Читать книгу: «Wildfire Island Docs: The Man She Could Never Forget / The Nurse Who Stole His Heart / Saving Maddie's Baby / A Sheikh to Capture Her Heart / The Fling That Changed Everything / A Child to Open Their Hearts», страница 2

CHAPTER TWO

KEANU RUSSELL WALKED swiftly back down the track. He probably wasn’t needed but the hospital was so short-staffed someone had to be there. The situation at the hospital was worse than he’d imagined when, alerted by the elders on Atangi, the main island of the group, he’d come back.

He touched the tribal tattoo that encircled the muscle of his upper arm, the symbol of M’Langi—of his belonging.

‘Come home, we need you.’

That had been the extent of the elders’ message, and as the islanders—with help from Max Lockhart—had paid for his high school and university education, he’d known he owed it to them to come.

He’d tried to contact Max before he’d left Australia but had been unable to get on to him. Apparently, Max’s son, Christopher, had had a serious lung infection and Max had been with him in the ICU.

Trying the hospital here instead, Vailea, the hospital’s housekeeper, had answered the phone and told him the islands—and the hospital in particular—were in big trouble.

‘That Ian Lockhart, he’s no good to anyone,’ Vailea had told him. ‘Max has been paying for the hospital out of his own money, because the mine is run-down and any money it does make, that rotten Ian takes.’

There was a silence as Keanu digested this, then Vailea added, ‘We need you here, Keanu.’

‘Why didn’t you call me? Tell me this? Why leave it to the elders?’

There was another long pause before Vailea said, ‘You’ve been gone too long, Keanu. I did not know how to tell you. I thought with me asking, you might not come, but with the elders—’

She broke the connection but not before he’d heard the tears in her voice, and he sat, staring at the phone in his hand, guilt flooding his entire being.

M’Langi was his home, the islanders his people, and he had stayed away because of his anger, and his mother’s inner torment—caused by a Lockhart …

But if he was truly honest, he’d stayed away because he didn’t want to face the memories of his happy childhood, or his betrayal of his childhood friend.

But home he was, and so aghast at the situation that memories had had no time to plague him. Although sometimes when he walked through the small hospital late at night he remembered a little boy and even smaller girl holding hands on about the same spot, talking about the future when he would be a doctor and she would be a nurse and they would come back to the island and work in the hospital her father had, even then, been planning to build.

Okay, so the ghost of Caroline did bother him—had bothered him even as he’d married someone else—but there was enough work to do to block her out most of the time.

Or had been until she’d arrived in person. Not only arrived but apparently intended to work here.

Not that she wasn’t needed …

The nurse they had been expecting to come in on the next day’s flight had phoned to say her mother was ill and she didn’t know when she might make it. Then Maddie Haddon, one of their Fly-In-Fly-Out, or FIFO doctors, had phoned to say she wouldn’t be on the flight either—some mix-up with her antenatal appointments.

Sam Taylor, the only permanent doctor, was doing a clinic flight to the other islands, with Hettie, their head nurse—another permanent. They didn’t know of the latest developments but as Keanu himself had come as a FIFO and intended staying permanently whether he was paid or not, he could cover for Maddie.

And, presumably, Caroline could cover for the nurse.

Caroline.

Caro.

He had known how hurt she would have been when he’d cut her out of his life, but his anger had been stronger than his concern—his anger and his determination to do nothing more to hurt his already shattered mother.

Caroline discovered why Harold hadn’t met the plane. He was in the front garden of the house, arguing volubly with his wife, Bessie. It had been Caroline’s great-grandfather, autocratic old sod that he must have been, who’d insisted that all the employees working in the house and grounds take on English names.

‘You come inside and help me clean,’ Bessie was saying.

‘No, I have to do the yard. Ian will raise hell if the yard’s not done, not that I believe he’s coming back.’

Watching them, Caroline felt a stirring of alarm that they had grown old, although age didn’t seem to be affecting their legendary squabbles.

‘Nor do I but someone is coming. Some other visitor. We saw the plane on a day when planes don’t usually come, and anyway it was too small to be one of our planes.’

‘Might be for the research station. Plenty of people coming and going there,’ Harold offered, but Bessie was going to have the last word.

‘In that case you don’t need to do the yard.’

