she’d married.
‘What the hell did he do to you to make you so fearful?’ Charles demanded suddenly, and Jill shook her head.
‘I’m not fearful.’
‘Not in your work, you’re not. Put bluntly, you’re the best nurse it’s ever been my privilege to work with. But in your private life…’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’ve kept yourself to yourself ever since you’ve been here.’
‘And you’ve kept yourself to yourself for even longer.’
‘Maybe I have more reason,’ he muttered. ‘Hell, Jill, do you think we can make a marriage work?’
‘I… How different would it be from what it is now?’
‘I guess not much,’ he conceded. ‘I’d need to buy you a ring.’
‘You don’t.’
‘No, that much I do,’ he said. ‘Let’s make this official straight away.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But things are tight. We’ve got Muriel Mooronwa’s hernia operation in half an hour, and I’ve promised to assist Cal. If things are straightforward we might catch the shops before closing.’ He grimaced. ‘And the paperwork…that’ll take time and I need to go to the island tomorrow.’ He frowned, thinking it through. ‘You know I’ve told Lily I’ll take her with me. Why not rearrange the roster and come with us? We could sort out the details over there.’
‘I can’t,’ she said flatly. ‘Someone senior has to stay here.’
‘I can ask Gina and Cal to stay. Cal’s so much second in command here now he’s practically in charge.’
‘He’s not a nurse. Doctors think they know everything but when it comes to practicalities they’re useless.’
‘You don’t want—’
‘No,’ she said flatly, and would have stepped away but Charles’s hand came out and caught her wrist. Urgent.
‘Jill, this doesn’t have to happen. I’m not marrying you against your will.’
‘Of course not,’ she said dully, and a flash of anger crossed Charles’s face.
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ he snapped. ‘I want no submissive wife.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I employ you as a director of nursing and I get a competent, bossy, sometimes funny, sometimes emotionally involved woman who keeps my nursing staff happy. It’s that woman I’m asking to marry me—not the echo of what you once had with Kelvin.’
‘I’m over Kelvin.’
‘You’re not,’ he said gently. ‘I know you’re not. I’d like to murder the bottom-feeding low-life. More than anything else, Jill, I’d like to wipe the slate clean so you can start afresh. Find some great guy who can give you a normal life—kids, dancing, loving, the whole box and dice. But I can’t. OK, I can’t have them either. We’re stuck with what life’s thrown at us. But between us we want to give Lily a great home. She makes us both smile, we make her smile, and that counts for everything. It’s a start, Jill. A need to make a kid smile. Is it a basis for a marriage?’
She took a deep breath. She turned and leaned back on the veranda rail so she was looking down at him.
‘I sound appallingly ungrateful,’ she whispered.
‘You don’t. You sound as confused as I am.’
‘You’re burying your dreams.’
‘I don’t do dreams,’ he said roughly. ‘We’ve both been there, Jill. We both know that life slaps you round if you don’t keep a head on your shoulders. But what we have… Friendship. Respect. Lily. Is it enough to build a marriage?’
‘For Lily’s sake?’
‘Not completely,’ he said, and he looked out to where Lily was swinging so high she just about swung over the branch. ‘Just a little bit for our sakes.’
‘Because we love Lily,’ Jill whispered.
‘And because the arrangement suits us.’
‘I guess we already have a ruddy great hole in our living-room wall.’
‘We may as well make it permanent,’ Charles said. He’d released her hand. He put his hands on the arms of his wheelchair as if he meant to push himself to his feet, but Jill took a step away and he obviously thought better of it. ‘What do you say, Jill? For all our sakes…will you marry me?’
‘As long…as long as you don’t expect a real marriage.’
‘Outwardly at least it has to be real. Lily needs to know that we’re marrying and we’re her adoptive parents.’
‘She calls us Jill and Charles,’ Jill said inconsequentially.
‘Wendy says that’s OK.’
‘Yes, but I’d really like her to call me…’ She faltered. ‘But I guess that’s something I can get over. Charles, if you really mean it…’
‘I really mean it.’
‘Then I’ll marry you,’ she whispered, and despite the enormity of their decision Charles’s eyes creased into laughter.
‘I’m supposed to get down on bended knee.’
‘And I’m supposed to blush and simper.’
‘I guess we make do with what we’ve got.’ He caught her hand again and before she guessed what he intended he lifted and lightly brushed the back of her hand with a kiss. ‘It makes sense, Jill. There’s no one I’d rather marry.’
The sound of laughter echoed from the pathway. Across the lawn was the doctors’ house, a residence filled with young doctors from around the world. Doctors came here and gave a year or two’s service to the remote medical base.
Two young women were coming along the path now, in white coats, stethoscopes around their necks.
They were young and carefree and gorgeous.
There was no one Charles would rather marry? Jill doubted that. He was gorgeous, she thought. His disability was nothing.
But it wasn’t nothing in his eyes. It would always stop him giving his heart.
If he couldn’t give his heart, she may as well marry him, she thought. And, hey…
A tiny part of her…just a tiny part…thought marriage to Charles Wetherby might be…well…interesting?
Quite simply, Charles was the sexiest man ever to be stuck in a wheelchair, voted so by every single female medic who ever came here.
‘OK,’ she said, and managed a smile. The smile even felt right.
‘OK, what?’
‘I’ll marry you.’
‘Fine,’ he said, and grinned and let her hand go. ‘Let’s get this hernia organised and go into town and find us a ring.’
‘A ring…’
‘A ruddy great diamond,’ he said. ‘If we’re doing this at all, we’re doing it properly.’
‘Charles, no.’
‘Jill, yes,’ he said, and spun his wheelchair to the end of the veranda where the ramp gave him access to the outside path. Decision made. Time to move on.
‘Let’s tell Lily,’ he said. ‘She needs to approve. But, hell, we only have a month to make this legal. We may as well stop wasting time.’
‘Don’t…don’t tell Lily yet.’ It