Neena followed him off the veranda, aware he’d been thinking the same thing she had—wanting to discuss the next move but not in front of Megan and Wilf.
‘What’s your opinion on leaving it in?’ he asked as they reached the bottom of the steps.
‘I’m dithering,’ Neena told him. ‘I can’t decide, although I think when you take into consideration the golden rule of “first do no harm” then leaving it in is probably the best option. If we reef it out we could do more damage and cause more bleeding. What worries me is whether leaving it in might compromise the eventual use of his foot in some way.’
‘I don’t see that it can,’ Mak told her. ‘When’s the flying doctor due?’
‘Original ETA was within two hours, so I’d say he’s getting close now, and it’s three quarters of an hour’s flight to their base so they could have him in an operating theatre within a couple of hours.’
‘Then we leave it in,’ Mak said as they walked into the shed, then suddenly he flung the hacksaw onto the ground, seized Neena in his arms and whipped her off the ground, racing out into the hot night air.
‘Put me down!’ she shrieked, kicking at him. ‘What on earth got into you?’
‘Snake,’ he said, clinging even more tightly to her, hurrying back towards the house.
‘What kind of snake?’ Neena demanded, still wriggling, although there was something very exciting about being held in Mak’s arms.
‘I didn’t wait to ask it,’ Mak said, fairly breathless now, as Neena was no lightweight for all her slight build.
‘It was Stanley,’ Wilf said from the veranda, smiling as if he’d enjoyed the little drama that had played out in front of his eyes. ‘Harmless old carpet snake that’s lived in the shed for years. He keeps the rats and mice down.’
Mak dropped his burden, slightly put out that his heroic act had been for nothing—although holding Neena in his arms had definitely been a bonus.
‘You didn’t need to tell her that,’he complained to Wilf. ‘I might have made some points for saving her life.’
‘You’d need to do more than rescue her from a snake to catch our Neena,’ Wilf said. ‘Especially now!’
‘Will you two stop talking about me?’ Neena ordered. ‘Megan, are the landing strip lights on?’
‘No, I’ll go and turn them on,’ Megan said, and disappeared into the house.
‘It’s good having the lights.’ Mak had walked over to Wilf and had casually picked up his wrist to check his pulse, Wilf explaining a new aspect of country life to Mak while he stood there. ‘Before we got them we had to take vehicles out to light the strip and guide the planes in, or light fires, but now the strip is lit all the way down. Got solar panels out there that provide the power for the lights. Been a great thing, the solar, out here in the bush.’
Neena had remained at the top of the steps, carefully out of range of Mak’s physical presence, although she was beginning to believe that Mars might be too close…
She watched him talking to Wilf, quietly checking their patient over with a minimum of fuss, and an ache started up in her heart, as if the month was already over and he was gone.
No, this couldn’t be. Just because he’d talked about attraction—and because he’d danced with her and held her in his arms…
The plane swooping overheard diverted her.
‘Mak and I will carry you down to the car and drive you out to the airstrip,’ she said to Wilf. ‘Have you talked to Megan about whether she wants to stay here or follow you to town?’
‘I don’t want her staying here on her own,’ Wilf said, ‘but there’re the chooks and the lamb to be fed tomorrow and my mum and dad are down at the coast for a few weeks’ holiday.’
‘I’ll get someone to come out and feed the animals,’ Neena offered. ‘Actually, Ned can come out and stay here until you get back.’
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she realised what that would mean—that she’d be alone in the house with Mak. Not that being alone with him would matter. She’d already decided that the only way to tackle the attraction was to ignore it, and she could do that just as easily without Ned.
She’d walked across to where Wilf was still seated but hadn’t bargained for Mak’s obstinacy.
‘You drive down to the airstrip and get someone from the plane to help me lift Wilf,’ he said.
‘But I can take one side,’ Neena argued.
‘No way!’ both men chorused, Mak adding, ‘and don’t suggest Megan help. Just for once in your life do as you’re told and go and get help!’
Neena gave him one of her best glares but she did turn away, only to find a vehicle already driving towards them. Megan had met the plane.
They saw Wilf safely dispatched, then waited while Megan tidied the house and packed a bag, eventually following her into town where she’d arranged to pick up her mother for the three-hour drive to the hospital where Wilf would be treated.
‘Will Ned mind you offering his services?’ Mak asked when he was once again a passenger in Neena’s car, heading back to town.
‘No, he loves the chance to get back out into the bush. He lived in the country most of his life, working on properties, droving cattle and sheep, breaking in horses. A man of many talents.’
‘Including cooking, and taking care of people’s clothes—that doesn’t seem to fit.’
Neena turned and smiled at her passenger.
‘Most outback men are self-sufficient, and at one stage Ned was cook for a gang of shearers and there’s no one more fussy about their food than shearers. He cooked at the hospital, too, for a while.’
‘Until you got him,’ Mak said, and Neena shook her head.
‘No, he got me,’ she said softly. ‘Without Ned I’d never have made it to where I am today—never have got through high school, let alone through university.’
