The Australian's Proposal. Alison Roberts

be developing an interest in a woman.

      Yet his mind kept throwing up the image of his first sight of her, a slight figure, dressed all in brown, except for those ridiculous purple sandals, standing in the gloomy hallway, with a stray sunbeam probing through the fretwork breezeway above the door and turning the tips of her loose brown curls to liquid gold.

      ‘Is he a good doctor?’ Jack asked, when Hamish had disappeared into the darkness.

      Kate looked in the direction Hamish had taken, but already she could see nothing but inky blackness beyond the glow of the lamp.

      ‘I’ve just started work so I don’t know, but from the way he treated you I’d have to say he is.’

      Jack closed his eyes and lay in silence for a while, but just when Kate had decided he’d drifted off to sleep he opened his eyes again and looked at her.

      ‘So you don’t know anything about the hospital?’ he asked.

      ‘Not a thing, except its reputation is excellent. Apparently the boss, Charles Wetherby, insists on hiring top-class staff and only buying the best equipment, so it has a name for being far in advance of most country hospitals.’

      But her words failed to reassure Jack, who had not only closed his eyes but had now folded his lips into a straight line of worry.

      Seeking to divert him, she pulled out the pad of assessment forms.

      ‘You must be tired, but before you drop off to sleep, how about we fill this out. There aren’t many questions.’

      Jack opened his eyes and looked directly at her.

      ‘I should have died,’ he said, then he closed his eyes again and turned his head away, making it unmistakably clear that the conversation was over.

      ‘Full name?’ Kate asked hopefully. ‘Address? Come on, Jack, we have to do this.’

      But the young man had removed himself from her—not physically, but mentally—cutting the link she’d thought she’d forged when they’d played their ‘whose life sucks the most’ game earlier.

      She lifted his wrist and checked his pulse then wrote the time and the rate on the form. She filled in all the other parts she could, remembering Jack’s initial respiration rate, systolic blood pressure—she’d taken that herself before Hamish had started the second drip—and pulse, writing times and numbers, wondering about all the unanswered questions at the top of the form.

      ‘Asleep?’

      Hamish’s quiet question preceded him into the light. She stood up, careful not to disturb their patient, and moved a little away.

      ‘He wasn’t—just closed his eyes to avoid answering me—but I think he’s genuinely asleep now. I’ve just checked him. His pulse is steadier but his systolic blood pressure hasn’t changed as much as I’d have thought it would, considering the fluid we’re giving him. Do you think there could be internal bleeding somewhere?’

      ‘It’s likely, and though I’ve sutured part of the wound and put a pressure pad on it, I’d say it’s still bleeding.’

      ‘That’s more than a guess, isn’t it?’ Kate looked up at the man who sounded so concerned. They’d moved out of the lamplight, but a full moon had risen and was shedding soft, silvery light into the gorge.

      ‘It’s a long story but we’ve time ahead of us. If you dig into the equipment backpack you’ll find a space blanket to wrap around Jack—there should be a couple of inflatable pillows in there as well. Put one under his feet and one behind his head and cover him with the blanket while I get a cuppa going and find something for us to eat.’

      ‘And then you’ll tell me?’

      Hamish smiled, but it was a grim effort.

      ‘I’ll tell you what I’m guessing.’

      Kate cupped her hands around the now empty mug and looked out at the broad leaves of the cabbage palms that filled the gorge. Hamish’s story of a newborn baby found at a rodeo, the dramatic efforts that had saved his life, the finding of his dangerously ill mother, and the fight to save her life, was the stuff of television medicine, while feuding neighbours and heart attacks turned it into soap opera.

      Maybe she’d got it wrong.

      She turned to Hamish, sitting solidly beside her at the entrance to the cave.

      ‘So you think Jack is Charles Wetherby’s nephew, sacked from the family property, run by Charles’s brother Philip, for consorting with the Cooper girl, daughter of the Wetherbys’ sworn enemies who live next door. And you’ve put all this together because his wound is bleeding and you think he has von Willebrand’s disease.’

      ‘Lucky—the baby—has von Willebrand’s disease and it runs through the Wetherby family,’ Hamish said patiently. ‘Originally, back when Lucky was found, Charles had no idea his nephew had been working at Wetherby Downs, because Charles and Philip rarely spoke to each other. But since Jim Cooper was admitted to hospital with a heart attack, Charles has been anxious about the Coopers’ property and that forced him to speak to Philip—’

      ‘Who told him about Jack and Megan—OK, I get that bit,’ Kate assured him. ‘And the family feud—I can understand that. But if Jack is Charles’s nephew, and Charles and Philip don’t get on, why’s Jack so against going to hospital at Crocodile Creek? It’s a good uncle and bad uncle scenario—like good cop and bad cop. You’d think he’d be happy to be under his good uncle’s care. Family does count, you know.’

      Before the words were fully out, she knew they were a mistake. She didn’t need to look at Hamish to know those darned expressive eyebrows of his would be on the rise.

      ‘Look,’ she told him, wishing she was standing up and a little further away from him but resigned to making the best of things. ‘The story I told Jack—well, that comes under the heading of nurse-patient confidentiality so, please, pretend you never heard it and don’t you dare breathe so much as a word of it to anyone. I went back to work for a week after my mother died, and if one more person had put their arm around me or thrown me a “poor Kate” look, I tell you, I’d have slit their throat with the nearest scalpel. Stuff happens, and you have to move on. I’ve moved on, and that’s it.’

      He nodded but didn’t speak. In the end she had to prompt him.

      ‘So why’s Jack worried about going to Crocodile Creek?’

      ‘He has a bullet in his leg.’

      Kate turned to frown at the man beside her.

      ‘This is the bush. Out here, from what I’ve heard, people tote guns all the time. They shoot things—wild pigs and water buffalo and snakes. From the evidence of road signs on the drive up, they even shoot road signs. So he shot himself, gun going off as he climbed through a fence—isn’t that what happens? Or maybe Digger shot him by accident.’

      ‘So where’s Digger now? If he shot Jack by accident, why would he call for help then disappear?’

      ‘Because he had to be elsewhere. Had to take his cattle to market or organise a rodeo. I’m a city girl, how would I know where he had to be?’

      She saw the glimmer of white teeth as Hamish smiled, but the cheerful expression passed quickly.

      ‘Outback people aren’t like that. They don’t desert their mates. And Jack’s worried about being disinherited for something that’s happened since his uncle sacked him. My guess is he met up with some unsavoury characters—no doubt innocently, he’s a city kid too, remember—and when he realised something was wrong, he tried to leave.’

      ‘And someone shot him? To stop him leaving? Someone who’s out there? With a gun?’

      Kate must have sounded more panicky than she’d realised, for Hamish put a comforting arm around her shoulders and drew her close. It was probably a ‘poor Kate’ kind of hug