‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’
‘Am I?’ Mallory shrugged. ‘I dunno. I needed time to think. So I came here.’ She smiled wryly. ‘I suppose I take after my mother. When in doubt, go climbing.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Climb. Think about what I want to do.’
Will’s hand tightened on hers for a moment, and then he moved his hand away. And he’d gone pale. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Fine.’
He didn’t look it. She placed her hand on his forehead. No temperature. His breathing wasn’t rapid or shallow. She swiftly checked his pulse. A bit fast, but in the normal range. Maybe he was just tired—though she’d tell the nurse on her way out. It might be the first signs of shock. ‘Will, I’d better let you rest.’
He shook his head. ‘’M fine. What’re your choices?’
‘Give up medicine. Or if I do stay in medicine…I might do some locuming for a bit. Maybe join Médicins Sans Frontières.’
Her father had accused her of running away. Though how could she have stayed in the New Forest? Mallory had let Charles down on all fronts. Professionally, she’d made a stupid—nearly fatal—mistake. Personally, she’d let his son fall in love with her and had broken his heart—because Mallory knew that she couldn’t marry Geoff. She loved him dearly, but just as a friend—she wasn’t in love with him. Geoff was good and kind and honest and decent, and he’d make somebody a fantastic husband. He’d be a brilliant dad. But he wasn’t the right one for her. Climbing in extreme conditions was as alien to him as the planet Mars. The one time she’d confessed to Geoff that her secret dream was to climb Everest, he’d thought she was joking.
Coming to the Lakes had been the right thing to do. A clean break—kinder to Geoff, too, because it would give him the chance to meet someone who deserved him. Someone who’d give him the cosy domestic set-up that was his dream.
Not that it had been easy to explain to her father. Dominic Ryman had been delighted when Mallory had told him she was going out with Geoff. A marriage between the two families would have been perfect in his eyes.
But it wasn’t going to happen.
Climbing—a chance to think. Will knew someone else who’d taken that point of view. Two people, in fact. One of them was dead and the other was hundreds of miles away in a war zone, working for Médicins Sans Frontières. Just as Mallory could be doing shortly.
And it was all his fault. He had to live with the guilt for the rest of his life. If he’d been different, been a daredevil risk-taking climber like Roly instead of the sort who double-checked all his equipment and never took risks…But he wasn’t. And his fiancée Julie had fallen out of love with him and in love with his twin brother.
The night Roly and Julie had told him about their love affair, Will had switched his mobile phone off, taken his phone off the hook and tried to drown his sorrows—knowing that he wasn’t on call that night or over the weekend, so he wouldn’t be letting his patients down. But he’d been in no mood to think about the weather. He hadn’t even realised how bad the storm had got. The mountain rescue team hadn’t been able to get in touch with him. But they had managed to contact Roly. So Roly had been the one abseiling down the cliff to rescue the stupid, irresponsible, brainless climber who’d decided to tackle Sharp Edge—the scariest slopes in the Lakes—in appalling weather and had got stuck.
If he himself hadn’t been so selfish, trying to blot out his feeling of misery and betrayal, he would have been the one who’d answered the call. He would have been the one who’d plummeted down the cliff when the rope had snapped. Roly would still be alive, and Julie wouldn’t be nursing a broken heart. She wouldn’t be feeling so miserable without the love of her life that she’d be risking her own life in a war zone, because nothing mattered to her any more…
He pulled his thoughts away with difficulty. This wasn’t about him. It was about Mallory. Mallory, the stranger who’d come to his rescue at the accident and who even now was keeping him company when she owed him absolutely nothing.
Mallory, who was a trained GP.
And, like it or not, he had problems of his own to face as well. Such as who was going to replace him until he was fit enough to work again.
‘I might have a solution,’ Will said slowly. To both their situations.
She frowned. ‘What?’
‘Look at me.’ He gestured to himself. ‘I’m a GP. But I can’t see my patients from a hospital bed. And I’m left-handed.’ He gave his cast a rueful look. ‘Can’t update patient notes, can’t write out a prescription—can’t even sign one printed off the computer. Or drive out to house calls.’
‘I think driving’s out for a few weeks.’
She smiled. And it transformed her face so much he almost wished he hadn’t made her smile. Because it was like being a child with his nose pressed against the toyshop window, longing for something he couldn’t have.
‘Look, you need some space to think, a chance to see if you still want to work as a doctor, but without any pressure. I need a locum. And I really hate interviewing. Interviewing with a headache’s going to be even worse. So if you agree to be my locum, we could solve each other’s problems.’
She frowned. ‘But I’ve just told you. I nearly killed someone.’
‘You made a mistake—a mistake that anyone could have made in the circumstances,’ he corrected. ‘And you’ve already shown me that you’ve learned from it. Look at the way you double-checked whether I’d had a previous bad reaction to co-proxamol.’
‘Ye-es.’
Co-proxamol, which had taken away the pain. At least he could think clearly again. He wasn’t slurring any more either. And hopefully his mouth was working in synch with his brain again and he sounded coherent. Because he really, really needed to talk Mallory round to his way of thinking. ‘Everyone doubts themselves at some point. If a patient dies on you, you always think it’s your fault—that maybe you could have saved them if only you’d done something else, tried another drug or referred them for a different procedure.’
‘That’s different. It’s not the same as making a stupid mistake in the first place.’
‘A mistake that you won’t repeat. Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ Will said softly. ‘Everyone deserves a second chance.’
‘Can’t the others at your practice cover you?’
‘They’ve probably taken care of my list for today, they’ll manage tomorrow and it’s not my weekend on call anyway,’ Will said, ‘but it wouldn’t be fair of me to ask for more. I need a locum, starting Monday. It’s going to take—what, six weeks?—until my arm’s out of plaster, and who knows how long before my leg’s right again? Three months?’
‘Not to mention the physio you’ll need to stop your muscles atrophying. And remember, no weight on that leg—you don’t want to risk malunion. It’s the most common problem with a fractured tibia.’
He nodded. ‘See? You think like a doctor, Mallory.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Even if it’s only for a month, it’ll take the pressure off my partners,’ Will said.
‘And what will your