There was silence at that. She’d risked having her nose snapped off—she knew she had—but it was a technique she’d used before when she’d coped with injuries in isolation. By obliquely talking about shared trauma maybe she’d normalised things a little, hopefully dragging ghosts out of the past to be put in perspective, so he could think of what lay ahead.
And maybe it was working. She watched his hands deliberately unclench on the wheel, then regrip with a hold that was more normal.
He still looked grim though. Well, maybe the man was always grim.
‘McLachlan Island,’ he said, and she thought he was deflecting attention back to her. Fair enough. She’d cop that and run with it.
‘It’s an amazing place,’ she said. ‘Stunning. It was such a privilege to be part of the team down there.’
‘Why the hell didn’t you have a doctor on board?’
‘There’s usually a doctor stationed down there,’ she told him. ‘My job was just to be on the ship as we took off a team that had summered over. I’ve done it before. Macca’s awesome and I jump at any chance to go back there. The wildlife’s breathtaking, of course, but it’s also an amazing example of uplifted ocean crust. It’s almost the only place in the world where oceanic lithosphere is exposed above sea level. The island’s volcanic basalt, cooled below sea level, and that’s created the most amazing oval-shaped pillow lava. The pillows have a glassy external margin because they cooled so fast. You should see them. The geological features...the plate boundary dynamics above sea level... Then there’s this layered troctolite...’
And then she glanced at his face and saw...incredulity?
‘Whoops, sorry,’ she said. ‘I forget some people aren’t all that fascinated with rocks.
‘Rocks.’
‘I love ’em,’ she said in satisfaction. ‘Anything you want to know about rocks, I’m your man.’
‘Muppet,’ he said tangentially, and she frowned.
‘Sorry. What?’
‘I’m doing a rethink,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve been doing a rethink all day. It was the toes that did it.’
‘So, muppet,’ she said thoughtfully, and eyed him sideways. ‘You said that before. You mean...bimbo?’
‘I admit, to my shame, I meant bimbo.’
‘Asking for it,’ she said darkly, and he frowned.
‘What?’
‘That comes from a guy on my second or third expedition,’ she said, feeling a twinge of satisfaction that—muppet comment aside—she seemed to have pulled him out of his trauma-filled head space. ‘We’d left Hobart, heading south, and had a day of calm, warm weather. You don’t know how rare that is in the Southern Ocean. The guys were all in shorts and nothing else—they knew it was their last chance of warmth from the sun for maybe a year. I wasn’t missing out either—I was on deck in my shorts and sports bra, soaking up the sun. But then above me, from the bridge, I heard one of the new expeditioners say, “Will you look at that bit of flesh? If she’s not asking for it... What a...” Well, what he said next wasn’t repeatable, but then he finished with, “I’ll be into that before we reach McLachlan.”’
He slowed. Swore. Looked across at her. ‘That must have really upset you.’
‘I wasn’t upset. I was just mad.’ She hesitated. ‘Okay, demeaned as well. What I was wearing was far more modest than what the guys were wearing, and I pretty much expected the team and the crew to treat me as just that—one of them. But I didn’t take it lying down.’
‘Um...how did I know you wouldn’t have?’
‘Don’t lie to me, Muppet Man. You know nothing of the sort.’
‘Not a lie,’ he said faintly. ‘Okay, this morning I judged you and got it badly wrong, but now... What did you do?’
‘I had to do something,’ she told him, thinking, yay, she really had tugged him out of his trauma. Okay, he wasn’t sharing what had happened to him, but maybe this was the next best thing. ‘There were women on McLachlan who were wintering over, and they didn’t need this scumbag causing trouble. Luckily, I realised he was talking to the skipper and Mike was a mate. I knew he wouldn’t be tolerating that crap. But I didn’t wait for his response, just hiked up there—still in my bra and shorts—and laid it on the line. And Mike backed me. The long and short of it was that the guy came back with us rather than staying on the island. He lost a job he’d angled for for years. So...’ She slipped off her oversized wellingtons and lifted her feet so her toes rested on the dash. Her ballerina toes. ‘There you go. Muppet, eh?’
