Flying Doctors

by Fiona Lowe

Pain slashed his face. ‘If I could take back yesterday, take back all the hurtful things I said, then I would. You were right. I had no idea what love really is.’

  ‘But you do now?’ A bubble of hope slowly rose from her pit of despair. She wanted to believe him but she couldn’t, not yet.

  ‘I do now.’ His deep voice vibrated with feeling. ‘I love you so much it hurts.’

  Hope sped through her. ‘I know how that feels.’ She bit her lip, trying to understand. ‘But what happened to change your mind?’

  He leaned in close. ‘Dad.’

  ‘Your father told you to marry me?’ She couldn’t stop the incredulity in her voice.

  He shook his head. ‘No. Dad doesn’t know anything about you and me. Yet. But he soon will.’ He rested his head on her forehead. ‘This afternoon at the polo, it was like the scales fell from my eyes.’

  His breath caressed her face. ‘You were right, totally and utterly correct. My father is wrong about relationships. They don’t trap people—they release love.’

  Her heart tumbled over with joy. ‘You really do love me?’

  ‘I really do love you.’

  He pulled her into his arms, kissing her hard and fast, making her feel giddy with wonder and bliss.

  Then he cuddled her close. ‘I’m so sorry it took me so long to realize that. All my life my father told me that marriage was a nightmare. I’d lived with my parents long enough to believe it and I hadn’t managed to make a success of it with Tamara.’

  He gripped her hands more firmly. ‘Believing Dad absolved me of my ever risking my heart again. Except I lost it to you without even knowing.’

  She cupped his cheek with her hand. ‘I think I lost my heart to you the first day I met you.’

  His eyes sparkled with elation. ‘You’ve taken me on a wondrous journey, shown me how amazing a loving family can be and completed me in every way. You’re my best friend. I didn’t recognise that our friendship was love.’

  ‘It’s love of the strongest kind.’

  He nodded his agreement. ‘And our baby will grow up basking in our love and the love of your family. A grandchild might even soften up the old man.’ He hesitated. ‘That is, if you’ll marry me.’

  Sheer joy and happiness exploded inside her and she smiled a wide smile. ‘Are you asking me?’

  He slid off the couch, kneeling on a muddy knee. ‘Emily Tippett, love of my life, mother of my child and future children, will you marry me?’

  She looked into his earnest face, full of love, tinged with a sliver of doubt, and threw herself into his arms. Her lips touched his and she knew she was home.

  She’s forgiven me. Relief surged through Linton, quickly overtaken by all-encompassing happiness. She tasted so good he never wanted to let her go. ‘I take it that’s a yes.’

  She nodded, her eyes dancing.

  He pulled her to her feet. ‘Let’s go and tell your dad.’

  She laughed. ‘What, you think in his pethidine haze he’ll give you permission to marry his only daughter?’

  He slipped his arm around her waist and grinned. ‘That’s my plan.’

  They walked along the corridor, her fingers snaking inside the gaps between the buttons on his shirt. ‘You do realise he’ll ask you how you’re going to provide for me and where we’re going to live.’

  He paused outside the resus room door, twirling one of her crazy red curls around his finger. ‘I guess we need to talk about that. I’ve always seen Sydney as the place I’d return to.’

  Her commitment to him shone in her eyes. ‘I’ll come to Sydney if that’s what you want, as long as I have a month at Woollara a couple of times a year so the baby knows his country heritage.’

  The strength of her love made him dizzy. ‘Or her heritage.’

  ‘Either way.’

  He gazed into her eyes, amazed at how long-held plans could change without a murmur of regret. ‘Except that I think our children deserve to grow up with their granddad teaching them to ride horses and their cousins teaching them to shell peas and climb trees.’

  Her gasp of delight was reflected in the joy on her face. ‘So you’d settle here in Warragurra?’

  ‘I think you and I belong in Warragurra.’ He lowered his lips to hers and kissed her.

  Time stood still. Nothing existed but his lips on hers, the comfort of her arms, the wondrous touch of her body pressed hard against his and the promise of a future together.

