The Stranger's Secret

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She bit her lip. ‘I can’t take too many—you know I can’t. They fuddle your brains, make you sleepy.’

‘Jess—’

‘I know what you’re going to say—that I should close the surgery until I can get a locum—but the agency can’t get me anyone for five weeks—’

‘Five weeks!’ he repeated in horror, and she groaned inwardly.

She’d meant to break the news to him gently, not spring it on him like this, but it was too late now.

‘It’s an awful lot longer than I expected, too,’ she said, ‘but I can’t—and won’t—ask my patients to travel to the mainland, so I have to keep on working—can’t you see that?’

He could, and the trouble was he could also see an obvious solution to her problem, but it was a solution he didn’t want to suggest. A year ago he’d vowed never to set foot in any medical establishment again unless he was a patient. Hell, that was why he’d come to Greensay, for anonymity, and yet…

Look at her, his mind urged. Hell, the girl’s in pain. It’s your fault, and if you can do even a little to help, you have to.

He cleared his throat, knowing he was undoubtedly going to regret what he was about to say, but seeing no other alternative.

‘Jess, I can’t offer to do your home visits and night calls—I wouldn’t feel comfortable, not knowing any of your patients’ medical histories—but would it help if I shared your surgeries until your locum arrives?’

She stared at him in amazement. Would it help? It was an offer to die for.

‘I—I don’t know what to say,’ she stammered.

‘How about “Yes, please, Ezra” and “Thank you?”’ he replied, forcing a smile to his lips.

‘Yes, for sure, but a mere thank you…’ She shook her head. ‘Ezra, I know this isn’t how you planned on spending your holiday. You probably came here to paint, or to write, or something.’ She paused, giving him the chance to explain, but he didn’t. ‘I guess what I’m trying to say is how very grateful I am, and…’ To her dismay tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away quickly. ‘I’ll be forever in your debt.’

Ezra groaned inwardly as he saw the tears. Jess was a spunky, stroppy, irritating lady, and the last thing he wanted was to see she could be vulnerable, too.

Vulnerable meant him noticing how soft and husky her voice became when she was deeply moved. Vulnerable meant him seeing the way her green eyes darkened, throwing the whiteness and translucency of her skin into sharp relief. And he didn’t want to see these things. Seeing them meant he was in danger of forgetting why he was here, and that the last thing he needed in his life was a relationship.

‘You ought to be in bed,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’re almost asleep on your feet.’

‘Does this mean you’ll be moving back to your own cottage?’

His heart lifted at the prospect, only to plummet down again as he thought it through. ‘I can’t. You’re obviously not fit enough yet to be left on your own. No, don’t try to argue with me, Jess,’ he continued as she opened her mouth to do just that. ‘If I say you’re not fit, you’re not fit. Just accept that you’re stuck with me for a little while longer.’

And he was stuck, too, he realised when she smiled up at him—a small, wobbly smile which touched him more than he could say. Stuck with a job he didn’t want, in the company of a girl who somehow seemed to be unaccountably growing more and more attractive by the hour.

He groaned inwardly again.

CHAPTER THREE (#udf1d52bf-d855-5c92-928d-533d4945a7f1)

‘I’M so glad it’s you, Dr Arden,’ Wattie Hope said, sitting down opposite her with an ingratiating smile. ‘This new chap you’ve got—nice enough bloke and everything, but you go in to see him with an ingrowing toenail and before you know it he’s got you stripped, sounded and your blood pressure taken.’

‘And how is the ingrowing toenail?’ Jess asked evenly as she opened his file.

‘Och, ’twas just an expression, Doctor,’ Wattie replied, his smile widening to reveal a row of tobacco-stained teeth. ‘It’s the old trouble—my back, you know.’

Jess did know, just as she also knew that Wattie’s back seemed to possess a marked tendency to get worse whenever work was mentioned, then miraculously improve the minute he heard someone was buying drinks in the local pub.

‘Have you found the pills Dr Dunbar prescribed helpful?’ she asked, scanning Ezra’s notes. ‘I see he’s started you on a course of indomethacin—’

‘They helped a wee bit, but…’ Wattie heaved a sigh. ‘Not as much as I’d hoped.’

Probably because you’re not taking them, you old fraud, Jess thought grimly. ‘It might be worth increasing the dose—’

‘Ronald at the garage told me you were speeding when you crashed into Dr Dunbar’s car.’ Wattie shook his head in wonder. ‘And there was me thinking you were one of the most careful drivers on the island, Doctor.’

PC Inglis had said the same, Jess remembered, when she’d reported her wrecked car. His sharply raised eyebrows had also told her he wasn’t one bit deceived by her story, but if that was the way she wanted to play it, so be it.

‘Wattie—’

‘Dr Dunbar was a doctor in London, so I understand,’ he continued. ‘Now, would he have been an ordinary GP there, or one of those big-shot Harley Street doctors?’