‘I’m very, very sorry.’
‘Yeah, well, I had you down as an axe murderer when I first saw you,’ she conceded. ‘I’ll nobly put muppet aside if you forgive the axe.’
‘Maybe an axe is slightly more threatening than ballerinas.’
‘I don’t know.’ She eyed her toes with consideration. ‘The pirouette blonde has a bit of a menacing expression. I tried to change it, but it’s pretty hard to tweak facial expressions when you’re working on a canvas the size of a middle toe.’ She hesitated. ‘You know,’ she added, quite kindly, ‘if I were you, I’d watch the road. I hear there are wombats hereabouts.’
He almost choked and then he chuckled, and she grinned and felt insensibly cheered. After the horrors of the day...to make this guy smile...
And then he was pulling up in front of Babs’s cottage and for some reason she felt reluctant to get out. They’d shared such a day. And besides...that chuckle... It seemed to have done something to her insides. She went to open the door but suddenly he reached over and put his hand on her arm.
‘Gina, I’m very, very sorry about calling you a muppet,’ he told her again. ‘And I’m very, very grateful for what you did today. I couldn’t have coped alone.’
She looked down at his hand, large, weathered, strong. And the twisting sensation inside her...she wasn’t sure where it came from, or what to do with it. ‘I suspect you’ve got pretty good at coping alone,’ she said gently, and then she hesitated. ‘Would you like to come in? I know Babs’s pie is big enough to feed an army and you can save yours until tomorrow.’
‘Thank you, but no.’ All of a sudden, he sounded stilted, as if refusing invitations was a rote response. ‘But I have Hoppy and I also have a wombat to see to. Responsibilities.’
‘So you have.’
But still his hand stayed on her arm.
She glanced up at his face and saw the horror was still there. It had been helped by her silliness, helped by her waffle, she thought, but it was still there.
How important was human contact after trauma? she thought. There’d been a reason they’d assigned two people to stay beside every one of the injured. To be injured and alone...
And she looked up into his scarred face and thought, that’s what he is. Tough. Solitary.
Injured and alone?
And with that thought came instinctive reaction. She couldn’t help herself. Without thought she learned forward, put her hand against that scarred cheek—and she kissed him.
It was a feather kiss, a kiss of friendship, warmth, thanks. Nothing more. Or that was what it was supposed to be. It should have meant nothing to her. Or to him.
But the day had been too traumatic, and her heightened emotions were screaming at her that she wanted—needed?—to be closer. She wanted the reassurance of human contact—and maybe so did he.
And she never meant him to react.
But he did.
And maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised. Who knew how much the horror of the day had brought back whatever was in his past? But she’d known it was there. Close enough to the surface to shatter reservations? To have him take what she needed as well?
For his hands caught hers and suddenly, without either of them seeming to will it, she was being kissed. Properly kissed. Deeply, strongly, with a fierceness born of who knew what?
And
maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it couldn’t matter, for her body was reacting with a heat, a need, a searing response to something she had no hope of explaining.
He felt...fantastic? No. Fantastic was far too small a word for what was happening.
Maybe she’d been stressed herself. Well, of course she had. She’d spent four long months trying to get off the boat, out of quarantine, back to a great-aunt who would never have admitted she needed her. Most of that time she’d felt alone. And today...she’d been pushed to the limit of her professional skills and she’d seen how close...
Don’t go there. Just take what was offering, she told herself, and what was offering right now was this man.
His mouth. Oh, his mouth. The taste of him. The strength of his hands holding her. The heat. Her breasts were moulding against his chest, fitting as if she belonged. She was so close, and she wanted to be closer. To have a man hold her like this...
Not a man. This man. This wounded guy who smelled and tasted like the drama of the day. Filthy from smoke and antiseptics and dirt and sweat and what else?
