Marion Lennox: Dating The Millionaire Doctor

And suddenly he could see her hidden agenda. He could take offence at her knocking back his help-or he could understand.

This place was filled with six months’ memories. She needed to say goodbye on her own terms.

She might well cry again. The thought was bad but he suspected she needed to, and she certainly had the right.

How could he ever have thought her frumpy? How could he ever have thought she was uninteresting?

He gazed down into her troubled face and he thought suddenly, I’d like to hold her again. And then he thought… I’d really like to kiss her. It wasn’t sympathy now. She had so many levels. She was such a woman…

He couldn’t kiss her. Of course he couldn’t; she’d run a mile and the thought was totally illogical.

And besides, he thought, trying hard for logical, she was too dirty, too tear-stained, too not the sort of woman he kissed .

But as she turned away, as she knelt to start filling boxes, he looked down at her, in her tight, faded jeans clinging to her neat figure like a second skin, at her torn T-shirt, at the way a curl was wisping down the nape of her neck…and he was aware of a sharp stab of missed opportunity.

What would she be like to kiss?

He didn’t know, and he had no business thinking about finding out. He formed relationships with women who knew the rules-independent women who wanted nothing but a lighthearted relationship which went nowhere.

Would Tori understand those rules? He knew she wouldn’t, and there was no way he was risking giving pain.

So he wanted to kiss her but he couldn’t. She didn’t even want his help cleaning this house-and he had to respect her wishes.

‘I’ll see you down at the lodge,’ he said, more harshly than he intended. ‘Before dinner?’

‘See you then,’ she said without looking up. ‘Thank you, again, Jake.’

So that was that. He turned and left, leaving Tori shoving welfare clothes into welfare boxes. Packing up life as she knew it-and moving on.

While a little dog watched Jake’s car until it disappeared from view.

The place was a mess. She gazed around the house and thought she couldn’t just walk out. It wasn’t fair.

She should have let Jake help, and maybe if it hadn’t been Jake she would have. But then Jake wasn’t anyone else. The man had her thoroughly off balance. The equilibrium she’d striven so hard to reach had been tossed off course by the death of one little koala-and then by the way she’d reacted to Jake.

For this was more than grief.

Barb said she had to move on. Her head told her she couldn’t, but her body was telling her it was more than time.

So she’d thought he was lovely and she’d sobbed all over him. What a turn-on. She headed into the bathroom to fetch her toiletries. Despite what she’d told Jake there was a mirror there, and she saw what she looked like. A nightmare.

‘Just forget it,’ she said fiercely to a pile of second-hand clothes she had no use for. ‘Your body would react to anything in pants right now. You’re needy and weepy and pathetic. So get a grip and don’t even begin to think that Jake Hunter’s seeing you as anything more than a basket case.’

She sniffed.

‘And don’t go blubbering about that as well,’ she snapped to her reflection, and headed back to the bedroom and kicked the closest cardboard box, which promptly collapsed. She stared at it as if it’d personally betrayed her-and then the phone rang.

‘Doc Nicholls?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Combadeen Cleaners,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘We’ve been paid to clean the place you’re using up on the ridge. Cart away garbage. Give stuff to welfare. Scrub. Do whatever you want.’

‘You’ve been paid?’ she said cautiously.

‘This guy-Jake Hunter?-apparently he owns the lodge as well as your place? He said you’re moving out. If it’s okay with you, he said you do what you want, then leave the rest for us. When you’re finished, leave a key on the kitchen table. We’ll collect it tonight. We’ll clean and lock up after our-selves. But it’s only if you want us. He made that clear. We’ve been paid already but it’s up to you.’

It’s up to you. Jake understood. He was helping, but on her terms. The offer took her breath away.

For the past six months she’d been in charge. She’d been giving instructions. She’d organised.

Jake had listened to what she’d said, but he’d heard the underlying message and he’d organised around her.

The woman was giving her time to think about it. She gazed around her, at six months’ chaos of a house being used as an animal hospital.

She should do it herself.

Jake was bossy, she thought. He was autocratic. He also scared her, just a little, the way he understood.

Logic said she should stay right away from Jake Hunter and his grandiose gestures.

It wasn’t going to happen. She sniffed again and thought if she cried one more time today she’d need an IV line to replace fluids.

‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I accept with pleasure.’

Would she come?

Jake paced the lodge and thought he should have been more insistent.

Why was it so important she accept?

He didn’t know. He only knew that it was.

SHE’Ddone what she could. The cleaners could deal with the rest. Tori sat in her little white van with Rusty close beside her, and thought leaving wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

Stupid or not, it was a grief in itself. Moving away from the ridge…

She and Rusty had spent the first dreadful nights after the fire on Barb’s couch. Then, when they’d found Jake’s place and settled that it could be a staging post for injured wildlife, it had seemed sensible that she move in here. Six months later she was still not looking further than her next patient. Until now.

Rusty was staring out the window with longing, along the road that led to her burned-out home.

Home.

She closed her eyes. It didn’t help to be angry-she knew that-but the rage she felt towards Toby was still real and dreadful. That she could have imagined she loved him… He hadn’t come near her since the fire, which was just as well. He was a coward of the worst kind-and she’d thought she’d loved him.

So don’t trust your stupid heart again, she told herself. Move on from the ridge but do not trust.

She was trying to get her tired mind to think.

Maybe accepting Jake’s invitation for accommodation at the lodge was a mistake, she decided. But staying up here tonight in the empty refuge seemed unthinkable, and landing on Barb again was equally impossible. There were relocatable homes set up down in the valley for anyone displaced by the fires. She could move into one of those.

But not tonight, she thought. She’d give herself this night of respite.

A night with Jake?

No.

This was a night at a lovely guesthouse, she told herself fiercely. It had nothing to do with Jake. It was a night of indulgence before moving onto practicalities. To the dreary other side…

She glanced at Rusty, sitting passively beside the cardboard box that held all her worldly possessions, the practical things-changes of clothes, toiletries, things she’d had to find to survive.

She would survive. She and Rusty.

‘And we’ll come back to the ridge,’ she told the little dog as he looked mournfully along the road towards where they used to live. ‘Dad and Micki and Benedict, and Mutsy and Pogo and Bandit-they’re still here. Just a little bit, but they’re still here.’

But for now they had to leave.

‘We’ll come back,’ she said again, and she flicked the engine into life and drove out the gate-and to Rusty’s great sorrow she turned right instead of left, down into the valley instead of where they’d left so much. ‘I promise you, Rusty. We’ll come home.’