The Outback Doctor's Surprise Bride

It had been an odd time. She’d realised that she’d never had a place she could truly call her own. A place she’d felt like she’d belonged. That deep down, despite Elsie’s love and assurances, she’d always felt on the outside. Her mother was gone and her father was more comfortable with the open road than his own daughter.

She looked around, feeling suddenly depressed. Even this place wasn’t hers. ‘A couple of years.’

James heard a sadness shadowing her answer. He saw it reflected in her eyes. He recognised the look. Had seen it in his own eyes often enough. Beneath the surface Helen Franklin was as solitary as him. Looking for something to make her feel whole. Just like him.

He felt a strange connection to her and had a sudden urge to pull her close, and perhaps if he hadn’t been encumbered with a cast that seemed to weigh a ton he might have. She seemed so fragile suddenly, so different from the woman who had dragged him from the bush. ‘Is that how long you’ve lived in Skye?’

Helen laughed. ‘Goodness, no. I was born here.’

Of course. Everything about her screamed homey. From her casserole to her prim ponytail. She looked utterly at home in this cosy worker’s cottage in outback Queensland.

He felt a growl hum through his bloodstream as the affinity he’d felt dissolved with a rush of hormones. She wasn’t his type. In fact, she was the type he avoided like the plague.

‘Have you lived here all your life?’

Helen didn’t miss the slight emphasis on the word ‘all’. Obviously staying in one place was a fate worse than death for him. She looked at his beautiful face, into his turquoise gaze, and saw the restlessness there. The same restlessness she’d grown up seeing in her father’s eyes. He was a drifter. A gypsy.

‘Except for when I went to uni.’

James nodded his head absently. Definitely not his type. He preferred women who had lived life a bit. Travelled. In his experience they were much more open-minded. They knew the score and didn’t expect an engagement ring the second a man paid them a bit of attention.

‘You don’t approve.’

He shrugged. ‘Not at all. It’s just not for me. I’d feel too hemmed in.’

Heed his words, Helen, heed his words. But a part of her rebelled. The arrogance of the man to assume that because she was still living in the place she’d been born that she’d not done anything with her life. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being grounded. Doesn’t running away get tiresome?’

He chuckled at her candour. She didn’t look fragile any more. She looked angry. ‘I prefer to think of it as moving on.’

God, he sounded like her father. ‘I bet you do.’ He chuckled again and goose-bumps feathered her arm as if he’d stroked his finger down it. ‘So where are you moving on to from here?’

He shrugged. ‘Central Queensland somewhere. Wherever they need a locum. I haven’t seen much of the state and I want to make my way up to the Cape. It’s supposed to be spectacular.’

Helen had been up to Cape York with her father during a very memorable school holiday. It was spectacular. But stubbornness prevented her from sharing that thought. She wasn’t going to elaborate and spoil his image of her as a small-town, gone-nowhere girl.

‘Where are you from originally?’

‘Melbourne. But I haven’t lived there since I finished my studies.’

‘Let me guess. You’ve been travelling?’

James laughed. ‘Very good.’

‘Do you still have family in Melbourne?’

‘My mother.’

Helen noticed the way his smile slipped a little. It didn’t appear that they were close. ‘Your father?’

James sobered as he fingered the chain around his neck. ‘He died in my final year of uni.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said quietly. She met his turquoise gaze and she could see regret and sorrow mingle.

He shrugged. ‘We weren’t really close.’

There were a few moments when neither of them spoke. The television murmuring in the background was the only noise. So James’s relationship with his parents had been as fraught as hers had been with her parents? She felt a moment of solidarity with him.

James stirred before the sympathy he saw in her gaze blindsided him to the facts. Helen Franklin was a woman who liked to be grounded. He’d avoided her type for years.

They were incompatible. He was just a little weakened from the pain that was starting to gnaw at his leg again and her terrific home cooking.

‘Still, I inherited his bike. I guess I have that to thank him for.’

That explained why he’d been so concerned about the machine. It wasn’t just because it was highly valuable, it obviously had sentimental value to him.

‘She’s a beautiful Harley,’ Helen commented. ‘Is it a ’60 or ’61?’

James regarded her for a moment. ‘You know something about bikes?’

Helen stifled the smile that sprang to her lips at his amazement. ‘I know a little.’

‘It’s a 1960.’

‘It seemed to survive the crash OK.’

He smiled. ‘An oldy but a goody.’

She grinned back at him. It was something her father would have said, his own classic Harley being his most prized possession. Looking at James, she could see why her mother had fallen for her father. The whole free-spirit thing was hard to resist. James’s handsome face was just as charming, just as charismatic as the man who had fathered her.

She blinked. ‘So…what…you just roam around the country, going from one locum job to the next?’

He nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Sounds…interesting.’ Actually, she thought it sounded terrible. No continuity. No getting to know your patients or your colleagues or your neighbours. It sounded lonely.

‘Oh, it is. I love it. The bush is drastically under-serviced. There are so many practices crying out for locums. Too many GPs working themselves into the ground because they can’t take any time off. Much more than city practices. I really feel like I fill a need out here. And bush people are always so friendly and happy to see you.’

‘But don’t you ever long to stay in one place for a while? Really get to know people?’

He shrugged. ‘I prefer to spread myself around. Locums are in such high demand out here—’

‘Tell me about it,’ Helen interrupted.

He smiled. ‘I’d like to think I can help as many stressed out country GPs as I can rather than just a few for longer. And, anyway, it suits my itchy feet.’

She suspected James Remington could have done anything he’d put his mind to. He looked like a hot-shot surgeon at home breaking hearts all over a big city hospital yet he chose to lose himself in the outback. ‘Not a lot of money in it,’ she commented.

‘I do all right,’ he said dismissively. ‘General practice has its own rewards.’