A Kiss To Melt Her Heart. Emily Forbes

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СКАЧАТЬ drawing and it lent a surreal air to her surroundings.

      Inside, the building was full of people who, she assumed, were summer expeditioners. They were milling around, waiting to get on the plane that would fly them home for winter, but despite the crowd it wasn’t any warmer inside the building. The only difference in here was that more people had their heads and faces uncovered.

      ‘Dr Thompson?’

      She turned at the sound of her name and, recognising the Scottish burr of the man’s voice, she smiled as she greeted him. ‘You must be John.’ His accent was much more similar to what she’d expected to encounter. John was the doctor she had come to replace and while she had dealt with him before through the AMU, the Antarctic Medicine Unit, it had only been over the phone, never in person, and it was good to be able to put a face to his name.

      He was able to give her a brief handover but Sophie was relieved to hear he’d left detailed instructions for her at the station. Knowing he had more pressing things on his mind—his daughter’s scheduled surgery—she insisted she would be fine. ‘Just make sure you call with an update on Marianna’s condition,’ she said, before saying farewell to him as he made his way to the refuelled aircraft.

      Alex appeared at her side as the terminal emptied of people. ‘We’re good to go,’ he told her.

      He kept up a steady stream of conversation from the moment she climbed into the Hägglund and she was grateful that he didn’t appear to expect too much in the way of replies from her.

      He was entertaining company, keeping her amused with stories from the ice and telling her what to expect. She was quite interested in how a rugby player from the warm climate of Queensland had adjusted to the indoor life at an Antarctic station.

      ‘We spend more time outside than you’d think,’ he responded. ‘The weather is cold but it’s often clear and fine. You’ll be able to get out and go exploring. Do you know how to ride a quad bike?’

      ‘No.’ Sophie shook her head.

      ‘No worries. I’ll teach you. That’s part of my role as the FTO. It’s my job to train the other expeditioners, including you, in station safety procedures, survival skills, how to operate snowmobiles, quad bikes and the like. I’m also one of your medical support team.’

      Sophie knew that some of the expeditioners had done some basic medical training and were able to assist her in an emergency situation, helping with suturing, anaesthetic monitoring and acting as scrub nurses among other things, but as Alex talked she found herself becoming increasingly nervous as it really sank in that she would be the only doctor for hundreds of miles and solely responsible for all the crew at the station.

      She was feeling quite overwhelmed. She’d thought she’d be excited but everything was far more foreign than she’d anticipated, including the landscape. The pictures and videos she’d seen hadn’t prepared her for the rather alien scenery that filled the windows. Vast expanses of ice stretched into the distance. She could see mountains of ice but the only thing that broke the expanse of white was the occasional rocky outcrop.

      The landscape looked relatively flat but she could feel corrugations under the caterpillar treads of the Hägglund, making it seem as though they were going up and down over crests of waves. Alex told her that was exactly what happened. The wind formed the snow into drifts that then froze, making waves in the surface. In some places, where the ice rose up in thicker drifts that absorbed red light from the spectrum, the ice appeared more blue than white, but mostly it was a blinding glare that made her feel she needed to close her eyes even with her sunglasses on.

      ‘Doc? We’re almost here.’

      Alex woke her as they approached the station. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep but the interior of the over-snow vehicle was warm and cosy, and despite the excitement of her new surroundings she was exhausted. She hadn’t slept the night before—she’d had to be at the airport by three-thirty in the morning and she hadn’t seen much point in going to bed first so she’d stayed up, double-checking her packing. She’d taken out clothes and put in a few nonessential luxury items that other women who had worked on the ice suggested she take—a nice dress, decent shampoo, a thick bath towel, sheepskin boots—and as much as she hadn’t wanted to miss anything on the seventy-kilometre trip from the airstrip to the station she’d been lulled to sleep by the monotonous sound of the diesel engine and the warmth of the cabin.

      ‘I thought you might like a first glimpse of your temporary home,’ Alex said, as they came over a crest in the snow.

      The station was spread out before her. It was perched on the edge of a natural harbour and while Sophie had seen photos the scale still took her by surprise. Close to a dozen brightly painted buildings were scattered over the snow, as if someone had spilt a handful of children’s building blocks. The buildings were a collection of shipping containers welded together to form larger structures, exactly the same as the buildings at the airstrip but on a bigger scale.

      Sophie knew the bright paint scheme—red, yellow, blue and orange—was to make the buildings distinguishable from each other in blizzard conditions. The colour each ‘shed’ was painted depended on its function, but the brightness of the paint made the buildings look out of place, a blight on the landscape and a stark contrast to the ancient, icy plateau surrounding her.

      A large dock poked out into the harbour and parked on the dock and scattered between the buildings were dozens of vehicles—trucks, graders, snowmobiles and trailers. Antennae and tanks, for water and gas storage, she suspected, sprouted out of the ground between the sheds, competing for space on the ice.

      Her nervousness kicked up another notch. This was the station, her home for the next few weeks, and the little outpost of civilisation looked even more alien than the landscape.

      ‘Welcome to Carey,’ Alex said, as he brought the Hägglund to a stop in front of the largest of the buildings. This building was painted bright red and it was one thing Sophie did recognise. It was called, not surprisingly, ‘the red shed’, and it housed the accommodation block, the kitchen and the medical centre, and it was where she expected to spend most of her time.

      Sophie pulled her gloves back on, squared her shoulders and climbed out of the cabin as she told herself everything would all be all right.

      The wind whipped past her cheeks, making them ache with the cold after the warmth of the vehicle. She reached for the neck warmer and pulled it up over the lower half of her face.

      ‘Doc, welcome.’

      A tall, solidly built man greeted her as he strode across the ground without a hint of the clumsiness she herself had felt as she’d negotiated the icy conditions. This man looked completely comfortable in the alien environment. He was dressed in a bright red cold-weather suit, identical to hers, but like Alex he had his head and face uncovered and exposed to the elements. The only concession he made to the conditions was in the form of sunglasses to protect against the blinding glare of the sun. Didn’t anyone else think it was cold?

      He stopped in front of her and Sophie looked up, way up.

      He was several inches taller than her and she stood five feet seven inches. His dark hair was cropped short and sprinkled with a little salt and pepper, and a dark, neatly trimmed beard covered the bottom half of his oval-shaped face.

      ‘I’m Gabe Sullivan, the station leader.’

      So this was the man whose job it was to run Carey Station. This was her new boss.

      He СКАЧАТЬ