‘That’s a totally spurious argument,’ she countered in her smooth, well-modulated voice that had always played hell with his senses. ‘The actual cause of melanoma is unknown. And unlike you, Doctor, I didn’t run around with my skin exposed to harsh sunlight as a child when it’s assumed the damage is done.’
‘We lived five minutes from the beach. Everyone ran around in the sun. And I did wear sunscreen.’
She arched an expressive brow. ‘How do you explain those two lesions on your back, then? They could have turned nasty.’
‘Just as well you excised them for me,’ he dismissed with a shrug.
She felt a gentle tide of warmth wash over her skin at the memory. He’d been barely a week in her department. For a man she had been doing her level best to avoid, the intimacy of seeing him half naked while she’d operated had almost undone her.
‘And they turned out to be benign,’ he reminded her now.
‘You were lucky.’ And this was an absolutely crazy conversation. ‘Look.’ She held out her arms in front of her. ‘My skin hasn’t suffered so far. And I’ll cover up while I’m here.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re not staying. How did you get here, anyway? You weren’t on the plane.’
‘I hired a car in Sydney and drove here.’
He felt a glitch in his heartbeat. She’d driven over a thousand kilometres on some of the most isolated roads in the country just to see him again? ‘I can’t believe you did that.’
‘Oh, I took it in easy stages,’ she countered lightly. ‘It was…fun.’
He looked at her broodingly. ‘It was downright dangerous. What if you’d been targeted by a low-life?’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Or had a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere?’
She gusted a small impatient sigh. ‘I have a mobile phone.’
‘And there was I, imagining you needed a jack to change a wheel,’ he said with a deadpan expression.
She poked a small pink tongue at him. ‘I stopped for petrol here and there. I asked the garage guys to check things. They were great.’
‘I’ll bet,’ he observed, studying the rosy mouth into which her tongue had retreated. A mouth with its tiny freckle on her bottom lip. A mouth that was made for kissing. And in a second some instinct, entirely male and protective, swamped him and locked itself around his heart.
He had no choice here. No choice at all. He couldn’t risk her turning temperamental on him and taking off into the sunset. ‘All right. You can stay for a week until the next flight out.’
‘That’s pathetic. I can’t do anything useful in a week!’
He got to his feet. ‘Well, it’s all I’m prepared to let you have.’ And, please, heaven, by then he’d have acquired the gumption to be able to handle this situation with Maxi with cool detachment.
‘Fine, then.’ Maxi shrugged and spun off her chair. But she was by no means giving up on this. ‘The pub looks pleasant enough. I’ll stay there.’
‘You’ll stay with me,’ he countered, the glint in his narrowed gaze as it skimmed over her, confirming her impression that he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight.
She bit back a smile. Well, that might work to her advantage. They still had something wildly unfinished between them whether Jake admitted it or not. She tilted her head and said innocently, ‘I appreciate you letting me stay with you. But won’t people talk?’
‘Talk, schmork,’ he dismissed. ‘Tangaratta is in the middle of a drought. Folk are too busy just trying to survive and keep food on the table to be concerned about their doctor’s living arrangements.’
‘I did notice the country looked rather parched,’ she said seriously. ‘How bad is it—really?’
‘It’s bad.’ He rolled back his shoulders as if to slough off an aching weariness. ‘Depression, exhaustion and stress everywhere. We’re already trucking water in for general use in the town.’
She nodded, moving closer to him, as if in some way to share his load. ‘So, I guess folk are pretty desperate.’
He nodded. ‘Farmers especially. Outlaying money they don’t have to plant crops that die before they’re barely out of the ground. In some cases selling up and getting nothing for their livestock. Families having to split up to go after jobs elsewhere. There certainly aren’t enough to go round locally.’
‘Suicides?’ she asked with some perception.
‘Couple.’ Jake dipped his head, the muscle in his jaw pulled tight. ‘One only recently.’ He stopped, unwilling to burden her with the harsh reality of it all. And especially he didn’t want to tell her about how it had affected him personally and made him question his worth as a rural doctor.
But Maxi, being Maxi and knowing him far better than he gave her credit for, soon sensed his need to unload his self-doubt. ‘So, tell me about it,’ she encouraged gently. ‘Was it someone you knew personally? A patient?’
He gave a hard-edged laugh. ‘Still the counsellor, I see.’
A flood of colour washed over her face. He’d made it sound almost an insult. ‘Call it debriefing, if that will assuage your medical ethics.’
Jake rode out the implication of her words with a small lift of his shoulders. He couldn’t deny it would help to talk and only another doctor, one with the special qualities that Maxi Somers possessed, would understand where he was coming from, when you agonised that perhaps you could have listened more closely, done more…
‘It was a friend, a local grazier.’ Jake scrubbed his hand across his cheekbones and went on, ‘When he was in town we’d usually make time for a beer and a chat. I knew he was concerned about the future. The bank was squeezing him and his property had generated little income with the prolonged dry.’
‘So, awfully difficult times,’ Maxi commented thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’ His moody gaze raked her face. ‘And it didn’t help that he was the fourth generation to inherit the property and felt an enormous burden to try to keep it in the family. But I guess things finally folded in on him. One morning he just upped and wrapped himself and his motorbike around a tree.’
‘Oh, lord…’ Maxi’s hand flew to her throat.
‘He should have come to see me,’ Jake emphasised tightly. ‘Maybe we could have talked things through. I’d encouraged him often enough…’
‘But he never came?’
‘No.’ In the brittleness of the silence that followed, Jake said hollowly, ‘This is no place for you to be, Max.’
She brought her chin up. ‘On the contrary. I’m a doctor. At a rough guess I’d say you could do with an extra pair of trained hands. And so could the people of Tangaratta, by all accounts. And I’m accredited to work here. I arranged all that before I left the UK. Put me on the staff and let me help.’
‘No.’
She hesitated infinitesimally. Jake was not a man you could bulldoze. She knew that. But there were other ways. More subtle ways… Closing the small gap between them, she went on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. ‘OK, then,’ she murmured. ‘If that’s what you truly want.’
Jake took a shaken breath as her hair fluttered a lacy pattern against his skin and he found himself surrounded by the delicate floral scent of her. God, it was magic to be this close to her again.
And in a rush all the old disconcerting feelings of his feet not seeming to quite touch the ground when she was this close