although Annabelle hated the nickname, she had to acknowledge he’d worked out who she was.
‘It’s Annabelle,’ she said, turning so she could look into the blue eyes that had most of the female population of the hospital swooning every time he walked into a ward—blue eyes that had snared more than one man’s share of female attention—or so the stories went. ‘Annabelle Donne.’
‘Ah!’ He nodded to himself. ‘I often wondered where it came from. You didn’t strike me as being a walking, talking, deadly poison. More a target of some kind, I would have thought, from the number of times some sick child threw up all over you, or some drunk puked on your shoes.’
He wasn’t smiling as he spoke so she took it as criticism and was about to point out that someone had to look after the patients with stomach upsets when he spoke again.
‘But you’ve cut off all your hair. That’s why I didn’t recognise you. No long schoolgirl plait trailing down your back, no tight little knot thing at the back of your head.’
Schoolgirl plait indeed, but, annoyed though the comment had made her, Annabelle could think of no suitable retort.
She made do with giving him a dirty look, though that didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest.
He studied her for a moment longer, then said, ‘Not that it doesn’t suit you, but hair that length must have taken ages to grow, so why cut it all off?’
There was a surreal aspect to sitting in a plane high above the earth, having a relatively personal conversation about her hair—the loss of which she deeply regretted—with a man she barely knew.
And assumed she wouldn’t like if she did know him…
Yet she found herself answering him.
‘Have you ever smelt bore water?’
He frowned at her, but shook his head.
‘It smells like rotten-egg gas and, as far as I’ve been able to discover, there’s no shampoo yet made that can mask the smell. I did it as much for you—if you are the doctor heading for Murrawalla—as for myself. Travelling long distances in a car with someone who smells like bad eggs isn’t pleasant.’
Nick Tempest stared at the woman in the seat beside him, a woman he knew yet didn’t know. In the A and E department of the big city hospital where both of them had worked, he’d seen her as a calm, competent nurse, quietly spoken and so self-effacing he’d wondered if anyone knew her well. Because she hadn’t been there long they hadn’t shared many shifts, never working on the same team, so maybe his impressions were all wrong. What he did know was that she never shirked the dirty work some other nurses—and doctors—avoided, and that her gentle but firm manner with patients could nearly always avert trouble.
But that woman—the nurse—was very different to this slight but curvaceous woman in the seat beside him. Was it because she was wearing worn jeans and a slightly faded checked shirt instead of a uniform that for the first time he actually registered her as a woman?
Or was it the way her newly cropped hair clung to her head like a dark cap, accentuating the size of her brown eyes, the straight line of her nose and the curve of beautifully defined lips?
No, hair had nothing to do with lips.
Realising his thoughts had strayed into dangerous territory, he made his way carefully back to where this introspection had begun.
‘You cut your hair off so it wouldn’t smell?’
The lips he’d been trying to not look at curled into a teasing smile which, as a man who’d consigned all women to the ‘only when needed’ bin, he shouldn’t have noticed at all, let alone registered as sexy.
Belladonna sexy?
More dangerous ground?
Definitely not! Lack of sleep, that was all it was. He’d been up half the night at the hospital, finishing reports and case-notes, and, naturally enough, though he’d not been on duty, answering calls for help when emergencies came in.
‘Mostly for the smell but also the dust,’ his companion was saying. ‘Dust?’
This conversation was rapidly getting out of hand. He knew she was speaking English, so it couldn’t be that parts of it were lost in translation, but—
‘Bulldust,’ she added, as if this explained everything.
In Nick’s head it just added another level of confusion, and he was sorry he’d started the conversation, although politeness alone meant he’d had to say something to her.
‘Is that an expletive? A slightly more proper form of bull—?’ he heard himself ask.
This time she didn’t smile, she laughed.
How long since he’d laughed?
Laughed out loud in that carefree way?
Relaxed to the extent that a laugh could be carefree?
‘You’ve never been out in the bush before, have you?’
He heard this question, too, but was too distracted by the laughter—the laughing face of the woman beside him and his inner questions—to respond immediately. Besides, the captain of the flight was introducing himself and telling them when they were expected to arrive in Murrawingi, adding that the weather there was fine and warm, and he didn’t expect any turbulence on the flight.
‘Murrawingi?’ Nick found himself repeating. ‘I thought the place we were going to was called Murrawalla. That’s assuming, of course, you’re the nurse half of the hospital team.’
‘No airport at Murrawalla,’ the nurse half explained. ‘As far as I know, the pair we’re replacing will take this plane back to Brisbane, leaving us the hospital vehicle to drive to Murrawalla.’
‘Well, that’s fairly stupid!’ he muttered, annoyed he didn’t know all these things—or perhaps annoyed that she did!
Or was he more unsettled than annoyed? Unsettled?
Because he didn’t know? Control had become important to him—he did know that!
Control had kept him on track when his world had imploded, Nellie ripping out his heart as casually as she’d—
Control!
But the pain he still felt in his chest when he thought of the baby was beyond control. No wonder he didn’t laugh out loud these days.
‘It’s fairly stupid, having to drive to Murrawalla?’ the woman queried.
‘No,’ he grumbled, clamping down on the pain, dismissing his unsettling thoughts and catching up with the conversation—reminding himself that he was looking to the future, not the past—and that he was heading west to learn. ‘Calling places by nearly the same names.’
His companion smiled again.
‘It happens all the time when aboriginal names are used. Further south, there’s Muckadilla
