With his gaze still on hers, he bent down and kissed her gently on the lips, his breath warm on her cheek as he turned his mouth to her ear and she closed her eyes. Very quietly he said, ‘I love you, Ava.’
Her eyes flew open. Men didn’t say that. Especially ones she’d only known for a week. ‘What?’
His lips tilted at her shock. ‘I love you.’ The words came out again, each word defined as if he savoured it.
In that instant, time felt like a slow train that ran over her ghostly self as she stood outside his door. Two carriages. Bump. Bump. He’d said it twice.
‘I’ll explain inside.’ He slid the key into the lock and opened the door for her. As he steered her through to the verandah, her eyes automatically crossed the glorious red and olive of the desert and lingered on the majesty of Uluru in the distance. Indented soaring cliffs were burnished orange and gold with the late-afternoon sun. She loved this view at sunset. If he’d planned the moment, he’d executed it perfectly.
Then she saw the rest. The table set with flowers, glorious desert blooms in an ochre bowl, crystal glasses and a beaded bottle of what she suspected was champagne in a bucket with ice. She shot him a glance and saw his lips twitch.
‘And still in time for the setting sun.’
‘This looks very special.’ But her mind reeled from his words at the door, her heart tentatively testing the echo again. Did she dare hope? She remembered how her day had been coloured by the promise of his arrival, by her first sight of him this afternoon. She’d felt like throwing herself into his arms and had had to hold her hands out instead for control. What if he really felt this craziness too?
He watched her, then shook his head with a smile. ‘Ava. I probably deserve this incredulity, but it’s no game I’ve played before. What I feel for you is not a lukewarm feeling. It’s hot. Urgent. Terrifying.’ He gave her a searing glance that could quite possibly have singed off all her clothes if she stood any closer to him. On the verandah, in full view of the road.
‘But my feelings aren’t just about the sexy you. You’re generous. Fearless. Limitless. I’m stupendously lucky for what we’ve already had and I’m gambling on the fact that you care for me as well. I missed you too much when you left. And I want you to know this is not a fling.’
And if it isn’t, what then? she wanted to ask. Instead, she said, ‘You do know we come from different worlds?’
‘I know, but they’re worlds that I’m very willing to negotiate.’
She stared up at him and said softly, ‘What does that mean in practical terms, Zac? I’m not a city girl … I doubt I could leave the outback for good.’
‘I know. I’m willing to do what it takes to make our relationship work. Share the dislocation of moving between city and centre. Move to Alice or somewhere like it.’ He paused, looking down in thought and then back into her eyes. ‘Finding something like we have deserves whatever it takes to work.’
She drew in a breath, wondering if he was quite ready to be so far from his old life, or she from hers. Were they both willing to live for six months of the year for the other, to make their relationship work? This needed sorting, but she didn’t know how.
Then he said, ‘Will you kiss me?’ That she could do. Had in fact been waiting all afternoon to do. She slid her arms around him and he lifted her up so her feet left the ground, hugging her to him. She sought his mouth and infused it with all the love she’d been holding back, all the frustration of him being away from her. She felt like she’d been starved of this – that she’d waited weeks, not just days, to be back in his arms.
‘This was why I came to Yulara, to talk about this, to make plans that suit us both, and to share my epiphany from our very short, very intense time in Alice.’ He lowered her gently and released her. ‘It’s crazy, but … I. Love. You.’
Ava still felt the shock of each word.
‘I was going to get to this more slowly.’ He ran his fingers through his hair and she realised she’d missed that gesture. Missed the need to brush it back into tidiness again. Missed everything about him, and now that he was here, her world had righted again.
Zac smiled at her. ‘But we had Jessamine’s babies to deliver and the sunset is getting away. The sunset on Uluru is part of my plan.’ Their eyes met and his were soft with understanding for her confusion. ‘You’ll see. I’ve had time to get used to the idea and you haven’t.’
More ideas?
