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

by Marion Lennox, Lilian Darcy, Lilian Darcy

  ‘Jealous? Were you?’ Something nagged and fluttered in the back of her mind as she spoke, but she didn’t have time to examine it now. Something to do with the words he’d just spoken.

  ‘Yes, because I remembered that we’d talked and laughed like that once, too,’ he was saying.

  ‘We did,’ she said on a shaky breath. ‘Suddenly it feels like yesterday.’

  ‘Come back to the beach with me. Come to the cabin and wait while I get Joshie to bed. We’re not letting this go.’

  ‘No, we’re not…’

  He took her hand and they stumbled down the sandy path, disorientated by the power of what had just happened.

  On the beach, the bonfire party was almost over. Kids were yawning and parents, camp staff and medical people were looking at their watches or packing up gear. It was nearly nine o’clock, and any of the Crocodile Creek people who needed to be back on the mainland tonight would have to leave very soon in order to make the last boat at nine-fifteen.

  ‘Come on, Rowdy!’ Janey said to her little boy, echoing similar hurry-up phrases from other parents.

  Josh stood ankle deep in the water, apparently mesmerised by the moonlight glowing on the white foam. Nick went down to him and took his hand, and Josh looked up at him in a way that would probably bring Nick’s heart close to bursting. Miranda waited, not wanting to interrupt the moment. They’d already made so much progress together.

  Charles was still here.

  She was surprised to see him on his feet, although he leaned heavily on a sturdy frame and had his wheelchair just behind him. He did have some use of his legs, then. He looked tired, and as if he was fighting the fatigue way too hard, refusing to give in to it until he had no choice. With his disability or without it, he was an incredibly impressive man.

  She heard him ask one of the Crocodile Creek doctors… Luke, maybe…‘Where’s Lily? She was here just a minute ago. Dammit, I hate it when she runs off in the dark!’

  Or rather, he hated his own inability to go easily in search of her, Miranda realised. The beach was soft and treacherous for either wheels or a frame, and he was stuck where he was. He moved back towards his wheelchair and seemed to relax when he saw Lily coming towards him.

  She was carrying something. ‘I need to show Charles. He’ll help.’

  The dark shape flopped in her outstretched hands and Miranda couldn’t tell what it was until Lily was just a few metres away. Another child’s forgotten piece of clothing?

  No, ugh, a dead bird…

  ‘Look! It’s sick.’

  ‘It’s dead…’

  ‘Can you make it alive?’ Lily brought it directly to Charles and held it out with her usual air of confidence and faith in adult power. Miranda didn’t know much about birds, but it looked like a migratory seabird. There were a number of such species, she thought, and struggled to come up with some names. Petrels? Terns? Mutton-birds?

  ‘Lily, no…’ Charles said, looking down at the creature. He touched it. ‘It’s still warm. That means it’s only just died, but it is dead. Put it down on the sand, Lily.’

  ‘But can’t you make it come back alive?’

  ‘I’m a people doctor, Lil, not a bird doctor, and anyway it’s dead. I can’t bring it back.’

  ‘But I saw it move…’

  ‘You probably did. It must have been its last flutter. It hasn’t been dead for long. But it is dead now, I promise, and there’s nothing we can do. Luke?’ Again, he’d had to turn to a fellow doctor for help, and again he didn’t like it.

  ‘Bury it?’ Luke suggested. ‘I think we’d better. We don’t want the kids mucking around with it.’ He turned to Janey and their son. ‘You should head for the boat. I’ll catch up. I’ll bury it up in the bushes, where the kids don’t dig. Maybe find something to wrap it in.’

  ‘Let me,’ Miranda offered. ‘There were some paper bread- bags, weren’t there?’

  ‘The garbage has all been taken away.’

  ‘I’ll find something.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just bury it as it is,’ Luke said. ‘The sand’s soft, I can dig a good deep hole very easily.’

  ‘Josh has his plastic shovel,’ Miranda realized out loud.

  She turned to look. Father and son were still down by the water, unaware of what was happening with Lily’s dead bird. Nick had the beach shovel in one hand, along with a red plastic bucket in the other. She loped down to him and asked for the shovel. It was about two feet long, with a nice strong square head.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Lily has too much faith in Charles’s healing powers. I’ll explain later. It’s no big deal.’

  She went back and gave Luke the shovel and he said, ‘Thanks. There are some roots, but I should be able to cut through those with this.’ He slid the bird onto the shovel. ‘Wonder why it died. I can’t see any obvious sign of injury. It’s thin…’

  ‘Natural causes, then?’

  ‘Yes, it must have been sick…’

  The incident of the dead bird cast a shadow over the evening’s end. Charles told Lily, ‘Go and wash your hands in the water, and then we’ll do them properly with soap when we get back to the cabin.’

  Lily ran obediently down to the water where she splashed her hands…and most of the rest of her, too, in the process.

  Nick and Josh arrived just as Luke finished shovelling sand into the little grave. By now they were almost the last people on the beach. ‘Let’s get you to bed, kid,’ Nick told his son, and Miranda followed them along the path to their cabin.

