Her Hot Highland Doc

“No.”

Yes.

“Give the girl a chance. She’s only just out of school and she doesn’t need her uncle hovering over her every step of the way.”

“What? Do you think I might accidentally breathe too much in the reception area and frighten away even more patients?”

“Brodie McClellan.” Ailsa wagged a finger at him. “You’d best think twice about pushing so hard against the support system you have. Caitlyn’s here until she starts university in September—but after that... Only a few months for you to make your peace with everyone. Including...” she steeled her gaze at him “...Dr. O’Shea. She’s here to help, might I remind you?”

“Help for something that’s not actually a problem?”

“You know what I mean, Brodie. C’mon.” She gave his shoulder a consoling rub. “You can’t blame folk for being nervous. And besides, you’re only fresh back. It’ll give you time to settle back in. Mend a couple of fences while you’re at it.”

She gave him her oft-used Auntie Knows Best stare.

He could do as she suggested. Of course he could. Or he could go back home and pack his bag and head back on another Doctors Without Borders assignment until Kali was gone.

A hit of protectiveness for his father’s surgery took hold.

Unexpected.

Or was it curiosity about Kali?

Interesting.

He leaned against the wall and gave his aunt his best I’ll-give-it-a-try face.

“So, after all the miraculous recoveries of the bumper-to-bumper patients we normally have over the past couple of weeks, do you think they’ll come flooding back now that we have Kali here?”

“Most likely.”

His aunt had never been one to mince words.

“So what am I meant to do? Just twiddle my thumbs whilst Kali sees to folk?”

“I suspect she’ll need some help. You would be showing her the good side of yourself if you were to talk her through a patient’s history. Give her backup support if she needed it. Prove to her you’re the lovable thirty-two-year-old I’ve had the pleasure of knowing all my life instead of that fusty old curmudgeon you showed her this morning. I’ll tell you, Brodie—I didn’t much like seeing that side of you. It’s not very fetching.”

“Fine.” He pressed back from the wall with a foot. “Maybe it’d be best if I just leave well enough alone. Let you two run the show and I’ll—I don’t know—I’ll build that boat I always had a mind to craft.”

The words were out before he could stem them.

“You mean the one your father always wanted to build with you?” Ailsa nodded at the memory, completely unfazed by his burst of temper. “That’s one promise you could make good on. Or you could put all of that energy you’ve got winging around inside of you helping out the new doctor who’s come all the way up here to get you out of a right sorry old pickle. Then make good on the other promise you made to your father.”

They both knew what she meant.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“That’s not what I meant, nor your father and you know it, Broderick Andrew McClellan.”

Brodie had to hand it to her. Whipping out all three of his names—that was fighting talk for Ailsa.

She pursed her lips at him for added measure, clearly refusing to rise—or lower herself—to his level of self-pity. And frankly he was bored with it himself. He’d never been one for sulky self-indulgence. Or standing around idly doing nothing.

He had twiddling his thumbs down to a fine art now. Not to mention a wind farm’s worth of energy to burn. He gave the wall a good thump with the sole of his boot.

Ailsa turned away, tsking as she went back into her office to prepare for the day. Which would most likely be busy now that Kali was here.

“It’s not like I was away having the time of my life or anything!” he called after her.

She stuck her head out into the corridor again, but said nothing.

“People were dying in droves!”

“Yes, you were an incredibly compassionate, brave man to go and do what you did—and it’s a shame folk here haven’t quite caught up with that. But with you looking like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders it’s little wonder you’ve become so unapproachable.”

“Unapproachable! Me?” He all but bellowed it, just as Kali walked into the hallway—only to do an immediate about-face back into the reception area.

Ailsa gave him an I-told-you-so look. Brodie took a deep breath in to launch into a well-rehearsed list of the things wrong with Dunregan and her residents, and just as quickly felt the puff go out of him. It would take an hour to rattle off the list of things wrong with himself this morning, let alone address the big picture.

For starters he’d been rude to Kali. Unprofessional. Then had thrown a blinkin’ tantrum over a burn that had happened solely because he’d been slamming around a kettle of boiling water in a huff because he had to tell yet another person why he was toxic.

The word roiled round his gut.

He wasn’t toxic! He was fit as a fiddle set to play for an all-hours fiddle fest! But he knew more than most it ran deeper than that. How to shrug off the mantle of the tortured laddie who’d sailed out on a handmade skiff with his mum, only to be washed ashore two hours later when the weather had turned horribly, horribly fierce?

He knew it was a miracle he’d survived. But he would’ve swapped miracles any day of the week if only his mother could have been spared.

“You know, Ailsa...”

His aunt gave him a semi-hopeful look when she heard the change in his tone.

“A second pair of hands round this place would be helpful longer term, wouldn’t it? Female hands. You’re wonderful—obviously—but Dad always spoke of having a female GP around. Someone not from Dunregan to give the islanders a bit more choice when they need to talk about sensitive issues.”

As he spoke the idea set off a series of fireworks in his brain. New possibilities. With Kali on board as a full-time GP he wouldn’t have to kill himself with office hours, out-of-hours emergency calls, home visits and the mountain rescues that cropped up more often than not during the summer season.

Not that he minded the work. Hell, he’d work every hour of the day if he could. But working here was much more than ferrying patients in and out for their allotted ten minutes. And if he was going to make good on his deathbed promise to his father to work in the surgery for at least a year he wasn’t so sure doing it alone would get the intended results...

His grandfather and his father had prided themselves on being genuine, good-as-their-word family doctors. Their time and patience had gone beyond patching up wounds, scribbling out prescriptions and seeing to annual checkups. Here on Dunregan it was personal. Everything was. It was why his father’s premature death from cancer had knocked the wind out of the whole population. Everyone knew everyone else and everything about them.

Sharing the load with Kali might be the way he’d get through the year emotionally intact. Maybe even restore some of his tattered reputation. Everyone who’d ever met his father thought the world of him. John McClellan: treasured island GP.

The same could not be said of himself.

Ailsa eyed him warily. “You’re not just saying this to get out of the promise to your father, are you?”

“No.” He struggled to keep the emotion out of his voice. A bedside promise to a dying father... It didn’t get more Shakespearean than that.

“Well, my dear nephew, if you’re wanting Dr. O’Shea to stick around you best check she’s not already legged it out the front of the clinic. You need to show her the other side of Brodie McClellan. The one we all like.”