The Australian's Proposal: The Doctor's Marriage Wish / The Playboy Doctor's Proposal / The Nurse He's Been Waiting For

Jack sipped from a glass of water, then continued.

‘About the time of the Gunyamurra rodeo they gave me some time off—I tried to visit Megan but couldn’t get the right lifts. I thought they were going to the rodeo because they kept talking about it, but when I got back they’d brought more cattle in. That’s when I saw the brands.’

‘What brands?’ Harry asked, as Megan walked back into the ward and, seeing Harry with Jack, came flying across to the bed.

‘It’s OK, Megan,’ Kate said quietly, but Megan was not to be stopped.

‘He’s still too sick!’ she yelled at Harry. ‘Can’t you see that?’ Then she turned her fury on Kate. ‘You should have stopped him.’

Behind her, Kate sensed another presence and turned to see that Hamish had come in quietly.

‘He has to answer questions some time, Megan,’ Hamish told her, but Megan refused to be appeased, and as Jack had closed his eyes again, this time with a finality Kate recognised, she indicated to Harry to walk away. She followed him out of the room, leaving Hamish to reassure Megan that her loved one was all right.

‘Jack was getting tired,’ Kate said to Harry. ‘Why don’t you come back in the morning? Patients are always fresher then. And in the morning Megan is due to spend some time with Susie, learning massage techniques for Jackson.’

Harry smiled.

‘She was as fierce as a mother bear protecting her cub, wasn’t she?’ he said, and Kate nodded, though she was thinking not of Megan’s behaviour but of Hamish, who had said the same thing to her the previous evening.

Hamish who was now holding Megan in his arms and no doubt whispering all the soothing, special, comforting things she needed to hear.

He was special …

Get your mind off him and onto your patient! Think Jack!

Kate set her mind to it, recalling the questions and answers. Jack had been talking easily about the cattle until he’d come to the bit about the brands.

‘Worries?’

So much for getting Hamish out of her mind by thinking about Jack! But, then, maybe Hamish could help.

Kate glanced back into the room to see Megan sitting quietly at Jack’s side, while he apparently slept, and turned her attention to the man she’d been determined to avoid.

‘Jack was upset by the questions before Megan came in,’ she explained. ‘Remember when you were telling me what might have happened and you said Jack might have recognised the Wetherby Downs brand and realised the cattle were stolen?’

‘In the cave?’

Kate nodded.

‘Well, what if they weren’t Wetherby cattle but Cooper cattle he recognised? Would he want to admit that? When Jim had just welcomed him to the family and Megan was nearby to hear?’

Hamish put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Do you always take on the worries of the world?’

‘It’s not the world, it’s Jack,’ she retorted. ‘And if Harry comes back in the morning to cover this tricky stuff, I’d like to be there, but I’m not a lawyer and maybe that’s what he needs.’

She used her own hand to lift his away and determinedly ignored the effects of both touches, but he wasn’t going to be put off.

‘It’s your tea-break—I checked,’ he said. ‘Let’s go talk to Charles about it.’

He led the way, guiding her along corridors and tapping quietly at the door before entering. Jill was there, which pleased Kate who was beginning to feel she was making a fuss about nothing but obscurely felt Jill might understand.

Jill could also change her shifts!

Charles greeted them as if he was used to small staff delegations wandering through his door, and asked how he could help.

‘Kate will explain,’ Hamish offered, so she brought Charles up to date and explained her worries.

‘So,’ she added, directly to Jill this time, ‘I know it’s a nuisance to keep switching shifts around, but if I could work maybe nine to six tomorrow, I’d be there in the morning when Harry comes, and still there in the afternoon if he happens to be held up.’

Jill assured her it would be OK but she was obviously as worried about Jack as Kate was.

‘Is it time to bring in a lawyer for him?’ Hamish asked Charles.

He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head.

‘At the moment it’s all pretty low key. Harry’s getting the information he needs—there is an old homestead out on one of the back blocks of Wetherby, by the way, but no one’s kept cattle on that block for years so Jack wouldn’t have known of it. Anyway, Harry’s happy and Jack’s not too distressed, and the way I look at it, if he can prove he had time off when the cattle were stolen—’

‘He hitched lifts to try to get to Megan,’ Kate broke in. ‘We only have to find the people who gave him lifts and we can prove he wasn’t there.’

