said that her help was for this afternoon only, but she had to stay.
Ben had no doubt she’d come to the clinic under pressure, but the fact that she’d seen the workload he was facing and had reacted was a good sign. Wasn’t it?
It had to be. He had a qualified doctor working in the room next door and there was no way he was letting her go.
Even if it was Ginny Koestrel.
Especially if it was Ginny Koestrel?
See, there was a direction he didn’t want his thoughts to take. She was simply a medical degree on legs, he told himself. She was a way to keep the islanders safe. Except she was Ginny.
He remembered the first time she’d come to the island. Her parents had bought the vineyard when he’d been eight and they’d arrived that first summer with a houseful of guests. They’d been there to have fun, and they hadn’t wanted to be bothered with their small daughter.
So they’d employed his mum and he’d been at the kitchen window when her parents had dropped her off. She’d been wearing a white pleated skirt and a pretty pink cardigan, her bright red hair had been arranged into two pretty pigtails tied with matching pink ribbon, and she’d stood on the front lawn—or what the McMahons loosely termed front lawn—looking lost.
She was the daughter of rich summer visitors. He and his siblings had been prepared to scorn her. Their mum had taken in a few odd kids to earn extra money.
Mostly they had been nice to them, but he could remember his sister, Jacinta, saying scornfully, ‘Well, we don’t have to be nice to her. She can’t be a millionaire and have friends like us, even if we offered.’
Jacinta had taken one look at the pleated skirt and pink cardigan and tilted her nose and taken off.
But Ben was the closest to her in age. ‘Be nice to Guinevere,’ his mother had told him. He’d shown her how to make popcorn—and then he’d shown her how to catch tadpoles. White pleated skirt and all.
Yeah, well, he’d got into trouble over that but it had been worth it. They’d caught tadpoles, they’d spent the summer watching them turn into frogs and by the time they’d released them the day before she’d returned to Sydney, they’d been inseparable.
One stupid hormonal summer at the end of it had interfered with the memory, but she was still Ginny at heart, he thought. She’d be able to teach Button to catch tadpoles.
Um…Henry. Henry was sitting beside him, waiting to talk about his indigestion.
‘She’s better’n her parents,’ Henry said dubiously, and they both knew who he was talking about.
‘She’d want to be. Her parents were horrors.’
‘She wanted me to stay at the homestead,’ he went on. ‘For life, like. She wanted to fix the manager’s house up. That was a nice gesture.’
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘I have me dad’s cottage out on the headland,’ Henry said. ‘It’ll do me. And when I’m there I can forget about boss and employee. I can forget about rich and poor. Like you did when she were a kid.’
Until reality had taken over, Ben thought. Until he’d suggested their lives could collide.
Henry was right. Keep the worlds separate. He’d learned that at the age of seventeen and he wasn’t going to forget it.
Think of her as rich.
Think of her as a woman who’d just been landed with a little girl called Button, a little girl who’d present all sorts of challenges and who she hadn’t had to take. Think of Ginny’s face when the lawyer had talked of dumping Button in an institution…
Think of Henry’s indigestion.
‘Have you been sticking only to the anti-inflammatories I’ve been prescribing?’ he asked suspiciously. Henry had had hassles before when he’d topped up his prescription meds with over-the-counter pills.
‘Course I have,’ Henry said virtuously
Ben looked at him and thought, You’re lying through your teeth. It was very tempting to pop another pill when you had pain, and he’d had trouble making Henry understand the difference between paracetamol—which was okay to take if you had a stomach ulcer—and ibuprofen—which wasn’t.
Ginny…
No. Henry’s stomach problems were right here, right now. That was what he had to think of.
He didn’t need—or want—to think about Ginny Koestrel as any more than a colleague. A colleague and nothing more.
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