Caroline Anderson, Sara Morgan, Josie Metcalfe, Jennifer Taylor

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 01 (lit)

  The message relayed down to him just a few minutes ago was that Tel was in Theatre, already undergoing cranial surgery for the removal of a blood clot and, hopefully, the repair of the injury that had cause it.

  Previous experience of similar cases told Adam that the boy would probably spend several days in Intensive Care in an induced coma while they waited for the swelling to go down. Only when his condition stabilised would they withdraw the drugs and wait to see if he regained consciousness; only then would anyone be able to judge how much permanent damage had been done by his fall.

  The other injured youngster—Adam thought Maggie had called him Chris—would require some delicate jigsaw work to realign the broken bones in the back of his hand, but while his rehab would probably be long and painful if he was to regain his full range of motion, it was a far from life-threatening injury.

  As for the rest of them, apart from a few nightmares to come about being stuck underground in the dark, they seemed to have escaped scot-free.

  And, of course, the thought of the boys suffering from nightmares took him right back to Maggie and the terrible price she was having to pay, and the only thing he could do was play the whole situation over and over inside his head, wishing he could go back and do just one thing differently.

  The trouble was, how far back would that train of thought take him? To the conversation at the entrance of the adit, when he’d coerced her into going into the mine against all her instincts? To a year earlier and the events of that meeting in London and the first time he’d persuaded her to put herself in danger? Or should he go all the way back nearly a decade to his failure to return to Penhally when he had been drawn back so strongly?

  He needed to talk to her about all those things, to explain the what, the why and the wherefore of each of them, but most of all he needed to take away the look of distrust in her eyes that had been there ever since she’d seen the photo on his bedside cabinet.

  He sighed heavily at that memory and hoped that he would have a chance to tell Maggie about Caroline, cool, beautiful, elegant Caroline who, like every other woman he’d dated after he’d left Penhally, had been as unlike dark-haired elfin Maggie Pascoe as it was possible to be.

  Except he hadn’t realised that was what he’d been doing until he’d seen her again, sitting at the front of the lecture theatre when he’d walked in to substitute for his sick colleague.

  He hadn’t been able to believe his eyes when he’d realised who she was, and from the wide-eyed expression on her face, she’d been equally surprised…and delighted?

  It had been hard to concentrate on that first lecture when all he’d been able to think about had been that there would be a coffee-break coming up in an hour and a half and he would be able to speak to her for the first time since she’d been sixteen.

  Oh, he’d seen her in the interim, briefly when he’d returned to be at his mother’s side while they’d waited to hear news of his father. It had been small consolation to either of them to learn that he had died a hero, helping to save the lives of the group of children who had been cut off by the tide that summer evening.

  And so, after the memorial service in the church overlooking a deceptively tranquil sea, he’d helped his mother to pack up their lives and move across the country to be near the rest of her family while he’d returned to medical school—returned with an image of the commiseration he’d seen in Maggie’s beautiful hazel eyes to console him and a determination that one day he would return to Penhally to find the woman she’d become.

  ‘Adam?’ said a hesitant voice, and all the hairs went up on the back of his neck.

  ‘Maggie?’ he said, horribly aware that almost everybody around him had frozen in position at the knowledge that the woman they were toiling to rescue had chosen to contact him again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a voice that was far huskier than usual, probably as a result of the tears she’d been shedding in the silence of her isolation. She might think that she’d hidden the fact that she had been close to breaking point and had needed time to herself, but he’d known. The only thing he hadn’t been certain of had been whether she would turn the radio on again or whether she had seen her withdrawal as permanent.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for,’ he reassured her, the guilt that was warring with his relief that she was speaking to him again suddenly overwhelming him. ‘It’s my fault that you’re in this position at all. If I hadn’t twisted your arm—’

  ‘Adam, don’t,’ she said wearily. ‘I really don’t want to spend the next…however long playing the blame game. I shouldn’t have stuck that crowbar there. I should have made certain that I’d cleared the passage better so Pete couldn’t trip, and so on, and so on. I just want…’ There was a wobble in her voice that made a tight fist clench around his heart. He didn’t trust that his own voice would be any steadier so he simply waited for her to continue in her own time.

  ‘I’m sitting here in the dark,’ she said when she finally broke the endless pause.

  Horrified, he broke in, ‘Dammit, Maggie, you didn’t tell me the torch broke when you fell.’ How much worse could her situation get?

  ‘No, Adam. The torch is OK,’ she reassured him quickly. ‘I decided to switch it off.’

  ‘Why?’ He couldn’t imagine anything worse than sitting in the dark, deep underground.

  ‘Partly I did it to save the batteries in the torch, but mostly it’s because that way I can fool my mind a bit…pretend that I’m not surrounded by millions of tons of rock and I…Oh, please, Adam, would you talk to me?’ she asked in a small voice that nearly broke his heart.

