White Christmas with Her Millionaire Doc
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Becky Wicks
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22
CHAPTER ONE
JAX CLAYBORN DROPPED to the wooden bench in the ski lodge and pulled off his mask. Balancing the phone on his shoulder, he slid out of his boots. ‘Talk to me.’
‘The report came in from Gallatin County twenty minutes ago. A male in his fifties was riding his mountain bike alone when he was attacked.’
Dr Fenway’s voice was grave from the medical clinic at Base. ‘You sure it was a grizzly?’ Jax tossed the boots into the locker with his jacket and mask. ‘It’s only just the start of November—they’re supposed to be hibernating.’
‘Something must have happened to lure it out. Mike found the victim by the side of the road.’
‘How big was it?’ Jax knew Mike, one of the rangers. They sometimes skied together. He knew every local within fifty miles of their small Montana town.
‘The bear? The guy said it was damn near eight feet tall, and it almost clawed his arm off. I know you have to get to the airport, but we thought you should hear it from us first.’
Jax snapped the padlock shut on his well-used locker and made for the door. He was running late for the airport already, but flights never arrived on time around here anyway.
He contemplated a grizzly on the rampage as the chairlift juddered with him down the mountainside. The crisp winter air had been cleansing his lungs on a rare morning off. He’d been making a mental note of all the things he’d have to do for the Christmas season’s locum—a certain Ophelia Lavelle. A fitting name for an ER doctor arriving so close to the festive holidays, he thought. His son, Cody, had been the one to inform him that the name had Greek origins and meant ‘helper’.
His new helper was thirty-three, so ten years his junior—not that it mattered. She was board-certified in family medicine, came from a line of doctors with a trusted family practice to their name in Brooklyn Heights, and her enthusiasm for the two-month role had been welcome in her interview a month ago. It was near-on impossible to get talented doctors to come and work all the way out here in winter.
Still, she’d probably never dealt with a grizzly bear attack in the concrete jungle she called home. He sincerely hoped she wouldn’t have to here either.
His father, Abe, was calling. Right away his mind went to Cody...something happening to Cody. Please, no.
‘A grizzly bear, Jax? At this time of year?’ Abe sounded flummoxed. News travelled fast in these parts.
‘It was probably confused and hungry,’ he said in relief. His son was clearly safe, as he always was in his grandfather’s care. ‘I’m sure it’s a one-off attack, but we can’t be too careful. Mike will let the school know if he hasn’t already. Did Cody get to class OK?’
‘He’s fine. He even asked if he could have a coffee for the ride.’
Jax snorted. ‘Coffee? He’s nine!’
‘Anything to be just like his dad, you know that. Are you on your way to the airport for this new...what’s her name?’
‘Ophelia.’ Jax shook his head at the thought of Cody asking for coffee. ‘Almost. The powder was too good this morning, and I lost track of time.’
‘My offer still stands to collect her myself.’
‘I know, and I appreciate it, but I always pick the staff up, you know that.’
‘It’s your call.’
The ski base swept into view at the bottom of the slopes. Jax was grateful beyond words for how his father had chosen to spend his retirement years, sharing the care of his grandson. Jax wouldn’t have coped with Cody on his own after Juno died, not with his duties piling up like snowdrifts on top of his mountain of grief.
It was five years ago he’d started as Chief of Ski Patrol at the only on-mountain resource for residents and vacationers for miles around. He was a qualified physician and the role was something that had seemed to evolve naturally, born from his love and knowledge of the mountain. This would be the third year running he’d brought people in for the Mountain Medicine Programme. Training the rescue volunteers for their Outdoor Emergency Care certificates out in the field in the run-up to Christmas helped channel his experience and always gave him a new sense of purpose. It helped to fill the long dark weeks, and made him feel as if he was at least doing something to ensure that what happened to Juno wouldn’t ever happen to anyone else.
A new lot of students would be here soon, which gave himself and the team a week to show Ophelia the ropes before they arrived.
He thought of the luxury cabin the staff had picked out for her. She’d like the view, for sure. They had more than enough space at Clayborn Creek to house everyone. Better to fill the place with action and laughter over the Christmas period than sink back into grief again over the missing piece—his late wife, Juno. Juno had loved Christmas more than anyone. He celebrated it for Cody now. Everything here was for Cody.
‘Thanks for doing the school run, Dad,’ he said as his toes hit the snow at the ski base. ‘I’ll take over soon as I get back, let you hit the Christmas store in peace.’
