A Proposal Worth Waiting For

Was Miranda here, then? She must be. He hadn’t had time to think about it. So this was the day, then, that he…or they…had managed to put off for so long.

And there she was, right in front of him, almost exactly the way Nick remembered her—the way he’d glimpsed her two years ago, before making that very fast and very firm decision to pull back. There she was, stepping into the breach with her cheerful, elfin and slightly mischievous face, her calm, sweet voice, her practical attitude, her slim, almost tomboy build and her heart worn carelessly and innocently on her sleeve.

‘Hello, Nick,’ she said.

Bestselling romance author Lilian Darcy has written over seventy-five novels for Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance, Special Edition and more. She currently lives in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, with her historian husband and their four children. When she is not writing or supporting her children’s varied interests, Lilian likes to quilt, garden or cook. She also loves winter sports and travel.

Lilian’s career highlights include numerous appearances on romance bestseller lists, three nominations for the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award, and translation into twenty different languages. Find out more about Lilian and her books or contact her at www.liliandarcy.com

Recent titles by the same author:

THE CHILDREN’S DOCTOR AND THE SINGLE MUM

LONG-LOST SON: BRAND-NEW FAMILY*

PREGNANT WITH HIS CHILD*

*Crocodile Creek

A PROPOSAL WORTH WAITING FOR

BY

LILIAN DARCY

MILLS & BOON

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PROLOGUE

HE SAW her through the open doorway of Josh’s hospital room and stopped, his body dropping instantly into a silent, wary freeze, half-masked by the door itself, while he prayed she hadn’t seen him.

Miranda Carlisle.

The name shouldn’t mean so much to him after so long. It had been eight years since they’d last seen each other. And if the intervening time since he and Miranda had studied medicine together provided a protective cushion, then surely his marriage to Anna should do so even more.

But my marriage is in so much trouble…

Nick shut his eyes for a moment, not willing to face the thought. He could hear Anna’s murmuring voice as she sat in the chair beside Josh’s bed, just out of his line of sight. She had her usual barrage of almost obsessive questions and concerns. Miranda’s replies sounded patient and cheerful and clear, but he doubted whether they would quieten Anna’s fears for long.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw Miranda scribbling some lines in Josh’s notes, her head bent a little to reveal the delicate shape of her neck and her elfin ears showing pale pink through her silky dark hair. She still wore it in that swinging ponytail he remembered, and it made her look young and vibrantly energetic, like a jazz dancer or the leader of a troop of Guides.

She was Josh’s doctor now. His new respiratory specialist, because the previous one, Dr McCubbin, had just retired. Anna was thrilled with Dr Carlisle, after Josh’s emergency admission yesterday, and had said so in her usual over-detailed, stress-filled way.

But Nick hadn’t admitted to their past association, other than to say to Anna in passing, ‘We went through medicine together. She worked bloody hard every step of the way. I’m not surprised you think she’s good.’

Good, and dangerous.

Dangerous?

He was shocked to recognise the fact, but he was in no doubt of it. If their brief, passionate past relationship was going to flare in his memory in such vivid colours every time he saw her, then he should steer clear of her in the future as much as he could. For the sake of his very shaky marriage. For the sake of politeness and professionalism. For the sake of…yeah…a few things inside himself that it wouldn’t be productive or relevant or safe at this point to confront, when there was so much else of more importance going on.

On paper, you’d think that avoiding Miranda Carlisle wouldn’t be possible at all. Nick’s own son. His son’s doctor. The scarily unstable nature of Josh’s asthma attacks. The relationship between Miranda and little Josh would definitely be ongoing.

But when Nick thought of the way Anna had been reacting to Josh’s illness since it had been diagnosed eleven months ago, he knew with his usual frustration and sinking heart that his wife would be only too happy if he kept out of the way and left all the questions, the emotions and the sacrifice to her.

Now, for example. She wouldn’t be pleased to see him, wouldn’t appreciate how much he’d shoved his schedule around at Royal Victoria Hospital in order to get here at this time of day.

