‘Not on the strength of one morning’s surgery,’ he said, so cool in the face of her rudeness she wanted to throw something at him. Something hard!
‘Sit down and have your lunch.’ This from Ned, and she knew his voice well enough to know he, too, was angry, but with her.
As well he should be!
‘I’m sorry, that was terrible of me,’ she muttered at Mak from the doorway. ‘Yelling at you when I should be thanking you.’
He nodded a gracious acceptance of her apology, but she suspected he was laughing at her inside for his eyes were twinkling with delight, which made her mad again. But she had to enter the kitchen! For a start, she was starving. But her legs were heavy and stiff with dread because, for only the second time in her life, Neena was feeling physical responses to a man. Well, maybe not the second time—but only once before had they been as strong as this and that once had ended in heartache, pain and trouble.
‘How’s Albert?’ she asked, directing the question at Ned, trying to ignore the other person in the room.
‘Blooming,’ the man she was trying to ignore replied. ‘I’ve just been talking to him. He quite likes the Mozart but would prefer a little rock music from time to time.’
Neena frowned at the light-hearted comment. She didn’t want to like this man—bad enough to be getting physical reactions from him, but liking him?
‘Sit down and eat,’ Ned told her, pulling a plate of cold meat and salad from the refrigerator and putting it down at the other end of the table from Mak, setting cutlery beside it and pouring her a glass of cold water.
So here she was, right opposite Mak Stavrou, where every time she looked up she’d see some bit of him, like how the dark hair on his arms curled around his watch. At least the table was long so she wouldn’t be accidentally bumping his feet or have her knees knocking his…
Although not thinking about him was hard as once again came the memory of the previous night, of the touch of his hands on hers.
Ridiculous, fantasising about a stranger’s touch!
‘Lovely salad, Ned. Are these tomatoes from our garden?’
‘You’ll note she says “our”,’ Ned growled at Mak, ‘though it’s years since she dirtied her hands in the vegetable patch. Reckons looking after the roses is enough for her, not that roses take much looking after out here.’
‘I noticed the rose gardens on my way to the stables,’ Mak replied, smiling at Neena. ‘My mother grows roses but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a wonderful display.’
‘The dry climate means you don’t get mildew or most of the bugs you get closer to the coast,’ Neena replied, keeping the words crisp and impersonal, the mention of his mother reminding Neena of her doubts about why this man was really here.
Reminding her he could well be the enemy!
An enemy who had helped out this morning, she reminded herself. She asked him about the patients he had seen, and managed to eat most of her lunch while they discussed them.
‘I’m going out to the drilling site this afternoon,’ the man who was disrupting her life announced as he stood up from the table, rinsed his plate and put it in the dishwasher. ‘I need to see some people and explain why I’m here. I want to talk to them about what they see as the impact on the township.’
‘You might as well stay out there, then,’ Neena told him. ‘They’re putting on a Christmas party for the town tonight. Every man and his dog will be there.’
Mak turned towards her and leaned against the kitchen bench.
‘And every woman and her camel?’
Neena had to smile.
‘Maybe not the camel, but as Ned is Father Christmas—yes, I know he’s not a normal size Father Christmas but he does a great ho-ho-ho—we have to go.’
‘Then I shall certainly stay for it,’ Mak said with a smile that made moths flutter in her stomach and caused regret that she’d mentioned it.
He departed soon after and Neena went up to the hospital to check on patients there, then crossed to the retirement home to sit with her old friend Maisie for a while.
But Maisie’s common sense, and their shared remembrances, failed to soothe the turbulence in Neena’s chest. The arrival of the man from Hellenic Enterprises had thrown her into such a muddle she couldn’t begin to think logically about him.
Or why he’d really come!
‘Don’t think too much,’ Maisie said as Neena was leaving, and although Neena hadn’t done more than mention Mak in passing, avoiding any discussion of him, she knew Maisie had picked up on her unhappy state of mind and had guessed he was the cause of it. ‘Sometimes our instincts are our best guide.’
