The Australian's Desire (Mills & Boon By Request)

by Marion Lennox, Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy

  Janey tried to keep hold of Felixx with one hand while fending them both off the seat-back in front with the other. The bus slid and heaved. She screamed. Chaos erupted, and then blackness.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘WHO do we still have left?’ Luke asked wearily, craning his head for a quick look through the half-open door of the back room at the Bellambour Post Office and General Store.

  ‘Only three,’ Nurse Marcia Flynn promised. ‘Want to see the kid next? He’s ten, he’s doing pretty well, but I think that arm is broken.’

  ‘Displaced?’

  ‘Not that I could see. I’m just going on how much it’s hurting him.’

  ‘Normally, I’d tell the parents to take him into Crocodile Creek and get it X-rayed,’ Luke said. He was an orthopaedic surgeon, he didn’t believe in letting bones heal crooked.

  But conditions were far from normal in the wake of Cyclone Willie, as they all knew. Even supposing the ten-year-old’s parents still had an operational vehicle, which some people didn’t, the roads were a mess, and southbound traffic ran in a slow, continuous stream as people evacuated the cyclone-ravaged coast of Far North Queensland. The hospital was running around the clock, as Luke himself had been doing for three days, living on snatched sleep and even sketchier meals.

  He’d only made it back to the doctors’ house for the occasional change of underwear. He’d even showered and slept at the hospital, and had attempted to tune out the mess of stories and rumours that swirled in the cyclone’s wake. Out of stubbornness, or something else?

  Grace O’Riordan was in the ICU while Harry Blake looked like death warmed up, Georgie Turner had been swept off her feet by that visiting American neurosurgeon, Alistair, while the two of them had been rescuing Georgie’s seven-year-old stepbrother, a dog and another kid from the very jaws of the storm.

  The kid.

  Luke was a self-destructive idiot for even thinking about the kid …

  Now, here he was in the post office of this little town an hour north of Crocodile Creek at what the local State Emergency Service had turned into a makeshift medical clinic. So that the citizens of Bellambour who weren’t planning to leave the town could see a doctor if they needed to.

  Charles Wetherby had virtually ordered Luke to take some time off that morning. ‘You made it to Mike and Emily’s wedding celebration for, what, twenty minutes, the other night?’ Crocodile Creek Hospital’s medical director had accused. ‘Just long enough to get Alistair Carmichael’s blood up when you danced with Georgie. And you’ve been working nonstop since. You need to get out of this place and breathe some air.’

  ‘I’m fine, Charles.’ Gritted teeth.

  ‘You’re not, but I can tell you don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘I don’t want any time off.’ Not until Janey Stafford had regained consciousness and he would hopefully be able to see her. Until then, he’d take any distractions he could.

  And he wouldn’t think about the kid.

  ‘Would it help if I sent you on a busman’s holiday?’ Charles had asked.

  ‘If you’ll tell me what that is.’

  ‘Hmm, I keep forgetting that anyone under thirty-five only learns American slang. I’ll send you out on a clinic run, so you can at least have a change of scene while you work yourself into the ground. That’s what I’m trying to say.’

  ‘That’d be great …’ he’d said, meaning it.

  ‘Check the broken arm out the old-fashioned way, by feel,’ Marcia said now.

  ‘And then a backslab and a bandage,’ Luke agreed, dragging his focus back. ‘Shouldn’t be a tough case. If it is displaced, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’

  ‘If it’s not washed away, like half the other bridges around here.’

  He gave a dutiful laugh. It came out rusty, so different from the charm-laden sound he’d once used to such good effect. He sighed. ‘OK, I’ll see him next.’

  ‘And then the old man, and last of all you can get to the guy who’s doing all the complaining!’

  ‘You’re punishing him for complaining the most?’

  ‘I think if there was really something wrong with him, he wouldn’t have the energy left for it.’

  ‘The Flynn triage system.’ He appreciated Marcia. She was quick-witted and cheerful, the type who used nursing as a ticket to see the world, and good for her, having that spirit of adventure. He liked a woman with energy and spark. She probably wouldn’t stay in Crocodile Creek much longer. ‘Treat the quiet ones first. I like it, Marcia.’

