And there it was—not just the vague glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel that there should have been this early in the morning but the biggest, brightest most beautiful glare that she’d ever seen that told her that the generator had been moved and there were people up there, waiting to help her.
That was the moment that told her that the end of her ordeal was in sight, and the sense of relief that hit her was so powerful that for several long moments she was totally unable to move a muscle.
‘Come on, Maggie the Mole. Don’t be frightened of the lights,’ he murmured softly into the radio, rather than calling down to her for everyone to hear, almost as though he was trying to coax a shy animal into the open. ‘Come on up so I can collect the hug I’ve been waiting for all night.’
‘You might not want to hug me when you see how dirty I am,’ she warned as she started moving again, her arms and legs feeling strangely leaden so that she had to force them into dragging her body over those last few remaining yards.
‘I’ll take my chances,’ he promised with a smile in his voice that she couldn’t wait to see in person.
And then, suddenly, she was emerging from the top of the ventilation shaft and there were hands reaching for her from every direction, grabbing her sore elbows and making her squeak with pain until Adam growled at them to let her go. And then he wrapped his arms tightly around her, surrounding her with his own warmth, and was lifting her completely off her feet and whirling her round and round in a ka lei do scope of light and laughter and applause.
She was totally unable to hear a single word he was saying because of the voices around them and she had no idea why the lights seemed to be flashing until Adam finally lowered her to her feet and she realised that there must have been a dozen people pressing towards them with what looked like a forest of cameras and microphones all pointing in her direction.
‘Maggie!’
‘Miss Pascoe!’
‘Over here, Maggie!’
It was a good job that he had his arm wrapped around her shoulders to steady her or she would have fallen over with shock.
‘What are all these people doing here?’ she asked, then didn’t care what his answer was when he smiled at her like that.
‘Do you want me to get rid of them?’ he asked with a devilish glint in his eye.
‘Please!’ She glanced down at herself and could have cried when she saw the state of her uniform, the smart green she’d always worn with pride now dusty, stained and torn. ‘I look disgusting, and they’re all taking photos!’ she wailed, burying her face against the shoulder of his borrowed jacket. He laughed aloud before he held up a commanding hand.
As if by magic, the cacophony died away until there was only the steady thrum of the generator powering the lights and a few indignant calls from the birds that had been woken too soon by the artificial dawn.
‘As you can all see,’ Adam said, his strong voice carrying easily right to the back of the crowd laying siege to them, ‘Maggie’s out and she’s safe and well. We’ll be saying a special thank you to all the rescue crew in the Penhally Arms this evening, but for now she just needs a little time to catch her breath.’
He started to turn away, wrapping the blanket he was handed around her shoulders to shelter her from the sharp breeze blowing in from the ocean below, before tucking her against his side with what felt like an extremely possessive arm.
Behind them there was a renewed storm of shouting when the media circus realised that they’d just neatly been balked of an immediate interview with her, but there was an impressive wall of rescue squad personnel wearing high-visibility clothing standing guard, preventing them from getting any closer.
Not that Maggie felt she had anything much to say.
She’d only been doing what a paramedic was trained to do when she’d stabilised Tel and prepared him for transport to St Piran’s, and it had just been common sense to escort the other lads out to the surface when she’d had to collect more supplies.
As for her journey up the ventilation shaft…the only remarkable thing about that was the fact that Adam had been able to persuade her to attempt it in the first place.
‘Maggie?’ The young voice was accompanied by the feeling of someone tugging on her tattered sleeve, and she turned to find Jem Althorp standing there with his mother.
‘Jem! And Kate!’ she exclaimed in surprise. ‘I thought you’d both be back home by now, tucked up in bed.’
‘I couldn’t go to sleep,’ Jem said earnestly. ‘Not until I knew they’d got you out of the mine safely.’
‘I took him home to feed him and get him clean and warm, but we couldn’t stay there, knowing you were still down the mine. We both wanted to be here,’ Kate said. ‘I had to be here to thank you for looking after him for me, and…and to apologise for shouting at you earlier. I—’
‘Kate, don’t worry about it. Just take him home and put it all behind you,’ she advised. ‘You’ve got a remarkably brave boy there, and he deserves a medal for staying down there with Tel.’
All the while they had been talking, Adam had been edging her gently away from the noise and the people until they’d said their goodbyes. Then he quickened his pace, leading her along the grassy slope and through the gate at the far side of the field until the lights and the people were left behind, the intrusive cameras kept firmly at bay by the determined efforts of the rescue squad, who had been there almost from the beginning of her ordeal.
In the shelter of a solid Cornish stone hedge he finally drew her down to sit beside him on the short-cropped grass and a tiny corner of her mind reasoned that there must have been a flock of sheep there until recently. Had they been taken to a field closer to the farm house ready for lambing?
