wheel, trying to locate the wipers. The blinkers on the hire car flicked on and off on either side. She let out a huff of exasperation as she tried the other side.
‘Road!’ Gerry’s voice pulled her attention back to the road as an approaching car honked loudly at her. She yanked the wheel back in an instant, her heart in her mouth. The car had drifted a little into the middle of the road as she’d tried to find the wipers. She cursed out loud as she pulled it back to the correct side of the road—which felt like the wrong side. ‘Darn it. Stupid road,’ she muttered.
Gerry shook his head. ‘No multiple lanes here. Get with it, Kristie. Embrace the countryside.’
She pressed her lips together. She hadn’t seen a single coffee shop she recognised, or any big department stores. What did people do around here? Her grip tightened on the wheel as the rain changed from a few splats to torrential within a few seconds. Her hand flicked the lever up and then down to quicken the windscreen-wiper speed. It was almost as if a black cloud had just drifted over the top of them. She leaned forward and tried to peer upwards. ‘What is this? Five minutes ago the sun was shining.’
She knew she sounded cranky. But she was tired. She was jet-lagged. She wanted some decent coffee and some hotel room service. She didn’t even know what time zone she was in any more.
A sign flashed past. ‘What did that say?’ she snapped.
‘Go left,’ said Gerry smoothly.
She flicked the indicator and pulled into the busy parking lot in front of her. There was a white building to their right, set next to the sea.
The rain battered off the windscreen and the trees edging the parking lot seemed to be lolling to one side in the strong winds.
Gerry let out a low laugh at her horrified face. ‘Welcome to Scotland, Kristie.’
* * *
‘Tell me you’re joking.’ He stared across the room at his colleague Magda, who had her feet up on a nearby stool and was rubbing her very pregnant belly. She sighed. ‘I signed the contract ten months ago. Before, you know, I knew about this.’
‘You signed a contract for filming in our practice without discussing it with me?’
She shot him an apologetic look. ‘I did discuss it with you.’ She leaned forward to her laptop and scrolled. ‘There.’ She pointed to her screen. ‘Or maybe not quite discussed, but I sent you the email. I forwarded the details and the contracts. So much has happened since then.’ She let her voice slow for a second.
He knew what she meant. In the last year he’d gone from helping out at the practice as a locum to taking over from his dad when he’d died. This had been his father’s GP practice, and Rhuaridh had been left in the lurch when his father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in the space of a few weeks. Due to the difficulties in failing to recruit to such a rural post, he’d spent the last ten months, giving up his own practice in one of the cities in Scotland, packing up his father’s house and selling his own, and trying to learn the intricacies of his new role. It was no wonder this piece of crucial information hadn’t really stuck.
He ran his hand through his thick hair. ‘But what on earth does this mean?’
Magda held up her hands. ‘I’m sorry. I meant to talk to you last week when I sent them your details instead of mine—but I had that scare and just didn’t get a chance.’
Rhuaridh swallowed and took a look at Magda’s slightly swollen ankles. This was a much-wanted baby after seven years of infertility. Last week Magda had had a small fall and started bleeding. It had been panic stations all round, even from the team of completely competent staff in this practice and at the nearby cottage hospital. It seemed that practically the whole island was waiting for the safe delivery of this baby. There was no way he was going to put his colleague under any strain.
He sighed and sat down in the chair in front of her as he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Tell me again about this.’
The edges of her lips quirked upwards. They both knew he was conceding that she hadn’t really told him properly at all.
‘It’s a TV show. A Year in the Life of...’ She held out her hands. ‘This one, obviously, is a doctor. It’s an American company and they specifically wanted a doctor from Scotland who worked on one of the islands.’
He narrowed his gaze. ‘I didn’t know you wanted to be a reality TV star.’ He was curious, this didn’t seem like Magda at all.
She laughed and shook her head. ‘Reality TV? No way. What I wanted, and what we’ll get—’ she emphasised the words carefully ‘—is a brand-new X-ray machine for the cottage hospital, with enough funds for a service contract.’
‘What?’ He straightened in the chair.
She nodded. ‘It’s part of the deal.’
Rhuaridh frowned. How had he managed to miss this? The X-ray machine in their cottage hospital was old and overused. Even though the staff had applied to the local health board every year for an upgrade and new facilities, NHS funding was limited. While their machine still worked—even though it was temperamental—it was unlikely to be replaced. A new machine could mean better imaging, which would lead to fewer referrals to the mainland for potential surgeries. Fractures could be notoriously hard to see. As could some chest complaints. A better machine would mean more accurate diagnosis for patients and less work all round.
He looked at Magda again with newfound admiration. ‘This is the reason you applied in the first place, isn’t it?’
She grinned and patted her belly again. ‘Give a little, get a little. You know I hate reporting on dusky X-rays. We’ll have a brand-new digital system where we can enlarge things, and ping them on to a specialist colleague if we need to.’ She shrugged, ‘Just think of all those ferry journeys that won’t need to happen.’
He nodded. Being on an island always made things tougher. Their cottage hospital only had a few available beds, which were inevitably full of some of the older local residents with chronic conditions. They had a small A and E department and a fully equipped theatre for emergencies but it was rarely used. Occasionally a visiting surgeon would appear to carry out operations on a couple of patients at a time, but they weren’t equipped to carry out any kind of major surgery and any visiting consultant had to bring their whole team.
Whilst their facilities were probably adequate for their population of five thousand, every year the influx of holiday tourists during the summer months took their numbers to over twenty thousand. Slips, trips and falls made the X-ray machine invaluable. Rhuaridh had lost count of the number of times he’d had to send someone with a questionable X-ray over on the ferry to the mainland for further assessment.
‘Sometimes I think I love you, Magda,’ he said as he shook his head.
She wagged her finger. ‘Don’t tell David you said that, and just remember that while I tell you the rest.’ He smiled. He’d known Magda’s husband for the last ten years. He’d watched his friend battle to win the heart of the woman in front of him.
‘What’s the rest?’ he asked as he stood up and stretched his back.
Magda bit her bottom lip. ‘The filming happens for three days every month. You don’t have to do anything special. They just follow you about on your normal