  ‘What do you want me to talk about?’ he offered, willing to promise her anything. Heaven only knew how long it would be before she wouldn’t be able to hear him any more. Every cell in his body rejected the idea of a world without Maggie in it…her courage, her empathy, her sweetness…but logic told him that there was very little chance that they would be able to move such an enormous quantity of rock in the short time available to them. It could take weeks in such an unstable environment, with every bit of excavation needing extensive use of props to stop it collapsing again. Was that why the mine had been abandoned in the first place?

  ‘Anything,’ she said, sounding so like the young girl he’d first got to know all those years ago that his own eyes burned with the threat of tears. Why had he wasted so much time before he’d come back to see her? If he’d returned before he’d met Caroline, the whole course of both their lives would have been so different.

  ‘Tell me about your wife,’ she suggested, almost as if she was picking up on his thoughts. ‘Tell me about Caroline.’

  His ears burned at the thought that all the rescuers would be listening in to such a personal conversation, but if that was what Maggie wanted, who was he to deny her? She deserved that and more.

  ‘Where did you meet? Is she a doctor, too?’ Maggie prompted, just as someone tapped Adam on the shoulder.

  ‘Hang on a second,’ he said, and turned to face the slightly bashful-looking man standing behind him.

  ‘Doc, I just wanted to tell you that the rest of us have switched our radios off to give you some privacy. The only interruptions will be if someone’s contacting us on this frequency from outside. OK?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Adam said, hoping he was far enough into the shadows for the heat of his blush to be indistinguishable. ‘I’ll let you know if there are any messages.’

  ‘Oh, Lord, I’m sorry, Adam,’ Maggie groaned. ‘I honestly hadn’t realised that the whole world was listening in. I’ll just—’

  ‘They’re not listening any more,’ he broke in quickly, afraid that she might withdraw again. ‘It’s just you and me, the way it was in the library on a Friday afternoon, remember?’

  The sudden gurgle of laughter at the other end was exactly how he remembered Maggie…his Maggie…the one who was full of laughter, not the serious, studious one that everybody else had seen.

  ‘Until th
e headmaster came in and caught us,’ she reminded him. ‘If you hadn’t lit the candles, he’d never have known we were up there.’

  ‘We couldn’t celebrate your birthday without lighting the candles on your cake,’ he objected, remembering the sudden stab of fear when he’d seen the expression on the joyless man’s face. He’d been so certain that he was going to be thrown out of school before he could take his final exams.

  Then Maggie, his indomitable Maggie had piped up, ‘Would you like a piece of my birthday cake, sir? It’s chocolate with real chocolate icing.’

  The voice coming out of the radio was repeating the words verbatim, and he burst out laughing. ‘Only you would have dared to offer the old dragon a piece of cake when he was ready to breathe fire.’

  ‘Ah, but, then, I was one of the few people who knew that Mr Pendragon had a seriously sweet tooth and couldn’t resist chocolate,’ she said smugly, her Saturday job, when she served the older man with his newspaper and a large bar of chocolate each week having given her the idea.

  ‘Well, he certainly proved it that afternoon,’ Adam grumbled, still sore that the treat he’d organised for Maggie had been so thoroughly hijacked by their headmaster. ‘He ate nearly half of it and it was supposed to be for you.’

  ‘It was the thought that counted more than the cake,’ she said softly, her voice almost lost in the crackles. ‘I knew Mum was upset about working late on my birthday, but I never dreamed that when I told you, you’d go out to the bakery in your lunch-break and bring a cake up to the library.’

  He hadn’t been able to believe it either. Buying a birthday cake for a sixteen-year-old certainly hadn’t been the sort of thing most other seniors would have done, and if his classmates had known about it…or about the fact that, instead of taking advantage of an afternoon without lessons to start the weekend early, he’d been meeting Maggie up in the library for several hours of study…

  About the only part of it that his hormone-ridden classmates would have applauded was the fact that on her sixteenth birthday, in the shadows behind the furthest library stacks, he’d finally found out what it was like to kiss Maggie Pascoe.

  ‘That was my first kiss,’ she said, proving that her thoughts had been following the same inevitable path.

  She’d been so very young when he’d met her, captivated at first by her quicksilver mind and shy sense of fun. He’d thought it would be little more than a quick peck…a token to celebrate the fact that she had officially become a woman. What he hadn’t expected had been that her lips would be so sweet, or that they’d cling softly to his as her arms had come up to twine about his neck, pressing her slender elfin body against his and setting off an unexpected firestorm inside him. It had taken all his self-control not to let things get out of hand and it had almost been a relief when the bell for the end of the school day had sounded stridently right above their heads.

  He’d needed a long cold shower when he returned home that night, but he’d made a promise to himself that, however their relationship went, he wasn’t going to rush Maggie. He was the older of the two of them and it was his responsibility not to rush her through the wonderment of growing up.

  He was determined that, even if he had to suffer frostbite under the shower on a daily basis, he would keep his libido under control, limiting their sexual experimentation to the kisses and cuddles appropriate for someone who had never run with the fast crowd. Just because he was older and ready to take things to a more intimate level, it didn’t mean that he had the right to rush her before she was ready to take that step.

