His shoulders hunched and he bent his head as if the weight of the emotional baggage he’d carried since that time still burdened his body.
‘Physical attraction, Grace, do you wonder I’m suspicious of it?’
‘But anger is a natural reaction to bad news,’ Grace whispered to him. ‘Your anger might have found an outlet in yelling about the abortion but it would have been far deeper than that—it would have been about the death sentence Nikki, your friend and lover, had just received.’ She held him more tightly. ‘It was natural, not cruel or unfair, Harry, and I’m sure Nikki would have understood that.’
‘Would she?’ he whispered hoarsely, the headshake accompanying the words telling Grace he didn’t believe her.
The wailing cry of a siren told them the ambulance was close by. Grace let him go and headed for the door, wanting to help Karen and the baby out of the bath.
She heard the vehicle pull up, the sound of doors opening, the wheels on a stretcher dropping down.
‘So now you know why he feels the way he does,’ she muttered helplessly to herself, ‘but what if it isn’t just physical attraction?’
She understood so much more now—understood it was guilt and anger at himself that prompted not only Harry’s risk-taking but also the emotional armour he’d drawn around himself.
Grace mulled it over as she led the paramedics first into the bathroom to collect Karen and baby William, then, once they were safely loaded, she walked with Daisy to the ambulance.
‘Yes, I’ll stay with Bill until the people from the funeral home arrive,’ she promised Daisy, and was surprised at Daisy’s protest.
‘You’ll do no such thing—you stay with Harry. Cyclone Willie shook a lot of things loose in that boy’s heart. He’s hurting and he needs someone with him.’
‘As if Harry would ever admit to needing someone,’ Grace said, but fortunately the funeral car arrived at that moment so she didn’t have to make a choice.
Harry had returned to the dry refuge of the dining room while she’d been seeing the two vehicles depart. He looked grey with fatigue—or was it more than that? He looked …
Despairing?
‘Georgie? You’ve heard from Georgie?’
He shook his head, then muttered, ‘I’m thinking no news is good news out there. I told Alistair we’d left the vehicle beyond the fallen tree—they could have sheltered in that.’
But this not good but not precisely bad news did nothing to ease the knots of worry in his features.
‘What’s wrong?’ Grace asked, walking towards him and reaching out to take his hands. Watching his face carefully, ready to read a too-easy lie.
But he didn’t lie, saying only, ‘It’s Sport,’ in a tone of such flat despair Grace thought her heart would break.
‘Dead?’ she whispered, then remembered where the dog had been. ‘Your parents? They’re OK?’
‘Sport’s not dead but gone. My parents are fine. Very little damage to the house, although the sheds have been destroyed and the sugar crop’s flattened. But Sport’s disappeared. Mum said he grew more and more agitated as Willie passed over, then, when Dad opened the door to look at the damage during the calm of the eye, Sport took off, last seen heading back towards the town.’
Grace pictured Harry’s parents’ place, not far from the sugar mill on the outskirts of town.
She could imagine the dog, hip-hopping his way through the fury of the cyclone.
Sport, a ragged, crippled mutt that had somehow wormed his way through the emotional barriers Harry had built around himself.
Wormed his way into Harry’s heart.
She wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly.
‘I love you, Harry,’ she said, although it was the last thing she’d meant to say.
Bloody dog!
She was resting her head against Harry’s chest so couldn’t see his reaction, although she felt his chest move with a sharp intake of air.
‘I know you don’t want to hear that,’ she added, anxious to get it all smoothed over and things back to normal between them again. ‘But we’ve been through so much—touched by death then welcoming new life, our physical world destroyed around us—I had to say it, and it’s OK because I don’t expect you to love me back. I’ve got over love before and I’ll get over this, but it needed to be said.’
One of his arms tightened around her and he used his free hand to tilt her chin, so in the rain-dimmed morning light she saw his face.
Saw compassion, which she hated, but something else.
Surprise?
Natural enough, but was it surprise?
Before she could make another guess, Harry bent his head and kissed her, his lips crushing hers with hot, hard insistence. She melted into the embrace and returned the kiss, letting her lips tell him, over and over again, just how she felt.
One corner of her mind was aware of the futility of it all, but this was Harry and right now he needed whatever physical comfort she could give him.
And she needed something that at least felt like love …
Perhaps a minute passed, perhaps an hour, although, looking at her watch as she pushed out of Harry’s arms, Grace knew it hadn’t been an hour.
Two, three minutes maybe—a short time out from all the chaos that lay both behind and ahead of them.
And if her heart cringed with shame that she’d told Harry how she felt—a confession prompted by pity that he’d lost his dog, for heaven’s sake—then she was good enough at pretence by now to carry on as if the words had not been spoken.
Which, she knew, was what Harry would do …
‘We’ve got to go. Sport will be looking for you,’ she said, and Harry nodded.
‘Damn stupid dog!’
‘We’ll look at your place first,’ Grace said.
Harry turned towards her, frowning now.
Grace loved him?
‘We can’t go out looking for a dog,’ he growled. ‘I need to see the damage, talk to people, get arrangements going.’
