LITMIR.BIZ

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       CHAPTER ONE

      DR RACHEL TILDING enjoyed treating kids. If they couldn’t speak it was often up to Rachel to figure out what was wrong, but in general kids’ needs were uncomplicated. They didn’t intrude on her personal space. If all Rachel’s patients were kids—without parents—she might well be looking at a different career path.

      As it was, her aim was to be a radiologist, interpreting results from state-of-the-art equipment and having little to do with patients at all. But the terms of her scholarship specified she had to spend her first two years after internship as a family doctor in Shallow Bay. She’d geared herself to face it.

      What she hadn’t prepared herself for was living next to a house full of kids. Their noise was bad enough, plus the yips of excitement from their dog. Then, a mere two hours after she’d moved in, a ball smashed through her window, almost making her drop the carton of glassware she’d been unpacking. The ball landed in a spray of shattered glass in the kitchen sink.

      Count to ten, she told herself. These are kids. Don’t yell.

      She’d been telling herself that since she’d arrived. These were her new neighbours. It wasn’t their fault that she valued privacy above all else. Someone would call them in for dinner soon. They’d go to bed and she’d have the silence she craved.

      But kids as such close neighbours…

      Shallow Bay’s nurse-manager had sent her pictures of this little house, a pretty-as-a-picture cottage surrounded by bushland. A five-minute walk took her up to the Shallow Bay Hospital, and five minutes in the other direction took her down to the beach.

      What the pictures hadn’t shown, however, was that it was one of three cottages, huddled together in the dip before the bay. Hers was the smallest. The largest was the middle one and that seemed to be filled with boys.

      She wasn’t sure how many yet. The noise they were making could have denoted a small army. She’d been trying to figure how she could intervene without turning Shallow Bay’s new doctor into Dragon Lady.

      Now she had no choice. A cricket ball was sitting in her kitchen sink, surrounded by a spray of glass.

      But before she could react, a shock of curly red hair appeared at the shattered window. Underneath the hair were two huge green eyes, fear-filled. The window was high for a child, so he’d obviously hoisted himself up to see where his ball had landed.

      The head disappeared and a hand appeared in its place. And groped into the sink. Through shattered glass.

      ‘No!’ She’d been standing behind packing boxes on the far side of the table. She launched herself across the kitchen, but the groping hand reached the ball before she did.

      There was a yelp of pain and then hand and ball disappeared.

      She hauled the back door open, raced down the steps and cut the child off before he could back away. He’d lurched back from the window and was staggering.

      ‘Don’t move!’ Her order contained all the authority of a doctor who’d spent her two years of internship working in emergency medicine. The child froze, staring down at his hand in horror.

      Their little dog, a black and white terrier—a ball of pseudo-aggression—came tearing across the lawn and barked hysterically, as if it was Rachel who was the intruder on her own lawn.

      It had…three legs?

      ‘Tuffy! Tuffy, back. He won’t bite. Please… Kit’s just getting our ball.’ The voice from the far side of the hedge sounded terrified. The oldest child?

      They were all redheads. The two on the far side of the hedge looked about ten and six. The child under her window was maybe eight.

      They all had huge green eyes. Pale skin with freckles. They all looked rigid with fear.

      Maybe her voice had done that to them. Even the little dog was backing away.

      Was she so scary?

      Rachel had little to do with kids except as patients, but the middle child was now definitely a patient. He was still clutching the ball, but he was holding it out in front of him. A line of crimson was dripping onto the garden bed.

      ‘Don’t move,’ she said again, because the child was looking in panic across to his brothers—they had to be brothers—and she knew his instinct was to run. ‘I’m not angry.’ Okay, maybe she was, but this wasn’t the time to admit it. There’d be an adult somewhere, responsible for leaving this group unsupervised. They deserved a piece of her mind, not this child. One thing Rachel was very careful about—a lesson learned from the long years of an unjust childhood—was that fairness was everything.

      ‘You’ve cut your hand on the glass,’ she told the little boy as she reached him. She took his arm and raised it, applying pressure around the wrist. ‘You need to stay still.’

      The eyes that looked up at her were huge. He looked terrified. There’d be pain. With this much blood, it had to be deep. The blood wasn’t pumping—the radial artery must surely be intact—but the gash from multiple glass shards tentacled out from wrist to palm. In a child, this amount of bleeding could well lead to collapse.

      ‘I’m a doctor,’ she told him, gentling her voice. ‘The glass has cut your hand, but we can fix it. Right now, though, it’s looking messy, so we need to stop it bleeding. You’ll feel better if you don’t look at it until we’ve cleaned it up. Look at your brothers, or look at the hole in my window. That’s quite a hole.’

      She was manoeuvring his hand upward, edging her body to block his gaze. The ball fell to the ground as she lifted his hand high, curling his palm in slightly so the hand created its own pressure on the pierced palm. There could well be shards of glass in there but now wasn’t the time to remove them. She needed a surgery, equipment, help.

      ‘Can you run inside and get your mum or dad?’ she called to the two boys on the far side of the hedge. ‘Ask them to bring out a towel. Run!

      ‘Tell me your name,’ she asked the little boy.

      She got a blank look in response. Fear.

      ‘He’s Christopher,’ the elder of the pair behind the hedge called. ‘But we call him Kit. Are you really a doctor?’

      ‘I am. Could you fetch your parents please? Now! Kit needs your help.’

      ‘We don’t have parents. Just a stepfather.’

       Just a stepfather.

      Why did that make her freeze?

      The wave of nausea that swept through her was as vicious as it was dumb. Her past was just that—past—and it had no place here, now. Somehow, she managed to fight back the bile rising in her throat, to haul herself together, to become the responsible person these boys needed.

      She needed a plan.

      She needed a responsible adult to help her.

      Her phone was inside. Where had she put it? Somewhere in the muddle of unpacked goods?

      She daren’t let Kit’s arm go to find it herself. He was too big for her to pick up and carry. He was also looking increasingly pale. Had these kids been left on their own?

      ‘Where’s your stepfather now?’ she asked, and stupidly she heard the echoes of her dumb, visceral response to the word in her voice.

      ‘At work,’ the eldest boy told her.

      ‘Is there anyone else here?’

      ‘Christine’s inside, watching telly.’

      ‘Then fetch her,’ she ordered. ‘Fast. Tell her Kit’s hurt his hand and he’s bleeding. Tell her I need a towel and a phone. Run.’

      ‘Can you just put a plaster on it?’ the

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