Marion Lennox - Bushfire Bride

Love was Hugo.

There was no time for each other. Not now.

They held each other for as long as they could, desperately taking what they most needed from this precious contact. But, of course, there was more needed of them this day than the care of Sue-Ellen.

The fire chief stood behind them and coughed and waited. He’d given them space. He was a wise man and he’d seen their need. He’d directed his team away from them as the chopper left and had given them as much time as he could, but needs were breaking through.

‘Doc…’ He coughed a couple of times and tried again. ‘Doc…’

They broke apart. Sort of. Battered and filthy, they sat in the mud and looked up at him, and the fire chief gave them a grin which said the incongruous picture they made was hardly lost on him.

‘Geez, whatever turns you on, Doc,’ he said to Hugo. ‘Me, I like my missus in a sexy negligee but if you like ’em covered with soot-well, each to his own. But kinky is what I call it.’

Rachel blushed. She blushed from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes and she tried to haul away, but Hugo was having none of it. His hand tightened around her waist and he grinned.

‘Sexiest lady I know.’

‘Isn’t she just.’ The fire-chief’s grin broadened. ‘We’ll have her up on our calendar next year, hard hat included. Look, I’m sorry to disturb you…’

‘You’d think we could have a bit of privacy,’ Hugo complained. He seemed suddenly almost jovial. ‘We’ve searched so hard to find it. And here we are with only thirty goats, one dog and twenty odd firefighters as an audience.’ His smile faded, just a bit, but it didn’t leave his eyes completely. ‘Don’t tell me. Problems?’

‘No major ones.’ The chief wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and something suspiciously like moisture smeared his cheek. ‘We’ve been so bloody lucky. It’s amazing. But…’

‘But?’

‘One of the teams down at the river are saying some of the guys are suffering from smoke inhalation. And the publican’s wife…she tried to hook up the hose as the first of the heavy smoke hit the town but she was working blind and she fell over the tap. She sounds like she’s broken her toe.’

A broken toe…

‘Is that all?’ Hugo asked in voice that was none too steady.

‘That’s all, Doc,’ the chief told him. ‘For now. You guys might have time to continue this…discussion later if you need to. But for now I’m afraid Cowral wants you both to be doctors.’

Hugo smiled and turned back to Rachel. To his love. ‘Can we be doctors for a bit?’ Hugo asked her. He held Rachel close and the expression in his eyes told her all she ever needed to know about this man. There was no need for anything else. Just Hugo. His feel. His touch. His eyes.

And the way he looked at her.

‘What do you think, my love?’ he whispered. ‘Can we be doctors for a bit?’

‘As long as we stay being more than just doctors underneath,’ she answered, her eyes smiling and holding and loving. ‘As long as we stay just as we are.’ And then her smile broke into a chuckle of love and laughter and joy. ‘Only maybe a little bit cleaner.’

They worked then, through the rest of that long, long day. Because, of course, it wasn’t just firefighters with smoke inhalation and Maddie Forsyth’s broken toe. The town was in firefighting mode. There were minor burns everywhere. Exhaustion. Dehydration. Stress.

Hugo and Rachel worked together and separately. They saw an endless stream of patients, one after another. The little hospital was a clearing-house through which most of the town’s population passed at some time during the day.

Toby was there from time to time, brought in by Myra just to see that Daddy and Rachel were still there. Still fine.

Toby and Myra came with three dogs. Because of course they couldn’t leave the shaky Pudge at the farm. Hugo had scooped him up and carried him into town beneath his fire-crew jacket and had handed him over to Myra to fuss over. Amazingly, the two big dogs seemed to sense the little dog’s distress and now Pudge was the centre of a two-dog, housekeeper and small boy circle of protection. By his second visit into the hospital the puppy’s tail was starting to wag again.

‘I’ll telephone Melbourne and tell them to pass the news on to Sue-Ellen,’ Hugo told Rachel as Myra herded her charges outdoors again. ‘It’ll do her more good than medicine.’

In the middle of all this…he could find time to think laterally about Sue-Ellen. That was what country practice was all about, Rachel thought as she returned to washing ash out of a firefighter’s eyes. Country practice was medicine from textbooks-plus the rest.

It was healing-just for her.

They worked far into the night. The townsfolk had gone home from the beach. The wind died, and about ten o’clock the hoped-for change blew through softly from the south. The air temperature dropped to almost cool and there was a spattering of blessed rain.

But still they worked. A team had been organised to go from house to house, checking, not for spot fires now but on people’s health. The elderly and those at risk had had a day where they’d been tested to the limit. They could go home now and maybe collapse with exhaustion, stress, smoke inhalation, minor injuries…

So everyone was checked. Cowral looked after its own. And as each problem was reported, it was passed on to the medical team.

At two a.m. Rachel finally arrived back in the kitchen of the doctors’ residence. Myra had taken Toby and all three dogs out to her place for the night. There were casseroles sitting on the kitchen table-of course-but Rachel was beyond eating. She sat and stared at nothing. At nothing at all.

And fifteen minutes later Hugo walked in.

He was as exhausted as she was. He appeared at the screen door and his face was grey with fatigue. She rose and looked at him. Just…looked. And what passed between them…

It was a vow. It was confirmation of all they had come through that day.

It was the start of their life together.

‘Rachel,’ he said at last, and it was as if it was a blessing.

‘Hugo,’ she whispered, and walked straight into his arms.

There was no time then for anything but love.

There was no time for talking. No time for anything but filling this aching, searing need. Holding. Finding their rightful place.

They showered together because to do otherwise was to waste time. Their filthy clothes were shed together-clothes that on any day but this one would have had both doctors struck off the medical register as disgraces to the medical profession. But no one had minded their clothes. They’d been doctors first and foremost. They’d seen to the town’s medical needs.

But now…the need was past. The town’s needs.

There was time now for their own needs.

Time to become lovers.

There was no hesitation. No questions. There were only answers.

Their bodies met in joyful wonder. They washed each other under the stream of warm water, soaping, smiling, learning each other’s bodies in this, the most intimate act of cleaning. Soaping off the layers of grime to reveal bodies that were already known and loved.

His hands were smoothing the soap over her skin and it was the most erotic of sensations. She had the flannel and was rubbing his back, but her body was falling forward, leaning into him, letting her mouth touch his…

Tasting. Wanting.

Needing!

The need was mutual. All-exclusive.

It was as if this man and this woman had been meant for each other-destined-from the beginning of time.

And then they were together in Hugo’s big bed, dry and warmed but still naked, gloriously naked. Skin against skin, holding, holding, narrowing the gap, merging…