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The Rebel of Penhally Bay
Caroline Anderson
The Penhally rebel is back ; to claim his secret bride Everyone remembers heartbreaking bad-boy Sam Cavendish ; but none more so than shy practice nurse Gemma Johnson. She's spent ten long years trying desperately to forget their secret whirlwind wedding, but from the moment she sees Sam's familiar sparkling eyes she knows the passion between them is as intense as ever. . .Now a high-flying doctor, Sam has taken a job at the Penhally Bay Surgery. Gemma just can't understand why. Little does she know that this rebel has a cause: to win the heart of the only woman he's ever loved. . .
Dear Reader
When I was asked to kick off the latest round of Penhally stories I was delighted—not least because it meant working again with two of my favourite authors, Kate Hardy and Margaret McDonagh, and ‘meeting’ Anne Fraser, who is relatively new to Medical™ Romance. We all worked together really closely on this little collection, because not only were there the interlinking stories in these four books, but also the whole existing infrastructure of Penhally Bay and St Piran, which had over the last year or so become entirely real to those of us involved. It was a chance to revisit old friends, to bring in new ones and to spend more time (sadly only in my head!) in a place I’ve grown to love.
It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to work with people I’ve come to call friends, and a chance to write a really involving and emotionally challenging story. Both Sam and Gemma have suffered life-changing challenges. One drove them apart; the other has brought them back together. But can they really forgive and forget? This is the story of their journey, and I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it as I had writing it. I give it to you with my love and best wishes.
If you’re revisiting Penhally, welcome back, and if this is your first trip, I hope you’ll love being here as much as I do.
Caroline
Caroline Anderson has the mind of a butterfly. She’s been a nurse, a secretary, a teacher, run her own soft-furnishing business, and now she’s settled on writing. She says, ‘I was looking for that elusive something. I finally realised it was variety, and now I have it in abundance. Every book brings new horizons and new friends, and in between books I have learned to be a juggler. My teacher husband John and I have two beautiful and talented daughters, Sarah and Hannah, umpteen pets, and several acres of Suffolk that nature tries to reclaim every time we turn our backs!’ Caroline also writes for the Mills & Boon
Romance series.
Recent titles by the same author:
Medical™ Romance
THE VALTIERI MARRIAGE DEAL
A MUMMY FOR CHRISTMAS
THEIR MIRACLE BABY
CHRISTMAS EVE BABY
Mills & Boon® Romance
TWO LITTLE MIRACLES
THE SINGLE MUM AND THE TYCOON
HIS PREGNANT HOUSEKEEPER
Brides of Penhally Bay
THE REBEL OF PENHALLY BAY
BY
CAROLINE ANDERSON
MILLS & BOON
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
For Clare, who has walked this road, for Dan and the children,who’ve held her hand along the way, and for thecountless others who walk it with her. Safe journey.
BRIDES OF PENHALLY BAY
Bachelor doctors become husbands and fathers—
in a place where hearts are made whole.
Look out for these four booksset in the picturesque town of Penhally,nestled on the rugged Cornish coast.
This month we’re back in Penhallyas bad-boy doc Sam Cavendish tries to win backhis long-lost wife…The Rebel of Penhally Bay by Caroline Anderson
Next month midwife Annie meets gorgeousSpanish doctor Dr Raphael Castillo,and one magical night leads to one little miracle…Spanish Doctor, Pregnant Midwife by Anne Fraser
In December there’s a real treat in store as gorgeoushigh-flying heart surgeon James arrives in Penhally!Falling for the Playboy Millionaire by Kate Hardy
And in January there’s a new GP in town whenItalian doctor and single father Luca d’Azzarobrings his twin babies to PenhallyA Mother for the Italian’s Twins by Margaret McDonagh
Welcome back to Penhally Bay!
Mills & Boon
Medical™ Romance welcomes you back to the picturesque town of Penhally, nestled on the rugged Cornish coast! With sandy beaches and breathtaking landscapes Penhally is a warm, bustling community, cared for by the Penhally Bay Surgery team, led by the distinguished and commanding Dr Nick Tremayne.
We’re bringing you four new books set in
this idyllic coastal town, where fishing boats
bob up and down in the bay, friendly faces line
the cobbled streets and romance flutters on
the Cornish sea breeze! We’ve got gorgeous
Mediterranean heroes, top-notch city surgeons,
and the return of Penhally’s very own
bad-boy rebel! But that’s not all…
We step back into the life of enigmatic,
guarded hero Dr Nick Tremayne, and
nurse Kate Althorpe—the one woman who
has stolen Nick’s heart and the only woman
he won’t allow himself to love! Dr Nick’s
unquestionable professional skill and dedication
to the Penhally Bay Surgery hide his private
pain—his is a story that will pierce your heart.