  ‘Hey, sis, there are sick people in this joint. Do you want to make them feel worse?’

  He looked up to see Eric leading the rest of the Tippett family into the department. Holding Emily close to his side, all he could do was grin.

  Emily giggled.

  ‘It’s about time.’ Hayden, with Tyler on his shoulders, thumped Linton on the back before exchanging a knowing look with Nadine.

  Mark smiled quietly at both of them, his face full of approval.

  Stuart grinned. ‘We’ve got a back-up member for the Tippett pool team.’

  ‘You’d have to be desperate,’ Emily teased. ‘But he’s got other skills.’ She laid her hand possessively on his chest.

  ‘So the flowers did the trick, Linton?’ Jim’s voice called as everyone walked into the room.

  Emily reached up on tiptoe and pulled Linton’s head down close to hers, her eyes sparkling with joy. ‘Are you sure about this, about living in Warragurra? My family can be pretty full on.’

  He glanced around, feeling all the love in the room. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  And he kissed her all over again.

  THE DOCTOR CLAIMS HIS BRIDE

  Fiona Lowe

  Unable to wait a moment longer, Mia launched herself to her feet and arrived at the low fence just as the propellers of the plane slowly wound down and stopped.

  The door on the opposite side of the plane opened. Mia caught sight of a pair of long, sun-kissed, muscular legs, which jumped down and landed on large feet. Intrigued, she watched as the legs strode around the plane, eating up the distance with commanding ease. Then the owner came into full view, and an uncontrollable shock of electric delight raced through her, completely disarming her.

  Mia’s mouth dried. The intensity of his look made her feel stripped bare, and to her horror she dropped her gaze.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting a welcoming party. I’m Flynn Harrington. Pilot and doctor.’ He grinned with the cheekiness of someone who had inside information. ‘You must be Mia.’

  ‘You’re the island doctor?’ She couldn’t hide the shock and disbelief from her voice.

  He didn’t look like any doctor she’d ever met—and she’d met more than her fair share, personally and professionally.

  And no doctor had ever made her tingle like that.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  To Gaye, with heartfelt thanks for the friendship, the walks along the river and the conversations that roam from laundry liquid to solving the world’s problems!

  Special thanks to Nellie, for generously sharing her experiences as a Remote Area Nurse.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘YOU still on city time, Sis.’ Susie, one of the Kirri health workers, grinned widely, her teeth white against her chocolate-brown face.

  Mia Latham sighed and twirled her hair up, welcoming the light breeze against her very hot and sweaty neck. Jamming her straw hat down hard, she scanned the outback-blue skies for the elusive light plane.

  Nothing.

  Not a faint dot in the distance, not even a bird. Just heat haze shimmering upwards against wisps of grey smoke from the dry-season fires. She forced her shoulders to relax while muttering, ‘He said eleven o’clock and now it’s almost one.’
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  ‘He on island time.’ Susie leaned back contentedly against the shady eucalypt.

  Mia turned and gazed at the sensible indigenous health worker. ‘But I have an immunisation clinic all organised, and we’re keeping people waiting.’

  Susie gave her a bemused look. ‘You got no clinic till plane brings vaccines.’ She shrugged. ‘So sit. You can’t do nothing until the plane comes.’

  Every cell in Mia’s body rebelled at the practical words. Her ‘to do’ list magnified in her head, the print bold and black, bearing down on her, urging her to do something, anything, to make a dent in it. She’d wanted to be as up to date as possible for when she met the visiting doctor. But at this rate she’d be way behind and she hated having no control over the situation.

  She stifled a huge scream of frustration and plonked down awkwardly in the shade next to Susie, her cargo shorts instantly filling with fine, brown dirt. Just great. She might still be on Australian soil but nothing about life up in the far far north of the country, nothing about life on this tiny island resembled anything she’d ever known.

  She’d wanted a change. She’d badly needed change but today, her fifth day on the job as a remote area nurse on Kirra Island, left her wondering if what she’d come to was harder than what she’d left.

