The Australian's Proposal: The Doctor's Marriage Wish / The Playboy Doctor's Proposal / The Nurse He's Been Waiting For

Jack’s responses were guarded, and occasionally confused, but, no, he hadn’t fallen, he’d stayed right on his bike. It was a four-wheeler.

And where was the bike?

He looked vaguely around, then shook his head, as if uncertain where a four-wheeler bike might have disappeared to.

The smell hit Kate as she fitted a mask and tube to the small oxygen bottle she’d taken from her backpack. She looked up to see Hamish unwinding the bandage from Jack’s leg. Necrotic tissue—no wonder the boy was feverish and looked so haggard.

‘How long since it happened?’

Jack shrugged.

‘Yesterday, I think. Or maybe the day before. I’ve been feeling pretty sick—went to sleep. Didn’t wake up until Digger moved me here this morning.’

‘Where’s Digger now?’ Kate asked, holding the oxygen mask away from his face so he could answer.

‘Dunno.’

Hamish raised his eyebrows at Kate, but didn’t comment, saying instead, ‘His pulse is racing. He needs fluid fast. I don’t want to do a cut-down here, so we’ll run it into both arms. If you open the smaller pack you’ll find a lamp. Set it up first then in your pack there’ll be all we need for fluid resuscitation—16g cannulae and infusers for rapid delivery. You’ll see the crystalloid solutions clearly marked.’

Kate found the battery-operated lamp and turned it on, a bright fluorescent light pushing back the shadowy evening. Now it was easy to see what they had—sterile packs of cannulas and catheters, bags of fluid, battery-operated fluid warmers, boxes of drugs.

‘Good luck,’ she said to Hamish as she handed him a venipuncture kit. ‘We’re going to get some fluid flowing into you,’ she added to Jack, as she found the fluid Hamish wanted and began to warm the first bag. ‘And that means inserting a hollow needle into one of your veins. But because you’re pretty dehydrated, your veins will have gone flat so it won’t be an easy job. I’m betting Hamish will need at least two goes to get it in.’

‘I’ll have you know, Sister Winship, I’m known as One-Go McGregor,’ Hamish said huffily, taking the tourniquet Kate passed him and winding it around Jack’s upper arm, hoping to raise a vein in the back of his hand or his wrist.

The needle slipped in. ‘See, told you!’ Hamish turned triumphantly to Jack. ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t bet?’

Kate had tubing and a bag of fluid ready, and she turned her light onto the cliff-face behind their patient in search of small ledges where they could place the bags.

They changed places, Kate starting the fluid flowing into Jack’s vein, then setting the bag so it would continue to gravity feed through the tube. And all the time she talked to him—not about how he’d come to have a bullet in his leg, but about what she was doing, and how it would help.

‘Once Hamish has you hooked up on that side, we can start pain relief and antibiotics. It’s the infection from your wound that’s making you feel so lousy.’

‘Actually,’ Hamish said mildly, ‘getting shot in the first place would make me feel pretty lousy.’

Jack gave a snort of laughter, and relief flowed through Kate. Surely if he could laugh he’d be OK. But he was very weak and the wound, now she could see it, was a mess. A deeply scored indentation running from halfway down his thigh towards his hip, then disappearing into a puckered, blue-rimmed hole. Dried blood on the bandages suggested it had bled freely—but not freely enough to keep infection at bay.

Hamish set the second bag of fluid on the ledge behind Jack, then probed through the contents of the backpack.

‘I’ll get some antibiotics into you with that fluid, then I want to check your distal pulses and test sensation in your foot and lower leg. Kate, would you watch for renewed bleeding from the wound? We know you’ve been lucky, Jack, in that the bullet didn’t go into your femoral artery. And how do we know that?’

Hamish had found what he wanted—a small bag of fluid Kate recognised as IV antibiotic medication diluted with saline. He spiked it with an IV administration set, connected it to a second port in the IV line he had running, then placed the small bag on the ledge so the drug could be administered simultaneously with the fluid.

‘Because you’d have bled to death by now—that’s how we know the bullet didn’t hit your artery,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But it might have damaged a nerve, which is why I’m going to prick your foot, or the velocity of the bullet might have chipped a bone and sent that as a secondary missile to squeeze against the artery, which is why I’m going to check to see if blood is still flowing in your foot.’

