Harry St Clair: Rogue or Doctor? by Fiona McArthur Page A

need a dose of Bonnie McKenzie’s reality to kick him back into gear. Bonnie would certainly give him that but he couldn’t face the thought of a hospital, even the slightly slower paced one in Darwin, impersonally rushing from one patient to the next. And he wasn’t ready for the commitment of general practice.
    The Royal Flying Doctor Service was always looking for staff but even in the state he was in he could see how frustrating it would be to fly everywhere wondering when next he’d get to Uluru and a certain straight-talking midwife.
    That was the crunch. He needed to see if what he suspected was true. Needed to see if Bonnie was the key to a normal world. Nothing more than that because he wasn’t doing the family thing again. Wasn’t going there. But it still left a lot they could share. If she was interested.
    But would she be happy to see him drop out of the central Australian sky into Uluru? He knew Steve would. If he hadn’t found a replacement yet.
    The acceleration as the wheels left the ground pushed Bonnie back in her seat. She closed her eyes then opened them again to watch the land fall away beneath her. Better to face reality after all her harsh words to Harry to do the same.
    She looked out. That would be Jimbaran Bay there and she could almost smell the smoke from the barbecues on the beach.
    Harry St Clair. Another liar. A doctor hiding from the world in a web of lies. She couldn’t believe she’d allowed him into her heart.
    And she’d done that for sure. How could it ever have seemed inevitable at the time? But she couldn’t deny, at unexpected moments, there’d been a real connection between them. But she would not give her heart to a man she couldn’t trust and he’d wiped out that possibility for ever. She’d have her heart back if it killed her.
    The Harry St Clairs weren’t ready for the world and she was.
    Now she had to let their time recede like the island somewhere below the aircraft wing. Bali would always be a place of memories and moments of gold and a manwho wasn’t who she’d thought, and she doubted she’d ever forget him. But she’d never go back.
    Enough. It was time to do what she was good at. Getting on with life.

CHAPTER SIX
    B ONNIE drove into Uluru an hour before darkness fell. All the other cars seemed to be heading out of the township in a mass exodus, off to see the sunset, like the tourists did when they hit the beach in Bali. Of course, thinking of sunset swamped her with the uncomfortable memory of a certain tall widower and that last sunset in Ubud. Had it only been two days ago?
    She dragged her mind away from Indonesia and remembered her friend in Darwin telling her about the ritual of sunset at Uluru.
    A motorbike pulled out in front of her and she swerved to miss the suspiciously young Aboriginal couple running late for nature’s best show. The boy waved and grinned and she saw his girlfriend was pregnant, heavily so, and that too reminded her of Bali. A precariously loaded motorbike and cheekily happy faces.
    ‘Slow down, buddy, or you’ll miss more than the sunset,’ she muttered, but her mind was stuck like a piece of grass stuck in a Balinese water buffalo’s hide.
    She’d promised herself she wouldn’t regret immersing herself in the Harry St Clair experience but that hadn’t happened. She’d been in way over her head and spent the flight back trying to place at what moment good sensehad escaped her. Hadn’t she learned her lesson? The men she seemed attracted to were not to be trusted. She must have a homing device that attracted compulsive liars.
    On the positive side, she hadn’t once felt that inertia and sadness she’d felt since Jeremy’s desertion and deceit. She was too angry.
    Even though she’d found another man to let her down, somewhere in the mix, maybe a little to do with the Balinese beliefs, she did feel alive. Angry, but alive.
    Harry’s main deceit was to himself and until he addressed that he’d never be whole.