Caroline decided she couldn’t stand behind an allemande vine, wild with shiny green leaves and brilliant yellow trumpet flowers, eavesdropping any longer.

‘Bessie, Harold, it’s me, Caroline!’

She passed the bush and came into view, expecting to be welcomed like a prodigal son—or daughter in her case—but to her utter bewilderment both of them burst into tears.

Eventually they recovered enough from their shock to rush towards her, arms held out.

‘Oh, Caroline, you have come back. Now we have you and Keanu back where you belong, everything will be good again.’

Wrapped in a double, teary hug, Caroline couldn’t answer.

Not that she would have been able to. Although she knew he was here—knew only too well—hearing Keanu’s name knocked the breath out of her. But it had been the last part—about everything being good again—that had been the bigger shock.

But it also gave her resolve. If the trouble was so bad the islanders thought she, whom they’d always considered a helpless princess, could help, things must be bad.

She eased out of their arms and straightened up. Of course she had to help. She didn’t know how, but she certainly would do everything in her power to save the islanders’ livelihood and keep much-needed medical care available to them.

Enough of the doormat.

M’Langi was her home.

‘But why are you working in the house, Bessie? What happened to the young woman Dad appointed after Helen left?’

With Keanu, a voice whispered, but she had no time for whispering voices right now.

‘That was Kari but from the time that Ian got here we thought it would be better if she kept her distance,’ Bessie explained. ‘Ian is a bad, bad man for all he’s your family. In the end I said I’d do the housework. I mind Anahera’s little girl too, but she’s no trouble, she plays with all your toys and loves your dolls, dressing and undressing them.’

Caroline smiled, remembering her own delight in the dolls until Keanu had told her it was girl stuff and she had to learn to learn to make bows and arrows and to catch fish in her hands.

‘Anahera?’ she asked, as the name was vaguely familiar.

‘Vailea, her mother, worked as the cook at the research station while we were caretakers there. But there’s all kinds of funny stuff going on there too, so now she’s housekeeper at the hospital and Anahera—she’s a bit older than you and went to school on the mainland; her grandmother lived there—well, she’s a nurse here so I mind her little one.’

It was hard to absorb so much information at once, so Caroline allowed herself to be led up to the house, where a very small child with dark eyes, olive skin and a tangle of golden curls was lining up dolls in a row on the cane lounge that had sat on the veranda for as long as Caroline could remember.

The cane lounge, potted palms everywhere, a few cane chairs around a table, once again with a smaller pot in the middle of it, and the swing she and Keanu had rocked in so often—this was coming home …

‘This is Hana,’ Bessie said, leading the little girl forward. ‘Hana, this is Miss Caroline. She lives here.’

Caroline knelt by the beautiful child, straightening one of the dolls.

‘Just Caroline will do,’ she said, ‘or even Caro.’

Caro.

No one but Keanu had ever called her Caro, but now wasn’t the time to get sentimental over Keanu, for all he looked like a Greek god, and had sent shivers down her spine just being close to him.

She was here to …

What?

She’d come because she was unhappy, seeking sanctuary in the place she’d loved most, but now she was here?

Well, she was damned if she was going to let things deteriorate any further.

But first she had to find out exactly how things stood, and whether whoever ran the hospital would give her a job, and most importantly of all right now, she had to find the steel in her inner self to work with Keanu …

‘Are you being paid, Bessie?’ she asked, thinking she had to set her own house in order first.

Bessie studied her toes then shook her dark, curly hair.

‘Anahera pays me for looking after Hana, but it’s been a while since Harold got a wage.’

Caroline was angry. She knew their fondness for the Lockhart family and gratitude for what her father had done for the islands would have kept them doing what they could whether they were paid or not.

Knew also that the couple wouldn’t be starving. Like all the islanders, and many people she knew on acreage on the mainland, they had their own plot of land around their bure—the traditional island home—and Harold would grow vegetables and raise a few pigs and chickens, but that didn’t make not paying them right.

‘Well, now I’m here we’ll shut off most of the rooms and I’ll just use my bedroom, bathroom and the kitchen. I can pay you to keep them clean and I’ll vacuum through the rest of the place once a fortnight.’

Bessie began to mutter about dust, but Caroline waved away her complaint.