‘Not mine!’ Neena muttered, but only after she’d walked out of Maisie’s room.
Back home she played with Albert for a while, walking him around the stall, talking to him, fondling his ears and scratching at his coat. But eventually she had to leave this safe retreat and get ready for the Christmas party.
Upstairs, she found a parcel on her bed and knew before she opened it what it would contain. Each year Ned made a trip to the two-dollar shop in Baranock and brought back Christmas shirts for the two of them, the surgery staff, the hospital staff and all the folk in the retirement home. This year his choice for her was a bright red singlet with a very tipsy reindeer on it, the deer’s horns festooned with glittering streamers, its front feet holding a foaming mug of beer.
‘Great! First time Mak Stavrou sees me dressed up and I’m wearing a tipsy reindeer!’
The words echoed around her bedroom, coming back to hit her with some force. Why on earth did it matter how she looked when Mak Stavrou saw her? her strong, grown-up and independent self demanded, but deep inside, another weak and feeble self knew that it did…
The site, usually three orderly rows of dongas, the demountable living huts now common in all mining areas of Australia, had been transformed. The dongas were strung with Christmas decorations, forming an aisle that led visitors down to a large marquee, brightly lit and covered in swathes of greenery the men had found somewhere in the bush. Christmas baubles and tiny fairy lights glittered in the leafy branches, making a magical grotto of a very ordinary large tent.
Was it fate that the first person Neena saw was Mak Stavrou or had she been looking for him? She hoped she hadn’t been, but on the other hand she wasn’t too keen to think it might be fate.
He was coming towards her with Bob Watson, the head of the geo-thermal exploratory crew.
‘I’ll go and get changed,’ she heard Ned say behind her, and he promptly deserted her.
‘Neena!’ Bob greeted her, taking her hand and giving her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Merry Christmas. You’ve already met Mak. Thanks on behalf of the company for taking him in. We could put him up out here but what’s the point when he needs to see what you do in town and maybe take just a little work off your shoulders?’
Bob had barely said the words when he stepped away, holding up his hands in a mock surrender.
‘No, don’t rip up at me. I know you can handle anything.’ He turned to Mak and added, ‘And not only does she believe it, but she can! Wonderwoman, I call her.’
Neena knew she was probably as red as her singlet, and far from ripping up at Bob she was struck dumb, for Mak had pulled on a Santa hat and now that Neena looked around, she realised all the Hellenic work crew were wearing them. And whereas most people looked a trifle foolish in red pointy hats with white trim and a white bobble on the end, seeing Mak in his had suddenly evoked not memories of Christmases past but images of future Christmases, though why she should be seeing him beside a tree in her old house and, worse, seeing small children laughing up at him, she had no idea. In fact, the vision made her shiver, and miss whatever Bob was telling her.
‘He suggested I take you through to the food tent,’ Mak said, presumably picking up on her vacant state, but hopefully not on the cause of it.
Don’t think too much, Maisie had told her, but when Mak put his hand on the small of her b
ack to guide her through the throng, she ceased to think at all. Couldn’t think! And didn’t then throughout the evening, not when Mak piled ham and turkey on her plate, not when he led her to a blanket-covered bale of hay to sit and eat her dinner, not as she chatted about nothing very much and listened to him talk about cheap energy—about which he seemed particularly keen—and especially not when he led her out of the marquee to where a dance floor had been laid on the desert sands, and suggested she might dance with him.
‘Because you’re really the only woman I know in town,’ Mak told her. ‘Apart from Paula, whom I met this morning but who seems to be attached to a very large farmer.’
So she danced with Mak beneath the stars—with a stranger to whom she was attracted—a stranger that the few brain cells still operating in her head warned her to avoid.
At all costs!
