‘She’s amazing,’ one of the firefighters told Hugo.

Miriam was one of the semi-trained volunteers. She’d been on the front line with Barry and she was suffering a nasty burn on her hand as well as shock from that morning’s trauma. Hugo had what he needed to treat her on the spot but, having cleaned and dressed her burn, he was sending the woman home. Now they stood together in the clearing, watching Rachel assessing her firefighters thirty feet away. Each catching their breath before they moved on.

‘She is amazing,’ Hugo agreed. They could hear her voice, raised in authority. ‘Bossy!’

‘You’d think she’d been trained to do it.’

‘Be bossy?’ Hugo smiled. ‘Maybe she has.’

‘I wish I’d been a bit bossy,’ Miriam said, and there was a load of bitterness and regret in her voice. ‘Barry knew what we were told to do. We were just mopping up after backburning. If anything gets away, call for help, we were told, but when it flared he started fighting like a madman. The rest of us were retreating and he took it as a personal challenge. Then it was all around him. If I’d been a bit bossier…’

‘Barry wouldn’t have taken it from you,’ Hugo said gently. Miriam was usually a clerk in the shire offices. She was so out of place here it was almost ridiculous. ‘He’d never take orders from someone without authority.’

‘He’d have taken orders from your Rachel,’ Miriam told him. ‘You just have to hear her. She seems…in charge.’

She did.

But what had Miriam said? ‘Your Rachel…’

His Rachel. The words were unnerving. Miriam had meant them to denote that he and Rachel were a team but, looking across and seeing Rachel, it seemed almost more than that. She was listening to an elderly man who was telling her exactly why he should be allowed to fight the fires. Sam Nieve. Hell. It was obvious to anyone the man couldn’t firefight. Hugo half rose to intervene but he didn’t need to. He couldn’t hear what she was telling him, but the man’s shoulders didn’t sag. Instead, his chest puffed out, he removed his helmet and he departed with an air of increased importance. His little car took off in the direction of the town and Hugo gave a sigh of relief.

Sam had a heart condition. He was the last person they’d want on the fire line but he was almost as stubborn as Barry. How had she convinced him?

If anyone could, Rachel could, he thought. The lady was amazing.

His Rachel?

No. The lady was married. The lady was…taken.


They worked solidly for three hours, but then it was time to return to the town. Hugo had patients in hospital and he had a clinic to run. He needed to return. The teams had changed over, the off-duty firefighters had gone back to the town to sleep and the on-duty members were lined up against the fire front.

The doctors would be needed again at change-over-or earlier if emergencies arose-but maybe because of the work they’d done, there’d be less chance of an emergency.

They could only hope.

‘You did really well,’ he told Rachel as they drove homeward, and she flushed.

‘If we’re forming an admiration society, can we make it mutual?’

‘Nope. What did you tell Sam to make him give up his plans to fight fires?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I used you.’

He raised his brows and grinned. ‘You used me?’

‘I told him you’d lost two patients in two days and there wasn’t room in the funeral parlour for a third. I also told him if you lost someone else you’d be in for a breakdown and it’d be on his head if the town lost its doctor.’

‘Gee, thanks very much,’ he said faintly, but she hadn’t finished yet.

‘I told him brute strength wasn’t all that was needed here. I told him that if the fire worsened, it was really important that everyone’s roof is clear and they have their hoses ready. There are lots of people who are just blind when it comes to this type of thing.’ She grinned, ignoring the fact that his brows had hit his hairline. ‘I suspect, in fact, that Mr Nieve’s own personal gutters around his roof are not as clean as they should be. I seemed to hit a nerve. Anyway, I suggested he contact the local school and borrow a few of the older kids and do a house-to-house check.’

Hugo whistled, seemingly totally astonished. ‘Well done, you.’

‘It’s true,’ she said gently.

‘What’s true?’

‘You really don’t want any more deaths.’

‘What do you think?’

She looked at him, considering. ‘I’m all for them,’ she said at last, teasing for a smile. ‘More deaths mean fewer patients and patients mess up your consulting rooms faster than anything I know.’

He laughed with her, but there wasn’t a true smile behind his eyes.

‘The two deaths…’ she probed gently, and waited. He needed to talk, she suspected. There wouldn’t be a lot of professional support in this one-doctor town.

And it seemed like it was professional support he was uncomfortable with.

