Surgeon Boss, Bachelor Dad Read online

  He was tall. She liked that about him.

  He was trim, too, and although the scrubs hung loosely on his lithe frame, she could quite easily see he had well-formed biceps and strong, lean shoulders. Finally, she met his eyes. They locked and held. Megan was a little surprised to find his seemed to be filled with an equal appreciation, and it was only then she realised that while she’d been looking closely at him, he’d been looking closely at her.

  Her throat went instantly dry and she felt a blush tinge her cheeks—although this time it wasn’t from embarrassment but more from the knowledge that he’d obviously liked what he’d seen. She knew she wasn’t beautiful, but when Loughlin looked at her like that she could almost believe that she was.

  BACHELOR DADS

  Single Doctor…Single Father!

  At work they are skilled medical professionals, but at home, as soon as they walk in the door, these eligible bachelors are on full-time fatherhood duty!

  These devoted dads still find room in their lives for love…

  It takes very special women to win the hearts of these dedicated doctors, and a very special kind of caring to make these single fathers full-time husbands!

  LUCY CLARK is a husband-and-wife writing team. They enjoy taking holidays with their two children, during which they discuss and develop new ideas for their books using the fantastic Australian scenery. They use their daily walks to talk over characterisation and fine details of the wonderful stories they produce, and are avid movie buffs. They live on the edge of a popular wine district in South Australia, and enjoy spending family time together at weekends.

  Recent titles by the same author:

  A MOTHER FOR HIS TWINS

  CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, CHRISTMAS BRIDE

  CITY SURGEON, OUTBACK BRIDE

  A WEDDING AT LIMESTONE COAST

  SURGEON BOSS, BACHELOR DAD

  BY

  LUCY CLARK

  www.millsandboon.co.uk

  To DT—My Scottish muse.

  Ps 34:17

  CHAPTER ONE

  MEGAN wasn’t happy. Not in the slightest.

  She closed her eyes. Said a silent prayer and took three deep breaths. In and out. Just breathe. Relax. Everything would be fine. She was a grown woman. She was a genius, in fact, but unfortunately her genius didn’t extend to stupid, unreliable motor vehicles that broke down so often it wasn’t funny. Not any more!

  Just as a patient could pick up on her mood, she decided to be nice and calm with the car as she opened her eyes and turned the key once more. She relaxed her shoulders. She smiled—even though it looked as though she was really grinding her teeth. The engine stirred. Hope flared. It turned over once. Twice, as though it was desperately trying to splutter to life. She pressed her foot on the accelerator, doing her best to aid its recovery in any way she could.

  ‘Come on. Come on.’ She stroked the steering-wheel. Encouraging. ‘You can do it. I know you can. Don’t give up now.’

  Again her ears were met with the whirring of the engine. She may not know anything about cars but from the sounds of things this one was definitely sick and although she was a doctor, a brilliant and reputed general surgeon, unfortunately, she wasn’t that type of surgeon. When she’d obtained her master’s degree in general surgery, two whole years before she was officially supposed to graduate, it hadn’t given her licence to perform surgery on anything in general!

  ‘Arrrgghh!’ Megan stopped turning the key and thumped the steering-wheel in total frustration. So much for the softly-softly approach. All she’d needed was for the car to get her to work this morning. That was all. She didn’t care about getting home. She had planned to deal with that later but she had to be at the hospital within the next ten minutes or…

  ‘Wait.’ She shook her head. ‘There is no “or”.’ The fact of the matter was, she wouldn’t lose her job, her patients would wait and the meeting that was scheduled to start in exactly nine and a half minutes’ time would simply be postponed until later in the day. She’d been working in the seaside town of Kiama, south of Sydney, for almost twelve months and it had taken her quite a while to realise that out here the townsfolk were so laid back and relaxed that sometimes she wanted to check them for a pulse.

