‘No fear of that,’ she told them. ‘I had Sherlock and he has a nose for holes. He does the hunting. I stick to paths.’
‘Except when you’re rescuing tourists. What does he think he’s doing, putting our doc at risk?’
And there was the nub, Elsa thought wearily as the day wore on. She was their doctor. She knew the islanders were fond of her, but they also depended on her.
She fielded a call from Tony, who put it more than bluntly. ‘You had no right to put yourself at risk, Elsa. Don’t you know what’s at stake?’
‘The whole island needs me. Yes, I know.’
‘I need you.’
‘No more than any other islander,’ she said, trying to keep irritation out of her voice. One unwise date and he practically had her wedded, bedded and mother to half a dozen little Tonys. ‘Tony, leave it. You know I had no choice.’
‘If he’s fool enough to have fallen...’
‘I should have left him there, cold and hurting? I don’t think so. Sorry, Tony, I need to run.’
‘I want to see you. How about dinner?’
‘No chance,’ she said and cut him short. It was getting to the stage where hints weren’t enough. ‘Tony, stop it with the idea that we’re a couple. We’re not.’
And she did need to run. It was already Thursday. Christmas Day was Sunday and how on earth was she going to get everything done by then? Dinner was a sandwich grabbed from the kitchen fridge, eaten while she typed up patient notes for the day with her spare hand—who knew that a five-fingered typist could be so efficient? Finally she headed over to the wards to check all was well before she could—hopefully—get some sleep.
She found Marc propped up on pillows, his leg in traction, scowling at a laptop. Actually...not a laptop. She recognised it as a generic tablet usually kept in the kids’ ward.
‘What, is Dorothy Dinosaur not co-operating?’ she asked, smiling at the sight of one gorgeous guy, sparsely dressed in a white hospital gown, holding a pink, sparkly, dinosaur-decorated tablet.
He didn’t smile back.
‘One of your nurses kindly unlocked it from kid-safe mode,’ he muttered, still glowering. ‘So I managed to download my files from the ether and I’m trying to get some work done. But every time I try to save anything, it defaults back to Dorothy and locks me down. And the nurse won’t give me the password. She comes in when she has time and unlocks it again like she’s doing me a huge favour.’
She grinned at that. ‘Maggie’s old school,’ she told him. ‘She likes discipline in her hospital, and to her everyone under the age of forty is a kid.’ She tugged up a chair, sat and took the tablet from him and typed in the password. ‘There you go.’
‘You’re not going to give me the password either?’
‘I’m with Maggie. We have two small boys in the kids’ ward right now who’d barter their mother for the password. Who’s to say you won’t sell it on? Plus Maggie’s knitting patterns are on this tablet.’ She relented. ‘You know you should be sleeping. Your body will demand sleep, even if your mind hasn’t caught up yet. But I can lend you my spare laptop if you want. The med stuff is locked but I’ll trust you not to try and break in.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She looked curiously at him. ‘So you really came all this way without so much as a change of socks?’
‘It was supposed to be a back and forth in a day trip,’ he said, sighing and setting the tablet aside. ‘Before she died, Mum told me it’d take three hours max to climb to the peak. The plane arrived at nine and was leaving at six, so getting here and back in a day seemed easy. I had a research paper to assess on the flight—a printout that’s still sitting in a locker at the airport—so I didn’t need my laptop. I can do urgent stuff on my phone, but that’s now smashed.’
‘So you’re screenless.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s truly horrible. But moving on...apart from your lack of screen, tell me what hurts?’
‘Just about everything,’ he admitted. ‘But mostly my pride.’ He pushed himself further up in the bed, grimacing with pain. He looked ruffled, she thought, and also...strangely defenceless? He was a big man, tall, lean, muscular. The dirt he’d been covered with was gone and he’d shaved, but his dark, wavy hair was ruffled as if he’d been raking it in frustration. Despite his immobilised leg, his arm in a sling and his loose hospital gown, his strongly boned face and what she could see of his ripped body combined to give the impression of barely contained strength. He looked powerful but confined, edgy to be gone.
