Outback Doctors/Outback Engagement/Outback Marriage/Outback Encounter Read online

  ‘My car’s this way,’ Anna said, stepping away from Carrie’s crowding and walking towards it, then realising Tom was carrying all the groceries, including cat food and the steak she intended cooking for her own dinner.

  ‘I’ll drop your groceries off at your place,’ Tom said, as if his mind was tuned to hers. Then, to Anna’s relief, he steered the other two women towards his vehicle.

  It wasn’t until Anna was belting her seat belt across her body that she admitted to herself the relief was more to do with escaping Tom’s presence than getting away from the two women who were dogging his footsteps. When she’d gone in to visit Dani the previous morning, the first person she’d seen had been Tom—leaving the hospital after he, too, had paid a visit to his sick friend, although the official visiting time at the hospital wouldn’t start for another three hours.

  Then, when she’d pulled into the service station to refuel her car yesterday evening, he’d been pulling out, and again this morning, when she’d done a familiarisation round with Paul Drouin, Tom had been sitting by Dani’s bed, for all the world as if he and not the absent truckie was her husband.

  OK, so he was a caring and considerate friend, but did he have to visit so often?

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if her body didn’t react every time she set eyes on him. She’d never been an overly sensitive person—not in a sexual or sensual way. Yet now it seemed as if her skin had been flayed by the outback dust, exposing nerve endings that leapt and tweaked and tingled whenever the handsome vet appeared.

  With a sigh that made her windscreen mist over, she started the car and headed back towards the hospital, determined in some way to inoculate herself against the man’s potent attraction.

  Arriving home to a phone call from Philip helped, but unfortunately she’d no sooner hung up than Tom appeared, clutching her groceries and announcing with great pride that he thought he’d finally got rid of the two women.

  ‘I promised Carrie that if she held off publishing a story now, we’d give her an exclusive for the wedding. Grace huffed and puffed about me making it all up, so I said of course it was on the level and we’d already fixed a date—the first of January. That OK with you?’

  Anna stared at him.

  ‘But we’re not getting married,’ she reminded him.

  He grinned and dumped her bags of groceries on the table.

  ‘I know that, and you know that, but Carrie doesn’t, and the date made even Grace back off. I’d like to think it means we’ve seen the last of them, but Bob Filmer arrived at the supermarket as I was about to leave and, of course, seeing me with two women, zeroed in on me. Now Carrie’s going to use him for the ‘‘last eligible bachelor’’ article and Grace seems to think if Carrie’s staying she should as well. Or maybe she liked Bob’s style of flirting.’

  Anna shuddered, remembering Bob’s over-the-top compliments and ogling looks.

  ‘Good luck to her,’ she said, then realised that, far from avoiding any opportunity to be with Tom Fleming, she was actually feeling both relieved by, and relaxed in, his company. Not good!

  ‘Thanks for delivering the groceries, but I guess you’d better be off. You wouldn’t want to leave Penny on her own for too long. Heaven knows what she might decide to do.’

  ‘Oh, that’s OK,’ Tom said calmly, opening Anna’s refrigerator and peering inside, then producing the half-finished bottle of wine he’d brought and opened on Friday evening. ‘Jim’s taking care of her. He stayed out of the way when the women were around, but once he came out of hiding I introduced him to Penny and the pair took to each other like long-lost siblings. Bit of an age gap, of course! Penny’s busy trying out names on the colt, then the pair of them are going to the cafe´ for dinner to celebrate its birth.’

  He waved the bottle of wine towards Anna.

  ‘Would you like a glass? I’m on my way to visit Dani but I could stay and share one with you. A kind of celebratory drink that we’ve sorted out our problems.’

  ‘“Sorted out our problems”?’ Anna repeated but she nodded yes to the drink. After all, what harm could come of sharing one drink? ‘When you’ve offered a magazine exclusive rights to a wedding that isn’t going to happen?’

  ‘But that’s the beauty of it,’ Tom told her, passing her a glass of wine, though this time she managed to avoid tangling her fingers with his. ‘Because there won’t be a wedding, we can’t be liable for breach of contract or any other legal issue if the magazine decided to get nasty.’

