afternoon, she’d inherited him, and a quick check of the contact details had confirmed that his father was that Nick, her Nick, the one who had sneaked up on her heart without her knowing it during the course of six years of shared medical studies and had then shattered it to pieces in one single night.
Or maybe she’d broken her own heart by giving it away too eagerly. She’d never really been sure how those things went. Her fault, or his? She could see, now, how much her failed six-year relationship with Ian Mackenzie had been the result of the lessons she’d learned…or had thought she’d learned…from what had happened with Nick.
And now she was Nick’s son’s doctor, and he’d disappeared from the doorway, and she wondered if the reason had anything to do with her. Maybe it was only that his pager had gone off. But if he was trying to avoid her…
Well, he couldn’t do that forever. At some point, they’d have to connect.
CHAPTER ONE
INCREDIBLY, it took two years.
Having taken on Josh Devlin as a patient when he was three years old, Miranda didn’t see his father again until the little boy was five…
‘I can’t come, Miranda. I have to pull out of the whole first week. Maybe even the whole trip.’ Anna Devlin looked white with stress and half-blind to anything else going on around her. She grabbed Miranda’s arm in the middle of the check-in concourse at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport and made the announcement before Miranda even had time to greet her properly.
‘Hey…’
‘My mother’s broken her leg. She’s not going to manage. It just happened today. She slipped on her front steps. I’ve been in six places at once, on the phone, at the hospital. And, of course, it all falls to me. My sisters are saying they can’t possibly come down. I’m so sorry, Miranda. I’m a complete mess.’
‘It’s OK. Slow down a bit, Anna.’ Miranda took a couple of controlled breaths herself in an attempt to encourage her patient’s mother to find some calm. ‘First, is Josh upset that you won’t be going with him? Where is he?’
Anna shook her head distractedly. ‘N-no, he’s all right. Sort of. He’s here, minding his suitcase. A bit overwhelmed. Am I doing the right thing? I can’t see any other option. I’m the one who’s really panicking. I’m trying not to let it show.’
Trying, and failing dismally.
Anna was often emotional and tunnel-visioned, verging on obsessive, although Miranda had tried in various ways to get her to see that it wasn’t good for her son. Anna said all the right things, but couldn’t put her resolutions into practice.
‘Do you want to look at cancelling? Rescheduling for another time?’ Over Anna’s shoulder, Miranda saw two more families arrive, but there was still plenty of time. The flight to Queensland wasn’t due to board for another half-hour.
Anna shook her head at Miranda’s questions. ‘No, Josh would be so disappointed. We’ve been talking about it for weeks. No, he definitely has to go. It would take months to schedule him another stay, wouldn’t it?’
‘Probably,’ Miranda had to admit.
Places at the Crocodile Creek Kids’ Camp on Wallaby Island off the coast of northern Queensland were in high demand. Miranda had a zing in her spirits this afternoon, herself, even though she was going there not on a private holiday but in her professional capacity.
Anna let go of her arm at last and she spotted five-year-old Josh just a few metres away, sitting obediently on his suitcase near the check-in counter. He looked far more calm than his mother. Too calm, maybe. A little subdued. He was still essentially the same kid Miranda had first met two years ago—small for his age, endearingly gap-toothed and urchin-like, a real sweetheart with a healthy capacity for mischief and numerous hospital admissions under his belt. Anna was totally and single-mindedly devoted to him, and he was her only child.
There wouldn’t be any more now.
Anna and Nick were divorced.
‘He’ll be fine,’ she promised Anna. ‘We’ll take care of him. We have a couple of other kids coming without parents.’
She gestured towards awkward, unconfident Stella Vavunis, aged thirteen, whom she’d already ticked off on her list. Stella’s dad was supposed to be coming later in the week. As one of the major donors to the new medical centre on Wallaby Island, he would be a guest of honour at Saturday’s official opening. For the first few days, however, Stella would be on her own.
In remission from bone cancer, Stella wasn’t one of Miranda’s own patients, but her heart went out to the girl anyway. Her dark hair was growing back wispy and thin after her chemo, and she’d lost the lower half of her right leg. Adept on her elbow crutches, she was intensely self-conscious about her lost limb and had her new prosthesis covered in a pair of heavy jeans that would be way too hot for the climate of North Queensland.
‘He’s not coming without a parent,’ Anna announced, her stress level visibly rising again. She had an exotic, compelling kind of beauty, with huge eyes, high cheekbones and full lips, and the combination of her good looks and high emotion had begun to draw some attention.
Miranda frowned, a little slow. Too slow, considering how long she’d been waiting for something like this to happen. ‘But…?’
‘That’s the whole thing, Miranda.’ Miranda’s arm was once again captured in a tight grip. ‘That’s the whole reason—well, abig part of it—why I’m so stressed.’ She added in a tone that was half wail, half whisper, ‘He’s coming with Nick.’
Right. With Nick.
She must have looked shocked—and shouldn’t have let it show—because Anna said in a tight voice, ‘Please. Don’t make me dread this any more than I am already. Don’t make Josh dread it, especially.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Nick should be here within the next ten minutes. He promised me he wouldn’t muck me around on this.’
‘So he’s coming for the whole two weeks? At such short notice?’
Anna rolled her eyes and drawled, ‘I know. It’s a miracle. Actually making a sacrifice for his son for once.’
‘Well, I meant—’ Miranda meant that it was a miracle, just as Anna had said, but without the other woman’s edge of sarcasm and bitterness. It was great that the persistently absent surgeon could step in to fill the breach, just hours in advance of the flight. Her initial shocked gut reaction was her own problem, not Anna’s.
‘I’m hoping it’ll only be for the first week,’ Anna was saying. ‘I’m going to find a way to get up there for the second week if it kills me! Two weeks with Nick will ruin Josh’s stay.’
Had the little boy heard? Miranda wondered. Anna wasn’t sufficiently careful in what she said around her son.
Whether it was one week or two, Nick must have called in some favours, Miranda realised. He would have made a lot of phone calls that morning to get everything organised and taken care of. His willingness to make the effort did surprise her
