скачать книгу бесплатно
A Bride and Child Worth Waiting For
Marion Lennox
Enter into the world of high-flying Doctors as they navigate the pressures of modern medicine and find escape, passion, comfort and love – in each other’s arms!The boss’s new-found familyTwo friends and one orphaned girl might not seem like the average family – but to Medical Director Charles Wetherby and Director of Nursing Jill Shaw it’s everything. Yet if they are to keep little Lily they must adopt her – and that means marriage. Charles offers Jill a marriage of convenience – wanting more but always believing his injuries will stop him finding love. But Jill sees beneath his surface – how could she not want this caring, sexy, successful man? She just needs the courage to tell him.Charles and Jill’s simmering emotions are unleashed when Lily suffers from a mystery illness. This could be their one opportunity to become the loving family they all need so much.CROCODILE CREEK A cutting-edge medical centre. Fully equipped for saving lives and loves!
‘I don’t do dreams,’ he said roughly. ‘We’ve both been there, Jill. But whatwe have… Friendship. Respect. Lily. Is itenough to build a marriage?’
‘For Lily’s sake?’
‘Not completely,’ he said. ‘Just a little bit for our sakes.’
‘Because we love Lily,’ Jill whispered. ‘I guess we already have a ruddy great hole in our living room wall.’
‘We might as well make it permanent,’ Charles said. He’d released her hand. ‘What do you say, Jill? For all our sakes…will you marry me?’
‘Charles, if you really mean it…’
‘I really mean it.’
‘Then I’ll marry you,’ she whispered, and despite the enormity of their decision Charles’s eyes creased into laughter.
‘I’m supposed to get down on bended knee.’
‘And I’m supposed to blush and simper.’
‘I guess we make do with what we’ve got.’ He caught her hand again, and before she guessed what he intended he lifted and lightly brushed the back of her hand with a kiss. ‘It makes sense, Jill. There’s no one I’d rather marry.’
Marion Lennox is a country girl, born on an Australian dairy farm. She moved on—mostly because the cows just weren’t interested in her stories! Married to a ‘very special doctor’, Marion writes Medical™ Romances as well as Mills & Boon
Romances. She used a different name for each category for a while—if you’re looking for her past romances, search for author Trisha David as well. She’s now had 75 romance novels accepted for publication.
In her non-writing life Marion cares for kids, cats, dogs, chooks and goldfish. She travels, she fights her rampant garden (she’s losing) and her house dust (she’s lost).
Having spun in circles for the first part of her life, she’s now stepped back from her ‘other’ career, which was teaching statistics at her local university. Finally she’s reprioritised her life, figured what’s important, and discovered the joys of deep baths, romance and chocolate. Preferably all at the same time!
Recent titles by the same author:
WANTED: ROYAL WIFE AND MOTHER*
HIS ISLAND BRIDE
A ROYAL MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE*
THEIR LOST AND FOUND FAMILY†
*In Mills & Boon® Romance
†Crocodile Creek
CROCODILE CREEK
A cutting-edge medical centre.
Fully equipped for saving lives and loves!
Crocodile Creek’s state-of-the-art Medical Centre
and Rescue Response Unit is home to a team of
expertly trained medical professionals. These
dedicated men and women face the challenges
of life, love and medicine every day!
In September, gorgeous surgeon Nick Devlin
was reunited with Miranda Carlisle
A PROPOSAL WORTH WAITING FOR
by Lilian Darcy
Then dedicated neurosurgeon Nick Vavunis
swept beautiful physiotherapist Susie off her feet
MARRYING THE MILLIONAIRE DOCTOR
by Alison Roberts
In November sexy Angus Stuart comes face to face
with the wife he thought he’d lost
CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, MEANT-TO-BE WIFE
by Meredith Webber
And this month sees Crocodile Creek
Medical Director Charles Wetherby’s
final bid to make nurse Jill his longed-for bride
A BRIDE AND CHILD WORTH WAITING FOR
by Marion Lennox
A BRIDE AND CHILD WORTH WAITING FOR
BY
MARION LENNOX
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU’LL have to be married or she’s going to someone else.’
Tom’s words were a bombshell, dropped with devastating effect into the quiet of Charles Wetherby’s office. Jill and Charles stared at Lily’s uncle in disbelief and mutual shock.
It was Wendy who filled the silence. Wendy was Lily’s social worker. She’d handled the details when the little girl’s parents had been killed a year ago. There’d been immediate agreement in the aftermath of tragedy. Charles and Jill would care for her.
‘Let’s just recap, shall we?’ Wendy said, buying time in a situation that was threatening to spiral out of control. ‘Tom, the situation until now has seemed more than satisfactory.’
It had. Dr Charles Wetherby, medical director of Crocodile Creek Air Sea Rescue Base, was a distant cousin of Lily’s mother and a friend of Lily’s father. In this remote community relationship meant family. Jill Shaw was the director of nursing at Crocodile Creek, and it had been Jill who Lily had clung to in those first appalling weeks of loss.
‘We’ve loved having her,’ Jill whispered.
They had. Neither Jill nor Charles could bear to think of six-year-old Lily with an unknown foster-family. They’d rearranged their living arrangements, knocking a door between their two apartments, becoming partners so Lily could live with them.
They’d become partners in every sense but one, but that one was what was bothering Tom now. Tom was Lily’s legal guardian. He had six kids by two marriages and he didn’t want his niece, but he’d become increasingly unhappy about her current living arrangements.
