‘Oh, dammit to hell.’
He kicked the starter viciously, dropped the bike forwards off the stand and straddled it while he fastened his helmet. Why the hell was she back in Penhally? And why, more to the point, was she working as a practice nurse? So much for her dedication to medicine—but that was just par for the course, really, wasn’t it? After all, she hadn’t stuck to him, either.
He twisted the throttle, listened to the feeble sound of the little engine and mourned his old bike. Gemma had loved his bike, and they’d gone everywhere on it. They’d been inseparable for a year, every time she’d come down from Bath with her parents to their holiday cottage, and they’d had so much fun.
Not that her parents had approved of him, but, then, they wouldn’t, would they? Not with his bad-boy reputation, and they’d had to do a fair amount of sneaking around to be together. But that second summer she’d come down alone after her final school exams, for the last summer before uni, and instead of it being the end, in a way it was to be the beginning—the beginning of the next phase of their lives. They’d got places at the same medical school in Bristol, and everything was panning out perfectly.
So he’d asked her to marry him and crazily, unbelievably, she’d said yes, so on a glorious day in early August they’d made their vows—vows he’d really meant, vows from the heart—and they’d honeymooned in the tumbledown little wooden shack on the beach that was his home for the summer, a retreat from the demands of home, a haven of tranquillity at first and then, with Gemma, a place of paradise—until her parents had come down from Bath and found them there.
They’d gone crazy, and Gemma had been in floods of tears, but she’d stood her ground, told them they were married and he’d shut the door in their faces and held her while she cried.
And then just days later, she’d left a note to say she’d changed her mind about them, and about going to uni. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to read medicine after all, and she was deferring for a year and taking time out to think about things, going travelling—Gemma, who’d already seen the world with her wealthy parents—and going alone. She didn’t want to see him again. And she was gone, she and her parents who’d obviously meant more to her than he had, their holiday home empty, closed up for the winter.
He’d never seen her again. Not a word, in all these years, all the time he’d been at med school in Bristol, keeping an eye on his family from a close distance and waiting and hoping for her to change her mind—he’d even been to see her parents, but they’d told him she didn’t want to see him, and he wasn’t going to beg.
So he’d given up on her and finished his degree, then moved to London, trained as a GP, then done a surgical rotation, and now here he was ten years down the line, working for an aid agency in Africa, and still she was following him in his head, in his heart, eating holes in him like some vile flesh-eating bug that wouldn’t leave him alone. Asking after him, of all things!
How dare she? How dare she ask after him?
And he’d dream about her again tonight, he thought bitterly as he let out the clutch and shot off down the dirt track on the start of his journey. Every time she was mentioned, every time he thought about her, which was pretty much daily, she haunted his sleep, the memory of her laughter, her smile, then those few days and nights they’d had together, so precious, so tender, so absolutely bone-deep right that he’d just known she was the only woman he’d ever love—the memories were enough to drive him mad.
As mad as his mother, if she thought he was ever going back to Penhally to expose himself to that again. No way. It would kill him. But just to see her again—to touch her—to hold her in his arms, to bury his nose in her hair and smell the warm summer fragrance that was Gemma…
So he wasn’t concentrating when he swerved off the road to avoid the broken-down car. He wasn’t thinking that it was strange for the car to be there, that it was possibly a booby trap. He wasn’t looking out for the rebels who’d left it there to trick him into going onto the verge.
He was thinking about his wife, about the soft sighs, the taste of her skin, the sobbing screams as she came apart in his arms.
And then he hit the landmine.
CHAPTER ONE
‘HERE’S trouble.’
Gemma looked up from the paperwork she was sorting and saw old Doris Trefusis jerk her head towards the door. And her heart hiccuped against her ribs, because there could be only one person she was talking about, and she wasn’t ready!
How silly. She’d thought she was prepared, but apparently not, if the pounding of her heart and the shaking of her legs was anything to go by.
Since his mother’s stroke yesterday evening, she’d been psyching herself up for Sam coming down from London, but nothing could have prepared her for the emotional impact of her first sight of him in years. Ten years, nine months, two weeks, three days and four and a half hours, to be exact.
Long, lonely years in which she’d ached for him, hungry for any scrap of news, any snippet that would tell her what he was up to. Then last year his distraught mother had told her he’d been hurt in a stupid bike accident and she’d misunderstood and thought for a fleeting second that he’d died. Not for long, but it had devastated her, the pain of loss slamming through her and bringing home to her just how much she still loved him.
But that was ridiculous, because she didn’t know him, not any more—if she ever really had. They’d been little more than kids, but he wasn’t a kid now. Lord, no.
Not that he’d really been one then, at nineteen, but he certainly wasn’t now, she thought, her heart lurching as he came into view. She was standing in the shadows at the back of Reception and she watched spellbound as he sauntered in, tall and broad, more solid than he had been in his late teens, but every bit as gorgeous. A slight limp was the only sign of his injuries, if anything only adding another layer of attraction, and that cocky smile flickering round his mouth was tearing her composure to shreds. But it wasn’t for her. He hadn’t seen her yet in her shadowy corner, and his smile was for Mrs Trefusis.
‘Morning, Doris!’ he said, and his deep, husky voice, so painfully familiar, made her heart turn over. ‘How are you? Looking as young and gorgeous as ever, I see!’
Their diminutive and elderly cleaner put the magazines she was tidying back in the rack and looked him up and down, her mouth pursed repressively even though her eyes were twinkling. ‘Good morning, Dr Cavendish.’
Gemma saw his mouth twitch and his eyebrows shoot up. ‘Dr Cavendish? Whatever happened to young Samuel? I get the feeling I’m still in trouble with you, Doris—or does it have to be Mrs Trefusis now?’
Doris tutted. ‘You can hardly expect a warm welcome, Samuel. You’ve been gone so long, and your poor mother—’
He snorted. ‘My poor mother has had my support continuously since my father walked out seventeen years ago, as you very well know.’
‘From a distance. You should have been here, Sam,’ she chided gently.
Did his smile lose its sparkle? Maybe, although it didn’t waver as he went on, ‘Well, I’m here now, so you can start by offering me a cup of tea. I’m as dry as a desert.’
Doris sniffed. ‘I’m not sure you deserve one.’
He grinned and gave her a slow, lazy wink. ‘You’re just saying that. You love me really,’ he said, and Gemma watched old Doris Trefusis melt under the megawatt charm.
‘Go away with you,’ she said, blushing and flapping