Australia Outback Fantasies

by Margaret Way

  He’d made a face. ‘Curse or blessing?’

  Maxi had felt herself bridle and responded sharply, ‘Always a blessing.’

  ‘Hey, bear with me.’ He’d held up his hands in self-defence, sending her a little-boy-lost look. ‘I know nothing about big families and how they operate.’

  ‘Then you’d better come down to Kent on your next days off and meet mine,’ she’d said, almost cringing at the sudden huskiness in her voice.

  And so it had begun. A love affair that had lasted three glorious months and ended in a mixed-up, emotional mess the day he’d flown back to Australia.

  Now Maxi swallowed deeply, running a quick, critical gaze over him in case it told her something. He looked older, harder, but his tanned leanness was still there. She blinked a bit. There was no mistaking the fatigue in his eyes. He was obviously worked to death. Perhaps that accounted for the new look of hardness about him.

  A lump came to her throat. Would he be receptive if she moved closer and gave him a hug for old times’ sake? Probably not, if his body language and that narrowed steely blue gaze were anything to go by.

  At last Jake found his voice. ‘How did you find me?’

  She moistened her lips. ‘It wasn’t too difficult. At first I thought I’d have to start calling every Haslem in the Sydney phone book. And then I remembered you’d said your mother was an MP. After that …’ She flexed her hands. ‘Easy as.’

  Jake lowered his gaze. Why now suddenly had she come here? Thousands of miles from everything that was familiar to her and for what?

  Nostalgia for the past …? Hope for a possible future …? After the soul-destroying way they’d parted? Unlikely.

  With a flick of his hand he motioned for her to take the chair at the side of his desk and then threw himself back into his own chair. ‘So, Dr Somers.’ His mouth twisted slightly over the formal use of her name. ‘It’s been two years. I don’t imagine you’ve come for the scenery?’

  Her heart gave an extra thud. How did she answer that? Honestly, if they were to have a chance of a reconciliation. ‘I wanted to travel, see some of the world. I haven’t come to apportion blame, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  In a second she saw a flash of his old arrogance. ‘It hardly matters now, does it? As I recall, you dumped me at the airport barely an hour before my flight home.’

  Maxi felt faintly sick. She hadn’t expected them to get into it so immediately or so intensely. But then what had she expected? It was never going to be easy. ‘You’d sprung a marriage proposal on me the day before,’ she reminded him. ‘You expected me to just up and follow you to the other side of the world.’

  ‘I didn’t have time to hang about while you made up your mind, Maxi,’ he dismissed with a sharp thrust of his hand. ‘My work visa had run out. I had to leave.’

  ‘That’s your excuse, Jacob,’ she threw at him. ‘You could have extended your visa. The hospital admin would have sorted that.’

  He looked disconcerted. ‘I had a job waiting for me in Sydney—a job I wanted. In the best clinic with the best facilities. Did you expect me to turn that down?’

  She shook her head. ‘But you expected to add me to your list of must-haves—just like that!’ She clicked her fingers for effect and he gave a hard laugh.

  ‘I practically begged you to come to me when you were ready. And you had a thousand excuses why it couldn’t work.’

  Maxi sighed. ‘You’re exaggerating, Jacob. I asked for time to sort out my feelings, my life. You were asking me to leave my family, everything I knew and … loved.’

  Jake’s gut clenched with huge uncertainty all over again. ‘More than you loved me, obviously.’

  ‘Well, if that’s the way you want to see it, so be it.’ Maxi looked down at her clenched hands. She could only imagine that for a man like Jake it must have been a shock and a bitter frustration to discover he couldn’t make life happen the way he wanted it to, that even his money couldn’t get him what he clearly wanted—for her to up and follow. Because he’d simply asked her to.

  Jake was shaken to his boots. Losing Maxi Somers had been the hardest lesson he’d ever had to learn. He’d been so angry she hadn’t seen it his way. And seeing her again here, it seemed the anger hadn’t died. It had catapulted back at him and now it had nowhere to fit. He dragged his thoughts together. Maybe they still had something to say to each other, maybe they didn’t. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. But she was here and somehow he’d have to deal with it. He dragged his brain into gear and asked the first mundane question that came into his mind. ‘So, how are your travels going, then?’

