Stormbound Surgeon

‘I’m intrigued,’ he admitted, and she grinned.

‘Good. I like my men intrigued.’

He was more intrigued by the minute, he thought faintly. She was a total enigma. And when she smiled… Whew!

‘Will you tell me?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘By the look of the weather I have forty days and forty nights to listen.’

‘I need to go back to work.’

‘I thought you were off duty.’

‘I have paperwork to do, and I don’t want to leave our new mother for too long. Mary’s there now but I don’t like to leave her on her own. I’ll stay for an hour but…’

‘Then we have an hour. Tell me.’

Amy made a cup of tea first. Hell, she really did have nothing, he thought as he watched her spoon tea leaves into a battered teapot and pour the tea into two chipped mugs. Nothing.

Poor little rich girl…

‘This house was my stepfather’s,’ she told him.

Joss took his mug of tea and sat, and Bertram flopped down beside him. It seemed almost ridiculous to sit in this vast room. Somewhere there should be a closet where this furniture should fit.

It wouldn’t need to be a very big closet.

‘Was?’

She sank into the opposite chair and by the look on her face he knew she was very glad to sit. Once more there was the impression of exhaustion. She looked like someone who had driven herself hard, for a very long time.

‘Was?’ he said again, and she nodded.

‘Yes.’

‘And now?’

‘It’s mine—on the condition that I live in it for ten years.’

He stared around in distaste. ‘He didn’t leave you any furniture?’

‘No.’

‘Then…’ He hesitated. ‘You haven’t thought of maybe selling the place and buying something smaller?’

‘Didn’t you listen? I said I had to live in it for ten years.’

He thought that over. ‘So you’re broke.’

‘Yes. Absolutely. It costs a fortune to keep this place.’

‘Maybe you could take in lodgers.’

‘Lodgers don’t come to live in Iluka.’ She hesitated and then sighed. She sat leaning forward, cradling her mug as if she was gaining warmth from its contents. As indeed she was. The house was damp and chill. It needed heating…

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Amy told him, seeing where he was looking. The central-heating panels almost mocked them. ‘Have you any idea of what it costs to heat this place?’

‘Why don’t lodgers come to live in Iluka?’

‘The same reason no one comes to live in Iluka. Except for retirees.’

‘You’ll have to explain.’

‘The town has nothing.’

‘Now, that’s something else I don’t understand,’ he complained. ‘My father’s married Daisy and seems delighted with the idea of coming to live here. There’s a solid residential population…’

‘On half-acre blocks which are zoned residential. We have a general store, a post office and nothing else. No one else has ever been allowed to build here.’

‘Why?’

‘My stepfather owned the whole bluff and he put caveats on everything.’

‘So?’

‘So there’s no land under half an acre available for sale. Ever. That means this strip along the beach has been bought by millionaires and it’s used at peak holiday times. The rest has been bought by retirees living their rural dream. But for many it’s turned into a nightmare.’

‘How so?’

‘There’s nothing here.’ She spread her hands. ‘People come here and see the dream—golf courses, bowling clubs, miles and miles of golden beaches—so they buy and they build. But then they discover they need other services. Medical services. Entertainment. Shops. And there’s nothing. There’s no school so there’s no young population. No land’s ever been allocated for commercial premises. There’s just nothing. So couples retire here for the dream and when one of them gets sick…’ She hesitated. ‘Well, until I built the nursing home it was a disaster. It meant they had to move on.’

‘That’s something else I don’t understand,’ he complained. ‘You built the nursing home? How did you do that when you can’t even afford a decent teacup?’

Amy rose and crossed to a kitchen drawer, found what she was looking for and handed it over.

He read in silence. ‘To my stepdaughter, Amy Freye, I leave my home, White-Breakers.

‘I also leave her the land on Shipwreck Bluff and sufficient funds to build a forty-bed nursing home…’

He read to the end, confusion mounting. Then he laid it aside and looked up to find her watching him.

‘Now do you see?’

‘I do—sort of.’

‘This place was desperate for a nursing home. There’s been huge numbers of couples for whom it’s been a tragedy in the past, couples where one has ended up in a nursing home in Bowra because they were too frail to cope at home but the other was stuck here until the end. And each time, as isolation and helplessness set in, my stepfather would offer to buy them out of their property for far less than they’d paid. He did it over and over. He found it a real little gold mine.’