Kate watched Jack’s face and saw that Hamish’s matter-of-fact approach was just what the young man needed. In fact, he was interested enough to ask, ‘Why does Kate have to watch for bleeding?’

‘Good question! Go to the top of the class.’ Hamish smiled at him. ‘Kate has to watch because you’ll have damaged some blood vessels, but smaller veins and capillaries have the ability to close themselves off if that happens. Problem is, once we build up your fluid levels, they might get all excited and open up again—bleeding all over the place.’

‘Ouch!’

Jack jerked his leg, and the bleeding Kate was watching for began right on cue.

‘Well, you’ve feeling in your toes and a weak but palpable pulse in your ankle, so I’d say you’ve been a very lucky young man. Unfortunately, that luck’s about to change. I need to clean up that wound and, although I’ll anaesthetise the area around it with a local, it won’t be comfortable. Kate, how about you shift over to Jack’s other side and talk to him while I work? Can you talk and pass instruments and dressings?’

Kate stared at the man who was taking this situation so calmly, chatting away to Jack as if they were sharing space on a city bus, not a cave at the bottom of a gorge at nightfall, while someone with a gun lurked somewhere in the darkness.

‘Well?’

Hamish smiled at her and she shook her head, then realised he might think she was answering his question.

‘Of course I can talk and pass things,’ she said, immediately regretting the assurance when his smile broadened and he threw a conspiratorial wink at Jack.

‘I thought so,’ he gloated. ‘Most women can talk and do other things, can’t they, mate?’

Jack smiled back while Kate glowered at the pair of them. She’d walked right into that one.

‘Local anaesthesia is in the green box,’ Hamish continued, ‘and sterile swabs in the white one with the red writing. You might pass me the sharps container and a plastic bag out of that pack as well, so I can put the soiled stuff away as I use it.’

Kate handed him what he needed, then checked the contents of the pack again, trying to anticipate what Hamish would want next. A scalpel, no doubt, to cut away some of the infected tissue, and more swabs to mop up blood as he got down to clean flesh.

Sutures? Would he stitch it up or leave it open until they got back to the hospital where further surgery would be necessary?

She set out what she thought he’d need immediately, placed them on a large flat stone and lifted it across Jack so it was within Hamish’s reach.

‘You’re supposed to be talking to me,’ Jack reminded her, but his voice was weaker than it had been earlier. Seeing them had probably prompted a surge in his adrenaline levels which had now waned. Did Hamish want her talking to the young man to distract him, or to keep him awake and stop him slipping into unconsciousness?

Not that the reason mattered.

‘I will,’ she promised, checking his blood pressure, pulse and respirations. He had the mask across his mouth and nose, but was talking easily through it. His breathing was still far too fast, but his pulse, though still tachycardic, was more regular than it had been when she’d automatically felt it earlier. ‘You start. Tell me all about yourself.’

‘Not worth talking about,’ he muttered weakly. ‘In fact, I’d have been better off if you hadn’t come.’

‘And here I thought you were pleased to see us,’ Kate teased, aware a little self-pity was quite normal in someone so ill.

‘Well, I was at first,’ Jack grudgingly admitted, ‘but only because I was feeling so lousy. Really, though, I’d be better off dead.’

‘Don’t we all feel that at times?’ Kate sighed.

‘I bet you don’t,’ Jack retorted, buying into the argument she’d provoked, although he was so weak. ‘Look at you—pretty, probably well dressed under those overalls, good job. What would someone like you know about how I feel?’

‘I would if you told me.’ Kate smiled at him. ‘In fact, you tell me the Jack story and I’ll tell you the Kate story, and I bet I can beat your misery with my misery—hands down.’

‘I bet you can’t.’

‘I bet I can.’

‘Bet you can’t!’

‘Can!’

‘Children, just get on with it.’

Hamish’s voice was pained, but Kate heard amusement in it as well. He knew they had to find out Jack’s background, and had guessed this was her way of goading Jack into telling it.

‘My family didn’t want me,’ Jack began, anxiety and pain tightening the words so they caused a sympathetic lurch of pain in Kate’s chest. ‘They all live in Sydney and they sent me right up here to work. Can you imagine a family doing that?’

‘Not to a nice boy like you,’ Kate told him, taking his hand to offer comfort even while she tried to stir him into further revelations. ‘But mine’s worse. My father died, then my mother, then my brother told me they weren’t my parents at all. They’d just brought me up because they’d felt sorry for me. So I didn’t really have a family at all. Beat that.’