  ‘Good.’ Maxi drummed up the briefest smile. ‘I’ve been to New Zealand already.’

  ‘And how was that?’ he asked levelly.

  ‘Green, beautiful, folksy.’

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  ‘I loved it.’

  Jake leaned back in his chair and studied his fingertips. ‘So, then what? You decided to flip over the Tasman to Oz?’

  ‘Something like that.’ She hesitated. ‘And when I called your mother, she told me where you were working. I thought it was probably my only chance to see something of the outback and catch up with you.’

  So there it was. Jake felt his gut clench even harder. She’d put it straight on the line. But letting her stay would mean his life would be turned on its head. He didn’t want it and he certainly didn’t need it. He opened his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t have come, Maxi.’

  She gave an uneasy half-laugh. ‘Well, thanks for the unwelcome. Why shouldn’t I have come? Your mother said your workload was horrendous. I actually thought perhaps among other things, I could help out.’

  He snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! You’d last a week and then you’d be screaming for the air-conditioned comfort of a city hotel.’

  ‘I’m tougher than I look,’ she protested, and he actually gave the semblance of a dry smile. ‘And you know we work well together.’

  ‘Maxi, listen,’ he said, serious now. ‘Living out here is light years from what you’re used to. And just now it’s hell on wheels. The drawbacks for you would be onerous.’

  Her face had disbelief written all over it. ‘Like what?’

  His heart revved. He couldn’t have her here. Not after all the hurt. Hell, did she think he was made of stone? He dragged his brain into gear. ‘Your complexion, just for starters. You’d be a sitting duck for melanoma.’ He warmed to his hastily invented excuses. ‘Believe me, I wouldn’t like to be responsible for anything as ugly as skin cancer happening to you.’

  ‘That’s a totally spurious argument,’ she countered in her smooth, well-modulated voice that had always played hell with his senses. ‘The actual cause of melanoma is unknown. And unlike you, Doctor, I didn’t run around with my skin exposed to harsh sunlight as a child when it’s assumed the damage is done.’

  ‘We lived five minutes from the beach. Everyone ran around in the sun. And I did wear sunscreen.’

  She arched an expressive brow. ‘How do you explain those two lesions on your back, then? They could have turned nasty.’

  ‘Just as well you excised them for me,’ he dismissed with a shrug.

  She felt a gentle tide of warmth wash over her skin at the memory. He’d been barely a week in her department. For a man she had been doing her level best to avoid, the intimacy of seeing him half naked while she’d operated had almost undone her.

  ‘And they turned out to be benign,’ he reminded her now.

  ‘You were lucky.’ And this was an absolutely crazy conversation. ‘Look.’ She held out her arms in front of her. ‘My skin hasn’t suffered so far. And I’ll cover up while I’m here.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re not staying. How did you get here, anyway? You weren’t on the plane.’

  ‘I hired a car in Sydney and drove here.’

  He felt a glitch in his heartbeat. She’d driven over a thousand kilometres on some of the most
isolated roads in the country just to see him again? ‘I can’t believe you did that.’

  ‘Oh, I took it in easy stages,’ she countered lightly. ‘It was … fun.’

  He looked at her broodingly. ‘It was downright dangerous. What if you’d been targeted by a low-life?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Or had a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere?’

  She gusted a small impatient sigh. ‘I have a mobile phone.’

  ‘And there was I, imagining you needed a jack to change a wheel,’ he said with a deadpan expression.

  She poked a small pink tongue at him. ‘I stopped for petrol here and there. I asked the garage guys to check things. They were great.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ he observed, studying the rosy mouth into which her tongue had retreated. A mouth with its tiny freckle on her bottom lip. A mouth that was made for kissing. And in a second some instinct, entirely male and protective, swamped him and locked itself around his heart.

  He had no choice here. No choice at all. He couldn’t risk her turning temperamental on him and taking off into the sunset. ‘All right. You can stay for a week until the next flight out.’

  ‘That’s pathetic. I can’t do anything useful in a week!’