‘Gina!’
For a moment she didn’t respond. How could she respond? She was far too busy. But the rap on the truck window and the harsh word was impossible to ignore. It was Hugh who reacted first, putting her back from him with what felt real reluctance.
He was reluctant? She felt like fighting to keep him just where she was.
‘Gina?’ The tap was insistent. It was Babs, of course, tapping and peering short-sightedly through the window.
‘Uh-oh,’ Hugh said. ‘Sprung.’
‘She’s not wearing her glasses,’ Gina managed. ‘There’s...there’s hope for us yet.’ She hauled herself further away from him—how hard was that?—and opened the truck door.
‘Yep, me, Auntie Babs. I asked someone to ring you and tell you where I was. I hope they told you...
‘Well, of course they did,’ Babs snapped. ‘I must have had fifty-seven phone calls telling me you were being of use to the good doctor. It’s the first time anyone’s ever told me you were useful.’ And to Gina’s astonishment she heard a note of pride in her aunt’s voice. ‘You’d better come in, the pair of you. Dinner’s keeping hot.’
And she sensed Hugh stiffen. Pull back even further. Retreat into himself?
‘I need to get home to see to Hoppy and the wombat,’ he told her.
‘Hoppy’s here, and I’ve seen to your wombat,’ Babs told him. She hesitated and Gina thought, wow, this was a big admission for a woman who normally would have walked on fire rather than get involved. ‘It was the least I could do,’ she admitted. ‘When the whole island’s been running around like headless chickens, that’s my mite. And nothing more,’ she snapped, as if Hugh might be about to take advantage. ‘But your dog’s here and he’s been fed and your dinner’s on the table.’
Gina glanced at Hugh and then deliberately climbed out of the truck. Something in Hugh’s face...
He didn’t need additional pressure.
‘Hugh’s tired, Babs,’ she told her aunt. ‘And we’re both desperate for a wash. Let’s just give him his dog and let him go.’
‘I’ve his dinner ready for him. Look at the time, and I’ll bet neither of you have eaten since breakfast. If you go home now, you’ll have to heat my pie and that’ll take time, unless you make it soggy by using one of those microwave things, and what a waste of my good pie. Don’t be ridiculous, man. Come and eat and then get home to sleep. Dinner’s going on the table now.’
And she turned and marched inside.
‘I’ll get your dog,’ Gina offered. Hugh’s face was set, impassive. ‘She’s just...like a bulldozer. You just have to learn to get out of her way.’
‘Is that why you left the island?’ he asked. The intensity between them was still there and she could almost see the effort he was putting into drawing back. Making things impersonal again.
But the question was anything but impersonal.
‘There’s a story,’ she said, struggling to make her voice flippant. ‘But now’s not the time for story. Now’s the time for pie and bed. You want me to get Hoppy?’
‘No.’ He climbed wearily out of the truck. ‘Your aunt’s right, it’s more sensible to eat here. Sorry. I’m being ungracious.’
‘You’re not being ungracious. But you don’t have the energy to get out of the way of the bulldozer. Welcome to my world, Dr Duncan, but only for the duration of the pie. Come on in, but I’ll make sure she lets you go.’
CHAPTER SIX
HE ATE QUICKLY, as did Gina. They were both exhausted and Babs wasn’t one for small talk. The pie was excellent, but it was a relief—maybe to all of them—when he left.
He took Hoppy home, slept, then woke knowing he couldn’t leave Gina to cope with the day’s medical needs by herself.
Actually, he could. He had no intention of working as a face-to-face doctor, ever again. Or face-to-face anything if it came to that.
The medical needs post explosion should all be minor. Any injury of significance had meant evacuation to Gannet, but for the population of Sandpiper Island that meant another problem. The Gannet medical facility was excellent but small. Their medical staff was limited—which meant there’d be no medic available to come back to Sandpiper to deal with any aftermath.
