MIRACLE ON KAIMOTU ISLAND/ALWAYS THE HERO Read Online Free PDF

thinking exactly the same.
    ‘Excellent plan, Dr Koestrel,’ he said. He motioned to the door beside the one he’d just come out of. ‘That’s our second consulting suite. I’m sorry we don’t have time for a tour. You want to go in there and make yourself comfortable? There’s software on the computer that’ll show pharmacy lists. I’ll have Abby come in and show you around. She can do your patient histories, guide you through. Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘And you don’t need to explain about Henry. Henry’s here.’
    He turned to an elderly man in the corner, and she realised with a shock that it was her farm manager.
    Henry had been caretaker for her parents’ vineyard for ever. It had been Henry’s phone call—‘Sorry, miss, but my arthritis is getting bad and you need to think about replacing me’—that had fed the impulse to return, but when she’d come he hadn’t let her help. He’d simply wanted to be gone.
    ‘I’m right, miss,’ he’d said, clearing out the caretaker’s residence and ignoring her protests that she’d like him to stay. ‘I’ve got me own place. I’m done with Koestrels.’
    Her parents had a lot to answer for, she thought savagely, realising how shabby the caretaker’s residence had become, how badly the old man had been treated, and then she thought maybe she had a lot to answer for, too. At seventeen she’d been as sure of her place in the world as her parents—and just as oblivious of Henry’s.
    ‘This means I can see you next, Henry,’ Ben said gently. ‘We have Dr Ginny here now and suddenly life is a lot easier for all of us.’
    * * *
    She’d said that her help was for this afternoon only, but she had to stay.
    Ben had no doubt she’d come to the clinic under pressure, but the fact that she’d seen the workload he was facing and had reacted was a good sign. Wasn’t it?
    It had to be. He had a qualified doctor working in the room next door and there was no way he was letting her go.
    Even if it was Ginny Koestrel.
    Especially if it was Ginny Koestrel?
    See, there was a direction he didn’t want his thoughts to take. She was simply a medical degree on legs, he told himself. She was a way to keep the islanders safe. Except she was 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