Her Hot Highland Doc. Annie O'Neil
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NO AMOUNT OF torrential rain unforgivingly lashing his face would equal the storm brewing inside of Brodie McClellan. Not today. Not tomorrow. A month of Sundays wouldn’t come close.
And yet he had to laugh...even though everything he was feeling was about as far off the spectrum of “funny ha-ha” as laughter could get. He’d seen death on a near daily basis for the months he’d been away, but this one...? This one had him soul-searching in the one place he’d longed to leave behind. Blindsided didn’t even come close to what he was feeling.
“Hey, Dad.”
He crouched low to the ground, unable to resist leveling out a small hillock of soft soil soaked through with the winter rains. The earth appeared months away from growing even a smattering of grass to cover his father’s grave. It was no surprise that his brother hadn’t come good on his promise to lay down some turf. It was difficult enough to drag him down from the mountains, let alone—
Enough. Callum had a good heart, and he had to be hurting, too.
Brodie dragged his fingers through the bare earth again. Time would change it. Eventually. It would become like his mother’s—the grave just to the left. The one he still couldn’t bear to look at. He moved his fingers behind him, feeling long-established grass. A shocking contrast to the bare earth in front of him.
Yes, time would change it. Just as it had all the graves, each one protected with a thick quilt of green. Time he didn’t have nor wanted to give to Dunregan. Not after all it had taken from him.
He scanned the parameters of the graveyard with a growing sense of familiarity. Brodie had spent more time here in the past fortnight than he had in a lifetime of growing up on the island. Asking, too late, for answers to all the questions he should have asked before he’d left Dunregan in his wake.
Gray. It was all he could see. Gray headstones. Gray skies. Gray stones making up the gray walls. A color washout.
He ran a hand across the top of his father’s headstone. “We’ll get this place fixed up for you, Father. All right? Put in some flowers or something.”
A memory pinged into his head of Callum and himself, digging up snowdrop bulbs when he’d been just a young boy. His father counting out a few pence for each cluster. He swiped his face to clear off the rain, surprised to discover he was smiling at the memory of his paltry pocket money. The small towers of copper pennies had seemed like riches at the time.
“I’ll get you some snowdrops, eh, Dad? Those’ll be nice. And some bluebells later on? For you and Mum. She always loved bluebell season.”
He shook his head when he realized he was waiting for an answer.
“It’s a bit of a nightmare at the clinic. I’ve had to call in a locum. It’ll buy me time until I figure out how to explain to folk that it’s okay. I’m okay.”
He looked up to the skies again, unsurprised to find his mood was still as turbulent as the weather. Wind was blowing every which where. Rain was coming in thick bursts. Cold. It was so ruddy cold up here on Dunregan.
He pressed his hands to his thighs, stood up and cursed softly. Mud. All over his trousers.
For the few minutes it took to drive home Brodie tried his best to plumb a good mood from somewhere in the depths of his heart. He wasn’t this guy. This growling, frowning man whose image he kept catching in the rearview mirror. He was a loving son. Older sibling to a free-spirited younger brother. Cousin, nephew, friend. And yet he felt like a newcomer. A stranger amidst a sea of familiarity. A man bearing more emotional weight on his shoulders than he’d ever carried before.
He pulled the car into the graveled drive in front of the family home, only to jam the brakes on.
“What the—?”
Wood. A huge stack of timber filling the entire driveway. He’d barely spoken to anyone since he’d returned to Dunregan, let alone ordered a pile of wood!
Brodie jumped out of his four-by-four and searched for a delivery note. He found it tucked under a stack of quarter-inch plywood. His eyes scanned the paper. The list of cuts and types of wood all began to slot into place, take on form...build one very particular item.
The boat.
The boat he and his father had always promised they would build.
The one he’d never been able to think about after that day when he’d come home from sailing without his mother.
Another sharp sting of emotion hit and stuck in his throat.
Today.
All he had to do was get through today. And then tomorrow he’d do it all over again, and then one more time until the pain began to ebb, like the tides surrounding the island he’d once called home.
* * *
Kali’s grip tightened on her handlebars.
The elements vs the cyclist.
Game on.
She lifted her head, only to receive a blast of wind straight in the face. Her eyes streamed. Her nose was threatening to run. Her hair...? That pixie cut she’d been considering might’ve been a good idea. So much for windswept and interesting. Windswept and bedraggled was more like it—but she couldn’t keep the grin off her face.
Starting over—again—was always going to be an uphill struggle, but she hadn’t thought this particular life reboot would be so physical!
Only one hundred more meters between Mother Nature’s finest blasts of Arctic wind and a hot cup of tea. Who would win? Fledgling GP? Or the frigid forces of Scotland’s northernmost islands?
Another briny onslaught of wind and sea spray sent Kali perilously close to the ditch. A ditch full of...ugh. One glimpse of the ice-skinned murk convinced her to swing a leg off her vintage-style bicycle and walk. A blast of icy water shot up from her feet along her legs, giving her whole body a wiggle of chills. She looked down at the puddle her ballerina flats–clad feet had landed in.
Splatterville. A shopping trip for boots and a proper jacket might be in order. So much for the romantic idea of tootling along Dunregan’s coast road and showing up to her first day of work with rosy-cheeked panache. There were tulips blooming all over the place in London! How long was it going to take the Isle of Dunregan to catch up?
“Dr. O’Shea?”
A cheery fifty-something woman rode up alongside her, kitted out in a thick waterproof jacket, boots, woolen mittens, hat...everything Kali should’ve been wearing but wasn’t. Her green eyes crackled with mischief...or was that just the weather?
“Yes.” Kali smiled, then grimaced as the wind took a hold of her facial features. She must look like some sort of rubber-lipped cartoon character by now!
“Ailsa Dunregan.” She hopped off her bike and walked alongside Kali, and laughed when Kali’s eyes widened. “Yes. I know, it’s mad, isn’t it? Same name as the island. Suffice it to say, my family—or at least my husband’s family—has been here a long time. My family’s only been here a few hundred years.”
Hundred?
“How’d you know it was me?”
Ailsa threw back her head and laughed. The sound was instantly yanked away by the wind. “Only someone not from Dunregan would—”
Kali struggled to make out what she was saying, her own thoughts fighting with the wind and making nothing comprehensible.
“Sorry?” Kali tried to push her bike a bit closer and keep up the brisk pace the woman was setting.
“I’m the practice nurse!” Ailsa shouted against the elements. “I get all the gossip, same as the publican, and not too many people come to the island this time of year.”
Kali nodded, only