He saw Miranda tuck Josh’s notes into the plastic pocket at the end of the bed. It looked as if she was leaving. He ducked quickly back against the corridor wall before heading into the nearest visitor’s toilet.

She hadn’t seen him. Good. He would wait until she was certain to be gone—as a reconstructive surgeon who made these kinds of hospital rounds himself on a daily basis, he knew how to time these things—and then he’d go in to greet his wife and son.

Nick was wrong. Miranda had seen him, although she guessed he didn’t know it. When he’d first appeared and then ducked back, the movement had caught her eye at once. She’d been steeling herself for the encounter, so she had been on the alert.

Her focus had been on Josh and his mother, but she’d glimpsed the figure in the doorway and managed to catch a couple more angled, hidden glances as she’d written in Josh’s notes.

Handy things, those notes.

As soon as she’d seen the name Devlin, Nicholas, listed as the patient’s father, she’d wondered. Her former colleague, James McCubbin, had mentioned in passing a young patient named Devlin with a surgeon for a father. Now James had retired, and his patients would be parcelled out to the other three doctors in the practice.

By virtue of being the one on call when Josh had come into the emergency department with his mother yesterday afternoon, she’d inherited him, and a quick check of the contact details had confirmed that his father was that Nick, her Nick, the one who had sneaked up on her heart without her knowing it during the course of six years of shared medical studies and had then shattered it to pieces in one single night.

Or maybe she’d broken her own heart by giving it away too eagerly. She’d never really been sure how those things went. Her fault, or his? She could see, now, how much her failed six-year relationship with Ian Mackenzie had been the result of the lessons she’d learned…or had thought she’d learned…from what had happened with Nick.

And now she was Nick’s son’s doctor, and he’d disappeared from the doorway, and she wondered if the reason had anything to do with her. Maybe it was only that his pager had gone off. But if he was trying to avoid her…

Well, he couldn’t do that forever. At some point, they’d have to connect.

CHAPTER ONE

INCREDIBLY, it took two years.

Having taken on Josh Devlin as a patient when he was three years old, Miranda didn’t see his father again until the little boy was five…

‘I can’t come, Miranda. I have to pull out of the whole first week. Maybe even the whole trip.’ Anna Devlin looked white with stress and half-blind to anything else going on around her. She grabbed Miranda’s arm in the middle of the check-in concourse at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport and made the announcement before Miranda even had time to greet her properly.

‘Hey…’

‘My mother’s broken her leg. She’s not going to manage. It just happened today. She slipped on her front steps. I’ve been in six places at once, on the phone, at the hospital. And, of course, it all falls to me. My sisters are saying they can’t possibly come down. I’m so sorry, Miranda. I’m a complete mess.’

‘It’s OK. Slow down a bit, Anna.’ Miranda took a couple of controlled breaths herself in an attempt to encourage her patient’s mother to find some calm. ‘First, is Josh upset that you won’t be going with him? Where is he?’

Anna shook her head distractedly. ‘N-no, he’s all right. Sort of. He’s here, minding his suitcase. A bit overwhelmed. Am I doing the right thing? I can’t see any other option. I’m the one who’s really panicking. I’m trying not to let it show.’

Trying, and failing dismally.

Anna was often emotional and tunnel-visioned, verging on obsessive, although Miranda had tried in various ways to get her to see that it wasn’t good for her son. Anna said all the right things, but couldn’t put her resolutions into practice.

‘Do you want to look at cancelling? Rescheduling for another time?’ Over Anna’s shoulder, Miranda saw two more families arrive, but there was still plenty of time. The flight to Queensland wasn’t due to board for another half-hour.

Anna shook her head at Miranda’s questions. ‘No, Josh would be so disappointed. We’ve been talking about it for weeks. No, he definitely has to go. It would take months to schedule him another stay, wouldn’t it?’

‘Probably,’ Miranda had to admit.

Places at the Crocodile Creek Kids’ Camp on Wallaby Island off the coast of northern Queensland were in high demand. Miranda had a zing in her spirits this afternoon, herself, even though she was going there not on a private holiday but in her professional capacity.