She sounded so sad Mak longed to ask her for an explanation, but he sensed she’d erected a barrier between them and he didn’t know her well enough to break it down. Didn’t know her well enough to be feeling all the things he felt, either, if it came to that!
He hid a sigh—he seemed to be forever sighing these days—sighing or shaking his head.
Neena had been doing okay in the ‘ignoring the attraction’ stakes until he’d lifted her into his arms, and suddenly, from being a woman to whom self-sufficiency was practically a religion, she’d turned into a weak and feeble female who wanted nothing more than to be held and protected and fussed over for the rest of her life.
Preferably in Mak’s arms.
Which was a very scary thought.
She turned her mind to medical matters.
‘If Wilf had turned up in your ER, would you have removed the nail or sent him to Theatre for surgeons to do it?’
‘I’d send him to Theatre every time,’ Mak replied. ‘In ER we’d have X-rayed the foot to see the exact position of the nail, then, if all the theatres were busy, I might have removed it. By sending him to Theatre, surgeons can do any repair work to nerves, ligaments and bones while they have his foot opened up, whereas removing it would only have been a temporary measure until we could get an orthopaedic surgeon involved.’
‘So as first response we did the right thing.’
‘There’s no real right thing,’ Mak told her, ‘just what seems best at the time.’
‘Then what exactly is your master’s thesis about?’
‘It’s more about how we can teach lay people to react when someone close to them is in trouble. Which advertising proves the most effective? How much information is enough—how much too much? You know the FAST campaign?’
‘For stroke victims?’ Neena queried. ‘Facial weakness, arm weakness, speech difficulty, time to act fast.’
‘That’s the one,’ Mak said. ‘Every home in Australia has been given one of the little FAST cards and should have it stuck on their fridge, showing them how to test a person they suspect might be having a stroke. If we can educate the public enou
gh that we get response teams to the patient as soon as possible, we can give the victim drugs which can nullify the effect of the stroke before too much damage has been done.’
‘But won’t having dozens of little cards stuck on the fridge only confuse people?’
Mak’s chuckle slithered beneath her skin and started all the responses she was trying so hard not to feel.
‘That’s one of the things I’m looking at—just how much do people need to know and how much is too much.’
She pulled into her parking spot at the bottom of the steps and climbed hastily out of the car.
‘I’ll just check on Albert before I come in. Ned will have heard the car and will be heating your dinner.’
Don’t come with me, in other words, Mak thought to himself, but being separated from Neena, if only for a short time, wasn’t such a bad idea right now. He could still feel the weight of her body in his arms and was carrying the scent of her in his nostrils.
How could he feel such a strong attraction to a woman he didn’t entirely trust? And why the attraction, anyway? Hadn’t he learned to avoid that? Learned to enjoy relationships that had no ties beyond the physical?
Although attraction was physical…
The idea that this attraction was more than that startled him so much he stopped on the veranda and looked out at the town, trying to work out what was going on, not only in his body but inside his head. The more he saw of Neena—with patients, with Maisie, with the camel—the more he found himself admiring her—and the harder it was to consider she might be the conniving female of his original suspicions.
He swallowed the sigh that nearly came out and headed for his late dinner.
‘She out with that camel?’ Ned asked as Mak entered the kitchen.
‘Just checking on him, she says,’ Mak responded.
‘While I have to keep her dinner hot,’ Ned complained, but he didn’t sound too put out about it.
He got me, Neena had said, but although Mak longed to ask the older man to explain this cryptic comment, he didn’t feel he could, so he ate his dinner—delicious—then on Ned’s suggestion took his coffee through to the living room, intending to turn on the television. But once there, the photos on the piano drew him closer and he sipped his coffee and studied them.
A little girl with two pigtails and no front teeth was photographed in front of the steps of the old house. She was clutching a hamster in her hands and beaming with the pride of ownership. Another photo showed a very beautiful Indian woman, younger than Neena but not her. Her mother? Yes, there she was again with a short, turbaned man, love shining from both their faces. Photos of the couple with a baby, the baby growing, then no photos for a long time until one of Neena in her graduation robes, a man beside her smiling proudly—and though he was younger, the photo was unmistakably one of Ned.
Looking at it more closely, Mak picked out a crowd of people, not anonymous others at the graduation but Wymaralong locals—there was Maisie, on sticks, not in a wheelchair, and Lauren from the hospital, and the old receptionist and even older surgery nurse. Mak felt emotion stir inside him. She may have been an orphan but she’d never been alone—neither had she ever been unloved, for all the faces in the background beamed with the same pride as Ned’s.
So what must they all be thinking of the pregnancy?
Weren’t country people more likely to be shocked by an unmarried mother having a baby?
And did the whole town know the story of it that Marnie and Phyllis had talked of? The Rat—indubitably Theo…
Mak almost shook his head, but as he’d told himself he wasn’t going to do that any more, he didn’t, simply going back to the early photos of Neena, lifting them and studying them, wondering if the baby would grow into a little girl with two pigtails and no front teeth.
A little girl would be nice, he was thinking, when he caught up with his straying mind and hauled it back under control. Neither Neena nor her baby were any concern of his—except for where the baby’s life would have an impact on his family, and his own determination to be involved in all plans for the baby’s future.
