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

by Marion Lennox, Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy

  Miranda glimpsed a scattering of smaller islands to the left and right, and there were a couple of boats anchored off a rocky point. They bobbed lazily in the blue, and she could see people on deck, sunbathing or sitting back with cool drinks in their hands. Behind the beach rose the island.

  Going further out onto the sand, she could look back and get a better sense of the place than she had during their descent in the plane over an hour ago. A couple of the kids had been queasy at that point and she’d barely managed a glance out of the windows. The island was bigger, wilder and more rugged than she’d expected, rising to a rainforest-covered peak in the centre, with all sorts of hidden gullies and slopes.

  The resort at the south end and the camp at the north both had only narrow toeholds on the place, linked by a couple of service roads and walking trails that skirted the steeper slopes and stuck close to the water.

  Standing transfixed by the peace and beauty of it all, as the sun began its rapid late afternoon drop towards the horizon, Miranda wanted someone beside her who could share the moment but, as so often seemed to happen, she was on her own.

  Not that the beach was deserted. Several families had already made their way down here, and Benita was here, too, with a group of the older kids who’d come to camp without their parents.

  They’d hit rip-roaring adolescence, some of them. Miranda saw a giggling teenage girl, her body puffy from medication side-effects, enjoying a mock sword fight with a curly-haired boy Miranda knew that she herself would have considered drop-dead cute at fourteen—the surfer type, all salty blond hair and tanned limbs and newly deepened voice. He was one of the in-remission cancer kids, she thought, and he had a natural, infectious smile.

  Stella sat on the sand with her crutches beside her, her prosthesis still hidden by jeans, socks and athletic shoes, and her chemotherapy hair covered by a backward-facing baseball cap shoved firmly on her head. Pretty and fragile blonde Lauren Allandale, whose spoiled only-child status was hugely exacerbated by her parents’ understandable concern over her cystic fibrosis, was standing with her mum and dad, staring disdainfully at Stella—without the latter seeing, thank goodness— as if to say, This is the friendship material I have to work with? Tell me there’s someone else!

  The two girls were almost the same age, but poles apart in most other ways, it seemed. Lauren was tiny and frail-looking. Portable oxygen equipment stood on the sand beside her, and a wheelchair sat on the wooden boardwalk, ready for when she had tired herself out and needed to rest. She had recently been put on the lung transplant list, while Stella hopefully had the worst of her cancer treatment behind her.

  Stella passionately hated what had happened to her, whereas at some level, having lived with CF all her life, Lauren had learned to trade on her poor health, even to value it in an upside-down way. It gave her a certain status, and an excuse for her spoiled-brat behaviour. Miranda found her a difficult patient, but privately considered that her parents’ doting attitude hadn’t done her any favours.

  Both girls had faced more than their fair share of challenges, but so far this common ground didn’t look as if it would turn them into friends. It was a pity, given what Benita had said about Stella needing someone to be close to.

  Now was not the right time to try and bridge the obvious distance between the girls, Miranda decided.

  She took several automatic steps in the direction of Lily, Josh and Nick, instead, but then she slowed her pace and stopped. Lily had latched onto Nick like a favourite uncle. ‘Dig here,’ she ordered him, taking it for granted that she had him wrapped around her little finger already. ‘Deep, so the water comes in.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Nick drawled, laughing.

  The laughter still suited him, although Miranda had the impression it remained as rare as it had been in his student days. It turned his cool smile into a wide grin, showed his white teeth and created a rich sound from low in his diaphragm. He got down on his hands and knees and began to dig, crawling around in his navy shorts and polo shirt as if there was nothing in the world he wanted more than to be excavating holes on a tropical beach.

  Josh hung back, however, watching the interaction between his father and the little girl as though he was waiting for something to explode.

  Nick was quick to notice his son’s distance. ‘Want to help me, Joshie?’ he invited cheerfully, sitting up on his haunches.

  No answer.

  ‘Joshie, we have to collect things to decorate the pool,’ ordered Lily, and to that Josh nodded. He began the task at once, running over the sand, picking up shells and bits of seaweed and broken coral, seeming immediately bright, eager and involved.

  Until Nick spoke to him again. ‘How about a tunnel here at the end? I’ll dig another hole so we have two pools with a bridge over the top?’

  Josh pretended not to hear. ‘Look at this shell, Lily.’

  Nick kept digging, face hidden as he bent into the rapidly deepening hole.

  Miranda didn’t know what to do. She could see exactly what was going on and all her instincts told her that Nick minded terribly about his son’s awkward rejection, but, oh, she couldn’t let him get under her skin this fast, couldn’t care this much.

  It was the same old pattern that he’d been responsible for in the first place. Friends, colleagues, family, patients…all those relationships worked fine, it was safe to give and she was good at it, but when it came to matters of love, she was so afraid of giving her heart away too soon that, since Nick, she had never given it away at all.

  Her ex-boyfriend, Ian Mackenzie, had probably deserved more.