‘Charles and Jill have both loved having her,’ Wendy reiterated, taking in Charles’s grim stoicism and Jill’s obvious distress. ‘And it’s great for Lily to stay in Croc Creek. She was born here. She’s friends with the local kids. Her father’s prize bulls are housed locally and Lily still loves them. Crocodile Creek provides continuity of identity, and that’s imperative.’
But it wasn’t an imperative with her uncle.
‘The wife’s been onto me,’ Tom retorted, sounding belligerent. ‘People are asking questions. Why don’t we take her? The wife’s feeling guilty. Not that we want her, but I’m damned if I’ll keep saying she’s fostered. I want her adopted, and the wife says whoever gets her has to be married. We’ve got to be able to say she’s gone to a good home.’
Gone to a good home… Like a stray dog, Charles thought bleakly. Lily wasn’t a stray. She was Lily, a chirrupy imp of a six-year-old who warmed the hearts of everyone around her.
But there were scars. He remembered the crash. The truck had been a write-off. They’d had to cut the cab open to get to the bodies of Lily’s mother and father, and only then had they discovered the little girl, huddled in a knot of terror behind the seats.
‘She needs us,’ he said roughly. ‘Tom, outwardly Lily’s a bundle of mischief, cheerful and bouncy and into everything. But she’s too self-contained for a kid her age, and almost every night she has nightmares.’
‘We’re only just starting to get through to her,’ Jill added urgently, and Charles looked across at his director of nursing and thought the process was going both ways.
Jill, damaged by a brutal marriage, had escaped to Crocodile Creek and was only now beginning to relax. Jill was starting to give her heart to this waif of a little girl.
And Charles…
He’d been a loner for twenty years. It had been no small thing for him to knock a hole in his living-room wall and let Jill and Lily into his life. To give Lily up now…
‘We want her,’ he said, watching Jill, and he knew by Jill’s bleak expression that Jill was expecting the worst.
‘Get married, then,’ Tom snapped.
‘We can’t,’ Jill whispered.
‘Yes, we can,’ Charles said, spinning his wheelchair so he was facing Jill directly. ‘For Lily’s sake…why can’t we?’
It seemed they could. When the shock of the question faded, Wendy was beaming her pleasure, seeing in this a really sensible arrangement that meant she didn’t have to relocate a child she was still worried about.
Tom was satisfied.
‘But do it fast,’ he growled. ‘I want her off our hands real quick. A month’s legal? I’ll give you a month to get it done or she’s gunna be adopted by someone else.’
He bade them a grim goodbye and departed. No, he didn’t want to see Lily before he went. He never did. He might be her uncle but he didn’t care.
‘This is wonderful,’ Wendy said as the door slammed behind him. They were sitting in Charles’s office at the Crocodile Creek medical base. The hospital was wide and long and low, opening out to tropical gardens and the sea beyond. Wendy looked out the big French windows to where Lily was swinging on a tyre hanging from a vast Moreton Bay fig tree. ‘This is fantastic.’
‘It’ll mean she can stay here,’ Charles said, casting an uneasy glance at Jill.
‘It means more than that,’ Wendy said warmly. ‘What Lily needs is commitment.’
‘We are committed,’ Jill said, startled out of her silence, but Wendy shook her head.
‘No. You’re doing the right thing. Neither of you give yourselves. Not really.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ Charles demanded.
‘I mean you two are independent career people. Both of you have been hurt in the past. I’m no mind reader but I can see that. You’ve gone into your individual shells and you’ve figured out how not to get hurt. Both of you are lovely people,’ she said, gathering her notes with an air of bringing the interview to a close. ‘Otherwise I’d never have let Lily stay with you. But both of you need to learn to love. That’s what that little girl really needs. Children sense—’
‘We do love her,’ Jill interrupted hotly.
‘Yes, you do,’ Wendy said, smiling. ‘Enough to marry. It’s come as a surprise to me—a joy.’ She stooped to kiss Charles on the forehead and then she hugged Jill. Jill stood rigid, unsure.
‘You’ll figure it out,’ Wendy said. ‘You and Charles and Lily. It’s fantastic. Get yourselves married, learn to expose yourselves to what loving’s all about and then I can rip up Lily’s case file. Oh, and invite me to the wedding. Tom’s not leaving you much time—I guess you’d better start organising bouquets and wedding cake now.’
She left them, skipping down to say goodbye to Lily with a bounce that was astounding for a sixty-year-old, grey-haired social worker.
Jill and Charles were left staring after her.
Not looking at each other.
‘What have you done?’ Jill said finally into the stillness, and the words sounded almost shocking.
‘I guess I’ve just asked you to marry me,’ Charles said.
‘I… We can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘In a month?’ she whispered, and he nodded. But he was frowning.
‘It’s a problem,’ he agreed. ‘We’ve got so much on.’
They did. Six months ago a tropical cyclone had ripped a swathe of destruction across the entire coastline of Far North Queensland. The damage had been catastrophic, and only now were things starting to get back to normal. Here on the mainland things were reasonably settled, but their base out at Wallaby Island—a remote clinic plus Charles’s pet project, a camp for kids with long-term illnesses or disabilities—had been decimated. With government funding, however, and with the sympathy and enthusiasm of seemingly the entire medical community of Queensland, they had it back together. Better. Bigger. More wonderful. The first kids were arriving this week, and the official opening was on Saturday.
