The Australian's Proposal (Mills & Boon By Request): The Doctor's Marriage Wish / The Playboy Doctor's Proposal / The Nurse He's Been Waiting For (41 page)

She was making fun of him, but still it hurt, and
somehow, because this was Grace and maybe because Bill and Daisy had loved one another for seventy years or maybe even because within minutes they could all be dead, he started telling her.

‘We’d known each other for ever, Nikki and I, our parents friends enough for me to call hers Aunt and Uncle. She left town to go to university in Townsville while I went to Brisbane for my training. Then, about three and a half years ago, her parents were killed in a car accident. She came home to see to everything, I helped her—well, my parents arranged everything for her, but I was there for comfort.’

Grace felt his arms tighten around her, and kept as still as she could. She wasn’t sure if she really wanted to hear about him loving Nikki, but listening to Harry was definitely better than listening to the raging fury of the cyclone and wondering if any of them would survive.

And maybe he needed the catharsis …

‘Comfort is physical, as you know, and suddenly we both felt the attraction that being close had stirred. Wild attraction, heightened most probably on Nikki’s side by grief.’

He paused then added in an undertone, ‘I didn’t have that excuse.

‘We thought it love, Grace, and married, caught in a whirl of physical delight that left no room for plans or practicality, then, as suddenly as it had come, it seemed to leave. Not the physical attraction—that was always there—but when we weren’t in bed there was—I can only describe it as an emptiness. Nikki was still grieving for her parents and she also missed her job, while I spent more time than was necessary at mine.’

Grace turned in his arms so she could hold him. She told herself it was because the noise of the cyclone was as loud as an express train roaring through a tunnel, but really it was so she could rub her hands across his back, offering silent sympathy he might or might not want.

Her heart ached for him—for the pain she heard in his voice and in the silence that now lay between them. But she couldn’t prompt him, knowing he had to get through this story his own way.

‘We didn’t talk about it—in fact, I didn’t know if Nikki felt it—but I was gutted, Grace, to think I’d mucked up so badly. Then I thought about it—really thought about it—and decided it would all be OK—that we could work it out. We’d always loved each other as friends, so surely that would remain as a solid foundation, and we had compatibility, so that had to count in building a future …’

He paused again and she felt his chest fill with air then empty on a sigh. She tightened her arms around him, offering the only comfort available.

‘Eventually she told me she’d been offered a new television job in Brisbane. She’d been with the same station in Townsville but this was a promotion. Would I transfer to the city to be with her?’

Somewhere outside a tortured screeching noise suggested a roof was being torn apart. Mrs Aldrich’s roof?

Grace snuggled closer, fear moving her this time.

‘Go on,’ she prompted, knowing Harry’s story was probably the only thing holding at bay the terror that was coiled within her.

‘I said I would, wanting so much to make it work, although all my life all I’d ever wanted was to be a policeman here where I belonged. We made arrangements, looked at housing on the internet, then she went to Townsville to see her old boss.’

The story stopped, and with it the noise.

‘It’s over?’ Grace whispered, then heard how loud her voice sounded in the silence and realised she hadn’t whispered at all.

‘It’s the eye passing over,’ Harry told her as he slid out from under the bed and cautiously lifted the mattress aside. ‘You two stay right where you are. I’ll check on Karen and the baby and be straight back.’

Grace reached out to stop him, but it was too late, so she had to wait, fearful for his safety, having heard enough of cyclones to know that the eye was only the calm before the storm returned, only this time the wind would blow the other way.

‘Both sound asleep, would you believe,’ Harry reported as the howling, roaring noise drew close again. ‘I guess having a baby and being born are both tiring experiences.’

He slid beneath the bed, lying between the two women, reporting to Mrs Aldrich that her kitchen roof had gone and a part of the bathroom wall had been damaged, but generally things looked OK. Radio calls to the station had assured him everything was OK there and at the civic centre.

‘It’s the second blow, once everything is loosened, that knocks houses about,’ Mrs Aldrich told him, as they all squiggled around to relieve cramped muscles and tired bones. ‘Will you go on talking, Harry?’ she
added. ‘I can’t hear the words but I like to hear your voice—it’s very soothing and it makes the cyclone noise easier to bear.’

Horrified that Daisy had even heard his voice, Harry hesitated, but the cyclone was roaring again, and Grace had snuggled close, so it was easy to finish the tale he’d carried inside him for so long, locked away but probably festering because it hadn’t ever been told.

He tucked Grace closer, held her tightly, and blurted out the words.

‘She went to Townsville to have an abortion.’

There, it was said.

For the first time he’d actually told someone about the almost routine operation that had led to the discovery of Nikki’s inoperable cancer.