  But his heart wasn’t really committed to the conversation, Luke knew. He’d been like this for three days, running on autopilot, locking back into focus when he saw a serious case but at other times not really there. When he looked back on the incredible days of the cyclone and its aftermath in the weeks and months to come, he knew he would probably remember it differently to how everyone else did.

  Because of Janey Stafford.

  Three days ago in the middle of the night, just hours before the cyclone had hit, hearing Janey’s name in the A and E department when Marcia had turned up some ID, he’d felt an electric prickle of shock all the way up his spine. He’d had to check the woman’s identity for himself, with his own eyes—reach out and take a look beneath her oxygen mask to make sure it was really and seriously the same Janey Stafford, Alice’s sister, not someone else.

  He’d recognised her at once. The glossy mid-brown hair, the brown eyes, the freckles, the features that weren’t quite regular enough to make her beautiful, except when she smiled, which of course she hadn’t been doing then, in her unconscious state.

  And although he’d played down their past relationship to his colleagues, he’d been thinking about her ever since. Wondering why she was there. Wondering if he was kidding himself that it had anything to do with him. Remembering how steady and sensible she’d always been, unlikely to come to Crocodile Creek on a whim. Thinking of his lost son and—

  Stop it, Luke.

  You can’t afford this.

  The ten-year-old with the iffy arm appeared in the makeshift clinic along with his mum, and Luke snapped back into the pretence of focus—into the cheerful humour that his fellow doctors might think was designed to lighten the atmosphere of disaster and loss all around them, but they were wrong. The humour was really just a way of anchoring himself to the work he had to do.

  ‘So?’ he said to the scruffy ten-year-old. ‘Circus tricks? Rodeo riding? Jumping off a fence wearing paper wings and trying to fly?’

  The kid gave a reluctant grin. ‘Nah. We were cleaning up the mud in the living room and I slipped on it.’ Not a story you were tempted to doubt when he still had a crust of dried mud all down his side, and when dozens of homes around here had fine, flood-washed silt inches thick on their floors. The mother nodded, too.

  ‘You didn’t consider a bath before you came in?’

  ‘We’re saving water.’

  Ironic, when they’d just had about twenty inches of the stuff coming down from the sky, but Luke understood the situation. The family could have lost their rainwater tank in the storm, creeks were contaminated with debris and dead animals, town mains supplies were cut off or compromised in some other way. The damage and danger hadn’t ended on Sunday with the passage of the storm.

  ‘How’s your arm now? Does it hurt?’ He went through some standard questions and checks, decided the forearm was fractured but not displaced and so the backslab and bandage would be fine. He’d do it himself because Marcia was still treating some dodgy-looking cuts on their previous patient.

  And while he wrapped the bandage, he wondered about Janey.

  If she’d been brought out of her medically induced coma.

  If she was talking yet.

  If she was in contact with her sister.

  If he could possibly go and sit beside her hospital bed and wangle anything out of her about Frankie Jay. If she acted cagey, told out-and-out lies, or if she really knew nothing, the way she’d cla
imed the last time he’d spoken to her by phone from England several years ago.

  ‘Just a couple of mosquito bites.’

  He blinked. The kid with the arm had gone, and here was the old man, playing down the infected bites covering a pair of ancient, skinny, reddish-purple legs which didn’t look as if they boasted very good circulation.

  And, of course, Luke was aware that he’d finished with the kid and called the old man in.

  Of course he was.

  He’d said the right words. Bring him in to the hospital outpatient department in two weeks, Mum, so we can check that arm. Good luck with the mud. Tell me what I can do for you today, Mr Connolly. But once again he’d been operating on autopilot the whole time.

  ‘Bit nasty, though, aren’t they?’ he said about the bites. ‘Have you been wading around in some of this water?’

  The old man shrugged. ‘Helping my son on the farm. Crop’s destroyed. Take us years to get on our feet again. Never seen anything like that rain.’