  Josh was asleep within ten minutes…

  Miranda looked lovely and a little nervous, waiting for him on the veranda. Nick could see her through the open window, and when he went to the kitchen to put on the electric jug for tea, he knew he was stalling.

  I’m nervous, too.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d kissed her on the path half an hour ago.

  Well, because he’d wanted to, of course, but wanting was never enough, wanting was only the start. There had to be a heck of a lot more, and it had to run so much deeper.

  He and Anna had found that out the hard way. It had been such an easy, obvious relationship on the surface. They’d been attracted to each other. They shared certain things—a scrupulous work ethic, an appreciation for some of life’s finer offerings.

  Anna collected Victorian silver while he collected antique chess sets, and they’d spent some great days browsing garage sales and antiques auctions and flea markets together before Josh’s birth. The shared interest had given them something safe and impersonal to talk about, and Anna hadn’t seemed to mind that they never truly plumbed each other’s emotional depths, never connected on a whole lot of levels.

  He’d been relieved about this lack of depth, to the extent that he understood it at the time. The shattering sense of vulnerability and nakedness he’d felt with Miranda had still haunted him when he and Anna had first met, even though at that point it had been more than a year since the night of the fateful medical students’ party.

  But everything changed with Josh’s arrival, almost three years into their marriage.

  It was a common enough pattern, Nick knew. Some relationships, like some plants, only thrived in full sunshine and heat. As soon as the first frost fell and life’s darker moments hit, the whole thing withered and died. The roots proved to be too shallow. Was that what love meant? Growing deep roots? He didn’t think he and Anna had ever loved each oth
er in the right way.

  With Josh’s birth, she no longer even wanted to find time for antique browsing. The meticulous, hard-working, obsessive part of her personality switched in full from career and hobbies to the baby, and if she hadn’t deliberately shut Nick out of her relationship with their son at first, it certainly became deliberate once his asthma developed and their marriage soured so badly.

  And with no pattern already in place for talking about their emotions, no way to cut to the heart of what each other thought and felt, he didn’t known how to challenge her behaviour until it was too late.

  The electric jug boiled and clicked off, and he poured hot water into the mugs. He didn’t want a cup of tea and very possibly Miranda didn’t want one either, but like the other night he needed a prop, something to hide behind.

  She heard him coming, turned from watching the moonlit glimpses of the water and smiled at him.

  Nervously.

  She was thirty-four, his own age. She understood as well as he did that the best kiss in the world was only the very beginning.

  ‘It seemed easy half an hour ago,’ he said, without a second’s thought.

  Hell! Why did she do this to him? He couldn’t hold anything back. Ever. It was as if they picked up effortlessly on a conversation they’d been having their whole lives—a conversation that involved so much more than words.

  Everything came spilling out with no censorship, no tact, no instinct for self-preservation—all of which he usually had in spades. It was as if, when he was with her, a great big hand came reaching down inside him, rummaging right into his emotions and churning everything to the surface.

  With Miranda, what he felt, he said.

  Was this why the sight of her had hit him so hard two years ago, when she’d first become Josh’s doctor? Was this why he hadn’t fought harder against the way Anna excluded him from Josh’s health problems?

  Pure, naked fear?

  She didn’t reply. He put the unwanted mugs of tea on the deck railing and watched her stand and come towards him, tentative and stubborn at the same time. Hell, and he felt so tentative himself, with a tingling sense of danger and challenge.

  ‘Just kiss me again,’ she said. ‘Let’s try that.’

  ‘Yeah…?’ he whispered, secretly thrilled that she was making the first move, and relieved that she was letting his unintended admission slide.

  ‘Somehow everything seemed to make sense when you did earlier,’ she told him softly. ‘I’m…kind of testing out whether we get the same effect again.’ She tilted her head to one side and gave him a crooked, almost impish smile.

  Oh, lord…

  He didn’t need any further invitation.

  First, he touched her shoulders, rediscovering her fine, strong bone structure and the soft skin on either side of her silky top’s two thin straps. She looked up at him, her eyes huge and dark and quietly watchful in the cool light.

  She didn’t fully trust him, yet. He could see it in her face, and it made something twist inside him to watch her taking this step towards his heart while she honestly believed that the ground might easily give way beneath her feet. She was braver than he was…

  Oh, hell, and maybe the ground would give way!

  He really, really didn’t want to hurt her, and yet the enormity of the alternative made his stomach drop with dread.

  Could he do it again? Could he strip himself bare? Give everything? Risk so much?

  Somehow, he understood that there was no middle road in this case, no safe, shallow-soiled piece of ground the way there had been in his marriage to Anna.

  With Miranda, it would be all or nothing. Deep roots, or barren terrain.

  And all couldn’t happen without this terrifying yet desperately wanted first step.

  He bent his head, nuzzled his nose against hers, and then his cheek against her cheek. He understood the meaning of his own gestures far too clearly.

  The boot’s on the other foot, Miranda. I’m the one who’s telling you this time, don’t hurt me.