So turn the page and meet them for yourself…
And if you’ve never visited Penhally before,step right in and enjoy Medical™ Romance’smost popular miniseries. There is aworld of romantic treats awaiting you.
PROLOGUE
HE WASN’T concentrating.
If he’d been concentrating, he might have seen it, but he wasn’t. He was miles away, in Cornwall, thanks to his mother and the letter he’d just been handed on his way out of the hospital.
It was all the usual blah.
Hope you’re well, Jamie’s done well in his exams, goodness knows how, he’s so idle, who does that remind you of? Oh, well, if he turns out as well as you he’ll be all right but why you want to bury yourself in Africa, goodness knows. I wish you were here, you could keep him in order…
Fat chance of that. They were like peas in a pod, and the only thing that would keep Jamie in order was Jamie, as Sam very well knew.
But then the letter changed.
I’ve seen Gemma again, by the way, and she asked after you. I can’t believe it’s ten years since you had that fling with her. You’ve hardly been back since, but maybe you’ll come now, with her here. Bit of an incentive for you—more interesting than your boring old mother. She’s a brilliant practice nurse, and still single, though I can’t imagine why when she’s so gorgeous, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around for her and she seemed very keen to hear all about you. You missed a chance there, Sam. Maybe you should come home and take up where you left off…
He hadn’t read the rest. He’d screwed it up, hurled it into the bin and stalked out into the sun. Damn. He’d meant to leave before dawn, but what with one thing and another, and now the bloody letter…
The bike was loaded, stocked up for the run to the makeshift little clinic thirty miles away, and he had enough to do without distractions. He really—really!—didn’t need to be thinking about Gemma, or that summer all those years ago. Ten, for God’s sake. A whole decade. Ten long, lonely years. And he hadn’t missed his chance, he’d had it snatched away from him—
‘Oh, dammit to hell.’
He kicked the starter viciously, dropped the bike forwards off the stand and straddled it while he fastened his helmet. Why the hell was she back in Penhally? And why, more to the point, was she working as a practice nurse? So much for her dedication to medicine—but that was just par for the course, really, wasn’t it? After all, she hadn’t stuck to him, either.
He twisted the throttle, listened to the feeble sound of the little engine and mourned his old bike. Gemma had loved his bike, and they’d gone everywhere on it. They’d been inseparable for a year, every time she’d come down from Bath with her parents to their holiday cottage, and they’d had so much fun.
Not that her parents had approved of him, but, then, they wouldn’t, would they? Not with his bad-boy reputation, and they’d had to do a fair amount of sneaking around to be together. But that second summer she’d come down alone after her final school exams, for the last summer before uni, and instead of it being the end, in a way it was to be the beginning—the beginning of the next phase of their lives. They’d got places at the same medical school in Bristol, and everything was panning out perfectly.
So he’d asked her to marry him and crazily, unbelievably, she’d said yes, so on a glorious day in early August they’d made their vows—vows he’d really meant, vows from the heart—and they’d honeymooned in the tumbledown little wooden shack on the beach that was his home for the summer, a retreat from the demands of home, a haven of tranquillity at first and then, with Gemma, a place of paradise—until her parents had come down from Bath and found them there.
They’d gone crazy, and Gemma had been in floods of tears, but she’d stood her ground, told them they were married and he’d shut the door in their faces and held her while she cried.
And then just days later, she’d left a note to say she’d changed her mind about them, and about going to uni. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to read medicine after all, and she was deferring for a year and taking time out to think about things, going travelling—Gemma, who’d already seen the world with her wealthy parents—and going alone. She didn’t want to see him again. And she was gone, she and her parents who’d obviously meant more to her than he had, their holiday home empty, closed up for the winter.
He’d never seen her again. Not a word, in all these years, all the time he’d been at med school in Bristol, keeping an eye on his family from a close distance and waiting and hoping for her to change her mind—he’d even been to see her parents, but they’d told him she didn’t want to see him, and he wasn’t going to beg.
So he’d given up on her and finished his degree, then moved to London, trained as a GP, then done a surgical rotation, and now here he was ten years down the line, working for an aid agency in Africa, and still she was following him in his head, in his heart, eating holes in him like some vile flesh-eating bug that wouldn’t leave him alone. Asking after him, of all things!