He stopped and then pulled her hand so that she leaned into him. He gathered her securely in his arms. ‘I love you, Ava. And after a reasonable, I-promise-I-won’t-rush-you engagement, I want to marry you.’ His voice reverberated low and deep through her skin and the wonder lifted the rays from the rock straight into her heart until it felt like it glowed as well. ‘But I’m offering commitment now. I want the engagement. A proposal of the old-fashioned kind. It feels right.’
Engagement?! But he wasn’t letting her think.
‘I’ve learned the hard way that life can be cut short,’ he went on in a rush. ‘When you left Alice it hit me. I’m not losing the opportunity to love you through faint-heartedness. And you’re not losing me. The distances between us in the next month mean we will be apart, so I want you to know I’m telling the planet. Here I am. Putting us out there. If you feel the same.’
Crazy man! She gestured to the desert as if the answer lay there. But he still hadn’t actually asked. Was she mistaken about what he meant?
He was watching her as she stared at the monolith in the distance. Listening for an answer. ‘Would it be easier for you if we drove there now? We have time before sunset. I wanted to ask you there.’
Her gaze jumped back to him, incredulous. How had he sensed that?
‘We could stand together and I’ll ask you properly.’ He raised his brows, gesturing at the champagne and flowers. ‘Then we’ll come back and celebrate. I want this to be the moment you dreamed of.’
‘And if I say no?’ she asked, more of a tease than a possibility, because suddenly she believed him. They could make it work.
‘I’ll leave as fast as I can to try to forget you,’ he said, only half teasing back. ‘And if you say yes, we will have a longer engagement than courtship, I promise. And I will never leave you,’ he vowed with a smile. ‘Would you like me to propose properly at Uluru?’
She was saving this moment to hug forever. Her romantic Zac. ‘Yes, please.’
Ava had never been this happy. Zac’s hand lay on her thigh as she drove, maintaining the connection between them. They were almost there, excitement building, Uluru growing larger in the windscreen as they curved towards the final approach, the rays deepening into glittering gold on the rock. It was so beautiful. So …
Something flashed ahead – a vehicle, a white campervan careering sideways around the last bend towards them on two wheels. Ava didn’t have time to understand as it grew larger and larger, approaching with ridiculous speed. She swerved, but there was nowhere to go.
The oncoming vehicle hit Ava’s car with an explosive whoomp of force, and spun them over the guardrail. Ava screamed as everything seemed to slow to one-second increments. Their bodies moved up in the seats, then sideways as the vehicle tilted and hung for a moment, before someone pressed the fast-forward button on disaster and the car crashed down onto its roof and then spun away in a furious blur of speed as it rolled over and over across the desert.
Ava’s forehead hit the steering wheel and white light burst in an explosion of pain. Everything went black and her last thought was a fervent prayer to see Zac’s face.
When Ava’s eyes opened, the smell of diesel saturated the air, and through the cracked front windscreen the last of the late afternoon sun shone serenely down on the wreckage to ironically paint the scene in beautiful Central Australian gold and yellow. Steam rose in escaping tendrils from the mashed bonnet, and the steering wheel in front of her was slimy and dripping with congealing blood. Hers.
She sat strapped upright, the car on its wh
eels, but as she slowly turned her head, her neck and face and shoulders sent spikes of pain along her nerve endings. Then she saw him and her own discomforts became nothing.
Zac.
Her heart thumped as she saw the way his head lolled.
‘Zac?’ His name was a croak from the depths of her throat. He didn’t move. Blood lay everywhere. His arm, his chest, his head.
She strained to see his chest rise or fall, but there was nothing. Slow tears began to drip and mix with her own blood. ‘You said you’d never leave me,’ she whispered, and she closed her eyes because it was too heartbreaking to look.
Then Ava heard him moan.
Her eyes flew open. Urgency pushed away the lethargy of shock and she fumbled for her seatbelt.
