took Cindy straight upstairs,’ he explained. ‘She wanted a shower before dinner, then I went out to see Pop in the shed and met Mac on the way back.’
‘Ah,’ Hallie said, nodding as if the world was now back in its rightful place. ‘So, Mac—you do like to be called Mac, don’t you? Isn’t that what you said at the interview?’
The poor bewildered man nodded, and before Hallie could go off on another tangent—something they were all only too used to—Marty stepped in.
‘Mac, the smallest of the women in the room is Nikki, and the redhead cowering in the corner is her mother, Izzy. It’s not your fault that the last hospital director had a mad ex-lover who tried to shoot Izzy.’
Marty waved his arm.
‘Come on over, Iz, and say hello to your new boss.’
‘We’ve already met,’ Izzy said bluntly, her anger at Marty for singling her out overcoming all her weird reactions to Mac.
‘And I’m Lila.’
Bless her! She’d read the tension in the room, had probably felt it emanating in waves from Izzy, and had stepped in to defuse things.
Now she was doing doctor talk again with the newcomer, smoothing over the earlier awkwardness and giving Izzy time to recover.
* * *
Mac tried to make sense of the place and people around him. He’d been directed to walk up the hill from the hospital and the only place on the hill was a big, old, stone-built building that looked as if it could house the hospital as well as all the staff.
He’d walked around it, wondering if the chairman of the hospital board might have a real house hidden somewhere behind it, and had ended up in a huge vegetable garden.
The man called Marty had rescued him, leading him into the old building through a cave-like back entrance and directly into a kitchen where, amidst what seemed like a dozen chattering women, stood his sprite. She had clothes on now, stretch jeans that hugged her legs and lower body and a diminutive top that showed a flash of golden skin at her waist when she moved.
Mrs Halliday he recognised, and the young girl with long golden-brown hair—okay, that was the daughter—while the real beauty of the room, the exotic dark-haired, black-eyed Lila, was finding it hard to hold his attention so his replies to her questions were vague and disjointed.
The sprite rescued him.
‘This is the man I was telling you about,’ she said to the room at large. ‘The man who helped me with the porpoise.’
After which she finally turned her attention to him.
‘Sorry about the chaos here tonight, Mac, but with—’
‘With your sister up from Sydney, and your brother might be home...yes, I know,’ he teased.
He saw the colour rise in her cheeks, but the flash of fire in her eyes suggested anger rather than embarrassment.
Bloody man! Izzy muttered inwardly. Now the whole family was looking at her.
Waiting for her famous temper to flare up?
No way! She would not react to this man’s teasing. Bad enough her body was reacting to his presence, sending messages along her nerves and excitement through her blood. If this kept up she’d have to leave—town, that is—given that a distracted nurse was no help to anyone.
But Nikki—school...
Pop saved her from total, and quite ridiculous, panic by appearing through the kitchen door with a long, and remarkably dangerous-looking spear in his hand.
It stopped both the conversation and the sizzle in her blood.
‘This’s the best I can do, Nik,’ he said, passing the lethal weapon to Izzy’s daughter. ‘I don’t know if the aboriginals in this area made ceremonial markings on their spears but old Dan at the caravan park will know. You can ask him, and he’ll show you what it needs.’
‘Put that away right now!’ Izzy ordered as Nikki began to caper around the room, flourishing the spear dangerously close to several humans.
Nikki disappeared, Hallie introduced Mac to Pop, she and Lila finished setting the table, and peace reigned, if only momentarily, in the Halliday kitchen.
Pop was explaining to Mac the project Nikki would be doing when school resumed, and why she needed a spear.
‘I’ve made so much stuff for so many kids over the years,’ he added. ‘Izzy, was it you who was the robot? That was probably my most ingenious design, although I did go through a lot of aluminium foil.’
Any minute now he was going to dig out the old photos and she’d be squirming with embarrassment all night!
‘Okay, dinner is ready.’
Hallie saved the day this time. She set the roasted leg of lamb on the table and handed Pop the carving knife and fork, Lila brought over dishes filled with crisply roasted potatoes and sticky baked pumpkin, while Izzy did her bit, taking the jugs of gravy from the warming drawer in the big oven and setting them on the table.
‘Right!’ Hallie said. ‘Guest of honour—that’s you, Mac—at the head of the table. Izzy, you’ll be working with him so you might as well get to know a bit about him. You sit on one side and Lila on the other, and no descriptions of operations of any sort, please, Lila. Pop, you sit next to Lila, and then Nikki, and on the other side Marty and Cindy, and I’ll sit at the end because—’
‘Because you have to get up and down to get things,’ the family chorused, and Izzy began to relax.
This was home, this was family, this was where she was safe, so who cared if her body found Mac whoever he was—did he have a last name?—attractive? Of course she’d felt attraction before—although not for quite a while, now she thought about it.
‘Are you going to sit?’
Heat crept up her neck and with her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head, the wretched man would see it! How was she to know he’d hold her chair for her?
She thumped down in the seat, too quickly for him to guide it into place, pulled it in herself and turned to offer a brusque thank you. She met the blue of his eyes and felt herself drowning.
This wasn’t attraction, this was madness.
‘So, why Wetherby?’
Lila saved her again, asking the question that had been in Izzy’s mind, only hers had been phrased more as ‘Why the hell Wetherby?’.
Now he was smiling at Lila—well, what man didn’t smile at Lila?—and the kind of dark voice she remembered from the beach was explaining in short, fairly innocuous sound bites: army doctor, Middle East on and off over the last few years—
‘—so when I decided to get out of the service I looked for somewhere green, and close to the surf, yet small enough to be peaceful.’
‘Well,
