Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family. Lilian Darcy

      

      CROCODILE CREEK

      A cutting-edge medical centre. Fully equipped for saving lives and loves!

      Crocodile Creek’s state-of-the-art Medical Centre and Rescue Response Unit is home to a team of expertly trained medical professionals. These dedicated men and women face the challenges of life, love and medicine every day!

      Two weddings!

      Crocodile Creek is playing host to two weddings this year, and love is definitely in the air! But…

      A cyclone is brewing!

      As a severe weather front moves in, the rescue team are poised for action—this time with some new recruits.

      Two missing children!

      As the cyclone wreaks its devastation, it soon becomes clear that there are two little ones missing. Now the team has to pull together like never before to find them…before it’s too late!

Dear Reader

      Our starting point for this second Crocodile Creek mini-series was ‘a cyclone and weddings’, and the whole thing dropped into place with amazing speed when we talked about it together. Something to do with our friendship as writers. The ideas sparked between us and we had no disagreements about how these books should develop.

      Something to do with that whole idea of human celebration in the face of nature’s devastation, too. People just seem to have an innate need to seek renewal and emotional connection even while the storm is still raging, and that balance of loss and renewal seemed so right in these books.

      Some of you may not know this, but cyclones and hurricanes are really the same thing—they just spin in opposite directions—so if you’re wondering just how intense our Cyclone Willie was, think of some of the most infamous hurricanes, only in a region of scattered population, tropical farms and rugged rainforest. Some of the devastation we describe comes from eye-witness accounts of Cyclone Larry, a powerfully destructive storm which hit the coast of far north Queensland in March 2006.

      But of course it’s the positive things we like to focus on as romance writers. There’s more than one happy ending in this book…

      All the best

      Lilian Darcy

      Long-Lost Son: Brand-New Family

      Lilian Darcy

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      LILIAN DARCY is Australian, but has strong ties to the USA through her American husband. They have four growing children, and currently live in Canberra, Australia. Lilian has written over seventy romance novels, and still has more story ideas crowding into her head than she knows what to do with. Her work has appeared on romance bestseller lists, and two of her plays have been nominated for major Australian writing awards. ‘I’ll keep writing as long as people keep reading my books,’ she says. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I love it.’ Find out more about Lilian and her books at her website, www.liliandarcy.com, or write to her at PO Box 532, Jamison PO, Macquarie, ACT 2614, Australia.

      CONTENTS

       COVER

LETTER TO READER

       TITLE PAGE

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

       CHAPTER THREE

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       COPYRIGHT

PROLOGUE

      FELIXX had fallen asleep now, thank goodness. He looked uncomfortable, with his cheek pressed against the sill below the darkened, rain-splashed window of the bus. Janey’s heart hurt when she looked at him. He was only five years old, and he hadn’t spoken a word to her. Not in the two hours they’d been on the bus, or over the past three days since she’d arrived at Mundarri. He hadn’t spoken a word to anyone, and no one could tell her why.

      Was she doing the right thing?

      As soon as news had reached her about Alice’s death, she’d taken indefinite leave from her group general practice in Darwin. Had managed to reach Mundarri via a roundabout route of hops by air in frighteningly small planes, and finally a lift from one of Mundarri’s other residents, a woman named Maharia.

      Everyone at Mundarri seemed to have chosen odd names for themselves. Janey gathered this was part of the philosophy of the place—that you gave yourself a fresh start with a new and more spiritual name. Alice had become Alanya, although Janey could never think of her by that name. Little Felixx had originally been named Francis James, which his dad had soon shortened to Frankie Jay, she remembered.

      Anyway…The Mundarri people had all seemed nice enough. Caring. Very gentle and warm with Felixx, as Janey was learning to call him.

      And yet they let my sister die.

      Yes, OK, so she was a doctor, trained within what the Mundarri people regarded as the uncompromising scientific straitjacket of Western medicine, but the fact was Alice’s liver had packed up and a ‘cleansing diet’ of carrot juice was just never going to cut it in the healing department.

      Alice had needed urgent hospital treatment, and probably a transplant down the track, and the people at Mundarri, out of arrogance or naivety or goodness knows what, hadn’t called an ambulance for her until it had been far too late.

      Thinking about it, Janey found she was crying. Anger and grief and doubt all mixed up together.

      Had she done the right thing?

      Felixx could have stayed at Mundarri. It would have taken some lengthy wrangling with the authorities, but one of the women—Maharia, or who was that other one Felixx had seemed close to? Raina?—could have been named his legal guardian and he would have continued to live in a place that was at least familiar.

      A place whose irresponsible, ill-informed healing philosophies had