Charles smiled at her.

‘We’ll find them,’ he promised, but, though he sounded confident, when Kate turned to close his office door behind her and Hamish as they left, she caught him frowning.

Had he only said it to make her feel better?

‘Now tea?’

How could someone make such ordinary words seductive?

‘No!’

The single word snapped out and hung in the air for so long she finally had to add a feeble ‘Thank you’ before she marched off back to the ward.

Didn’t he know she was avoiding him?

Of course he didn’t! She’d practically leapt at his suggestion that they talk to Charles together.

Harry arrived at ten the next morning, while Kate was hanging a new bag of fluid on Jack’s drip stand.

‘You getting preferential treatment here, Jack?’ he asked. ‘A pretty nurse all to yourself?’

‘I’ve only just got to him,’ Kate protested, knowing Jack would be embarrassed by the question. ‘I didn’t like to disturb him earlier when Megan was here, and Mr Roberts needed a bit of TLC.’

She checked the calibrations on the drip and picked up Jack’s chart, knowing she had to look busy if she wanted to hang around.

‘So, we were up to where your mates—’

‘They weren’t my mates!’ Jack snapped, then, as Kate brushed his arm with her hand, he relented. ‘Digger was OK.’

‘Well,’ Harry continued, ‘we were up to where Todd and Digger took you back to the old homestead and there were more cattle there.’

Jack nodded.

‘I saw the brands and asked if they’d bought the cattle from Jim Cooper—that’s Megan’s dad. I’d sometimes helped her, you see, mending the fences. It’s how we met. Some of their cattle got in with ours and Philip went berserk, saying they were rubbish and he didn’t want them polluting his stock, but although they were in poor condition, they were good cattle.’

Kate smiled to herself. Jack might have been a city kid like she had been, but he’d soon learnt.

‘Anyway, I asked Todd if he’d bought them and he said yes, the place was going down the drain and Jim wanted rid of them—and I knew things were bad with the Coopers so it seemed OK. But then Todd and Digger started fooling around with the brands and that didn’t seem right. So I left.’

‘Did you tell them you were leaving?’

Jack shook his head.

‘But I had to take the bike—Todd had two two-wheeler bikes and a four-wheeler he let me use. And taking the bike was stealing—so I left a note to say I’d leave it up near the highway, and as soon as I had some money I’d send him some for the inconvenience.’

‘So he knew exactly which way you’d head?’

‘I guess!’

Jack sounded more defeated than tired, but Kate felt he’d had enough, so she signalled to Harry that it was time to leave.

To her surprise, he didn’t argue, and Kate wondered if he’d been as affected by Jack’s patent honesty as she had been. Here was a kid from the city, helping his girlfriend mend fences on her property, worrying about her father’s cattle, escaping from criminals, yet leaving a note to say which way he was going!

She smiled at the young man on the bed. Some might say it was stupidity rather than honesty, but she couldn’t believe any jury in the world would find him guilty of whatever charges Harry might choose to lay against him.

In fact, if she could find out who had given him lifts and prove he hadn’t been with the men when they’d stolen the cattle, Harry couldn’t lay charges at all.

Another job for Batman and Robin?

Shaking her head at the intrusion of the stupid joke she’d come up with in the cave, she got on with her work. The whole idea of avoidance was that it got the other person out of the forefront of your mind.

Kate loved the walk from the hospital to the back of the house. There was a path, of course, from the front of the hospital to the front of the house, but that didn’t go through the garden. The Agnes Wetherby Memorial Garden, she’d discovered it was called. Planted in honour of Charles’s grandmother—Jack’s great-grandmother.

Jack was doing well—medically—and Harry hadn’t reappeared to ask more questions in the afternoon, so Kate, Jack and Megan had all decided to take that as a good sign.

But apart from finding out who had given Jack a lift—and she had no idea how to go about that—she couldn’t do much to help, so she wouldn’t think of Jack’s problems now. Although not thinking of Jack left a space in her mind, which was dangerous because spaces in her mind inevitably filled up with thoughts of Hamish.

