New Doc in Town

And although she dreaded the annual influx of school-leavers every year, Jo still felt affronted that the man would think her town not good enough for them.

‘Not all school leavers want the bright lights of Surfers’ Paradise,’ she said defensively.

‘Ha!’ he said, blue eyes twinkling at her in a most disconcerting manner. ‘Bet you wish they hadn’t discovered Crystal Cove!’

She considered denying his assumption, but knew she couldn’t. He’d be working with her so he could hardly avoid seeing how frazzled she became as she worried about drunk, sick and sometimes very unhappy teenagers who were supposedly marking some rite of passage into adulthood.

Adulthood? They had as much sense as fleas, some of them …

‘You’re right. It’s only in recent years that young people have decided the Cove is cool enough for them. Most of those who come are keen surfers and they’re not a problem. Anyway, I’ll take you on but, as I said, we’ll have to see how things work out.’

‘I don’t mind that,’ the stranger—Cam—said calmly. ‘After all, I might not like working with you either, and there’s still a lot of coastline for me to cover in my surfing odyssey.’

She was about to take affront—again!—but realised he was right.

‘Fair call,’ she told him, ignoring the smirk that had accompanied his words. ‘Now, once the schoolies arrive—that’s next week—there’ll be no time to show you around so—’

She didn’t want to sound desperate but, given the situation at the refuge and the fact that she needed some free time to try to sort out funding problems there, she actually was desperate.

‘Can you start tomorrow? No, that’s stupid. Can you start now so I can show you the clinic, introduce you at the hospital, and give you a quick tour of the town?’

Was she looking dubious that he glanced down at his attire and raised his eyebrows at her, the amused expression on his face sparking an unexpected—and totally inappropriate—flicker of warmth deep inside her body?

This definitely wasn’t a good idea!

‘Like this?’ he said, then shook his head. ‘Give me an hour to check in at the caravan park and have a shower and shave. I wouldn’t want to give people the wrong first impression.’

The man’s amused expression turned into a smile—her stupid flicker graduated to a flutter in her chest that caused another mental head slap.

Reality added a harder slap, this one bringing her down to earth with such a thud her physical reactions to the man paled into insignificance.

‘It’s no good. You won’t find a patch of grass available at the caravan park,’ she told him, gloom shadowing the words. ‘Well, there might be something for the next few days but after that you’d be out on your ear. Most of the schoolies camp there, then during the school holidays regulars book the same sites from year to year. It’s a similar situation with the flats and units in town. Most of them are holiday rentals and, although you wouldn’t be looking for something permanent because we don’t know if it will work out, there’d be nothing available right now.’

Not put off by the despair in her voice, he was still grinning when he suggested, ‘Is there a shower in your medical centre? Will the council evict me or fine you if I camp in the parking area?’

Jo rolled her eyes.

‘Great—here comes Dr Cameron, emerging from his van in the parking area. I can just imagine what people would think!’ The words came out snappish but she knew she was more annoyed with the offer she’d have to make than with the man himself.

She told herself not to be feeble, straightened her shoulders, and made the offer.

‘There’s a flat.’

‘You make it sound like the castle of doom!’ Cam teased, wondering why the woman was looking so unhappy about the revelation. Although she’d hardly been joyous about anything since his arrival. ‘Rats? Spiders? Snakes? Cockroaches big as dogs?’

‘It’s here at the house,’ she muttered, sounding even more unhappy, although now he could understand why she was wary. It would be awkward to have a strange man living so close, though if she’d checked out his credentials and read through his references, she shouldn’t be too worried. ‘Out the back. Dad built it years ago and I used it for a while until he took off on the yacht. It’s got a deck, the flat not the yacht, although—’

She stopped, probably aware she was dithering, and she drew a deep, calming breath.

‘The deck on the flat—it’s not as big as this, but it has the northerly view. In the past, since Dad left, I’ve hired locums at holiday times and they’ve used it.’

Temporarily.