  ‘Legal issue? Breach of contract?’ Anna took a desperate sip of her drink. ‘Tom, you didn’t sign anything, did you?’

  He laughed and reached over to touch her reassuringly on the shoulder—tactile man in action again.

  ‘Of course not, you silly duffer. I’m not totally stupid.’

  Anna was reasonably sure that being called a ‘silly duffer’ wasn’t complimentary, but the touch, and a warmth in his so-special voice, made it seem that way.

  So much for inoculation!

  CHAPTER SIX

  TRUE to his word, Tom stayed only for a drink and, though the little house felt empty when he’d gone, Anna told herself it was only because he and Penny were the closest things to friends she’d made—so far—in Merriwee.

  Though Penny doesn’t make your skin tingle, she reminded herself.

  Putting aside the matter of tingling skin—though it vaguely worried her that Philip’s presence had never induced any physical manifestations in her skin—and looking at the situation sensibly, now that Tom’s tale of a wedding would get rid of both his problem women, there was no reason why she need ever see him again.

  ‘Even if it means me remaining friendless, and you sitting there for ever!’ she told the cat who’d plunged her into this maelstrom, and, now that Tom had departed, had returned to sitting in her travelling cage.

  Anna fed the cat, who deigned to cross the kitchen to eat, then cooked her own meal and carried it to the dining table, where she’d left a stack of patient files. Then, as she ate, she went through first the files, some dating back twenty years, of patients who were currently in hospital, then those of patients she would see at the surgery the following day.

  Paul had explained the split in her duties, and how some patients would always see her as outpatients at the hospital, while others would come privately to the two sessions a day she held at Peter Carter’s surgery.

  ‘And if I’m called over to the hospital for an emergency during one of these private sessions?’ she’d asked, trying to work out when she’d have time in this schedule to breathe, let alone shop or eat or sleep.

  ‘The patients wait, or Peter picks up the slack, or sometimes, if whatever it is isn’t urgent and your call to the hospital might take time, the patient makes another appointment and goes home.’

  ‘It all seems very slapdash,’ Anna muttered to herself as she checked the file of a diabetic patient who, according to the notes, found it impossible to stick to his diet.

  She set aside thoughts of her schedule and concentrated on ways she might be able to persuade the man to behave sensibly, for his own sake and that of his family.

  As luck would have it, he was the patient who was with her when her first summons back to the hospital interrupted her session the next day. Fortunately she’d finished her examination and a stern lecture on the importance of his diet before the call came in.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s a serious car accident. I’ll have to go,’ she told the man, Albert Hibbert. ‘But make another appointment for next week, and take this chart and write down everything you eat—even snacks—and drink. We’ll soon sort out where you’re going wrong.’

  Albert beamed at her.

  ‘Ned said you were very pretty—he was right,’ he said shyly, leaving Anna, as she hurried across from the surgery to the hospital, to wonder who Ned was.

  ‘Single car accident, ran off the road and into a tree, two women injured but not as seriously as the ambos had first thought.’

>   Elena, once again manning the A and E entrance, passed on this information as Anna came in. ‘Bruising and lacerations and one has severe swelling of the ankle. I’ve sent for Jillian.’

  Jillian? Jillian? Anna sorted through the maze of information she’d been trying to absorb over a very short period.

  ‘Nurse trained as an X-ray tech?’

  Elena nodded.

  ‘We’ve two—her and Roberta—and they do X-rays on a roster system except on Wednesdays, when the radiographer comes up from Three Gorges.’

  By this time they’d reached the bed of the first accident victim and Anna recognised, with a spurt of sympathy and a splash of horror, that it was Carrie, the reporter. Almost fearing to look, she glanced sideways and confirmed that, yes, the second injured woman, now being wheeled towards the X-ray room, was Grace.

  ‘What have you two been up to now?’ she asked, bending over Carrie and lifting away a loose dressing to reveal a long gash up the inside of her arm.

  ‘Drove out to dam for swim. Kangaroo,’ Carrie said, mumbling through swollen lips. ‘Jumped out on the road, swerved to miss it, hit tree.’

