helping hand.’
Anna drove home, mentally listing all the urgent jobs that had to be done. Too many jobs, not enough time.
She just hoped the locum was a good swimmer because he was going to be thrown right in the deep end with no buoyancy aid.
The sun blazed down on the car, the sea sparkled and Anna turned up the volume on the radio. Cornwall in the summer might be a crazy place to work but it was a beautiful place and she’d never want to live anywhere else. She smiled and the smile lasted for the time it took for her to pull up outside the surgery.
She was met by a film crew and her smile went out like a light.
For a moment she just sat in her little car and stared at the big van and the cameras and then finally she opened the door and ventured outside.
‘Are you Dr Riggs?’ A man with a microphone scurried over to her and she nodded.
‘Yes. Is there a problem? What’s going on here?’
‘Just hold it right there.’ The man held up a hand to halt her movement and gestured to the cameraman. ‘We want to get some footage of you greeting Dr McKenna. Wait just a moment …’
Footage? Of her greeting Dr McKenna?
To the best of her knowledge, she’d just waved Dr McKenna off at the airport and there was only one other Dr McKenna that she knew of, and he wasn’t …
She glanced at the film crew again and shook her head in denial.
Oh, no. No. No. David wouldn’t have done that to her. He couldn’t …
Ignoring the man’s plea for her to stay put while they prepared to shoot, she slammed her car door and stalked across the small car park towards the group of people gathered by the entrance, a suspicion growing inside her.
‘McKenna?’ She growled his name like a threat and the people moved to one side. But she had eyes only for one person.
Cool blue eyes swept over her and his mouth tilted slightly. ‘Riggs. What an unexpected pleasure.’
He was as handsome as the devil and his arrogance drove her nuts.
‘Unexpected?’ She slammed her hands on her hips and glared at him. ‘This is my surgery, McKenna, so how can my presence here be unexpected? What is unexpected is the fact that you’re standing outside it. You’d better have a damn good reason for causing a disturbance.’
He lifted a dark eyebrow in that lazy, careless way that always drove her mad. ‘Nice to see you haven’t changed. I have to confess that I thought you’d leg it once my father told you that I was coming,’ he drawled. ‘Never thought you’d show up to greet me. I’m flattered, Riggs. And touched. I obviously mean more to you than I thought.’
‘Greet you? I’m not greeting you, and you need to move yourself and that van …’ she stabbed a finger towards the offending vehicle, her dark hair swinging over her shoulders as she turned her head ‘… from my car park before I have it towed away. I have a surgery starting in an hour and at the moment there is no room for my patients.’
‘Our patients,’ he corrected her mildly, not moving an inch, ‘and you’re going to have to learn not to swear while the cameras are here. You’d be amazed how little it takes to get complaints from viewers. They like their doctors wholesome and clean-living. No sex or swearing.’
She opened her mouth to make a sharp observation about his reputation for the former and then stopped herself. It wasn’t worth it. She really didn’t care about his sex life. And anyway, something he’d said was jarring inside her head.
She stared at him, drew breath and finally mentally reran the last few sentences. ‘Hold on.’ She lifted a hand as if to ward him off. ‘What did you mean when you said that your dad should have told me you were coming? Tell me he didn’t know you were coming. Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.’
Surely David wouldn’t have done that to her.
He couldn’t …
Sam leaned impossibly broad shoulders against the wall and looked at her, a trace of amusement lighting his blue eyes. ‘He’s been nagging me for more than three months, Riggs. Finally he resorted to emotional blackmail. ‘‘I need this break, Sam, and if I can’t find a decent locum I can’t leave poor Anna.’’’
His imitation of his father was so good that if she hadn’t been so horrified, Anna would have laughed. Instead she gaped at him. ‘Locum? You’re the locum?’ Her voice cracked and all her important bodily functions like breathing and staying upright suddenly seemed threatened. It had to be a joke. ‘You have a sick sense of humour, McKenna.’
He shrugged. ‘Better a sick sense of humour than no sense of humour at all.’ He gave her a meaningful look. ‘Now, enough chatting. You can thank me later.’ He straightened and waved a hand to the cameraman who was still hovering. ‘In the meantime, we have work to do.’
She clenched her fists in her palms. He was implying that she had no sense of humour. He’d always accused her of being too uptight. Of not knowing how to relax. Of planning every detail of her life.
‘What I mean is, there is no way your dad would arrange for you to be the locum,’ she said, her teeth gritted as she spoke. ‘He knows we’d kill each other.’
‘That possibility does exist,’ Sam agreed, stifling a yawn and moving past her with a loose-limbed stride that betrayed absolutely no sense of urgency. ‘However, I reckon that if you stay in your space and I stay in mine, we should just about manage to coexist without significant injury.’
‘Wait a minute.’ She elbowed her way past the cameraman and planted herself in front of Sam again. Strands of dark hair trailed over her face and she brushed them back with an impatient hand. ‘If you’re really the locum, why are they here?’ She glared at the film crew as if they were a disease and he muttered something incomprehensible under his breath.
‘They’re here because I have a job to do,’ he said bluntly. ‘Normally I’d be in London, filming a new series. It seems I’m spending the summer in Cornwall so we’ve had to make some changes to the programme. We’ve had to adapt. You ought to try it some time.’
At that point, the woman who had been hovering at a tactful distance stepped forward. ‘It’s going to be brilliant, Dr Riggs.’ She reached out and shook Anna’s hand. ‘I’m Polly. I’m the producer of this series of Medical Matters. When Sam told us he was going to be working down here, we decided to do a whole series on summer health. It will be fantastic. We can look at taking care of yourself in the sun, first aid—everything families should know before they go on holiday.’
Warm and friendly, she listed her ideas with enthusiasm, and in normal circumstances Anna would have liked her immediately. But these weren’t normal circumstances. And she couldn’t like anyone who looked at Sam McKenna with such blatant adoration.
‘This is a busy practice,’ she said crisply. ‘We work flat out to cater to the needs of the locals and at this time of year our numbers double because of the tourist population. We don’t have time for film crews.’
‘But
