CHAPTER ONE

      MEGAN MARSHALL was smiling as the train pulled into the small country station.

      She was home and happy to be so, and as Mike from the ticket office came hurrying forward to help her lift her cases out on to the platform, it was as if the two weeks she’d just spent in Florida belonged to another life.

      A life in which she’d laughed a lot, played a lot, flirted a bit, and in which the two friends she’d gone with hadn’t guessed that underneath her carefree manner there had been worry.

      She was soon going to be facing a big responsibility and was concerned in case she wouldn’t be up to it. There were going to be changes in the medical practice in the beautiful Cheshire village where she lived, and she was going to be very much involved in them.

      They were connected with her parents, Margaret and James Marshall, both GPs, who had worked there side by side for as long as she could remember.

      But now retirement was on the cards and arrangements were having to be made regarding the practice and who would be taking over. It was a problem that was half-solved as Megan had followed in their footsteps by going into medicine.

      Since her degree she’d been hospital-based, but not now. That had changed. She’d been brought up around the village practice, played at doctors and nurses there when she had been small and, not wanting it to go out of the family, had taken GP training so that her presence might fill some of the gap that her parents were going to leave.

      She wasn’t going to be doing it on her own. Another GP was needed. An experienced doctor who would help her to offer the standard of care that had always been present there.

      Her parents were at the surgery now, making the final choice out of three applicants. When she’d got off the airport train in Manchester, Megan had phoned them to say that she would be catching the local train shortly and would one of them meet her at the station?

      ‘That could be difficult,’ her mother had said. ‘We’re in the middle of the final interviews. I’ll ask Henry to pick you up in his taxi, Megan. It’s lovely to know you’re back. Are you coming straight here? If you do, you’ll be able to meet the person you’re going to be spending a lot of time with in the future We’re pretty sure who it’s going to be. He stands out way above the others. You’ll be fortunate to have him working beside you in our small rural backwater.’

      ‘All right. I’ll come straight there,’ Megan said, thinking that although she couldn’t wait to get back to her little cottage on the hillside, she may as well get it over and done with.

      * * *

      ‘Been away to get your strength up before your parents leave, have you, Megan,’ Henry Tichfield, the local taxi driver, asked as he piled her luggage into the boot.

      She smiled. ‘Something like that, Henry. Heaven knows when I’ll get the chance for another holiday.’

      It was the lunch-hour, one of the quietest times in the surgery. The morning patients had been seen, the house calls done, and there would be a lull until the later surgery in the afternoon.

      Megan could hear voices coming from