Loe raamatut: «The Doctor's Marriage For A Month»

CHAPTER ONE

“NO TAKERS FOR the Nocturnal Turtle Tour?” asked Isla MacLeay as she scrubbed at her face, hoping her father couldn’t see that it was, as it had been for the past three days, stained with tears.

“Not tonight. I thought we had some takers, but...” Her father looked out at the huge expanse of beach before them. “I guess getting the sanctuary established is going to be a bit more of a task than I thought. Here you are, lassie.”

She felt one of her father’s soft cotton handkerchiefs brush against her hand. She took it with a smile she knew didn’t reach her eyes as her heart cinched tight. It was the second time this week he’d acted like a “real dad.”

If getting dumped a week before her wedding was all it took to get his attention, she would’ve faked a wedding years ago.

Before her father had found her she’d been sitting against a palm tree, next to the little tote bag that held her diary and her increasingly eclectic pen collection, almost enjoying quietly sniffling away as silvery moonlight bathed the idyllic crescent of beach, where palm leaves murmured in the light breeze as the warm Caribbean sea lapped and teased at the pure white sand.

She’d come a long way from her little Scottish home in Loch Craggen, but tonight the beach had been as far as she’d been prepared to go.

She had kissed her father goodnight when he’d pulled out yet another one of his huge folders full of plans for the El Valderon Turtle Sanctuary and, not being sleepy, had strolled to the beach for a bit of a sob, leaving the low-slung buildings of the sanctuary behind her, and losing herself to the beautiful cove which they surrounded.

The billowing foam arcing atop the waves surging in from the Caribbean Sea reminded her of a delicate glass of fizz, just about to overflow. Not that she was used to champagne being popped and poured at the drop of a hat. Her fiancé—her ex-fiancé—hadn’t really been one to plump for that sort of thing. Not for her, anyway.

Remembering his words had fresh tears rolling down her freckled cheeks. Just in case she hadn’t understood what “I’ve fallen in love with someone else” meant...he’d gone on to make it plain as day.

“How could I marry you? It wouldn’t be fair. To either of us. Sorry, babes. Now that I’ve dipped my toe into the waters of life off Craggen it’s plain as day. I’m a world traveler. And, as much as it pains me to say it, you’re a boring, rule-abiding, science nerd. It’s just not my scene, darlin’. Ciao!”

Ciao?

The man had only flown to Italy once. He’d not even left the airport and now he was fluent?

Pffft. That showed her for falling for pretty words and a handsome face. She saw it now. Plain as the hand in front of her face. Kyle had only wanted someone reliable until something better came along. The next man she met and fell for would be a nerd through and through.

“There’s nothing wrong with being reliable as a millstone.”

When her grandmother had said it, it had sounded like a good thing.

When Kyle had said it she’d instantly heard the bell toll for the end of their marriage plans.

She couldn’t help but wonder how others might have reacted—what people who were perky flight attendants in Europe might have been inclined to say.

Not that she’d met Kyle’s new girlfriend. Girlfriend! But the rumor mill ran stronger than the mountain rivers that flowed into the inky depths of Loch Craggen. Apparently the new girlfriend was absolutely adorable and soooo sophisticated.

What was wrong with corduroy skirts, woolly tights and hand-knitted jumpers? It was cold in Loch Craggen. Even in August.

Which was precisely why she had packed just about nothing appropriate for her last-minute trip El Valderon. Was there anything appropriate, apart from mourning clothes? She wasn’t mourning Kyle, exactly. But she did feel she was mourning the loss of something intangible. Either way, she needed new clothes and had promised to take herself shopping. One of these days.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

Startled into the present, she stared with her father out into the inky darkness as the moon slid behind a cloud.

“What was that?”

Despite the late-night tropical heat, goose bumps rippled up Isla’s arms, then shot down her back.

It wasn’t a sudden chill she felt.

It was fear.

She pressed her fingers to her eyes, gave them a quick rub, then pinged them open, forcing herself to adjust to the inky darkness.

“Dad?” She couldn’t see him. He’d been right beside her a second ago!

Fear clashed with an age-old anger. Had he run off toward the danger, instead of staying with her when she truly needed him?

She squinted out into the darkness.

The gunfire sounded again.

“Dad? Daddy! Are you all right?”

Where was he?

Her heart pounded against her chest. Isla hadn’t called her father “daddy” in years. Decades, even. At thirty-one years old she was a grown woman. A doctor. But fear had a way of reducing a girl to her essential self. A little girl who’d come halfway round the world to seek solace from her father when her heart had been smashed into a thousand little pieces.

