Em wanted him to go!
Well, he’d expected it, Jonas told himself. After she’d knocked back his marriage proposition, it was the only sensible decision.
She was darned lucky he intended staying on in the town.
No. That was anger speaking, and he forced anger onto the back-burner. OK, he felt anger that she’d turned down what was the most logical plan for all of them. He felt anger that she let her heart get in the way of sense.
But it wasn’t sensible for either of them to want Robby, he thought. And if Em hadn’t wanted Robby, would he have wanted this marriage thing so much?
It was all muddled in his mind. Robby. Anna.
Em…
There was a whuffling under his bed, and he put a hand down to discover a large, wet tongue rasping across his hand. Bernard. Well, well. When had Bernard last moved from the comfort of Em’s bed?
‘You’re a dope, dog,’ he muttered, thinking of where the dog had come from. ‘That’s where I’d love to be.’
And then he heard what he’d said.
Was it the truth?
Yes, he acknowledged. Absolutely. Well, why not? Em was the most gorgeous woman he knew. A man would have to be insane not to want to sleep with her.
Or…marry her? That, too.
Just not love her.
‘I can’t,’ he told Bernard a trifle desperately. ‘I don’t even know how to begin to love someone. And she’d depend on me, and it’d scare me rigid. I’m independent. I’ve fought all my life to be independent and that’s the way I intend to stay.’
Bernard licked again, and Jonas sighed.
‘You’re telling me I’m not so independent-that I can’t walk away and leave everyone. That it’s not just Em. It’s Anna and her kids. It’s Robby. And it’s even you, you misbegotten mutt.’
That earned him another slurp and he grinned.
‘Hell!’
He was getting deeper and deeper into this quagmire.
‘The lady’s right. I need at least to get out of here. I need to live alone.’
Only why did the thought seem so bleak?
Two days to Anna’s radiotherapy. Then one.
‘Do you want me to come with you the first time?’ Jonas asked for what must surely have been the tenth time. ‘Anna, it’s not something you should face alone.’
‘Why? Does it hurt?’
‘No. It doesn’t hurt at all. It’s just a simple X-ray.’
‘Well, then…’
‘There’ll be people there who are sicker than you,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Proper cancer patients. Not frauds like you.’
That earned him a faint smile, but still Anna shook her head.
‘I can cope alone.’
‘Some people find it threatening.’
‘And so might I,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ve never depended on anybody and I don’t intend to start now. Jim’s already been at me to let him come with me, and I’ve refused him. So back off, Jonas, and let me be.’
He had no choice but to accept her decision. He was doing a lot of that these days. And the damnable thing was that he knew, in her situation, he’d do exactly the same thing.
So he worked on through the afternoon’s list of house calls, he concentrated on his medicine and he knew more and more that he could never depend on anyone. That had been knocked out of him and his sister the hard way.
But Em and Robby needed him. They needed him to stay in the town.
That was all right, he told himself. The need was on Em’s side only. Not his.
He didn’t need in return.
Ever.
It was two in the afternoon. Em was at her desk in her surgery and Jonas was out doing a house call on a farmer with gout. This was the Jonas-organised new order. Em was seeing one patient after another, enjoying the sensation that her house calls weren’t mounting up as she went. When she finished surgery at six or so, Amy would be waiting to hand over Robby. Then Jonas was on call tonight, so she could get back to being Robby’s mother.
Which was lovely.
Or it should have been lovely. There was still this aching need that wouldn’t subside, a need that Jonas had created and not filled.
He’d asked her for marriage, but he hadn’t needed her. He didn’t love…
Medicine!
She needed to concentrate on medicine.
The phone rang. She winced, knowing before she picked up the receiver that it meant an emergency. She was in the middle of Erica Harris’s litany of complaints and Lou didn’t interrupt a consultation by putting a call through unless it was absolutely vital.
And it was. The normally unflappable Lou sounded shocked and sick.
‘Em, it’s Anna Lunn’s little boy, Sam.’
Em’s heart sank. The voice Lou was using spelt disaster.
‘What is it?’
‘Anna has just rung, and she’s almost hysterical. It seems Sam went up into the bush behind their place-the site of the old gold diggings? Apparently there’s an old shaft there that hasn’t been filled in. Or she says it looked filled in from the top, but it’s collapsed and he’s fallen. Anna says she and Matt can hear him calling from about thirty feet down, but they can’t get him out. They can’t get near him. I’m ringing the emergency services but can you go out there, too?’
Of course. She’d already left. Erica Harris was left sitting with her mouth open.
‘Find Jonas,’ Em snapped at Lou as she flew past. ‘Explain to Mrs Harris.’
And she was gone.
CHAPTER TEN
THE mineshaft was about half a mile from Anna’s house, back in the hills merging into the national park. Gold had been found here a hundred years ago and mine after mine had been sunk, but gradually most of them had been filled in. Some of the bigger ones had been professionally capped, but this one…
Someone had capped it, Anna told them, speaking between sobs of sheer terror, but they’d used only rough timber. Over time the timber had become covered with bush litter, the wood had rotted and Sam had stepped on the wrong spot and plunged down.
‘And I never would have found him if Matt hadn’t been with him and come to get me.’ Anna subsided into tears on Em’s shoulder, and Em held her tightly. Willing her strength…
As well as the terror she was facing, Anna was close to exhaustion, having run to the shaft when Matt had come home screaming for his mother and then run back to the house to telephone Em and Jim. Now she was in the cab of Jim’s fire engine, wedged between Em and Jim while the fire chief gunned the truck across the paddocks.