  Anna checked the admittance sheet the ambulance attendants had left and examined Carrie carefully, alert for signs of internal injury. She explained what she was doing and the samples she’d need for testing, then examined the open wound again.

  ‘Most of the lacerations on your legs will heal well as long as we keep infection at bay, but I’d like to stitch your arm.’

  ‘Will it leave a bad scar?’ Carrie asked, and Anna understood the young woman’s anxiety.

  ‘Not the way I sew,’ she promised, ‘though I’m better with sutures than I am with a needle and cotton.’

  She sent Elena to get what she needed, and went through to the X-ray room to check on Grace before suturing Carrie’s wound.

  ‘How’s Carrie?’ Grace demanded, with enough anxiety for Anna to realise that the two women, thrown together in unusual circumstances, had become friends.

  ‘She’s suffering from shock, of course, and has minor wounds, but she should be whole again in no time,’ Anna said, while her professional self took in Grace’s too-pale face and, as Grace was wheeled under an overhead light, a slight difference in pupil size in her eyes.

  ‘Did you hit your head when the car went into the tree?’

  Grace frowned at her.

  ‘I don’t think so. We weren’t travelling fast and I braked when I saw the kangaroo, but as I swerved to avoid it, I must have hit a patch of oil or loose gravel on the road and we just slid sideways off the road and into the tree.’

  She pointed to her right ankle.

  ‘The door caved in, which might explain how I hurt my ankle.’

  Anna thought about the mechanics of the accident and then eased her fingers into Grace’s thick hair, feeling the bones of her skull, seeking any fault or indentation.

  ‘We’ll X-ray your skull as well, just to be sure,’ she said, when touch alone had failed to find any damage.

  The heavy doors to the room slid open and a young woman, clad in cut-off jeans and a singlet top, came in.

  ‘I’m Jillian, I guess you’re the new doctor,’ she said, coming forward and extending her hand in greeting. ‘Now I see you, I can understand why Tom wasn’t interested in any of the single women—me included—who threw themselves at him when he arrived in town. He already had you stashed away somewhere.’

  Grace protested that he couldn’t have known Anna then, but Anna decided to ignore the ‘stashed away’ comment. She shook Jillian’s hand then explained about the skull X-ray.

  ‘I’ll just take a look at Grace’s ankle,’ she added, feeling this was a very odd way to be examining a patient but realising the nurses were probably used to coping on their own when a doctor wasn’t immediately available.

  The ankle was so swollen a break seemed more likely than a sprain, but Anna was uncertain about protocol. Skull X-rays were a simple procedure but, with the ankle, did she tell Jillian what angles she wanted or assume the woman would know what was necessary?

  ‘With the ankle, I’ll take two lateral views and an angled one,’ Jillian said, lifting thick wedges of foam onto the X-ray table ready to hold first Grace’s head and then her foot at the appropriate angles. Anna realised the tech knew what she was doing. Better still, the ankle views were the ones Anna would have requested.

  Anna left her to it and returned to stitch the long gash in Carrie’s arm. Elena was carefully cleaning the lacerations on the patient’s legs then spraying them with antiseptic, which made them look ghastly but would stave off infection.

  ‘I’d like you to stay here for a few hours,’ Anna told the young woman when the wound was stitched and covered with a sterile dressing. ‘Just so we can keep an eye on you.’

  Carrie didn’t protest, which suggested she was more shaken by the accident than she’d admit.

  With one patient settled, Anna returned to the X-ray room where the skull X-rays were ready for her perusal.

  ‘There’s no sign of a fracture but we’d need a scan to tell if there’s brain damage and we don’t have the facilities,’ Jillian said, slotting the films into a light-box then looking at them over Anna’s shoulder.

  ‘Why are you thinking brain damage?’ Anna asked, and Jillian smiled.

  ‘Same reason you asked for skull X-rays,’ she said lightly. ‘Her pupils are different sizes.’

