‘Are you OK?’ he asked, helping her to her feet.
She tried to brush him off, but he could see the pain like a misty shadow in her grey-blue eyes, so he kept his hold gentle but firm as she regained her balance.
He ran his gaze over her. ‘Your knees are bleeding,’ he said. ‘Let me help you inside to clean them up.’
‘I’m all right,’ she said, but it was clear she wasn’t. She looked shaken and pale and her bottom lip was trembling slightly, as if she was fighting tears. It had been tough at the Pelleris’, he was the first to admit that, but she was a qualified medic, for pity’s sake. If she was going to last any time in the bush she would have to toughen up, and fast.
Jacob put an arm around her shoulders and helped her to the front door, his body springing to awareness of her petite feminine frame tucked into the strength of his. Her long blonde hair tickled the bare skin on his arm, and he could smell its alluring summer fragrance of frangipani and coconut.
After his break-up with Melissa he had been determined not to do the rebound thing, but weeks and then months had gone by and he had started to forget how nice it felt to hold someone close. However, Dr Frances Nin was just the sort of woman he usually avoided. Touchy, argumentative and prickly, not exactly the qualities he was looking for in a life partner. But he had to admit she packed quite a visual punch.
Rufus barked as they came in but Jacob issued him with a
stern command to sit in case he bumped against Fran. ‘Which way to the first-aid kit?’ he asked.
‘Look, Sergeant Hawke,’ she began, ‘this is totally unnecessary. It’s just a scratch.’
‘Jacob.’
She blinked at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘You can call me Jacob,’ he said with a crooked tilt of his lips. ‘Pelican Bay isn’t big on formality, or hasn’t anyone told you that?’
‘Jacob…’ She slipped out of his hold, her cheeks the colour of a soft pink rose. ‘Thanks for the lift but really I would much rather be alone right now.’
Jacob made an L with his fingers and rested it against his chin and mouth as he looked down at her musingly.
‘He really did a good job on you, didn’t he?’
Her chin came up and a storm brewed in her grey-blue eyes. ‘I have already told you I am not interested in discussing my private life,’ she said.
‘What was his name?’
Her hands fisted by her sides, flashes of anger in her gaze as it clashed with his. ‘I realise it is a part of your job to ask questions but to put it bluntly, Sergeant Hawke, I have no intention of answering them.’
‘Where’s the first-aid kit?’ he asked again.
She crossed her arms and angled her head towards the door. ‘I have two words for you, Sergeant. Leave. Now.’
Jacob moved past her to where he supposed the nearest bathroom was, a part of him enjoying the verbal tussle with her. He liked the way her eyes lost their soulless look when she battled head to head with him. He suspected behind that fragile the-world-is-against-me demeanour was a spirited young woman who just needed some time to sort herself out.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked as she limped after him into the downstairs bathroom.
He opened a couple of drawers below the basin before he found what he was looking for. ‘Sit on the toilet seat while I clean those scratches,’ he said.
She stood mulishly, still glaring at him with those thundercloud eyes. ‘I am quite capable of seeing to my own scratches, Sergeant Hawke. I am a doctor, remember?’
He dabbed a cotton-wool ball with antiseptic. ‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ he said. ‘When word gets around about your heroic success in saving Ella Pelleri, just about every resident in Pelican Bay is going to be knocking on your door for a consultation.’
‘We both know it wasn’t me that saved her,’ she said.
His eyes locked on hers before he returned to assembling the first-aid items on the bench. ‘I figure it’s like loosening the lid on a jar for someone.’
‘What?’
He looked sideways to see her frowning at him in confusion. ‘When I was a little kid…’ He paused for a second before continuing, ‘My mother had trouble unscrewing jars, or so she said. I would try my hardest to unscrew it but in the end I would hand it back to her, but each and every time she would say I had loosened it for her. The way I see it, you had the situation more or less in control, apart from momentary panic, which could have happened to anyone given the circumstances. I just loosened the lid on it for you.’
