Alison Roberts - Scandal In Sydney

‘It protects your reputation.’

‘Thank you.’ She didn’t feel like saying thank you. She felt … like she didn’t know what to say.

He was being businesslike, a surgeon outlining an action plan. ‘Apart from protecting your reputation, if we let everyone know what happened yesterday was the result of a long-term relationship, it helps me. I’m having four weeks with you and then you can go to Brisbane, you can do anything you like, but from my point of view you can be my absentee girlfriend for as long as I can carry it off. I’ll tell them you need to care for an ailing mother or something similar. I can tell them we met on holiday a couple of years ago. That you come to the farm whenever you can. That I’m a very loyal lover. I’m thinking I might get two years out of this.’

‘Two years …’

‘Two years without matchmaking. Two years where I’m left alone.’ He ran his fingers through his already rumpled hair and sighed. ‘Believe me, in this hothouse, that’s worth diamonds. And in return you get board for a month. You have to admit anything’s better than that dump you were staying in. So … deal?’

The fuzz was everywhere, but his gaze was on her. Firm. Businesslike. Like what he was suggesting was reason itself. ‘Platonic,’ he said. ‘No sex. Promise.’

‘Of course there’d be no sex, but …’ But her head was spinning. This was crazy. She’d be a pretend lover?

He was proposing an affair of convenience. No sex.

He really did have the most beautiful … pillows.

Oh, she was tired.

‘You,’ Luke said, with a certain amount of contrition, ‘are wrecked. You need to sleep. I have another bathroom off the living room. We’re independent. You sleep your bug away and then settle in for a month of businesslike contact. Would you like anything before you go to sleep?’

What was happening?

Sense was telling her to get out of this man’s bed now; get out of his life.

If she did, she’d have to leave the pillows.

And … He’d just asked her if she’d like anything. What she wanted more than anything else in the world …

‘Another cup of tea?’ she murmured, figuring it couldn’t hurt to ask.

He grinned. ‘Your wish is my command.’

And five minutes later she was tucked up in his bed with a fresh cup of tea, plumped pillows, a spare blanket, the night settling in over the apartment. Five minutes later she was Luke Williams’s Lover of Convenience.

SHE slept for almost twenty-four hours. Mrs Henderson popped in during the day with sympathy, tea, more eggs and toast soldiers, and some gentle probing.

Where had she come from? How long had she known ‘our lovely Dr Williams’? Were they engaged?

She acted shy. She acted sleepy, which wasn’t all that hard.

She slept.

The events of the last week had left her exhausted. In truth, the events of the last few years had left her exhausted.

She’d been her mother’s keeper. It had been a full-time job.

Right now, her mother didn’t know where she was and she couldn’t contact her. When Lily left town she’d stopped at the headland overlooking the bay and tossed her cellphone as far as she could throw it.

If her mother had a drama—and she would certainly have a drama—Lily wouldn’t even know about it.

She could guess.

Would the vicar stay with her? Would her mother be able to ride out the town’s condemnation? Would her mother be able to operate the microwave?

Her father had treated her mother like a Dresden doll. He’d died when Lily had been twelve, and Lily had promised …

Enough.

She lay in Luke’s bed with no cellphone, no way her mother could know where she was, and she felt … weightless.

She could even manage pretending to be Luke’s lover for this luxury, she told herself. And Luke was serious about what he wanted. He’d slept in the living room, then carefully packed everything up before he’d left for work, checking and rechecking so Mrs Henderson would have no hint they’d slept apart.

Mrs Henderson supported her into the shower, clucked over her and helped her into a clean nightgown. Apparently Luke had gone through her baggage and given instructions that everything should be cleaned. She should be offended but she didn’t have the energy. She lay in the vast bed on the crisp linen Mrs Henderson had insisted on changing. She gazed out of the windows at the glorious vista of Sydney Harbour.

Four days of nothing, nothing and nothing.

Apart from being Luke Williams’s pretend lover.

‘Wouldn’t your mother want to know that you’ve been ill?’ Mrs Henderson asked as she bustled back in to say goodbye for the night.

‘No,’ she said sleepily. ‘I don’t want to worry her.’

And her mother wasn’t worrying her. Luke Williams’s lover wouldn’t have mother worries.

Luke William’s lover didn’t.

‘So how long has this been going on? Why haven’t we heard about her before this? Where have you been keeping her? And where is she now?’

To say he was besieged was an understatement.

Luke’s Thursdays were always frantic—it was the day he did his kids’ list, birth defects, procedures that took all his skill and emotion. Today he was doing graft work on Ruby May Ellington’s left thigh. Ruby May was four years old. Born as a conjoined twin, her sister had died at birth. Her sister’s death had meant there had been no hard ethical decisions to be made, but the surgery to separate them had been performed urgently. There’d been no time for preparation of excess skin flaps, and the grafting still was ongoing.

Luke had been working on this case when Hannah had died. The day she’d died, his team had saved Ruby’s life.

The medical imperative tore a person in two. Like now, when he was concerned about the woman he’d left in his apartment. She was suffering from gastro but instinct told him it was more. She was too thin. Too tired. Too … shadowed.

She was running from something, he thought, but what?

He worked on, but the questions kept coming.

And they kept coming from the people around him.

Who was this Lily he’d kept so dark?

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ The head of paediatrics, Teo, a Samoan with a heart almost as big as his body, had been involved in Ruby’s care from the beginning and, like Luke, he was willing the little girl a good outcome. It wasn’t, however, deflecting him from hospital gossip. ‘You’ve had this woman for how long?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Hey, this is the Harbour,’ Teo said mildly. ‘Everything’s everyone’s business. And now you’ve installed her in Kirribilli Views … You expect to keep her to yourself?’

‘Until she’s better, yes.’

‘You have the next three days off, right?’ With the procedure over, Luke was stripping off his theatre garb. Teo had hitched himself up onto the sinks and was regarding him thoughtfully.

‘Yes.’ What was coming?

He knew what was coming. Teo had a huge extended family and he treated the hospital as part of it. He shouldn’t be a paediatrician, he should be a party organiser.

‘I’m having a party on the beach on Saturday night,’ Teo told him. ‘My aunties are bringing food. You’ve knocked me back now one hundred and seventeen times …’

‘A hundred and seventeen?’

‘I’ve been counting,’ Teo said. ‘You disappear every time you have time off, and now we know why. But since you’ve introduced your Lily into the medical team, the least you can do is bring her along.’

His Lily? ‘No.’

‘No?’

Finn walked in and Teo turned to him. ‘He’s not cooperating,’ he complained. ‘Tell him letting us in on this lady is in his contract.’