sophia Poulos, mother of the groom at the next day’s wedding, phoning every fifteen minutes to ask about the cyclone as if he was personally responsible for its course, and to top it all off, he’d had to visit Georgie again.
The Australian's Proposal (Mills & Boon By Request): The Doctor's Marriage Wish / The Playboy Doctor's Proposal / The Nurse He's Been Waiting For Page 34