  He hated this evidence of his Achilles’ heel and fought it off, focusing on the one indisputable reality that was coursing through his body.

  I want her.

  Oh, hell, he wanted her so much!

  It surged in him suddenly, with a power that took his breath away, and there was no more nuzzling. He crushed his mouth against hers, dragged the loop of elastic from her ponytail and tangled his fingers in her hair, pulled her against him so that her neat breasts flattened against his chest.

  He could feel her nipples, hard through her barely-there bra. He could feel her breathing, uneven and shallow. He could feel the swelling heat at the apex of her thighs pressing into him, answering the painful, rock-like hardness straining against the front of his baggy beach shorts.

  He grabbed her backside, wanting her even closer, and she rocked her hips against him, making him wild with need. He wanted to be inside her, to bring her to the edge and tumbling over it with his touch and his hard length, with the lap of his tongue against the soft inner skin of her lip.

  ‘I’m such a slow learner,’ she muttered, on a sound that might have been a sob or a laugh.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ He could feel a new resistance in her body, but it was ambivalent. She was fighting herself.

  ‘You have a big double bed in there, don’t you?’ she said. ‘And you want me in it, and as soon as you say the word, I’m going to peel off my clothes and go.’

  ‘Yeah…?’ He couldn’t stop himself from grinning about it like a teenager, his mouth still only a few inches from hers.

  She saw the grin and said shakily, ‘You are so-o-o missing my point here.’

  ‘You’re scared,’ he answered. ‘I know that.’

  ‘Yes, I’m very scared.’

  He took a breath. ‘Well, so am I.’

  ‘Of different things.’

  ‘Maybe…No,’ he corrected himself, sure of his ground suddenly. ‘The same things. I’m scared of exactly the same things.’

  ‘What things, then?’ He could feel the whisper of her breath against his upper lip as she spoke.

  ‘Of making ourselves too raw. Of having our trust smashed. Of it just not working out for any one of a hundred reasons, and ending up messy and painful and complicated. I hate regret. It’s such a destructive, obsessive feeling. It holds you back, pushes you in totally the wrong direction.’

  ‘What have you regretted, with me?’

  ‘That I said too much. Words can be so dangerous. And then, much later, that I didn’t phone you.’

  ‘You regretted that?’

  ‘Of course I did! I carried your phone number around on a piece of paper in my pocket for six months.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you use it?’

  ‘Well…Do you know what I did do, in the end?’

  ‘What, Nick?’ She pulled away from him, curving her palms round his jaw and pushing lightly, and she laughed at him—perplexed, willing to listen, poised to be angry if she decided it was necessary.

  ‘I burned the piece of paper,’ he said.

  ‘There were half a dozen other ways you could have found out my number. Not to mention several easier ways to get rid of it on a piece of paper. Six months, though? You had my phone number in your wallet for six months, before you—? And did you really—?’

  ‘Burn it, yes. Act of self-preservation.’ He thought about that for a moment. ‘No, actually it was more like taking the easy way out.
’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense, Nick.’

  ‘I’m not saying any of this makes sense. I know there were other ways I could have got in touch with you. I knew where you lived, I knew several of your friends. Keeping the phone number for so long was…I don’t know. A talisman. Burning it was a recognition of my own…’ Say it, Nick. He took a breath. ‘My own failure.’

  She wasn’t deflected. If she thought he’d failed, ten years ago, it didn’t seem relevant to her now. ‘Are you going to take the easy way out tonight?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Or tomorrow? Tomorrow would be worse. Please, please, don’t take the easy way out tomorrow.’

  ‘How many days do you want promises for?’ he asked, and felt her body turn rebellious in his arms.

  ‘All right. It’s an unreasonable request. This…feels unreasonable, Nick. The demands I want to make are unreasonable.’

  ‘Make them anyway,’ he invited her, but she shook her head.

  Maybe he didn’t need her to say it.

  This felt unreasonable to him, too.

  Drastically, earth-shatteringly unreasonable and impossible to resist.

  ‘Just kiss me again,’ she said. ‘Take me to bed.’

  The simplicity of it stunned him, in the end.

  They left the veranda in silence, hand in hand like schoolchildren.

  His room was dark and the tropical air kept it warm even with opened windows. He didn’t want to turn on the light. Didn’t some people consider it prudish to make love in the dark? Nick loved it that way, especially in a place like this, so alive, so warm. He loved how the shadows wrapped around the two of them and cocooned them together. Loved the soft, bluish light that did filter into the room from the moonlit world outside.

  In it, Miranda’s eyes looked even deeper, her mouth even softer, the curves on her smooth-skinned body sculpted by highlights and shadows. She pulled her vest top over her head, unfastened her bra and let it fall, her movements deft and unselfconscious.

  Then, with her hands poised at the waistband of her shorts, and her soft breasts cradled by slightly rounded shoulders, she smiled at him. She’d turned impish again, with her head tilted and her eyebrows raised, and he realised it was an invitation— Hey, get your kit off, you! I’m not doing this on my own!