by Annie O'Neil
A match made in Scotland
He might have the good looks of a modern-day Viking, but Dr. Brodie McClellan has brooding down to an art. He’s only recently returned to the Isle of Dunregan and already the demons of his past are pushing him to the edge.
Running from her own troubled past, this remote posting is heaven-sent for locum Dr. Kali O’Shea. And Brodie makes her long to find her true home in Scotland...in her new boss’s arms!
Everything about the moment felt forbidden...
And inevitable. She could feel her hair shifting back and forth along her shoulders as Brodie’s hand swept along her back to her waist. The play of his fingers along the curves between her breasts and hips elicited hypersensitive tingles as if she were being lit up from within. If she had thought she knew what being touched by a man was like before, she knew for certain she’d had no idea until now. Each infinitesimal movement of Brodie’s fingertips, hips, even his breath spoke to her very essence.
He untangled their fingers and tipped her chin up as he lowered his lips to meet hers. Tentative at first. A near chaste kiss. Then another. Longer, more inquisitive. His short beard was unbelievably soft. Kali’s fingers crept up to trace along his jawline as his hands cupped hers. Her lips parted, wanting more than anything to taste and explore his full lips. A soft moan passed between the pair of them—she had no idea where it had started or how it had finished, she was only capable of surrendering to the onslaught of sensations. On her skin, inside her belly, shifting and warming, farther, deeper than she’d ever experienced. She felt delicate and protected in his arms. And utterly free to abandon herself to the erotic washes of heat and desire coursing through to her very core.
Dear Reader,
So good to see you here, about to embark on Kali and Brodie’s journey to a Highland HEA. I enjoy writing all of my books, but this one really took hold of my imagination in the form of two different radio stories I heard. I’m a bit of a radio and podcast junkie and soak up stories whenever I’m in the car.
One was a story about an amazing young woman who had been tricked into a “summer break” in her parents’ homeland only to discover it was an arranged marriage. She was rescued by a group who work with the British Embassy but on the condition she never see her family again. As you can imagine, that set the wheels turning.
Then I heard another story about some amazing doctors who, during the recent Ebola crisis in Africa, volunteered to go work with patients under pretty harrowing conditions only to discover, upon their return, reintegrating back into the patient-doctor world of the UK was a lot trickier than they’d anticipated. Cue: more reeling brain cogs.
Those are a lot of extenuating circumstances to deal with! What remains ever dazzling to me about falling in love, and the power of being in love, is what a person can overcome when they’ve found that special someone. This is one of those stories. I hope you enjoy Kali and Brodie’s story, and please do feel free to get in touch no matter what you thought! There’s absolutely no need to feel shy. I can be reached on Twitter, @AnnieONeilBooks, or at [email protected].
Enjoy!
Annie O’ x
HER HOT HIGHLAND DOC
Annie O’Neil
Books by Annie O’Neil
Harlequin Medical Romance
Hot Latin Docs
Santiago’s Convenient Fiancée
Christmas Eve Magic
The Nightshift Before Christmas
The Monticello Baby Miracles
One Night, Twin Consequences
Doctor...to Duchess?
One Night...with Her Boss
London’s Most Eligible Doctor
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This book goes out to—and I’m stealing her phrase here—the best friend I never met, the marvelous Nettybean. She’s ALWAYS there for me and I am ever grateful. Thanks, Netts—hope you don’t mind having to go to an inclement Scottish Island for a big slice of gratitude pie!
xx Annie O’
Praise for Annie O’Neil
“This is a beautifully written story that will pull you in from page one and keep you up late and turning the pages.”
—Goodreads on Doctor...to Duchess?
Annie O’Neil won the 2016 RoNA Rose Award for her book Doctor...to Duchess?
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EXCERPT FROM HIS PREGNANT ROYAL BRIDE BY AMY RUTTAN
CHAPTER ONE
NO AMOUNT OF torrential rain unforgivingly lashing his face would equal the storm brewing inside of Brodie McClellan. Not today. Not tomorrow. A month of Sundays wouldn’t come close.
And yet he had to laugh...even though everything he was feeling was about as far off the spectrum of “funny ha-ha” as laughter could get. He’d seen death on a near daily basis for the months he’d been away, but this one...? This one had him soul-searching in the one place he’d longed to leave behind. Blindsided didn’t even come close to what he was feeling.
“Hey, Dad.”
He crouched low to the ground, unable to resist leveling out a small hillock of soft soil soaked through with the winter rains. The earth appeared months away from growing even a smattering of grass to cover his father’s grave. It was no surprise that his brother hadn’t come good on his promise to lay down some turf. It was difficult enough to drag him down from the mountains, let alone—
Enough. Callum had a good heart, and he had to be hurting, too.
Brodie dragged his fingers through the bare earth again. Time would change it. Eventually. It would become like his mother’s—the grave just to the left. The one he still couldn’t bear to look at. He moved his fingers behind him, feeling long-established grass. A shocking contrast to the bare earth in front of him.
