Not that he had any need to check on Cal. Callum Jamieson was one of the best doctors they’d ever been blessed with.

Normally doctors didn’t stay at Crocodile Creek for too long. The work was hard, the place was one of the most remote in the world and doctors tended to treat it almost as a mission. They spent a couple of years here working with the Remote Rescue team, they got their need for excitement out of their system and then they disappeared.

Not Cal. He’d come four years ago and had made no attempt to move. There was something holding him, Charles had decided long before this. Something that didn’t make him want to face the real world. Woman trouble? Charles didn’t know for sure what the whole story was, but he knew more than Cal ever admitted-and he’d met Gina. For now, though, he wasn’t asking questions. Cal was a fine surgeon, and he went that extra step with patients. He really cared. Also, Cal was more gentle and painstaking with the indigenous people than any of the younger doctors who struggled with-and often didn’t care about-their culture. Cal was invaluable to this Remote Rescue Service and Charles was deeply grateful that he had him.

Especially now.

‘I need you in the chopper,’ he told him.

‘Trouble?’

‘Out at the rodeo.’

‘Didn’t Christina and Mike just bring someone in?’

‘Yeah. Joseph Long, with a fractured femur. You’d think kids would have something better to do than to risk life and limb sitting on a steer that doesn’t want to be sat on.’

‘How old were you when you got shot pig-shooting?’ Cal asked mildly. ‘Eighteen? Don’t tell me. Joseph’s…what? Eighteen? You’re telling me that kids should learn a lesson from you and stop being risk-takers?’