Free Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle by Meredith Webber / Jennifer Taylor Page B

probably shouldn’t question.
    And persistent!
    He’d forgotten how persistent she could be, although her arrival here should have reminded him. Once she got an idea in her head, she followed through with it. Back in Africa she’d pushed and worked and wound officials around her little finger until she’d been allowed to run her clinic for the women in the village near the refugee camp, only to have to leave it when called home to her mother.
    ‘Well?’
    Yes, persistent!
    ‘I gather it was about a woman,’ he said, adding, ‘Isn’t it always,’ with considerable asperity, for his thoughts had led him back down paths he hadn’t wished to travel.
    ‘He was attacked with an axe or machete over a woman?’
    She’d lifted her head, her eyes watching him more closely now, as if she might read a lie or evasion in his reply.
    ‘I suppose the other man just grabbed whatever was handy.’
    ‘But the hospital? You didn’t want to send him there.’
    He turned the gas down under the pot and leaned against the small kitchen bench.
    ‘Sending him to a hospital would involve the police. These people have a fear of being locked away and they also do not fare well in a general prison population. They are small, and too fiery for their size. The settlement hasits own wardens—the two men who brought him to me are wardens—and they will deal with him and with his attacker in the appropriate way.’
    Caroline shuddered at his words, although she knew Jorge wouldn’t condone further violence as ‘an appropriate way’. There was more to the story than Jorge was telling—perhaps more than he knew—but here she was, again wanting to probe deeper, to learn more, when it was, as he had used to say, none of her business. Only he’d always said it in Spanish,
Qué te importa,
so it sounded as if her query had been rude, his words a ‘stay out of it’ command.
    Well, she’d stay out of local affairs—after all, it seemed as if she wouldn’t be here even for a full month. Where she’d be when Jorge left she wasn’t certain, but it would be somewhere near where he was. She hadn’t come all this way to give in easily. Besides, now he’d met Ella, Caroline was reasonably sure he’d want to get to know her.
    Perhaps it was time to talk about the future. Surely she could do that without being told,
‘Qué te importa'!
    ‘You said you wouldn’t be here for much longer. Where will you go? To another squatter settlement like this in another city?’
    He looked blankly at her, as if he hadn’t understood a word she’d said, but then blinked himself back from wherever he had been.
    ‘Home,’ he said, but there was little joy in the word.
    ‘Home to your father? He is ill?’
    She sounded concerned but, then, she’d always beenempathetic and perhaps not having known her own father had listened avidly to stories of his. But Jorge had to answer her, and how to answer when he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of his motives himself?
    ‘He is not ill—the very opposite—but he is not getting any younger and I feel not a duty to return but something pulls me back there. He gave so much of his time to me, bringing me up when my mother died, taking time out of his day to do it when he could have left it to Antoinette, that I feel the least I can do is give him a little of my time.’
    ‘Did you go straight home to his place from the hospital in France? Did you recuperate there? ‘
    Caroline sounded interested enough for Jorge to explain further. Besides, talking about his father—about that time—took his mind off the other things he was feeling with Caroline here in his little hut.
    ‘I stayed until I could walk again and my internal wounds had healed. Then I came up here. My father understood my need to get away for a while, to rebuild myself, both physically and mentally, and he would accept my absence if I felt my work here was necessary—if there was no one else who would do it. But the article you must have read