She flattened her body against his, trying to get nearer, desperate to have every part of her in intimate contact with him. Desperate to ease the ache that had been building inside since the day she’d laid eyes on him. But it didn’t help so she locked her legs around his waist, the bulge in his underwear rubbing against her intimately, stoking and satisfying all at once. She felt delirious, desired, sexy. She felt like a woman. Like a George. Ina.

  Andrew revelled in the give and take of her mouth, the intimate play of her tongue against his, the pulse in his groin as she rubbed herself against him. It was so much better than it had been in any of his dreams. So much more real. So much more thrilling.

  The water seemed like ice against his overheated flesh and as a contrast it was wildly stimulating, but he was finding it technically challenging to tread water, kiss passionately and keep both their heads above water, so he moved her swiftly towards the shallows. Besides, he wanted that top off and he knew he couldn’t manage all three things without drowning.

  Georgina felt her feet touch bottom and then her back hit solid rock and she found herself lying horizontally, Andrew’s weight on top of her on a shallow ledge in the pool.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, not even aware that they’d moved.

  Andrew grinned. ‘Thank Mother Nature. We have our own water bed.’ And he kissed her again, hard.

  Georgina moaned against his lips and opened her mouth again, but he pulled away. ‘Oh, no, you don’t, no more distractions. This is next,’ he said, pointing to her bra and then drawing a circle around her nipple on the outside and smiling triumphantly when he felt the bud harden beneath the fabric. ‘I want to taste you,’ he said.

  Georgina felt the slam of desire tighten her internal muscles. She saw the heat and smouldering intent in his gaze and remembered how many times she had dreamed about him making love to her. She reached for the front clasp and whipped the black scrap of lace away.

  Andrew watched as her breasts sprang free, buoyant in the water, the nipples tightly scrunched. He sucked in his breath. ‘I wanted to do that,’ he half complained, trying to decide where he wanted to start or whether he just wanted to look at their magnificence for a little while longer.

  ‘What’s the matter? Don’t those fancy city girls take the initiative?’ she teased huskily, incredibly turned on by his blatant appreciation.

  He chuckled and looked at her for a moment then quickly sucked a nipple deep into the warm cavern of his mouth. He smiled at her harsh indrawn breath and revelled in her deep appreciative moan. ‘You were saying?’ he asked, lifting his mouth temporarily to look into her lust-drunk eyes.

  ‘I…um…’ she said, not sure of her place in the conversation any more. And when he sucked her other nipple, grazing his teeth lightly against the sensitive tip, she didn’t even try to keep up.

  Then, suddenly, noisy laughter nearby shattered their intimacy. Andrew broke off his ministrations abruptly and protectively covered her near-naked body with his own.

  ‘It’s down in the lower pools,’ she whispered into his neck, assuring him as much as herself as she tried to get control of her tripping heart and ragged breathing.

  He nodded, the intrusion bringing with it an inevitable dose of reality. She shifted out from under him and he moved, too. She sat on the ledge and drew her knees up to cover her nakedness. He sat beside her.

  ‘Now, that’s what you call a bucket of cold water,’ she said.

  He chuckled. ‘We’ve been making out in a bucket of cold water—it doesn’t seem to have mattered.’

  They sat silently for a few moments. ‘We’d better get back,’ she said, a sudden chill making her shiver. ‘I think my bra is a goner.’

  ‘No, look, there it is,’ he said, and pointed to the scrap of fabric floating in the middle of the rock pool, the cups keeping it buoyant.

  Georgina laughed. It looked so forlorn, bobbing around in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he said, and pushed away from the edge.

  Georgina took the opportunity to get out of the pool. She really didn’t want to, suddenly self-conscious again about her body and her state of undress. It seemed absurd, given what they’d been doing only minutes ago, but she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to act now. She wrapped her sarong around her shoulders.

  ‘Here,’ he said, vaulting out of the pool.