Family!
Family Neena wanted nothing to do with.
He heard her in the kitchen, talking to Ned, no doubt explaining about the accident and speaking to him about going out to Wilf and Megan’s house.
‘I hope you can cook,’ he heard her say, and turned to see her coming into the living room, a cup of something—probably not coffee or tea—in her hand.
‘Hot chocolate, my least favourite drink but it’s better than nothing,’ she said, catching his quick glance at the cup. ‘And don’t think just because Ned is leaving, you can take over as the caffeine police—I am very aware I have to limit myself. I have one cup of coffee—weak—a day and that is it!’
‘I can cook,’ Mak told her, wondering if this conversation was in some way a truce between them. ‘But I doubt I can mix camel milk formula.’
Neena smiled at him.
‘That I can manage,’ she said. ‘And you needn’t cook every night, we can eat at the hospital or the café or the pub. Breakfast you can help yourself. There’s always cereal and yoghurt and bread for toast.’
‘You don’t do cooked breakfasts?’ Mak teased, and won another smile.
‘I’m the world’s worst cook,’ she admitted. ‘Maisie felt I should know how and she tried to teach me, but I get distracted and things get burnt. She took to stocking the freezer with bread and the pantry with tins of baked beans and packets of instant soup mix so if she did have to go away I wouldn’t starve to death.’
‘And if you have a daughter, will you get Ned to teach her?’
Had he broken the moment of rapport that Neena paused before answering? But then she smiled again—three smiles in one evening.
‘I’ll get Ned to teach him or her, boy or girl—why discriminate? Your mother obviously didn’t!’
‘No, for all she is a very traditional Greek, she made sure both her children not only learned to cook but knew how to work the washing machine and turn on an iron. She was proud when my sister decided to study engineering. I sometimes wondered if perhaps she’d have liked to have had the chance to take up a career herself.’
‘Is is too late now?’ Neena asked, and Mak, although he’d sworn he wasn’t going to shake his head again, found it moving from side to side.
‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said, smiling at the woman whose simple question had provided a possible solution to something that had been concerning him since his father’s death—how to shake his mother out of her unhappiness. ‘Anthropology—that’s always interested her. She needn’t do a whole degree but she can begin some study, maybe go along on some digs.’
He moved towards Neena, removed the cup from her hands, set it down, and swung her into his arms, whirling her around and around.
‘You are a genius!’
And then, because she was in his arms, as he set her back on her feet, he kissed her.
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS a friendly kiss, a thank-you kiss, nothing more, Neena tried to tell herself, but as his lips firmed against hers and her body, bulky stomach and all, pressed tightly against his, the embers of desire she had been sure she could control flared into life, heating her body to meltdown.
This from a kiss?
She had to break away—move—put space between them, yet her body refused to obey her brain’s commands, staying clasped against Mak’s chest, her lips now responding to the kiss, her tongue tangling with his, her heart beating so erratically she could feel its pounding right through her body.
Or was it his heart pounding?
No, hers, for she could hear the thunder of it in her ears, all senses on alert.
All for a kiss…
Mak broke the spell, which was just as well as Neena doubted she could have moved to save herself. He put his hands on her shoulders and eased away from her, then he moved her back towards a chair, sat her down, and returned her cup of chocolate
to her hand.
‘Well, that was interesting,’ he said, as if he’d successfully completed some kind of experiment. He sat down across from her and put his feet up on a footstool, looking as relaxed and at ease as Neena’s father had, when he’d finished dinner and had been relaxing in the living room while she’d played the piano.
She actually glanced towards the piano, wondering if she’d see the ghost of her younger self sitting there.
But the tall man sitting in her living room was a very different proposition from her gentle father. The tall man sitting there wanted control over her child—she had to remember that. Theo had seduced her for one reason—the challenge—and this man was doing it for another—she had to remember that, too.
‘I was a thirty-four-year-old virgin, I wasn’t that hard to seduce, especially not for someone like Theo.’
She had no idea why she’d felt impelled to pass on that information except, perhaps, in case the kiss had given Mak ideas, she needed to let him know she’d fallen for one Greek recently but wasn’t going to do it again.
‘A thirty-four-year-old virgin?’
‘You don’t have to make it sound like an extinct animal!’ she grumbled, not at all sure why she was having his conversation but now it had started wanting to get it over and done with.
He smiled at her, which was something she wished he wouldn’t do.
‘I thought they were extinct,’ he said.
‘I’d put them more in the rare category, and so coming under the protected species act—or protection of some kind, which was my situation.’
‘As in?’ he prompted, and this time it was Neena who sighed.
‘I know you haven’t been here long, but you’ve met some of the people of the town.’ She walked across to the piano and picked up the graduation photograph, handing it to him. ‘Look at them. They’re just the ones who came to Brisbane for the ceremony. The whole town helped send me to uni, they fundraised to pay my higher education fees and boarding costs. But I had to work for spending money, and I wasn’t a genius so I had to study in virtually all my spare time.Yes, there were boys there, male students, and some I really liked, but—’
A Magical Christmas Page 25
