Any allergies?’
‘None.’ What he said made sense. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and was annoyed at how feeble she sounded.
And astonishingly he touched her hand, lightly. It was the kind of touch he might give any patient he wanted to reassure. It was entirely professional, so why it seemed to burn…
It didn’t. She was being dumb. This kind of thump on her head would make anyone dumb, she told herself. He was being purely professional. ‘Right, let’s get you sorted. Maria can take X-rays. I’ll come back with the results as soon as I can.’
‘Thank you,’ she managed. ‘There’s no hurry.’
‘There’s always a hurry,’ he said, and suddenly it was a snap. ‘That’s what my life is, thanks to your family.’
Your family… The words resonated, an echo of what he’d said all those years ago.
‘Your family robs my country blind, leeching every asset we ever had. How can I associate myself with anyone even remotely connected to the Castlavarans? I’m sorry, it’s over, Anna.’
‘So the judgement’s still there,’ she managed, and stupidly she was starting to feel her eyes well with unshed tears. It was the shock, she told herself. A decent thump on the head always messed with the tear ducts.
It wasn’t anything to do with this arrogant, judgemental guy she’d once loved with all her heart.
‘It’s not judgement, it’s knowledge,’ he told her. ‘Maria will take care of you. I’ll be back to sew things up. By the way, I will be charging.’
‘Charge what you like,’ she muttered. ‘And get me out of here as soon as possible. All I want to do is go home.’
He wanted her out of here as much as she wanted to be gone. Maybe more. The thought of a Castlavaran in his treatment room should be enough to make his skin crawl.
Only this was Anna, and what he felt for her…
She was two parts, he conceded. She was Anna Raymond, the redheaded, gorgeous, fun-loving fellow student he’d fallen in love with. But she was still Anna Castlavara, daughter of Katrina Castlavara, who was in turn the daughter of a family who’d held the wealth of this small country in its grasping hands for generations.
‘They’re nothing to do with me.’
He remembered Anna’s response when he’d first discovered the connection. His reaction had been guttural, instinctive, incredulous. For six months he’d been dating her. He’d been nineteen, a student madly in love, thinking life was as good as it could get. And then he’d met her mother.
Katrina had been in America when he’d first met Anna, with a guy Anna had said was one of a string of men.
‘We hardly see each other,’ she’d told him, but she’d told him little else.
It seemed she’d known little.
‘As far as I know, she left Tovahna in her teens and she hasn’t been back. She said her mother died young and her father’s horrible, but that’s pretty much all she’ll tell me. I imagine Mum would have been a wild child, so maybe that had something to do with it. Sometimes, though…when I was little she’d sing to me, songs like the one you heard, and in between men, when she was bored, she taught me Tovahnan. It’s always seemed fun, our own secret language. I suspect she was a bit homesick, though she’d never admit it. She refuses to talk of her family—she says they’ve rejected her and she’s rejected them. She’s said there’s no way she’d ever go back—that most of the young people from Tovahna end up emigrating.’
They still did, Leo thought grimly. The extent of economic activity on the island was to grow olives and tomatoes, fish and pay exorbitant rents to the Castlavaran landlords.
There’d never been a king, a president, even an official ruler. The island was simply owned by the Castlavarans. For generation after generation they had ruled with a grasping hand and nothing had disturbed that rule. There was little on this rocky island to invite invasion. Its inhabitants were peaceful, ultra-conservative, accepting the status quo because that’s what their parents had, and their parents before them.
Right now, though, the status quo had changed. The last male heir, Yanni, had left no descendants. The inheritance had thus fallen to a woman the country didn’t know, a woman who’d been born abroad, a woman who—as far as Leo could tell—knew little about her ancestors’ homeland.
Was it time for the population to rise up and say, ‘Enough’? The land should be owned by the people who’d worked it for generations.
It wasn’t happening. Any kid with any ambition had one thought and that was to emigrate, and the remaining islanders accepted apathy as the norm. That meant that Anna’s inheritance was being met with stoic acceptance.
Maybe he should lead a revolution himself, but he was far too busy to think of political insurrection. Work was always waiting.
Like Anna’s split head.
‘Please let it not be fractured,’ he muttered as he left her. Not only for her sake either. He needed to get her out of his hospital and then get on with his life.
His next patient was a child brought in by his grandparents ‘because he won’t eat’, which probably meant he’d been given so many sweets he didn’t need anything else. But they’d been waiting for over three hours. The toddler’s parents were off the island, visiting the little boy’s ill maternal grandmother, and he didn’t want them worried, so he took the time to reassure the grandparents. He gave them a chart where every single thing that went into the small boy’s mouth had to be recorded, no matter what, and sent them away dubious. But if they stuck to the chart they’d have forty fits when they saw how much they were sneaking—behind each other’s backs—into one small mouth.
At any other time that might have made him smile, but he wasn’t smiling when he returned to check Anna’s X-rays.
All okay. Excellent.
He still had to keep her in overnight. There remained a risk of internal bleeding.
But first stitching.
Carla was still caught up with a tricky birth. He checked in, hopeful, but there was no joy there.
‘She may need a Caesarean,’ Carla told him. Carla was in her sixties, tough and practical and kind. ‘We’re doing the best we can. First sign of foetal distress, though, and I’ll need you. Don’t go anywhere, Leo.’
‘I was wondering if you could do a stitching,’ he told her, glancing behind her to the woman in labour. ‘Swap places?’
‘I’ve been with Greta all the way,’ Carla said. ‘It’s not kind to swap now.’ And then she grinned. ‘Besides, Maria tells me she’s the Castlavara. I understand why you want to swap. Just treat her like anyone else and then multiply the costs by a hundred. Hey, if you’re nice to her maybe we could persuade her to fund us a new ambulance. Put on your charm, Dr Aretino, and go charm yourself our future.’
To say she was miserable was an understatement. She was tucked into a cubicle with curtains around her, cut off from the outside world. The painkiller Leo had prescribed had taken effect but was causing even more fuzziness, and there was still a dull ache. She was in a foreign country, in the hands of a man who’d made it clear ten years ago that he was rejecting her.
She wanted to go home so badly she could taste it, to her lovely little cottage in her English village, to people who treated her as a friend as well as a doctor, to her two happy, bouncy dogs.
It was mid-afternoon. Rhonda,