  ‘Wish we could send some of it to the drought areas down south, hey?’ Luke took a closer look at the bites and decided that a topical cream wouldn’t be enough to combat the multiple sites of infection, some of which were crusted with yellow-white pus. The man needed a course of oral antibiotic, but would he remember to take it? He’d probably rely on his daughter-in-law or his son to remind him. The man’s skin felt warm to the touch. ‘Pretty sticky out there, is it?’

  Another shrug. ‘Not too bad.’

  Luke wrote out the script, gave some instructions and saw the old man’s eyes glaze over. ‘Show the tablets to your daughter-in-law,’ he said firmly. ‘She’ll make sure you take them at the right times of day.’

  ‘She’s good,’ Mr Connolly agreed. He hunched his shoulders, put a fist over his mouth and geared up for a cough, but nothing came. His breath wheezed in and out.

  ‘Nothing else bothering you today, Mr Connolly?’

  Something you’re not talking about, the way I’m not talking about Janey, or the kid …

  The man shook his head. ‘It was me daughter-in-law brought me in, said I had to do something about the bites. I told her it was nothin’ but she wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘She did the right thing.’

  Marcia was mouthing something at Luke from the door with a frown on her face, and he had another one of those chills down his spine as an odd intuition kicked into high gear. He ushered the old man out, patting him on the back in an attempt to coax him to move faster. What did Marcia have to report?

  ‘Someone’s been asking for you,’ she said, as soon as they were alone. ‘That woman from the bus crash.’

  ‘Janey Stafford,’ he supplied automatically.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘So you do know her.’

  ‘I said I did, the other night.’

  ‘You said you knew her sister.’

  He wasn’t going to respond to that. ‘So she’s conscious?’ His head felt suddenly light, and his ears were ringing.

  ‘Doing a lot better. They’re talking about discharge tomorrow. She wants to see you, and—’ She stopped suddenly.

  ‘Yeah? What?’ he growled, ill at ease.

  ‘Nothing. One more patient. Roads are still crawling, apparently, people are just pouring out of the area and heading south, which is good because it means less stress on services. Did you take Mr Connolly’s temperature?’

  Luke went still. ‘You asked me to, didn’t you?’ Damn, he’d totally forgotten, even when he’d touched the man’s warm skin.

  ‘I thought he was brewing a low-grade fever.’

  ‘Has he left? Could you try and catch him? I completely forgot.’

  Oh, hell, he didn’t usually do this! He could have blamed the lack of sleep since Saturday, the stress, the makeshift conditions of the clinic, but he knew the problem was in his own head, and the distractions were far more personal, deeply rooted in his past. If Janey Stafford had come to Crocodile Creek because of him … If she had news about his son … If that unidentified kid whom Georgie and Alistair had found …

  ‘So you think—?’ Marcia began.

  ‘I don’t know what I think. What did you think?’

  ‘I wondered about pneumonia. He’s a smoker. I should have been more specific, Luke. I’m sorry, it’s my fault as much as yours.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he retorted grimly. ‘Just see if you can catch him. I should have given him a more thorough check.’

  But Mr Connolly and his daughter-in-law had already gone, and although Marcia tried to reach them by phone, there were so many equipment problems at the moment—lines down, towers damaged—she had no success. Luke made a mental note to himself to keep trying once they got back to Crocodile Creek.

  ‘I cannot believe this,’ Marcia said for about the fifth time, as they drove back. ‘I just cannot believe this is the same landscape I drove through four weeks ago.’

  She’d had a couple of days off back then, apparently, and had gone north for a bit of a wild beach weekend with a couple of female friends. Luke hadn’t been up this way as recently, and didn’t feel the need to express his reaction out loud—he’d learned to keep his emotions to himself in recent years—but he was just as shocked as Marcia, and no less so because they’d passed the same sights only that morning, on their way up. Seeing them in the other direction brought a fresh wave of disbelief.

