LITMIR.BIZ

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baby was dead.

      ‘There’s a baby behind my rock.’

      Gina closed her eyes in frustration and tried hard not to snap. CJ’s need for the toilet was turning into a marathon. The coach left the rodeo grounds in ten minutes and if they missed the coach…

      They couldn’t miss the coach. Being stranded at Gunyamurra in the heart of Australia’s Outback was the stuff of nightmares.

      ‘CJ, just do what you need to do and come on out,’ she ordered, trying hard for a voice with inbuilt authority. It didn’t work. Dr Gina Lopez might be a highly qualified cardiologist who worked in a state-of-the-art medical unit back home in the US, but controlling one four-year-old was sometimes beyond her.

      CJ was just like his daddy, she thought wearily. Even though those big brown eyes made her heart melt, he was fiercely independent, determined to follow his own road, whatever the cost.

      Like now. CJ had taken one look at the portable toilets and dug in his heels.

      ‘I’m not using them. They’re horrible.’

      They were, too, Gina conceded. The Gunyamurra Rodeo had come to an end, the portable toilets had accommodated a couple of hundred beer-swilling patrons and CJ’s criticism was definitely valid.

      So she’d directed his small person to where the parking lot turned into bushland. Even then she had problems. Her independent four-year-old required privacy.

      ‘Someone will see me.’

      ‘Go behind a rock. No one will see.’

      ‘OK, but I’m going behind the rock by myself.’

      ‘Fine.’

      And now…

      ‘There’s a baby behind my rock.’

      Right. She loved his imagination but this was no time for dreaming.

      ‘CJ, please, hurry,’ she told him, with another anxious glance across the parking lot where the coach was almost ready to leave. She was too far away to call out, and she hadn’t told the driver to wait. If they missed the coach…

      Stop panicking, she told herself. It’d come this way. If the worst came to the worst, she could step down into its path and stop it. She might irritate the driver but that was the least of her problems.

      She should never have come here, she thought wearily. It had been stupid.

      But it had seemed necessary.

      Back in the States she’d thought maybe, just maybe she could find the courage to face Cal. Maybe she could find the courage to tell him what he eventually had to know.

      But now she was even questioning that need. Was it even fair to tell him?

      She’d started out with the best of intentions. She’d arrived at Crocodile Creek late last Thursday and she’d left CJ with her landlady so she could go to find him. The house she’d been directed to was the doctors’ quarters—a rambling old house on a bluff overlooking the sea. At dusk it had looked beautiful. The setting should have given her courage.

      It hadn’t. By the time she’d reached the house, her heart had been in her boots. Then, when no one had answered her knock, things had become even worse.

      She’d walked around the side of the house and there he’d been, on the veranda. Cal. The Cal she remembered from all those years, with all her heart.

      But he wasn’t her Cal. Of course he wasn’t. Time had moved on. He hadn’t seen her, and then, just as she had been forcing herself to call his name, a young woman had come out of the house to join him.

      Gina had stilled, sinking back into the shadows, and a moment later she had been desperately glad she had. Because Cal had taken the woman into his arms. His face had been in her hair, he had whispered softly, and as Gina had stood there, transfixed, the woman’s arms had come around Cal’s shoulders to embrace him back.

      This wasn’t passion, Gina thought as she watched them. Maybe if it had seemed like passion she could still have done what she’d intended. But this was more. It was a coming together of two people who needed each other. There was something about the way they held each other that said their relationship was deep and real. The girl’s face looked pinched and wan. Cal cupped her chin in his hand and he forced her eyes to meet his, and Gina’s heart twisted in a pain so fierce she almost cried out. This girl had found what she never had.

      She’d fled. Of course she’d fled. She’d treated Cal so appallingly in the past. Now it seemed that he’d found love. Real love—the sort of love they’d never shared. What right did she have to interfere with him now?

      She’d gone back to her hotel, cuddled CJ and tried to regroup, but the more she thought about it the more impossible it seemed. How would Cal’s lady react to her appearing on the scene? How could she jeopardise this relationship for him?

      She couldn’t. CJ had been born in wedlock. Paul was his father and that was the way it had to stay.

      But she’d invested so much. She’d come so far. Surely she couldn’t simply take the next plane home, though that was what she frantically wanted to do.

      She’d promised CJ they’d see Australia. She had to make good that promise.

      So she’d made herself wait a few days. She’d booked herself and her young son onto a crocodile hunt—a search by moonlight for the great creatures that inhabited the local estuaries. Thy hadn’t found a crocodile but they’d met a real live crocodile hunter and CJ’s wide-eyed enjoyment of his stories had helped ease the ache in her heart. They’d taken a tour out to the Great Barrier Reef and had tried not to be disappointed when the weather had been wild and the water cloudy.

      Then she’d heard about the Gunyamurra Rodeo. CJ’s passion was for horses. There’d been a coach going via the rodeo to the airport, and the last day of the rodeo was a short one, so they’d decided to spend their last morning in Australia here.

      CJ had loved it, so maybe it hadn’t been a total waste of time, but now the thought of leaving was overwhelmingly appealing. Crocodile Creek was three hundred miles away. She was never going to see Cal again. Their coach was due to leave to take them back to Cairns Airport, and it was over.

      All she had to do was get her son from behind his rock.

      ‘CJ, hurry.’

      ‘I can’t do anything here,’ he told her with exaggerated patience. ‘There’s a baby.’

      ‘There’s no baby.’

      CJ’s imagination was wonderful, Gina thought ruefully, and at any other time she encouraged it. Her son filled his life with imaginary friends, imaginary animals, rockets, battleships, babies. He saw them everywhere.

      Not now. She couldn’t indulge him now.

      ‘There’s not a baby,’ she snapped again, and, dignity or not, she peered around CJ’s rock.

      There was a baby.

      For a moment she was too stunned to move. She stood and stared at the place between two rocks—the place where her son was gazing.

      This was a birth scene. One fast glance told her that. Someone had lain here and delivered a baby. The grass was crushed and there was blood…

      And a baby.

      A dead baby?

      She moved swiftly, stooping to see, noting his stillness and the dreadful blue tinge of his skin. He was so pale under his waxy birth coating that she thought he must be dead.

      She touched him and there was a hint of warmth.

      Warmth? Maybe.

      He wasn’t breathing.

      She fell to her knees and lifted him against her. His tiny body was limp and floppy. Where was his pulse?

      Nothing.

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