She didn’t say the word but Cam heard it in her voice. He could understand her reluctance to have a fellow-worker living in such close proximity full time but if locums had done so up till now …

Maybe she had a set against men?

Been hurt by one?

Realising he should be thinking about the job, not the woman who was hiring him, he turned his attention back to the subject.

‘I understood that although there’d be a trial period, you were looking for someone for a permanent position this time, not a locum. Has the town grown? Do you want to cut down on your own workload?’

She studied him for a moment, as if debating whether he was worth answering, then gave a deep sigh.

‘The town’s grown, a second practice opened but no sooner did that happen than the hospital had staff cuts, then the second practice closed, and with the refuge—well, I decided it was time to expand.’

The explanation rattled from her lips—nice lips, very pale pink, distracting him again—and Cam understood enough to know that the flat, like the job, was only temporary. While she might have been happy having a fortyish woman living permanently in close proximity to her, having a large male surfer was a different story.

‘I’ll show you over it then you’ll have to go back down the steps to the car park and drive along the road towards the highway, taking the first left to bring you up the hill and around to the carport.’

All business now, she led him off the deck, through a sparsely furnished living area. It was functional and uncluttered, decorated in sand colours, but with wide windows giving views of the sea in all directions, the room didn’t need decoration.

It was like the woman herself, functional and uncluttered, he decided, following a decidedly shapely bottom in khaki cargo shorts, a khaki singlet top completing her outfit.

A decidedly shapely bottom?

Well, he couldn’t help but notice, any more than he could have helped noticing the pink lips earlier. Was noticing such things about his boss unprofessional behaviour?

So many years in the army had left him unprepared for the niceties of civilian life, particularly where women were concerned. He held a mental conversation with his sisters and came to the conclusion that while thinking his boss had a shapely butt was okay, mentioning his opinion of it or of any other part of her anatomy, to her or anyone else, would definitely be unwise.

CHAPTER TWO

A BREEZEWAY divided the house from the little building perched beside it on the steep hillside.

‘A double carport so you can keep your van under cover,’ his guide said, waving her left hand to indicate the covered parking spaces. She reached above the door for a key, saying, ‘I know I shouldn’t keep it there,’ before inserting it in the lock and opening the door.

The flat was as different from the minimalist-style house as it was possible to be. Roses, not giant cockroaches! The roses dominated the small space. They bloomed from trellises on the wallpaper, glowed on the fabric covering the small lounge suite, while silk ones stood in vases on small tables here and there.

‘Ha!’ Cam said, unable to stop himself. ‘You wanted a fortyish woman to fit in with the furnishings, although … ‘

He turned towards his new boss and caught a look of such sadness on her face he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth. Though now he had, he had to finish what he’d been about to say or look even more foolish than he felt.

‘Well, one of my sisters is forty and roses definitely aren’t her thing.’

The words came out strained, mumbled almost under his breath, but he doubted Joanna Harris heard them. She’d moved across the small room and opened the sliding glass windows, walking out through them onto the deck.

The way she stood, hugging herself at the railing, told him she wanted—perhaps needed—to be alone, so he explored the neatly organised domain, finding two small bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen had been fitted somehow into the tiny flat. The configuration of the bathroom made him wonder. There was a shower above a tiled floor, no cubicle, just a floor waste where most of the water would go. The basin was set low, no cupboard beneath it.

This and a silver bar screwed onto the wall at waist height suggested the room had been built for someone with a disability and now he looked around he realised the doorways were wider than normal—to accommodate a wheelchair?—and hand-grips had been installed in other places.

Jo had spoken of a sister …

A disabled sister?

He looked out at the figure standing on the deck, a hundred questions flashing through his mind, but the way she stood—the way she’d handled his arrival and their conversation since—told him he might never have those questions answered.

A very private person, Jo Harris, or so he suspected, although on an hour’s acquaintance how could he be judging her?