Four hours later, Ava stared out the clinic window and tried to ignore the pounding in her head. Outside the dust storm hid the night sky. So much for the help from Alice Springs she’d begged for, because Zac still hadn’t woken up.
Jill had dressed Ava’s head wound and made her shower, then she’d put a pillow and a blanket on the easychair in the corner of Zac’s curtained area because she’d refused to leave.
Ava looked back towards the bed and Zac. Unconscious Zac. The man who’d introduced her to the hidden depths of her own body, who’d caught her eye and grinned wickedly as their occasionally macabre humour clicked silently at work. The man who had been going to propose.
The dust storm had rolled in not long after the ambulance had moved them to the clinic. It had shrouded the township and grounded the RFDS aircraft before it could come back from taking Jessamine and her babies to Alice Springs with extra medical help.
Now, hours later, she knew that in the dark the great Uluru would be dusted with eddies of sand, and red dirt would coat all the trees and the grasses in the desert as far as the eye could see when the sun rose. They’d blow away soon.
She wished she could go outside and scream away the fear and pain and mental exhaustion, but it would hurt her head. And she wouldn’t leave Zac. Wouldn’t leave him in the understaffed centre that was meant for daytime clinics only. They’d recruited a doctor from the other private medical clinic. After checking Ava and Zac, he and Jill had taken over the care of the occupants of the other car, who were in need of emergency resuscitation and Ava had said she’d watch Zac and call out if he deteriorated. And she had, mostly alone, until Denise had heard and arrived as support, though she was away briefly now to find Ava a drink.
Ava stared at the small window showing the empty road. Denise had been amazing, and Ava allowed herself to be soothed again by the bush medicine leaf pattern on the curtain material, copied from one of Denise’s Dreamtime paintings. Her friend would be glad she was drawing strength from the flowing motion and undulating rhythm of the vivid lilac and white strokes. The brushstrokes seemed to ripple across the material with their significance to local traditional Aboriginal culture and healing. Healing that she needed desperately for the man she loved.
For the last two hours, as she’d twisted her hands in fear and Zac’s pulse had grown more erratic, she’d tried to keep him stable until the flying doctor could airlift him out. He’d been too agitated, restless, and Ava had been beside herself trying to calm him. Visibility was down to mere feet on the road to Alice, so there was nothing they could do until a plane could land.
She feared she’d lose her big, beautiful man, with the extent of his head injury unknown and the torn wound on his arm, which she’d bound in the car as he’d threatened to bleed out. It was the simple things that could kill you. She stared at his pale face and beautiful eyes, which were shut to the world, his long, dark lashes lying still now against his ashen cheeks.
She’d leapt on Denise’s idea of traditional healing for his soul at least – anything to keep him calm before more help could arrive – because she’d almost admitted defeat. Denise had studied Zac, seeing to the spirit within, and murmured about a build-up of negative energy which had placed a stone of bad magic inside him. She’d said that the stone was preventing his return to consciousness and she’d danced and smoked the accumulation out with a solemnity that had brought tears to Ava’s eyes.
So was it coincidence that from the moment after the cleansing smoke and chanting from the traditional healer had finished, Zac’s restless movements had settled and his galloping, thready pulse had begun to even out? She didn’t know. But she had hugged her friend in gratitude.
Since then she’d been able to sit and watch, and she was trying to keep him calm with her voice. She was so immensely, wearily thankful that she could.
She watched her man’s large, capable hands and those long, strong, brown legs lying too still. And that broad expanse of tanned chest and ripped upper abdomen, which had been slick with agitated sweat, but now lay cool and dry.
Tiredness swamped her, and she opened and shut her gritty eyes. She swept back the curtains to the early-morning darkness and allowed her gaze to drift over the roadway outside. There were few cars at this hour, and the ones that did crawl past left an unfamiliar muffled noise of dusty bitumen and tyres. Not your usual Yulara sound. The silence of the night calmed her and sent a shallow burst of new energy through her.