‘I think you’d better ask Dr Dunbar that yourself,’ Jess replied. With any luck he would, and with a little bit of extra luck she might be there when Ezra sent him away with a flea in his ear. ‘Now, about these pills—’

‘Wasn’t it a stroke of luck he turned out to be a doctor? I mean, if it had been anybody else…’ Wattie shook his head. ‘Where would we all have been?’

‘Yes—quite,’ Jess said tightly. ‘Now, as I was saying—’

‘And lucky, too, that your father’s old house has two bedrooms in it, now that Dr Dunbar’s staying with you. It does have two bedrooms, doesn’t it?’

Didn’t Wattie ever give up? Apparently not, judging by the way his small, dark eyes were surveying her speculatively, like a crow contemplating a worm. Well, she’d had quite enough, she decided, snapping his folder shut.

‘As you’ve only been taking the indomethacin for a week, I think we’ll give it a little longer to see if it will help,’ she declared, reaching for her crutches. ‘If you still don’t find any improvement in a fortnight, come back and we’ll try something else.’

That Wattie did not take kindly to this abrupt conclusion to his consultation was plain. He got to his feet, rammed his cloth cap back on his head and fixed her with a baleful glare.

‘Just as long as it’s you I see, Doctor. Some of us have got better things to do than be turned inside out by a man who would make the rocks on the seashore look talkative.’

Anger surged within her as she accompanied him back to the waiting room, but much as she longed to deny his criticisms she knew she couldn’t. Ezra did take a long time examining his patients, and it wasn’t because he was chatting to them.

‘Doesn’t say much, your new chap,’ her regulars had commented. ‘In fact, he can be a bit brusque at times but, my word, is he thorough.’

So thorough that the number of blood samples they’d been sending off to the mainland had doubled since he’d joined the practice a week ago. So thorough that Bev Grant had jokingly said she’d soon be a full-time radiographer instead of a part-time one.

If it had been anyone else Jess would have wondered if Ezra’s thoroughness masked a massive case of insecurity, but he was the least insecure man she’d ever met.

‘Wattie doesn’t look very happy,’ Cath observed as he strode out of the surgery, frustration on his face.

‘Wattie Hope is a pain in the butt,’ Jess replied. She glanced out at the waiting room. It was empty, apart from Miss Tweedie. ‘Has Robb MacGregor cancelled his twelve o’clock appointment with me?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ Cath replied, reaching to answer the phone. ‘Good morning. Inverlairg Health Centre. Oh, hello, Fraser.’ Quickly, she transferred the telephone receiver to her other ear and picked up a pencil. ‘I can give you an appointment with Dr Arden—Oh, you’d rather see Dr Dunbar? It would have to be Monday, then. OK, we’ll see you Monday at 9.30.’

‘Looks like you’ve got yourself a fan.’ Jess smiled, seeing Ezra come out of his consulting room.

He didn’t look particularly thrilled by the information. In fact, he looked downright puzzled.

‘Jess, what do you know about gout?’

‘Gout?’ she repeated in surprise as the surgery phone rang again. ‘Not a lot, except it was previously thought to be caused by too much rich food and alcohol, but we now know it occurs when the kidneys aren’t excreting enough uric acid.’ She ran her finger along the selection of medical books they kept in the office and pulled one out. ‘Who do you think has—?’

‘Sorry, Jess, but it’s Virginia—the Dawson’s Pharmaceuticals rep,’ Cath declared, cradling the telephone against her chest. ‘She wants to know if you’ve had a chance to look through her catalogue yet?’ Jess drew a finger across her throat expressively, and Cath smothered a chuckle as she put the phone back to her ear. ‘So sorry, Miss Brunton, but Dr Arden’s decided not to buy anything this time. Yes, I’ll be sure to tell her you called.’

‘That woman is driving me nuts,’ Jess groaned when Cath replaced the receiver. ‘One order—that’s all I’ve ever given her—and now she haunts me.’

‘Told you it was a mistake, didn’t I?’ the receptionist said. ‘Give these reps an inch, and they’ll take a mile.’

Tracy could have done with quite a few more inches, Jess thought, blinking slightly, as the girl joined them wearing a skirt that could have doubled for a pelmet.

‘We’ve plenty of the MMR vaccine, but we’re getting low on the diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus triple vaccine,’ she declared, beaming up at Ezra as she passed him.

‘Um, right. I’ll order some more,’ Jess replied, involuntarily glancing down at her own very sensible, calf-length skirt, before suddenly remembering Ezra’s patient. ‘Who do you think has—?’

She was too late. He had already disappeared back into his room.

Tracy sighed as she gazed after him. ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’

Cath nodded in agreement and Jess stared at the two women in bemused disbelief. Lovely? For sure, Ezra could be very kind. Indeed, his offer to help with her practice had been downright amazing, but lovely as in drop-dead gorgeous? She must need her eyes tested because she sure as heck couldn’t see it.

‘Sorry to be so late, Doctor,’ Robb MacGregor said, coming through the health centre door at a rush, ‘but I’ve been waiting on an order from the mainland and it’s finally arrived, and it’s wrong. Heaven knows how it can be. Twelve tons of bricks is twelve bloody tons of bricks in anybody’s language!’

