Page 23 of Stranded with the Surgeon

‘The swelling’s gone down quite a lot.’

Guy took the bag of first-aid supplies and smeared antiseptic cream over the raw patches before covering them with gauze dressings. Then he sliced a crepe bandage in half lengthways to make a narrow strip, which he used to bind the dressings in place.

‘This should work like extra socks,’ he commented. ‘Might make the shoes fit a bit better as well. Now.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Let’s see that arm.’

The cardboard splint had become soggy way back when the snow had gone up her sleeve that morning. It was doing little to support the fracture, but Jennifer’s arm still felt exposed and vulnerable when the splint was removed along with the bandage.

‘Any paraesthesia?’ Guy queried.

‘A bit,’ Jennifer admitted. ‘Just in the tips of my ring and little fingers.’ The tingling had started after that fall.

‘Can you squeeze my hand?’

His fingers felt wonderfully warm and solid. Jennifer closed her hand around them and held on. It was worth the pain.

‘Pretty weak,’ Guy said with a grunt. ‘You’ll have to watch you don’t put any real weight on that arm tomorrow.’ He uncurled her fingers and removed his hand. ‘I’ll find a stick or two we can splint it with. That cardboard’s useless.’

‘What about your ankle?’ Jennifer asked when he returned. ‘And that nasty cut on your leg?’

‘They’ll keep.’ Guy bound her arm firmly. ‘I’m going to collect some leaves for the base of our shelter and then’ – he smiled at Jennifer – ‘I’m going to make the best soup you’ve ever tasted in your life.’

It was more like faintly chicken-flavoured hot water, with only two packets of dehydrated soup dissolved in a whole billy full of boiling water, but Guy was right.

It was more delicious than anything Jennifer could remember. The thin layer of noodles at the bottom was a bonus. They took turns drinking from the billy after it had cooled enough to handle, and used their fingers to scoop up the noodles. They sat on the foil sheet spread over a layer of dead leaves beneath the tarpaulin Guy had tethered between two large boulders, and they basked in the warmth radiating from the roaring fire in front of them.

‘Try and get some sleep,’ Guy advised. ‘We’ve got another hard day ahead of us tomorrow. I’ll keep the fire going as long as I can.’

The padding of two anoraks was enough to make leaning against the smooth rock almost comfortable but, as tired as she was, Jennifer didn’t feel inclined to sleep.

‘Do you still think you know where we are? What direction we need to go in?’

Guy’s grunt was noncommittal. ‘Roughly. Whether we can keep to it is another matter. Depends on how many bluffs we need to get past and how dense the forest is. If the weather closes in, we’ll be in real trouble.’

Jennifer sat quietly for several minutes. She would have considered herself in real trouble already if it wasn’t for Guy. After today she was quite prepared to trust in his leadership, wherever that took them. Okay, so he hadn’t rushed back to help her when she had fallen on the snow slope, but she had coped, hadn’t she?

He hadn’t slackened his pace for the rest of the day either, but she had kept up. Trying to prove to Guy that she was capable of more than he thought had pushed her physical boundaries further than she would have imagined possible, and a part of her was feeling pretty damned proud of herself right now.

Guy’s movement as he added more wood to the fire drew her attention, and Jennifer knew he wouldn’t realise he was being observed from the darkness of the small shelter. She watched as he hunkered down beside the flames and stretched his hands towards the warmth. His physical size alone was enough to give the impression of great strength, but there was something far more solid about this man than mere physical attributes.

The flickering firelight illuminated his features enough for Jennifer to see a repose that was startling. The sadness was only to be expected. How many times that day would Guy’s thoughts have returned to Digger? A lot more than hers had, and that had been frequent enough. How much pain had he had to cope with in the past to have reached the level of acceptance he was unknowingly projecting at the moment? And where did anybody gain the strength of character to actually seem at peace in a situation like this?

He belongs here, Jennifer realised suddenly. He was a part of this landscape… The way she had felt for those fleeting moments when watching the sunset on the lake surface. But she didn’t feel like that now. She felt left out. And lonely.

‘You don’t like talking much, do you?’

Guy flicked a brief glance in her direction and then shrugged. ‘Is that necessarily a fault? Maybe I’m a good listener.’

She could imagine that to be true. Guy was probably as dependable as a GP as he was proving as a leader in a survival situation. How many people trusted him with their secrets and their health? Even their lives? Jennifer had the strong impression that once you earned loyalty from Dr Knight, you would never lose it. She liked that. It was the kind of dependability her father had always demonstrated. The kind of man Digger must have been.

Guy obviously misinterpreted her sigh. ‘Did you have something you wanted to talk about?’ he asked.

‘Not really.’ Jennifer chuckled softly. ‘I must have bad karma, I guess. I’ve never been so cut off from the rest of the world and I’m stuck with someone who hates me.’

‘I don’t hate you. I don’t even know you.’

‘You think you do. You think I’m useless. Posh. One of a “type” you clearly have no time for.’

‘You’re rich and famous. Highly successful and very popular. You must be used to living in luxury. It doesn’t give us a lot in common, does it?’

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