Anna let go of her arm at last and she spotted five-year-old Josh just a few metres away, sitting obediently on his suitcase near the check-in counter. He looked far more calm than his mother. Too calm, maybe. A little subdued. He was still essentially the same kid Miranda had first met two years ago—small for his age, endearingly gap-toothed and urchin-like, a real sweetheart with a healthy capacity for mischief and numerous hospital admissions under his belt. Anna was totally and single-mindedly devoted to him, and he was her only child.

There wouldn’t be any more now.

Anna and Nick were divorced.

‘He’ll be fine,’ she promised Anna. ‘We’ll take care of him. We have a couple of other kids coming without parents.’

She gestured towards awkward, unconfident Stella Vavunis, aged thirteen, whom she’d already ticked off on her list. Stella’s dad was supposed to be coming later in the week. As one of the major donors to the new medical centre on Wallaby Island, he would be a guest of honour at Saturday’s official opening. For the first few days, however, Stella would be on her own.

In remission from bone cancer, Stella wasn’t one of Miranda’s own patients, but her heart went out to the girl anyway. Her dark hair was growing back wispy and thin after her chemo, and she’d lost the lower half of her right leg. Adept on her elbow crutches, she was intensely self-conscious about her lost limb and had her new prosthesis covered in a pair of heavy jeans that would be way too hot for the climate of North Queensland.

‘He’s not coming without a parent,’ Anna announced, her stress level visibly rising again. She had an exotic, compelling kind of beauty, with huge eyes, high cheekbones and full lips, and the combination of her good looks and high emotion had begun to draw some attention.

Miranda frowned, a little slow. Too slow, considering how long she’d been waiting for something like this to happen. ‘But…?’

‘That’s the whole thing, Miranda.’ Miranda’s arm was once again captured in a tight grip. ‘That’s the whole reason—well, abig part of it—why I’m so stressed.’ She added in a tone that was half wail, half whisper, ‘He’s coming with Nick.’

Right. With Nick.

She must have looked shocked—and shouldn’t have let it show—because Anna said in a tight voice, ‘Please. Don’t make me dread this any more than I am already. Don’t make Josh dread it, especially.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Nick should be here within the next ten minutes. He promised me he wouldn’t muck me around on this.’

‘So he’s coming for the whole two weeks? At such short notice?’

Anna rolled her eyes and drawled, ‘I know. It’s a miracle. Actually making a sacrifice for his son for once.’

‘Well, I meant—’ Miranda meant that it was a miracle, just as Anna had said, but without the other woman’s edge of sarcasm and bitterness. It was great that the persistently absent surgeon could step in to fill the breach, just hours in advance of the flight. Her initial shocked gut reaction was her own problem, not Anna’s.

‘I’m hoping it’ll only be for the first week,’ Anna was saying. ‘I’m going to find a way to get up there for the second week if it kills me! Two weeks with Nick will ruin Josh’s stay.’

Had the little boy heard? Miranda wondered. Anna wasn’t sufficiently careful in what she said around her son.

Whether it was one week or two, Nick must have called in some favours, Miranda realised. He would have made a lot of phone calls that morning to get everything organised and taken care of. His willingness to make the effort did surprise her somewhat, when she thought about it. She’d been forced, by his persistent non-appearance, to the conclusion that he was a very uninvolved parent, and the fact bothered her more than it should.

Anna and Nick had been divorced for months, now, but even before that, Anna was always the parent who brought Josh in for appointments, always the one who phoned with questions, and whose signature appeared on admission and consent forms when Josh was in hospital.

Miranda knew that Nick had made the odd appearance since that first time when she’d seen him pause and stand half- hidden by the open door. She’d seen his name in Josh’s patient notes a couple of times—‘7 p.m. Dad visited.’ But they’d never come face to face. To be honest, for reasons that she didn’t want to examine too closely, she’d been relieved about that. Maybe she’d even contributed to it, in how she timed her hospital visits and routine check-ups.