His pride was hurting? Yeah, she could see it. For such a man to be in this position...
‘I can’t do much about your pride,’ she told him, ‘but I can do something about the aches and pain.’
‘I’ll make do with paracetamol.’
She grinned and motioned back to the tablet, where Dorothy and her dinosaurs were circling the perimeter of Marc’s word document. ‘I guess if you want to do battle with Dorothy you need to keep your wits about you, and the stronger painkillers might indeed make you feel a bit fuzzy,’ she admitted. ‘But there’s no prizes for heroics, Dr Pierce. Your leg’s a mass of bruises and lacerations, to say nothing of the break. Your shoulder must be giving you heaps. Plus your back... You can’t see, but it’s spectacularly black and blue.’ Her voice grew serious. ‘You were incredibly lucky not to break your spine.’
‘I was incredibly lucky in more ways than one,’ he said, and almost involuntarily he reached out with his good arm and took her hand in his. And held it tightly, as if reassuring himself she was real. ‘I was lucky because of one Dr Elsa McCrae,’ he said softly. ‘Elsa, I’ll never forget it.’
She stilled, looked down at their linked hands. It had been a casual gesture, an impulse, but their hands stayed locked.
She’d spent a long, scary night with this man. He must have been terrified when she’d found him, but he hadn’t let on. He’d been matter-of-fact, uncomplaining, holding it together.
He was grateful. It was the only reason he was holding her hand.
Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe the terrors were still with him. Maybe he needed the contact.
She told herself that as she let her hand stay where it was. She’d had a hard night too. The work was piling up around her, but for just a moment she let herself be held. She felt the strength and comfort of his grip. She even let herself believe she wasn’t alone.
But she was alone, and there was work a mile high to be waded through. She needed to get on.
She should tug her hand away.
But still she didn’t. For his sake, she told herself. Not for hers.
‘It’ll be a darn sight easier to forget gratitude—forget anything else that’s bothering you—if you let me give you some decent painkillers,’ she managed, and was annoyed to find that her voice was unsteady. ‘Have some now and I’ll write you up more for the night. Just ask Maggie, she’s on all night.’
‘Maggie’s scary,’ he said, and she grinned.
‘Better men than you are scared of Maggie. Wielding a bedpan, she’s a force to be reckoned with, but she’s a fine nurse.’ Finally, reluctantly, she tugged back her hand and rose. Was it her imagination or had there been reluctance on his part to let her go? It was understandable, she told herself. He’d need human contact after feeling such fear.
And her reaction?
This was ridiculous. Moving on...
‘Is...is there anything else you need?’
‘A set of clean clothes?’ he ventured, back to being practical. ‘You cut off my pants. At least I didn’t lose my wallet so I hope I can purchase something to wear.’
‘I’d like to keep you in for a couple of days,’ she warned him. ‘I’m still worried about clots.’
‘That’s two of us,’ he said grimly. ‘I know the risks. So clothes can wait but I’d kill for decent pyja
mas. Even more for a phone.’
‘I can help there as well. Didn’t you already use our ward phone? It has overseas capability—we cope with a lot of tourists and you’d be astonished at how many of them lose their phones. I’ll tell Maggie to drop it in again.’
‘I’d like my own,’ he growled. Without his phone he felt stranded. Or even more stranded than he already was. ‘Is there anyone on the island who could organise me one?’
‘Jason,’ she told him. ‘He’s a cray fisherman but he does a nice little sideline in technology. His boat’s due in tonight so I’ll ask him to come and see you tomorrow. Anything’s possible if you’re prepared to pay. In the meantime, Maggie will bring you my laptop. We’ll even unlock the passwords for you.’
‘Thank you,’ he said stiffly, and she thought this was a guy who hated being out of control. Not having his phone, not having the internet would be killing him. But his next question surprised her. ‘What about you? Are you going to bed now?’