  Personally, though, she hated being late. It was all part of her high-achiever, type-A, top-of-the-stress-range personality and one which she was trying to change before she did some permanent damage to her cardiovascular system. Now, for instance, she had a very tight pain in her chest which was caused purely by stress. Granted, the stress in Kiama was nothing compared to what she’d been through in Sydney but even so, learning to let go, to relax, to control her breathing so the chest pains went away was something she struggled with on a daily basis.

  ‘Time to take a look at my patient,’ she said, reaching determinedly beneath the steering-wheel so she could pull the lever to release the bonnet. Climbing from the car, she was still amazed that she’d broken down on the only stretch of road few people seemed to take. It was a short cut between her residence, on a nice secluded hillside and on the main road to town. She’d decided on the short cut today, thinking it was a shorter distance for the car to traverse, and had hoped it would have been able to get her to her destination. Apparently not.

  As she looked beneath the bonnet, even though she had no real idea of what she was looking for, she wanted the problem to identify itself quickly. What was it that she could magically poke or prod to get this car started again?

  ‘You can do this.’ Megan prodded at something to try and gauge whether it was hot or not. ‘You don’t need to rely on a man or anyone else to fix things. You can fix them all yourself.’ She touched what appeared to be the battery and made sure that all the connections were in place. ‘And if you can’t fix them, you’ll at least figure out a solution. You’re an emancipated woman now. You don’t need a man to complete you.’ Squaring her shoulders after her pep talk, she checked a few more connections, before returning to the driver’s side to try her luck once again.

  ‘Come on. Come on!’ she urged as the engine whirred again then wheezed to a stop. Megan frowned. It sounded as though something was clogged, like an artery. If she was in surgery right now, she’d be able to figure out the source of the blockage, clamp and excise the offender, then patch her patient back together confident in the belief that they’d make a full recovery. But this wasn’t surgery.

  She breathed, trying to remain calm. ‘You can do this,’ she whispered again. Returning to look beneath the bonnet, Megan frowned as she studied the layout of the bits and pieces before her.

  ‘Car trouble?’

  Megan was startled at the sound of a man’s voice and hit her head on the side of the uplifted car bonnet. ‘That would seem obvious,’ she declared, rubbing her parietal bone. She turned to face the only other person to have driven along this road today and found herself staring into the smiling face of a man who had the most incredible brown eyes she’d ever seen.

  His hair was dark brown and was sticking out in an unruly fashion as though he’d not long woken up and instead of combing it had just raked his fingers through it. His clothes were of the comfortable variety—dark denim jeans and comfortable boots, loose chambray shirt which had clearly not been ironed and was also misbuttoned. She looked over his shoulder and saw his shiny new ute parked a little way down the road from hers. She hadn’t even heard another car come along the road and for a moment wondered if he was a mirage.

  None of that mattered as he merely edged her aside and bent to study the inner workings of the motor in far more detail than she’d attempted.

  ‘I can do it,’ she protested, not wanting to be indebted to anyone else. ‘Thank you for stopping but I should
be fine.’

  ‘Is that so?’ His rich Scottish brogue washed over her and Megan simply raised her eyes brows in interest. ‘How exactly?’

  She heard the teasing lilt in his voice and was a little surprised at it. It also appeared he was seriously awaiting an answer to his question. ‘How?’ Her eyes widened for a second, indicating she had no idea, and he had to admire the way she quickly pulled herself together and turned to look at the engine.

  ‘Aye. How?’

  ‘Well, I’ve already ascertained that it’s not the battery.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm.’

  ‘So I intend to work my way methodically through the different sections to eventually discover what is actually wrong.’

  She obviously had a decent amount of common sense because that was what most mechanics did. They checked things over, taking their time and figuring things out. ‘Good. Good.’ He nodded with enthusiasm and Megan could see a small twinkle in his eyes. He was obviously enjoying watching her bluff. ‘And then?’

  ‘And then what? And then I’ll know what’s wrong with my car.’

  ‘Aye, and how do you intend to fix it?’