How dare she? How dare she ask after him?
And he’d dream about her again tonight, he thought bitterly as he let out the clutch and shot off down the dirt track on the start of his journey. Every time she was mentioned, every time he thought about her, which was pretty much daily, she haunted his sleep, the memory of her laughter, her smile, then those few days and nights they’d had together, so precious, so tender, so absolutely bone-deep right that he’d just known she was the only woman he’d ever love—the memories were enough to drive him mad.
As mad as his mother, if she thought he was ever going back to Penhally to expose himself to that again. No way. It would kill him. But just to see her again—to touch her—to hold her in his arms, to bury his nose in her hair and smell the warm summer fragrance that was Gemma…
So he wasn’t concentrating when he swerved off the road to avoid the broken-down car. He wasn’t thinking that it was strange for the car to be there, that it was possibly a booby trap. He wasn’t looking out for the rebels who’d left it there to trick him into going onto the verge.
He was thinking about his wife, about the soft sighs, the taste of her skin, the sobbing screams as she came apart in his arms.
And then he hit the landmine.
CHAPTER ONE
‘HERE’S trouble.’
Gemma looked up from the paperwork she was sorting and saw old Doris Trefusis jerk her head towards the door. And her heart hiccuped against her ribs, because there could be only one person she was talking about, and she wasn’t ready!
How silly. She’d thought she was prepared, but apparently not, if the pounding of her heart and the shaking of her legs was anything to go by.
Since his mother’s stroke yesterday evening, she’d been psyching herself up for Sam coming down from London, but nothing could have prepared her for the emotional impact of her first sight of him in years. Ten years, nine months, two weeks, three days and four and a half hours, to be exact.
Long, lonely years in which she’d ached for him, hungry for any scrap of news, any snippet that would tell her what he was up to. Then last year his distraught mother had told her he’d been hurt in a stupid bike accident and she’d misunderstood and thought for a fleeting second that he’d died. Not for long, but it had devastated her, the pain of loss slamming through her and bringing home to her just how much she still loved him.
But that was ridiculous, because she didn’t know him, not any more—if she ever really had. They’d been little more than kids, but he wasn’t a kid now. Lord, no.
Not that he’d really been one then, at nineteen, but he certainly wasn’t now, she thought, her heart lurching as he came into view. She was standing in the shadows at the back of Reception and she watched spellbound as he sauntered in, tall and broad, more solid than he had been in his late teens, but every bit as gorgeous. A slight limp was the only sign of his injuries, if anything only adding another layer of attraction, and that cocky smile flickering round his mouth was tearing her composure to shreds. But it wasn’t for her. He hadn’t seen her yet in her shadowy corner, and his smile was for Mrs Trefusis.
‘Morning, Doris!’ he said, and his deep, husky voice, so painfully familiar, made her heart turn over. ‘How are you? Looking as young and gorgeous as ever, I see!’
Their diminutive and elderly cleaner put the magazines she was tidying back in the rack and looked him up and down, her mouth pursed repressively even though her eyes were twinkling. ‘Good morning, Dr Cavendish.’
Gemma saw his mouth twitch and his eyebrows shoot up. ‘Dr Cavendish? Whatever happened to young Samuel? I get the feeling I’m still in trouble with you, Doris—or does it have to be Mrs Trefusis now?’
Doris tutted. ‘You can hardly expect a warm welcome, Samuel. You’ve been gone so long, and your poor mother—’
He snorted. ‘My poor mother has had my support continuously since my father walked out seventeen years ago, as you very well know.’
‘From a distance. You should have been here, Sam,’ she chided gently.
Did his smile lose its sparkle? Maybe, although it didn’t waver as he went on, ‘Well, I’m here now, so you can start by offering me a cup of tea. I’m as dry as a desert.’
Doris sniffed. ‘I’m not sure you deserve one.’
He grinned and gave her a slow, lazy wink. ‘You’re just saying that. You love me really,’ he said, and Gemma watched old Doris Trefusis melt under the megawatt charm.
‘Go away with you,’ she said, blushing and flapping her hand at him. ‘I’ll bring it in—Dr Tremayne’s half expecting you. I might even be able to find you one of Hazel’s fairings if those doctors have left you any. She made an extra batch specially when she knew you were coming home.’
‘What, to help lure me back in?’ he said drily, glancing at Hazel Furse, the practice manager, with a wry smile. Then, as if he’d only just become aware of her presence at the back of Reception, he turned and met Gemma’s eyes, his face suddenly expressionless.
‘Gemma.’