Well, that was okay. Gina had offered herself into the role of chief medic without a show of reluctance and had said she’d only call him if she needed him. With her experience she could well cope with lacerations, scratches, dust-filled eyes from the blast...
But on the morning after the explosion, Hugh lay in bed listening to the crazy island birds with their raucous dawn chorus and he thought...he’d have to help.
He also thought—strangely—that he hadn’t slept so well for years.
Which was crazy. The explosion should have brought past trauma flooding back. Instead he’d slept with the memory of a woman leaning into him, of her mouth touching his. Of her arms holding him as his had held hers. Of her breasts moulding against his chest.
How long since he’d had human contact?
He remembered waking in hospital when he’d finally been returned to Australia, months after he’d been injured. His mother had occasionally talked to him on the phone since he’d been able to speak, and, once he was back in an Australian hospital, she’d dragged his stepfather in to see him.
He remembered gushes of tears, and the sensation of overpowering perfume as she’d hugged him.
He remembered his stepfather standing back, camera pointing.
‘Please don’t.’ He remembered saying it, but he’d already known it’d be useless. He’d seen his mother’s social media posts since the accident—‘My Hero Son’. He’d seen the mass of over-the-top emotion from her ‘followers’.
The next day it had been as he’d feared, his picture all over the Internet: ‘Wounded Hero with Distraught, Socialite Mother...’
It always had been all about her. His father had walked out when he was five—and who could blame him? Although if it were his son Hugh might have made an effort to stay in contact. But his father’s sole interest had been in making money, and he saw Hugh rarely.
Andrew Duncan had been disgusted when his son had decided on a career in medicine, scorning what he labelled as ‘an idiot’s idealist aim to save the world’. Thus, from the time he’d left school there’d not even been financial support, and Hugh suspected the only reason his father had finally bequeathed him his fortune had been that he hadn’t had the imagination or forethought to think of an alternative.
Hugh’s half-sister—the product of his mother’s first marriage—had thus been Hugh’s only real family, but Sophie was ten years older than he was. Their mother was so appalling that Sophie had left as soon as she could, without a backward glance to the little brother who’d thought she’d loved him. Even now he thought Sophie’s
phone calls were mostly due to what she saw as duty—plus gratitude for his decision to share some of his almost obscene fortune.
So he didn’t do family. From an early age he’d learned that needing people was a weakness that left him exposed. He’d occasionally dated, but the trauma he’d endured over the past years had only solidified his need to be alone. He’d never felt the need to get close.
So hugging as a sensation of choice? Not so much.
He didn’t even think he’d missed it.
Until Gina.
No. It had nothing to do with Gina as a person, he told himself. It was just that there’d been trauma and she’d been a warm body willing to share some of that warmth.
Hoppy leaped up onto his bed and attempted to snuggle under the bedclothes, and he thought that was what he’d needed last night. Hoppy.
But Gina...
The meal at Babs’s had been stilted. Babs had been polite towards him, but there’d been tensions between Gina and Babs. Babs had asked him rather than Gina what had been happening. At times Gina had attempted to talk, but every time Babs had deferred to him. ‘Is that right, Doctor?’
He thought of Gina complimenting Babs on her pie. Babs snapping, ‘Well, you should remember it.’ Gina growing quieter and quieter.
He’d judged her for staying away for the four long months since Babs’s heart attack, and it turned out that that judgement had been unfair. And now she’d offered to do all the minor medical stuff herself for the next few days.
‘I don’t have a choice,’ he told Hoppy. ‘I need to help.’
Hoppy eyed him with suspicion, maybe sensing the sequel, and Hugh almost grinned. Smart dog.
‘Yeah, I know, that means you get to stay home and look after Hubert all by yourself. But sheesh, Hoppy, you’ve hardly had a day by yourself since we came here. She said she’d call if she needs me but it’s not fair to leave it all to her. It can’t hurt to help.’
Healing Her Brooding Island Hero Page 7
