bored to snores here, too.
‘I don’t think I can work here,’ she said cautiously. ‘Don’t I need registration and medical insurance and stuff?’
‘This is classified as a remote community. Really remote. That means the government is grateful for whoever it can get.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s still late afternoon yesterday in the States. If you give me a list of your qualifications and a contact number for the hospital you’ve been working in, I can get you accreditation to work right now. As in
‘You really want me,’ she said, awed, and he grinned.
‘I really want you.’ Then he hesitated. ‘As a doctor.’
‘Of course,’ she said demurely. ‘What else would you mean? But…to bring everyone here… What will Angus say to that?’
‘I’ll give it to Angus as a fait accompli,’ Jake told her. ‘You intend to work with me. He wants Susie to stay here, but Susie can’t stay unless Margie stays here with her. Margie can’t stay here unless the twins come, too, and Ben as well.
‘This place has been like a tomb,’ Jake went on, his smile disappearing as he tried to make her see how seriously he’d really thought this through. ‘Since Deirdre died, Angus has locked himself away and waited to die as well. But he has so much to live for, if only he can see it. If I can throw open the doors, bring in his old friend, Ben, Margie to care for him, the twins to fill the castle with giggles and play-dough-and Susie and a new little baby to give him family again… Don’t you think that might equal any anti-depressant, Dr McMahon? For Susie as well as Angus? What do you think?’
He was anxious, she thought incredulously. He was watching her and there was much more than a trace of anxiety behind the smile. He was waiting for her approval.
He didn’t have to wait, she thought, throwing any remaining caution to the wind.
She was going into country practice.
He had her approval in spades.
CHAPTER FOUR
AT TWO that afternoon Kirsty was sitting beside Jake on her way to her first house-call, feeling bulldozed.
Back at the castle were Susie, Angus, Ben and Margie Boyce, Alice, Penelope and Boris. Maybe they were feeling equally bulldozed, but they certainly seemed happy. Susie and Angus had gone reluctantly to have an afternoon nap. Margie Boyce was baking. Jake’s freckled and pigtailed four-year-olds were waiting to lick bowls, Boris was under the kitchen table, waiting for things to drop, and Ben was having a quiet dig in Angus’s parsnip patch.
‘How long did it take to work all that out?’ Kirsty demanded, and Jake gave a self-satisfied smile and turned his car onto a dirt track leading away from the town.
‘I work fast when I see rewards in front of me. Pretty good, huh?’
‘Pretty fantastic,’ she whispered. From the dark and gloomy castle of last night, there was now life and laughter and the chaos of a family. Even if it lasted only a day, this was worth it. Susie had been so bemused this morning she’d laughed at least half a dozen times, and that was six times more than she’d laughed since Rory had been killed. She thought the twins were great. They’d all sat at the kitchen table and eaten cold meat and salad for lunch, and Susie had hardly seemed to notice that she was eating.
The twins, two chirpy imps with their daddy’s gorgeous brown curls and eyes that were wide with innocence and mischief, hadn’t permitted a moment’s silence, and who could be desolate when they were around?
‘It’s excellent,’ Jake said, and she grinned her agreement. But…
‘There’s no need to get too smug. If we come home and Boris has dug up the pumpkin patch…’
‘Boris is a dog of intelligence,’ Jake said solidly. ‘Besides, it’s a pumpkin patch. Now, if it was lamb shanks or even strawberries, I’d worry.’
There was a long contented silence. It wasn’t just Susie and Angus who were benefiting from this, Kirsty thought. Her own mood had lightened about a thousand per cent.
And maybe some of that was to do with sitting beside Jake Cameron?
‘Tell me about the patient you’re taking me to see,’ she said hurriedly, in an attempt to distract herself from thoughts she had no right to think. But she was thinking anyway.
For a moment she didn’t think he’d answer. Maybe he was distracted too, she thought hopefully. Maybe he was thinking…
Cut it out!
‘Mavis Hipton is a sweetheart,’ he said softly, and she knew she’d been misjudging him. His face said all his attention was on his patient, and he was worried. ‘She’s eighty and has terminal cancer. Uterine cancer with bone metastases. Like Angus, she refuses to go into hospital. She’s better off than Angus, though, in that she has her daughter caring for her. Barbara is looking after her mother really well.’
‘So why do you need me to see her?’
‘She has breakthrough pain. I can’t keep it under control without making her so drowsy she can’t read to her grandchildren. I saw her when I left you last night. I upped her morphine, but I was hoping you might be able to give me a more imaginative solution to the problem. I can ring a physician in Sydney to get advice, but without seeing her he’s not much use. And…’ He hesitated.
‘And?’
‘And he seems to think sleeping into death is the way to go,’ Jake said bleakly. ‘I’m hoping you disagree. Mavis may have a few months left, and if I can give her some quality time with her family…well, I’m damned if I’ll deprive her of it unless I have to.’
Their destination was as far from Kirsty’s Manhattan hospice as she could imagine. It was a tiny weatherboard shack, ramshackle around the edges but with bright gingham curtains in the window, hens clucking around what was obviously a well-tended garden and a toddler making mud pies on the front step. The lady who greeted them was wearing jeans, an oversized shirt and big workman’s boots. She was wiping her hands on a dishcloth as she opened the door, and she tossed the cloth aside to seize Jake’s hands in welcome.
‘Jake. I didn’t think you’d make it back today.’
‘I told you I would, Barbara.’
‘Yeah, but you squeezed us in last night and we know how busy you are.’
‘How did she sleep?’
‘Like a baby,’ Barbara told him. ‘It was great that you did come. She was in so much pain.’
‘And today?’
Barbara’s eyes clouded. ‘It’s probably worse than it ought to be. She won’t take any more of the morphine. She’ll take it tonight, she says, but not now. It makes her drowsy and she says if she’s going to sleep all the time then she may as well die right now.’
Jake grimaced. ‘Maybe we can do better than that. Barbara, this is Dr McMahon. Kirsty’s a pain specialist from the US. I wondered if your mum would mind seeing her.’
‘Mum’s delighted to see anyone,’ Barbara said. She motioned to a bigger house along the track. ‘That’s where my hubby and I live,’ she told Kirsty. ‘But Mum gets lonely and her oven’s better than mine. I’ve got scones in the oven right now. You go in and see her and by the time you finish I’ll have the scones ready.’
‘Who needs payment when we have scones?’ Jake said lightly, bending down to admire the toddler’s mud pies.
Kirsty’s astonishment grew. Jake Cameron was a doctor with heart, she decided. Real heart. Most of the doctors she knew cared about their patients, but they’d not spare the time to stoop to admire a small child’s mud pie-or to give their patient’s daughter a swift hug, as Jake did as he passed Barbara to enter the house. Barbara sounded cheerful but her eyes were strained and bleak. Kirsty knew from experience that there was often little sleep for the primary caregiver. Not much sleep and too much heartache.
Mavis’s bedroom was lovely. It was simply furnished, with an old double bed on a plain wooden floor, a worn rug and a vast patchwork eiderdown that was the centrepiece of the room. But it was the window that made it.