Don’t think too much, she reminded them, hoping they’d calm down, because dancing with Mak was like dancing on a cloud, high above the real world, the bright light of the stars scattering magic all around them.
Of course it had to end. Sirens approaching from the distance told them not that a disaster was at hand but that Santa had arrived, not in a sled drawn by reindeers, or even leaping kangaroos, but in the local fire engine.
‘At least it’s red,’ Mak remarked as Neena eased out of his arms and turned to watch the arrival.
He didn’t sound any happier than she felt, but maybe she was imagining that. Or maybe he just liked dancing and he didn’t know anyone else…
He still had one arm around her shoulder, but as excited children surged forward to grab the sweets Santa was throwing from his perch atop the fire engine, Mak touched the bump—very gently at first then settling his hand on it.
And as they’d been dancing with it pressed against him Neena could hardly object, although when he murmured, ‘Next year you’ll have someone special with whom to share your Christmas,’ she felt a wave of sadness sweep over her. Yes, it would be good to have a baby in the house for Christmas, but right now the two of them as a family, even with Ned and Maisie added, seemed a little meagre.
Neena and Mak were separated by the crush of people moving to see Santa and though she talked and laughed with all those present, the magic had gone out of the evening. Until later when she and Ned—now Ned again—were about to leave and Mak caught up with her, guiding her into a shadowy spot outside the marquee.
His touch had started tremors in her limbs and shivers up her spine—ridiculous, she knew, but how to stop them?
‘Bob’s offered me a bed in his donga,’ Mak began. So that was how to stop tremors and shivers—they disappeared immediately! ‘Just for tonight so I can go out with him in the morning to see another site where they are drilling.’
Neena could only stare at him—her brain once again gone AWOL. Surely she couldn’t have been thinking he’d been going to kiss her!
Shivers, tremors—of course she had been. Or if not thinking it, then hoping…
‘That’s okay,’ she managed, her words cutting across his explanation that he hoped to be back in town by lunchtime. ‘The house is never locked so we’ll see you when we see you.’
She walked away, her legs feeling ridiculously weak and trembly. Must be all the dancing…
Mak watched her join up with Ned in a group of people, then after kisses and hugs and various other forms of farewell, the pair of them walked into the darkness. Was it because they’d danced that the last thing he’d wanted to do in that shadowy corner was tell her his plans for the following day? What he’d wanted to do—so badly he’d barely restrained himself—had been to kiss her. Hold her in his arms and kiss the breath right out of her.
He lifted his arms and raked his hands through his hair, cursing silently in Greek as he tried to make sense of a situation that was fast spiralling out of control. He’d been here less than twenty-four hours and the woman he was supposed to be checking out—a woman of whom he was still suspicious—had woven a spell around him.
Had he forgotten how perfidious women could be? Forgotten his vow never to become involved—emotionally involved—with one of them again? Where was his head, where were his brains?
He strode out into the darkness, thinking a brisk walk might sort things out, knowing the lights were bright enough to guide him back to the camp. But with every stride some memory of Neena intervened. Bob telling him what a great doctor she was, and how she attacked any problem with grit and determination, sorting out not only the townspeople’s illnesses but the tangles some of them made of their lives.
Now an image of Neena with Albert’s head on her knee popped into Mak’s head, and he heard her quiet voice soothing the little orphaned animal to sleep. Would a woman who took in stray animals deliberately get pregnant?
He shook his head and picked up his pace, wondering what on earth he was doing out here in this godforsaken desert land. Then he heard the sound of carols drift through the hot night air and knew.
It was about Christmas, and Christmas was about family.
CHAPTER THREE
MAK returned as Neena was eating her lunch. She’d had a good sleep-in, for once undisturbed by any emergency, but Sunday had brought no relief from the problem that was Mak. He’d visited her dreams, a tall, dark-haired man in a Santa cap, teasing her so her body had heated in her sleep and she’d tossed and turned.