The Hamish who had kissed her on the hill, not Colleague Hamish who had first appeared when he’d driven her to Wygera. Hamish kissing away her fear of crocodiles. Or had he been kissing away her fear of commitment? Hamish looking hurt when she’d refused to have tea with him yesterday.

It had been tea, for heavens’ sake, and there’d have been a dozen people in the dining room, yet she’d seen the flare of disappointment in his eyes and had felt the touch of that flare in her heart.

‘You’re stupid in the heart,’ she muttered to herself, and turned her attention to the garden.

Yesterday she’d discovered the source of a new perfume in the garden and she wanted to pick a stem of the pale pink pendulous flowers and ask someone to identify them for her. Actually, she’d pick the top of the stem—the whole stem, like the leaves that sheltered them, being taller than she was.

She had just succeeded in her task and was sniffing the rich, sweet scent when she heard the strumming of a guitar, but it wasn’t until she reached the bottom of the steps she recognised the tune.

‘K-K-K-Katie swallowed a ha’penny, a penn’orth of fish, a ha’porth of chips the day before—’

‘The day before that,’ Kate joined in, ‘she swallowed the doormat, now she’s trying to swallow the key of the kitchen door!’

She beamed up at Hamish, who was slumped in the old settee on the back veranda, his guitar across his lap.

‘My grandad used to sing that to me. I always thought he’d made it up, but if you know it, too …’

Hamish saw the radiant smile fade from her face and read the cause of its disappearance with ease. Unexpected pain stabbed deep into his gut. Getting to know how this woman thought wasn’t all beer and skittles.

And the fact that she was trying to keep him at arm’s length wasn’t doing one thing to curb his body’s reaction every time he saw her. Rather the opposite, in fact.

‘Come here!’ he ordered, setting aside his guitar and standing up to enforce his order should it be necessary.

But Kate obeyed, coming wearily up the steps towards him, halting in front of him, summoning a shadow of her earlier smile and snapping a cheeky salute with a spray of flowers she’d been holding in her hand.

‘Oh, Kateling!’ he whispered softly, then he put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the settee.

It had been sat on so often by courting couples that it sagged conveniently in the middle, so any attempt to not sit close was met by defeat. This helped him tuck her small body close to his far larger one, the closest to a hug or cuddle Kate would allow.

‘Just because he wasn’t a blood relation, it doesn’t mean he didn’t love you with all of his heart.’

She turned and stared at him.

‘How do you do it?’ she demanded. ‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’

He had to smile.

‘Never play poker, kid!’ If he kept it light he could tighten his arm and give her half a hug. Half a hug was friendship, not involvement. ‘You’ve got the most expressive face I’ve ever seen.’

Kate sighed then, joy of joys, rested her head on his shoulder and gazed out over the placid waters of the cove.

‘I know that in my head—about Grandad and my parents loving me,’ she admitted sadly. ‘It’s in my heart I’m having trouble.’

Tell me about it! But Hamish kept his comment to himself. Having Kate this close was bliss, but one false move and she’d skitter away again, hiding behind the barricades of remembered pain.

‘In my heart I’ve got this alone thing happening. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t seem to get around it. Anyway, smell this.’

She thrust her frond of flowers under his nose.

‘Isn’t it beautiful? Do you know what it is? Do you know why Charles doesn’t like me?’

‘Charles doesn’t like you? You’re asking me to identify a flower for you—it’s ginger, by the way. I liked the scent so much myself I asked Jill about it. Then you switch to some cockamamie question about Charles not liking you. Has he said so? Did he roll right up to you and say, “Kate, I don’t like you”? What is going on in that head of yours?’

He tightened his hold—in friendship of course.

‘He frowns at me. Well, not at me when I’m looking at him, but you know how silently he gets around—someone should have found a way to make his wheels squeak by now. Anyway, sometimes I kind of sense his presence and I turn around and there he is, frowning at me.’

‘You’re imagining it,’ Hamish said stoutly, though in his head and heart he was remembering that he spent a lot of his own time frowning at this woman when she wasn’t aware of his presence. His frown was because he was pretty sure he loved her, and couldn’t work out how to get past her determination to avoid love at all cost.

Could Charles also be in love with her?