And Miss Tweedie, for one, clearly didn’t appreciate his, judging from the way she pointedly slammed her magazine down in the waiting room.

‘Would you like to come through to my consulting room, Robb?’ Jess suggested, and the builder bit his lip as he followed her.

‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but if it’s not one damn thing at the moment, it’s another. Perhaps if I had more energy I’d be able to cope, but…’ He shook his head unhappily. ‘I’m so tired all the time, you see—that’s one of the reasons I’ve come to see you—and as for being short-tempered…!’

‘Are you having trouble sleeping?’ Jess asked, propping her crutches by the side of her desk and sitting down.

Robb thrust a large hand through his already tousled brown hair and smiled ruefully. ‘Doctor, if you were a self-employed man with a wife and two kids to support, and idiots on the mainland kept sending you the wrong goods, would you be sleeping?’

She chuckled. ‘I guess not. Could you slip your shirt off for me?’

He did, but after Jess had given him a thorough checkup she was no wiser.

‘You’ve lost weight since your last physical, haven’t you?’ she asked when Robb had put his shirt back on.

‘Still need to lose a bit more, I reckon,’ he replied, patting his stomach ruefully.

‘Any diarrhoea or stomach pains?’

He shook his head, and she leant back in her seat with a frown. He looked at the end of his tether. He also looked tired and pale and drawn, but his heart rate had been normal, his BP the same, and apart from his stomach being a little distended she could find nothing to suggest anything worrying.

‘I’ve taken a blood sample, and started him on a course of iron tablets in case he’s slightly anaemic,’ she told Ezra when he joined her in her consulting room for coffee at the end of morning surgery, ‘but I keep wondering if I’ve missed something.’

‘If he’d been suffering from stomach pain or diarrhoea I’d have said possible stomach ulcer,’ Ezra said, handing her one of the cups of coffee Cath had brought in. ‘But without that it certainly looks like anaemia to me.’

She wished she was more convinced, and then she remembered something else she still didn’t know the answer to. ‘Which of my patients did you think had gout?’

‘Brian Guthrie.’

‘Oh, the poor man,’ she exclaimed with concern. ‘Are you sure?’

‘He has all the classic symptoms. A swollen toe, which is very red and tender to the touch, and the veins on the rest of his foot were quite extensively enlarged, too.’

She shook her head. ‘Brian’s had a really rough time lately. His wife died two years ago, and he misses her a lot.’

‘So he told me. He also seemed a little bit disappointed to discover it wasn’t you who would be treating him.’

Actually, more than a little disappointed, Ezra remembered, whereas his jaw had dropped when Greensay’s reputedly wealthiest man had limped into his consulting room.

Brian Guthrie had to be fifty-five if he was a day, not to mention being red-cheeked, portly and balding. OK, so he knew that looks weren’t everything, but if this was Mairi Morrison’s idea of eligible manhood for Jess, he dreaded to think what Fraser Kennedy must look like.

Not that it was any of his business, of course, and neither did he care, but he’d have thought Jess deserved something better than a fifty-five-year-old with gout, or a wizened sailor.

‘Jess—’

‘The trouble is, people still tend to regard gout as a bit of a joke,’ she observed, sipping her coffee pensively, ‘and it’s anything but for the poor sufferer. In fact, I believe it can lead to serious bone and kidney damage if it’s not treated.’

‘So the book you gave me said.’ Ezra nodded. ‘Thanks for the loan of it, by the way. Gout wasn’t something I tended to come across when I—before I stopped practising medicine.’

Damn, but she wished he wouldn’t do that, she thought with frustration. Almost reveal what branch of medicine he’d been in, then suddenly clam up. It was so tantalising. And there was no point in asking him. She’d already tried it and had got nowhere.

Anyway, he was a good doctor, and that was all she really needed to know, but she couldn’t deny she was curious—OK, more than curious—about what he’d done before and why he didn’t practise any more.

‘I had another case of head lice in this morning,’ she said, determinedly dragging her mind away from Ezra’s past.

He smiled ruefully. ‘Snap. Looks like it’s going to go through the whole school. You’d better drop into the shop before you start on your home visits this afternoon and warn Nazir to stock up on antiseptic shampoo.’

She nodded and turned as Tracy popped her head round the staff room door.

‘Morning mail’s arrived, Doctors. Do you want it in here, or…?’

‘In here’s fine,’ Jess answered, only to immediately regret her decision the minute when Tracy came in.

Heavens, but her skirt was short. Short and tight, revealing a pair of long, perfectly shaped slender thighs which tapered down into even more slender ankles. The kind of ankles any woman would have envied. The kind of legs to die for, Jess thought wistfully as the girl left the staffroom. Her legs had never been great even before she’d broken one. In fact, if she’d worn a skirt like that it wouldn’t have been admiring glances she’d have drawn but laughter.