New Doc in Town. Meredith Webber

she show him around.

      She pulled into the hospital car park, enjoying, as she always did, the old building with its wide, sheltered verandas and its view over the beach and the water beyond.

      Today must have been ‘putting up the decorations’ day for the veranda railing was garlanded with greenery while red and green wreaths hung in all the windows.

      ‘Great hospital!’ Cam said.

      ‘It’s a triumph of local support over bureaucracy,’ she told him. ‘The government wanted to close it some years ago and the local people fought to keep it. We’ve even got a maternity ward, if you can call one birthing suite and a couple of other rooms a ward. It’s so good for the local women to be able to have their babies here, and although we don’t have a specialist obstetrician we’ve got a wonderful head midwife, and Tom’s passionate about his obstetrics work.’

      ‘I vaguely remember him being keen on it during our training,’ Cam said, while Jo hurried out of the car before he could open her door and stand near her again.

      She really needed to get away—needed some time and space to sort out all the strange stirrings going on in her body, not to mention the fact that her mind kept enjoying conversations with her new employee. It was almost as if it had been starved of stimulation and was now being refreshed.

      Impossible.

      Was she away with the fairies that she was even thinking this way?

      She was saved from further mental muddle by Tom, who was not only at the hospital, checking on the moped driver, but was delighted to meet up with a friend from bygone times.

      ‘I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than hang around listening to us play “Remember this”,’ Tom told Jo. ‘How about you leave Cam here and I’ll drop him back up at your place later?’

      Jo’s relief was out of all proportion to the offer Tom had made, but she hoped she hid it as she checked that this was okay with her new tenant and made her escape.

      He was just a man—Cam, not Tom, although Tom was also a man, though not a man she thought of as a man.

      This particular dither was so ridiculous it told her just how far out of control her mind had become. She drove home, made herself a cup of tea—very soothing, tea—and sat on the deck to try to sort out what was happening to her.

      Was it because it was a long time since she’d been in a relationship that her new employee was causing her problems?

      Three years, that’s how long it had been.

      There’d been the odd date in that time—very odd, some of them—but nothing serious. Nothing serious since Harry had declared that no power on earth would persuade him to live in a one-horse, seaside town for the rest of his life, and if she wanted to leave Sydney and go back home, that was fine by him.