When would he wake up? Had he been damaged? Would he wake up? The questions bombarded her as memories of Zac on the gurney from their one ambulance skittered through her mind like that staccato gecko making his way down the wall of the room. Stop. Start. Freeze.
His unfocused eyes.
The blast of concern at his continuing unconscious state.
The panic she’d stamped down because of her helplessness at not being able to get him to a higher level of care and knowing he could only become worse – at least that had passed for the moment.
Now all she could do was wait.
Chapter Fourteen
Zac
When Ava’s car had hit the guardrail on Zac’s side, it had been so fast he didn’t have time to shift away. Something in the deafening maelstrom of their crazy spin ripped his shoulder open and smacked the back of his head, and his vision blurred until they stopped spinning and landed with a thwump back on the vehicle’s wheels, but he’d stayed awake.
Blinking with difficulty, Zac opened his eyes. Red dust swirled around them, and for a full minute he couldn’t see. Then his breath caught at the horror of red streaming down Ava’s face from a gaping wound in the middle of her forehead.
A wound he’d seen once before. Exactly like one he’d seen before. This was his fault. Again.
His brain screamed No! so loudly it escaped in a moan through his lips. Ava was dead. Or worse. Comatose.
Panic surged like a swirling black tornado in his brain, ripping his consciousness with the horror of his worst nightmare and swallowing him. His mind churned and the edges of the world grew dim. Everything went blessedly black.
When Zac began to take in his surroundings, it was the familiar routine sounds of a hospital he noted. Which hospital, he had no idea. In fact, the events of how he’d arrived here remained strangely elusive. His head pounded and he raised his hand to touch the spot. A thick bandage met his fingers at the back of his skull. Head injury? And his arm hurt.
Below the fog in his mind, a panicked urgency fluttered to get out and his heart pounded with the need to remember. He’d almost woken several times, pushing through the gentle weight of unconsciousness, and sometimes a whisper of an elusive feminine voice clamoured for his attention. Always it said the same thing. ‘Zac?’ There was something about the voice that calmed him, until eventually, the nightmare receded as he clawed his way up through the mists of confusion.
He remembered saying, ‘Roslyn?’ And then the patient in the next room cried out and some instinct made him swing his legs off the side of the bed to render the fellow assistance, but before his feet could touch the floor a nurse hurried towards him.
‘Back in your bed, Dr Logan, please. Dr Fithers will be here soon. You stay resting till the doctor comes.’
/> When she saw that Zac was in no more danger of falling, she hurried out the door and he heard her soothe the other man’s distress.
To Zac’s relief, someone he knew, George Fithers from med school, appeared at his side, and after a moment’s hesitation he perched awkwardly on Zac’s bed.
‘It’s good to see you alive, Zac.’
‘Hello, George. Was I that close to death?’
‘You’ve had a big couple of months.’
What month would that be? he thought but he didn’t ask. It would come back. ‘Where am I?’
‘Alice Springs.’ George studied him. ‘A bit hazy on that, are you?’
‘A bit,’ Zac admitted cautiously.
‘Not surprising.’ George steepled his fingers and considered him. ‘You came to work for me here a week ago. A locum appointment, though.’ He gave Zac a mock glare. ‘You’re off sick now.’
‘Sorry about that.’ Zac was never sick. But that wasn’t what he needed to know. ‘What happened with this?’ He slid his hand around the back of his neck again and winced when the pressure stung.
‘Car accident. Impact and roll over, and a branch came through the side door and knocked you out. You’re lucky it didn’t take your head off.’
Zac winced. ‘Harder to get over that one.’
‘Beyond my help,’ George agreed. ‘But you’ll be fine. It happened on the road out to Uluru. You were hit by a speeding campervan.’ He sat back. ‘You had to wait for a storm to pass before the RFDS flew you in here.’
George seemed to be watching his face intently, but none of this rang any bells.
The Desert Midwife Page 9