  A couple of other parents and kids had questions or just wanted to chat, so she did that. She talked about what she’d seen at the new medical centre, promised to clear up a couple of details with the camp staff later on, assured the Allandales that she had the physiotherapy appointment schedule back in her cabin and would let people know their times over dinner.

  She saw Stella and Lauren both looking surreptitiously at the salt-blond surfer boy—Jamie, she’d heard someone call him—and immediately thought, Uh-oh, there’s some hormonal trouble brewing!

  For ten minutes she carried on various conversations with one part of her mind, while watching Nick and his son with the rest, wondering if she should interfere, step in and try to ease their uncomfortable dealings with each other if she could, or if, once more, she would simply be her own worst enemy.

  Nick sat back on his heels, finally. ‘There!’

  The sand construction was magnificent. Two paddling pools connected by a square-sided canal that ran beneath a bridge cut into the sand. Josh smiled at the whole thing and Nick seemed to drink in the expression on his son’s face the way a thirsty man drank fresh water.

  Too soon, however, disaster struck.

  Josh didn’t realise that the bridge only held itself together through the damp, compacted consistency of the sand. It wouldn’t bear any weight. Before Nick understood the little boy’s intention, he’d put a foot square in the middle of it and it collapsed under him. There was no damage to Josh, but the neat little sand structure was ruined.

  Josh threw a terror-stricken look at his father and stood ankle deep in wet sand, frozen, waiting for the blow to fall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, the words dragging out of him.

  ‘It’s OK, Joshie, it’s fine,’ Nick said quickly, his voice rising in pitch as he sought to reassure his son. ‘I should have warned you the sand wasn’t strong enough. It’s not your fault, O
K?’

  The indomitable Lily yelled, ‘Let’s build it again!’ and got to work at once, in a doomed attempt to create a sand arch over the collapse.

  But Josh wasn’t interested any more. Or else he didn’t trust the way his dad had reacted. Was the anger yet to come? he seemed to be wondering. He wandered off silently, towards the water. Nick’s gaze followed him, while every muscle on his strong frame had gone rigid.

  Looking on, Miranda could read the body language in both of them like a book and she couldn’t bear it. She felt a sudden spurt of anger against Anna Devlin that shocked her. Nick had his faults as a father and as a man but he would have to have a black heart indeed to deserve what Anna had done, whether deliberately or unconsciously, to his relationship with his son.

  Josh was scared of him.

  He didn’t know him, and he didn’t trust him, and Anna had communicated to the child all her own bitterness and soured love, her doubts about Nick’s abilities as a father, her fear that she was the only one who understood his asthma well enough, her over-emotional reactions to everything Nick said or did, and it just wasn’t fair.

  It put Nick in an agonising position here at the camp, and for a few stark moments every bit of that agony showed in his face.

  Without quite knowing how she’d got there, Miranda found herself at Nick’s side. ‘You’ll have to be patient,’ she blurted out.

  She put a hand on his bare upper arm, but that felt too much like an invasion of his space. He hadn’t invited the gesture, and his knotted muscle hadn’t softened to accept it. He’d always been very good at maintaining physical distance when he wanted to. Bare feet planted apart, gaze fixed on the horizon, body brown and big and strong, and saying loud and clear, Don’t touch me.

  She took her hand away, but just as she did so he softened a little and half turned to her, palms open and upward in a gesture of appeal. ‘We have a week,’ he said. ‘A bare week. What is it they say in the tourist brochures? Six days, seven nights. I don’t think it’s enough. Not anywhere near.’

  ‘It’s a long time in a child’s life. Especially in a place like this.’

  ‘It’s not a long time in mine. It’s way too short.’ His voice was low and emotional. No one else would hear this. It was meant only for her, and she somehow knew that her timing had been perfect. Too perfect. She’d caught him at a moment of vulnerability that was very rare indeed. ‘To bridge all that distance? To wipe those shuttered, fearful expressions from his face when he looks at me? I hadn’t realised until today that it was this bad. Oh, in my heart, I suppose I knew, but…’

  ‘No, that’s not how he—’

  ‘Yes. It is how he looks at me. Don’t pretend. I’m sure you can see it.’

  ‘Sometimes kids get it wrong,’ she said inadequately.

  He ignored her. ‘I want this week so much. It seemed like the answer to a prayer. So help me, my mother-in-law is not a bad woman, I shouldn’t applaud her broken leg, but I did. I do. Anna would never have let me have this time with him if there’d been another option, if Josh hadn’t been looking forward to the camp so much and if she’d had even a day longer to make alternative plans. I can only imagine how close she came to cancelling Josh’s stay altogether rather than having him come here with me. This close.’ He pressed his right thumb and forefinger together, leaving a minute sliver of space.