Her mouth pulled even tighter but he saw a flicker of consternation pass through her eyes. ‘Even so, I’m not obliged to see anyone while I am here in town,’ she said. ‘I haven’t even got a prescription pad with me.’
He placed a hand on her shoulder and with gentle pressure
forced her to sit on the closed toilet seat. ‘I am sure there are prescription pads at the clinic as well as anything else needed to run a small one-doctor practice.’
Fran felt her breathing go out of whack as he hunkered down in front of her. He was wearing his gunbelt complete with handcuffs and mobile phone and radio, adding to his dangerous, don’t-mess-with-me air. Her shoulder was still tingling from the pressure of his large warm hand, the nerves beneath her skin tap-dancing in delight. She couldn’t help staring at his hands. His fingers were twice the thickness of hers, long and tanned with neatly clipped square nails. The knuckles of his right hand were grazed, and she wondered if he had got that in the line of duty or doing some sort of handyman job.
‘Ouch!’ She jerked back as he dabbed her scraped knees with the cotton wool.
‘Sorry, but, believe me, this is hurting me more than it’s hurting you.’
Fran peered at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Are you laughing at me, Sergeant Hawke?’ she asked.
He gave her a glinting half-smile that did strange things to her stomach, making it tip upside down like a quickly flipped pancake. ‘Now, why would I do that, Dr Nin?’ he asked.
She scowled as he continued to dab at her knees. ‘I wish you would stop calling me that.’
He met her gaze in between dabs. ‘Too formal for you?’
She blew out a sigh. ‘I don’t feel like a doctor any more…at least I don’t want to.’
He placed two pieces of sticky plaster on each knee before he straightened. ‘So you’re going to throw away all those years of study to do what? Go on endless holidays?’ he asked, a disapproving frown narrowing the distance between his eyes as he looked down at her.
Fran stood up gingerly, conscious of how close he was standing to her. She could smell his male smell, warmth, a hint of citrus and a hint of perspiration full of sexy male pheromones, which was dangerously attractive. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in a deliberately airy tone. ‘I’m still thinking about it.’
He scrunched up the wrappers and tossed them in the pedal bin near his feet. ‘Well, while you’re thinking about it, why not think about this?’ he said, locking his gaze with hers. ‘There are people living here who need a doctor, not next week, not next month, but today. You don’t have to put in a ninety-hour week—no one is asking you to. But why not just a couple of hours, once or twice a week until a replacement is found?’
Fran would have pushed past him but it would have meant touching him and that she wanted to avoid. She’d had enough trouble keeping her head while he’d been tending to her knees. Feeling his gentle touch had switched on sensations she could still feel charging through her body. She lowered her gaze and ran her tongue over her lips, feeling cornered and confused. ‘I’m not interested, Sergeant Hawke,’ she said with as much firmness as she could muster, which wasn’t much.
Something about him made her feel deeply disturbed. It wasn’t just his male presence—it was also his commanding air of authority. He was a man used to getting his own way. She could see it in the carved-from-stone contours of his jaw, not to mention the ice-hard focus of his gaze when it locked on hers.
The phone on his belt began to ring and Fran let out a sigh of relief as he moved past her to answer it. Her reprieve was brief, however, for in less than thirty seconds Jacob was back, his car keys already tinkling in his hand.
‘There’s been an accident out on Valley Road,’ he said. ‘A teenager has fallen off her horse—sounds like at the very least a broken leg. The ambulance is away, taking Ella Pelleri to Wollongong Hospital, so the clinic receptionist has called in Careflight. We’ll drop by the ambulance station and pick up their trauma bag. You can stabilise the victim until the chopper arrives.’
‘But I—’ Fran quickly bit back her protest. What would be the point in saying she couldn’t handle it, that two emergencies in one day was asking way too much of her? She could see from the look in Jacob’s eyes there was no way he was going to take no for an answer.
W
ITH
the police siren screeching, Jacob hit speeds Fran had only seen at her Formula One medical training days in Melbourne a couple of years ago. Thankfully the breakneck pace took her mind off everything but surviving the journey in one piece. Even though he had supposedly only been in town only a few months, he seemed to know his way around the back roads, she thought as they arrived at a large property with white post-and-rail fences in less than ten minutes, notwithstanding their detour to the ambulance station for the trauma kit.