Talk about coming out of left field! Grace, his friend, suddenly declaring love for him?
‘You need to drive through town to see the damage,’ this friend he suddenly didn’t know reminded him, then she repeated what she’d said earlier. ‘We’ll go past your place first.’
And now carrying on as if she hadn’t just dropped a bombshell on him.
As if love had never been mentioned.
He had to put it right out of his mind. The town and its people needed him—and needed him to have a fully functioning brain, not some twitchy mess of grey matter puzzling over love and Grace.
Grace first—he’d deal with Grace the friend and that way might not keep thinking about the Grace he’d kissed.
Twice …
‘What’s this we? I’ll drop you home, that’s if your cottage is still standing. Or at the hospital. You need to sleep.’
‘No, Harry, we’ll do a drive around town then you can drop me at SES Headquarters so I can start sorting out what’s needed and who we’ve got to help.’
Unable to think of a single argument against this—well, not one that she would listen to—he led the way out to where he’d left the police vehicle, tucked in under the Aldrichs’ high-set house. It seemed to have survived the onslaught with only minor damage.
Sadness filled her heart as Grace snapped her seat belt into place. She sent a sidelong glance at the object of her thoughts, who was talking seriously to someone on his cellphone. Now those fatal words had been said, they could never be unsaid, so things could never really be the same between them again.
That was probably just as well, because although she’d spoken lightly about getting over love, she knew this was going to take a huge effort, and not seeing much of Harry would certainly help.
Although, comparing what she’d felt for James with what she felt for Harry, maybe he was right about physical attraction giving an illusion of love.
Certainly the love she’d felt for J
ames had never hurt like this …
It was at this stage of her cogitations that she became aware of the world around her—or what was left of it.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered, trying desperately to make some sense of the devastation that lay around them. Harry was driving very slowly and carefully, picking a path along a road strewn with corrugated iron, fibro sheeting, furniture and bedding, not to mention trees, branches and telegraph poles, the latter flung about as if they’d weighed no more than matches.
The rain poured down with unrelenting insistence, as if Nature hadn’t yet done enough to bring the town of Crocodile Creek and its inhabitants to their knees.
‘We’ll need the army. The mayor phoned earlier. He’s already asked the premier for help,’ Harry said as he pulled into his driveway.
‘But today?’ Grace asked, staring helplessly around. ‘What can we do today? Where do we start? How can we help people?’
‘Food and water. I’ll check Sport’s not here, then drive around town. We’ll stop at the civic centre first, although I’ve had a report that everyone’s OK there. We’re broadcasting messages asking anyone who needs help to get out of their house to phone the dedicated line at the police station—the number we gave out at the end of all the cyclone warnings.’
‘Four, zero, six, six, eight, eight, nine, nine,’ Grace repeated, remembering the trouble Harry had had getting a number so easy to remember.
The radio was chattering at them. All downed power poles and torn lines would have to be removed before the authorities would consider turning power back on. No reports of casualties so far, apart from those lost in the bus crash. Banana plantations and cane fields had been flattened. The farmers were in for a grim year, but Willie, his violence spent, had continued moving westward and was now dumping much-needed rain on the cattle country beyond the mountains.
‘So Willie moves on,’ Grace whispered as she heard this report. ‘But how do people here move on? How can anyone move on from something like this?’
Harry glanced towards her, and she knew he was thinking of her stupid declaration.
Well, so what if he was? Like Willie, she was moving on.
Moving on …
CHAPTER NINE
THEY stopped at the house just long enough for Harry to satisfy himself Sport wasn’t there. Neither was his dirt bike, which meant Georgie and Alistair were still out in the bush.
They were both sensible people, they had his vehicle out there to shelter in—or the bus—they’d be OK.
But had they found the kids?
Worry knotted inside him and he sent a silent prayer heavenward, a plea that they and the two children were all right. Then he looked around at the havoc and wondered if heaven had given up answering prayers, because plenty of people had prayed the town would be spared a cyclone.
‘Do you think the old bridge will hold?’ Grace asked as they approached the bridge across the creek that separated the hospital part of the town from the main commercial and residential areas.
‘The council engineers looked at it when it was forecast Willie might head this way and declared it would probably outlast the new bridge across the river, but the problem is, because it’s low and water is already lapping at the underside, all the debris coming down the creek will dam up behind it, causing pressure that could eventually push it off its pylons.’
‘Debris piling up is also causing flooding,’ Grace said, pointing to where the creek had already broken its banks and was swirling beneath and around houses on the hospital side.
‘Which will get worse,’ Harry agreed, concern and gloom darkening his voice.
They were driving towards the civic centre now, Grace looking out for Sport, although the streets were still largely deserted.
Except for teenagers, paddling through floodwater on their surf-skis here and there, revelling in the aftermath of the disaster.
‘I’ll be in meetings for the rest of the morning,’ Harry said, turning towards Grace and reaching out to run a finger down her cheek. ‘You do what you have to do then get someone to run you home, OK? You need to sleep.’
‘And you don’t, Harry?’ she teased, discomfited by the tenderness of his touch—by his concern.