She didn’t let him off the hook. She waited and finally he shrugged and started to speak.

‘Last night’s death was expected,’ he told her. ‘It was Annie’s time, but I was fond of her for all that.’ He gave a twisted smile. ‘Annie started making me chocolate cakes when Beth died and we’ve had a weekly chocolate cake ever since. And Barry…Barry was a pompous little prig who didn’t deserve what happened to him. He has a sweet little wife and a couple of obnoxious kids who’ll miss him for ever.’

Silence.

More silence.

‘It’s hard, this country practice,’ Rachel said at last. She was combing pieces of debris from her hair with her fingers. She’d taken her hard hat off before she’d got back in the car, which had been a mistake. The air was thick with falling ash, and most of it seemed to have ended up in her hair. ‘You get attached.’

‘Something you don’t do?’

‘It’s not all that easy getting attached when you work in emergency medicine,’ she agreed. ‘I keep track of some patients but not many.’

‘So when you finish up a shift, the day’s over.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘It’d be a great life,’ Hugo said softly, and Rachel didn’t miss the note of bitterness in his voice.

‘What, so you’d really like to swap?’

‘I’d just like to turn off sometimes,’ he told her. ‘This town… I came here for a few years to look after my ailing grandfather and I’ve never been able to leave.’

‘Because you can’t get anyone else to replace you?’

‘Partly.’

‘And partly what else?’ She’d twisted sideways to watch him. They were nearly back in town now-their time for intimacy was almost over and she regretted it. She liked this big, gentle man with the laughing eyes. She liked him a lot. It seemed such a shame that he was meant for…the likes of Christine?

She’d seen the way Christine had looked at Hugo. Hugo may have married one sister but by the look in Christine’s eyes and by the accounts of local gossip he was destined to marry the other.

But Hugo wasn’t talking about Christine. Or he was, but only in that she was part of the tapestry of Toby’s life. ‘Partly because my life is here,’ he told her. ‘Toby’s life. The people here love him. He has Myra and Christine and…so many people. He has the freedom of the place-there’s not a soul in Cowral Bay who doesn’t know who he is and watches out for him.’

‘And in return you watch out for them,’ she said softly. He was concentrating on turning into the hospital car park but it wasn’t the concentration that was causing the set look around his mouth. He cared. He’d certified the deaths of two of Cowral’s own in the past twenty-four hours and it had bitten deep.

Rachel saw deaths most days. She worked in a big city emergency department.

Two deaths wouldn’t affect her like this.

Maybe they should. Maybe she should be more involved.

She was involved enough. How could she be any more involved than she was right now?

She should be home…

‘It must be amazing,’ Hugo said, ‘to leave work at night and be free to go to the movies, go out to a restaurant-do anything you want.’

He had to be kidding. If he knew how much she hated eating out… And when had she last gone to a movie? Going to movies on her own sucked. ‘I have responsibilities,’ she said stiffly, and he nodded.

‘Of course you do. Penelope. Michael.’

‘Michael’s not-’

‘You’re right. Michael’s none of my business.’ He cut her off as he switched off the engine. ‘But I’m interested. What do you do with the rest of your life? How do city doctors without kids operate? It’s a world away from what I know.’

‘You did it once.’

‘It’s so long ago I’ve forgotten. I wouldn’t mind remembering.’

Remembering what? He was talking about the giddy social life Michael enjoyed, Rachel knew, and that was so far away from her own experience that it was ridiculous. She closed her eyes. What was the point in explaining? There wasn’t one. This man had enough on his shoulders without burdening him with her personal tragedy.

‘You wouldn’t be interested,’ she said flatly. ‘And you have work to do. Is there anything else I can do to help?’

He looked at her and once again she had the feeling he saw more than she wanted him to. But he couldn’t know. How could he possibly know about Craig?

He didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He was shaking his head, moving on.

‘You’ve done enough.’

‘You’re doing clinic?’

‘For a couple of hours.’

‘So Toby and I will see you at dinner.’

‘That’s right. So you can take your overalls off, Dr Harper, and turn into a guest again. Exercise your dog or something.’

‘Right.’

‘I’ll see you later.’

End of conversation. But he was still watching her. His eyes still held hers.

He should turn away, she thought. He should get out of the car.

He didn’t. They were somehow…locked?