None of that mattered now.

An anguished male scream broke through the roar of blood in her head as rapid-fire Spanish was lobbed from one end of the cove to the other.

She didn’t have to be a doctor to know the sound of pain, but she was thanking heaven that she was. It narrowed her focus. Pushed away the fear. Gave her something to do: help.

She spun round and saw a young man clutching his shoulder. Her heart lurched into her throat. She saw blood pouring between his fingers. Oh no. He’d been hit.

Everything slowed down, as if she were in a frame-by-frame film sequence.

The atmosphere at the oceanside cove had flipped from tranquil to chaotic in little more than the blink of an eye. One minute she’d been quietly sobbing her heart out about her wreck of a life and the next... Gunfire and shouting erupted from each of the two heavily armed groups facing off against each other.

So these were the men her father had said “might bear a bit of a grudge” against the sanctuary.

The man stumbling toward her must have been caught in the crossfire between The El Valderon Turtle Sanctuary’s security guards and the tattooed, slick-haired members of Noche Blanca—the ragtag but reportedly vicious, mafia-type group led by the island’s one notorious criminal: Axl Cruz.

He had been enraged when the owners of a large coffee plantation had donated the land to the sanctuary. Her father had hinted that there had been a rise in tension over precious turtle eggs. Precious to Axl Cruz because they meant money on the black market. Precious to her father because the sea creatures were endangered.

Instinct set her in motion.

Flashes of gunfire lit up the inky black sky. An illustration, if she needed one, of why the so-called gang called themselves White Night.

Her nostrils stung with the sour scent of spent gunpowder.

A volley of Spanish came at her from all directions as yet another round of gunfire broke through the night. When the moon reappeared she saw her father.

“Daddy!”

Why were they dragging him away?

“I’m all right, love.” Her father’s scratchy brogue carried across the cove. “Just stay calm. You’ll be fine. They only want the eggs. They won’t hurt you if you do what they say. All right, laddies. ¡Suéltame!”

She strained to hear her father’s calm, ever-scientific voice rising and falling, explaining something in Spanish as calmly as if the gun-wielding pandilleros had come along for one of her father’s nocturnal sea turtle tours.

Ever since her mum had died the man had lived on another planet. How else could one unbelievably intelligent human think he could talk down a criminal gang intent on illegal turtle egg sales?

It was why her grandmother had raised her to be the sensible one. The reliable one.

The boring one.

She pushed aside her ex’s cruel words and tried to follow her father’s directions. As bonkers as he was, there wasn’t a chance on earth she was going to lose him too. Not after the week she’d had. So she did what she was good at: following protocol.

There was a gunshot victim and he needed help. Now.

She astonished herself by offering a polite smile to one of the burlier men closing in on her. His pitch-black hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. If he loosened his hair and put on a smile she could imagine him as a father or son.

He grunted and looked away.

Apparently smiles weren’t going to help tonight.

Her father had told her that in a good year on the black market a family could live for a year on the proceeds of a single night’s haul of the precious eggs. Little wonder some of the men had turned to crime when the land had become protected.

Not protected well enough.

Her father’s project was meant to put an end to the need for violence. Create a viable means of making a living on the island. Bring an end to the destruction of the endangered animals. An end to the violence. A way to legitimately support a family. But it would take time. Time these men didn’t seem willing to give.

A tall, lanky man stepped forward and grabbed her arm as yet another unhooked a skein of rope from his shoulder.

Her vision blurred as reality dawned.

She was going to be held hostage.

She turned and caught a final glimpse of her father being manhandled toward the smattering of seaside bungalows where the sanctuary staff lived. Before he disappeared she heard him shouting something about calling for help.

An ice-cold flash of fear prickled along her spine.

Help? Which one of them was in any position to call for help? She’d only been on the island a few days, and those had largely been spent sobbing her eyes out over her broken engagement. The little girl in her wanted to scream with frustration. He was the one who was tapped into the local support network. He was the grown-up!

The male who’d been shot uttered a low groan as he dropped to his knees in pain.

And just like that she remembered she was an adult too. One with the power to help.

It felt as if hours had passed since she’d heard the first gunshots, but Isla knew better than most that only a few precious seconds had passed. Life-changing seconds.

The pony-tailed man shouldered an automatic weapon. She followed the trajectory of his gun as it swung to the far side of the cove.