She should have redecorated the flat, Jo chided herself. She should have done it as soon as she’d moved into it after Jilly died—yet she’d always felt that changing the roses her sister had loved would have been letting go of her twin for ever.

A betrayal of some kind.

And surely ‘should’ was the unkindest word in the English language, so filled with regrets of what might have been, or not been. Should have done this, should not have done that. Her own list of shoulds could go on for ever, should have come home from Sydney sooner being right at the top of it!

Jo hugged her body and looked out to sea, waiting for the view to calm her, for her mind to shut away the memories and consign the shoulds to the trash bin she kept tucked away in her head. Coming into the flat usually upset her—not a lot—just brought back memories, but today, seeing the stranger—Cam—there, he’d looked so out of place among the roses Jill had loved, it had hurt more than usual.

‘I’ll bring my car up.’

He called to her from the doorway and before she could turn he was gone. Good! It would give her time to collect herself. Actually, it would give her time to scurry back to her place and hide from the man for the rest of the day, though that was hardly fair.

She found a little notebook on the kitchen bench and scribbled a note. ‘Will meet you in the carport in half an hour, we can get a bite to eat in town and I’ll show you around.’

A bite to eat in town.

It sounded so innocuous but within an hour of being seen down the street with him the word would be all over town that Jo Harris had finally found a man!

As if a man who looked like him—like the picture of him anyway—would be interested in a scrawny redhead.

Of course once the locals realised he’d come to work for her, the talk would settle down, then when he left …

She shook her head, unable to believe she’d been thinking that maybe it would be nice to have a man around.

A man or this man?

She had a sneaky suspicion the second option was the answer but she wouldn’t consider it now. Instant attraction was something for books, not real people—not real people like her, anyway.

The man would be her colleague—temporary colleague—and right now she had to show him around the town. She’d reclip her hair and smear on a little lightly coloured sunscreen, the only make-up she ever used, but she wouldn’t change—no need to really startle the town by appearing in anything other than her usual garb.

Unfortunately as she passed through the kitchen she saw his résumé, still open on the bench—open at the photo …

She added lipstick to the preparations. After all, it, too, had sun protection.

Leaving the house, she drove down to the clinic first, showing him around the consulting and treatment rooms, proud of the set-up and pleased when he praised it. Then back in the car, she took Cam to the top of the rise so he could see the town spread out below them.

‘It’s fairly easy to get around,’ she explained to him. ‘As you can see from here, the cove beach faces north and the southern beach—the long one—faces east.’

‘With the shopping centre running along the esplanade behind the cove, is that right?’

He pointed to the wide drive along the bay side, Christmas decorations already flapping in the wind.

‘There’s actually a larger, modern shopping mall down behind this hill,’ Jo told him. ‘You just drive up here and turn right instead of left. We’re going the other way because the best cafés are on the front and the hospital is also down there. Until the surfing craze started, the cove beach was the one everyone used. It’s only been in relatively recent years that the open beach has become popular and land along it has been developed for housing.’

Explaining too much?

Telling him stuff he didn’t need to know?

Yes to both but Jo felt so uncomfortable with the stranger in her car, she knew the silence would prickle her skin if she didn’t fill it with talk.

‘Can we eat before we visit the hospital?’ her passenger asked, and although there was nothing in his voice to give him away, memories of her own surfing days came rushing back to Jo. When the surf was running, food had been the last thing on her mind, so she’d return home close to lunchtime, starving.

‘Don’t tell me you haven’t had breakfast?’ she wailed. ‘I realised you’d come straight from the beach but … ‘

She turned so she could see his face.

‘You should have said,’ she told him, mortified that she’d been proudly pointing out up-to-date equipment while all he wanted was something to eat. ‘I could have offered you food at the house—cereal or toast or something. It was just so late in the morning I didn’t think of it. Or we could have gone straight to the café instead of doing the clinic tour first.’

She’d turned her attention back to the road but heard the smile in his voice when he replied.

‘Hey, don’t go beating yourself up about it. I’m a big boy. I can look after myself.’

