‘Um…doesn’t your wife cook?’ she asked, but the idea didn’t last.

      She almost forgot the question before it was out of her mouth. The heat of the fire, the morphine and the events of the night were catching up with her. Her words were slurring.

      He smiled back at her. ‘You want to concentrate on staying awake ’til your bed’s made?’

      She tried. But as he lifted her over onto the fresh sheets, as he drew the blankets over her, she felt her lids drooping and no amount of effort could keep them from closing.

      ‘Thank you,’ she murmured. It seemed enormously important to say it. ‘Thank you for everything.’

      ‘My pleasure,’ he said, in an odd, thoughtful voice. ‘It’s all my pleasure, Dr Carmody. You go to sleep and don’t worry about a thing.’

      He touched her face. There it was again—this…strangeness. It was a tiny gesture, and why it should seem so personal…so right…

      There was no figuring it out. She was too tired to try.

      ‘G’nigh…’ she whispered.

      Praise for Marion Lennox’s Medical™ Romance writing:

      ‘Marion Lennox’s RESCUE AT CRADLE LAKE is simply magical, eliciting laughter and tears in equal measure. A keeper.’

      —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

      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® Romance. (She used a different name for each category for a while—if you’re looking for her past Mills & Boon® Romance, search for author Trisha David as well.) She’s now had over 75 romance novels accepted for publication.

      In her non-writing life Marion cares for kids, cats, dogs, chooks and goldfish. She travels, and 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!

      Look out for the first book in Marion Lennox’s brand-new royal trilogy Marrying his Majesty.

      CLAIMED: SECRET ROYAL SON is available from Mills & Boon® Romance next month.

       Recent titles by the same author:

      A BRIDE AND CHILD WORTH WAITING FOR*

      WANTED: ROYAL WIFE AND MOTHER†

      *Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance—Crocodile Creek †Mills & Boon® Romance

      A SPECIAL KIND

      OF FAMILY

      BY

      MARION LENNOX

      To my Number One Marion, my Number One Reader,

      my Number One Mum. Love you for ever.

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE doorbell rang at one in the morning. Dominic Spencer, Doc to the locals, swore and thumped his basin of dough into the trash. The locals knew he couldn’t go out tonight. Was a patient coming to him?

      Happy Easter, he thought, and tried not to glower as he stomped through the hall to the front door. It had better be serious.

      It was.

      The girl standing on his veranda was a bedraggled, muddy mess. Age? Somewhere between twenty and thirty. It was hard to be more precise. She was five feet six or so, slightly built, and wearing jeans and a windcheater, both coated with mud, and with blood. One leg of her jeans was ripped to the knee, and there was blood on her bare shin.

      What else? She was wearing one filthy shoe, but only one. The other foot was partly covered by a sock, but the sock had long abandoned the idea of being footwear.

      Her brown-black curls were drooping in sodden tendrils to her shoulders. Her eyes were huge. Scared. A long scratch ran from her left eyebrow almost to her chin, bleeding sluggishly.

      She was carrying one of the ugliest dogs he’d ever seen. Maybe an English bulldog? Fat to the point of grotesque, it lay limply in her arms—a dead weight.

      ‘Oh, thank God,’ the girl managed before he had a chance to speak. She shoved the dog forward, lurching like she was drunk. He grabbed the dog, then watched in dismay as she sank onto the veranda, put her head between her knees and held her head down with both hands.

      Triage, he thought, his arms full of dog. Woman first, dog second.

      Get rid of the dog.

      Rain was blasting in from the east, reaching almost to the door, so he turned and laid the dog on the mat inside the hall. The dog sagged like a rag doll, but the girl was his priority.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ He caught her wrist. Her pulse was racing. She was sweating, and as he knelt beside her she started to retch.

      ‘H-help me,’ she stuttered, and couldn’t manage more.

      A child’s sand bucket was lying on the veranda. He hauled it forward but she didn’t need it. This hadn’t been the first time she’d vomited tonight, then.

      Now wasn’t the time for questions. He did a more careful visual examination as he waited for the nasty little interlude to be over.

      She was kneeling, which meant the damage to her leg must be superficial. The scratch on her face wasn’t deep either. She was moving her arms freely. There didn’t seem to be any major injury.

      Maybe she was retching from exhaustion. If he’d had to carry that lump of a dog far, he might be retching, too.

      This afternoon had been sultry before the change, and the kids had set up their paddling pool by the sandpit. A house-proud man might have tidied the place as soon as the colder weather hit, but housework was well down Dominic’s list of priorities. So towels still lay on the veranda, albeit damp ones. As she ceased retching, he used one to wipe the worst of the mud and blood from her face. She submitted without reaction and he thought again, This is exhaustion.

      ‘Let’s get you inside.’

      She looked up then, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘Where…where…?’ She was almost incoherent.

      ‘I’m the local doctor,’ he said, smiling at her in what he hoped was his best bedside manner. ‘I assume you know that from the sign on the front gate. My name’s Dominic Spencer. Dom for short.’

      ‘Dominic,’ she managed.

      ‘Dom will do fine. And your name?

      ‘Erin Carmody.’

      It wasn’t a comprehensive patient history but it’d do for now. ‘What hurts?’

      ‘Everything.’ It was practically a wail and he relaxed a little. In his experience, patients who were deathly ill didn’t wail.

      ‘Anything specific?’

      ‘N-no.’

      ‘What happened?’

      ‘I crashed my car.’