message that she understood only too well as he spoke to her. “Would you tell reception to hold over all calls to me while I’m with Mr. Carew, Suzanne?”
Painful business, best handled without interruption. She nodded and started to withdraw, pulling the door shut after her.
“Suzanne...”
Leith Carew spoke her name as though rolling his tongue around it, tasting it, savouring it. It sent a shiver down her spine. She instinctively squared her shoulders, fighting off his unwelcome effect on her. Courtesy demanded she acknowledge him one last time. She looked, meeting a green-eyed gaze that held a determined promise he would find her again at a more opportune time.
“Thank you,” he said.
She bit down on the automatic response, “You’re welcome.” He wasn’t welcome. He had twisted the indefinable link that had leapt between them into something totally wrong and unacceptable.
She gave a brief nod to satisfy Brendan’s sensitivity to the situation, then firmly shut the door, leaving the two men to get on with what had to be done.
The post-mortem reports, most likely, Suzanne thought, wincing over the horror of hearing the grim results of what could have been avoided if only Ilana and Hans Bergen had understood the terrain they had travelled.
Tourist brochures billed the Australian outback as the last frontier, an adventure into a primitive timeless landscape that defied the encroachment of civilisation. The dangers involved in setting out without an experienced guide were well publicised, but every year there were people who believed they knew enough and were properly prepared to meet and beat any possible mishap on their own. And every year the outback took its toll of them.
Ilana and Hans Bergen had decided to travel the Gunbarrel Highway, so named because the track had been bulldozed in a dead straight line across the desert by a geological survey team. It was not maintained and was barely negotiable by the hardiest four-wheel-drive vehicle. What had drawn the Bergens off that track no-one knew. Perhaps the mirage of a lake. The area where they were eventually found was nicknamed the Dunes of Illusion.
The outcome was easy enough to piece together afterwards. They had driven over high spinifex, which had been caught up and compressed under the metal guards of their Land Rover. Since spinifex was full of combustible gum, it ignited against the hot exhaust.
The couple had obviously panicked and tried to put the fire out with their water supply. They were left with little or no water and an undriveable vehicle. Their fate was inevitable. In the Gibson Desert temperatures could reach fifty degrees Celsius at midday.
Suzanne delivered Brendan’s message to the receptionist and retreated to her own office. She automatically filed cards on the aboriginal families she had seen that morning. Although there was nothing of a serious nature to report, she was meticulous about keeping records. One never knew what might be important some day.
It was the lack of any records on her father that had made tracing any family impossible. Not that it really mattered now, Suzanne told herself. After all, she had been brought up in the greatest family in the world, fourteen lost children taken in by the kindest and most loving parents, who taught them how to blend together and support each other. She was proud to be one of the James family.
They had all been encouraged to be achievers in their own individual ways, and Suzanne had found a very real fulfilment in her nursing career. Brendan was the perfect partner for her. In that sense, Leith Carew had nothing to offer her, and she had nothing to offer him.
She frowned over his reaction to her. Why would such a man even bother to show an interest, let alone feel one? It wasn’t as though she was strikingly attractive.
She had a slim, trim figure nicely proportioned to her average height, but it was hardly spectacular. She was lucky with the natural wave of her hair, and her eyes were certainly attractive in shape and colour. She wished her nose wasn’t tip tilted, since it always caught the sun if she didn’t wear a hat, and she would have preferred not to have a dimple in her chin. But she counted herself passably pretty. More than passably compared to most of the young women who populated Alice Springs.
She had no doubt Leith Carew could choose from the cream of society in more than this continent, and in such a wide field of beautifully polished and sophisticated women, Suzanne felt sure she would be quite ordinary.
Perhaps, for him, she had simply been an on-the-spot diversion from burdens that were weighing too heavily on him. She wished he hadn’t reacted like that. It had made her feel wrong instead of...
Instead of what?
Suzanne shook her head in vexation. Forget it, she sternly told herself. It couldn’t have been important. And Leith Carew would soon go back to his own world, which was a long, long way from hers.
She immersed herself in paperwork, not looking up from her desk until a knock came on her door. Brendan, she thought, but it was Leith Carew who stepped into her office.
Again Suzanne was gripped by a sense of something meaningful that went beyond any logical reasoning. It ran through her mind that this man had a part to play in her life or she had a part to play in his. Improbable as that was, the strange feeling could not be easily dismissed.
He closed the door behind him and stood in front of it for several moments, his eyes probing hers for answers he wanted or needed. There was a rigidity about his body that suggested he was holding a tight control over himself. He looked sick.
“I wondered—” he started forward as he spoke “—if you were free this evening. I’d like to have your company.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Carew. I’m not free,” Suzanne answered softly, realising the medical reports Brendan would have read to him must have conjured up images that would have been harrowing.
He picked up the solid glass paperweight from her desk, rolled it around in his hand, then gripped it hard as though he needed to hold onto something solid. His gaze slowly lifted to hers again, a compelling intensity in the dark green depths.
“I know we’ve barely met, but I feel you’re someone I can talk to. Be with. Won’t you give me your company for one evening? Help me forget...other things...for a while? There’s nothing for you to be wary of—” he winced “—unless being seen with me is too distasteful.”
“No, it’s not that,” Suzanne assured him gently. He was hurting badly, but she couldn’t give him the solace he was looking for. “I’m simply not free to be with you, Mr. Carew.”
He frowned. “Couldn’t you cancel whatever arrangements you’ve made? I’m only asking...”
“No. I’m sorry, but no,” Suzanne said firmly.
His face tightened. His mouth compressed in frustration with her outright rejection. The appeal in his eyes hardened to an arrogance that challenged her decision. “Tell me what arrangements you’ve made and I’ll speak to the person or persons concerned.”
He was not used to being refused. Suzanne offered him an ironic little smile. “You misunderstand me, Mr. Carew. I am not free. I have a husband. And you’ve just been speaking to him.”
He stared at her with a look of stunned disbelief. “You’re married...”
“To Dr. Forbes,” Suzanne finished for him with quiet dignity.
Leith Carew visibly shuddered. His gaze dropped to the paperweight in his hand. His fingers tightened around it, and from the way his knuckles gleamed white Suzanne thought he would have crushed the glass to powder if it was possible.
His tension stirred the same unease he had evoked earlier. Suzanne’s sympathy for him was stretched thin. Although his meeting with Brendan could never have pleasant associations for Leith Carew, surely he realised that was not Brendan’s fault. She resented the look of repugnance on his face.
“How long have you been married?” he suddenly shot at her.
Surprised by the question, she answered