Now he was here in person, chatting on to Ned about the drilling site and geo-thermal plant and totally oblivious of the ructions he’d caused in the night—ructions he was still causing…
She had to escape him!
‘I’m off to the hospital,’ she told him. ‘Nick dropped off a loaner car for me yesterday afternoon. I know you worked yesterday morning, but there’s no need for you to hang around with me today. Ned can show you around the town, not that there’s much to see, though most tourists are interested in the bore head. Our artesian bore was one of the first sunk in Western Queensland.’
He’d lost her! The seeds of the tentative, if not friendship then working relationship Mak thought they’d achieved, not to mention the rapport he’d sensed as they’d danced last night, had been washed away in the bright light of day.
‘I’ll come to the hospital with you. If your week doesn’t acknowledge Sundays, why should mine?’
Dark eyes studied him—wary? Suspicious? Then she shrugged her shoulders as if he was of no importance whatsoever.
Which in her mind was probably true, so why should it bother him? Because they’d danced beneath the stars? Was she regretting that as much as he was? From his side it was because it had thrown him off track—made him forget just why he was here, which was to persuade this woman to let her child be part of his family, and hope that the child could help to reunite and rebuild his family.
‘If you like,’ she said, pushing aside her half-eaten meal and standing up. ‘I’ll pop down and visit Albert and meet you at the car in ten minutes. That suit you?’
She wasn’t really asking, so he didn’t reply, puzzling instead over the change in her manner.
Did it matter?
Not really as far as his official job was concerned, but if he was to persuade her to let Helen and his mother be part of the baby’s life, then he had to win her trust.
How he was supposed to persuade her to vote the baby’s shares with Helen was a whole different ball game, but he was sure trust had to come into it!
But how did he go about winning trust? He was a doctor, for heaven’s sake, people usually trusted him automatically—he didn’t have to go out of his way to prove himself.
He carried his plate over to the counter by the sink, where Ned was leaning, a broad smile on his grizzled face.
‘Prickly little thing, ain’t she?’
Mak glared at him, not needing the snide observation to bring home the fact that Neena Singh had definitely gone off him!
‘The hospital has twenty beds, but they’re rarely full.’
Neena passed on th
is riveting fact as the man settled into the beaten-up loaner four-wheel-drive and did up his seat belt. Determined to keep things on a purely professional basis and to forget—for the moment—why he was here and, more difficult, the way he was affecting her, she continued in the same vein.
‘The flying surgeon used to operate here but with the town’s decline in population—before the exploratory teams turned up—and the widening of the road between here and Baranock, he now operates there once a month, so any surgical patients from Wymaralong will spend their first twenty-four hours post-op in Baranock then come back to us.’
‘And are people obliging enough to save their acute appendicitis until the surgeon’s due to visit?’
Neena swung to face him, frowning at the slight smile—smug, surely—on his face. The smile focussed attention on his lips—lips that had already featured in her dreams, lips she’d thought for one fleeting moment last night might actually kiss her!
Professional, she reminded herself, turning into the tree-lined drive that led up to the low-set hospital.
‘The flying doctors take the acute appendicitis cases straight to a bigger hospital. The flying surgeon does elective stuff, carpal tunnel, hip replacements, hernias—even in the city I imagine patients have to wait for surgery.’
‘Too long,’ Mak agreed, so honestly that Neena found herself liking him again.
Well, liking a colleague was okay, wasn’t it?
‘At St Kit’s we try to keep the waiting lists as short as possible, but I doubt we’ll ever have the facilities or the staff in any city hospital to reduce them to zero.’
‘I’ve read about the problems,’ she said, pulling up in the shade of one of the spreading pepper trees. ‘In fact, the more I read the more I think our services are better in the country—for some things. Having to send people away for operations—and for childbirth—is disappointing, but it’s unavoidable these days.’
He was coming around the car towards her, a tall man in lightweight cotton trousers and a dark green polo shirt. Did he wear green to make his eyes seem greener?
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