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      ‘I don’t do dreams,’ he said roughly. ‘We’ve both been there, Jill. But what we have… Friendship. Respect. Lily. Is it enough 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

      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

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