him to go to prison.’
‘Because then you’d get Max back?’
‘I’m all he’s got.’
‘Your stepfather must love him to keep him with him.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Georgie said fiercely. ‘He’s just using him. Last time he was here—last time Ron spent time inside—Max told me he does the running. He acts as lookout. Max shops for them when Ron doesn’t want to get recognised. Ron even used him for drops. When he was six years old!’
‘Oh, Georg …’
‘Ron’s rotten,’ Georgie muttered. ‘My whole family’s rotten. That’s why I’m here in Crocodile Creek—I’m as far as I can get from any of them. Except Max. My one true thing. Max—and I can’t do a thing about him.’
There was a long silence. Gina stared at her friend in real concern. Georgie, who’d hauled herself up the hard way, who’d fought her way through medical school, who’d come from the school of hard knocks and was tough on the exterior, but underneath …
‘If you really don’t want to be my bridesmaid …’ she said tentatively, and Georgie’s eyes flew up to meet hers.
‘Who said I didn’t want to be your bridesmaid?’
‘But Alistair …’
‘I can cope with Alistair Carmichael,’ she said grimly. ‘He’s the least of my worries. Engaged, huh? I can cope with Alistair Carmichael with my hands behind my back.’
‘Georgie …’
‘Nothing outrageous,’ she said, and threw up her hands as if in surrender. ‘I agree.’
And then she added, under her breath, ‘Or nothing outrageous that you’re going to know about.’
It had been some flight. Alistair emerged into the brilliant sunshine of Crocodile Creek feeling almost shell-shocked. He’d been coping with sleepless nights before he’d left. They were setting up a new streamlined process to move patients from Theatre to Intensive Care—not such a difficult process when you said it like that, but in reality, with paediatric problems the transfer was too often a time of drama. He’d orchestrated a whole new method of processing transfers, and he’d hoped to have it securely in place before he’d left, but there’d been last-minute glitches. He’d spent the days before he’d left going through the procedures over and over, supervising mock transfers, timing, making sure the team knew exactly who was doing what.
In the end he’d been satisfied but Eloise had driven him to the airport and even she had been concerned.
‘You’re pushing yourself too far.’
‘Says the youngest ever professor of entomology.’
‘I know my limits, Alistair.’
‘I know mine, too. I can sleep on the plane.’
But as it had turned out, he hadn’t. There’d been turbulence and the plane had been diverted to New Zealand. There he’d endured eight hours in an airport lounge and finally clearance to fly on. More turbulence—this time so severe that some passengers had been injured. Apparently there was a cyclone east of Northern Australia.
Luckily it was southeast of Crocodile Creek and the last short leg had been drama free. Thank God. He descended the plane steps, looking forward to seeing Gina. Trying not to look exhausted. Trying to look as if he was eager for this visit to begin.
Gina wasn’t in the small bunch of waiting people. Instead …
His heart sank. Georgie. Dr Georgiana Turner.
He’d hoped she’d have left town by now. What Gina saw in this … tramp, he didn’t know.
‘Hey, Alistair.’ She waved and yelled as he crossed the tarmac.
She was chewing gum. She was wearing tight leather pants and bright red stilettos. She had on a really tight top—so tight it was almost indecent. She was all in black. The only colour about her was the slash of crimson of her lips, her outrageous shoes and two spots of colour on her cheeks.
‘How’s it going, Al?’ she said, and chewed a bit more gum.
‘Fine,’ he said, trying to be polite and not quite succeeding. ‘Where’s Gina?’
‘See, she was expecting you yesterday. So today she and Cal are running a clinic out on Wallaby Island. The weather’s getting up so they thought they ought to go when they could.’
‘You couldn’t have taken her place?’
‘Hey, I deliver babies. Gina’s the heart lady. There’s not a lot of crossover. You got bags?’
‘One. Yes.’
She sniffed, in a way that said real men didn’t need baggage. She turned and headed for the baggage hall, her very cute butt wiggling as he walked behind her.
It was some butt.
OK, that’s what he couldn’t allow himself to think. That was what had landed him into trouble in the first place. She was a tart. Somehow she’d gained a medical degree but, no matter, she was still a tart.
But even so, he shouldn’t have tried to pick her up.
Now they stood side by side at the luggage carousel, waiting for his bag. It took for ever. There were other doctors there from the plane.
‘There’s some other wedding happening here,’ he ventured for something to say, and Georgie nodded, looking at the baggage carousel as if it was she who’d recognise his bag.
‘Yep. One this Saturday, one next. Planned so those going to both needn’t make two trips. We were starting to think there’d be no guests for the first one.’
‘It’s some storm down south,’ he said reflectively. ‘That’s how I met these guys. The trip from New Zealand should have been cancelled. We hit an air pocket and dropped what felt like a few thousand feet. Anyone who wasn’t belted in was injured.’
‘You got called on as a doctor?’
‘A bit. I was asleep at first.’
‘Off duty,’ she said blankly, and he winced. There was no criticism in her voice. It was a simple statement of fact, but she knew how to hurt. When he’d woken to discover the chaos he’d felt dreadful. He’d helped, but other doctors had been more proactive than him.
‘Look, I—’
‘Is this your bag? It must be. Everyone else has theirs.’
‘It’s mine,’ he said, and she strode forward and lugged it off the conveyor belt before he could stop her. She set it up on its wheels and tugged out the handle, then set it before him. Making him feel even more wimpish.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘My wheels are in the car park.’
‘Your car?’
‘My wheels.’ She was striding through the terminal, talking to him over her shoulder. He was struggling to keep up.
He was feeling about six years old.
‘Hey, Georg.’ People were acknowledging her, waving to her, but she wasn’t stopping. She was wearing really high stilettos but still walking at a pace that made him hurry. She looked like something out of a biker magazine. A biker’s moll?
Not quite, for her hair was closely cropped and cute—almost classy. The gold hoop earrings actually looked great. She was just … different.
‘Doc Turner.’ An overweight girl—much more your vision of a biker’s moll than Georgie—was yelling to get her attention. ‘Georgie!’
Georgie stopped, spinning on her stilettos to see who was calling.
The girl was about eighteen, bottle-blonde, wearing