Read Online The Doctor's Proposal by Marion Lennox - Free Book Online Page B

time.’
    â€˜Not quite so soon as you’re preparing to shuffle off,’ Jake said bluntly. ‘I’ve told you. With physiotherapy and withoxygen and pain relief you could still have years. Especially if you agree to bypass surgery.’
    â€˜I’ll not be wanting years. What would I do with years?’
    â€˜You could grow bigger pumpkins,’ Susie said wildly. ‘Angus, I’ve only just met you. And you sound like my Rory. You’re his uncle. If you die then I’ve got nobody.’
    Gee, thanks very much, Kirsty thought, but she had enough sense to stay silent. And if she hadn’t had enough sense, Jake’s hand was suddenly on her arm, his pressure a warning. I know , she thought, annoyed, but then she glanced at his face and saw the tension and thought, This guy really cares.
    Did he care about her sister? Maybe not, but he certainly cared for the old man. He was a country doctor in the old-fashioned sense, she thought, a man who knew every aspect of his patients’ lives and who treated them holistically. Sure, he could set up an oxygen supply. He’d also plaster a broken leg or administer an antibiotic for an infection. But he looked at the whole picture, and he was looking at it now. Angus didn’t need medicine as much as he needed family, and Jake was fighting with everything he had to give him one.
    â€˜Would you like us to stay?’ Susie was asking Angus, and Kirsty held her breath. For Susie to make such a decision seemed amazing. Her twin had made no decisions since Rory had died. Even the decision of what to put on in the morning was beyond her. A crippling side-effect of depression was indecision, and Susie had it in spades, yet here she was making an instantaneous decision all by herself.
    Which might have to be revoked.
    â€˜We could only do that if Dr Cameron could deliver your baby,’ she said tentatively, and Dr Cameron grimaced.
    â€˜I usually send my expectant mothers to Sydney two weeks before the birth.’
    â€˜Why?’ Susie asked.
    â€˜A lone medical practitioner doesn’t make for an idealbirthing situation,’ he told her. ‘If you needed a Caesarean, I’d need an anaesthetist.’
    Susie’s face cleared. ‘That’s easy. Kirsty can give an anaesthetic. Not that I’ll need it, mind. I intend to deliver this baby normally. Is that the only problem?’ She turned again to Angus. ‘Is it OK if we stay? We’re stuck, you see. I came out to Australia to find you, but I was too close to my due date and now no airline will take me home. So if you need someone to stay here and I need somewhere to stay…we could really work on this pumpkin.’
    Jake’s hand was still on her arm, Kirsty realised. And he was looking at her. Angus and Susie had turned back to Spike the Pumpkin, and there was time to think things through before they took this plan any further.
    How could she think when Jake’s hand was on her arm?
    She shook it off and he drew back, as if he hadn’t meant to get so familiar.
    Good. Or was it good?
    â€˜What’s going on here?’ Jake asked cautiously, glancing at her arm and then turning deliberately to look at Susie and Angus. ‘This is happening so fast.’
    â€˜Susie’s desperate for this.’
    â€˜I don’t understand.’
    â€˜There was nothing,’ Kirsty told him. He needed to see, she thought. She needed to make him understand the mess her sister was in. ‘Rory was always really ambivalent about his background. He said he’d never got on with his parents and we knew his brother hated him. He arrived in America wanting to make a clean break and he did that by not talking about his background. The only person he ever mentioned was his Uncle Angus and that was only in passing—he’d never talk at length about him, and when Susie suggested maybe they come out here he was horrified. It was as if he’d