‘Lockharts have been eating dust since the mine began,’ she said, ‘so a little bit on the floor of the closed rooms doesn’t matter. And now,’ she announced, ‘I’m going down to the hospital to ask whoever runs it for a job. Even if they can’t pay me, they can surely find me something to do.’

She left her case and headed back down the way she’d come. Work would give her the opportunity to find out what was going on. Even small hospitals were hotbeds of gossip.

Although …

Of course she could work with Keanu. She didn’t know the man he’d become so she’d just treat him like any other colleague.

Male colleague.

Friendly, but keeping her distance …

Definitely keeping her distance, given how the accidental touches had affected her …

Lost in her muddled thoughts, she was halfway to the hospital when she remembered the only people there had been Keanu and an aide. What had he said? Hettie and Sam were on a clinic run? Caroline knew the hospital ran weekly clinics on the other inhabited islands of the group and today must have been one of those days.

That was probably the only reason Keanu had accepted her help with the injured man earlier.

She walked back up the hill, wondering why she’d thought returning to the island was such a good idea.

Wondering how things had gone so wrong, not only with the island but between herself and Keanu.

Had she judged him too harshly?

Refused to accept he might have had a good reason for stopping communication between them?

But surely they’d been close enough for him to have given her a reason—an explanation?

Hadn’t they?

Totally miserable by the time she reached the house, she went through to her old bedroom and unpacked the case that either Bessie or Harold had left there.

Then, as being back in her old room brought nostalgia with it, she slowly and carefully toured the house.

Built like so many colonial houses in those days, it had a wide veranda with overhanging eaves around all four sides of it. She started there, at the front, looking down at the hospital and beyond it the airstrip, and onto the flat ground by the beach, and although she couldn’t see the research station, she knew it was there, sheltered beneath huge tropical fig trees and tall coconut palms.

As she knew the village was down there, on the eastern shore, nestled up against the foothills of the plateau. The village had been built on land given by her father, after the villagers on another island had lost their homes and land in a tsunami.

Now some of the villagers worked in the mine and at the hospital, and worshipped in the little white church they’d built on a rocky promontory between the village and the mine. A chapel built to celebrate their survival.

She knew the beach was there as well, but that too was hidden, although as she turned the corner and looked across the village she saw the strip of sand and the wide lagoon enclosed by the encircling coral.

On a clear day, from here and the back veranda, she’d have been able to see most of the islands that made up the M’Langi group, but today there was a sea haze.

The western veranda formed the division between the main house and the smaller copy of it, an annexe where Helen and Keanu had lived.

No way was she going there now, although their home had been as open to her as hers had been to Keanu.

This time she entered the house through the back door, through the kitchen with its different pantries opening off it and the huge wooden table where she and Keanu had eaten breakfast and lunch.

The pantries had provided great places for hide and seek, although Grandma’s cook had forever been shooing them out, afraid they’d break the precious china and crystal stored in them.

Caroline opened the door of one—empty shelves where the crystal had once reflected rainbows in the light.

The sight sent her hurrying to the dining room, on the eastern side of the main hall. Looking up, she saw with relief that the chandelier still hung above the polished dining table.

Grandma had loved that table and the grandeur of the chandelier. She had insisted Caroline, Keanu and Helen join her there for dinner every evening, the magic crystals of the chandelier making patterns on the table’s highly polished surface.

Helen would report on anything that needed doing around the house, and talk to Grandma about meals and what needed to be ordered from the mainland to come over on the next flight.

Grandma would quiz Keanu and Caroline about their day at school—what they’d learned and had they done their homework before going out to play.

Ian might have sold her grandmother’s precious crystal to cover his gambling debts but at least he’d left the chandelier.

He must have been desperate indeed to have packed the delicate objects before sending them out on the boat that made a weekly visit to the harbour at Atangi.

Before or after he’d started skimming money from the mine?

Taking away the livelihood of the workers?

Shame that she could be related to the man brought heat to her cheeks, but what was done was done.

Unless?

Could she do something to help set things to rights?

Refusing to be waylaid, she continued with her exploration. Next to the dining room was the big entertaining room Grandma had always called the Drawing Room—words Caroline still saw in her mind with capital letters. Here, at least, things remained the same. The furniture, the beautiful old Persian carpets—Ian couldn’t have known they were valuable.