sighed, looked down at their linked hands and carefully disengaged. The gentle look became grim.
‘I don’t do relationships,’ he said.
‘I see that,’ she said cautiously, casting a quick look round the sparse bedroom. This was such a male domain.
‘But everyone in the hospital wants me to.’
This was important, she decided. She had to get to the other side of the fuzz. Figure out where reality and nonsense merged. ‘You don’t think that’s just a wee bit egotistical?’ she demanded, and his smile returned. It was a truly gorgeous smile.
His smile could make a girl’s knees turn to putty—if a girl’s knees weren’t already putty.
‘Sydney Harbour Hospital is gossip central,’ he said. ‘Too much intense emotion, too many people working long hours, thrown together over and over … Everyone at the Harbour knows everyone else’s business.’
‘You’re kidding,’ she said faintly. ‘I’d thought it’d be a huge, anonymous hospital.
‘The Harbour?’ He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Anonymous is not us. Big or not, we’re made up of individual teams. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, sometimes I think right down to the jocks we wear. Actually, that may well be the literal truth; Mrs Henderson does my washing. This apartment block is home to at least half a dozen Harbour medics who also use Mrs Henderson, so I guess that’s public knowledge as well. But since my wife died four years ago …’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s history,’ he said harshly. ‘But that’s the problem. The hospital, the grapevine, the whole gossip network has decided it’s time for me to move on. Even my boss keeps pushing women at me.’
‘Gee,’ she said cautiously, her interest caught through the fuzz. ‘So you’re being besieged with women. That must be tough.’
‘I’ve been married,’ he said, maybe more harshly than he intended because he paused and softened his tone. ‘What I mean is that I have no intention of going there again. I’d like everybody to lay off. You’re in Sydney for a month?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then where are you going?’
‘Brisbane?’ It was the first place that came into her mind. It sounded a lot more fun than Lighthouse Cove.
‘A month would give me head space,’ he said. ‘I’ve told them we’ve been in a relationship for a while.’
‘You did that?’ The fuzz was thickening.
‘It protects your reputation.’
‘Thank you.’ She didn’t feel like saying thank you. She felt … like she didn’t know what to say.
He was being businesslike, a surgeon outlining an action plan. ‘Apart from protecting your reputation, if we let everyone know what happened yesterday was the result of a long-term relationship, it helps me. I’m having four weeks with you and then you can go to Brisbane, you can do anything you like, but from my point of view you can be my absentee girlfriend for as long as I can carry it off. I’ll tell them you need to care for an ailing mother or something similar. I can tell them we met on holiday a couple of years ago. That you come to the farm whenever you can. That I’m a very loyal lover. I’m thinking I might get two years out of this.’
‘Two years …’
‘Two years without matchmaking. Two years where I’m left alone.’ He ran his fingers through his already rumpled hair and sighed. ‘Believe me, in this hothouse, that’s worth diamonds. And in return you get board for a month. You have to admit anything’s better than that dump you were staying in. So … deal?’
The fuzz was everywhere, but his gaze was on her. Firm. Businesslike. Like what he was suggesting was reason itself. ‘Platonic,’ he said. ‘No sex. Promise.’
‘Of course there’d be no sex, but …’ But her head was spinning. This was crazy. She’d be a pretend lover?
He was proposing an affair of convenience. No sex.
He really did have the most beautiful … pillows.
Oh, she was tired.
‘You,’ Luke said, with a certain amount of contrition, ‘are wrecked. You need to sleep. I have another bathroom off the living room. We’re independent. You sleep your bug away and then settle in for a month of businesslike contact. Would you like anything before you go to sleep?’
What was happening?
Sense was telling her to get out of this man’s bed now; get out of his life.
If she did, she’d have to leave the pillows.
And … He’d just asked her if she’d like anything. What she wanted more than anything else in the world …
‘Another cup of tea?’ she murmured, figuring it couldn’t hurt to ask.
He grinned. ‘Your wish is my command.’
And five minutes later she was tucked up in his bed with a fresh cup of tea, plumped pillows, a spare blanket, the night settling in over the apartment. Five minutes later she was Luke Williams’s Lover of Convenience.
SHE slept for almost twenty-four hours. Mrs Henderson popped in during the day with sympathy, tea, more eggs and toast soldiers, and some gentle probing.
Where had she come from? How long had she known ‘our lovely Dr Williams’? Were they engaged?
She acted shy. She acted sleepy, which wasn’t all that hard.
She slept.
The events of the last week had left her exhausted. In truth, the events of the last few years had left her exhausted.
She’d been her mother’s keeper. It had been a full-time job.
Right now, her mother didn’t know where she was and she couldn’t contact her. When Lily left town she’d stopped at the headland overlooking the bay and tossed her cellphone as far as she could throw it.
If her mother had a drama—and she would certainly have a drama—Lily wouldn’t even know about it.
She could guess.
Would the vicar stay with her? Would her mother be able to ride out the town’s condemnation? Would her mother be able to operate the microwave?
Her father had treated her mother like a Dresden doll. He’d died when Lily had been twelve, and Lily had promised …
Enough.
She lay in Luke’s bed with no cellphone, no way her mother could know where she was, and she felt
