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.
CHAPTER THREE
GINNY WORKED THROUGH until six. It was easy enough work, sifting through patient histories, checking that their requests for medication made sense, writing scripts, sending them out for Ben to countersign, but she was aware as she did it that this was the first step on a slippery slope into island life.
The islanders were fearful of an earthquake—sort of. Squid was preaching doom so they were taking precautions—buying candles, stocking the pantry, getting a decent supply of any medication they needed—but as Ginny worked she realised they weren’t overwhelmingly afraid.
Earth tremors had been part of this country’s history for ever. The islanders weren’t so worried that they’d put aside the fact that Guinevere Koestler was treating them. This was Ginny, whose parents had swanned around the island for years and whose parents had treated islanders merely as a source of labour.
She hadn’t been back since she’d been seventeen. Once she’d gone to medical school she’d found excuses not to accompany her parents on their summer vacations—to be honest, she’d found her parents’ attitude increasingly distasteful. And then there had been this thing with Ben—so the islands were seeing her now for the first time as a grown-up Koestler.
The island grapevine was notorious. Every islander would know by now that she’d been landed with a child, and every islander wanted to know more.
She fended off queries as best she could but even so, every consultation took three times longer than it should have and by the time she was done she was tired and worried about Button.
Button?
Where was she headed? She’d spent the last six months building herself a cocoon of isolation. One afternoon and it had been shattered.
She needed to rebuild, fast.
She took the last script out to the desk and Ben was waiting for her.
‘All done,’ she said. ‘Mrs Grayson’s cortisone ointment is the last.’ She handed over the script she’d just written. ‘This’ll keep that eczema at bay until Christmas.’
He grinned and greeted Olive Grayson with wry good humour, signed the script and watched the lady depart.
The waiting room was empty. The receptionist was gone. There was no one but Ben.
‘Button…’ she started, and headed towards the kitchenette, but Ben put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.
It shouldn’t feel like this, she thought, suddenly breathless. Ben touching her?
For heaven’s sake, she wasn’t seventeen any more. Once upon a time she’d thought she was in love with this man. It had been adolescent nonsense and there was no reason for her hormones to go into overdrive now.
‘I hope you don’t mind but I sent her home with our nurse, Abby,’ he said.
‘You…what?’
‘Abby’s a single mum and the tremors happening when she
