am not exaggerating, and if that is the extent of your useful advice then I suggest you shut up now and leave.’
She crossed her arms and he suddenly noticed she had breasts. Small but round and … He hauled his gaze away. ‘It’s been a few months since anyone’s lived here, although I would have thought someone would’ve checked out the house before you arrived. Who did you talk to in Administration?’
She stepped back inside, her gaze darting left and right and her long legs moving gingerly. ‘No one.’
He followed. ‘No one?’ Usually Julie was very efficient.
‘Me coming up here was—’ She stopped abruptly for a moment. ‘I rushed up here because the town was desperate. The fax telling you I was coming probably only arrived a few hours before me.’
They’d been desperate for weeks so her hasty arrival without the usual planning didn’t make a lot of sense and he was about to ask her about it when a mouse raced out from under the couch.
Poppy leapt into the air, her long T-shirt rising up to expose creamy white thighs.
Matt tried not to look and instead marched like a foot soldier on patrol, punching open the kitchen door. Every surface was covered in mouse scats.
He heard Poppy’s shocked gasp from the doorway but by the time he’d turned, her face was the usual mask of control, although she had a slight tremble about her.
‘Just fabulous. This really is the icing on the cake of a stellar few days, and yet the poets wax lyrical about the bush.’
A startling fragility hovered around her eyes despite her sarcasm and he had an unexpected moment of feeling sorry for her. He shrugged it away. ‘Living with a few creepy-crawlies is all part of the Bundallagong allure.’
‘Not from where I’m standing it isn’t. I think we have definition conflict on the word “few”.’
Again he found himself wanting to smile yet at the same time a feeling of extreme restlessness dragged at him. He flung open cupboards and found mice squeaking and scurrying everywhere amidst bags of pasta, cereal, oats and biscuits, all of which had been chewed and their contents scattered. He slammed the doors shut. ‘OK, you were right. It’s a plague and with this many mice it probably means you don’t have a python.’
Her eyes widened like the ongoing expanse of Outback sky and her hands flew to her hips. ‘No snake? And that’s supposed to make me feel better? Hell, and they give surgeons a bad rap about their bedside manner.’
This time the urge to smile won. ‘Actually, a python would have meant fewer mice. I haven’t seen an infestation like this in years. Your predecessor must have left food and I guess the cleaners figured it was non-perishable and left it for the next occupant. Thing is, time marched on and the mice moved in. Julie can get the exterminator to come in the morning.’
‘The morning.’ The words came out as a choked wail loaded with realisation. Another mouse shot past her and she stiffened for a second before hastily retreating to the lounge room.
Matt crossed the kitchen and leaned against the architrave, watching her. She had her back to him and was standing on tiptoe, reducing her contact with the floor to the bare minimum. One hand tugged at the base of the T-shirt in an attempt to make it longer, and the other pressed her mobile phone to her ear as she spoke briskly.
‘Yes, I need the number for motels in Bundallagong. I don’t have a pen so can you put me through direct?’
He thought about the suit she’d worn when they’d met and how it had been followed by surgical scrubs. Both garments had given her a unisex look, but the baggy shirt she wore now hid little. Poppy Stanfield might sound like a general but she had the seductive curves of a woman.
Heat hit him, making him hard, followed immediately by a torrent of gut-wrenching guilt. He loved Lisa. No woman could match her but for some reason his body had disconnected from his brain and was busy having a lust-fest. He hated it and every part of him wanted to get the hell out of the house and away from Poppy Stanfield and that damn T-shirt. But he couldn’t leave, not until he knew she was settled in a motel. So he moved instead, putting distance between them by crossing the room and tugging his gaze away from the sweet curve of her behind that swelled out the T so beautifully that his palm itched.
He stared at the blank walls and then at the couch with a ferocious intensity he’d never before given to decor. He noticed a significant-size hole in the material covering the couch and realised the inside was probably full of rodents too. It would take days before baits and traps took effect, making the house liveable again.
He started making plans in his head to keep his mind off those long, shapely legs. As soon as he knew which motel she’d got a room at, he’d set the GPS in the hospital vehicle for her so she wouldn’t get lost at this late hour. There’d be no point driving her because she’d need the car to get to and from the hospital.
Yeah, that, and you don’t want to be in a car alone with her.
Poppy’s voice suddenly went silent and the next moment, with a frustrated yell, she hurled her phone with a great deal of feeling onto the soft cushions of the couch. It was her first display of ‘surgical temper’.
The outburst—so very different from Lisa’s quiet approach—made him feel less guilty about getting hard, and yet it was so full of energy and life that it swirled around him, both pulling him in and pushing him away. After months of not feeling anything this maelstrom of emotions confused and scared him, and when he spoke, the words shot out harsh and loud. ‘No instruments to throw?’
She didn’t even raise a killing look. ‘I have never thrown anything in Theatre, although I did train with a master thrower and once had to dodge a chair.’ She plonked herself down hard on the couch, threw her head back and closed her eyes. ‘This is a nightmare.’
Grey shadows hovered under her eyes and she looked exhausted.
‘Actually, it’s probably not a good idea to sit on that.’ He pointed to the gnawed hole.
He’d expected her to fly off the couch but she merely shuddered and stayed put. Eventually she opened one eye and stared accusingly at him. ‘You could have told me that the Australian billfish competition is on!’
Was it? Had that many months passed? ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise it was that time of year.’ Once he’d had his finger on the pulse of his hometown and been part of the committee for one of the biggest events on the calendar, but not any more. Now days just rolled together into one long and empty period of time.
She frowned at him as if she didn’t quite believe him. ‘Every motel between here and a hundred k up and down the coast is fully booked out with anglers hoping to catch a two-hundred-and-twenty-kilo marlin. God, I hate this dust-impregnated town.’ She picked up her phone and stared at it as if willing it to ring with news of a bed.
A mouse scuttled between his feet.
She can’t stay here.
She’s not staying with me.
Why not? You don’t care about much any more so why care if she stays a few nights?
She sighed. ‘I don’t suppose you know