  She watched helplessly, unable to stop. His arm muscles rippled and the water sluiced off his chest and flat stomach and, despite the intimacy now being completely dead, he still had a most impressive erection. He handed her the bra, seemingly unembarrassed or unashamed of his near nudity or his state of arousal.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, taking it from him, their fingers brushing, the energy between them still there despite the noises of kids swimming below.

  He turned to get into his clothes and she took the opportunity to hastily throw hers on, too. They walked back together in relative silence, lost in their own thoughts. Georgina knew she should be cross at herself for letting it happen, but truthfully it had been too good to lament. It had been a long time since she’d been kissed so thoroughly and she seriously doubted if she’d ever been kissed that well.

  Andrew was just too blown away to be able to fully analyse all the pros and cons. It certainly complicated his life. And it was definitely complicated enough. But maybe this had been a healthy outlet for something that had been fairly inevitable right from the beginning? Maybe they could go about their work now minus the undercurrent that hummed between them?

  ‘How come you were up so early?’ Georgina asked, breaking into his rationalising.

  ‘Dreams,’ he said, smiling down at her. ‘You?’

  ‘Same,’ she said, blushing hard as his knowing chuckle feathered her skin with goose-bumps.

  They headed straight for their tents when they re-entered the camp. Most people were up and about by this time and if they wondered why Georgina and Andrew were emerging from the bush rather damp at such an early hour, nobody asked. Andrew was grinning as he opened his tent zipper, suppressing an insane urge to whistle.

  It died quickly as he heard Cory’s anguished sobs. ‘Cory, what’s wrong?’ he asked, throwing himself down beside his nephew. Cory was curled up in a ball, his arms clutched across his abdomen, and he was rocking himself.

  Georgina peeked her head into the tent, having heard Andrew’s worried exclamation.

  ‘Have you got a pain?’ Andrew asked, trying to pry the boy’s arms away from his stomach so he could investigate.

  ‘You were gone,’ Cory cried. ‘I woke up and you were gone, just like Mummy.’

  Andrew felt his earlier happiness sink like a stone. He glanced at Georgina, their earlier experience tarnished by a sudden jolt of guilt. His nephew had been lying there, crying, while he’d been making out with Georgina? No, no no. He looked at Georgina hopelessly.

  ‘I was just with Georgina, Cory. I didn’t think you’d be awake for a long time. I’m never going to leave you, mate.’

  He placed a comforting hand on his nephew’s shoulder which Cory promptly shrugged off. Andrew closed his eyes castigating himself for his stupidity. What must Cory have gone through when he’d woken to find his uncle had disappeared? They’d been so close yesterday, closer than they’d been since Ariel’s death and now Cory looked as distant as he ever did.

  Georgina could see the regret written all over Andrew’s face and couldn’t bear that she had been the cause. It was funny how something so wonderful could be viewed in such a different light at another time. She’d known they were impossible but something like this really emphasized the gap between them.

  She watched Andrew lie down beside his nephew and pull his little body in close. His big arm encircled the boy’s waist and although Cory held himself rigid, Andrew tucked him in close anyway. She backed out of the tent as Andrew rubbed his chin against Cory’s hair and dropped a kiss on his head. Uncle and nephew, together. A team. A unit. A family.

  She heard him say, ‘I’m right here, mate, I’m not going anywhere,’ as she zipped the tent up. Andrew was stepping up to the plate. He’d come a long way in a few weeks, too.

  But her arms ached and her womb ached and her heart ached, knowing their actions had caused a child such distress. A child who had already been through too much already. She shook her head in disbelief. How could they have allowed their own needs to take precedence over Cory’s?

  Andrew’s attention span was shot for the rest of the day. Between worrying about Cory and thinking about Georgina and the rock pool, he was really distracted. And it was a bad day to be easily distracted. He was operating and performing surgery on an eye was very delicate, requiring intense concentration.

  Georgina wandering back and forth, her floral perfume wafting towards him, usually at the most inopportune time, not helping this process. Visions of her topless in the water, her nipple in his mouth, warred with visions of Cory awake and upset, the memory of his anguished cries tearing at Andrew’s gut.

