‘I reckon we’ll get a stretcher to bring you in to bed, eh?’
‘I can walk,’ Frank mumbled, but Quinn shook his head.
‘Why walk when you can ride?’ Quinn grinned at the ribbons on the car. ‘Though we might forgo a bit of the bridal splendour from here on.’ He motioned to the verandah and Fern saw a waiting trolley at the head of the stairs.
How would they get that up to the entrance…?
Then, to her amazement, Fern saw a wide, sloping ramp had been installed beside the granite steps. Chrome handrails bordered both steps and ramp.
No expense had been spared here.
Fern’s impressions of expensive renovation deepened the further she went into the clinic. Fern had been in this house once for a lavish party thrown on the movie star’s arrival to the island. Then the house had screamed glitz and glamour. Now it spoke of welcoming comfort, backed by clinical cleanliness and state-of-the-act technology.
How could Barega support such a place?
As she and Quinn wheeled Frank’s trolley along the main corridor Fern inwardly boggled. This place was worth a fortune and the medical renovations were worth almost as much again.
The room that Quinn steered Frank’s trolley into was set up as a two-bed ward, though it was large enough to take six beds if the need arose. It was vast, with huge French windows looking out over the verandah beyond.
It was a great place to be ill in, Fern thought, knowing that once the sun rose in the morning the patients could see the garden and the distant ocean beyond those windows. This was a far cry from the wards at Fern’s teaching hospital in Sydney.
The other bed was already taken.
‘Fern!’
Fern’s eyes flew to the bed’s occupant with shock.
Sam…
‘Sam, are you OK?’ she asked swiftly, concerned. There must be something worse than a gastric upset happening to Sam if Quinn had admitted him.
‘Fern, where the hell have you been?’ her fiance croaked from his mound of pillows. ‘I’ve been ringing your uncle’s house…everywhere…Finally I had to get Mum and Dad to drive me here!’
Fern gazed down at her intended husband. His normally florid countenance had recovered some of its colour and his bright purple pyjamas increased the impression that he wasn’t dangerously ill. Then Fern’s gaze moved to Quinn.
Why on earth had Sam been admitted?
‘Mr Hubert has vomited three times,’ Quinn Gallagher said solemnly, guessing her question. His expressive lips twitched only slightly as he spoke. Laughter, it seemed, was being firmly suppressed. ‘Mr Hubert feels there’s a very real danger he’ll become dehydrated and, after being so ill, the only safe place for him is in hospital.’
‘But you’re no sicker than anyone else who ate the oysters, Sam,’ Fern stammered, and then wished she hadn’t as Sam’s face tightened in anger.
‘How on earth would you know that, Fern?’ he snapped. ‘You didn’t even check. You just went dashing off and you left me…You left me…’ The big man’s voice rose on an incredulous note of disbelief. It seemed that such treachery could hardly be believed.
Fern winced. She knew that Sam was one who called a cold the flu and the flu pneumonia but as he was normally an exceedingly robust individual she hadn’t been called on for too much sympathy in the past.
Maybe, seeing that he was unused to illness, Sam was justified in being frightened.
She crossed swiftly to his bed and bent to kiss him on the brow. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said gently. ‘But Maud was ill.’
‘She was hardly as ill as me!’
‘Maud had a heart attack, Sam.’ Fern was fighting hard to stay calm.
‘A heart attack!’
‘Yes.’
That silenced Sam for only a second. Then he raised himself on his elbow.
‘Your aunt’s old, though, Fern,’ he said savagely. ‘And your uncle was with her. Surely your place is with your husband.’
Count to ten. Count to ten, Fern…
Behind her, Fern was aware of Quinn Gallagher watching with malicious enjoyment.
‘You’re not my husband yet, Sam,’ Fern finally managed. She took a deep breath. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, Dr Gallagher and I need to attend to Mr Reid.’
‘But I’m going to be sick again,’ Sam hissed.
Fern sucked in her breath, fury mounting. How could she possibly have given in to this man’s pressure to marry her? Of all the insensitive oafs…
She looked down at the bedside table and picked up the shiny aluminium kidney dish.
‘Fine,’ she snarled. ‘Have a basin, Sam. Just do what you have to do and leave us alone.’
He wasn’t sick again.
Sam lay back on his pillows and watched with sullen resentment as Fern and Quinn worked on Frank.
‘I’d like your assistance, if you don’t mind,’ Quinn told her. ‘Both my nurses are suffering from the effects of your oysters.’
She would have helped without being made to feel guilty, Fern thought grimly, as she assisted Quinn to move Frank from trolley to bed. While Quinn set up a drip to replace the fluids the old man had lost, Fern gave him a gentle bed bath and helped him change into hospital pyjamas.
It took time to make the frail old man comfortable and by the look on Sam’s face it seemed that he was almost jealous. Fern felt herself growing angrier and angrier, especially as Quinn Gallagher made it clear that he was enjoying the whole situation.
‘I’ll take these blood samples down to the lab,’ Quinn told her finally as he filled a small vial with Frank’s blood. ‘Are you right to finish here?’
‘I’m right,’ Fern said through gritted teeth. She managed a smile down at Frank. ‘As long as you’re happy having me treating you rather than Dr Gallagher?’
‘You can treat me any time you choose, Fern Rycroft,’ the old man smiled back. ‘Eh, you’re a right ministering angel and that’s the truth. One in a million.’ He cast a malicious look across at Sam. ‘And you and Doc Gallagher work a treat together. A real pair you make-unlike some…’
It didn’t help Fern’s anger-or Quinn Gallagher’s irritating sense of humour. Quinn choked on laughter and left, chortling, and Sam choked on fury.
Finally, Frank was settled. Fern checked the drip flow rate, bade Frank a concerned goodnight and Sam a rigid one and walked out to find Dr Gallagher waiting in the corridor.
‘What, a ten-second goodbye to your love?’ Quinn quizzed her as she closed the door behind her. ‘I’d expected a half-hour of passion, at the very least. Don’t you realise you can pull the curtains round the bed? Once Mr Reid’s asleep it could be almost a honeymoon suite in there.’
Quinn was leaning against the wall of the corridor, stethoscope swinging idly from those long, surgeon’s fingers. He was watching the diminutive, red-haired Fern with malicious amusement.
Surgeon’s fingers…Fern didn’t know he was a surgeon. Why had she thought that?
It was just the man’s supreme air of confidence, Fern thought angrily. Confidence? Arrogance. Either way it was something that she usually saw only in doctors who were supremely skilled in their work-and both they and their colleagues knew it.
‘Why did you admit Sam?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You know he doesn’t need to be in hospital.’
‘I thought you’d like to have him well looked after,’ Quinn said blandly and watched her face. He was waiting for a reaction and she knew it.
‘And if someone really ill needs the bed?’
‘Then I guess it’s up to Mr Hubert’s future wife to toss him out into the snow.’ Quinn grinned. ‘Meanwhile he’s argued himself in here with all the aplomb of the legal mind. He’s quite a lawyer, your intended. I get the feeling your Sam could convince a jury black’s white while gargling chilli sauce-or maybe even seventy fathoms under water
