And there she was, right in front of him, almost exactly the way Nick remembered her—the way he’d glimpsed her two years ago, before making that very fast and very firm decision to pull back. There she was, stepping into the breach with her cheerful, elfin and slightly mischievous face, her calm, sweet voice, her practical attitude, her slim, almost tomboy build and her heart worn carelessly and innocently on her sleeve.
‘Hello, Nick,’ she said.
Bestselling romance author Lilian Darcy has written over seventy-five novels for Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance, Special Edition and more. She currently lives in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, with her historian husband and their four children. When she is not writing or supporting her children’s varied interests, Lilian likes to quilt, garden or cook. She also loves winter sports and travel.
Lilian’s career highlights include numerous appearances on romance bestseller lists, three nominations for the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award, and translation into twenty different languages. Find out more about Lilian and her books or contact her at www.liliandarcy.com
Recent titles by the same author:
THE CHILDREN’S DOCTOR AND THE SINGLE MUM
LONG-LOST SON: BRAND-NEW FAMILY*
PREGNANT WITH HIS CHILD*
*Crocodile Creek
A PROPOSAL WORTH WAITING FOR
BY
LILIAN DARCY
PROLOGUE
HE SAW her through the open doorway of Josh’s hospital room and stopped, his body dropping instantly into a silent, wary freeze, half-masked by the door itself, while he prayed she hadn’t seen him.
Miranda Carlisle.
The name shouldn’t mean so much to him after so long. It had been eight years since they’d last seen each other. And if the intervening time since he and Miranda had studied medicine together provided a protective cushion, then surely his marriage to Anna should do so even more.
But my marriage is in so much trouble…
Nick shut his eyes for a moment, not willing to face the thought. He could hear Anna’s murmuring voice as she sat in the chair beside Josh’s bed, just out of his line of sight. She had her usual barrage of almost obsessive questions and concerns. Miranda’s replies sounded patient and cheerful and clear, but he doubted whether they would quieten Anna’s fears for long.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw Miranda scribbling some lines in Josh’s notes, her head bent a little to reveal the delicate shape of her neck and her elfin ears showing pale pink through her silky dark hair. She still wore it in that swinging ponytail he remembered, and it made her look young and vibrantly energetic, like a jazz dancer or the leader of a troop of Guides.
She was Josh’s doctor now. His new respiratory specialist, because the previous one, Dr McCubbin, had just retired. Anna was thrilled with Dr Carlisle, after Josh’s emergency admission yesterday, and had said so in her usual over-detailed, stress-filled way.
But Nick hadn’t admitted to their past association, other than to say to Anna in passing, ‘We went through medicine together. She worked bloody hard every step of the way. I’m not surprised you think she’s good.’
Good, and dangerous.
Dangerous?
He was shocked to recognise the fact, but he was in no doubt of it. If their brief, passionate past relationship was going to flare in his memory in such vivid colours every time he saw her, then he should steer clear of her in the future as much as he could. For the sake of his very shaky marriage. For the sake of politeness and professionalism. For the sake of…yeah…a few things inside himself that it wouldn’t be productive or relevant or safe at this point to confront, when there was so much else of more importance going on.
On paper, you’d think that avoiding Miranda Carlisle wouldn’t be possible at all. Nick’s own son. His son’s doctor. The scarily unstable nature of Josh’s asthma attacks. The relationship between Miranda and little Josh would definitely be ongoing.
But when Nick thought of the way Anna had been reacting to Josh’s illness since it had been diagnosed eleven months ago, he knew with his usual frustration and sinking heart that his wife would be only too happy if he kept out of the way and left all the questions, the emotions and the sacrifice to her.
Now, for example. She wouldn’t be pleased to see him, wouldn’t appreciate how much he’d shoved his schedule around at Royal Victoria Hospital in order to get here at this time of day.
He saw Miranda tuck Josh’s notes into the plastic pocket at the end of the bed. It looked as if she was leaving. He ducked quickly back against the corridor wall before heading into the nearest visitor’s toilet.
She hadn’t seen him. Good. He would wait until she was certain to be gone—as a reconstructive surgeon who made these kinds of hospital rounds himself on a daily basis, he knew how to time these things—and then he’d go in to greet his wife and son.
Nick was wrong. Miranda had seen him, although she guessed he didn’t know it. When he’d first appeared and then ducked back, the movement had caught her eye at once. She’d been steeling herself for the encounter, so she had been on the alert.
Her focus had been on Josh and his mother, but she’d glimpsed the figure in the doorway and managed to catch a couple more angled, hidden glances as she’d written in Josh’s notes.
Handy things, those notes.
As soon as she’d seen the name Devlin, Nicholas, listed as the patient’s father, she’d wondered. Her former colleague, James McCubbin, had mentioned in passing a young patient named Devlin with a surgeon for a father. Now James had retired, and his patients would be parcelled out to the other three doctors in the practice.
By virtue of being the one on call when Josh had come into the emergency department with his mother yesterday afternoon, she’d inherited him, and a quick check of the contact details had confirmed that his father was that Nick, her Nick, the one who had sneaked up on her heart without her knowing it during the course of six years of shared medical studies and had then shattered it to pieces in one single night.
Or maybe she’d broken her own heart by giving it away too eagerly. She’d never really been sure how those things went. Her fault, or his? She could see, now, how much her failed six-year relationship with Ian Mackenzie had been the result of the lessons she’d learned…or had thought she’d learned…from what had happened with Nick.
And now she was Nick’s son’s doctor, and he’d disappeared from the doorway, and she wondered if the reason had anything to do with her. Maybe it was only that his pager had gone off. But if he was trying to avoid her…
Well, he couldn’t do that forever. At some point, they’d have to connect.
CHAPTER ONE
INCREDIBLY, it took two years.
Having taken on Josh Devlin as a patient when he was three years old, Miranda didn’t see his father again until the little boy was five…
‘I can’t come, Miranda. I have to pull out of the whole first week. Maybe even the whole trip.’ Anna Devlin looked white with stress and half-blind to anything else going on around her. She grabbed Miranda’s arm in the middle of the check-in concourse at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport and made the