  ‘Oh. That part I hadn’t worked out.’

  ‘You could always call a tow truck and get them out here to tow this magnificent piece of machinery to the nearest mechanic where everything could be put to rights.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I’ll do and the car is hardly magnificent.’ Megan had to scoff at that.

  ‘Och, careful lassie. You don’t want to hurt the ol’ gal’s feelings.’ He stroked the side panel of the car as he spoke, his tone lowering to a hushed whisper. ‘But why would you want to call a mechanic when I can fix it easily for you and get you on your way faster that it would take for the tow truck to arrive in the first place?’

  Before Megan could say another word, this Scottish stranger moved alongside her and immediately had his hands all over her engine. Fiddling around, unscrewing things, pulling out long metal sticks which she vaguely remembered her brother once mentioning was how you checked the oil.

  Then he started to become more adventurous, sticking his hand down and pulling out tubes, blowing on them before putting them back where they belonged. He unclipped a big round thing in the centre and checked something else in the middle.

  Loughlin glanced at the woman hovering beside him, taking in her appearance. She was dressed in a casual but neat suit that screamed ‘career woman’. He knew her type. All too well. He’d been married to that type a long time ago and he’d tried to avoid them wherever possible since then. He should have guessed that even out here in Australia, in the middle of a patch of scrubland with one small road going through the centre of it, he’d find a career woman!

  Although he did have to admit that the way this particular woman was dressed definitely suited her. The black trousers combined with a cream shirt and black woollen vest certainly highlighted her lovely blonde locks, which were secured at her nape. On any other woman the outfit might look severe but this stranded beauty had the colouring and the figure to carry it off…even if she did appear to be bristling at the way he’d simply taken over.

  As far as he was concerned, she was stranded, he was passing by and he knew how to fix this sort of car. He would do his duty as a good Samaritan and hopefully still make it to his appointment relatively on time. When you were the new boy in town, you needed to make friends wherever possible. Loughlin glanced again at the woman beside him and hoped she wasn’t indicative of the townsfolk of Kiama. He’d only been in town a few days and had yet to see anything much of the place, or its inhabitants.

  He continued to methodically check his way through the various possibilities and his thoroughness impressed Megan. It was how she treated her patients, checking for the obvious causes and symptoms before graduating to the more in-depth tests, if her initial findings gave conflicting results. This stranger was employing a logical and scientific approach, displaying the fact that he actually had a brain and knew how to use it. For that reason, it made Megan less wary of him, which was odd as she didn’t usually take kindly to strangers.

  ‘You seem to know what you’re doing,’ she stated after a few minutes of silence had passed between them.

  ‘Should do. Had me one of these cars in Scotland when I was a laddie. In fact, it was my first car. Temperamental, to be sure, but if you can get the wee bairn to run, och, it’s magic.’

  ‘Uh…I take it you’re not from around these parts.’ She closed her eyes the instant the words were out of her mouth and shook her head. Had she just stated the obvious? She hated that. Opening them again, she watched as he angled his head to look at her. His eyes really were the most amazing colour. So rich and deep.

  ‘No but…’he glanced at the beautiful gumtrees around them ‘…I am hoping to stay for quite some time. It’s rather pretty here.’

  A small smile touched his lips and she realised he had an almost perfect curve to his mouth but it dipped a little on the right side. His nose was crooked, indicating a break in the past, but even so, it simply added more character to his features. His brown eyes were alive with merriment as though he honestly didn’t have a care in the world. Well…good for him. It was nothing to do with her, even if she did experience a slight twinge of envy.

  Megan had always wished to have more of a carefree attitude to life, to not mind what other people thought of her, and yet in the past few years of her life that was all she’d done. Sculpted herself into someone she wasn’t sure even she recognised. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. Not any more.

  ‘You a local?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Yes. Well, I guess I am. For the moment.’

  ‘Ambiguous.’ He nodded slowly, his intrigue growing. There was a beat of silence before she offered a bit more information.

