Australia Outback Fantasies

by Margaret Way

  A kind of awkward silence fell over them.

  ‘So—’ Nell moistened her lips. ‘So, what are your plans, Mitch?’

  He looked blank. ‘Plans?’

  ‘For Sam?’

  ‘I—I don’t know. What sort of plans do you mean?’

  Beside her, Jacob cleared his throat. ‘Let’s not jump the gun, Nell. Mitch has only just met Sam. He hasn’t had a chance to think about the future.’

  ‘Yes, I know but—’ Nell saw the warning light in Jacob’s eyes and stopped.

  ‘I thought you guys were the ones with the plans,’ Mitch said, clearly confused. ‘You’re Tegan’s mum and dad. You’ll be the ones raising Sam, won’t you?’

  Nell choked back an exclamation.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Jacob asked quietly. ‘You’d like us to continue to care for him?’

  A look of panic crossed Mitch’s face as his eyes flicked from Nell to Jacob. ‘I didn’t even think to ask you about that. I just—’ He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘Is there a problem? Can’t you manage him any more?’

  Somehow, Nell managed to stay calm. ‘There’s no problem, Mitch. We’re quite prepared—actually, we’d be more than happy to continue to look after Sam.’

  Mitch’s shoulders slumped as he relaxed. ‘Phew. That’s a relief. You had me worried for a minute there.’

  He looked down at Sam and gave a helpless shrug. ‘Grandparents are so great with little kids and I wouldn’t know where to start if I had to look after him. I’m only just scraping a living. And I don’t know anything about nappies or feeding babies. I work crazy hours.’

  ‘It’s OK, Mitch. Stay cool.’ Jacob smiled warmly at the young man, then at Nell.

  ‘I’m not even sure how often I’ll be able to see Sam,’ Mitch said.

  Jacob squeezed Nell’s hand. ‘I’m sure Nell and I will figure a way to help you to see Sam on a regular basis.’

  Mitch grinned, then held Sam out to Nell. ‘Can you take him while I get my camera? I’d like a shot of Sammy and me. And you two, of course. We should start a family album for the little bloke, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ll admit it now,’ Nell whispered as Mitch left the room. ‘I did prejudge him.’

  ‘Forget Mitch,’ Jacob said, surprising her. ‘I’m more interested in the conversation we were having just before he interrupted us on the doorstep. You were going to tell me something important.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She cuddled Sam to her for courage. ‘I was going to tell you what would have made me happy, if we weren’t looking after Sam any more.’

  ‘And I need to know the answer, Nell.’

  The poor man. He couldn’t have looked more serious if he were facing a firing-squad. Nell edged closer and lifted her lips close to his ear. ‘I was hoping you’d let me stay with you.’

  ‘At Koomalong?’

  ‘Where else? Actually, I don’t really care, as long as we’re together.’

  Jacob’s face broke into a wide and radiant smile and then, in a heartbeat, he was hugging her and kissing her and squashing Sam.

  ‘Of course I want us to be together.’ He hugged her again. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I love you, Nell. And I swear I’ll never let you go again.’

  ‘Now that’s a great shot,’ called Mitch from the doorway.

  They broke apart and Nell couldn’t stop grinning. ‘Jacob and I just had something to sort out.’

  Mitch’s cheeky smile reached from ear to ear. ‘That’s fine by me. I think it’s absolutely cool. You old folks want to try that again? It would make a great shot for the album.’

  They walked back to their car and Jacob took Nell’s hand. ‘Did you really mean that, Nell? That you want to stay at Koomalong?’

  ‘You impossible man. Of course I meant it.’

  ‘Even if we’d lost Sam?’

  ‘Especially if we’d lost Sam.’ She turned to him, her eyes huge. ‘But I’ve been so scared that you wouldn’t want me without Sam.’

  ‘How could you think that?’ Almost as soon as the question was out he knew the answer. She’d been gripped by the same uncertainties that had haunted him. He had to tell her again. ‘I love you, Nell.’

  ‘I know.’ Tears sparkled in her eyes. ‘I’m so happy.’ The tears trembled on her eyelashes and spilled down her cheeks. ‘I love you too, Jacob. So, so much.’

