Guilty Secret

by Josie Metcalfe

  It wasn’t as if there was much housework left to do either. She hadn’t slept at all on Friday night and then had spent half the day yesterday using frantic activity to try to subdue her fury at Martin’s pronouncement. But she certainly couldn’t face that wallpaper, much though the job needed doing. All she had to do was look at the carrier bag and she was seeing the drops of water that had run down his clever face and dripped onto the plastic.

  It was a very short journey from that image to the one where the two of them had been intimately entwined under the pelting spray of the shower, laughing as they’d licked the drops of water from each other’s faces…bodies…

  ‘Dammit! I might as well go in and clear some paperwork!’ she exclaimed in disgust when her body began to respond to the mental pictures. The rest of the staff in the practice already knew how hard she found the empty weekends when Laura and Katie were with their father, so it shouldn’t raise any eyebrows that she was there on one of her precious days off.

  Even if they were to make a comment, she rationalised as she set off in an unexpected flurry of snow-flakes, she had Martin’s latest bombshell as a valid reason for her unrest. She could only thank God that none of them would ever know what else had happened to her this weekend. They would probably never believe that she could have done something so out of character…so potentially dangerous…as to go to bed with a complete stranger.

  The increasingly treacherous journey into the surgery started with a car filled with the conflicting emotions of guilt and relief—guilt at what she’d done and relief that her house was isolated enough that no one would have known how long her visitor had stayed last night or what time he’d finally left this morning.

  By the time she gingerly slotted her car into one of the spaces in the staff car park she’d run through the gamut of emotions, finally working her way to regret—the realisation that even if a similar opportunity arose, it wouldn’t…couldn’t happen again.

  Making that decision helped to calm her jumping nerves, as did the prospect of familiar tasks. There was something very soothing about being in the everyday surroundings of the staffroom, not least because they held absolutely no memories of a certain tall, dark and handsome man who had passed through her life so spectacularly.

  She was sorting through the pile of junk mail which had accumulated in her pigeonhole by the time her sense of humour surfaced.

  ‘I wonder…Does that mean I went to bed with a toy boy?’ she murmured with a hastily stifled chuckle. Johnny would certainly qualify on several counts, not least the fact that he must be several years younger than she was, indisputably good-looking and apparently completely unencumbered. ‘And if one of the requirements is that he should know how to satisfy a woman, he certainly gets full marks from me!’

  ‘What are you muttering about?’ demanded Jack Lawrence as he struggled into the room with one hand full of paperwork. The other was clutching the mono-grammed medical bag his proud GP father had given him to celebrate the completion of his GP training. ‘You’re not on duty today, are you?’

  ‘Neither are you,’ she retorted smartly. ‘And unless your social life has collapsed dramatically, you haven’t got the excuse of an empty house to tempt you into doing voluntary overtime.’

  ‘Hey! I resent that!’ he exclaimed with an indignant scowl. ‘Can I help it if everybody is attracted to my charm and my sweet nature?’

  Frankie blew a raspberry. It was probably his looks and his taste in cars, as much as anything, that all the women around went for. ‘So, if you’re so attractive to everybody, what are you doing here? Wouldn’t you rather keep your pride and joy nice and safe in the garage than take it out where someone might skid into it?’

  ‘Of course I would, but, then, I’m such a self-sacrificing sort of person that I’ve turned out to form the welcoming committee,’ he said righteously. ‘You remember? Nick Johnson, an old colleague from our training days, is joining the practice. It’s worked out well, now that he and Vicky are getting married.’

  Frankie remembered. Vicky Lawrence was Jack’s younger sister and had returned home to her roots to nurse in Denison Memorial Hospital. Jack had come in for some ribbing when his sister and his old friend Nick had finally become engaged some twelve years after he’d first introduced them. Confirmed-bachelor Jack hadn’t been able to understand why they’d suddenly decided to ‘get serious’ and he had backpedalled rapidly when some members of staff had suggested that it would be his turn next to take the plunge into matrimony.

  ‘I did an on-call swap with Joe for today so that I could spend some time showing Nick around,’ Jack was explaining while he measured coffee into the filter with his usual haphazard panache and set the coffee machine going. Then we can dump him right in at the deep end tomorrow.’

  Frankie winced when she saw how strong the brew was going to be. She could do with another shot of caffeine but that was going to need diluting with a hefty whack of milk and sugar if it wasn’t going to corrode her insides.

  She turned back to her task, deciding that she’d wait until Jack had taken their new recruit off on a tour of the unit before she helped herself.

  She was quite glad, now, that she’d come in today. The new man had been formally interviewed by the three most senior members of the practice and had met most of the others, but for some reason she hadn’t seen him before. All she knew was that he and Jack had first met when they’d begun their medical training together in the city, and had kept up the friendship ever since.

  She was deep into her perusal of yet another flyer for yet another all-singing, all-dancing drug preparation when there was a brief tap on the door beside her, then it swung open. From her position behind it, she couldn’t see who was there but Jack’s reaction left her in no doubt.