Jacob pulled up in the main driveway and grabbed the trauma kit from the back seat while Fran got out on legs that were still smarting from their tumble on the gravel earlier.
In the middle of the main paddock in front of a colonial cottage there was a small group of people—mostly men, from what Fran could see—surrounding a teenage girl lying in the dust. A horse was some distance off, lying on its side, its chest and belly rising and falling as if every breath was like trying to lift a road train off its chest.
The gate to the paddock was at least two hundred metres away, so there was little choice but to climb over the fence.
The oldest of the men broke away from the group and ran across the field towards them. Jacob helped Fran over the fence, and then handed over the trauma kit before scaling the fence effortlessly himself.
‘Candi’s broken her leg, Sergeant Hawke,’ Jim Broderick, the girl’s father, said, looking pinched about his weather beaten face. ‘We’ve done what we can to make her comfortable but she’s in a helluva lot of pain.’
‘G’day, Jim. This is Dr Nin, Carolyn Atkins’s sister, visiting from Melbourne,’ Jacob said as they made their way to the injured girl. ‘She’s very kindly offered to help out until the Careflight arrives.’
‘Thank God,’ Jim said, relief relaxing his tight features for a moment. ‘I’ve been nearly out of my mind since I heard there was no ambulance for at least a couple of hours. My poor kid’s in agony.’
Fran could see the girl’s right thigh was bent back at a right angle. Thankfully her riding boot and sock had been removed, although her foot was obviously blue. She was rigid with severe pain, her teeth chattering and tears streaming amidst the dust on her young freckled face. At least the girl was conscious which made Fran’s panic ease a little. She worked hard on remaining focussed, keeping her head as clear as she could so Jacob would see she was not completely useless in a crisis.
‘Candi, we’ve got a doctor here to help you,’ Jacob said soothingly as he put the bag down for Fran to access. ‘A helicopter is coming soon to take you to hospital.’
‘Hi, Candi, my name is Fran,’ Fran said as she opened the trauma kit. ‘It looks like you’ve got a nasty leg injury. I can see you’re being very brave but let’s see if we can do something about the pain, shall we?’
The girl nodded, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Is Cheeky all right?’ she asked, trying to twist her head to see where she thought her horse was.
Jacob exchanged a quick glance with Fran, his eyes communicating much more than words. Fran caught a glimpse of Jim Broderick’s grim expression and turned back to Candi. ‘You’re the one we are concentrating on now, Candi,’ she said as she gloved up and drew 10 mg of morphine and 10 mg of diazepam into a syringe. Inserting a canula into Candi’s left arm, she administered the drugs and attached a litre of saline, instructing Jacob to pump it in through the IV pump set she had attached.
‘We’re going to have to straighten the leg to try to regain the blood supply to your foot,’ Fran said. ‘I’m sorry, Candi, this will hurt but I’ve given you some pain relief, which should be taking effect now, and we really have to straighten out your leg to avoid permanent damage.’
Under Fran’s direction Jim put his arms around his daughter’s chest while Jacob helped to stabilise her position. Fran gently pulled and rotated Candi’s leg to the normal anatomical position, accompanied by a scream of pain from the girl.
Fran felt for the dorsalis pedis pulse, which had reassuringly returned, together with a pink colour of the foot. She then took a blow-up splint from the kit, applied it to the leg and was about to show Jacob where to blow into the valve to inflate it but he was already onto it.
‘You did really well, Candi,’ Fran said, resting back on her heels in the dust of the paddock. ‘Your leg’s going to be fine. You’ll have to have a cast, of course, and no riding for a couple of months at the very least.’
Candi’s eyes were a little glazed from the drugs she had
been given but she still seemed determined to see where her horse was. ‘Let me up,’ she said, struggling to lift herself up on her elbows. ‘I want to see Cheeky.’