He felt Grace stiffen, then her hand crept up to touch his face, cupping his cheek in her palm.

‘No wonder seeing that new baby hurt you,’ she whispered, her voice choked with tears.

He shook his head although he knew neither woman would see the gesture, frustrated at this situation. What was he thinking, lying under a bed—a bed with a dead body in it—in a category five cyclone, playing out his past like a series of episodes in a soap opera?

Fortunately—for his sanity—at that moment the roar grew louder and above the wild fury of the wind they heard the scream of metal sheets being torn from their anchors, nails screeching in protest as the rest of Daisy’s roof peeled away.

‘The weight of rain could bring the ceiling down so we stay here until we know the wind has eased,’ Harry warned the two women, reaching out and drawing both
of them closer, knowing they all needed human contact at the moment. ‘Now Willie’s crossed the coast, he’ll lose his power.’

But what had that power done as it passed over the town? What havoc had it caused?

Anxiety tightened all the sinews in his body—anxiety for all the townsfolk but most of all for two small children out there on the mountain.

Had Georgie and Alistair reached them in time?

Were all four safe?

Max watched the light creep into the blackness of the hole in which they huddled, turning the dark shadows that had frightened him in the night into harmless posts and odds and ends of timber.

The kid was sleeping, curled up in a puddle of muddy-looking water, Scruffy in his arms. The kid had needed Scruffy, not because he’d said anything but because the way his face had looked when Max had heard Georgie calling to them and he’d answered her.

Instead of being happy they’d been found, the kid had started crying. Not bawling loudly, like CJ sometimes did when he was hurt, but silent crying, the light from the torch Mum was shining on them picking out the tears running down his face.

Max had thought at first he was crying because Mum had said she couldn’t get them out straight away because it was too dangerous and that they’d have to wait until the cyclone stopped blowing trees over. But the kid had kept crying even after Mum had thrown down her leather jacket and some chocolate bars, and
Max had figured out he was crying because his Mum wasn’t there.

So Max gave him Scruffy to hold because earlier, when Max had had a little cry because Mum wasn’t there, holding Scruffy had made him feel really, really brave.

Max pushed the leather jacket over the sleeping kid and waited for more light to come.

I
T WAS
another hour before the noise abated sufficiently for Harry to slide out from under the bed. The roof had indeed gone and the ceiling had collapsed in the far corner of the room, pouring water onto the floor, but thankfully the rest of the room was, for the moment, dry.

Grace joined him, staring about her at the devastation, then heading for the door.

‘Don’t go,’ he said, catching her hand. ‘You stay here with Daisy while I check out what’s solid and what isn’t.’

She turned, anxious eyes scanning his face in the murky dawn light.

‘Be careful,’ she said, touching her hand to his cheek, so many things unspoken in the gesture that Harry felt a hitch in his breathing.

The house was a mess. One of the bathroom walls had collapsed across the bath, so Harry had to toss boards and beams aside to get to the mattress-covered bath. Fortunately the ceiling had held so the room was relatively dry. He could hear Karen and the baby both crying, Karen hysterical when he lifted the mattress.

‘Come on, I’ll help you out. You can shelter in the bedroom with Daisy until it’s safe enough to drive you to the hospital.’

‘With Daisy and dead Bill? I can’t do that. I can’t take my baby into the room with a dead person.’

Harry sighed but he kind of understood. There’d been ghosts beneath that bed with him.

‘All right, but I’ll have to put the mattress back on top of you.’

‘That’s OK,’ Karen said, stifling her sobs and settling back down in her nest of blankets. ‘Now it’s getting lighter and I know you’re not all dead and that noise has stopped, it’s not nearly as scary.’

He replaced the mattress—if the ceiling did come down he didn’t want wet plasterboard smothering the pair of them—then did a recce through the rest of the house. To his surprise, the dining room, a square room to one side of the kitchen, was apparently unscathed, and from the kitchen he could see that the roof in that area remained intact.

Once they had tarpaulins over the rest of it, Daisy might be able to move back into her home as soon as services like electricity, sewerage and water were restored, although that could be weeks away.

Sure his charges were safe, he ducked into the dining room, sat down on a chair and pulled out his cellphone. Time to check on the damage in the rest of the town.

Unbelievable damage from all accounts, the policeman on duty at the station told him, but no reports of casualties. Harry breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Just let me sort out a few problems here,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll do a run through town to see what’s what.
Expect me back at base in about an hour. In the meantime I’ll be on air on the radio or you can get me on the cellphone.’

He rang the hospital. No word from Georgie but they’d despatch an ambulance to pick up Karen, the baby and Daisy Aldrich. They’d also contact the funeral home to send a car for Bill.

Grace was standing in the doorway as he ended the call.