  Anna nodded, and relaxed a little more. She might have the grand title of Medical Superintendent of this hospital, but with staff of the quality of those she’d met so far, her job would be the easy one. These women had the experience of nursing in an isolated town—they would know when a patient could be handled in this hospital and when to either call for help or send the patient on to a larger regional centre.

  ‘OK, let’s look at the ankle. That might help us make a decision.’

  Jillian put new negatives into the box, then pointed to the hairline mark that indicated a fracture of the lateral malleolus, the lumpy bit of bone on the ankle end of the fibula.

  ‘Do specialists here pin fractures like that?’ Anna asked, pointing to the detached but not displaced piece of bone. ‘Or do they plaster the ankle and let it heal itself?’

  Jillian looked pleased to be consulted.

  ‘With multiple fractures they’d plate and pin fractures of the fibula and with a fracture at the end of the tibia, the medial malleolus, they’d pin, so we automatically send the patient to Rocky. Someone in the family usually drives the patient over, so we’re not taking an ambulance off duty, but if we need the ambulance then we let Rocky know and one of their ambulances meets ours halfway. But I think with this, we can plaster it here. A back slab first until the swelling goes down, new X-rays later in the week to check the bone’s correctly aligned, then a proper cast.’

  Anna nodded her agreement.

  ‘Do you do the casts as well?’ she asked, and Jillian beamed at her.

  ‘I love doing them, but if you want a real plaster expert any time, then Jenny, our part-time physio, is really, really good.’

  They discussed the back slab, a plaster that would curl around the sole of Grace’s foot and up the back of her leg to just below the knee, then be held in place by wide bandages, then Anna left, promising to come back to inspect the finished product.

  But the slight difference in the pupil size of Grace’s eyes was still bothering her, and she phoned the surgery to ask Peter’s advice.

  ‘Did you ask her if it’s normal?’ he said. ‘People can have unequal pupils—or she might have an Adie’s pupil, which takes longer to adapt to changes in light. If she has, it could be affected by tiredness.’

  It was such a sensible suggestion that Anna felt foolish for having troubled him, but later, when she had both women settled in hospital, and the private session at Peter’s surgery was over for the day, Peter assured her it was always better to ask.

  ‘I decided early on—particularly out here where y
ou’re on your own a lot of the time—that it was better to appear foolish than to make a mistake. Mistakes happen, I know, but as long as you’ve covered all the bases, you can’t be held responsible.’

  Comforted by this practical advice, Anna returned to the hospital. Though Grace had denied any knowledge of uneven pupils, Anna suspected Peter’s suggestion of an Adie’s pupil was correct as the slightly larger one had diminished in size by the time the plastering was complete. Shining a torch in Grace’s eyes proved the point, as one pupil responded more slowly than the other.

  When Anna finished with Grace, she checked on Dani. No distracting visitor, but the young woman was fretting about her bed rest.

  ‘It’s the goats,’ she said. ‘I know Tom’s been going out to check on them every morning and see to their feed and water, but I can’t expect him to keep doing that.’

  ‘And you can’t expect to have a healthy baby unless you stay here and rest. It would be different if your husband was at home and could make sure you didn’t do anything, but you know as well as I do that if you go home you’ll do things. You’ll tell yourself you’ll just get up for a minute, then you’ll see something that needs doing and before you know it, you’ll be sick again.’

  Dani sighed.

  ‘You’re right, of course. I wouldn’t stay in bed, but this is so boring!’

  ‘Read a book,’ Anna suggested. ‘What do you like? Romance? Crime?’

  Dani blushed.

  ‘I love romances but Brian teases me about reading them.’

  ‘Well, phooey to him. I can’t think of a better or more relaxing way for you to be spending your time here. And it’ll stop you fretting about going home. I’ll get you some.’

  Then, satisfied with Dani’s condition, she went on to where Mr Jenks, an elderly man with severe renal failure, was fighting fate.

  Knowing she was officially off duty, Anna could spend some time with him, asking him questions about his life as a drover, shifting herds of cattle from one part of the outback to another. His stories fascinated her and she hoped that someone, some time, had written these stories down, because this was part of the outback heritage, and though the huge road trains now shifted cattle, the romance of the drover’s life should live on.