  ‘You’re here!’ he exclaimed with a broad grin. ‘I was beginning to wonder if the weather was going to frighten you off. Hey, Frankie, come out from behind there and meet my old friend, Nick Johnson. Johnny, this is Frankie Long.’ He paused, obviously struck by what he’d just said. ‘Hey! How about that? Frankie and Johnny. Do you remember that song?’

  Frankie couldn’t have answered if her life had depended on it. She was barely able to remember how to breathe, let alone form a coherent sentence, as she stared into disastrously familiar blue eyes.

  Of all the people she had expected to see walking into this room, he would have been the last one in the world.

  Why hadn’t he said something so that she could have been prepared for this? Surely he must have realised that she’d thought he’d been delivering that damned wallpaper because he was somehow connected with the shop? Was he going to say something to Jack?

  Her heart was pounding with dread, the sound of it almost deafening as she forced herself to hold the man’s gaze.

  He was smiling at her, his blue eyes very clear and focused, and suddenly she somehow knew that he was going to keep their secret.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Jack,’ he chided easily. ‘Of course Frankie and I have met. You left a message at Reception yesterday, telling me to go and collect the mobile phone and paperwork from her house, and a map showing me how to get there.’ He held up the items in question and it was the first Frankie had realised that they had even disappeared from the table in her hallway.

  She managed a weak answering smile, but it wasn’t until her brain started to work logically again that she realised that she had nothing to fear from this man.

  He hadn’t been caught on the hop with the introduction because he’d already known who she was. Besides, if Johnny, her incomparable lover of last night, was also Nick Johnson, new GP in the practice, he was engaged to Jack’s sister and would have just as much reason to keep their brief encounter quiet as she did.

  Her relief that her disastrous lapse in propriety wasn’t going to have repercussions was enormous, so much so that for a moment it overwhelmed everything else. It was only when the two men had left to take their tour around the building that other e
motions began to surface.

  The first was a crashing sense of disillusionment that such an attractive man should have waited so long to pledge himself to a woman—they’d known each other for twelve years, for heaven’s sake—and before they even made their way up the aisle, he was willing to cheat on her. Were all men just like Martin under the skin? Were none of them prepared to be faithful?

  The fact that he had been the most sensitive, caring, passionate lover she’d ever known became much less attractive when she realised that she must just be one among many on whom he’d practised his wiles.

  With the shine well and truly taken off her memories, her home had seemed a far less threatening place than the practice. The last thing Frankie needed was to spend any more time in Nick’s presence until she’d got her scrambled emotions under control. There was also the prospect that Martin might need to drop the girls off early if the condition of the roads became any worse.

  In the end, she’d opted to do the dreaded wallpapering and had taken a savage delight in stripping the walls in her bedroom while she planned how she was going to rearrange the furniture.

  ‘By the time I’ve finished in here, there won’t be a single thing to remind me of my stupidity,’ she vowed as she scrubbed the denuded walls clean, wishing wryly that she could scrub her memory, too.

  The paint around the windows was still too wet to allow her to hang the curtains but, apart from that, the whole room was finished by the time she heard Martin’s car draw up outside the house.

  She watched Laura and Katie climb out and knew instantly that Martin had told them of his plans. She could see immediately that these weren’t the same lively chattering girls who had left two days ago but what she didn’t know was what they felt about his plans.

  Tears prickled the back of her eyes when she realised just how skewed her priorities had become since she’d last seen her precious daughters. What sort of a mother was she? She should have been worrying about how they would cope with the turmoil looming on the horizon, with the possibility that they might soon be going to live with their father and his new wife. Instead, she’d been falling into bed with a complete stranger and then obsessing about her ability to work with the man on a daily basis.

  Monday morning arrived far too soon for Frankie’s peace of mind even though she couldn’t wait for the disastrous weekend to be over.

  She still hadn’t managed to have a decent night’s sleep—that made three in a row—and the sullen mood Laura had brought back from her visit with her father hadn’t improved overnight either. Even Katie was more subdued than usual, her natural bounce completely absent at breakfast.

  Without making too much of it, Frankie had tried to find out what Martin had said to them, but neither was forthcoming beyond the bald statement from Laura that he was redecorating their bedrooms ready for when they moved in.

  Frankie was still silently cursing her ex-husband’s lack of sensitivity in breaking his intentions to them without her input when she dropped the girls off at school, and was mentally composing a blistering diatribe, which she’d probably never have the chance to deliver, all the way to the hospital.

  The car park was chaotic, with far too many people taking advantage of the fact that the parking bay markings were covered in snow to park wherever would afford them the least trek through the treacherous stuff.

  There had been several inches of it in her driveway at home and she suddenly realised that neither Katie nor Laura had bothered to do so much as make a snowball out of the tempting layer. If she needed anything to tell her how much the new situation was affecting them, that was the proof. And she had absolutely no idea how to persuade them to talk to her.

  At nine and eleven, they were growing faster than Japanese knotweed and even though she’d taken care of them for most of their young lives, she suddenly realised that she didn’t even know if they were secretly glad that they were going to be living with their father soon. After all, she was a busy GP. There wasn’t nearly enough time for her to do all the things with them that Martin’s stay-at-home wife would.