Jack frowned at her, but had his comeback ready.

‘Mine’ll disinherit me when they find out about this,’ he said.

‘Well, that sounds as if they haven’t already done it. You’ve still got time to redeem yourself. And now you’re hurt, you can play the sympathy card. My brother—or the louse I thought was my brother—is contesting my mother’s will because he says I wasn’t ever properly adopted. How’s that for the ultimate disinheritance?’

‘That is a lousy thing to do,’ Jack agreed, but he was thinking hard, obviously not yet ready to concede in the misery stakes. ‘My uncle kicked me off his property.’

‘I traced my birth mother but found out she’d died the week before I got there.’

‘Wow! That’s terrible. So you don’t know who you are?’

‘Nobody—that’s who I am,’ Kate said cheerfully. She didn’t feel cheerful about it, but that wasn’t the point. Keeping Jack talking was the point. ‘Beat you, didn’t I?’

He looked at her for a moment then shook his head.

‘I lost my girl.’

His voice broke on the words and Kate squeezed harder on his hand.

‘That’s why my uncle kicked me out.’

‘Ah, that’s terrible, but can’t you get in touch with her again even if you’re not working for your uncle?’

Jack shook his head.

‘I tried. I really tried. I worked on another property. It didn’t pay much so I got this other job, then I had some time off so I thought I’d go and see her—tell her what was happening. But I couldn’t get a lift—I tried, I really tried—and I had to get back, and it turned out—Anyway, if I had got to her place, her dad would probably have killed me. It was her dad broke us up. He rang my uncle and told him we’d been seeing each other. Apparently he went mental about it and that’s why my uncle sacked me.’

The story had come tumbling out in confused snatches, but Kate was able to piece it all together.

‘Love problems are the pits,’ she sympathised, ‘but, really, yours are chicken feed, Jack.’

‘Chicken feed?’ He perked up at the challenge she offered him. ‘I’m shot and I lost my girl.’

‘OK, but what about this? I stop work to nurse my mother—’

‘Who wasn’t your mother,’ Jack offered.

‘That’s right, but I loved her.’ It was only with difficulty Kate stopped her own voice cracking. This wasn’t personal, it was professional, and Jack was sounding much more alert. ‘Anyway, I took two months off to nurse her at the end and my ever-loving fiancé and my best friend began an affair right under the noses of all our colleagues. OK, so I didn’t lose my job, but can you imagine going back to work with the pair of them billing and cooing all over the place, and everyone laughing about it?’

‘More swabs.’

The gruff demand reminded Kate that Jack wasn’t the only one hearing the story of her recent life, but Hamish had told her to distract Jack, and her strategy was working. She opened a new packet of swabs and passed them over, giving Hamish a look that warned him not to say one thing about her conversation.

‘No, I wouldn’t have gone back to work there either,’ Jack said. ‘But you’ve got another job now, haven’t you? I’ll never get another job.’

‘Piffle! Of course you will. Young, healthy, good-looking chap like you. You’ll get another job and another girl, both better than the ones before.’

Silence greeted this remark, a silence that stretched for so long Kate checked his pulse again. Then he said quietly, ‘I don’t want another girl, and I don’t know how to get … the one I want back now I’ve messed things up so much.’

‘We’ll help you,’ Kate promised rashly. ‘Won’t we, Hamish? We’ll get you better then we’ll help you find your girl.’

Hamish looked up from the business of debriding infected tissue from Jack’s leg.

‘We can certainly try,’ he said, but the frown on his face was denying his words.

Did he think they wouldn’t find the girl?

Or … Kate’s heart paused a beat … did he think they wouldn’t get this young man better?

CHAPTER TWO

‘OKAY, THAT’S ABOUT as clean as I can get it without actually removing the bullet,’ Hamish announced. ‘I’d like to go in and get it, but without X-rays to show us exactly where it is and where I’d have to cut, I wouldn’t risk it. You’re also losing a fair bit of blood, Jack. Had any problems with bleeding before?’

Jack ignored the question, closing his eyes as if the effort of talking to Kate had exhausted him.

Which it might have, though Hamish was thinking otherwise.

