Dear Reader,
This is the sixth romance in the Wildfire Island Docs series, and it marks the end of one of the most dramatic, exotic series Iâve ever been involved in. Wildfire Island is a tropical paradise. Our heroes and heroines are our ideal lovers, the most skilled, the most gorgeous and the most fun doctors, nurses and paramedics ⦠Oh, and did I mention the most sexy?
Meredith Webber, Alison Roberts and I have loved co-creating our characters, our worlds, our romances. Each is a stand-alone love story, but together we believe theyâre awesome. Linked stories push our creative boundaries, and they deepen our friendship in the process.
Max and Hettieâs story tugged on my heartstrings as I wrote it, and I hope youâll be as touched by it as Iâve been. I love how much they deserve their happy ending. Let me know if you enjoy itâwrite to me at [email protected]. If you love it as much as we do ⦠who knows? We may be recruiting more medics for Wildfire!
Meanwhile, happy reading.
Marion
CHAPTER ONE
THIS COULD BE a disaster instead of a homecoming. He could be marooned at sea until after his daughterâs wedding.
Max wasnât worrying yet, though. Things would be chaotic on Wildfire Island after the cyclone, but the weather had eased and Sunset Beach was a favourite place for the locals to walk. If the rip wasnât so fierce he could swim ashore. He couldnât, but eventually someone would stroll to the beach, see his battered boat and send out a dinghy.
Max Lockhart, specialist surgeon, not-so-specialist sailor, headed below deck and fetched himself a beer. There were worse places to be stuck, he conceded. The Lillyanna was a sturdy thirty-foot yacht, and she wasnât badly enough damaged to be uncomfortable. She was now moored in the tropical waters off Wildfire Island. Schools of tiny fish glinted silver as they broke the surface of the sparkling water. The sun was warm. He had provisions for another week, and in the lee of the island the sea was relatively calm.
But he was stuck. The waters around the island were still a maelstrom. The cliffs that formed the headland above where he sheltered were being battered. To try and round them to get to Wildfire Islandâs harbour would be suicidal, and at some time during the worst of the cyclone his radio had been damaged and his phone lost overboard.
So now he was forced to rest, but rest, he conceded, had been the whole idea of sailing here. He needed to take some time to get his head in order and ready himself to face the islanders.
He also needed space to come to terms with anger and with grief. How to face his daughterâs wedding with joy when he was so loaded with guilt and sadness he couldnât get past it?
But rest wouldnât cut it, he decided as he finished his beer. What he needed was distraction.
And suddenly he had it. Suddenly he could see two people on the island.
A woman had emerged from the undergrowth and was walking a dog on the beach. And up on the headland...another woman was walking towards the cliff edge.
Towards the cliff edge? What the...?
As a kid, Max and his mates had dived off this headland but theyâd only dived when the water had been calm. Theyâd dared each other to dive the thirty-foot drop. Then theyâd let the rip tug them out to this reef, where theyâd catch their breath for the hard swim back. It had kept them happy for hours. It had given their parents nightmares.
For the woman on the headland, though, the nightmare seemed real. She was walking steadily towards the edge.
Suicide? The word slammed into his head and stayed.
He grabbed his field glasses, one of the few things not smashed in the storm, and fought to get them focussed. The woman was young. A crimson shawl was wrapped around a bundle at her breast. A child?
She was walking purposefully forward, closer to the edge. After the cyclone, the water below was a mass of churning foam. Even as a kid heâd known he had to get a run up to clear the rocks below.
âNo!â His yell would be drowned in the wind up there, but he yelled anyway. âDonât...â