‘I’m so sorry.’ She rose and grinned down at him, and she didn’t look sorry at all.
She had a great grin.
‘Think nothing of it,’ he managed. ‘Take the damned thing away.’
‘I haven’t got a car.’ Holding the lamb in one arm, she offered a hand to help haul him to his feet. He took it and discovered she was surprisingly strong. She tugged, and he rose, and suddenly she was just…close. Nice, he thought inconsequentially. Really nice. ‘I’m about half a mile from where I live,’ she was saying, but suddenly he was having trouble hearing.
‘So?’ He was disconcerted. The feel of her hand… Yep, he was definitely disconcerted. She released him and he was aware of a pang of loss.
She didn’t seem to notice. She was looking up toward the ewe, brushing mud from her face and leaving more mud in its place. ‘It was dumb to let him go,’ she muttered. ‘He and his mum need to go in the house paddock until we’re sure he’s recovered.’
‘How do you get them to a house paddock?’ Fergus asked, and then thought maybe that was a question he shouldn’t have asked. It was tantamount to offering help.
And here it came. The request.
She bit her lip. ‘I don’t think I can herd a sheep and a lamb up to the house,’ she admitted. ‘Ewes aren’t like cows. They might or might not follow, even if I have the lamb.’ She looked at his Land Cruiser and he saw exactly what she was thinking. ‘Can you give me a lift to the Bentley place? That’s where these two belong.’
‘Oscar Bentley’s?’ he demanded, startled.
‘Yes.’ She handed him the lamb and he was so astounded that he took it. ‘Just stand there and don’t move,’ she told him. Then: ‘No,’ she corrected herself. ‘Joggle up and down a bit, so the ewe’s looking at you and not me.’
‘I need to go.’ He was remembering Oscar Bentley. Yes, the lamb’s needs were urgent, but a broken hip was more so.
‘Not until we have the ewe.’ She moved swiftly away, twenty, thirty yards up the slope, moving with an ease that was almost catlike. Then she disappeared behind a tree and he realised what she was doing.
He was being used as a distraction.
OK, he could do that. Obediently he held the lamb toward the ewe. The ewe stared wildly down at her lamb and took a tentative step forward.
The woman launched herself out from behind her tree in a rugby tackle that put Fergus’s efforts to shame. The ewe was big, but suddenly she was propped up on her rear legs, which prevented her from struggling, and the woman had her solidly and strongly in position.
It had been a really impressive manoeuvre. To say Fergus was impressed was an understatement.
‘Put the lamb in your truck and back it up to me,’ she told him, gasping with effort, and he blinked.
‘Um…’
‘I can’t stand here for ever.’ If she’d had a foot free, she would have stamped it. ‘Move.’
He moved.
He was about to put a sheep in the back of the hospital truck.
Fine. As of two days ago he was a country doctor. This was the sort of thing country doctors did. Wasn’t it?
It seemed it was. This country doctor had no choice.
He hauled open the back of the truck, shoved the medical equipment as far forward as it’d go and tossed a canvas over the lot. Miriam, his practice nurse, had set the truck up for emergencies and she had three canvases folded and ready at the side. For coping with sheep?
Maybe Miriam knew more about country practice than he did.
Anyone would know more about country practice than he did.
He put the lamb in the back and started closing the door, but as he did so the little creature wobbled. He hesitated.
He sighed and lifted the lamb out again. He climbed in behind the wheel and placed the lamb on his knee.
‘Don’t even think about doing anything wet,’ he told it. ‘House-training 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.’