‘Soon,’ she lied.
‘Soon, as in after you’ve seen what...another ten patients?’
‘Only one,’ she admitted and then decided maybe she needed to talk to this guy as a colleague. For some reason he had her unsettled and she couldn’t figure it out. ‘Mathew Hobson rang fifteen minutes ago and thinks he might have been bitten by a redback spider,’ she told him. ‘He’s on his way in. He’ll be fine, though. He met one once and never got over it—now every time he feels a prick from an ant or mosquito he thinks the worst.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘He should be arriving any minute.’
‘And then you’ll get to bed?’
‘In time. I have the thirty-odd Christmas gifts to wrap over the next couple of days, and I’m already way behind.’
‘Thirty!’
She smiled and shrugged. She should leave—she didn’t have time to stay and gossip with patients—but those dark eyes of his were watching her with a hint of warmth, of humour, of understanding. He was a colleague, she thought. A real medical colleague who understood the pressure she was under.
Like a friend.
Whatever, the need to tell him was suddenly overwhelming.
‘I do a thing,’ she told him. ‘On Christmas Day.’
‘A thing?’
‘Well, it’s not all me,’ she told him. ‘But the gifts are me. I’m not sure what you know about this island.’
‘Not much.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s been a quiet little backwater for years. We don’t have decent educational facilities here—the kids have to go away for school if they want to do more than fish or farm. We now have a big tourist network, but local kids don’t see that as an opportunity. Most of our local kids leave when they’re old enough. Some come back but most don’t. That means we’re left with an ageing population and at Christmas a lot of lonely oldies.’
‘Which is where you come in?’
‘A lot of us come in,’ she told him. ‘The year I came back to the island I copped literally scores of calls on Christmas Day from oldies who really did feel ill. There’s nothing like loneliness to make a slight niggle seem like something frightening. Then the next year Jonas Cruikshank, a local farmer, committed suicide on Christmas Day. His wife had died six months earlier, neither of his kids could make it back to the island and it must have been all too much for him.’ She shrugged awkwardly. ‘The local church ladies had put on a welfare-type dinner, but he hadn’t put his name down for it. Why would he? Come and admit that he was one of the lonely? He had far too much pride. His death hit us all dreadfully, so after that we decided to change things up a bit. Make Christmas fun.’
‘You mean you decided to make it fun.’
‘I did,’ she said a trifle defensively.
‘How?’
What was she doing, sitting talking when she had so much to do? This guy was a patient. She’d written him up for the drugs he’d need for the night—if he’d take them. Her work here was done.
But this was Christmas.
Jonas Cruikshank had been a friend more than a patient. His wife had babysat her as a little girl. Jonas had given her her first dog, the predecessor of a long line leading to Sherlock. His death had cast a pall over the whole island, and the next year she’d overridden all objections and done it her way.
And this guy had asked. He should be sleeping but he seemed wide awake and she wouldn’t mind...just talking for a little while.
She shut her eyes for a moment, closing her mind to the to-do list still waiting for her. She tugged her chair back up to the bed and sat. And talked.
‘For a start, I moved our communal Christmas dinner out of the church hall,’ she told him.
‘You’re not religious?’
‘I didn’t say that. The churches on this island do a fabulous job, but the only one with a hall big enough to take us has walls covered in Easter images. They’re beautiful but they’re sad. I want fun at my Christmas celebration, Dr Pierce, not suffering. So I moved the whole thing to the footy ground training room. It’s huge.’
‘So let me guess,’ he said, bemused. ‘You now have portraits of sweaty, post grand final football teams, and rolls of past players?’
‘They take ’em down for us,’ she said smugly. ‘They didn’t want to, but three years back the whole team came down with norovirus two days before playing the grand final with one of the neighbouring islands. You have no idea how hard Grandpa and I worked to rehydrate those guys, and in the end we got them all match fit and they won. So the coach’s speech included a public declaration that the footy club stood in our debt. Same as you. You’re donating lift chairs, or I hope you are. They’ve donated a testosterone-free training room every Christmas, they take down their pictures and honour rolls and they even throw in a decorated tree for good measure.’