He raised it to the starlit sky and fired. The sharp rat-a-tat-tats sounded more like a signal than an attempt to get the turtle sanctuary’s ragtag protection detail to run for the hills.

Her heart ached for the sanctuary security team. They were gentle men—cooks, farmers, bricklayers, fathers—whose sole desire was to see an end to the violence that threatened to taint their lives so cruelly.

Ire burnt and stung in her chest, then reformed as a white-hot rod of indignation. They shouldn’t have to live like this. Fearing for their lives while trying to do the right thing by their families and their community.

“Everybody stop!”

Much to her astonishment, they did.

The moment’s reprieve in the shooting and shouting gave her a chance to listen for anyone approaching or more instructions from her father.

Nope.

Not a living soul.

Just a chance to realize that her heart had stopped hammering against her rib cage as if it too were trying to escape.

Two weeks ago she would’ve been hiding under something right now. Most likely the big bed in her little stone cottage on Craggen. Not standing between two gun-toting groups of men with her arms out like some sort of bonkers traffic controller.

Was being dumped more character-building than soul-destroying? Or was the truth a bit more simple.

After the week she’d had Isla really didn’t have time for this sort of ridiculous machismo.

She pushed her own issues to the wayside. Her father was here to help the community—not hinder. Nor had she faced up to a lifelong fear of flying only to get killed when she got here.

She was here to lick her emotional wounds, sulk a little. Wallow. Something she never did. And she was not best pleased to have to patch together gun-wielding turtle egg poachers just because they didn’t see the sense in her father’s big plan.

The same father, she reminded herself, who probably should’ve mentioned the fact that El Valderon was more akin to the Wild West of yesteryear than a restorative Caribbean spa.

Maybe he simply didn’t want to see the dark side.

Her heart softened. For once, her father had been trying to do right by her. To give her a place to hide away from the prying eyes of Loch Craggen. Regroup after being deemed “the most boring girlfriend on earth.”

Well, Kyle would’ve been boring too, if his mother had been killed and his father had lost the plot. Someone needed to be practical. Someone needed to look after Grannie. Someone had to be there.

Ponytail Man retrained his gun on her. She stared him straight in the eye. Here was her chance to show Kyle Strout just what boring looked like.

She looked down at the pure white sand currently soaking up the splatterings of very real blood, courtesy of the egg poachers and guards shooting at each other.

A swift shot of resolve crackled through her like a flash of unexpected lightning.

She wasn’t boring.

Nor was she going to engage in all this mopey, weepy, victim of an ill-fated romance palaver.

She was going to save this man’s life, then find her father and help him make his dream of saving the sea turtle come true.

She squared off to Ponytail Man and fixed him with her fiercest look of determination. The type she would’ve given Annie Taggart’s highly energized toddlers when she needed to take blood samples.

Yes, she’d show Kyle precisely how exciting “fifty shades of boring” could be.

* * *

Fury pumped through Diego’s veins. He slammed his phone against the stucco wall outside the small hospital, not caring when the handset shattered.

If Noche Blanca were going to act like cavemen they could resort to smoke signals if they wanted his help.

But as quickly as the urge to tell them where to stick their call for help launched his blood pressure through the stratosphere, it crashed back down to earth.

A patient was a patient. Even if that patient was a class-A idiot. And this particular idiot was the son of Noche Blanca’s take-no-prisoners head honcho Axl Cruz. If he died there was no telling the extremes Axl would take to exact revenge.

Diego picked up the pieces of his phone and shoved them into his pocket, shaking his head in utter disbelief. It was the third burner he’d obliterated in a week. Just yesterday, as he’d been stitching up one of Axl’s pandilleros who’d lacerated his arm after putting his meaty fist through a window, he’d thought he’d made it crystal clear. The help would continue so long as they left the sanctuary alone.

Transition periods took time. And, sure, it depleted everyone’s pocket money—which he knew was rich, coming from him—but the ultimate reward was peace. A steady economy for all the islanders. That was priceless. And it was why he’d instructed his family’s company to gift the land to the sanctuary.

He swore as he strode into the hospital, not caring who heard.

“Amigo! Hold up.”

He whirled round as the small hospital’s head surgeon caught up to him.

“Que paso? I didn’t think you were on tonight.”

The thunderous expression on Diego’s face told Dr. Antonio Aguillera all he needed to know.

He raised his hands and backed off. “I’ll call in back-up.”