  ‘Nick, you don’t—’

  He seemed to read her thoughts. ‘You’re right. I don’t know for sure she was thinking that way. But I do know for a fact that she phoned both her sisters first to see if either of them could look after their mother or bring Josh up here. They’d have had to fly up separately. They’re in Sydney. But she would have preferred that—having him fly up on his own to meet an aunt he doesn’t know very well. I was most definitely the last resort. A week is a tiny amount of time. Unless he’s miserable here, miserable with me, in which case it’s going to feel like seven years of hell.’

  ‘How did this happen, Nick? What went wrong?’

  ‘How long have you got?’ he countered bitterly.

  No time at all, as it turned out. A siren sounded, and Miranda knew it was the call to dinner, which she suspected wouldn’t exactly be the most private hour of the day for her, here at the camp, given her professional role.

  ‘Let’s go, everybody!’ she called out, waving her hands in the air. Not everybody knew yet what the siren meant. ‘Lily, Lauren, Stella, everybody. Dinner’s up. Let’s find out what the food is like.’ She dropped her voice again and began to pivot around. ‘Nick, why don’t we try to meet up later and—?’

  But he wasn’t there.

  He’d turned away from her to walk down to the frilly little waves at the water’s edge, where Josh stood. Taking his son’s hand, he said in a neutral voice, ‘Dinnertime, Joshie, come on.’ And the two of them walked up the beach together a yard and a half apart, with fingers tenuously and uncomfortably joined.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHY had he dumped all that stuff about his relationship with Josh on Miranda, of all people?

  Nick felt almost ill about it—restless and wound up and helpless, bitterly regretful of his own loss of emotional control, the way he’d felt after their night together ten years ago. You just shouldn’t do things like that. Why? Where did it get you?

  They’d managed to get through dinner, he and Josh, without any huge problems. No traces of egg or nuts in the food to trigger one of Josh’s allergies. No accidental spills. He’d eaten with hearty enthusiasm, which always gave Nick an irrational degree of pleasure.

  But there’d been the usual distance between them. Josh had stayed largely silent, watching a couple of the other kids talking and laughing. He’d responded minimally to anything Nick said. Nick had had to ask Josh twice to pass him the pepper before he’d paid any attention and when he had, it had just been with the action. No ‘There you are, Dad,’ or even ‘OK.’ Lily was sitting next to a man in a wheelchair—her father, presumably—on the far side of the big dining room, which was a pity because the two kids had done so well together on the beach.

  Josh was tired, that was part of it. Back at the cabin, he had a quick bath and his night-time regimen of preventative asthma treatment and breathing exercises, and then he fell asleep barely halfway through the Greedy Frog story Nick read to him.

  All good, except that it was only just after seven-thirty, which left Nick with a solid three hours before his own bedtime—a huge window of opportunity for regretting every word of what he’d said to Miranda on the beach.

  These eco-cabins didn’t have TV. Nick had now read through every page of the information folder he’d found. And he’d packed in too much of a hurry this morning to remember to bring a book of his own, while the plot line in Josh’s Very Greedy Frog story just wasn’t gripping enough to the adult mind to sustain a second reading! He would need to raid the resort gift shop for a couple of nice thick paperbacks tomorrow, or Josh’s early bedtimes would become very limiting by the end of the week.

  Or maybe Joshie could manage a late nap during the day, he decided after some more thought, and then the two of them could take part in the evening activities listed on the schedule. The torch-lit night-time walks in search of nocturnal animals, the kids’ disco on Friday night as part of the opening celebrations, the campfire supper.

  It was a plan, but it didn’t help Nick right now.

  He couldn’t leave Josh alone in the cabin, but he felt too restless and dissatisfied with himself t
o stay inside. Instead, he made a mug of decaf, black with one sugar, and went out onto the veranda, where at least the sense of vague claustrophobia should lessen.

  It was a gorgeous night, the air soft and buttery and salt- flavoured, filled with the rhythmic washing sound of the sea. He sat in one of the veranda’s big, cushion-covered wicker chairs and sipped his coffee, hoping that the air and the sounds would soothe his unsettled, regretful state.

  They didn’t.

  What would Miranda think?

  He couldn’t let it go. Never had been able to let that kind of thing go, the rare times when it had happened—just twice, really, in his whole adult life. His night with Miranda had been the second time, and the night of his father’s death the first. That time, thank goodness, the urgent sounding of a monitor alarm had saved him from spilling everything to the soft- voiced, sympathetic nurse with the warm eyes who’d been at his father’s deathbed, when nineteen-year-old Nick himself had missed his father’s final moments by just half an hour. The alarm had cut him off a few minutes in, before any tears had come—before he’d literally cried on the nurse’s shoulder.

  Dad himself would have been relieved. He had taught all three of his sons—Nick was the eldest—to present a strong and inviolate front to the world. Never show your deep emotions or your doubts. Never admit when you’re wrong. Don’t let people discover your Achilles’ heel or they’ll use it against you.

  For a successful surgeon, the strategy worked.

  For a man struggling after a divorce, fighting to keep and build a relationship with his only child…

  He honestly didn’t know any more.

  Hell, what would Miranda think of him now?