‘
Did
she have the abortion because of her career?’ she asked, and the question was so unexpected he answered without thinking.

Answered honestly.

‘No,’ he said bleakly, remembering the terrible day he’d stared in disbelief at Nikki while she’d told him this—and then, disbelief turning to denial, added that she was dying of cancer. ‘At least, she said not, but it might have had something to do with it. She said she had it because we didn’t love each other. She said she knew that almost as soon as we were married—knew it was just lust between us, lust and her grief, and that I was there. She said she didn’t want to bring a baby into that situation because without love we’d probably split up.’

Grace came closer and put her arms around him, holding him tightly.

‘Then she told me about the cancer—that when she had the operation they found inoperable cancer.’

‘She was dying of cancer?’

Harry nodded.

‘Which made my anger at her—my fury that she’d gone ahead and aborted my child without discussing it
with me—totally absurd. The baby wouldn’t have lived anyway, but that fact couldn’t penetrate the anger. I said things then that should never have been said—hard, hot, angry things, and through all that followed—her time at home and then in hospital—that was the guilt I had to carry. To have reacted with anger towards Nikki who’d been my friend for ever, to have hurt her at any time, let alone when she was dying …’

His shoulders hunched and he bent his head as if the weight of the emotional baggage he’d carried since that time still burdened his body.

‘Physical attraction, Grace, do you wonder I’m suspicious of it?’

‘But anger is a natural reaction to bad news,’ Grace whispered to him. ‘Your anger might have found an outlet in yelling about the abortion but it would have been far deeper than that—it would have been about the death sentence Nikki, your friend and lover, had just received.’ She held him more tightly. ‘It was natural, not cruel or unfair, Harry, and I’m sure Nikki would have understood that.’

‘Would she?’ he whispered hoarsely, the headshake accompanying the words telling Grace he didn’t believe her.

The wailing cry of a siren told them the ambulance was close by. Grace let him go and headed for the door, wanting to help Karen and the baby out of the bath.

She heard the vehicle pull up, the sound of doors opening, the wheels on a stretcher dropping down.

‘So now you know why he feels the way he does,’ she muttered helplessly to herself, ‘but what if it isn’t just physical attraction?’

She understood so much more now—understood it was guilt and anger at himself that prompted not only Harry’s risk-taking but also the emotional armour he’d drawn around himself.

Grace mulled it over as she led the paramedics first into the bathroom to collect Karen and baby William, then, once they were safely loaded, she walked with Daisy to the ambulance.

‘Yes, I’ll stay with Bill until the people from the funeral home arrive,’ she promised Daisy, and was surprised at Daisy’s protest.

‘You’ll do no such thing—you stay with Harry. Cyclone Willie shook a lot of things loose in that boy’s heart. He’s hurting and he needs someone with him.’

‘As if Harry would ever admit to needing someone,’ Grace said, but fortunately the funeral car arrived at that moment so she didn’t have to make a choice.

Harry had returned to the dry refuge of the dining room while she’d been seeing the two vehicles depart. He looked grey with fatigue—or was it more than that? He looked …

Despairing?

‘Georgie? You’ve heard from Georgie?’

He shook his head, then muttered, ‘I’m thinking no news is good news out there. I told Alistair we’d left the vehicle beyond the fallen tree—they could have sheltered in that.’

But this not good but not precisely bad news did nothing to ease the knots of worry in his features.

‘What’s wrong?’ Grace asked, walking towards him and reaching out to take his hands. Watching his face carefully, ready to read a too-easy lie.

But he didn’t lie, saying only, ‘It’s Sport,’ in a tone of such flat despair Grace thought her heart would break.

‘Dead?’ she whispered, then remembered where the dog had been. ‘Your parents? They’re OK?’

‘Sport’s not dead but gone. My parents are fine. Very little damage to the house, although the sheds have been destroyed and the sugar crop’s flattened. But Sport’s disappeared. Mum said he grew more and more agitated as Willie passed over, then, when Dad opened the door to look at the damage during the calm of the eye, Sport took off, last seen heading back towards the town.’

Grace pictured Harry’s parents’ place, not far from the sugar mill on the outskirts of town.

She could imagine the dog, hip-hopping his way through the fury of the cyclone.

Sport, a ragged, crippled mutt that had somehow wormed his way through the emotional barriers Harry had built around himself.

Wormed his way into Harry’s heart.

She wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly.

‘I love you, Harry,’ she said, although it was the last thing she’d meant to say.

Bloody dog!

She was resting her head against Harry’s chest so couldn’t see his reaction, although she felt his chest move with a sharp intake of air.

