What was wrong with her?
She sat in her car and glowered at her own stupidity. It was a relief to be away from the castle. She needed time. She needed…
She didn’t know what she needed.
She slowed down and then pulled off the road to admire the scenery. The views here were fabulous. Dolphins were surfing in the waves just beneath the cliff-side road. That made her glower lessen. She watched in fascinated delight, but then the dolphins gave up on their surfing and disappeared off to wherever dolphins went. Life had to go on.
Mavis. She was going to see Mavis.
But when she reached the farm, Ben was proved right. Jake’s car was already there, and her glower sprang right back. Jake should be back at the hospital doing all his very important work that kept him away from the castle all the time, she thought savagely, and then she made a valiant attempt to regain some semblance of professionalism and thought maybe Mavis was in trouble.
And if Mavis was in trouble, then she, as consultant specialist, ought to be in there with her, instead of sitting out here glowering like a lovesick teenager. Her dumb emotions had no basis in logic. She had to stay in this place for a few weeks yet, so she may as well get on with acting normal right now.
Right. Normal.
She headed up the porch steps as Jake came out the front door, and she had to struggle really hard not to start glowering again.
‘Hi,’ she said, and he looked at her blankly, like he’d forgotten who she was.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I thought you asked me to stay in touch with Mavis.’
‘I did. But I thought you were back at the castle.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ she said crossly. ‘How’s our patient?’
‘Sitting up in bed with two grandchildren and a paint-a-Rembrandt-by-numbers kit,’ he told her, allowing himself to smile. ‘There’s paint everywhere and Barbara’s trying to act crabby. You want to see?’
‘I do,’ she said, and she even smiled back-but then she remembered who she was talking to and she stopped smiling. ‘But I won’t keep you. You’re obviously busy.’
‘Not so busy that I can’t enjoy your reaction to what you’ve done,’ he said, standing aside and letting her past. ‘You’ve done great, Dr McMahon.’
She flushed. She had to walk right by him and she flushed some more.
She needed to go back to the States, she thought desperately. She was losing her mind.
But she wasn’t losing her touch with her medicine. She walked into Mavis’s bedroom and stopped in astonishment.
The room was full of family. Mavis was propped up on pillows, with a grandchild on either side of her. The bed had been pulled out from the wall so the kids could have a chair apiece either side, and they’d added a few books to get the children-a boy and a girl of about five and seven-to the right height. A tray had been set up over Mavis’s knees to hold paints and brushes and canvas.
There was as much paint on the bedspread as there was on the canvas but no one seemed to be minding. Everyone looked up as Kirsty walked in, and everyone smiled. Barbara was by the window, and as she came forward Kirsty saw the faint glimmer of tears on her lashes.
But they weren’t tears of despair, she thought. The change in the sickroom since the week before was little short of miraculous. Pain was an absolute killer all by itself. It ruined lives before death. If it could be held at bay…
She’d succeeded. There was no need to ask. It was written all over Mavis’s face.
‘So you don’t need me to adjust anything?’ she said softly, doing a fast blink herself. Mavis’s smile broadened.
‘Oh, no, dear. I’m doing very nicely.’
It would change again, Kirsty thought. This disease was cruel and it was terminal. The bone metastases would be growing and the pain regime would have to be tweaked every day for as long as the old lady had left. But for now she was enjoying life, and Kirsty could keep tweaking the pain regimen.
Kirsty could keep tweaking until Susie delivered her baby and she left.
‘You’ll train me before you go,’ Jake said softly, and she knew he was thinking the same thing. And it slammed into her all over again-that Jake seemed somehow to share her thinking. The knowledge was extraordinarily intimate. More, it was just plain extraordinary. She saw him smile, and she wondered how it was that she could meet such a man when he wasn’t interested. When she lived half a world away. When she didn’t want involvement. When the whole thing was ridiculous.
And she wondered whether he knew she was thinking that, too.
‘Of course I’ll run through the latest pain management regimen for this sort of disease with you,’ she said, a trifle distractedly. She managed to smile at Mavis and turned determinedly away from Jake. ‘Can I interrupt the painting to do a quick check? Do you have any sore spots?’
‘My hip’s bothering me a little,’ Mavis admitted. ‘But it’s so much better than last week that I don’t like to complain.’
‘The squeaky wheel gets the oil,’ Kirsty told her, still trying her best to ignore Jake. If dumb platitudes filled the uneasy silence, then he’d get dumb platitudes, but platitudes weren’t going to stop her being acutely aware of him every minute. ‘Dr Cameron, why don’t you take these two aspiring artists for a walk?’ she said desperately. ‘Then their grandma and I can have a discussion about a sore hip.’
She could still help. Once Jake left she relaxed. Not only did she assist Mavis with her hip pain, she spent some time talking about the future, reassuring the old lady that the pain could be kept at bay for as long as it took.
‘We may have to change the cocktail over and over again,’ she told her. ‘But we can. Even when I go, I’ll leave instructions as to what to do in the future, and I’m always on the end of the phone. And Dr Cameron is good. He was about to phone for help from a city pain specialist when I arrived, and if I leave he’ll still do that.’
‘I wish you could stay,’ Mavis said wistfully, but Kirsty thought there might well be six months or so left to the old lady-maybe even more-and she could make no promises.
The sun was losing its warmth when she left. She checked her watch and realised she’d dawdled too long on the way there. They were expecting her back at the castle for dinner.
But when she went out to the veranda there was another patient lined up. Jake was sitting on the veranda steps with a farmer by the looks of him, a man in his sixties or early seventies. The man glanced up at her, grinned, a gap-toothed grin in a battered and not-so-clean face.
‘This’ll be the other doc,’ he said in satisfaction. ‘Two for the price of one. Barbara said Doc’d be coming tonight and I watched the road for his car. Now I have the pair of you.’
‘Herbert lives just over the rise,’ Jake said dryly, with a look that was almost apologetic. ‘Herbert, this is Dr McMahon. Herbert doesn’t like clinic because he doesn’t like waiting.’
‘The missus makes me have a bath before I go to clinic. A man could waste a whole day on a visit like that,’ Herbert said indignantly. ‘Me leg’s a bit of a mess and the missus said she’d drag me in tomorrow regardless. But now I’ve found you…’ He beamed. ‘If you could just fix me up.’
He hauled up his trouser leg and revealed a gory haematoma, with a long jagged gash in the centre. There were angry red weals leading up the leg toward the groin. It didn’t take a brains trust to realise this injury had taken place some days before and had been ignored.
‘So what happened?’ Jake asked. They had an audience. Barbara was standing watching, holding a child by each hand. These were farm kids, Kirsty thought in wry amusement. A kid from Manhattan might well faint, but all these children showed was fascinated interest.
‘Blasted heifer kicked out as I was putting her into a bail last Monday,’ Herbert said sourly. ‘It was her first time in. I should know better by now and keep myself out of the way, but I’m getting slower in my old age. Anyway, the missus saw it last night and had a pink fit and said the leg’d drop off if I didn’t see you. So I’m seeing you.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance you might come to the hospital,’ Jake said, but he sounded amused more than annoyed and he didn’t look surprised when Herbert shook his head.
‘The leg’ll have to turn black before that happens.’