Yes, time would change it. Just as it had all the graves, each one protected with a thick quilt of green. Time he didn’t have nor wanted to give to Dunregan. Not after all it had taken from him.
He scanned the parameters of the graveyard with a growing sense of familiarity. Brodie had spent more time here in the past fortnight than he had in a lifetime of growing up on the island. Asking, too late, for answers to all the questions he should have asked before he’d left Dunregan in his wake.
Gray. It was all he could see. Gray headstones. Gray skies. Gray stones making up the gray walls. A color washout.
He ran a hand across the top of his father’s headstone. “We’ll get this place fixed up for you, Father. All right? Put in some flowers or something.”
A memory pinged into his head of Callum and himself, digging up snowdrop bulbs when he’d been just a young boy. His father counting out a few pence for each cluster. He swiped his face to clear off the rain, surprised to discover he was smiling at the memory of his paltry pocket money. The small towers of copper pennies had seemed like riches at the time.
“I’ll get you some snowdrops, eh, Dad? Those’ll be nice. And some bluebells later on? For you and Mum. She always loved bluebell s
eason.”
He shook his head when he realized he was waiting for an answer.
“It’s a bit of a nightmare at the clinic. I’ve had to call in a locum. It’ll buy me time until I figure out how to explain to folk that it’s okay. I’m okay.”
He looked up to the skies again, unsurprised to find his mood was still as turbulent as the weather. Wind was blowing every which where. Rain was coming in thick bursts. Cold. It was so ruddy cold up here on Dunregan.
He pressed his hands to his thighs, stood up and cursed softly. Mud. All over his trousers.
For the few minutes it took to drive home Brodie tried his best to plumb a good mood from somewhere in the depths of his heart. He wasn’t this guy. This growling, frowning man whose image he kept catching in the rearview mirror. He was a loving son. Older sibling to a free-spirited younger brother. Cousin, nephew, friend. And yet he felt like a newcomer. A stranger amidst a sea of familiarity. A man bearing more emotional weight on his shoulders than he’d ever carried before.
He pulled the car into the graveled drive in front of the family home, only to jam the brakes on.
“What the—?”
Wood. A huge stack of timber filling the entire driveway. He’d barely spoken to anyone since he’d returned to Dunregan, let alone ordered a pile of wood!
Brodie jumped out of his four-by-four and searched for a delivery note. He found it tucked under a stack of quarter-inch plywood. His eyes scanned the paper. The list of cuts and types of wood all began to slot into place, take on form...build one very particular item.
The boat.
The boat he and his father had always promised they would build.
The one he’d never been able to think about after that day when he’d come home from sailing without his mother.
Another sharp sting of emotion hit and stuck in his throat.
Today.
All he had to do was get through today. And then tomorrow he’d do it all over again, and then one more time until the pain began to ebb, like the tides surrounding the island he’d once called home.
* * *
Kali’s grip tightened on her handlebars.
The elements vs the cyclist.
Game on.
She lifted her head, only to receive a blast of wind straight in the face. Her eyes streamed. Her nose was threatening to run. Her hair...? That pixie cut she’d been considering might’ve been a good idea. So much for windswept and interesting. Windswept and bedraggled was more like it—but she couldn’t keep the grin off her face.
Starting over—again—was always going to be an uphill struggle, but she hadn’t thought this particular life reboot would be so physical!
Only one hundred more meters between Mother Nature’s finest blasts of Arctic wind and a hot cup of tea. Who would win? Fledgling GP? Or the frigid forces of Scotland’s northernmost islands?
Another briny onslaught of wind and sea spray sent Kali perilously close to the ditch. A ditch full of...ugh. One glimpse of the ice-skinned murk convinced her to swing a leg off her vintage-style bicycle and walk. A blast of icy water shot up from her feet along her legs, giving her whole body a wiggle of chills. She looked down at the puddle her ballerina flats–clad feet had landed in.
Splatterville. A shopping trip for boots and a proper jacket might be in order. So much for the romantic idea of tootling along Dunregan’s coast road and showing up to her first day of work with rosy-cheeked panache. There were tulips blooming all over the place in London! How long was it going to take the Isle of Dunregan to catch up?
“Dr. O’Shea?”
A cheery fifty-something woman rode up alongside her, kitted out in a thick waterproof jacket, boots, woolen mittens, hat...everything Kali should’ve been wearing but wasn’t. Her green eyes crackled with mischief...or was that just the weather?
“Yes.” Kali smiled, then grimaced as the wind took a hold of her facial features. She must look like some sort of rubber-lipped cartoon character by now!
“Ailsa Dunregan.” She hopped off her bike and walked alongside Kali, and laughed when Kali’s eyes widened. “Yes. I know, it’s mad, isn’t it? Same name as the island. Suffice it to say, my family—or at least my husband’s family—has been here a long time. My family’s only been here a few hundred years.”