‘At least, doing it back at the hospital, we’ll have blood on hand should you need it. The helicopter will be back at first light, and we’ll have you in Theatre in Crocodile Creek a couple of hours later.’

Jack’s eyes opened at that, and he tried to sit up straighter.

‘Shouldn’t I go to Cairns? Or what about Townsville? That has a bigger hospital, doesn’t it?’

‘Bigger but not better,’ Hamish told him. ‘Besides, it’s too far for a chopper flight. Something about Crocodile Creek bothering you? We don’t really have crocodiles in the creek—well, not where it flows past the hospital.’

Jack didn’t answer, but turned his head away, as if not seeing Hamish might remove him from the cave.

And the prospect of a trip to Crocodile Creek …

Hamish watched Kate bend to speak quietly to the young man, no doubt reassuring him he’d have the very best of treatment at Crocodile Creek, but Hamish was becoming more and more certain that Jack had reasons of his own for avoiding that particular hospital.

But how to confirm what he was thinking?

He walked around to the other side and squatted beside the open pack, delving through it for what he needed. Then, from this side, he looked directly at Jack.

‘I’ll add some pain relief to the fluid now, so you should be feeling more comfortable before long, and then I guess we should do the paperwork. You up for that, Kate? Did you see the initial assessment forms in the pack?’

Kate’s frown told him she disapproved of the change in his attitude from friendly banter to practical matter-of-factness, but she didn’t know about a feud between two neighbouring families up here in the north, or the connection of one family to the hospital. Or about a baby called Lucky who was now called Jackson who had a form of haemophilia known as von Willebrand’s disease.

Or about the search for the baby’s father—a young man called Jack.

‘I’ve got them here,’ she said, putting ice into her words in case he hadn’t caught the frown.

‘Then fill them out. You and Jack can manage all the personal stuff then I’ll do the medication and dosages when you get down to that section. And while you’re doing it, I’ll take a look around to see if there’s a patch of clear ground from which we can winch Jack up in the morning.’

He found a stronger torch in the equipment backpack, turned it on and walked away, hoping his absence might help Jack speak more freely. If he’d talk to anyone, it would be to Kate. Nothing like a baring of souls to create a bond between people. But had she really been through so much emotional trauma or had she made it all up to keep Jack talking? He had no idea, which wasn’t surprising, but what did surprise him was that he wanted to find out.

Hell’s teeth! He’d been in Australia for nearly two years, and while he’d enjoyed some mild flirtations and one reasonably lengthy and decidedly pleasant relationship, he’d remained heart-whole and fancy-free. So now, three weeks before he was due to return home, was hardly the time to be developing an interest in a woman.

Yet his mind kept throwing up the image of his first sight of her, a slight figure, dressed all in brown, except for those ridiculous purple sandals, standing in the gloomy hallway, with a stray sunbeam probing through the fretwork breezeway above the door and turning the tips of her loose brown curls to liquid gold.

‘Is he a good doctor?’ Jack asked, when Hamish had disappeared into the darkness.

Kate looked in the direction Hamish had taken, but already she could see nothing but inky blackness beyond the glow of the lamp.

‘I’ve just started work so I don’t know, but from the way he treated you I’d have to say he is.’

Jack closed his eyes and lay in silence for a while, but just when Kate had decided he’d drifted off to sleep he opened his eyes again and looked at her.

‘So you don’t know anything about the hospital?’ he asked.

‘Not a thing, except its reputation is excellent. Apparently the boss, Charles Wetherby, insists on hiring top-class staff and only buying the best equipment, so it has a name for being far in advance of most country hospitals.’

But her words failed to reassure Jack, who had not only closed his eyes but had now folded his lips into a straight line of worry.

Seeking to divert him, she pulled out the pad of assessment forms.

‘You must be tired, but before you drop off to sleep, how about we fill this out. There aren’t many questions.’

Jack opened his eyes and looked directly at her.

‘I should have died,’ he said, then he closed his eyes again and turned his head away, making it unmistakably clear that the conversation was over.

‘Full name?’ Kate asked hopefully. ‘Address? Come on, Jack, we have to do this.’

But the young man had removed himself from her—not physically, but mentally—cutting the link she’d thought she’d forged when they’d played their ‘whose life sucks the most’ game earlier.