‘I know you don’t want to hear that,’ she added, anxious to get it all smoothed over and things back to normal between them again. ‘But we’ve been through
so much—touched by death then welcoming new life, our physical world destroyed around us—I had to say it, and it’s OK because I don’t expect you to love me back. I’ve got over love before and I’ll get over this, but it needed to be said.’

One of his arms tightened around her and he used his free hand to tilt her chin, so in the rain-dimmed morning light she saw his face.

Saw compassion, which she hated, but something else.

Surprise?

Natural enough, but was it surprise?

Before she could make another guess, Harry bent his head and kissed her, his lips crushing hers with hot, hard insistence. She melted into the embrace and returned the kiss, letting her lips tell him, over and over again, just how she felt.

One corner of her mind was aware of the futility of it all, but this was Harry and right now he needed whatever physical comfort she could give him.

And
she
needed something that at least felt like love …

Perhaps a minute passed, perhaps an hour, although, looking at her watch as she pushed out of Harry’s arms, Grace knew it hadn’t been an hour.

Two, three minutes maybe—a short time out from all the chaos that lay both behind and ahead of them.

And if her heart cringed with shame that she’d told Harry how she felt—a confession prompted by pity that he’d lost his dog, for heaven’s sake—then she was good enough at pretence by now to carry on as if the words had not been spoken.

Which, she knew, was what Harry would do …

‘We’ve got to go. Sport will be looking for you,’ she said, and Harry nodded.

‘Damn stupid dog!’

‘We’ll look at your place first,’ Grace said.

Harry turned towards her, frowning now.

Grace loved him?

‘We can’t go out looking for a dog,’ he growled. ‘I need to see the damage, talk to people, get arrangements going.’

Talk about coming out of left field! Grace, his friend, suddenly declaring love for him?

‘You need to drive through town to see the damage,’ this friend he suddenly didn’t know reminded him, then she repeated what she’d said earlier. ‘We’ll go past your place first.’

And now carrying on as if she hadn’t just dropped a bombshell on him.

As if love had never been mentioned.

He had to put it right out of his mind. The town and its people needed him—and needed him to have a fully functioning brain, not some twitchy mess of grey matter puzzling over love and Grace.

Grace first—he’d deal with Grace the friend and that way might not keep thinking about the Grace he’d kissed.

Twice …

‘What’s this
we?
I’ll drop you home, that’s if your cottage is still standing. Or at the hospital. You need to sleep.’

‘No, Harry, we’ll do a drive around town then you can drop me at SES Headquarters so I can start sorting out what’s needed and who we’ve got to help.’

Unable to think of a single argument against this—well, not one that she would listen to—he led the way out to where he’d left the police vehicle, tucked in under the Aldrichs’ high-set house. It seemed to have survived the onslaught with only minor damage.

Sadness filled her heart as Grace snapped her seat belt into place. She sent a sidelong glance at the object of her thoughts, who was talking seriously to someone on his cellphone. Now those fatal words had been said, they could never be unsaid, so things could never really be the same between them again.

That was probably just as well, because although she’d spoken lightly about getting over love, she knew this was going to take a huge effort, and not seeing much of Harry would certainly help.

Although, comparing what she’d felt for James with what she felt for Harry, maybe he was right about physical attraction giving an illusion of love.

Certainly the love she’d felt for James had never hurt like this …

It was at this stage of her cogitations that she became aware of the world around her—or what was left of it.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she whispered, trying desperately to make some sense of the devastation that lay around them. Harry was driving very slowly and carefully, picking a path along a road strewn with corrugated iron, fibro sheeting, furniture and bedding, not to mention trees, branches and telegraph poles, the latter flung about as if they’d weighed no more than matches.

The rain poured down with unrelenting insistence, as if Nature hadn’t yet done enough to bring the town of Crocodile Creek and its inhabitants to their knees.

‘We’ll need the army. The mayor phoned earlier. He’s already asked the premier for help,’ Harry said as he pulled into his driveway.

‘But today?’ Grace asked, staring helplessly around. ‘What can we do today? Where do we start? How can we help people?’

‘Food and water. I’ll check Sport’s not here, then drive around town. We’ll stop at the civic centre first, although I’ve had a report that everyone’s OK there. We’re broadcasting messages asking anyone who needs help to get out of their house to phone the dedicated line at the police station—the number we gave out at the end of all the cyclone warnings.’

‘Four, zero, six, six, eight, eight, nine, nine,’ Grace repeated, remembering the trouble Harry had had getting a number so easy to remember.

The radio was chattering at them. All downed power poles and torn lines would have to be removed before the authorities would consider turning power back on. No reports of casualties so far, apart from those lost in the bus crash. Banana plantations and cane fields had been flattened. The farmers were in for a grim year, but Willie, his violence spent, had continued moving westward and was now dumping much-needed rain on the cattle country beyond the mountains.