  He got to his feet. ‘Well, it’s all I’m prepared to let you have.’ And, please, heaven, by then he’d have acquired the gumption to be able to handle this situation with Maxi with cool detachment.

  ‘Fine, then.’ Maxi shrugged and spun off her chair. But she was by no means giving up on this. ‘The pub looks pleasant enough. I’ll stay there.’

  ‘You’ll stay with me,’ he countered, the glint in his narrowed gaze as it skimmed over her, confirming her impression that he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight.

  She bit back a smile. Well, that might work to her advantage. They still had something wildly unfinished between them whether Jake admitted it or not. She tilted her head and said innocently, ‘I appreciate you letting me stay with you. But won’t people talk?’

  ‘Talk, schmork,’ he dismissed. ‘Tangaratta is in the middle of a drought. Folk are too busy just trying to survive and keep food on the table to be concerned about their doctor’s living arrangements.’

  ‘I did notice the country looked rather parched,’ she said seriously. ‘How bad is it—really?’

  ‘It’s bad.’ He rolled back his shoulders as if to slough off an aching weariness. ‘Depression, exhaustion and stress everywhere. We’re already trucking water in for general use in the town.’

  She nodded, moving closer to him, as if in some way to share his load. ‘So, I guess folk are pretty desperate.’

  He nodded. ‘Farmers especially. Outlaying money they don’t have to plant crops that die before they’re barely out of the ground. In some cases selling up and getting nothing for their livestock. Families having to split up to go after jobs elsewhere. There certainly aren’t enough to go round locally.’

  ‘Suicides?’ she asked with some perception.

  ‘Couple.’ Jake dipped his head, the muscle in his jaw pulled tight. ‘One only recently.’ He stopped, unwilling to burden her with the harsh reality of it all. And especially he didn’t want to tell her about how it had affected him personally and made him question his worth as a rural doctor.

  But Maxi, being Maxi and knowing him far better than he gave her credit for, soon sensed his need to unload his self-doubt. ‘So, tell me about it,’ she encouraged gently. ‘Was it someone you knew personally? A patient?’

  He gave a hard-edged laugh. ‘Still the counsellor, I see.’

  A flood of colour washed over her face. He’d made it sound almost an insult. ‘Call it debriefing, if that will assuage your medical ethics.’

  Jake rode out the implication of her words with a small lift of his shoulders. He couldn’t deny it would help to talk and only another doctor, one with the special qualities that Maxi Somers possessed, would understand where he was coming from, when you agonised that perhaps you could have listened more closely, done more …

  ‘It was a friend, a local grazier.’ Jake scrubbed his hand across his cheekbones and went on, ‘When he was in town we’d usually make time for a beer and a chat. I knew he was concerned about the future. The bank was squeezing him and his property had generated little income with the prolonged dry.’

  ‘So, awfully difficult times,’ Maxi commented thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes.’ His moody gaze raked her face. ‘And it didn’t help that he was the fourth generation to inherit the property and felt an enormous burden to try to keep it in the family. But I guess things finally folded in on him. One morning he just upped and wrapped himself and his motorbike around a tree.’

  ‘Oh, lord …’ Maxi’s hand flew to her throat.

  ‘He should have come to see me,’ Jake emphasised tightly. ‘Maybe we could have talked things through. I’d encouraged him often enough …’

  ‘But he never came?’

  ‘No.’ In the brittleness of the silence that followed, Jake said hollowly, ‘This is no place for you to be, Max.’

  She brought her chin up. ‘On the contrary. I’m a doctor. At a rough guess I’d say you could do with an extra pair of trained hands. And so could the people of Tangaratta, by all accounts. And I’m accredited to work here. I arranged all that before I left the UK. Put me on the staff and let me help.’

  ‘No.’

  She hesitated infinitesimally. Jake was not a man you could bulldoze. She knew that. But there were other ways. More subtle ways … Closing the small gap between them, she went on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. ‘OK, then,’ she murmured. ‘If that’s what you truly want.’

  Jake took a shaken breath as her hair fluttered a lacy pattern against his skin and he found himself surrounded by the delicate floral scent of her. God, it was magic to be this close to her again.

