Bride by Accident

It wasn’t Corey. The voice wasn’t the same. It was deeper. Older?

What cruel joke was this?

She was so confused. She tried to make herself speak, but it was so hard.

‘Let me be,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll be fine, Corey. I’m always fine.’

A voice called then from behind them. It was another voice she didn’t know, loud and male and fearful.

‘You’ve gotta come, Doc.’

It was over. The dream was receding, as she knew it must. Corey—her Corey—put a hand on her forehead and smoothed her dark curls back from her face.

‘Lie still,’ he told her. ‘Help’s coming.’

Sure.

It was the sort of disaster every doctor dreaded.

Dr Devlin O’Halloran rose from the woman he’d been checking and stared around, trying desperately to decide where to go next. The woman was dazed but her breathing was fine, which was all he had time to check. Everything else had to wait.

Triage. Priorities. The problem was there was only one doctor—him—and this disaster might well need a dozen.

This place was so isolated.

Karington National Park, a Queensland paradise where rain-forest met sea, was said to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. The locals who lived here loved it. Tourists thought it was magic.

But the steep cliffs and high mountains meant that the roads here were treacherous, especially at the end of the rainy season when the roadsides were sodden and liable to crumble. The logging truck had come around the bend too fast. One logging truck with an unstable load meeting one school bus with twenty kids on board.

And one tiny, two-seater car with a pregnant driver.

These trucks weren’t supposed to use this route, Dev thought savagely. It might be more direct than the inland road, but it was far more dangerous. By the look of it, the truck had swerved to miss the car. It hadn’t, quite. It had clipped the front, then slammed into the cliff. The logs had been thrown off with force, and they’d rolled down against the school bus. The logs were vast eucalypts from the farmed timberlands north of the national park. They’d crushed the side of the bus and they’d pushed it sideways off the road.

Towards the sea thirty feet below.

They were desperately lucky that the bus hadn’t slid right down. Now it was lying on its side, balanced precariously on the cliff face.

Likely to slide further.

This was chaos.

He couldn’t cope.

Dev had been at a house call only minutes from here when the call had come. An emergency transmitter on the bus console—installed because one of the schoolkids was a severe asthmatic—was linked directly to Dev’s cellphone. Jake had obviously hit the transmit button and yelled that he was needed. Nothing else. The transmission had ended before he’d got details. So Dev had headed along the bus route, expecting an asthma attack, swearing at Jake for not telling him more.

And found this.

Chaos.

There was no one but him.

The truck driver was sitting on the roadside, shocked into immobility. Jake, the local bus driver, was staring at the bus as if he couldn’t believe what was happening.

Children were clambering out the back window of the bus—using it as an emergency exit. Someone seemed to be lifting them out from the inside. They were helping each other down.

Jake was useless.

The bus could slide at any minute.

‘Jake, will you help get these kids out?’ he snapped. ‘I want everyone off the bus—now.’

Why hadn’t Jake already done it? It had been almost five minutes since he’d called.

There were ten or twelve kids on the verge now, clustered in a shocked, confused huddle.

There were still more on the bus. If it slid…

It mustn’t slide. Not yet.

He was helping the kids down from the back windows now, hauling them out, swinging them down to the roadside, giving each a cursory check as he went. The children were battered, bleeding, crying, but there was no time for comfort. He’d practically fallen over the young woman so he’d checked her first, but getting the kids out had to be the highest priority.

Damn, why hadn’t Jake done this before anything? he thought as he realised just how precariously the bus was balanced. The man must be more shocked than he’d thought.

Maybe he was lucky Jake had had the capacity to call him at all.

The kids were still emerging, sliding out into his arms as he lifted them down. Some were crying, but most were so shocked they were simply following instinct. They were from the local primary school—kids aged between six and twelve.

He needed help. He had to get more help.

He had to keep pulling kids out. The bigger ones were out now but someone inside was handing the littlies out to him. The teacher?

‘Come on, you can do it. You must.’

Yeah. The teacher. Colin Jeffries. Devlin recognised his voice, giving shaky directions from inside.

‘I think…I’ve got all I can,’ Colin called, his voice wavering. ‘There’s a couple more trapped but I can’t…I can’t…And Jodie’s in real trouble.’

‘OK, come out yourself,’ Dev called.

Colin did, sliding awkwardly backwards out through the bus’s rear window—the emergency exit that was the only way anyone could get out. Dev moved to help him. In his mid-fifties, his suit ripped and spattered with blood, Colin was bleeding profusely from a deep gash on his face, and he was hauling a kid out after him.

‘Jodie needs help,’ he told Dev, and he laid Jodie down at Devlin’s feet before sitting—abruptly—himself.

There was blood everywhere. Far too much blood.

Some of it was the schoolteacher’s. More than enough to tip him over into unconsciousness, Dev thought grimly.

But the child’s blood was pumping. Triage. Jodie.