The Australian's Proposal: The Doctor's Marriage Wish / The Playboy Doctor's Proposal / The Nurse He's Been Waiting For

Jill assured her it would be OK but she was obviously as worried about Jack as Kate was.

‘Is it time to bring in a lawyer for him?’ Hamish asked Charles.

He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head.

‘At the moment it’s all pretty low key. Harry’s getting the information he needs—there is an old homestead out on one of the back blocks of Wetherby, by the way, but no one’s kept cattle on that block for years so Jack wouldn’t have known of it. Anyway, Harry’s happy and Jack’s not too distressed, and the way I look at it, if he can prove he had time off when the cattle were stolen—’

‘He hitched lifts to try to get to Megan,’ Kate broke in. ‘We only have to find the people who gave him lifts and we can prove he wasn’t there.’

Charles smiled at her.

‘We’ll find them,’ he promised, but, though he sounded confident, when Kate turned to close his office door behind her and Hamish as they left, she caught him frowning.

Had he only said it to make her feel better?

‘Now tea?’

How could someone make such ordinary words seductive?

‘No!’

The single word snapped out and hung in the air for so long she finally had to add a feeble ‘Thank you’ before she marched off back to the ward.

Didn’t he know she was avoiding him?

Of course he didn’t! She’d practically leapt at his suggestion that they talk to Charles together.

Harry arrived at ten the next morning, while Kate was hanging a new bag of fluid on Jack’s drip stand.

‘You getting preferential treatment here, Jack?’ he asked. ‘A pretty nurse all to yourself?’

‘I’ve only just got to him,’ Kate protested, knowing Jack would be embarrassed by the question. ‘I didn’t like to disturb him earlier when Megan was here, and Mr Roberts needed a bit of TLC.’

She checked the calibrations on the drip and picked up Jack’s chart, knowing she had to look busy if she wanted to hang around.

‘So, we were up to where your mates—’

‘They weren’t my mates!’ Jack snapped, then, as Kate brushed his arm with her hand, he relented. ‘Digger was OK.’

‘Well,’ Harry continued, ‘we were up to where Todd and Digger took you back to the old homestead and there were more cattle there.’

Jack nodded.

‘I saw the brands and asked if they’d bought the cattle from Jim Cooper—that’s Megan’s dad. I’d sometimes helped her, you see, mending the fences. It’s how we met. Some of their cattle got in with ours and Philip went berserk, saying they were rubbish and he didn’t want them polluting his stock, but although they were in poor condition, they were good cattle.’

Kate smiled to herself. Jack might have been a city kid like she had been, but he’d soon learnt.

‘Anyway, I asked Todd if he’d bought them and he said yes, the place was going down the drain and Jim wanted rid of them—and I knew things were bad with the Coopers so it seemed OK. But then Todd and Digger started fooling around with the brands and that didn’t seem right. So I left.’

‘Did you tell them you were leaving?’

Jack shook his head.

‘But I had to take the bike—Todd had two two-wheeler bikes and a four-wheeler he let me use. And taking the bike was stealing—so I left a note to say I’d leave it up near the highway, and as soon as I had some money I’d send him some for the inconvenience.’

‘So he knew exactly which way you’d head?’

‘I guess!’

Jack sounded more defeated than tired, but Kate felt he’d had enough, so she signalled to Harry that it was time to leave.

To her surprise, he didn’t argue, and Kate wondered if he’d been as affected by Jack’s patent honesty as she had been. Here was a kid from the city, helping his girlfriend mend fences on her property, worrying about her father’s cattle, escaping from criminals, yet leaving a note to say which way he was going!

She smiled at the young man on the bed. Some might say it was stupidity rather than honesty, but she couldn’t believe any jury in the world would find him guilty of whatever charges Harry might choose to lay against him.

In fact, if she could find out who had given him lifts and prove he hadn’t been with the men when they’d stolen the cattle, Harry couldn’t lay charges at all.

Another job for Batman and Robin?

Shaking her head at the intrusion of the stupid joke she’d come up with in the cave, she got on with her work. The whole idea of avoidance was that it got the other person out of the forefront of your mind.

Kate loved the walk from the hospital to the back of the house. There was a path, of course, from the front of the hospital to the front of the house, but that didn’t go through the garden. The Agnes Wetherby Memorial Garden, she’d discovered it was called. Planted in honour of Charles’s grandmother—Jack’s great-grandmother.

Jack was doing well—medically—and Harry hadn’t reappeared to ask more questions in the afternoon, so Kate, Jack and Megan had all decided to take that as a good sign.

But apart from finding out who had given Jack a lift—and she had no idea how to go about that—she couldn’t do much to help, so she wouldn’t think of Jack’s problems now. Although not thinking of Jack left a space in her mind, which was dangerous because spaces in her mind inevitably filled up with thoughts of Hamish.

The Hamish who had kissed her on the hill, not Colleague Hamish who had first appeared when he’d driven her to Wygera. Hamish kissing away her fear of crocodiles. Or had he been kissing away her fear of commitment? Hamish looking hurt when she’d refused to have tea with him yesterday.

It had been tea, for heavens’ sake, and there’d have been a dozen people in the dining room, yet she’d seen the flare of disappointment in his eyes and had felt the touch of that flare in her heart.

‘You’re stupid in the heart,’ she muttered to herself, and turned her attention to the garden.

Yesterday she’d discovered the source of a new perfume in the garden and she wanted to pick a stem of the pale pink pendulous flowers and ask someone to identify them for her. Actually, she’d pick the top of the stem—the whole stem, like the leaves that sheltered them, being taller than she was.

She had just succeeded in her task and was sniffing the rich, sweet scent when she heard the strumming of a guitar, but it wasn’t until she reached the bottom of the steps she recognised the tune.

‘K-K-K-Katie swallowed a ha’penny, a penn’orth of fish, a ha’porth of chips the day before—’

‘The day before that,’ Kate joined in, ‘she swallowed the doormat, now she’s trying to swallow the key of the kitchen door!’

She beamed up at Hamish, who was slumped in the old settee on the back veranda, his guitar across his lap.

‘My grandad used to sing that to me. I always thought he’d made it up, but if you know it, too …’

Hamish saw the radiant smile fade from her face and read the cause of its disappearance with ease. Unexpected pain stabbed deep into his gut. Getting to know how this woman thought wasn’t all beer and skittles.

And the fact that she was trying to keep him at arm’s length wasn’t doing one thing to curb his body’s reaction every time he saw her. Rather the opposite, in fact.