Marion Lennox: Second Chance With Her Island Doc

‘You can’t imagine how grateful that makes me feel,’ she muttered. ‘Is there no one else?’

‘Not right now. Our only other doctor is in the midst of a birth.’

‘You only have two doctors?’

‘This island’s small.’

‘I’ve read about it. Twenty thousand people. Two doctors?’

‘You tell me how to get the money to train them and I’ll do something about it. We have a couple of islanders we’ve trained as nurse-practitioners. They’re good, but for a head wound you need either Carla or me.’

She’d known the island was impoverished. Two doctors, though, for such a population... Now, though, wasn’t the time for thinking about it. ‘I’ll wait for Carla,’ she said, and she knew she sounded belligerent but she couldn’t help it. This man had hurt her in the past and hurt her badly. She didn’t want him anywhere near her.

‘I doubt if you can wait that long.’ He stood back a little, studying her. Like an interesting bug? Like he didn’t even know her. ‘So what were you doing climbing under the castle without a hard hat?’

‘A hard hat...’ she said cautiously, and thought about it. Or tried to think about it. The knock had made her feel ill, and Leo’s presence was now removing almost all the rest of her ability to think logically. ‘Maybe that would have been sensible,’ she conceded at last. ‘It wasn’t offered as an option, though, and I really wanted to see.’

‘So Victoir took you underground?’

‘He was my cousin’s agent. He knows the place.’

‘He also knows the rule about hard hats. He didn’t warn you?’

‘Of course he did. He said it’s dangerous. He said the entire underground needs to be closed off, and I guess now I agree. My inheritance states that capital must be used to improve or maintain the castle itself. That’s pretty limiting. Victoir’s idea is that I close off the underground area and divide the castle into apartments. He says with the view over the sea they’ll command exorbitant rent and provide an economic boost for the whole island.’

‘I imagine they will,’ Leo said dryly. ‘And an economic boost for Victoir as well. So he told you that going underground was dangerous.’

‘I told you.’ She sighed. ‘Leo, can we just get on with this? Fix my head, charge me what you like and let me go.’

‘You know I won’t keep you longer than I must,’ he said, formally now. ‘But losing consciousness... You know as well as I do that overnight obs are essential. Like it or not, you’re stuck here for the night.’

He turned back to the nurse, switching back into Tovahnan. ‘Maria, let’s get this X-rayed before we do a proper clean-up,’ he told her. ‘Can you take her through? I’ll get some pain relief in first, though.’ He turned back to Anna. ‘Pain... One to ten?’

She thought about it and decided to be honest. Her head was thumping.

‘Maybe...six?’

‘Ouch,’ he said, sympathetically. ‘You do need that X-ray. But a nice shot of something first. Any allergies?’

‘None.’ What he said made sense. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and was annoyed at how feeble she sounded.

And astonishingly he touched her hand, lightly. It was the kind of touch he might give any patient he wanted to reassure. It was entirely professional, so why it seemed to burn...

It didn’t. She was being dumb. This kind of thump on her head would make anyone dumb, she told herself. He was being purely professional. ‘Right, let’s get you sorted. Maria can take X-rays. I’ll come back with the results as soon as I can.’

‘Thank you,’ she managed. ‘There’s no hurry.’

‘There’s always a hurry,’ he said, and suddenly it was a snap. ‘That’s what my life is, thanks to your family.’

Your family... The words resonated, an echo of what he’d said all those years ago.

‘Your family robs my country blind, leeching every asset we ever had. How can I associate myself with anyone even remotely connected to the Castlavarans? I’m sorry, it’s over, Anna.’

‘So the judgement’s still there,’ she managed, and stupidly she was starting to feel her eyes well with unshed tears. It was the shock, she told herself. A decent thump on the head always messed with the tear ducts.

It wasn’t anything to do with this arrogant, judgemental guy she’d once loved with all her heart.

‘It’s not judgement, it’s knowledge,’ he told her. ‘Maria will take care of you. I’ll be back to sew things up. By the way, I will be charging.’

‘Charge what you like,’ she muttered. ‘And get me out of here as soon as possible. All I want to do is go home.’

* * *

He wanted her out of here as much as she wanted to be gone. Maybe more. The thought of a Castlavaran in his treatment room should be enough to make his skin crawl.

Only this was Anna, and what he felt for her...

She was two parts, he conceded. She was Anna Raymond, the redheaded, gorgeous, fun-loving fellow student he’d fallen in love with. But she was still Anna Castlavara, daughter of Katrina Castlavara, who was in turn the daughter of a family who’d held the wealth of this small country in its grasping hands for generations.

‘They’re nothing to do with me.’

He remembered Anna’s response when he’d first discovered the connection. His reaction had been guttural, instinctive, incredulous. For six months he’d been dating her. He’d been nineteen, a student madly in love, thinking life was as good as it could get. And then he’d met her mother.

Katrina had been in America when he’d first met Anna, with a guy Anna had said was one of a string of men.

‘We hardly see each other,’ she’d told him, but she’d told him little else.

It seemed she’d known little.

‘ As far as I know, she left Tovahna in her teens and she hasn’t been back. She said her mother died young and her father’s horrible, but that’s pretty much all she’ll tell me. I imagine Mum would have been a wild child, so maybe that had something to do with it. Sometimes, though...when I was little she’d sing to me, songs like the one you heard, and in between men, when she was bored, she taught me Tovahnan. It’s always seemed fun, our own secret language. I suspect she was a bit homesick, though she’d never admit it. She refuses to talk of her family—she says they’ve rejected her and she’s rejected them. She’s said there’s no way she’d ever go back—that most of the young people from Tovahna end up emigrating.’

They still did, Leo thought grimly. The extent of economic activity on the island was to grow olives and tomatoes, fish and pay exorbitant rents to the Castlavaran landlords.

There’d never been a king, a president, even an official ruler. The island was simply owned by the Castlavarans. For generation after generation they had ruled with a grasping hand and nothing had disturbed that rule. There was little on this rocky island to invite invasion. Its inhabitants were peaceful, ultra-conservative, accepting the status quo because that’s what their parents had, and their parents before them.

Right now, though, the status quo had changed. The last male heir, Yanni, had left no descendants. The inheritance had thus fallen to a woman the country didn’t know, a woman who’d been born abroad, a woman who—as far as Leo could tell—knew little about her ancestors’ homeland.

Was it time for the population to rise up and say, ‘Enough’? The land should be owned by the people who’d worked it for generations.

It wasn’t happening. Any kid with any ambition had one thought and that was to emigrate, and the remaining islanders accepted apathy as the norm. That meant that Anna’s inheritance was being met with stoic acceptance.