A Doctor, A Nurse: A Christmas Baby

‘About that.’

Maggie shook her head at his unabashed reply. He was never ten.

‘Well, I guess I’d better get my A into G,’ Nash said, reluctant to leave. ‘I’m sure Mac wants to be getting home.’

Tonight? He was working tonight? She gave an inward groan. She’d assumed he was just doing the retrieval and then leaving. Great! Now she had to add Nash Reece and his unsettling presence to her first-night blues.

Two hours later Maggie lay in the darkened break room on a mattress on the floor, cocooned in warm blankets from the blanket warmer, trying to sleep. But her thoughts kept turning to Nash Reece with his impossible blue eyes.

Damn it! She was supposed to be sleeping.

She had one precious hour to recharge her batteries and here she was staring at the ceiling with Nash’s I like seeing you flustered, Maggie Green whispering its treachery into her subconscious.

After twenty minutes she admitted defeat, got up and headed for the tearoom, feeling tired and irritable. She was going to have to settle for bad late-night TV and a cup of tea instead. She was channel-surfing when Nash entered the room a little later.

‘Couldn’t sleep, Maggie?’

His voice purred around her and her irritation ballooned. It was all his fault she was going to feel like death warmed up in the morning.

‘Are you watching that?’ he asked, not waiting for her to answer.

Maggie passed him the remote control. There was nothing on. ‘Not really.’

‘Goodo.’ He took the gadget and flicked it to a sport channel. ‘Country versus city,’ he said to her. ‘I missed it this afternoon.’

‘You can take the boy out of the country, hey?’

He grinned at her. ‘Something like that.’

Maggie sipped her cup of tea for a few minutes while Nash watched the television. The silence between them was unsettling. Not that he looked unsettled but she sure as hell felt it. It was too…intimate.

‘So where exactly is home?’ she asked.

‘Far western New South Wales. The family owns a couple of hundred thousand acres.’

‘You’re a long way from your roots. I thought country boys hated the city?’

Nash hooted. ‘Are you kidding? I love the city. I may be a country boy at heart but I feel like a kid in a lolly shop here. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting down and dirty and dusty…’ Nash paused as he watched Maggie’s knuckles grow white around her mug. He knew she wasn’t as indifferent to him as she pretended. ‘But I love the theatre and the shopping and the night life.’

Maggie swallowed a snort. She just bet he liked the night life. She just bet he fitted right in and the girls in the clubs drooled over his strange mix of metro-sexual hottie and country-boy charm.

He was going to adore London. London was certainly going to adore him. ‘So you’re converted?’

‘It’ll do for now.’

‘Ah.Your great career plans?Your path? Tell me about it.’ This was good, they were chatting. Like two normal, reasonable adults. No vibe, just polite small talk.

Nash shrugged. ‘Become the best damn paediatrician in Australia and then take myself back home. The bush is notoriously underresourced and underfunded. I want to start up a flying paed service.’

Maggie shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given the stuff he’d talked about yesterday during his interview. His childhood promise to his sister. But she was. She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said he was going to drop out of medicine and become a drag queen.

When he’d talked about being married to his career the other day and finding out about London tonight she’d assumed it was for some hotshot, high-profile calling. To discover he was staying true to his boyhood promise was stunning.

Nash Reece, the charming flirt who’d made it clear he wanted her, had been pretty irresistible. Nash Reece, honourable doctor with a selfless purpose born from his sister’s illness, was completely irresistible. She’d caught a glimpse of this man yesterday in the studio. And she was looking at the rest of him now.

‘Your sister must be very proud of you,’she murmured.

Nash shrugged. ‘I’m sure she would be if she was alive.’

Maggie stilled as a sense of dread washed over her. Nash’s features had become shuttered. ‘Oh, Nash. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s fine,’ he dismissed. ‘She had leukaemia. I was eight. She was ten. It was a long time ago.’

‘I’m sorry, I just assumed yesterday…you didn’t say,’ she ended lamely.

‘I didn’t think it was appropriate to broadcast my sister’s death on a kids’radio show in a children’s hospital.’

‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I suppose not.’

He was silent for a moment as the overwhelming rawness of that time came back to him. He didn’t often talk about Tammy. Maybe the interview yesterday had sparked the memories again but he found himself wanting to tell Maggie about it.

‘She died in the city because there weren’t the appropriate support services at home to help with palliative care. Having to make long trips into Sydney was a drain on our family life and my parents’ finances. Being separated from Tammy a lot of the time was really, really hard on the rest of us. We missed her.’

Maggie nodded. ‘I can imagine.’

He looked at her, compassion swirling in the fudge-brownie depths of her eyes. It was nice not to have to explain the true impact of that to someone. The PICU got its share of oncology patients and he knew Maggie would understand the true horrors of the illness.

‘It took a long time for Mum and Dad to get over it. I mean, they tried hard…for the rest of us, but they were just…sad.’

‘Of course they were,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sure you all were.’

Nash looked at her, seeing not only compassion but respect. Suddenly she didn’t look at him like he was an annoying bug buzzing around. Or a child, to be tolerated or humoured. Suddenly she looked as if she was taking him seriously. Not dismissing him with a pat on the head. She was looking at him like he was a man.

Sort of like how he’d felt about her yesterday when he’d discovered her background with Radio Giggle. Instantly she’d become a three-dimensional entity and he’d had to face that there was more than a physical trigger to the tug he felt when they were together.

He didn’t know whether to be pleased by this development or to get up and leave the room. There was something in her gaze that saw deep inside him. Something he knew for sure would demand more from him than he was usually prepared to give.

The television erupted. The crowd cheered and the commentator’s voice rose an octave or two as one of the country team made a mad dash for the goalpost. Nash was grateful for the diversion and he dragged his gaze from hers and feigned interest in the game.

Maggie was also pleased for the distraction. Things had suddenly gotten quite intense and it was the last thing she wanted. Writing Nash off as a frivolous jack-the-lad had made it easier to ignore the attraction between them. But his family tragedy and dedication to his career had added a whole further dimension. A fully fleshed-out Nash Reece was going to be much harder to ignore.

‘Well, my time’s up.’ Maggie stood. Actually, she had another eight minutes but she really needed to get away.

Nash nodded, deliberately keeping his eyes trained on the television. Something had passed between them, making his interest in Maggie Green very unwise. He needed to give up on her pronto, because the Maggie who had just looked at him with compassion and respect in her eyes wouldn’t be so easy to turn his back on come January.

And that he couldn’t allow. There was London and then home. No woman had ever swayed him from his goal and he wasn’t about to get tangled up with one who could.

So, there was chemistry. So, he wanted her. Maggie Green was off limits.