‘Hardly a boy!’ Jo snapped, contrarily angry now, although it wasn’t her fault the man was starving.

She pulled up opposite her favourite café, a place she and Jill had hung out in during their early high-school days.

‘They do an all-day big breakfast I can recommend,’ she told Cam, before dropping down out of the car and crossing the road, assuming he would follow. As she heard his door shut, she used the remote lock and heard the ping as the car was secured.

‘A big breakfast will hit the spot,’ Cam declared as he studied the blackboard menu and realised that the combination of eggs, bacon, sausages, tomato, beans and toast was just what he needed to fill the aching void in his stomach.

If only other voids in other parts of him could be filled as easily …

‘I’ll have a toasted cheese and—’

‘Tomato sandwich and a latte,’ the young girl who’d come to take their orders finished.

‘One day I’ll order something different,’ Jo warned her, and the girl laughed as she turned to Cam.

‘The sky will turn green the day Jo changes her order,’ she said. ‘And for you?’

He ordered the big breakfast, absolutely famished now he’d started thinking about food and how long it had been since he’d eaten. He looked out across the road at the people gathered on the beach, and beyond them to where maybe a dozen surfers sat on their boards, waiting for a wave that might never come.

He understood their patience. It wasn’t for the waves that he surfed, or not entirely. He surfed to clear his head—to help to banish the sights and sounds of war that disturbed his nights and haunted his days.

He surfed to heal himself, or so he hoped.

‘The surf was far better this morning,’ he said, turning his mind from things he couldn’t control and his attention back to his companion.

‘Higher tide and an offshore breeze. Now the wind’s stronger from the west and flattening the surf but those kids will sit out there anyway. They don’t mind if there are no waves, and now they’re all pretty good about wearing sun protection it’s a healthy lifestyle for them.’

She spoke in a detached manner, as if her mind was on something else. Intriguing, that’s what his new boss was, especially as she’d been frowning as she’d explained surf conditions in Crystal Bay—surely not bothersome information.

‘So why the frown?’ Yes, he was intrigued.

‘What frown?’

‘You’ve been frowning since the girl took our order,’ he pointed out.

A half-embarrassed smile slid across his new boss’s lips, which she twisted slightly before answering.

‘If you must know, I was thinking how predictable I’ve become, or maybe how boring I am that I don’t bother thinking of something different to have for lunch. This place does great salads, but do I order a roast pumpkin, feta and pine-nut concoction? No, just boring old toasted cheese and tomato. I’ve got to get a life!’

Cam chuckled at the despair in her voice.

‘I wouldn’t think ordering the same thing for lunch every day prohibits you from having a life.’

Fire flashed in her eyes again and he found himself enjoying the fact that he could stir her, not necessarily stir her to anger, but at least fire some spark in the woman who was … different in some way?

No, intriguing was the only word.

‘Of course it doesn’t, and if my life wasn’t so full I wouldn’t need to employ another doctor, but the cheese and tomato is a symbol, that’s all.’

Small-scale glare—about a four.

‘A symbol? Cheese and tomato—toasted—a symbol?’

Now the eyes darkened, narrowed.

‘You know very well what I mean. It’s not the cheese and tomato, it’s the repetition thing. We get stuck in a groove—well, not you obviously or you wouldn’t be wandering along the coast in a psychedelic van, but me, I’m stuck in a groove.’

‘With a cheese and tomato sandwich, most uncomfortable,’ he teased, and saw the anger flare before she cooled it with a reluctant grimace and a head shake.

‘It’s all very well for you to mock,’ she told him sternly. ‘You’ve been off seeing the world with the army. You don’t know what it’s like to be stuck in a small town.’

She hesitated, frowning again, before adding, ‘That came out sounding as if I resented being here, which I don’t. I love the Cove, love living here, love working here—so stuck is the wrong word. It’s just that I think maybe people in small towns are more likely to slip into grooves than people in big cities.’

He had to laugh.