  Impossible.

  She wanted remoteness, wanted to work on her own and be as far away as possible from her old life. She just wanted to forget.

  She fanned her face and took a long slug of water from the bottle that was a permanent part of her in this heat. And this was the dry season—winter. She didn’t want to think about the dripping humidity just before the big wet.

  ‘Hear that?’ Susie inclined her head to the right.

  Mia couldn’t hear anything. It was so hot that even nature had gone quiet. ‘No.’

  ‘Listen with all of you,’ Susie chided gently.

  Mia let the heat roll over her, let the dust settle on her and strained to hear past the silence of the soporific midday malady. A faint buzzing vibrated in her ears. ‘The plane?’

  Susie nodded. ‘That’s right. Him coming now.’

  Mia moved forward, preparing to stand.

  Susie’s workworn brown hand rested against her forearm, detaining her. ‘Still five minutes, no hurry.’

  She forced herself to sit back but most of her wanted to rush out onto the runway and start unpacking boxes the moment the plane had come to a complete halt. She’d never been very good at sitting back and waiting. Even when she’d known in her heart there was nothing she could do to help her mother, she’d hated the waiting. Waiting and watching her die.

  The Cessna lined up with the runway and slowly descended, coming in over the thick mangroves and the eucalypts, its small black wheels bouncing on the asphalt, sticky with heat. The pilot immediately opened the window and gave a wave.

  Unable to wait a moment longer, Mia launched herself to her feet, leaving Susie under the tree, and she arrived at the low cyclone fence just as the propellers of the plane slowly wound down and stopped. The door on the opposite side of the plane opened. Mia caught sight of a pair of long, tanned, muscular legs, which jumped down and landed on large feet. Feet clad in sturdy work boots with khaki socks that casually gathered down around solid ankles.

  It wasn’t the usual uniform of a pilot—they wore long navy trousers. No, these legs looked like they belonged to a bounty hunter, buffalo or crocodile hunter—a man who spent a lot of time outdoors.

  Intrigued, she watched as the legs strode around the plane, eating up the distance with commanding ease. Then the owner came into full view and an uncontrollable shock of electric delight raced through her, completely disarming her.

  At well over six feet, her crocodile hunter had the natural grace of a man at one with his surroundings, and it radiated from the top of his jet-black hair to the tips of his olive-skinned fingers, which gripped a large cooler in one hand and held a backpack in the other. Three-day stubble hovered around his smiling mouth, fanning out along a firm jaw. Dark brows framed intelligent hazel eyes, whose mesmerising gaze quickly took in his surroundings, acknowledged Susie with a wave and then centred in on her.

  Mia’s mouth dried. The intensity of his look made her feel stripped bare and to her horror she dropped her gaze. She took in his broad shoulders, which were covered by a shirt made from locally designed fabric. The emerald green and sea blue of the design accurately depicted the colours of the island’s land and sea, and together they brought out a hint of green in his hazel eyes.

  Desperately wanting to look further to what she suspected would be a washboard-flat stomach, her professionalism hauled her gaze upwards and with a quick, steadying breath she stepped forward, hoping she looked more dignified than she felt.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting a welcoming party.’

  A rich, deep voice with the smoothness of velvet cloaked her, making her heart hiccough. She looked up into teasing eyes, the flecks of green and brown almost moving like crystals in a kaleidoscope.

  Confusion overrode her body’s unwanted tingling reaction to him, making her dizzy with bewilderment. ‘Aren’t you the pilot bringing in the vaccines? I got a message…’

  ‘I’m Flynn Harrington. Pilot, deliverer of vaccines and doctor.’ He grinned with the cheekiness of someone who had inside information. ‘You must be Mia.’

  Doctor? She wasn’t expecting to meet the island’s visiting doctor for another three days. Her calendar, left to her by her predecessor, had ‘Doctor clinic’ inked in red for Monday.