Hundred?
“How’d you know it was me?”
Ailsa threw back her head and laughed. The sound was instantly yanked away by the wind. “Only someone not from Dunregan would—”
Kali struggled to make out what she was saying, her own thoughts fighting with the wind and making nothing comprehensible.
“Sorry?” Kali tried to push her bike a bit closer and keep up the brisk pace the woman was setting.
“I’m the practice nurse!” Ailsa shouted against the elements. “I get all the gossip, same as the publican, and not too many people come to the island this time of year.”
Kali nodded, only just managing to keep her bike upright with the approach of another gust.
“It has its merits!” Kali shouted back when she’d regained her footing.
“You think?” Ailsa hooted another laugh into the stratosphere. “If you’re after a barren, desolate landscape...” she groaned as her own cycle was nearly whipped out of her hands “...you’ve come to the right place!”
As if by mutual agreement they both put their heads down, inching their cycles along the verge. Kali smiled into the cozy confines of her woolen scarf—her one practical nod to the subzero temperature. Compared to the other obstacles she’d faced, this one was easy-peasy. Just a healthy handful of meters between her and her new life.
No more hiding. No more looking over her shoulder. Okay, so she still had a different name, thanks to the heaven-sent Forced Marriage Protection Unit, and there were a boatload of other issues to deal with one day—but right here, right now, with the wind blowing more than the cobwebs away, she felt she really was Kali O’Shea. Correction! Dr. Kali O’Shea. Safe and sound on the uppermost Scottish Isle of Dunregan.
As if it had actual fingers, the frigid tempest abruptly yanked her bicycle out of her hands, sending her into a swan dive onto the rough pavement and the bicycle skidding into the ditch. The deep ditch. The one she’d have to clamber into and probably shred her tights.
She looked down at her knees as she pressed herself up from the pavement. Nope! That job was done already. Nice one, Kali. So much for renaming herself after the goddess of empowerment. The goddess of grace might’ve been a better choice.
“Oh, no! Are you all right, darlin’?” Ailsa was by her side in a minute.
Kali fought the prick of tears, pressing her hands to her scraped knees to regroup. C’mon, Kali. You’re a grown woman now.
If only...
No. Focus on the positives. She didn’t do “if onlys” anymore.
“What’s going on here?”
A pair of sturdy leather boots appeared in Kali’s eyeline. They must go with the rich Scottish brogue she was hearing.
“You pulling patients in off the streets now, Ailsa?”
Kali’s eyes zipped up the long legs, skidded across the thick wax jacket and landed soundly on... Ooh... She’d never let herself think she had a type, but this walking, talking advert for a Scandi-Scottish fisherman type with...ooh, again!...the most beautiful cornflower-blue eyes...
She swallowed.
He might be it. There was something about him that said...safe.
Thirtyish? With a straw-blond thatch of hair and a strong jawline covered in facial hair a few days past designer stubble to match. She’d never thought she was one to go for a beardy guy, but with this weather suddenly it made sense. She wondered how it would feel against her cheek. Reassuringly scratchy or unexpectedly soft?
She blinked away the thought and refoc
used.
He was no city mouse. That was for sure. It wouldn’t be much of a step to picture him on a classic motorbike, lone wolfing it along the isolated coastline. And he was tall. Well... Everyone was tall compared to her, but he had a nice, strong, mountain-climber thing going on. You didn’t see too many men like that in London. Perhaps they were all hiding out here, in Scotland’s subarctic islands, waiting to rescue city slickers taken out by the elements.
“All right, darlin’?” He put a hand on her shoulder, his eyes making a quick visual assessment, gave a satisfied nod and headed for the steep embankment. “Here, I’ll just grab your bicycle for you.”
Chivalrous to boot!
Strange how she didn’t even know him and yet her shoulder seemed to almost miss his touch when he turned toward the ditch.
Kali’s hormones all but took over her brain, quickly redressing her Knight in Shining Gore-tex in Viking clothes. Then a kilt. And then a slick London suit, just to round off the selection. Yes. They all fit. Every bit as much as his hardy all-weather gear was complementing him now. Maybe he’d just come from an outdoor-clothing catalog shoot.
“Brodie?” Ailsa called to him as he affected a surfing-style skid down the embankment toward the ditch. “She’s no patient! This is Kali O’Shea. The new GP.”
“Ah.”
Brodie came to a standstill, hands shifting up to his hips. His bright blue eyes ricocheted up to Kali, to Ailsa and then back to Kali before he took a decisive step back up the bank.
Kali’s eyes widened.
Was he taking back his generous offer?
Abruptly he knelt, grabbed the bike by a single handle and tugged it out of the ditch.
“Here you are, then.”
In two long-legged strides he was back atop the embankment, handing over the bike as if it were made out of pond scum...which, now, it kind of was. In two more he was slamming the door to his seen-better-days four-by-four, which he’d parked unceremoniously in the middle of the road.
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