  How could something so amazing suddenly be so sullied? He shouldn’t have lost focus. Things with Cory were still so precarious—he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the ball again. Cory had to be his priority.

  Georgina, too, was distracted as she assisted Andrew with the surgery. It was obvious from his aloofness that Andrew blamed himself for Cory’s state of mind that morning, and after being so intimate earlier it seemed odd for them to be so distant, so detached.

  She tried to maintain a professional distance but scrubbing in with him required a degree of closeness in the cramped confines of the caravan. Their shoulders rubbed, their fingers brushed as she passed him instruments, their gazes locked above their masks, and, despite the futility of it, the fire in her belly grew hotter.

  Trying to keep a distance seemed strange now when all her feminine instincts that he’d so successfully roused were telling her the opposite. She wanted to lean into him. Get closer. Nearer. Smell him. Taste him. Bat her eyelids at him. Flirt.

  Flirt? Where the hell had that come from? She didn’t flirt. She’d never flirted. Even with Joel she hadn’t. And there were more important things at stake here. Like a damaged eight-year-old boy. She was letting her imagination make more out of the rock pool than there had been. Whatever had happened there had soon been overshadowed.

  The little fantasy bubble they’d been in for those brief moments of ecstasy had burst dramatically and their lives had been brought back into sharp focus. He had commitments and responsibilities and a life far from here, and she had Byron and the eye service—there was no room in her life for any more city boys.

  They broke for lunch and Georgina was relived to be out of such close confines. She ate her sandwich, acutely aware of Andrew and Cory sitting nearby, eating theirs. She admired Andrew’s fortitude. He kept up a constant stream of chat, trying to bring Cory back out of the shell he’d retreated into. She eavesdropped unashamedly.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Cory,’ Andrew said, ‘about your painting of Georgina. How about when we get home we frame it and hang it in the lounge room so we can always remember our time out here?’

  Andrew almost sank to his knees in thanks when Cory stopped chewing, stopped staring morosely at the ground and looked him square in the face.

  ‘Really? You really think it’s good enough to hang on a wall?’

  Andrew could sense Cory contemplating his first tentative step forward. He nodded enthusiastically to draw him out and felt like he was finally reconnecting with his nephew after that morning’s debacle.

  ‘Absolutely. Don’t you think so, Georgina?’ he asked, looking around for her support.

  Georgina looked up from her food, nodded and smiled. ‘I reckon it’s good enough to hang in an art gallery,’ she enthused.

  Cory looked at her and then at his uncle and a slow smile spread across his face. The boy suddenly looked a foot taller.

  ‘That’d be neat,’ he said. ‘When we get home.’

  Georgina was thankful that uncle and nephew were too engrossed in each other to see the smile fade from her eyes. Home. Back to the city. Back to their lives. And she would continue on here with hers. The rock pool this morning and sharing yesterday’s breakthrough and this morning’s crisis with Andrew had been so intimate it was easy to forget she wasn’t part of their equation. Easy to forget that she didn’t want to be.

  She finished her lunch listening to a more animated Cory and then busied herself with cleaning up and preparing for the afternoon theatre cases.

  ‘Thanks.’ Andrew’s low voice warmed her ear. ‘You seem to always know just the right thing to say.’

  ‘No probs,’ she said, not glancing up from the very important job of washing the dishes.

  He watched her fussing around in the sudsy water. ‘About the rock pool,’ he said. Had it been only that morning? It seemed like such a long time ago now.

  No, not that. She’d been trying to forget the rock pool all day. It had been a mistake. ‘It’s OK. I think we should just forget it happened,’ she said.

  He looked at her and could see the vulnerability not quite hidden in the depths of her honey gaze.

  ‘Can you do that?’ he asked quietly.

  Georgina tossed the knives and forks a little too forcefully into the wire drainer. ‘We’re not teenagers, Andrew,’ she said impatiently, wanting this conversation to be over.