Hamish could well understand if he was, and the clenching in his gut suggested he didn’t like this idea one bit. Charles was far too old for her.

Not that old …

And Charles could certainly be charming …

‘I’ll talk to Charles,’ he said firmly, and Kate laughed.

‘And ask him to stop frowning at me? Oh, please!’ She turned and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’re a really good friend, Hamish, and I appreciate the offer, but I’ll live with Charles’s frowns. I only mentioned it because it happened again when we left the room after we’d been talking to him about Jack.’

She was silent for a moment, moving away a little before the settee tipped her back towards him.

‘You don’t suppose he thinks—He couldn’t think I’ve got something going with Jack, could he? I mean, apart from me being far too old for Jack, he’s really only interested in Megan …’

She sounded confused enough to need comfort so Hamish drew her close again, and they sat like that for a while, watching the moon come up over the horizon, spreading a silver path across the water of the cove.

‘Moonlight and water—made for romance, isn’t it?’

The murmured words slid seditiously into Kate’s ear and her heartbeats upped their intensity, bringing heat to the innermost parts of her body.

Kissing Hamish was back!

‘We can’t have a romance, Hamish,’ she said, betraying the words by wriggling closer to him, because being close to Hamish was extremely comforting. ‘Leaving aside my hangups about relationships—which are huge—you’re going home in a couple of weeks. It would be stupid to start something we can’t finish.’

He kissed the top of her head then his lips moved down and pressed against the corner of her right eye. His tongue slid out to lick a tiny patch of skin—surely eye-skin shouldn’t be erogenous.

‘My leaving isn’t an issue. We could finish it in Scotland. Or not finish it at all.’

Even hushed, his deep voice sent shivers down her spine. It had to be the accent. Daniel’s voice had never made contact with her spine at all—with any of her bones, come to think of it.

‘Come home with me. Be my family. Make a family that is ours.’

His lips had reached the corner of her mouth. He couldn’t have any idea how tempting that suggestion had been—how much she longed to regain some concept of ‘home’ and ‘family’.

Damn, she should have been concentrating on the progress of his lips, not thinking about nebulous concepts of home and family. He’d taken advantage of her distraction and was kissing her!

Perhaps she hadn’t got an F for the cliff kiss …

‘Are you with me on this?’

He raised his head far enough to free his lips and ask the question, but the aftershocks of the kiss were such that she couldn’t answer. Bones—it was all to do with bones. His voice had affected her spine; now the kiss had made the rest of her bones turn to jelly.

Not possible.

‘Apparently!’ Hamish said, presumably to himself as she certainly wasn’t carrying on a conversation with him. She was trying to get her bones to solidify again, and worrying about the warm feeling in the pit of her stomach that Hamish’s kisses was generating.

He resumed kissing her.

She should be protesting, or at least not kissing him back, but there was something so deliciously delirious about being kissed by Hamish that shoulds and shouldn’ts didn’t count.

‘Oh, dear,’ she managed when they drew apart to breathe some time later. ‘This really shouldn’t be happening, Hamish.’

‘No?’

He tipped her chin up and smiled into her eyes.

‘But how else can I convince you this is special? Yes, it’s sudden, and surprising, and barely believable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, Kate. So I’ll keep kissing you because I know words won’t build the trust you need to overcome your doubts—and admit it, woman, you’re kissing me right back!’

His gruff words shook her jellied bones.

‘Yes, I know, and it’s very nice—lovely kisses—very special, but, Hamish …’

Kate couldn’t find the words she needed to tell him about the hurt inside her—about the scars so new they had no protective scabs—about the hurt against which she had so few defences.

To open herself up to pain like that again, it was unthinkable …

‘No buts,’ he said gently, and he kissed her again, so thoroughly she wondered if they’d leave scorch marks on the settee.

‘No, I won’t go to the fire on the beach with you tonight,’ Kate said firmly, pushing past a lounging Hamish to get into the ED office. With Harry apparently satisfied he’d got all he could out of Jack, Kate had been shifted back to the ED for the weekend.

She’d been happy about the arrangement as there was usually less time for chat and gossip in ED—until Hamish had wandered in.

Searing embarrassment still swamped her when she remembered her behaviour on the settee the previous night. They’d eventually been startled apart by a round of applause from the kitchen, Cal announcing with unabashed delight that they’d broken the settee kissing record, set only recently by himself and Gina.