  ‘I’m originally from Sydney. I’ve been in Kiama for almost twelve months.’ Now, why had she just volunteered that information? He could be an axe-wielding homicidal maniac for all she knew…although her intuition told her that that wasn’t the case at all. It was something else that she was learning—not only to listen to but to trust as well, and that was her own instincts.

  ‘Ah. A drifter, eh?’ Although by the cut of her clothes, she didn’t drift too far from the nearest shopping centre.

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Then you’re planning on staying in town? Moving permanently to the sunny seaside?’

  Megan shrugged. ‘I’m not entirely sure. I’m not really looking to get tied down to any one place.’

  ‘Keeping your options open.’ He nodded, wondering if she realised her words revealed a lot about her. Problems with her family? Needing to move around? Find herself? Escape? Escape from a bad marriage? Bad husband? His gaze slipped to her hands and he noticed she didn’t wear a wedding ring and he couldn’t see any faint tan lines either. In fact, apart from the watch on her wrist and a pair of gold studded earrings in her ears, she didn’t wear any jewellery at all. Either way, she was more than likely escaping a painful past but, then again, he rationalised, who wasn’t? He himself had decided Australia was far enough away from Scotland to try something new.

  ‘I have to say, though, that it is incredibly beautiful here. I can understand why so many people come from the city for the weekend.’

  ‘Our busiest times,’ she murmured, thinking of the A and E department in her small hospital.

  ‘Now you definitely sound like a local.’ He wondered whether she ran one of the businesses in town. ‘Must be good for the economy, though.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘You don’t sound too concerned about it.’

  ‘What? The economy in general or the economy in Kiama?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘You want to have an economic discussion whilst you’re fixing my car?’

  ‘Why not? Or you could tell me more about yourself.’

  The stranger looked at her with such charm, such delight in his eyes, as though he knew exactly whi
ch topic she would choose. She wasn’t about to disappoint him.

  ‘Right, then. The economic structure of our country at the moment is something everyone should be concerned with. I mean, the trade deficit is getting more out of proportion every day and, as per usual, the government doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.’

  Her statement was met with rich, deep laughter. His eyes twinkled. His lips curved even wider than they had before and his straight white teeth gleamed. He may not be classically handsome but with his lithe build, his messy hair and his mesmerising eyes he was certainly igniting some hidden spark which had been buried deep down inside her.

  The knowledge shocked her.

  Megan wasn’t looking for any type of relationship. Not with this Scotsman, not with anyone. She was polite and courteous to her colleagues, she was nice to her patients and she avoided socialising wherever possible. She’d learned the hard way that she and love didn’t mix, that she functioned best when she didn’t get too close to people, didn’t get too involved in their lives.

  The exceptions were her parents, her brother and her brother’s family. Keeping to herself had seemed to work during the time she’d spent here in Kiama but she could sometimes feel that the townsfolk were expecting her to settle down, to stay here for another year or two, and the thought of that made the walls feel as though they were closing in once more.

  ‘The economic problems of your country sound the same as the ones back home.’ He straightened and rolled his shoulders before jerking a thumb at his ute. ‘I just need to get a few tools from my ute and you’ll be on your way in no time at all.’

  ‘So you know what’s wrong with it, then?’

  ‘Aye.’ He winked at her then sauntered over to his ute, Megan’s gaze drawn to the swagger of his hips and the leanness of his long legs. She guessed him to be about six feet four—the perfect height to match her five feet ten. Or, at least, she’d always thought that was the perfect height as that had been Calvin’s height and she’d fitted perfectly in his arms.

  Closing her eyes, she turned her head, blocking out thoughts and visions of Calvin as they swam into her mind. She controlled her thoughts as she always did, turning her mind to the busy day she had ahead of her…if she ever got the chance to get it started. There was ward round, clinic and, above all, a new colleague starting today. The interview process had been rather different from the ones she’d previously taken part in, as the hospital staff were employed by the board of directors.