  And in a rush all the old disconcerting feelings of his feet not seeming to quite touch the ground when she was this close were back, engulfing him.

  He stepped away, breaking the mood quickly, before it turned into something wild and bitter-sweet. Sweeping down to collect his medical case from the floor beside his desk, he said briskly, ‘Let’s get you settled in, then, shall we?’

  They arrived outside Jake’s place which Maxi observed was a big old sprawling timber home with verandahs all round.

  ‘Here, let me help you with that,’ he said gruffly when she opened the boot of her hire car and dragged out an overstuffed backpack. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’

  She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘You expected seven suitcases, didn’t you?’

  ‘Probably.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘I thought you might have even brought your feather-down quilt as well.’

  Maxi chuckled. He’d always taken the mick. She’d finally got immune to it after being tetchy at first. ‘I’ve brought everything I’ll need and this thing has a thousand pockets.’

  ‘Hmm. Is that it, then?’

  ‘That’s it,’ she confirmed. ‘I have all my really important stuff inhere.’ She tapped the large leather satchel she’d swung over her shoulder. ‘Oh—who’s this, then?’ she laughed as a black Staffordshire terrier tore from the region of the back yard to wait inside the gate, thumping his tail on the cement path.

  Jake opened the gate. ‘Get down, boy.’ He shooed the dog away with a nudge of his knee. ‘This is Chalky. He came with the practice so I’m stuck with him.’

  Maxi bent and fondled the Staffy’s blunt head. ‘Chalky? Oh, I see.’ She gusted a laugh. ‘Upside-down logic—Chalky because he’s black.’

  ‘I didn’t name him so don’t blame me.’ With the dog glued hopefully to his side, Jake led her up onto the verandah and produced a key to the front door.

  ‘Do you take him for walks?’ she asked, as Chalky followed them inside, his claws clipping across the polished floor.

  Jake snorted. ‘Of course I don’t take him for walks. ‘He’s got a huge back yard to run in. And when would I get the time
?’

  ‘I suppose … It’s a nice house,’ Maxi changed tack, her gaze flying over the simple furnishings.

  ‘It comes with the job. You’d better have this room,’ he said abruptly. ‘It has its own en suite bathroom.’

  ‘Oh, lovely.’ She lifted a hand to tug off her cap and shake out her tangle of hair. ‘I’d kill for a bath.’

  ‘No baths.’ Jake went into the bedroom and dumped her backpack on the end table. ‘Three-minute showers are all that’s allowed.’

  ‘Oh, of course.’ She frowned a bit. ‘I imagine it’s imperative to use the least amount of water as possible.’

  ‘You’re going to hate it,’ He said flatly.

  ‘Don’t go making assumptions on my behalf, Jacob,’ she responded sharply. ‘Now, do you have spare linen? I’ll need to make up the bed.’

  Jake’s eyes glazed over and he took a deep, very deep breath. This was never going to work. ‘Sheets and towels in the built-in cupboard in the hallway. Help yourself. Marie Olsen is employed by the hospital to come in once a week and keep the place clean and aired so you should find everything else is OK.’

  ‘Fine, thanks. Um, you mentioned a hospital.’ Maxi’s curiosity was piqued. ‘What’s the bed capacity?’

  ‘These days, ten,’ he replied, a slight edge to his voice almost as though he thought it was none of her business. ‘Four are designated nursing-home beds. We’re funded differently for those.’

  ‘The same the world over, then. Doctors being slaves to management number-crunchers wherever they work.’

  Jake gave a noncommittal grunt and glanced at his watch. ‘Speaking of the hospital, I have to make a quick round. Couple of patients to check.’

  Maxi’s eyes brightened. ‘I need to stretch my legs,’ she said. ‘Give me a minute to freshen up and I’ll come with you.’

  Jake sensed he was never going to win here so he’d better just go with the flow. Or go nuts. ‘Whatever makes you happy.’ Shaking his head, he turned and left her to it.

  Maxi spritzed water on her face and then ran a brush through her hair. It needed cutting and shaping again, she thought ruefully, disentangling a couple of strands until her brush ran smoothly.