  ‘But you’re crying.’

  ‘Because I’m so happy.’

  They reached the car. Nell put Sam in the back and Jacob found a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes and her cheeks. She took the handkerchief from him and blew her nose, gave him a wobbly smile.

  ‘Let’s get back to the hotel,’ he said.

  ‘Lovely.’ She smiled at him. ‘Actually, I’m so happy right now I would have said lovely if you’d suggested we swim to Africa.’

  As they got into the front seats Jacob suddenly realised that this was the moment. There could never be a better moment. He couldn’t—shouldn’t—delay it a second longer.

  ‘I have something important to ask you, Nell.’

  He watched the surprise in her eyes, the swift colour in her cheeks, the soft O of her mouth.

  ‘Here? Right now?’

  ‘It’s probably the wrong place and the wrong time. We should be down by the beautiful harbour, not stuck here on a busy road with traffic whizzing past, but I’ve waited too long.’ Taking both her hands in his, he said, ‘It’s a question I asked once before. A long, long time ago.’

  ‘Oh, Jacob. Oh, darling.’

  ‘I haven’t asked the question yet.’

  ‘I know, but the answer is yes!’ Nell slipped out of her seat belt and opened her arms to him. ‘I love you,’ she cried as she covered his face with kisses.

  A horn blasted close by and a huge lorry rushed past them.

  Looking out at the speeding traffic, Nell laughed and hugged him again. ‘This is the perfect time and the perfect place. We’ve both waited too long for this.’

  EPILOGUE

  NELL looked with wonder at the tiny bundle in her arms. Her daughter was gorgeous, with a cap of dark hair and bright grey eyes.

  ‘My tiny, shiny girl,’ she whispered.

  There had never been a more beautiful baby.

  Nell’s obstetrician had expressed concern when he’d discovered that his forty-year-old patient wanted to give birth in his country hospital. He’d tried to persuade her to go to Brisbane for her confinement, but she had insisted that she would be fine. She wasn’t being sent away to the city to have this baby.

  Her faith had been justified and Caitlin had arrived in the early hours of this morning with a minimum of fuss. Jacob had been present for the birth, holding Nell’s hand, rubbing her back, giving her ice chips to suck and generally cheering her on as their perfect daughter had slipped into the world.

  ‘Does she look like anyone we know?’ he had asked as their baby girl’s hand gripped his finger.

  ‘She looks very much like Tegan,’ Nell had told him. ‘Which means she’s going to look like you, Jacob.’

  ‘I hope she doesn’t have my ears.’

  ‘Or your big feet.’

  They had laughed together and Nell’s heart had been full to overflowing—with gratitude, with happiness, with love.

  Now she heard footsteps in the hospital corridor and looked eagerly towards the door, seeing Jacob’s long legs and his grin stretching from ear to ear above an enormous bouquet of pink roses.

  ‘What gorgeous roses!’ She smiled up at him and thought he was still the best-looking man she’d ever seen.

  ‘These are for both of you.’ He leaned down to kiss her. ‘The two loveliest girls in town.’

  Setting the flowers on a bedside table, he looked down at Caitlin.

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ Nell asked for the thousandth time.

  ‘Utterly gorgeous,’ Jacob assured her.

  ‘But you must have bought every rose in town.’

  ‘Only every pink
one,’ he admitted with another happy grin.

  ‘Thank heavens Mitch was able to come and babysit Sam,’ Nell said. ‘Did you get through to Koomalong? How are he and Sam?’

  ‘I did get through and Mitch was over the moon when I told him the good news. Would you believe he stayed awake all night? Said he had no idea waiting for a baby could be so nerve-racking.’

  ‘Poor fellow.’ Nell smiled down at Caitlin. ‘You were worth the wait, weren’t you, sweetheart?’ Quickly, she asked, ‘But how’s Sam?’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s been a perfect lamb, according to Mitch. He’s eaten an enormous breakfast and now Mitch is entertaining him with his guitar.’

  ‘Oh, that’s sweet.’

  ‘Very sweet,’ said Jacob dryly. ‘I could hear Sam in the background, trying to play heavy metal on a saucepan.’