Their failure to connect with each other gave a nagging, unfinished quality to her memories of their past, however. Everything she knew about Nick Devlin’s attitudes and behaviour as a father over the past couple of years she’d heard from Anna. Very little of it was good. Nick was apparently cool, distant and uncaring, and Josh shrank from him whenever father and son were together.

Funny how things happened.

Years ago, younger and more naive about men in general and about Nick Devlin in particular, Miranda would have predicted he’d make a great father. She was so sure that in their one night together she had suddenly seen—had been allowed to see—beyond the arrogant, unapproachable exterior to the person he really was. But apparently she hadn’t understood him anywhere near as accurately and deeply as she’d thought back then.

Ships that passed in the night, and all that. Women were sometimes way too good at kidding themselves about that stuff. Was that the problem? Her own poor judgement? Had she learned enough since then to avoid similar mistakes in future? The memories were still strong, but Miranda didn’t trust them any more. She must have read him wrong when they’d been medical students together. A wife—even an ex- wife—would know him better.

How am I going to feel about seeing him?

For better or for worse, she was about to find out.

Nick paid off the cab driver, grabbed his duffel bag from beside the kerb and headed for the terminal. He’d promised Anna that he wouldn’t be late and he wasn’t.

Or almost wasn’t.

He’d had a sick-making fifteen minutes of panic at home about what he should be bringing for his son, and as usual he couldn’t deal with the strength of the emotion because it brought so much other stuff with it.

He had some snacks and a drink for the flight, a couple of picture books and the kind of cheap toy that a five-year-old kid could play with on an aircraft tray table, and Anna would have Josh’s asthma gear, of course, as well as his clothing, but…

Should he be bringing a proper gift? A camera, or snorkelling equipment? He already had Josh’s Christmas present, a substantial addition to his Lego collection. Should he bring that, make it a going-away treat, and get him something else for Christmas, which was still two months away? Or did that smack far too much of an attempt to bribe his son for love?

The decision paralysed him.

Yes, he, Dr Nicholas Devlin, MB BS FRACS, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon at Melbourne’s renowned Royal Victoria Hospital, who was normally able to make life- altering decisions in seconds if he had to, could not for the life of him decide how to handle the issue of his son’s gift.

He knew what Anna would say. ‘Oh, no, Nick, you didn’t!’

Inevitably, whatever decision he made, it would be drastically and utterly the wrong one as far as she was concerned. It was a pathological condition in their impossible relationship, and a basic tenet of her maternal faith, that everything he did with, or to, or for their asthma-stricken son, everything he felt, everything he planned and almost every word he said, was and always had been wrong.

Although this was probably not the major reason for their divorce, it hadn’t helped, and things hadn’t improved since.

OK, so since he couldn’t win no matter what he did, he’d go with his own convictions and not try to second-guess what she would want. Unless she asked directly, he wouldn’t tell her about what he had and hadn’t brought for Josh. The Lego could stay at home, and if Josh wanted to take photos or try snorkelling, they’d pick up what they needed on the spot.

Decision made.

Jaw squared.

Emotion pushed safely below the surface where it couldn’t get in the way.

Sorted.

By the time he’d thrown off the panic and the bitterness, remembered how to act like a surgeon instead of a powerless and frustrated non-custodial parent, and realised he hadn’t yet called for a taxi, a vital fifteen minutes had passed and he was running late.

He saw Anna’s pale, accusing face as he approached the check-in concourse. She must have been looking for him, scanning for his figure above the heads of the crowd.

And she wanted him to be late. He knew it. Later than this. Really, unforgivably, flagrantly, uncaringly late, so that she could tell people about it— ‘Can you believe he missed the flight? Josh had to go up on his own!’—and it would count as yet another black mark against his name.

‘What happened?’ she asked with angry accusation as soon as he came up to her, as if she expected at minimum a six-car pile-up on the freeway.