“I’ve got it,” Diego growled, grabbing a fresh pair of scrubs and a pair of surgical scrubs from a porter passing with a supplies trolley. “I’ll bring them back to the clinic.”

They both knew what that meant. These patients weren’t on the right side of the law. The hospital was stretched to the limit as it was, and Diego knew more than most what happened when blood was shed and Noche Blanca were involved.

“Just a bit short on supplies.” He’d ordered some in from the States, but, as often happened in developing countries, things went missing.

“Okay, brother. Good luck.”

Anton disappeared into a nearby supplies cupboard and moments later handed Diego a jute coffee sack he knew would be stuffed full of supplies. Supplies that the hospital’s administration would never officially hand over to him, despite the number of lives he’d saved that hadn’t been linked to Noche Blanca.

Diego gave his colleague a slap on the back. One that communicated all the things he couldn’t say.

No one will ever be able to replace my brother, but thank you for treating me like one. We both know luck counts for nothing when dealing with Noche Blanca.

“See you in the morning.”

With any luck.

“Dr. Vasquez! Momentito, por favor!”

Irritation crackled through him. He didn’t need to wriggle out of another administrative hoop. He wasn’t on shift tonight.

He turned around.

Maria del Mar.

The woman was half siren, half business mogul. It was a shame she’d picked healthcare as her means of expressing the two sides of her personality.

Running the hospital was akin to a hot night in the sack for her. The life and death decisions... The status... The ability to play God... Or goddess, in her case.

The only reason he worked at the hospital was because he’d vowed not to hold the rest of the islanders accountable for one woman’s idiot decision.

Sure. It sent a message to Noche Blanca. You wield guns? Your problem.

The only thing was, when it was your kid brother lines got blurred.

“No time, Maria.” He tapped the face of his non-existent watch.

It was a ten-minute boat run to the turtle sanctuary. He’d thought with Professor MacLeay’s plans to turn the turtle eggs into a legitimate commodity Noche Blanca might back off. That Axl would move on to another island, just as he had moved to theirs some fifteen years ago.

Maria wobbled toward him on her ridiculous high heels. Why the woman was even at the clinic after-hours was beyond him.

He snorted.

She has no life. Just like you.

No. That was exactly the point. He did have a life. Unlike his brother, who’d died just a few miles away from this very hospital.

Nico hadn’t been a criminal. Wayward? Absolutely. But his heart had been pure gold. When some bandilleros from a neighboring island had tried to move in on El Valderon Nico had thrown himself between a bullet and the eldest son of Axl Cruz. On nights when he let himself think about it, Diego guessed his brother had thought Better the devil they knew...

In Maria’s eyes the life-saving gesture had painted Diego’s kid brother with the Noche Blanca brush, and Nico had bled out a handful of miles away as an ambulance idled in the hospital’s parking lot.

Would going there have been scary? Sure. But that was what bullet proof vests and the police were for. And most of Noche Blanca weren’t true criminals. They were weak men, intimidated and bullied into a life of crime by someone who promised them untold riches. Riches he had no right to promise them.

The only good thing about Axl Cruz was that he liked a clean shop. Not one other gang had ever gained a foothold on their small island nation.

Better the devil they knew...

“Diego Vasquez! Where are you off to with a bag of El Valderon coffee beans?”

She knew as well as he did that the sack he was holding wasn’t full of premium roast.

He slung it over his shoulder and pasted on his version of a good-boy smile. “Off to help a citizen of this fair isle, Maria. Where else?”

He never saw the point in lying.

“That citizen had better not be inked up and wearing knuckle dusters.”

He gave a careless shrug. “Won’t know till I get there.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Who made the call?”

“A concerned citizen.”

He knew the drill now. Keep it vague, then she couldn’t say no. Theirs was an unwritten agreement, but to all intents and purposes it was written in stone. So long as he could use hospital supplies to treat patients on-scene he’d continue to work at the poorly staffed hospital. The second she turned off the supply room tap it would be Hasta luego, mamacita.

“Meet up after for a drink? Maybe we can talk about putting you on the roster for a few more shifts?”

He laughed. He had to hand it to her. If she wanted something she went for it. Her husband must have one helluva spine. Diego was civil to her. Polite, even. But there wasn’t a chance on God’s green earth that he would be her friend.

“I’ve got to go, Maria.” He swung the bag back round. “Duty calls.”

He pulled the keys to his motorboat from his pocket and set off at a jog. He wasn’t going to let Maria stand in the way of yet another life being lost.

Not on his watch. Not ever again.