her chestnut curls into a knot of wispy curls on top of her head. She’d applied make-up to her pale skin with care. She knew she looked sexy and seductive and expensive—and she knew that there was good reason why every man present had turned his head as Grady had ushered her into the restaurant.
This was how she loved to look. But after tonight there’d never be any call for her to look like this again.
‘Hey, it can’t be that bad.’ Grady reached out and took her hand. He stroked the back of it with care. It was something she’d seen him do with patients.
Two weeks ago a small boy had come into Sydney Central after a tractor accident and Grady had sat with the parents and explained there was no way the little boy’s arm could be saved. She’d seen him lift the burly farmer’s hand and touch it just like this—an almost unheard-of gesture man to man, but so necessary when the father would be facing self-blame all his life.
She’d loved that gesture when she’d seen it then. And now, here he was, using the same gesture on her.
‘What is it, Morag?’
‘My sister.’ She could hardly say it.
Don’t say it at all! a little voice inside her head was screaming at her. If you don’t say it out loud, then it won’t be real.
But it was real. Horribly real.
‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’ Grady was frowning, and Morag knew he was thinking of her mother, the brisk businesswoman to whom he’d been introduced.
‘Beth’s my half-sister,’ Morag whispered. ‘She’s ten years older than I am. She lives on Petrel Island.’
‘Petrel Island?’
‘Off the coast of—’
‘I know Petrel Island.’ He was focused on her face, and his fingers were still doing the smoothing thing to the back of her hand. It was making her cringe inside. This man—he was who she wanted for ever. She knew that. But he—
‘We evacuated a kid from Petrel Island twelve months back,’ Grady said. ‘It’s a weird little community—Kooris and fishermen and a crazy doctor-cum-lighthouse-keeper keeping the whole community together.’
‘That’s Beth.’
‘That’s your sister?’ His tone was incredulous and she knew why. There seemed no possible connection between the placid islander Beth and the sophisticated career doctor he was looking at.
But there was. Of course there was. You couldn’t remove sisterhood by distance or by lifestyle.
Beth was her sister for ever.
‘Beth’s the island doctor,’ she told him, finding the courage to meet his eyes. ‘She’s also the lighthouse caretaker. It’s what our father did so she’s taken right over.’
‘Beth’s the lighthouse-keeper? And the doctor as well?’
‘Yes.’
‘But…why?’
‘It’s a family thing,’ she told him. Seeing his confusion deepen, she tried to explain. ‘Dad was born on the island, and inherited the lighthouse-keeping from my grandad. He married an island girl and they had Beth. Then the lighthouse was upgraded to automatic—just as Dad’s first wife died. She was seven months pregnant with their second baby, but she collapsed and died of eclampsia before Dad could get her to the mainland.’
Grady was frowning, taking it on board with deep concern. ‘She had no warning?’
‘There was no doctor on the island,’ Morag said bleakly. ‘And, no, he had no warning. Everything seemed normal. She was planning on leaving for the mainland at thirty-four weeks but she didn’t make it. Anyway, her death meant that within a few weeks Dad lost his wife, his baby son and his job. All he had left was two-year-old Beth. But the waste of the deaths made him decide what to do. He brought Beth to the mainland, and managed to get a grant to go to medical school. That’s where he met my mother. They married and had me, but the marriage was a disaster. Everyone was miserable. By the time Dad finished med school, the government decided that leaving the lighthouse to look after itself—even if it was automatic—was also a disaster. The island was still desperate for a doctor, and the caretaker’s cottage was still empty. So Dad and Beth went home.’
Grady’s face was thoughtful. ‘Leaving you behind with your mother?’
‘Of course.’ She shrugged. ‘Can you see my mother living on Petrel Island? But I did spend lots of time there. Every holiday. Whenever I could. Mum didn’t mind. As long as she wasn’t seen as a deserting mother, anything I did was OK by her. She’s not exactly a warm and fuzzy parent, my mother.’
‘I have met her.’
He had. They’d moved fast in four weeks. Morag’s eyes flickered again to his face. Maybe this could work. Maybe he…
But the eyes he was looking at her with were wrong, she thought, confused by the messages she was receiving. He was concerned as he’d be concerned for a patient. He was using a ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this’ kind of voice. He was gentleness personified, but his gentleness was abstract. For Morag, who’d had a childhood of abstract affection, the concept was frightening.
‘So you spent holidays with your father and Beth,’ Grady was saying, and she forced herself to focus on the past rather than the terrifying future.
‘Yes. They were… They loved me. Beth was everything to me.’
‘Where’s your father now?’
‘He died three years ago. He’s buried on the island. That’s OK. He had a subarachnoid haemorrhage and died in his sleep, and it wasn’t a bad way to go for a man in his seventies.’
‘But Beth?’
‘As I said, she’s a doctor, like me.’ Still she couldn’t say what was wrong. How could she? How could she voice the unimaginable? ‘My dad, and then Beth after him, provided the island’s medical care. Because there’s only about five hundred people living on the island, and the medical work is hardly arduous, they’ve kept on the lighthouse. too. Lighthouse-keeping’s not the time consuming job it was.’
‘I guess it’s not.’ Grady was watching her face. Waiting. Knowing that she was taking her time to say what had to be said, and knowing she needed that time. He lifted her hand again and gripped her fingers, looking down at them as if he was examining them for damage. It was a technical manoeuvre, she thought dully. Something he’d learned to do. ‘So Beth’s the island doctor…’
‘She’s great.’ She was talking too fast, she thought, but she couldn’t slow down. Her voice didn’t seem to belong to her. ‘She’s ten years older than me, and she was almost a mother to me. She’d turn up unexpectedly whenever I most needed her. If I was in a school play and my mother couldn’t make it—which she nearly always couldn’t—I’d suddenly, miraculously, find Beth in the audience, cheering me on with an enthusiasm that was almost embarrassing. And when she decided to be a doctor, I thought I could be, too.’
‘But not like Beth?’
‘Beth wanted to go back to the island. It tore her apart to leave to do her medical training, and the moment she was qualified she returned. She fell in love with a local fisherman and the island’s her home. She loves it.’
‘And you?’ he probed.
‘The island’s never been my home. I love it but I never thought of living anywhere but here.’ She attempted a smile but it was a pretty shaky one. ‘I guess I have more than a bit of my mother in me somewhere. I like excitement, cities, shopping…life.’
‘Like me.’
‘My excitement levels don’t match your excitement levels,’ she told him ruefully. ‘I like being a surgeon in a bustling city hospital. I don’t dangle out of helicopters in raging seas,