Poppy shrugged. ‘Maybe we could talk about it another day?’
‘I don’t think so.’
They both stopped beside her red scooter. He stared at the tiny vehicle and its bottletop-sized wheels.
‘What an embarrassing bike.’
Poppy laughed out loud. And she’d been worried about offending him? ‘Oh very diplomatic, Dr Sheppard. I bet what you drive doesn’t cost less than a soft drink to run every month, and it’s fun. Have you heard of fun?’
He obviously wasn’t used to being paid back and she smiled as he blinked at her tone.
‘I’m sorry, that was rude of me,’ he said. ‘Which reminds me, I left rather quickly without telling you how impressed I was with your resuscitation skills. I thought we worked well together.’
Damn. She’d just decided he was an insufferable prig and he said something nice. She hated that. Now she felt like a louse.
She tried to hide her face by bending down to put the keys in the ignition. She could feel the heat in her cheeks because he’d made her feel self-conscious with his comment.
‘Thank you, Dr Sheppard.’
‘Jake, please.’
‘Jake, then. You’re pretty good yourself at what you do. I’m Poppy.’
He raised his eyebrows.
Poppy sighed. ‘My mother was a sixties flower child and she named her daughters after her favourite flowers. My sister’s name is Jasmine.’
Jake glanced down at her. She was tall for a woman and well rounded. He liked the way her red hair curled and bounced around her face. It was a big improvement on the theatre cap. She looked like a poppy. She had one of those husky, sexy voices that seemed to come out of the most unlikely people.
He watched her face soften when she spoke of her mother, and it made him think of the way she’d looked at the baby outside Theatre. Her face wasn’t beautiful—except when she smiled. Yet she had the kind of face he could watch all day, waiting for the changes. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed watching a woman’s reactions so much.
Then she smiled and he realised that had been what he’d been waiting for. She lit up from within and the power of it scrambled his brains again. She could light a dark room with that smile. It made him catch his breath. Like the moment in Theatre when the baby had first cried. He was probably hypoglycaemic. Light-headedness and low blood sugar levels had a lot to answer for. He needed to get away from her.
‘Well, Poppy, you should be safe if I leave you now.’ He went to shake her hand but stopped at the expression on her face. He couldn’t believe it. She looked like she was trying not to laugh. At him. He glared at her. She bit her lip and took the hand he’d let fall. She held it in both of hers and shook it.
‘I’m sorry. Not that I don’t appreciate the thought or your combat skills, Jake, but this is Midcoast.’ She gestured around at the deserted street. ‘Not Sydney or New York.’
The ungrateful minx.
‘You’re laughing at me.’ He couldn’t remember the last time someone hadn’t taken him seriously. Then there had been that crack about fun. He froze. That was a worry. What was he turning into? Then she smiled that smile again.
‘I’m sure you’ll recover.’
She was playing the cheeky minx again, but she intrigued him. Still, he knew better than to lose his usual common sense. He’d always said that women in the health profession didn’t attract him. Women required more than he could give. Look at his marriage before Helen had died.
He was here to do the work he loved. His eyes narrowed. And make someone, somewhere in this small country town pay for his brother’s death, he reminded himself. He couldn’t forget why he’d come here—to find the woman responsible for stealing a month of his brother’s short life.
Someone had to fight against the new wave of alternative remedies that were causing people to turn their backs on real medicine. Maybe she was one of them.
The herbal scent in Poppy’s hair drifted to him and he found himself staring at her. One part of him sneered at her irresponsible stand on home births and the other half was sliding into a whirlpool of attraction that he knew was dangerous. But for the first time in nearly three years he felt alive. Something had shifted or cracked to allow some light in. He didn’t know if it felt good or not, but it was hard to back away.
If he ignored the voice of reason he had listened to for years, he could just cup her chin in his hand and drop a swift kiss on her parted lips. Just one.
Jake stepped back. She encouraged people to condemn conventional medical care. Just like the woman who’d killed his brother. Hell, that had been close. He turned away. ‘Goodnight, Sister.’
Poppy raised her eyebrows at the coldness and revulsion in his voice. The guy was all over the place. ‘Goodnight, Jake! Nice meeting you, too.’ She pulled her helmet on and puttered away as fast as the little bike could go.
CHAPTER TWO
POPPY felt unsettled all the way home. OK, so Jake was gorgeous. It might be amusing to bait him but it could be dangerous. Stop thinking with your hormones and think of the unit, she urged herself. She’d been crazy to risk alienating him by pushing home birth at him straight off, and then she’d laughed at him. He hadn’t liked that. She giggled and bit her lip. It wasn’t funny. But he was such a stuffed shirt.
It was a shame that what he stuffed in his shirt seemed to start a slow burn in her. Just when she’d thought her libido had been terminally extinguished. And doctors were definitely off the menu.
* * *
The next afternoon, Poppy arrived on the ward to start her shift. She barely had time to put her bag down before being hailed from the birthing room to assist.
Jake was the first person she saw as she entered the room and she instinctively bit back her smile. Strange how there still seemed to be time to notice how broad his shoulders looked in an open-necked white shirt that seemed to go on for ever across his chest. It wasn’t fair that he affected her like this. Her life was fine without a man to complicate it. She frowned and pushed the thoughts away. She’d been through this last night and had decided not to be attracted to him.
Her glance flicked away to rest on the young girl in the final stages of labour. All seemed to be well in hand but she ensured that Dr Gates and the two morning midwives had everything needed before she moved over to the infant resuscitation trolley and Jake.
The paediatrician’s presence meant that something wasn’t right.
She raised her eyebrows in a silent question and he leaned over to speak softly in her ear.
‘Lana is a sixteen-year-old first-time mum, due in ten weeks. She only came in half an hour ago and there was no time to send her off to the base hospital. She had a small antepartum haemorrhage at home and sudden onset of labour. No foetal heart rate found since admission.’
Poppy felt her stomach plummet. ‘It still could have a chance.’ Every midwife’s worst nightmare was a mother left without a baby to take home.
‘I haven’t given up.’ Jake’s quiet words reinforced her sense of denial. She never gave up until the end. They had that much in common. When he continued with, ‘NETS is on standby if the baby looks like it’s going to make it.’ He proved he was prepared to give the baby every chance.
The neonatal evacuation team from Newcastle Hospital flew to country areas with their own portable intensive-care unit, complete with highly trained nursing staff, all equipment and a neonatologist on board to stabilise the baby before transfer.
‘I’ll