‘Here,’ Adam said. ‘You’re probably ready for this.’ He held out a bottle of water.
‘Oh, yes!’ she said, suddenly realising just how dry her throat was, and reached for it, only to realise that her battered and bruised fingers were too sore to unscrew the top.
‘Ah, keresik, let me do that for you,’ he offered with a catch in his voice as he took the top off and handed it to her.
‘Oh, that tastes so good,’ she said when the cool liquid had slid down her throat. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so thirsty.’
‘Is there anything in your pack that I can put on your hands for you?’
‘My pack!’ She’d completely forgotten that she’d been dragging that up the shaft with her, attached by what was now a very dirty length of bandage.
She suddenly started to laugh as a ridiculous image leapt into her mind.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked with a frown, clearly wondering if she’d finally cracked under the strain.
‘I’d completely forgotten about my pack…that I’d tied it to me… And if you hadn’t seen it before you swung me round…’ She laughed helplessly.
‘We wouldn’t have had any difficulty getting rid of the press because I’d have flattened the lot of them with it.’ His deeper laughter joined hers in joyous early-morning harmony as the day brightened steadily around them. ‘I couldn’t believe how heavy it was. What do you paramedics keep in there? Bricks?’
Suddenly Maggie remembered putting the souvenir pieces of rock in the pack before she’d started that last climb and reached for the appropriate pocket.
Adam had to take over when her fingers were too clumsy to open it but then she burrowed down inside until she felt the rough texture of the two rocks and pulled the bigger one out into the strengthening light.
‘Not bricks exactly,’ she said. ‘But just before I started climbing that awful ventilation shaft I saw this and thought it would be a pretty memento. Do you recognise what it is? Isn’t that what they call Fool’s gold because so many people mistake it for the real thing?’
Adam examined it, turning the heavily streaked rock over and over in his hands.
‘It might be an idea to show it Young George,’ he suggested with a strange little smile.
‘Well, he does know more than most about the mines around here,’ she agreed easily. ‘He’ll enjoy a chuckle when he realises that the only bit of treasure I salvaged from my time down there was a bit of iron pyrites.’
‘It could be.’ But he was still smiling mysteriously as he continued. ‘Young George and I were talking when you were asleep. He’d had a chance to look at the old map and it reminded him that the mine’s original name was Wheal Owr. That was corrupted over the years and ended up being anglicised to Wheal Owl.’
‘So, does owr mean owl?’ She was always interested in anything to do with the history of the region.
‘No. Apparently owl is kowann in Cornish.’
‘So owr is…?’
‘Gold,’ he said with a significant glance at the rock in his hand. ‘The mine was originally called Wheal Gold and it looks as if you brought up a piece of the evidence as to why it got its name.’
‘You’re kidding!’ she exclaimed, and traced a bright vein with a tentative fingertip.
‘I wonder,’ Adam said reflectively as he turned it over in his hand. ‘Do you think there would be enough in here for a wedding ring…or two?’
‘A wedding ring?’ Maggie wasn’t sure what she was hearing. It had been a very long night and she could easily be hallucinating or…
‘Is it such a hard question, keresik?’
She wouldn’t have believed that he could sound so uncertain. When he’d been eighteen he had seemed to have all the answers and a year ago…
‘While I was…down there…you said Caroline was in a coma. So how long was it before…?’
‘She’d already been comatose for months by then, but her mother just couldn’t let go, couldn’t bear to lose her only daughter when she looked as if there was absolutely nothing wrong with her…as if she’d just wake up at any moment.’
Now she could see that the shadows she’d glimpsed in his eyes were sadness and regret for a wasted life.
‘I suppose I felt guilty because I’d never really loved her, so I just let her mother go on hoping but…’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t let it go on any longer, not after I’d seen you again and realised just what had been missing in my life all that time.’
He took one of her grubby, scraped hands in his and held it gently against his face, a full day’s growth of prickly dark beard making him look like the perfect illustration of a pirate.
‘It took me a while to persuade Caroline’s mother that it was time to let go, and then there was my contract to work out, but I knew what I wanted—to come back to Penhally and persuade you that you still loved me enough to give me a second chance. What I didn’t know was whether you’d allow me to get close enough to explain where everything had gone wrong.’
‘And within minutes of setting eyes on you, I’m trapped down a mine and a captive audience,’ she said wryly, loving the way his eyes gleamed in the light of the new day. ‘Did you really mean it? That you wanted to move back to Penhally? I thought you were only here as a locum?’
‘They’re desperately short of staff, with two of them disappearing off to Italy last month. I’m here as a short-term locum and there’s a retired GP from another practice who’s been helping out. So there’s a permanent position for me at Penhally Bay Surgery if I want it, but I wasn’t going to commit myself to it in case you didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. It would have been too painful to see you and not—’
‘You mean, you wouldn’t have tried to change my mind?’ she teased.