‘I’m sorry, love,’ Jim said, holding her back down. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’
Fran watched as the young girl’s face crumpled, the pain of her leg quite obviously nothing to what she was going through now.
‘Don’t shoot him!’ Candi cried, still trying to get out of her father’s hold, her flailing hands totally ineffectual other than to stir up more dust over everybody. ‘Don’t you dare shoot him!’
Fran felt her chest go tight as she glanced to where the horse was vainly trying to lift its head, its big, lustrous eyes wild with pain and fear. She wondered if the animal somehow knew what was going to happen to him, that this was the end of the road. Fran had seen that look in terminally ill patients’ eyes before. The light of hope fading as realisation dawned. There was no going back, no miracles to pull out of the box.
The sound of the helicopter arriving didn’t quite deaden the sound of the rifle, but thankfully the increase in pain relief Fran had quickly administered meant that Candi hadn’t heard either sound.
‘I don’t know how to thank you,’ Jim said to Fran as his daughter was being loaded onto the aircraft. ‘My wife passed away two years ago. Like Sergeant Hawke’s mother, she had breast cancer. When she died last week it brought back all my memories. And now this…Candi’s all I’ve got.’ He gave another tight swallow.
‘If anything happened to her…’
Fran touched him on the arm, her throat so tight she could barely speak.
Jacob’s mother had died just a week or so ago?
Her brain tumbled with the information, like clothes all twisted and knotted in an overloaded dryer. He had said nothing. Not a word. But, then, it wasn’t as if she knew him well enough to exchange anything but the most basic of information. But had he told anyone? If Jim Broderick knew, surely Beryl at the store would have known also. Fran could sense Jacob was a very private sort of person, but still…
Somehow she brought herself back to the moment to concentrate on Candi’s worried father. ‘Candi will be fine, Mr Broderick. She’s a very brave girl. You must be very proud of her.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back in the saddle for sure. Once that cast is off, you just watch her. I just know she’ll be back.’
Fran stood a few minutes later by Jacob’s side as the chopper lifted off with both Candi and Jim Broderick on board.
‘I didn’t realise your mother had died so recently,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’
Fran was conscious of her words—her totally inadequate words—hanging in the dry, dusty air for a long moment.
‘Thank you.’ His eyes moved away from hers. ‘But it wasn’t sudden and she was well prepared for it.’
And what about you?
Fran wanted to ask.
Were you prepared for it?
But before she could get the words out he broke the small silence.
‘You did a great job, Dr Nin. You handled Candi’s injuries well under the circumstances.’
Fran looked back at the scene of the accident. ‘Did they have to shoot the horse when she expressly asked them not to?’ she asked, looking up at Jacob with a frown pulling at her brow. ‘Why couldn’t they call a vet or something? Surely it would have been a bit more humane.’
He dusted off his trousers where the dust had clung to his knees. ‘This is the country, Dr Nin,’ he said in a pragmatic tone. ‘The nearest vet is two and a half hours away. Just like doctors and police, vets are hard to attract and keep in places like this. The community is small, so making a living for a professional is harder than in the city. We have to do what we can with what we have. Sometimes that means that animals get shot rather than another form of euthanasia, and patients go for days or weeks without medical care.’
Fran pursed her mouth as she inspected his unreadable expression for a beat or two. ‘Are you lecturing me, Sergeant Hawke?’
He hooked his thumbs into his gunbelt as his eyes met hers. ‘You’ve got the skills; this place has the need of those skills, and you’re here for a couple of months. You work it out.’
She bit down on her bottom lip. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking…’
Jacob led the way back to the police vehicle, this time via the gate rather than have her scramble in an ungainly manner over the fence. ‘Jim talked about his daughter getting back in the saddle,’ he said as held the gate open for her. ‘I would imagine, given what she’s just gone through, that will be a huge challenge. Different horse, maybe a different saddle, but the same skills apply.’
Fran frowned as she went through the gate. Was he somehow referring to her situation? Surely Caro hadn’t told him? She had made her sister promise. No one was to know. Fran wanted to allow herself time to come to terms with what had happened without having to go over it again and again every time someone new met her. Anyway, Jacob had implied he’d only met Caro and Nick once or twice. Surely Caro wouldn’t have had time to engineer any of her matchmaking tricks. Or had she?