She lifted his wrist and checked his pulse then wrote the time and the rate on the form. She filled in all the other parts she could, remembering Jack’s initial respiration rate, systolic blood pressure—she’d taken that herself before Hamish had started the second drip—and pulse, writing times and numbers, wondering about all the unanswered questions at the top of the form.

‘Asleep?’

Hamish’s quiet question preceded him into the light. She stood up, careful not to disturb their patient, and moved a little away.

‘He wasn’t—just closed his eyes to avoid answering me—but I think he’s genuinely asleep now. I’ve just checked him. His pulse is steadier but his systolic blood pressure hasn’t changed as much as I’d have thought it would, considering the fluid we’re giving him. Do you think there could be internal bleeding somewhere?’

‘It’s likely, and though I’ve sutured part of the wound and put a pressure pad on it, I’d say it’s still bleeding.’

‘That’s more than a guess, isn’t it?’ Kate looked up at the man who sounded so concerned. They’d moved out of the lamplight, but a full moon had risen and was shedding soft, silvery light into the gorge.

‘It’s a long story but we’ve time ahead of us. If you dig into the equipment backpack you’ll find a space blanket to wrap around Jack—there should be a couple of inflatable pillows in there as well. Put one under his feet and one behind his head and cover him with the blanket while I get a cuppa going and find something for us to eat.’

‘And then you’ll tell me?’

Hamish smiled, but it was a grim effort.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m guessing.’

Kate cupped her hands around the now empty mug and looked out at the broad leaves of the cabbage palms that filled the gorge. Hamish’s story of a newborn baby found at a rodeo, the dramatic efforts that had saved his life, the finding of his dangerously ill mother, and the fight to save her life, was the stuff of television medicine, while feuding neighbours and heart attacks turned it into soap opera.

Maybe she’d got it wrong.

She turned to Hamish, sitting solidly beside her at the entrance to the cave.

‘So you think Jack is Charles Wetherby’s nephew, sacked from the family property, run by Charles’s brother Philip, for consorting with the Cooper girl, daughter of the Wetherbys’ sworn enemies who live next door. And you’ve put all this together because his wound is bleeding and you think he has von Willebrand’s disease.’

‘Lucky—the baby—has von Willebrand’s disease and it runs through the Wetherby family,’ Hamish said patiently. ‘Originally, back when Lucky was found, Charles had no idea his nephew had been working at Wetherby Downs, because Charles and Philip rarely spoke to each other. But since Jim Cooper was admitted to hospital with a heart attack, Charles has been anxious about the Coopers’ property and that forced him to speak to Philip—’

‘Who told him about Jack and Megan—OK, I get that bit,’ Kate assured him. ‘And the family feud—I can understand that. But if Jack is Charles’s nephew, and Charles and Philip don’t get on, why’s Jack so against going to hospital at Crocodile Creek? It’s a good uncle and bad uncle scenario—like good cop and bad cop. You’d think he’d be happy to be under his good uncle’s care. Family does count, you know.’

Before the words were fully out, she knew they were a mistake. She didn’t need to look at Hamish to know those darned expressive eyebrows of his would be on the rise.

‘Look,’ she told him, wishing she was standing up and a little further away from him but resigned to making the best of things. ‘The story I told Jack—well, that comes under the heading of nurse-patient confidentiality so, please, pretend you never heard it and don’t you dare breathe so much as a word of it to anyone. I went back to work for a week after my mother died, and if one more person had put their arm around me or thrown me a “poor Kate” look, I tell you, I’d have slit their throat with the nearest scalpel. Stuff happens, and you have to move on. I’ve moved on, and that’s it.’

He nodded but didn’t speak. In the end she had to prompt him.

‘So why’s Jack worried about going to Crocodile Creek?’

‘He has a bullet in his leg.’

Kate turned to frown at the man beside her.

‘This is the bush. Out here, from what I’ve heard, people tote guns all the time. They shoot things—wild pigs and water buffalo and snakes. From the evidence of road signs on the drive up, they even shoot road signs. So he shot himself, gun going off as he climbed through a fence—isn’t that what happens? Or maybe Digger shot him by accident.’

‘So where’s Digger now? If he shot Jack by accident, why would he call for help then disappear?’

‘Because he had to be elsewhere. Had to take his cattle to market or organise a rodeo. I’m a city girl, how would I know where he had to be?’

She saw the glimmer of white teeth as Hamish smiled, but the cheerful expression passed quickly.