  The phone rang in the staffroom, dragging her out of her self-condemnation with the short buzz that told her it was an internal call.

  ‘Oh, hello, Dr Long,’ said Jane Pelly, youngest of the three practice receptionists. ‘I didn’t know you’d arrived yet. Is Dr Lawrence there?’

  ‘Sorry, Jane. It’s just me and the never-ending piles of paperwork. Perhaps he’s been delayed by the state of the roads.’

  ‘Drat!’ the young woman muttered, already sounding frazzled in spite of the relatively early hour.

  ‘Anything I can do to help?’ Frankie offered rashly, suddenly feeling the need to see something other than the usual run of winter coughs and colds to jump-start her day.

  ‘I’m actually trying to track down the new man, Dr Johnson,’ Jane explained, sending Frankie’s stomach into a slow roll. ‘I know he’s a friend of Dr Lawrence’s and I was hoping he’d know how I could get in contact in a hurry.’

  ‘Problem?’ In spite of her reaction to the man’s name, there was something in the tone of Jane’s voice that was tightening her nerves with a different tension.

  ‘One of the school buses has skidded and crashed. He’s down as an A and E specialist, and we’re going to need him.’

  ‘Have you got the number of the spare mobile phone?’ Frankie suggested. ‘I believe Jack organised for him to take it home with him yesterday.’

  ‘Fantastic!’ Jane exclaimed fervently. ‘I’ll try it. In the meantime, if you’ve got a few minutes free to take a look at the collection of walking wounded…’

  ‘You tell me,’ Frankie countered, her pulse already picking up as the surge of adrenaline kicked in. ‘What time is my first patient due and what are the chances they’ll be able to get here?’

  There was a brief pause while Jane consulted the list. ‘Not due for another fifteen or twenty minutes and they’ll probably be held up at the crash site as they’ll be coming in that way. If you could cover until I find out whether Dr Johnson’s on his way…’

  That was one of the advantages of working in a small place like Edenthwaite, Frankie thought as she hurried towards their small A and E department. Everyone knew so much about everyone else that the receptionist even knew which road the patient would be travelling to come for their appointment.

  Her pulse gave a totally unnecessary skip at the prospect of seeing Johnny…Nick, she reminded herself fiercely…in a little while and she sternly ordered it to behave.

  She knew only too well that there was a downside to such rural communities—gossip grew faster than staphylococcal infections and was even harder to control. If even one person were to catch a hint of anything untoward between the two of them, they would never hear the end of the speculation.

  Unfortunately, she knew that it was one thing to make rational intelligent decisions but it might be entirely another to try to stop herself reacting to the wretched man’s presence. But she was going to do her best.

  Everything went well when she arrived in Denison Memorial’s A and E department. It was full of the purposeful flurry of preparations that would always precede a sudden influx of accident victims, but for the moment there were people already waiting for attention, totally unconnected with the bus crash. If she directed her efforts, she could probably clear most of them before the injured children arrived. At least she could warn the less urgent cases that there might be a long delay before they would be seen.

  ‘Oh, Frankie! Thank goodness!’ Mark Fletcher exclaimed when he caught sight of her and beckoned her over.

  It was the first time she’d ever seen the hospital manager looking anything but perfectly composed and the only place safe to stand was in the doorway of the sluice.

  ‘Are you seeing patients this morning or are you free?’ He ran one hand over his neatly trimmed hair but it wasn’t enough to subdue the uncharacteristic disarray.

  ‘I’ve got a list booked,’ she confirm
ed. ‘But I came in early this morning.’ She came in early most mornings as she had to drop the girls off at school on the way, but he didn’t need to know that.

  ‘Well, how long can you give us in here? The emergency services seem to be revising the number of injuries upwards every time we speak to them. Jack Lawrence is on his way in but we still haven’t been able to get hold of Dr Johnson.’

  Ruthlessly subduing any stray concern about the man’s whereabouts, Frankie thought for a second.

  ‘I’m quite happy to stay until I’m not needed any more, but you’ll need to clear it with the rest of the doctors on duty this morning to see if they can cover for me. Is there anyone coming in from the other practices?’

  The hospital was at the centre of a fairly wide circle of villages and towns of various sizes, and was able to call on the various GP practices for extra cover in the case of emergencies.

  ‘Several willing, but having difficulties getting here because of the state of the roads,’ he supplied succinctly. ‘If you could get stuck in, I’ll have a word over in the GP unit to see how long they can let you stay on here.’

  He whirled and strode away, his brisk steps clear evidence of his former military experience.

  ‘Hey, Frankie. Ready for the fray?’ Vicky Lawrence asked, coming into the room as she washed her hands.

  ‘No babies to deliver?’ Frankie kept the question light but she couldn’t help the flood of guilt that tied her stomach in knots. She’d completely forgotten that she might have to face Nick’s fiancée at some stage.

  ‘Not at the moment, so I’m on loan. Any idea what we’ve got here?’

  ‘From what I caught sight of on the main board, assorted lacerations, foreign bodies and trapped appendages. None of it desperately serious but all of it needing attention. Shall we?’ She pulled the neck loop of a plastic apron over her head and gestured towards the main reception area.