‘Did you tell Ophelia about the full-time role yet?’ Abe sounded hopeful, and Jax sighed. His father, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, was looking forward to Carson, their oldest physician’s impending retirement next spring. Probably more than Carson was. The two men had been friends for decades. Abe was already planning their summer fishing trips, and new animal-tracking routes for the kids to explore with them next winter.
‘I haven’t told her that, Dad. You know I don’t advertise full-time positions right off the bat. It scares them off. It would probably scare Carson too. He doesn’t like to think about retiring, it makes him feel old.’
‘He should feel lucky to be old. Some people don’t get that far.’
They were both silent for a moment, thinking of Juno, no doubt. Abe had adored Juno, everyone had. No one had seen it coming, the sudden end to ‘Jax and Juno’, least of all him. They’d been the enviable couple others aspired to be like, he a medic, she an artist, different in every way but somehow aligned in everything that mattered. They’d been married almost eight blissful years before Juno’s accident. He’d lost his mother, Kay, to colon cancer three years before that; it was just the men left now, from three generations. Himself, his father and Cody.
This woman, Ophelia, might be a tough-as-nails New Yorker, with or without any grizzly bear experience, he thought, watching the snow build in the distant clouds, but in order for him to offer anyone a full-time position on his mountain, they would have to prove their worth. They would ultimately become part of their family out here.
‘Small-town life isn’t for everyone, Dad, you know that. How many locums have we had in the past who’ve just disappeared as soon as they could? Anyone can take a full-time position and then hate it here and leave us in the lurch. We don’t need someone like that around here. We’re a team. We’re a family.’
He could almost hear his father roll his eyes. ‘You need to at least try and let new people in, son.’
Jax jumped from the ski lift and raised a hand at Melanie on the snowplough as he headed for the parking lot, keeping mute in the face of antagonism. He was doing just fine, now. At least that was what he told himself most days when the loneliness crept in.
‘Stay indoors, Dad. Keep an eye out for that bear, OK?’ He sighed, then hung up. For some reason, he felt a little nervous about picking up Ophelia. Her pretty, angular face and sleek, ebony-black hair had stuck with him ever since her video interview, but there had been something else about her, lingering in the silent moments during their call. Something he hadn’t been able to put his finger on. Something intriguing. He hoped she’d enjoy the little welcome gift, already waiting for her in the truck.
The direct flight to Bozeman from New York was only four and a half hours. Ophelia Lavelle had distracted herself from the rattling windows and seat-back trays by counting thirteen men with snap-button Western shirts and blue jeans.
It was already glaringly apparent that people from Montana, and in Montana, dressed nothing like they did in New York. A glacial lake appeared below, aqua, white and blue. It took her breath away. There were icebergs too—melted jagged chunks like ice cubes in a blue martini. A steady white waterfall frozen in motion, a giant herd of deer, or antelope. Something was cantering zigzags along a snowy trail. Wow.
The sheer scale and dazzling beauty were like an art museum, created by nature, she thought. Ponderosa pine cover, prairies and snowy peaks were all part of her new home, at least until the end of the year. Dr Jax Clayborn had said his land had been in the family for five generations—some thirty thousand acres of rivers, forests and open grassy plains. On that land, his staff manned almost six thousand acres of skiable terrain, and she’d be working at the medical clinic at Base, out on the snow for the first time without her brother, Ant.
She focused on the cantering herd below them, tracing the silver arrow on the cord around her neck with her fingers. Ant was everywhere, still, even after more than a year.
‘It’s been fifteen months, you need a change of scene,’ her father, Dr Marvin Lavelle, had told her this morning outside Terminal One at JFK. ‘We can discuss the partnership properly when you’re back. Just make sure you come back, OK?’
Her father had been teasing her, of course, but she could tell he was less enthusiastic about her departure than he was letting on. Deep down, he was probably afraid she wouldn’t come back. Things hadn’t exactly been the same, since Ant died.
But here she was, the epitome of fake it till you make it. Taking on a job somewhere crazy before life got less than adventurous. Her future was already set at the family practice, Health Dimensions, in Brooklyn Heights, and she was determined to build up a sense of excitement for it while she was away. It was a great opportunity, a full-time position in the close-knit community she and Ant had grown up in. Some of the kids she’d seen in the waiting room with their parents back then would be her patients soon. The salary was impressive, at last she’d be striking out on her own, and she’d be extending a line of legendary physicians...