  There was such a dramatic grandeur about the huge mountains that backed this part of the coast, and with the region’s bountiful rainfall they were always incredibly lush and green. Not any more. The rainforest’s entire canopy had been shredded, leaving only straggly sticks. The twisted trunks and branches had even been scoured of their bark, as if sandblasted. It would take the landscape years to recover.

  There were massive, beautiful trees, once lush with enormous canopies and huge branches hung thickly with epiphytes, but now reduced to trunks with a couple of stick-like branches poking up, their greenery lying in a shredded mulch on the ground and already beginning to rot.

  Close by the highway, huge weeping figs lay one after another on the ground, their root systems exposed, as if a giant hand had been pulling roadside weeds. Telephone poles leaned drunkenly, with their wires trailing in muddy pools.

  They passed a house set back about fifty metres from the road—a typical old-fashioned Queenslander up on wooden pylons ten feet from the ground. Its front veranda and wall had been torn off and lay in a crumpled heap nearby, while its neat interior was open to display like a doll’s house.

  And the crops. Totally flattened. Sugar cane, bananas, pawpaws, with the farmers’ ruined houses set in the middle of the destruction.

  ‘What about the animals?’ Marcia whispered again. ‘The birds …’

  ‘I know,’ muttered Luke. Cassowaries, sugar gliders, tree frogs, possums, parrots, tree kangaroos, paddymelons, pythons, butterflies … The list went on, endangered species and common ones, predators and prey. Where would they find food and shelter now? ‘But it’s the people we have to think about.’

  He slowed to a crawl behind an evacuating family in a loaded down minivan towing a trailer piled high with their belongings and covered with a badly tethered blue plastic tarpaulin. They probably had relatives somewhere down south, who’d promised to put them up until they could get back on their feet, make some decisions, sort out their finances.

  ‘People help each other,’ Marcia pointed out. ‘Animals can’t.’

  ‘Nature is cruel,’ Luke answered, sounding cruel himself, although he didn’t mean to be. ‘Marce, we’re all pretty much in shock. Close your eyes and get some rest while we drive. Don’t let it get to you so much, when we’re so strapped as it is.’

  ‘Oh, put up a few nice defensive walls?’ She smiled to soften the statement.

  ‘What’s wrong with walls?’ he said.

  He knew what she must be thinking—that he must know all about walls. He hadn’t asked any of the right questions about Janey Stafford. But he couldn’t
risk giving anything away. He couldn’t bear to. His absurdly leaping hopes, all the anger and distrust, those irritating memories he still had of the time eight years ago when he and Janey had been colleagues.

  She’d disapproved of him, and she’d let it show, even before he and her sister had fallen so wildly in love. She’d thought he was a lightweight, and that he relied on charm and networking to get what he wanted. In hindsight, there could have been some truth in all of that. He’d led a pretty charmed life until he’d married Alice Stafford.

  Now Janey was asking for him. Which surely meant she must have come to Crocodile Creek to see him. And why would she have done that, unless …?

  The shoe tortured him.

  The stupid little shoe that Susie Jackson’s sister Hannah had taken on as a personal quest, since arriving from New Zealand for Mike and Emily’s wedding and getting caught up in the drama of the cyclone.

  Who did the shoe belong to? What age of child would it fit? There had been two children missing following the bus crash up in the rainforest, they now knew—Georgie’s little half-brother Max, aged seven, whom she hoped would be living with her permanently from now on, and the other boy that Georgie and Alistair had rescued from their hiding place in an old gold-mining shaft, whom Luke hadn’t yet seen. The one who didn’t speak, so they didn’t even know his age or his name.

  He knew Susie pretty well after his five months in Crocodile Creek, as a hospital physiotherapist and an orthopaedic surgeon tended to have a fair bit to do with each other professionally. She and Hannah were twins. Identical.

  And there had been something quite disturbing about all this concern for a child’s forlorn shoe coming from someone who wasn’t Susie Jackson but who looked exactly like her. He’d had to hold himself back, pretend to a lack of concern and questions that had probably made him look cold in the face of everyone else’s concern.