Taming Dr Tempest. Meredith Webber

it hadn’t been for the fight.’

      ‘Can you drive it?’ Nick asked, and Annabelle nodded then watched him get out, walk around the bonnet and open the door on her side.

      ‘It’s all yours. I’ll read the manual while we’re travelling.’

      She smiled at him as she slid back out to the ground.

      ‘Well, at least you’re not too stubborn to admit you don’t know something. I could name half a dozen doctors in A and E back home who’d cut their tongues out before admitting a woman might know more about a vehicle than they did.’

      Nick returned her smile with interest, flashing a gleaming grin alight with teasing self-mockery.

      ‘My ego’s taken such a battering already, one more blow is hardly noticeable.’

      They swapped seats but it wasn’t until Annabelle started the engine that she heard a short, sharp bark and remembered Bruce.

      ‘Ha! You don’t know how to drive it either,’ Nick said, but she was already out of the vehicle, looking around her, finally locating the dog tied in the meagre shade of a gidgee tree at the edge of the car park.

      ‘Bruce?’ she called, and got an answering bark, but as she approached the dog she wondered just how adaptable he was to the medical staff who came and went from Murrawalla. He seemed to be largely blue cattle dog, a dog known to be loyal to one master, but Bruce’s slavering, tail-wagging, stomach-crawling behaviour as she approached suggested he was happy to be in any human company.

      She let him sniff her hand and, as he continued to greet her with grovelling wriggles and little whimpers of delight, she unhooked his lead from the tree, picked up the empty water bowl and led him back to the vehicle.

      ‘That’s not a dog, it’s a small wolf,’ Nick announced as the dog approached him, prepared to offer Nick as much love as he’d offered Annabelle. ‘And just where does he sit? Not on my knee, I hope.’

      But his attention to the dog, the way he scratched between his ears and under his chin, convinced Annabelle that he was all talk. Bruce had won him over in a matter of seconds.

      Bruce settled the matter of where he would sit when Annabelle opened the back doors. The dog leapt in and dropped down onto a padded mat on top of one of the chests, his head against the luggage barrier that divided the front seats from the back part of the troopie. One glance at Bruce’s favoured position was enough to convince Annabelle she’d drive as often as possible. Whoever sat in the passenger side was sure to get a good amount of Bruce’s drool down the back of his or her neck.

      They drove into town, Annabelle pulling up in front of the general store, which she knew from the past sold everything from groceries to underwear, from water tanks to televisions. Across the road a group of men sat on the low veranda of the local pub, cool in the shade of the wide eaves. They nodded their acknowledgement of a couple of strangers in town and returned to their drinking without comment, although Annabelle did wonder what they’d made of Nick in his bloodstained suit.

      Once inside the store a keen young man took charge, checking Nick’s size and producing a couple of pairs of moleskin trousers, a pair of jeans, and three shirts within minutes of their arrival, then hustling Nick towards a dressing room to try them all on.

      Annabelle took the opportunity to try on the hats, finally settling on a neat black number with a good brim and the ability to tilt saucily down over one eye.

      Could she afford it?

      Not really, but it was a great hat and it really would be better for Nick to have her old one, rather than advertising his new chum status in a brand-new Akubra.

      Although why she was worried about what people might think of Nick she wasn’t sure.

      Was it because she sensed a hint of vulnerability beneath his unyielding exterior, not just the uncertainty natural to a newcomer to the bush, but something deeper—some pain—hidden behind the hard polished surface of Nick—Storm—Tempest?

      She tried tilting the hat to the other side and considered herself in the mirror, considering also why the man’s vulnerability—imagined or otherwise—was any of her business. He was noted for his lack of commitment to the women he took out, while her one and only serious experience in the relationship department had been so disastrous she’d been forced to realise she had to start again, going back to the first man she’d loved—the first man who’d deserted her—her father.

      Making her peace with him and the past so she could move forward…