‘Of course I would,’ he said very seriously. ‘I meant what I said when you were down there—that you had to get out of there safely because I need you in my life as much as I need air to breathe. And I would love to settle in Penhally permanently with you…unless you’d rather go somewhere else?’
‘It might seem rather unadventurous, but I like living here,’ she said, while the realisation was slowly dawning that he might really have meant that comment about the wedding rings to be the fore runner of a proposal. Or had he?
‘That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to travel abroad at some stage,’ she added uncertainly, not really knowing where this conversation was going. Was he just asking if she’d mind if he moved back to Penhally, that it wouldn’t matter to her if she saw him around the place on a daily basis? ‘Um, the furthest I’ve been from home was that course in London.’
‘In which case, I’ll accept the permanent position,’ he said with a new sense of purpose in his voice, ‘but I’ll work to the end of my present contract first—that will take me to the end of March. Then I’ll start the new one at the beginning of May. That means I’ll be giving the practice nearly a month and a half’s notice that I’m going to be away on my honeymoon for the whole of April. Well, at least they’ll know that I’m going to be back full time before the summer visitors start flooding into Cornwall and the practice goes manic. But perhaps you’d rather wait?’ he added hastily, so he must have seen the frown of puzzlement on her face.
‘Wait for what?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry, Adam, but my mind must be fuzzy with lack of sleep. What would I be waiting for?’
‘Oh, keresik, have I done everything wrong?’ he demanded, looking quite stricken. ‘Here I am asking whether you’d rather wait a few more months and be a June bride when I haven’t even proposed properly.’
‘Proposed?’ she whispered, wide-eyed as he suddenly shifted to his knees on the grass in front of her.
He was still wearing his ruined trousers and the borrowed jacket from one of the rescue team but he’d never looked more handsome to her.
The pale February sun was just creeping over the field behind her to outline the face of the man she’d loved ever since she’d been fifteen, and the wide expanse of the ocean beyond the safe harbour of Penhally Bay was spread out behind him as he carefully took both her hands in his.
‘Keresik, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love you, and I know I’ll love you for the rest of my life, so will you do me the honour of marrying me?’
‘Oh, Adam, yes, please. I love you, too,’ she whispered, and had to swallow hard to stop the happy tears spoiling the moment. Besides, she had something important to add. ‘And I don’t want to be a June bride because that’s too far away. I’ve been waiting to marry you since my sixteenth birthday.’
‘So let’s not wait at all,’ he suggested, drawing her up to her knees so that they were facing each other before he said solemnly, ‘I, Adam Donnelly, take you, Margaret Pascoe, to be my lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward as long as we both shall live.’
Maggie knew that they would have the formal legalisation of their vows in the presence of their friends later, but she also knew that nothing could be more solemn or binding than becoming his bride in the soft grey sunrise of a Cornish February morning.
She smiled into those beautiful dark blue eyes and her heart swelled with happiness as she said, ‘I, Margaret Pascoe, take you, Adam Donnelly to be my lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward as long as we both shall live.’
‘May I kiss my bride?’ he asked softly, but before she could answer a sudden gust of wind buffeted them and brought the first sharp needles of rain with them.
‘Your bride would love a kiss, but wonders if she could have it somewhere just a little bit warmer,’ she said, as the blanket was flipped off her shoulders by the next gust and her teeth started to chatter. ‘It seems as if that rain might be arriving a bit sooner than forecast.’
‘Going somewhere warmer—and more private—sounds like a wonderful idea, especially for what I’ve got in mind,’ he agreed, as he rescued the blanket and helped her to her feet, then grinned. ‘Your place is closer. I hope your shower is big enough for two.’ And he swung her up into his arms, travel-stained pack and all.
She squealed in surprise at his unexpected move, then laughed as she flung her arms around those broad shoulders and tucked her head where it had always belonged—
beside his.
She’d thought he would stride swiftly back to the field that had been the scene of so much drama during the night, to the car he’d left there when he’d come to help find the boys, but instead he paused to gaze down at her for a long moment.
‘Ah, Maggie, keresik, I can’t tell you how glad I am to have you safely in my arms again,’ he said, tightening them around her and pressing his cheek against hers. ‘And how impossible it is to wait before I have at least one kiss,’ he growled in her ear, before he pressed hungry lips to hers.
And suddenly it didn’t matter that the wind was getting stronger, colder and wetter. All that mattered was that she was in his arms and that this was the start of the rest of their lives…together.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Josie Metcalfe for her contribution to the Brides of Penhally Bay series.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-8852-6
THE DOCTOR’S BRIDE BY SUNRISE
First North American Publication 2011
Copyright © 2007 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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