‘Lady, you don’t know nothin’ about grooves until you’ve been in the army. Everyone in the army has a groove. It’s the only way a thing that big can work. Hence the psychedelic van you mentioned—that’s my way of getting out of my particular groove.’

And away from the memories …

Jo studied the man who’d made the joking remark and saw the truth behind it in the bruised shadows under his eyes and the lines that strain, not age, had drawn on his cheeks. She had an uncomfortable urge to touch him, to rest her hand on his arm where it lay on the table, just for a moment, a touch to say she understood his need to escape so much reality.

He’s not staying!

The reminder echoed around inside her head and she kept her hands to herself, smiling as their meals arrived and she saw Cam’s eyes widening when he realised how big a big breakfast was in Crystal Cove.

‘Take your time,’ she told him, ‘I could sit here and look out at the people on the beach all day.’

Which was true enough, but although she watched the people on the beach, her mind was churning with other things.

Common sense dictated that if she was employing another doctor for the practice it should be a man. A lot of her male patients would prefer to see a man, especially about personal problems they might be having. Elderly men in particular were reluctant to discuss some aspects of their health, not so much with a woman but with a woman they’d known since she was a child.

She’d ignored common sense and asked for a woman for a variety of reasons, most to do with the refuge. Not that her practice and the refuge were inextricably entwined, although as the only private practice in town she was called in whenever a woman or child at the refuge needed a doctor.

Mind you, with a man—she cast a sidelong glance at the man in question, wolfing down his bacon, sausages and eggs—she could run more effective anti-abuse programmes at the high school. The two of them could do interactive role plays about appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—something she was sure the kids would enjoy, and if they enjoyed it, they would maybe consider the message.

The man wasn’t staying.

And toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches were really, really boring.

‘Tell me about the refuge while I eat.’

It had been on her mind, well, sort of, so it was easy to talk—easier than thinking right now …

‘It began with a death—a young woman who had come to live in the Cove with her boyfriend who was a keen surfer. They hired an on-site van in the caravan park and had been here about three months when the man disappeared and a few days later the woman was found dead inside the van.’

Her voice was so bleak Cam immediately understood that the woman’s death had had a devastating effect on Jo Harris.

But doctors were used to death to a certain extent, so this must have been more traumatic than usual?

Why?

‘Did you know her?’ he asked. ‘Had she been a patient?’

Jo nodded.

‘No and yes. I’d seen her once—turned out she’d been to the hospital once as well. Perhaps if she’d come twice to me, or gone to the hospital both times … ‘

He watched as she took a deep breath then lifted her head and met his eyes across the table, her face tight with bad memories.

‘She came to me with a strained wrist, broken collarbone and bruises—a fall, she said, and I believed her. As you know, if you’re falling, you tend to put out a hand to break the fall, and the collarbone is the weak link so it snaps. Looking back, the story of the fall was probably true but if I’d examined her more closely I’d probably have seen bruising on her back where he’d pushed her before she fell.’

Cam stopped eating. Somehow he’d lost his enjoyment of the huge breakfast. He studied the woman opposite him and knew that in some way she was still beating herself up over the woman’s death—blaming herself for not noticing.

‘And when she was found in the van? She’d been battered to death?’

Jo nodded.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt such … ‘ She paused and he saw anguish in her face so wasn’t entirely surprised when she used the word.

‘Anguish—that’s the only way to describe it. Guilt, too, that I hadn’t helped her, but just total despair that such things happen.’

He watched as she gathered herself together—literally straightening her shoulders and tilting her chin—moving onward, explaining.

‘After she was dead some of the permanent residents at the park told the police they’d heard raised voices from the van but, like most domestic situations, no one likes to interfere. Her parents came up to the Cove and we found out they’d known he was abusive. In fact, he’d moved up here because she had often sought refuge with her parents and he’d wanted to isolate her even more. They offered a donation—a very generous donation—for someone to set up a refuge here. I … ‘

She looked out to sea, regret written clearly on her face.