LITMIR.BIZ

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starts now.’

      The woman was walking the sheep down the slope toward the track. He backed up as close as he could.

      ‘Mess my seat and you’re chops,’ he told the lamb in a further refinement of house-training. He closed the door firmly on one captive and went to collect another.

      Getting the ewe into the truck was no easy task. The ewe took solid exception to being manhandled, but the woman seemed to have done this many times before. She pushed, they both heaved, and the creature was in. The door slammed, and Fergus headed for the driver’s door in relief.

      The woman was already clambering into the passenger seat, lifting the lamb over onto her knee. Wherever they were going, it seemed she was going, too.

      ‘I can drop them at Bentley’s,’ he told her. ‘That’s where I’m going.’

      ‘You’re going to Bentley’s?’

      ‘That’s the plan.’ He hesitated. ‘But I’m a bit lost.’

      ‘Go back the way you came,’ she said, snapping her seat belt closed under the lamb. ‘I can walk home from there. It’s close. Take the second turn to the left after the ridge.’

      ‘That’s the second time I’ve been given that direction,’ he told her. ‘Only I’m facing the opposite way.’

      ‘You came from the O’Donell track to get to Oscar’s?’

      ‘I’m not a local,’ he said, exasperated.

      ‘You’re the local doctor.’

      I’m here as a locum. I’ve been here since Thursday and I’ll be here for twelve weeks.’

      She stared and he thought he could see calculations happening behind her eyes.

      ‘That might be long enough,’ she whispered, and he thought she was talking to the lamb. She was hugging it close—two muddy waifs.

      He wasn’t exactly pristine himself.

      Whatever she was thinking, though, she didn’t expand on it. They drove for a couple of minutes in silence and he realised he didn’t even know her name

      I’m Dr Fergus Reynard,’ he told her, into what had suddenly become a tense stillness.

      ‘I’m Ginny Viental.’

      ‘Ginny?’

      ‘Short for Guinevere, but I’m not exactly Guinevere material.’

      Hadn’t Guinevere been some gorgeous queen? If that was the case…

      But maybe she was right, Fergus decided. Maybe Queen Guinevere wouldn’t be splodged with lamb mud.

      But there was definitely gorgeous underneath the mud.

      ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Ginny,’ he told her, figuring he should concentrate on keeping the truck on the slippery track rather than letting his attention stray to this very different woman beside him. It was a hard task. ‘Do you live around here?’

      ‘I used to live here,’ she told him. ‘I’ve just come back…for a while.’

      ‘Do your parents live here?’

      ‘They lived here when I was a kid,’ she said discouragingly. ‘I did, too, until I was seventeen.’

      She wasn’t seventeen now, he thought, trying again to figure her age. She looked young but there were lines around her eyes that made him think she’d not had things easy. But something in her face precluded him from asking questions.

      ‘Oscar Bentley,’ he said cautiously, searching for neutral ground. ‘You’re sure it’s his lamb?’

      ‘I’m sure. The cattle grid’s on our property but he has agistment rights. Oscar was an ordinary farmer fifteen years back. Now he seems to have lost the plot completely.’

      ‘He’s hardly made a decent access track,’ Fergus muttered, hauling the truck away from an erosion rut a foot deep.

      ‘He likes making it hard for visitors,’ Ginny told him. ‘Why has he called you out? Unless that’s breaking patient confidentiality.’

      ‘I’m not sure there can be much patient confidentiality about a broken hip.’

      ‘A broken hip?’

      ‘That’s what he thinks is wrong.’

      She snorted. ‘Yeah, right. Broken hip? I’ll bet he’s fallen down drunk and he wants someone to put him to bed.’

      ‘You know him well, then?’

      ‘I told you, I lived here. I haven’t been near Oscar for years but he won’t have changed.’

      ‘If you don’t live here now, where do you live?’

      ‘Will you quit it with the inquisition?’ she said, her voice muffled by the lamb again. ‘I hate the smell of wet wool.’

      ‘So don’t stick your nose into wet sheep.’

      ‘There’s a medical prescription for you,’ she said and she grinned. Which somehow…changed things again.

      Wow, he thought. That was some smile. When the lines of strain eased from around her eyes she looked…beautiful?

      Definitely beautiful.

      ‘Why are you here?’ she demanded, hauling her nose off the lamb as if the question had only just occurred to her and it was important.

      ‘I told you. I’m here as a locum.’

      ‘We’ve never been able to get a locum before.’

      ‘I can’t imagine why not,’ he said with asperity, releasing the brakes then braking again to try and get some traction on the awful track. ‘This is real resort country. Not!’

      ‘You’re seeing it at its worst. We had a doozy of a storm last week and the flooding’s only just gone down.’

      ‘It’s not bad,’ he conceded, staring out at the rolling hills and bushland and the deep, clear waters of the lake below. Sure, it was five hours’ drive to the nearest city, to the nearest specialist back-up, but that was what he’d come for. Isolation. And the rugged volcanic country had a beauty all its own. ‘Lots of…sheep,’ he said cautiously.

      ‘Lots of sheep,’ she agreed, looking doubtfully out the window as if she was trying to see the good side, too.

      ‘If you think sheep are pretty.’

      She twisted to look over her shoulder at the morose-looking ewe in the back of the truck. As if on cue, the creature widened her back legs and let go a stream of urine.

      ‘Oh, yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Sheep. My favourite animals.’

      He was going to have to clean out the back of his truck. Already the pungent ammoniac smell was all around them. Despite that, his lips twitched.

      ‘A farmer, born and bred.’

      ‘I’m no farmer,’ she said.

      ‘Which might explain why you were lying on the road in the middle of nowhere, holding a lamb by one ear, when the entire crowd from the Cradle Lake football game could have come by at any minute and squashed you.’

      There was that grin again. ‘The entire crowd from this side of the lake being exactly eight locals, led by Doreen Kettle who takes her elderly mother and her five kids to the football every week and who drives ten times slower than you. The last of the eight will be the coach who drives home about ten tonight. Cradle Lake will have lost—we always lose—and our coach will have drowned his sorrows in the pub. There’ll be no way he’ll be on the roads until after the Cradle Lake constabulary go to bed. Which is after Football Replay on telly, which finishes at nine-thirty, leaving the rest of Saturday night for Cradle Lake to make whoopee.’

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