‘I can’t just yet,’ he reminded her, then he leant across the centre console and kissed her on the lips, murmuring, ‘I’m sorry, Grace,’ and breaking her heart one last time because the apology had nothing to do with not sleeping.
One of her fellow SES volunteers drove her home to check the cottage was all right. She’d lost a window and the living room was awash with water, her garden was wrecked, but apart from that she’d got off lightly. They drove on to SES Headquarters, passing people wandering through the wreckage of countless homes, oblivious of the rain still pelting down, looking dazed as they picked an object from the rubble, gazed at it for a moment then dropped it back.
Some were already stacking rubbish in a pile, hurling boards that had once made up the walls of their houses into a heap on the footpath. It would take forever to clear some of the lots, but these people were at least doing something. They were looking to bring some order back into their lives.
Once at Headquarters, she set up a first-aid station. Volunteers would be injured in the clean-up and would also know to bring anyone with minor injuries to the building.
What she hadn’t expected was a snakebite.
‘Bloody snake decided it wanted to share our bathroom with us. I had the kids in there,’ the ashen-faced man told her. ‘I picked it up to throw it out, and the damn thing bit me on the arm.’
He showed the wound, which Grace bandaged with pressure bandages, down towards the man’s fingers then back up to his armpit.
But it was really too late for bandages. The wound had been oozing blood, and snake venom stopped blood clotting properly.
‘Did you drive here?’ she asked, and the man nodded, his breathing thickening as they stood there.
‘Good. We’ll take your car.’
She called two of the volunteers who’d come in looking for orders to carry the man out to the car.
‘The less effort you make, the less chance of poison spreading.’
‘It didn’t look like a brown or taipan,’ the man said, but Grace had already taken the car keys from his hand and was hurrying towards the door. Even so-called experts couldn’t always identify snakes by their looks.
The volunteers settled her patient into the car, and she took off, making her way as fast as she could through the hazardous streets. At the hospital she drove straight into the emergency entrance, leaping out of the car and calling for a stretcher.
‘Bringing your own patients, Grace?’ someone called to her as she walked beside the stretcher.
‘Snakebite,’ she snapped, pushing the stretcher in the direction of a trauma room. ‘We need a VDK.’
Inside the trauma room she started with the basics, knowing a doctor would get there when he or she could. She slipped an oxygen mask over her patient’s head, opened his shirt and set the pads for electrocardiogram monitoring, and fitted an oxygen saturation monitor to one finger.
IV access next—they’d need blood for a full blood count and for a coag profile, urea, creatinine and electrolytes, creatine kinase and blood grouping and cross-matching. Urine, too—the venom detection kit worked on urine.
She talked to the man, Peter Wellings, as she worked, hoping a doctor would arrive before she got to the catheterisation stage.
A doctor did arrive, Cal Jamieson, looking as grey and tired as Grace was feeling.
She explained the situation as briefly as she could, then was surprised when Cal picked up a scalpel and turned to her.
‘Where exactly was the bite?’
Grace pointed to the spot on the bandaged arm.
‘And it was definitely bleeding freely?’
She nodded.
‘OK, we can take a swab from there for venom detection, rather than wait for a urine sample. I’ll cut a
small window in the bandages, and in the meantime let’s get some adrenaline for him in case there’s a reaction to the antivenin—0.25 milligrams please, Grace. And get some antivenins ready—the polyvalent in case we can’t identify the snake, and some brown, tiger and taipan, which are the most likely up here.’
Cal was working swiftly, cutting through the bandages, swabbing, talking to Peter as well as telling Grace what he required next. He took the swab and left the room, returning minutes later to go through the antivenins Grace had set out on a trolley.
‘Tiger,’ he said briefly, more to Grace than to Peter, who looked as if he no longer cared what kind of snake had bitten him. ‘I’m going in strong because of the delay. The Commonwealth Serum Laboratories recommend one ampoule but we’re going two. I’ve actually given three to someone who had multiple wounds. But he’ll need careful monitoring—straight to the ICU once I’ve got the antivenin going in his drip.’
He glanced towards Grace as he worked.
‘You’ve obviously been outside. How bad is it?’
Grace thought of the devastation she’d seen and shook her head.
‘I can’t describe it,’ she said. ‘I can’t even take in what I’ve seen. All the photos of floods and hurricanes and even bomb-sites you’ve ever seen mixed into one. I don’t know how people will begin to recover. And the rain hasn’t let up one bit. That’s making things worse.’
Cal nodded.
‘We’ll see plenty of post-traumatic stress,’ he said. ‘Hopefully we’ll be able to get the staff we need to handle it—it’s such a specialist area.’
He was adjusting the flow of the saline and antivenin mix, ten times the amount of saline to antivenin, and calibrating the flow so Peter would receive the mixture over thirty minutes.
Grace wrote up the notes, and the latest observations, wanting everything to be in order as Peter was transferred.
‘He’ll need to be on prednisolone for five days after it to prevent serum sickness,’ Cal said, adding his notes. ‘And watched for paralysis, which with tigers starts with muscles and tendons in the head.’
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 45