‘Taxi.’ He’d stopped making lengthy excuses long ago. Had stopped arguing, stopped appealing to her common sense and her notion of justice, stopped trying to get her to see how obsessively over-protective she was, and how much she shut him out of their son’s life. Maybe she was right to consider that he didn’t belong there, he sometimes felt.

Before he could get past her to greet Josh, Anna delivered a stinging, rapid-fire round of instructions about their son’s care and finished, ‘Nick, if you stuff this up, Josh has a miserable time, I will kill you!’

Ignoring the threat to his life, which his ex-wife found a reason to hit him with almost every time they spoke, he said through a tight jaw, ‘I’m not going to stuff this up. Why do you think I would?’

‘Because you never take his health seriously enough. Because you hardly know him, and he hardly knows you. He doesn’t trust you.’

‘And that’s my fault, is it?’ he added quickly, almost growling the words, ‘Forget it, forget it.’ They’d been through that one a thousand times. ‘Look, I know you’re not happy about this. But Josh and I will be fine.’ He took a deep breath and prepared himself to say the L-word. ‘I love my son, Anna, and don’t you ever, ever dare to suggest otherwise!’

‘Love isn’t enough,’ she muttered, turning away from him so that her face was screened by her well-cut fall of light brown hair. ‘Nowhere near enough.’

For her, it was a pretty generous concession, so he left the subject alone, said a stilted goodbye, and looked over at Josh, his stomach already sinking at the thought of what he might see in his son’s face.

Indifference. Dislike. Fear…

Anna reached their little boy first, of course. While Nick was still three paces away, she bent down and engulfed Josh in a huge, constricting hug as she prepared to say goodbye. She was actually shaking, Nick saw, as she let forth an intense stream of words close to his ear. Nick only caught a few words. ‘Don’t want…terrified…every single minute.’

Josh nodded. Was he wheezing? What the hell was Anna saying? That she was terrified?

‘And you’ll phone if there are any problems,’ she finished, beginning to stand so that Nick could hear her better. ‘Anything that’s making you unhappy.’

If Dad is making you unhappy, Nick heard in her tone. At least she managed not to say it out loud for once. He stepped forward. ‘Go, Anna,’ he said, more calmly than he felt. ‘Josh and I will be fine, won’t we, little guy?’

‘Don’t call him that,’ Anna snarled through the side of her mouth, and tore herself away, disappearing behind a noisy tour group before he could reply.

Hell.

He’d meant it as an endearment. If Josh was sensitive about being small for his age, Nick hadn’t known. But, then, how would he? Anna made it so difficult for them to spend any real time together, and she never willingly shared her insights about their son. If Josh was wary and distant, it was her doing, wasn’t it?

Or was it his own lack of perception that was the problem? His tendency to pull back when emotions grew risky and ran high? His reluctance to show his deepest feelings?

A wave of self-doubt washed over him and he stepped away, didn’t drop into a Josh-level squat as he’d intended and wanted to, didn’t pick up the colourful backpack with the inhalers and spacer and written asthma action plan inside, even though he could definitely hear that Josh was wheezing. And he didn’t put his arm around his son’s little shoulder in case Josh pushed him away.

This kind of self-doubt had been such a rare thing in his life until Josh’s birth that he still didn’t know how to handle it. He’d been taught to believe in himself, to act as if he was in the right even when he wasn’t, to keep the façade of strength and ego and self-control in place at all times, no matter what he might be feeling inside. He’d doubted himself at times, of course, but he’d always mastered it, never let it hold him back.

The slow, horrible breakdown of his marriage to Anna and the gulf in their attitudes to Josh had thrown a new light on everything he’d thought he knew about himself, and it was still doing so. Did he listen to the doubts, ignore them, or shoot them down?

In a stark moment of anguish, he decided that Anna was right. He and Josh didn’t know each other or trust each other well enough to be doing this—going away together, going to camp, father and son. He blamed her for it, but however it had happened…perhaps he was more at fault than he’d ever admitted…it was a reality. He felt ill-equipped and at sea, daunted at the prospect of fulfilling all Anna’s dire predictions and fears, and messing this up.