  Nell groaned and smiled simultaneously.

  Jacob chuckled. ‘I told Mitch that was fine, as long as he doesn’t get Sam started on drums.’

  ‘Not till Caitlin’s a little older,’ Nell agreed. ‘When’s he bringing Sam in to see his little sister?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see them together.’

  Strictly speaking, Caitlin was Sam’s aunt, but for the time being, as far as Nell and Jacob and the rest of the family was concerned, Sam and Caitlin were brother and sister.

  ‘I rang everyone else,’ Jacob said. ‘They’re all ecstatic, of course. Mum and Jean send their love and congratulations. They all want to be here for the christening.’

  ‘It’ll be just like the wedding. The whole clan at Koomalong.’

  ‘I’ll get Hilda to organise some extra household help. I don’t want you overdoing things.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be fine.’

  Yes, she would be fine.

  With a lump in his throat, Jacob touched his little finger to the palm of Caitlin’s outstretched hand and again her fingers gripped him tightly.

  He knew he was a lucky man.

  ‘Where’s my camera?’ He smiled down at Nell as she relaxed against the pillows with Caitlin in her arms. ‘You. Are. Glowing,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about the camera for now.’ She patted the bed beside her. ‘Come here.’

  As he obeyed, she snuggled against him and lifted her lips to the underside of his jaw. ‘Just remember, my darling man—for me, nothing is perfect without you.’

  With her husband beside her and her daughter in her arms, Nell breathed a sigh of utter contentment. Their dreams might have been trampled and broken when they were young, but now they had been resurrected. Bright. Shining. Coming true.

  OUTBACK DOCTOR,

  ENGLISH BRIDE

  Leah

  Martyn

  About the Author

  LEAH MARTYN loves to create warm, believable characters for the Medical Romance™ series. She is grounded firmly in rural Australia, and the special qualities of the bush are reflected in her stories. For plots and possibilities, she bounces ideas off her husband on their early-morning walks. Browsing in bookshops and buying an armful of new releases is high on her list of enjoyable things to do.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FRUSTRATION was eating him alive.

  The regular flight for the week had been and gone and his locum hadn’t been on board. So, where the hell was he?

  Impatiently, Jake Haslem pushed a hand through the dark strands of his short hairstyle. ‘Ayleen!’ he yelled through the open door of his consulting room.

  Ayleen Sykes, loosely titled Practice Manager, tipped a long-suffering gaze towards the ceiling, before swinging off her chair and walking across the corridor to Jake’s consulting room. ‘There was a reason we spent all that money and had the intercom phones installed, you know?’ she said dryly from the doorway.

  ‘Mmm. Forgot.’ Jake gave one of his repentant twisted smiles. ‘Could you call the agency in Sydney and see if they have any word on our locum’s movements, please? He was supposed to be on today’s plane.’

  Ayleen glanced at her watch. ‘Haven’t you noticed the time, Jake? They’ll have all gone home.’

  Jake swore under his breath. He hadn’t realised. Outback Australian summers meant daylight went on and on into the evening, until darkness fell as profoundly and quickly as a cloak thrown over the sun.

  ‘I suppose I could email them,’ Ayleen compromised. ‘We’d possibly have an answer first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’ Jake gave a resigned open-handed shrug. ‘Thanks.’ As his receptionist disappeared back to her desk, he swung to his feet and went across to the open window, looking out at the heat-hazed landscape.

  There was the smell of smoke in the air today. And smoke meant bush fires. Jake exhaled a long slow breath. Not that on top of everything else.

  He was trying to do the best for his patients but he was finding it more difficult every day. Tangaratta was dry and dusty, struggling through the worst drought in memory. And just lately he’d begun doubting his sanity in relocating here shortly after he’d returned from England two years ago.

  But with his dreams for the future in tatters, he’d wanted out of Sydney and the predictability of working civilised hours at the state-of-the-art medical centre. And that had been when he’d chosen the hard physical grind that went with practising medicine in a remote rural area. In a place where he could actually feel needed by his patients. He huffed a rueful grunt into the silence. Sometimes, like today, he wished he didn’t feel quite so needed.