She sighed at the window, staring at the mountainous peaks. It sounded so good on paper but, somehow, it just didn’t feel right for her any more.
Health Dimensions had been her grandfather’s practice and he had been the top recommended physician in their zip code. Then her dad took over, changed the name to something more snazzy and promised that some day she and her younger brother, Ant, would join him. ‘Captains at the helm of the family ship,’ he’d said.
Marvin had made it sound like such a grand dream. For years she had ploughed through med school, a fellowship, seventeen-hour night shifts and worse, working to achieve that dream, working to be good enough to impress her father. She’d spent years believing that taking the role with Ant and her father was her dream, and not his.
Still, she wouldn’t let him down, not now Ant was gone. In her father’s eyes she was the only remaining heir to the practice, and he’d lost his only son.
So did you, she thought suddenly. You lost your only son too, along with your brother.
The reminders always came when she wasn’t expecting them. She’d thought about the baby she’d miscarried shortly after Ant’s death for almost the whole flight, maybe because this was the furthest she’d been from the wreath of candles she’d added to her brother’s grave as a memorial to her lost baby. She was further than she’d ever been from either of them now.
Her hand went to her belly. How would he have looked by now, if he’d made it to full term? She’d always imagined it had been a he. She’d called him Little Bean.
The nightmares used to make her howl, all of it at once. She’d lost both Ant and the baby a thousand times over in her dreams. She’d drifted through her days back then like a ghost around her fiancé, Sanjay, thinking if she’d paid more attention to Ant’s ever-growing antisocial habits she might have noticed sooner that he liked a little more than a drink at the end of a long day. Her younger brother had always been more prone to wild nights out than her, but she’d thought he’d stopped all that to focus on med school. She should have checked up on him more frequently, asked him who he was with when he stopped picking up his phone at night. Maybe if she had, he wouldn’t have OD’d in a drunken haze, and she wouldn’t have been such a bad host for a baby.
What was Sanjay doing now? Did he even know she’d left New York? Gazing out of the window, she swore she saw his face in a cloud.
Sanjay had blamed their sudden split on her needing ‘proper care’ after losing the baby, but Ophelia knew he’d been looking for a way out of their engagement long before Ant’s death and the pregnancy. They were just too different, he a jazz musician in three different bands, she a medical professional. Their schedules had never aligned and neither had their priorities. The day he’d broken off the engagement she’d felt a strange kind of relief, as if losing the baby had saved them both somehow from compounding their mistakes.
She had never told anyone that, though. It would have sounded as though she hadn’t wanted to be a mother. She had wanted to be a mother, more than anything. Not like Sanjay. She’d always known his religious father had pressed him into proposing to her when she fell pregnant, but she’d still said yes. And he’d definitely been relieved when the miscarriage let him off the hook. No more Little Bean. No more engagement. No more Sanjay.
‘Just go clear your head, find your peace,’ her sweet, enduring mother, Cecelia, had said only this morning. ‘And come back rested and ready. Your father can’t wait for you to start this new chapter of our lives together. Ant would have been so proud of you.’
Ophelia couldn’t help but wonder if things would really be so peaceful where she was headed. She would still be surrounded by emergencies after all. She tried to picture the Clayborns. She knew from her research they were doctors and environmentalists, and local heroes.
She forgot her worries, suddenly, recalling Jax’s low, gravelly Montana drawl. It had come to her unsummoned from time to time since her interview with him and Dr Carson Fenway. Before that she’d never had a conversation with anyone who had a set of vintage skis mounted on the wall behind him, but it wasn’t just the décor of their million-dollar ski lodge that had stuck with her.
Jax was undeniably handsome. She recalled the way her words had caught in her throat, in spite of her cool demeanour, when she’d first logged on to the call and seen his piercing eyes, the slight dimple in his stubbled chin, the way his broad shoulders and big, strong arms filled out his sweater. He’d been consummately professional, and so had she, but there had been a moment at the end of their conversation, she swore, when they’d met each other’s eyes for a handful of long, silent seconds, seemingly just taking one another in, acknowledging a sudden shared shift in normality. It had left her feeling quite flustered for the rest of the day.
Thinking twice about the real-life Jax waiting for her at the airport, she hastily checked her mascara hadn’t streaked mid-flight. They were almost at Bozeman.