  Neither of them could have known what that year was to bring. At the time that the two of them were laughing, teasing, talking and kissing their way through a glorious Cornish summer they had no idea that the next time they saw each other would be at his father’s funeral and the memorial service for all those who had lost their lives that day.

  ‘I missed you when we moved away,’ he said, only now realising just how deep that emotion had gone. It had been as if an essential part of him had been torn away inside and hadn’t been put back until he’d walked into the staffroom at Penhally Bay Surgery and seen Maggie standing there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I MISSED you when we moved away,’ he said in the darkness, and Maggie’s heart swelled inside her, sending warmth to every part of her.

  She’d never known that before, thinking that when they’d moved away he’d instantly forgotten the skinny bookworm he’d given her first kiss to on her sixteenth birthday.

  For months after he and his mother had moved away she’d waited and hoped that he would write to her, but when nothing had come all she had been left with had been the determination to work hard enough to be accepted at the same medical school he attended. In her teenage mind she’d pictured the day when she would be able to meet him on even ground at least, both of them medical students working towards the same goal. Perhaps then he’d finally realise that she was ready for more than kisses.

  Except while she was making her plans, the one thing she hadn’t counted on was that her mother would become ill.

  ‘Mum had cancer,’ she said, and the stark words still had the power to wound.

  ‘Ah, Maggie, keresik, I’m sorry. Once Mum moved back to be near her family we lost touch with what was going on in Penhally. How long…?’

  ‘She was diagnosed just before I took my last school exams—breast cancer—so even though I got the grades I needed, I couldn’t take up my place at medical school.’ Even this much later she could remember the bitter turmoil inside her as she’d railed against fate.

  Her mother had been the only relative she’d had in the world and because she’d loved her, there had been no way she could have left her to go through the misery of cancer treatment by herself. But that didn’t mean that she hadn’t mourned the destruction of all the plans she’d made for her future, not least the fact that she would once again be able to see Adam on a daily basis.

  ‘What treatment did she have?’ he prompted, and after years of reticence it was almost a relief to be able to talk about it with him. He’d actually met her mother and he was also someone who would understand what she was talking about without having to go into long and involved explanations.

  ‘She had a radical mastectomy and they excised the lymph nodes, too.’ She could still remember her shock when she’d seen her mother for the first time after the surgery. ‘She looked as if she’d aged twenty years overnight,’ she murmured, reliving her terror that her mother wouldn’t survive the night, that she’d be left completely on her own to make her way in the world. ‘The primary tumour was the size of a pigeon’s egg and highly vascularised and every lymph node they took out seemed to be affected. She was an absolute mess by the time they’d finished.’

  ‘Chemo?’ he asked.

  ‘By the time she called it quits she’d had everything they could throw at her,’ Maggie said through a throat that ached with tears. ‘The surgeon seemed so sure that they’d got it all, but somehow they’d missed a tiny tumour in the other breast, and it was one that didn’t respond to the chemo she was on for the other one. By the time they found it and realised what it was…’ She swallowed, recalling the day when her mother had sat her down in their tiny kitchen and told her what the oncologist had found, and what the prognosis was.

  ‘It was very fast growing, very aggressive, and he couldn’t be certain that there weren’t others elsewhere in her body so he…’ She dragged in a quick breath so that she could get the telling over with. ‘He told her that they could hit it with everything they’d got, but the treatment would probably be worse than the disease and there was very little chance that it would be successful. So she’d decided that she would like to spend the time she had left with me rather than in a hospital ward with a load of strangers.’

  It had been a strange time, full of memories recalled and memories made. A time when she’d delighted in driving her mother to all the places that had been special in her life and li
stening as she’d told the tales of people and incidents that had made her who she was. It had been a time when she had been very aware that her mother had been saying good bye to her life and all the things that had made it so rich, and it had obviously given her so much joy and such an air of peace that Maggie had decided that it was what she would want to do when her time came.

  Except now she wasn’t going to have that option, not since half a hillside had come cascading down and buried her before she was even dead.

  Maggie shook her head and firmly pushed that thought into the darkest corner of her mind. She didn’t know whether she had just a few hours left or several days…but, then, was that really any different to anyone else? To Walter Dinnis, for example? One minute he’d been living his life, happily retired and spending the afternoon with his wife, and then the next Betty had been frantically phoning for an ambulance to take him to hospital and Maggie had needed to use the defibrillator to shock his heart back into its proper rhythm.

  So she wasn’t going to sit down here getting more and more maudlin by the minute. She may not have the option of doing it in person, but she was going to do her best to revisit all the events and places that had meant the most to her in her mind. And along the way perhaps she could get the answers to all those questions that had been plaguing her for so long.

  ‘So that explains why you didn’t go to medical school,’ Adam said with the air of someone who had discovered the secrets of the universe. ‘When we met up in London, I couldn’t believe that you’d qualified as a paramedic instead. You’d been so determined to do well in your exams that I was sure you’d be tapping me on the shoulder one day to show me that you’d made it.’