  But, then, he had to admit that nothing had gone to plan since he’d arrived at what was supposedly a two-doctor practice. When he’d been in Tangaratta for only a month, a family emergency had driven his partner Tom Wilde back to the city. So now, many months on, Jake was still the sole family practitioner for the district, with the nearest large medical facility over two hundred kilometres away.

  He reached up and rubbed a crick in the back of his neck. He couldn’t go on like this. Every day the situation became more critical. And if he fell by the wayside then his patients would have no one. And now, more than ever, the welfare of his patients had to come first. He blew out a low, weary breath. And in the same breath made a decision. To hell with trying to entice a locum to come here. He needed something much more permanent.

  He needed a partner.

  A murmur of conversation from Reception had him turning and frowning. He didn’t conduct an evening surgery and if someone was under the impression he did, they could think again. Unless it was an emergency, of course. But by the lilt of female conversation, it didn’t seem so. Possibly one of Ayleen’s tennis friends had come to collect her for their weekly night game …

  Jake got no further with his speculation. Suddenly Ayleen was back at his door. ‘Someone to see you, Dr Haslem,’ she said formally. And sensing something private and of a confidential nature between her boss and his visitor was about to happen, she twinkled a finger wave and fled.

  ‘What the—?’ Jake’s muttered response was cut short as a young woman stepped forward into the doorway, looking squarely at him across the space that divided them.

  For a second Jake couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes or the weird kind of sexual energy that rose out of nowhere to slice the air between them. His throat convulsed in a dry, deep swallow. His eyes weren’t deceiving him. It was her.

  In the flesh.

  As gorgeous as he remembered. Tall and leggy, her cloud of red hair drawn back from her face and gathered loosely under the sassy little cap perched on the top of her head, the peak almost hiding the green of her eyes. In deference to the heat, she wore a white vest top and fatigue-styled pale olive cotton trousers.

  Jake felt his heart go into freefall, the nerves in his stomach twist and grind painfully.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, Maxi?’ he said into the nerve-crunching silence.

  ‘Well, hello to you, too, Jacob.’

  His mouth compressed and something like pain, no more than a flic
ker crossed his face. No one, not even his mother, called him Jacob but on her tongue, with its precise little English accent, it sounded perfect. And suddenly he was pitched back to another time and another place.

  And a lover he would never forget.

  Had she expected way too much? That his attitude might have softened in the two years they’d been apart? Maxi felt the composure she’d drummed up slide away and be replaced by a tangling disquiet in the pit of her stomach. Even just seeing him had elevated her pulse to drumming proportions, her body humming like a high-energy electricity grid.

  She bit hard on the inside of her bottom lip and harnessed her wayward thoughts. He obviously wasn’t pleased to see her. That was an understatement. He wasn’t far off oozing hostility, riveted to the spot, the vibe of tension around him almost palpable.

  Maxi frowned uncertainly. This Jake Haslem hardly seemed the same man who had arrived at the emergency department of her London hospital as part of a six-month doctor-exchange programme. Then he’d seemed big and brash, loaded with self-assurance, his Australian accent and his tan in the middle of an English winter setting him apart. And she’d decided huffily that his manner had bordered on arrogance. He’d annoyed her, confused her. And she’d avoided him like the plague until the duty rosters had changed and they’d been thrown together shift after shift.

  And she’d begun to know a different Jake Haslem.

  He’d told her he was from Sydney, his mother was an MP. ‘And your dad?’ she’d asked him.

  ‘Left us when I was thirteen.’ He’d got a closed-in look about him suddenly. ‘Went back to the States. He’s big in mining. You might have heard of him, John J. Haslem?’

  She’d shaken her head. ‘And he’s not been back to see you since?’

  He’d given a one-shouldered shrug. ‘Mum divorced him. But he had the grace to settle an obscene sum of money on us. I’m a rich kid,’ he’d added with his charm-laden grin. ‘So what about you, Maxi Somers? What’s your story?’

  ‘My parents have a small farm in Kent.’

  ‘Siblings?’

  ‘Twin brother and younger sister. Large extended family.’