Marc chuckled. She met his eyes and saw a twinkle lurking in their depths. She chuckled too, and all at once she felt better. As if the weariness had lifted a little.
She should go now, she told herself.
She didn’t.
‘So you have a hall,’ he prompted, sounding fascinated. ‘What else?’
‘I pull in favours wherever I can find ’em,’ she told him. ‘I also now have Douglas McCurdie’s puddings, and that’s really something.’
‘Puddings?’
‘Douglas is a local poultry farmer. His wife used to make a Christmas pudding which was a legend among her family, and when she died he found the recipe and started making them to sell. They’re awesome but he’s canny—he sells them for a ridiculous amount through a trendy Sydney outlet. But he was friends with Jonas, and when I twisted his arm he agreed to provide them—as long as he’s on the guest list. He’s lonely and it’s a pride saver for him, too. And so it’s spiralled. We have some of the best island cooks competing to have their food accepted. Grandpa and I have people we decree need to be invited, but the rest of the places are up for ballot, and that list’s a mile long. But if you volunteer to help you become part of it. It’s fabulous.’
‘And the gifts?’ he said cautiously, sounding entranced.
‘They’re just for the specials. If I did gifts for everyone I’d go nuts. But the islanders who don’t have anyone waiting at home, or those too ill or elderly to have a decent Christmas themselves—they get a gift, and those gifts are personal. No handkerchiefs and socks from me.’
‘Like what?’
‘Little things,’ she told him. ‘You’ve already figured money on this island is tight so they can’t be big. But I have spies in the welfare shop, with the fishermen, with the local tradies, with whoever I can think of to help, and I have a plan that lasts all year.’
He’d forgotten the pain in his leg. The pain all over his body. She had him fascinated.
‘So tell me about your plan.’
‘Well...like geraniums for Sandra Carter,’ she told him. ‘Sa
ndra’s been alone since her husband and her son drowned in a boating accident six years back. But she adores geraniums—she reckons she has every variety known to man. Six months ago we had an evacuation flight arrive without its usual doctor. They’d expected a routine problem, but it turned nasty so I had to go with them to Sydney. I needed to stay overnight and took a dusk walk and saw the most amazing geranium—I swear it was almost black. I knocked on the door and the lady gave me a cutting and it’s actually grown. I reckon Sandra will be beside herself when she sees it. Not all my things hit the sweet spot, but I do my best. I have a “Beware, Vicious Dog” sign for May Trent with her ancient chihuahua. I have a perfect nautilus shell for Louise Addington whose grandson broke hers when he was here last holiday. I have a second-hand book on making artificial flies for Ron Nesbit—he spends his life fly-fishing. Oh, and I had another triumph—I found an ancient pottery wheel for Gay Ryan, who’s always wanted to try throwing pots, and it goes with a promise of lessons from Chris Baker, who’s an excellent local potter. That took me taking Chris’s kid’s appendix out to wheedle. So many things—and they all have to be wrapped.’
‘Including the pottery wheel?’ he said faintly.
‘I’ll use a long piece of string for that,’ she told him. ‘It’ll lead to the janitor’s room, where the wheel will be set up. I’ll wrap a box with the end of the string in it to give to Gay. The trick is to make every gift look ordinary. It’s become a bit of a thing—the islanders love it. I have people suggesting stuff now, but no one knows until Christmas Day what the gifts are. Actually, that’s not true. Grandpa knows because he helps—he loves it too.’ She paused and bit her lip. ‘Or mostly he does. He’s not even asking about it this year.’
And that was enough to haul her out of her story, to make her remember reality. ‘Sorry,’ she said contritely. ‘That’s far too much information about my hobby horse. You need to rest.’
‘So do you.’
Mistletoe Kiss with the Heart Doctor Page 7
