Leah Martyn - Outback Doctor, English Bride

She looked in the mirror, feelin g an expectant throb in her veins as she twisted her hair up int o a presentable knot. She’d foun d him again. Now somehow, som e way, she had to make him want t o reclaim all they’d had.

Impossible as it appeared on the surface, she had to get Jake to tap into his feelings again. Realise that what they’d shared together in England they could have again here, on the other side of the world—his world, in the Australian Outback. She had her fingers firmly crossed as she left her bedroom and went to find him.

He still found it unbelievable she was here. Under his roof. The time they’d spent in England suddenly seemed pitched into sharp focus. And he knew now that meeting her had changed the whole course of his life. And it wasn’t just the intimate moments they’d shared, although they had been magic. No, it had been the way she’d made him feel, the way she’d made him laugh. In fact it had been the whole damn package that was Maxi. His Maxi?

Well, she had been. For a while.

Leah Martynloves to create warm, believable characters for the Medical™ Romance series. She is grounded firmly in rural Australia, and the special qualities of the bush are reflected in her stories. For plots and possibilities, she bounces ideas off her husband on their early-morning walks. Browsing in bookshops and buying an armful of new releases is high on her list of enjoyable things to do.

Recent titles by the same author:

THE DOCTOR’S PREGNANCY SECRET

A MOTHER FOR HIS BABY

DR CHRISTIE’S BRIDE

THE BUSH DOCTOR’S RESCUE

CHRISTMAS IN THE OUTBACK

THE DOCTOR’S MARRIAGE

BY

LEAH MARTYN

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

FRUSTRATION was eating him alive.

The regular flight for the week had been and gone and his locum hadn’t been on board. So, where the hell was he?

Impatiently, Jake Haslem pushed a hand through the dark strands of his short hairstyle. ‘Ayleen!’ he yelled through the open door of his consulting room.

Ayleen Sykes, loosely titled Practice Manager, tipped a long-suffering gaze towards the ceiling, before swinging off her chair and walking across the corridor to Jake’s consulting room. ‘There was a reason we spent all that money and had the intercom phones installed, you know?’ she said dryly from the doorway.

‘Mmm. Forgot.’ Jake gave one of his repentant twisted smiles. ‘Could you call the agency in Sydney and see if they have any word on our locum’s movements, please? He was supposed to be on today’s plane.’

Ayleen glanced at her watch. ‘Haven’t you noticed the time, Jake? They’ll have all gone home.’

Jake swore under his breath. He hadn’t realised. Outback Australian summers meant daylight went on and on into the evening, until darkness fell as profoundly and quickly as a cloak thrown over the sun.

‘I suppose I could email them,’ Ayleen compromised. ‘We’d possibly have an answer first thing tomorrow.’

‘Sounds like a plan.’ Jake gave a resigned open-handed shrug. ‘Thanks.’ As his receptionist disappeared back to her desk, he swung to his feet and went across to the open window, looking out at the heat-hazed landscape.

There was the smell of smoke in the air today. And smoke meant bush fires. Jake exhaled a long slow breath. Not that on top of everything else.

He was trying to do the best for his patients but he was finding it more difficult every day. Tangaratta was dry and dusty, struggling through the worst drought in memory. And just lately he’d begun doubting his sanity in relocating here shortly after he’d returned from England two years ago.

But with his dreams for the future in tatters, he’d wanted out of Sydney and the predictability of working civilised hours at the state-of-the-art medical centre. And that had been when he’d chosen the hard physical grind that went with practising medicine in a remote rural area. In a place where he could actually feel needed by his patients. He huffed a rueful grunt into the silence. Sometimes, like today, he wished he didn’t feel quite so needed .

But, then, he had to admit that nothing had gone to plan since he’d arrived at what was supposedly a two-doctor practice. When he’d been in Tangaratta for only a month, a family emergency had driven his partner Tom Wilde back to the city. So now, many months on, Jake was still the sole family practitioner for the district, with the nearest large medical facility over two hundred kilometres away.

He reached up and rubbed a crick in the back of his neck. He couldn’t go on like this. Every day the situation became more critical. And if he fell by the wayside then his patients would have no one. And now, more than ever, the welfare of his patients had to come first. He blew out a low, weary breath. And in the same breath made a decision. To hell with trying to entice a locum to come here. He needed something much more permanent.

He needed a partner.

A murmur of conversation from Reception had him turning and frowning. He didn’t conduct an evening surgery and if someone was under the impression he did, they could think again. Unless it was an emergency, of course. But by the lilt of female conversation, it didn’t seem so. Possibly one of Ayleen’s tennis friends had come to collect her for their weekly night game…

Jake got no further with his speculation. Suddenly Ayleen was back at his door. ‘Someone to see you, Dr Haslem,’ she said formally. And sensing something private and of a confidential nature between her boss and his visitor was about to happen, she twinkled a finger wave and fled.

‘What the—?’ Jake’s muttered response was cut short as a young woman stepped forward into the doorway, looking squarely at him across the space that divided them.

For a second Jake couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes or the weird kind of sexual energy that rose out of nowhere to slice the air between them. His throat convulsed in a dry, deep swallow. His eyes weren’t deceiving him. It was her.

In the flesh.

As gorgeous as he remembered. Tall and leggy, her cloud of red hair drawn back from her face and gathered loosely under the sassy little cap perched on the top of her head, the peak almost hiding the green of her eyes. In deference to the heat, she wore a white vest top and fatigue-styled pale olive cotton trousers.

Jake felt his heart go into freefall, the nerves in his stomach twist and grind painfully.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Maxi?’ he said into the nerve-crunching silence.

‘Well, hello to you, too, Jacob.’

His mouth compressed and something like pain, no more than a flicker crossed his face. No one, not even his mother, called him Jacob but on her tongue, with its precise little English accent, it sounded perfect. And suddenly he was pitched back to another time and another place.

And a lover he would never forget.

Had she expected way too much? That his attitude might have softened in the two years they’d been apart? Maxi felt the composure she’d drummed up slide away and be replaced by a tangling disquiet in the pit of her stomach. Even just seeing him had elevated her pulse to drumming proportions, her body humming like a high-energy electricity grid.