Fran narrowed her gaze as she sent a covert glance Jacob’s way, but his expression was shadowed by his police hat, making it impossible for her to read it.
‘How are your knees feeling?’ he asked once they were back in the police vehicle.
‘To borrow your own words, Sergeant Hawke, you did a good job.’
He gave her one of his fleeting smiles. ‘You really like to keep your professional distance, don’t you?’
Fran arched her brows at him. ‘You’re the one who keeps calling me Dr Nin when I’ve told you I don’t want to be called that.’
‘You don’t like your name?’ he asked. ‘I admit it’s a bit unusual. But it kind of suits you. Short and to the point.’
‘It’s actually French,’ Fran said, deciding to overlook his provocative comment in case it led to another showdown. ‘Apparently amongst the twigs of my family tree I am related to the writer Anais Nin.’
‘That’s quite a name drop,’ he said, darting a quick glance her way as he turned the vehicle towards town.
‘My mother used to read her stuff. She said it was highly sensual, or words to that effect.’
Fran examined his features during a small silence. ‘I really am very sorry about your mother,’ she said softly. ‘It must still seem unreal to you.’
He sent another quick, unreadable glance her way. ‘No, actually, it’s me who should be apologising,’ he said, his tone sounding gruff. ‘I got the phone call from the hospital the day we had that near collision. I was rushing to get back to the station to sign off some paperwork needed for a court case before I drove to Sydney to organise the funeral.’
Fran mentally cringed at how she had shouted at him on
the roadside and then stormed into the station, not for a moment realising what he had been going through. She had come across as a ranting virago, intent on lecturing him when he had just received the most devastating of news. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘Had she been ill for long?’
‘Yeah.’ He turned out of Valley Road into the one that led past the bay. ‘She was diagnosed a couple of years after my father was killed. It took eighteen years to kill her but she put up a very brave fight.’
‘You were close to her?’
This time his glance had a small rueful smile attached. ‘I wasn’t exactly a mummy’s boy or anything but I loved her and I will miss her. She was a good woman, brave and strong even though life had thrown her some rough stuff.’
Fran felt herself sink even further into the passenger seat. She felt like a complete coward, baulking at the first hurdle that had come along, instead of working her way through her fears to find her rightful place back in the world.
But the thought of going back…
‘I would have liked to have been with her when she died,’ Jacob added. ‘But without a doctor in town it wasn’t possible. She needed strong pain relief and a few weeks ago decided to go back to Sydney. I brought her down most weekends if I wasn’t on duty. She loved the beach. She used to sit for hours on the deck and watch the waves rolling in.’
Fran was starting to see why he thought her refusal to perform as a part-time doctor in the Bay seemed so selfish and shallow. No wonder he was on her back all the time, trying to bully her into a job she felt unable to perform with any competency. She considered telling him but then swiftly changed her mind. He might feel compelled to take her on as some sort of project, just as some of her colleagues had tried to do.
‘I’m so sorry things didn’t work out for her or for you,’ she said, drawing in a scratchy sigh as she looked at the sparkling waters of the bay as it came into view.
The waves were rolling in evenly now, the fringe of white sand against the turquoise water picture-postcard perfect.
If only her life was as perfect, but, then, whose life ever was? Even the happiest and most successful people eventually had to face some sort of tragedy during the course of their lives. The Pelleris very nearly had, and the Brodericks, although saved from disaster this time, had not been so lucky in the past. And then there was Jacob and his mother…
After a moment she turned back to look at him. ‘You said your father was killed. How did he die?’
His face changed, his mouth becoming a flat line of tension, his jaw with its shadow of dark stubble locking like a padlock. ‘He was shot.’
The three words hung in the air.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Fran pressed her lips together as she let the silence ring with the echo of his gunfire statement.
‘Was it…?’ She searched for the right words, even though she knew deep down there were none. ‘Was it an accident?’