  He moved his mouth closer to her ear. ‘When I’m old and grey and my brain is addled by Alzheimer’s, I hope the rock pool is the one thing I don’t forget.’

  His voice was low and husky and she clutched the plastic bowl as its timbre stroked across her pelvic floor, causing a quiver deep inside.

  He cleared his throat. ‘I wish my life was different, less complicated. I’m sorry…This is really bad timing…’

  ‘It’s OK, Andrew.’ She sighed. ‘You have your priorities and I have mine. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.’

  And she picked up a towel and began to dry.

  Georgina woke the next morning at her usual time with an image of Andrew disappearing as quickly as a desert mirage. She rolled on her side and curled herself into a ball, her thighs squeezed together tight, trying to relieve the ache that a head full of rock-pool dreams had put there.

  She hugged herself. What the hell was she doing? She should know better than this. Had her experience with Joel taught her nothing? Getting involved with another city boy was just plain madness. They were worlds apart. And not just in distance. He was used to neon lights and shopping malls and the ballet. And there was nothing like that out here.

  But they had things that were just as good. Better.

  They had campfires and night skies to die for. They had Bomber and his mail run, bringing exciting packages from mail-order catalogues. And they had bush dances and coroborees and the mystical rhythm of nature as it ebbed and flowed in its ancient dance.

  She got up and walked outside, the approaching dawn still and perfect. Her feet were bare and she revelled in the feel of the soil. This dirt was in her blood, the call of the land resonating in every cell.

  There was a bond she couldn’t explain. It was completely intangible. Fine, like the silk strands of a spider’s web—delicate but resilient, too. Her family lived here. Her mother was buried in the rich red earth here. And she belonged here also. And no amount of charm and bright city lights could sway her again.

  She had everything she needed here. A job and family and friends. She had money and food and a beautiful old house to live in. She could see. She had her health. She was free to come and go. She was much better off than so many people. People needed and depended on her, and it gave her purpose.

  Then why did it suddenly feel like it wasn’t enough? Why wasn’t her heart singing like it usually did at this hour of the morning as she counted her blessings? Why had a city doctor suddenly made her feel like she wanted more?

  A dog barked and she shook herself out of her reverie. She’d better get cracking. They had all their post-ops to see and then they had to pack up camp and travel the five hundred kilometres to Byron. She could feel the stir in her blood again. She was going home.

  When the vehicles pulled up at the homestead, Georgina felt her heart swell with love and pride to see her family waiting on the steps to greet the convoy. Good old-fashioned country hospitality demanded no less. She realised as she looked at them through the dusty window that everything that was important to her was right there. Her father and John and Charlie and Mabel and even the newly discharged prof all waving and smiling down at her.

  She glanced at Andrew, who was helping Cory gather his stuff. He had his family. His commitments. She looked back at Charlie and smiled as he waved his arms enthusiastically. This was what was important. Her family. Her commitment.

  Charlie rushed forward to meet them, followed more sedately by the others. Georgina grinned at her nephew as she pushed open the door and gratefully set her feet on Byron soil. She absorbed the impact of his eager hug, sweeping him into her arms.

  ‘George, George, is he here?’ he asked eagerly.

  Georgina had told Charlie on the phone a week ago that she was bringing him a playmate, and he’d apparently not stopped talking about it ever since. Having a child his age around to play with was a true novelty.

  She laughed. ‘Yes, Charlie. Steady on, you’ll frighten him off.’

  ‘Hello Georgie girl,’ said the prof, pecking her on the cheek.

  Georgina couldn’t believe how well her boss looked, compared to the last time she had seen him. She had been worried deep down that she may never see him again, but he looked like he had years left in him. The prof had obviously been really run down—they needed to find a replacement fast.

  ‘Harry, you look fantastic. I’m so pleased you’re going to spend some time relaxing with us at Byron.’

  He chuckled, the rasp in his voice back in full force. ‘Mabel wouldn’t have it any other way.’

 

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