Kate had skulked off to her room, not knowing the others well enough to laugh it off, though Hamish had stayed, apparently unaffected by the fact any number of their housemates had seen them kissing.

Now here he was again, wanting her to accompany him to the fire party at the beach, making public a relationship that didn’t exist.

‘You’ll enjoy it,’ Hamish persisted.

‘Yes, I will, because I’m going anyway,’ Kate told him. ‘With Susie. She was talking about it yesterday while she was massaging Jack’s leg. And as it’s in celebration of getting Megan and Jack back together, Megan’s coming with us. Girls’ night out.’

‘Oh!’ For a moment Hamish looked so downcast Kate wanted to change her mind, but when he smiled just seconds later she was glad she’d stood firm. Hamish’s smiles were nearly as addictive as Hamish’s kisses and neither were the kind of addiction a woman who was determined to make her own way in life could afford.

‘Susie and Megan, huh? Well, that’s OK.’

He wandered off, leaving Kate to get on with her work, which, today, because the ED secretary hadn’t appeared, was recording patients as they came in and prioritising them to see the doctor on duty, who happened to be Charles—making it the first time Kate had worked directly with him.

She glanced cautiously around, but he was still out the back where ambulance patients were admitted or in treatment room five where a small boy who’d been vomiting all night had been shifted up ahead of a young woman with stomachache and a drunk who’d fallen out of his mate’s car and taken a lot of skin off one leg.

‘OK, I’ll take over here while you make yourself useful out there.’ Jane, a cheerful secretary who usually worked on the front desk, came bustling into the small office. ‘Charles phoned to say Wendy hadn’t arrived, and asked if I could come. Don’t worry, I started work in this cubbyhole, so I know what to do.’

Then she nodded to the drunk who was singing a song neither Kate nor, by the looks on their faces, anyone else in the room could recognise.

‘Who’s your friend?’

Kate smiled.

‘I’ll do him first,’ she said, and went out, taking the man with the gravel rash through to a treatment room. With any luck, all his leg needed was to be cleaned up and dressed, then he could go on his way.

Easier said than done. She managed to get him into the treatment room, but he’d no sooner lain down on the examination table than he gave a helpless yelp then threw up all over her.

A hastily summoned aide came in to clean up while Kate grabbed some clean scrubs and headed for the bathroom. But no matter how much water she splashed over herself, she knew she’d smell all day.

Damn the man!

Back in the treatment room, he was sitting up and at least had the decency to look embarrassed.

‘Room went round and round when I lay down,’ he explained, which was when she realised she’d misread his embarrassment as he began to sing again, this time about a room going round and round.

Kate shifted him so his leg was propped on an absorbent pad on the table and she could get at the bits of gravel in the wound. She flushed it first, but the grit remained embedded and she knew it was going to be a piece-by-piece job.

Using small tweezers and wearing a magnifying loupe, she painstakingly removed every grain, while her patient alternately serenaded her and asked her to marry him. She had nearly finished when Charles appeared in the doorway.

‘Need me?’ he said, and this time she was sure the frown accompanying the words was because of the way the two of them smelt. ‘Phew! Talk about ripe!’ he added, confirming her thoughts but making her smile nonetheless.

‘You might like to take a look, but he’s up to date with his tetanus shots, there are no deep wounds that need stitching and there’s no infection, so I thought I’d swab it all over with Betadine and let him go. Leave it without a dressing to dry it out?’

‘Yes,’ Charles said, then he frowned again, though he should have got used to the smell by now.

He wheeled away and, because the line-up for treatment hadn’t become noticeably longer, Kate finished tending her drunk then ducked over to the house to have a proper shower and change into clean clothes. She didn’t want people coming into the ED and going home feeling worse than when they’d arrived.

Susie knocked on her door at eight that evening.

‘You ready?’ she asked, when Kate called to her to come in.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ Kate told her. The quiet morning had turned into a hectic afternoon and she’d only come off duty fifteen minutes ago. But she’d had a quick shower and dressed in jeans and a light cotton knit sweater, thinking the breeze on the beach might be cool in spite of the fire.