  ‘You’re the island doctor?’ She couldn’t hide the shock and disbelief from her voice. He didn’t look like any doctor she’d ever met and she’d met more than her fair share personally and professionally. And no doctor has ever made you tingle like that.

  ‘Yep, I’m the doctor for Kirra, Mugur and Barra.’ He extended his long arm out behind him, lazily indicating the approximate direction of the other islands. ‘I divide my time between all three.’

  A swoosh of righteous indignation surged through her, quickly dousing the unsettling sensations that had shimmered along her veins. She’d just lost half her morning hanging around for him. ‘But you’re three days early and you’re also two hours late!’ The heat and waiting caught up with her. ‘And what do you mean you don’t usually have a welcoming committee? I was here two hours ago, as your message instructed, to collect the vaccines. The least you could have done was to send a message to say you were going to be late.’

  His casual stance stiffened for a moment and then his shoulders relaxed. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot that you’d still be city-wired. Usually the truck comes and picks me up the moment they hear the plane coming over. That way no one’s left waiting around.’ He started walking toward the truck.

  The city-wired tag pricked her like barbed-wire and she folded her arms against the sensation in her chest as she jogged to keep up with his long-legged stride. ‘Well, it would have been nice if someone had told me.’ She threw her hands out in front of her. ‘You for instance, or Susie. Why didn’t Susie tell me the routine?’

  He tilted his head, his brows slightly raised. ‘Did you ask her?’

  His quiet and reasonable tone sent a ripple of contrition through her, dampening her indignation. ‘Ah, no. I think I said something like, “We have to be at the airport at eleven.”’

  He pulled a battered bushman’s hat out of his backpack before tossing the pack into the tray of the truck. Then he carefully wedged the cooler under a hessian sack. ‘That’s why she didn’t say anything. Kirri people don’t say no to a request. Susie was happy to help you so she came. If a local doesn’t want to do as you ask, well, they just avoid the issue by failing to turn up.’

  He glanced down at her, his expression a mixture of understanding and humour. ‘Beware the “I’ll come back and do it” sentence—that actually means no.’

  Mia wiped the back of her hand against her perspiration-soaked forehead and sighed. ‘I’ve got so much to learn.�
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  Flynn smiled and dimples carved through the black stubble, giving him a renegade look. Perhaps her initial impression of a crocodile hunter hadn’t been far off. Somehow she couldn’t imagine him in a white coat, stuck inside the antiseptic corridors of a hospital down south.

  ‘If you want to learn then we’re happy to teach you.’ His voice rumbled around her like distant thunder.

  A slight tremble of unease rippled through her before her indignation surged back. ‘What do you mean, if I want to learn? Of course I want to learn.’

  He shrugged. ‘Not everyone does. We get a lot of people up here. They arrive city-wired, city-savvy, ready to save the world as long as it can be saved their way.’ He grinned at Susie, who’d wandered over from the shade of the tree now that it looked like they were ready to return to the clinic. ‘And then they leave us, don’t they, Susie?’

  Susie nodded. ‘Yep. Mia third nurse this year.’

  Mia’s chest tightened. ‘I plan to be the one that stays.’

  ‘Yeah, they all say that.’ Flynn opened the driver’s door of the truck, his expression resigned.

  ‘No, really, I’m staying.’ I have nothing to go back to. Nothing at all. Her mother’s blank and expressionless face wafted across her mind and a sliver of the terror she usually managed to keep concealed deep inside her coiled upward, threatening to choke her.

  She needed to move, she needed to do something to keep the panic at bay. The clinic. Walking briskly, she ducked under Flynn’s outstretched arm and sat down hard in the driver’s seat.

  A startled expression momentarily creased his forehead before he gently closed the door.

  A dash of guilt bubbled up at her abrupt brush past him but it was quickly doused by fear and anger at his blasé attitude toward her. She gripped the steering-wheel hard and breathed in deeply. How dared this man make assumptions about her when he didn’t even know her? She wasn’t ‘everyone’. She was so far removed from being ‘everyone’, so far removed from being the ‘norm’, that it didn’t bear thinking about.