‘Glad to hear it.’ She exchanged a laughing look with him and his heart turned over. She was beautiful.
He was very proud of her. He wondered if he realised how far she’d come in the past two months. A spiral of excitement corkscrewed through him.
Day by day, she was relaxing a little more, gaining resilience, losing the haunted, frail look.
At the hospital, she was doing marvellous things. They’d discussed her hours and he’d pressed for her to come off the shift roster. But she’d been more than pulling her weight with running health clinics, reaching out to disadvantaged members of the community, organising preventative health initiatives.
In his life…He hadn’t been pushing for intimacy in their relationship, knowing that he had to leave the pace up to Terri. Last night they’d made love. A thrilling heat ran through him at the memory of pleasure beyond anything he’d known. If he spent the rest of his life worshipping her with his body he would be a very happy man.
After lunch, he cradled his coffee mug and watched Allie at the sandcastle. She had been joined by another couple of children and the three of them were working diligently.
‘She’s doing well,’ Terri said.
‘Very.’ He swallowed the last of his drink and put the mug aside. ‘Those breath exercises you taught her have been terrific. She’s chasing me to make sure she does them.’
‘Good for her. She’s been one of my best pupils.’ Terri laughed self-deprecatingly. ‘But, then, I might be a little biased.’
The words gave him a warm glow. Terri cared, wanted the best for Allie and for him.
God, he loved her so much. He…
‘Marry me.’ He heard the words leaving his mouth, saw the twist of anguish flash across Terri’s face.
In that one spontaneous moment he’d ruined everything. Why couldn’t he have waited? Too late, he wished he could call the words back. He felt sick. She was going to say no.
‘Luke…’ She stopped, closing her eyes, gathering herself.
He should help her, say it was all right, say it didn’t matter…that they’d still be friends.
But he couldn’t do it-not even to spare the woman he loved from the agony of having to refuse him. His face felt numb as he waited for the sentence that would rip his heart out.
‘You’ve been wonderful and I wouldn’t have got this far so quickly without your support.’ Her throat worked and he could see she was struggling to say the words. ‘There’s something that I have to tell you, something I’ve been hiding…even from myself.’
She looked at him and the sadness shadowing her eyes clawed at his gut. ‘When I lost my baby…the placenta was ripped from the wall of the uterus…Luke, I don’t know if I’ll be able to have children.’
A family with him.
She wanted to have a family.
With him.
She looked at him solemnly. ‘I can’t marry you unless you know that. I don’t want it to come between us down the track.’
‘I don’t care.’ He caught her by the upper arms and pulled her into his embrace. ‘I don’t care. It’s you I want. Only you. If we had children together that would be wonderful, too. But it’s you I want.’
With his face buried in the crook of her neck and his eyes squeezed shut, he took a deep breath. ‘I’ll sorry if it turns out that you can’t have children, but for you, darling, not for me. You’d be a wonderful mother.’
He pulled back and looked at her. ‘I love you. Marry me.’
Her eyes sparkled with unshed tears. ‘Yes. I love you and I’d love to marry you.’
‘Yes!’ He leapt to his feet, tugging her then scooping her up to twirl her around.
‘What are you guys doing?’
‘Allie.’ He laughed then sobered. He’d started preparing his daughter for this possibility but had he done enough? ‘Allie, sweetheart, we’re going to get married.’
‘It’s about time,’ she said and her face split in a huge smile. ‘I suppose this means you’re too busy to come and carry sand.’
Marion Lennox
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 Mills & Boon® 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 out what’s important, and discovered the joys of deep baths, romance and chocolate. Preferably all at the same time!
Sharon Archer
Born in New Zealand, Sharon Archer now lives in county Victoria, Australia, with her husband Glenn, one lame horse and five pensionable hens. Always an avid reader, she discovered Mills & Boon as a teenager through Lucy Walker’s fabulous Outback Australia stories. Now she lives in a gorgeous bush setting, and loves the native fauna that visits regularly…Well, maybe not the possum which coughs outside the bedroom window in the middle of the night.
The move to acreage brought a keen interest in bushfire management (she runs the fireguard group in her area), as well as free time to dabble in woodwork, genealogy (her advice is…don’t get her started!), horse-riding and motorcycling-as a pillion or in charge of the handlebars.
Free time turned into words on paper! And the dream to be a writer gathered momentum. With her background in a medical laboratory, what better line to write for than Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance?
