Caroline Anderson, Josie Metcalfe, Maggie Kingsley, Margaret McDonagh

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 03 (li

  Not so long ago, Beabea would have been impatiently waiting for the man to go so that she could ask endless questions about the interesting situation her granddaughter had skated over earlier. It was a measure of the rapid progression of the disease that all she’d wanted to do was drift off to sleep.

  ‘I promise we’ll do our best to keep her discomfort to a minimum,’ Nick Tremayne reassured her quietly. ‘We pride ourselves on making a dreadful situation as easy as possible for both patient and family, but if you have any concerns or need to speak to me at any time…’

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘but nothing can really make it any easier when you’re losing the only person in the world who…’ Her throat closed up completely and she was unable to utter another sound.

  To her utter mortification, the tears started to stream down her cheeks and with one last despairing look at the precious figure slumped against the mountain of pillows, she fled from the room.

  It wasn’t very far from the front door of the nursing home to the steps from Mevagissey Road down onto the beach and Emily made it at a flat-out run, uncaring for once whether anyone saw her tear-stained cheeks or not.

  Once on the beach, she kicked off her shoes and made for the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge, knowing that she desperately needed the physical exertion of a long run to get herself under control again.

  There were still a number of surfers taking advantage of the waves ramped up by the evening’s onshore wind, but they seemed every bit as oblivious to her presence as she was to theirs once she hit her stride.

  She had no idea how long she pounded backwards and forwards, but eventually the fact that her legs were shaking with a combination of exhaustion and lack of food slowed her pace and forced her to take refuge in her usual spot among the rocks at the base of the cliff.

  Almost before she’d settled herself into her little haven she caught sight of her mystery man making his way to his usual spot, as if he’d been waiting for everybody to leave the foreshore.

  As on every other occasion, he began with a series of stretches and warm-up exercises before he started to push himself further and harder than ever.

  Even in the depths of her own misery Emily could see that there was something different this time. It was almost as though he couldn’t find his usual rhythm, or perhaps the injury that had given him the limp was more painful than usual. Whatever it was, she could tell that he was struggling, but she had a feeling that he was so stubborn that he would be more likely to do himself further damage than give in to the disability, no matter how temporary it was.

  The harder he tried the more concerned she became, until all her concentration was on what he was doing rather than on the misery that had driven her down to the beach so precipitately.

  Even as she watched, he faltered and nearly fell, only just managing to stay on his feet, then, with a despairing shout towards the last of the sunset he sank to the sand.

  For several minutes he sat hunched over, the very picture of disheartened male ego. She felt so sorry that all his efforts over the last few days seemed to have been for nothing, and for the sake of that dented ego would happily have remained out of sight if he’d simply left the beach when he’d recovered.

  As it was, she was still watching him when he gathered up his belongings, but when he went to straighten up, something went wrong and he virtually collapsed onto the sand again with a hoarse cry.

  ‘Dammit, what have you done to yourself now?’ she demanded under her breath. One half of her wanted to hurry across to offer her help, but she was almost certain it would be refused—there weren’t many men who would willingly accept physical assistance from a woman.

  So she stayed where she was, her gaze riveted to him as she waited for him to make a successful attempt at getting to his feet.

  Only it didn’t happen, even though he tried twice more.

  ‘Enough is enough,’ she growled when he started to make a third attempt, even though she could see clearly that he must be suffering from some sort of muscular spasm in his back or his leg. She snatched a quick breath for courage, hoping that whoever it was would have the sense to accept the helping hand she was about to offer.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ she called as she stepped out from the shadows at the base of the cliff. ‘Let me give you a bit of support so you don’t hurt yourself any further.’

  She broke into a jog and arrived at the man’s side just as he turned to look up at her from his crumpled position on the sand.

  ‘Zayed! I mean Mr Khalil,’ she hastily corrected herself when she recognised his unmistakable face in spite of the encroaching dusk.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped, for all the world like a trapped and wounded beast.

  Emily recoiled from his harsh tone, but she’d suffered much worse from patients during her training and survived.

  ‘I live not far away, in one of the cottages in the old part of Penhally,’ she explained simply, sticking to plain facts. ‘I was visiting my grandmother and came for a run on the beach.’

  His frown was disbelieving until his eyes dropped to her bare feet and the sand-encrusted hems of her trousers.

  ‘In that case, if you have finished your run, you can go home to your cottage and leave me in peace.’

  ‘To leave you sitting on the beach all night in pain?’ she challenged. ‘I don’t think so. If you remember, I’ve taken the Hippocratic oath, too. Now, where does it hurt? What have you done to yourself?’

  He stayed stubbornly silent for such a long time that Emily began to think that he really was going to refuse her help.

  Finally, when there was so little light remaining that it was only the paleness of the silvery sand that showed her where he was, he cleared his throat.

  ‘I have had reconstructive surgery after an injury,’ he admitted in a voice that clearly contained disgust at his own weakness.

  It was very easy for Emily to read between the lines, especially since she’d seen the stubborn way he’d been determined to struggle on in Theatre that day.

  ‘And at a guess, you’ve been pushing yourself to get fit on top of days filled with a punishing regime of surgery and assessments as well as late nights and early mornings in Intensive Care.’ She shook her head in disbelief at what he’d been putting himself through, before realising that he wouldn’t be able to see it. ‘You were already hurting earlier on today. What on earth made you think you were in a fit state to come down here and push yourself like this?’

  Without giving herself time to think about the advisability of what she was doing, she stepped behind him and knelt in the sand to put one hand on each of his shoulders.

  ‘Where is the pain worst?’ she demanded, refusing to let herself think about the warmth of his oiled-satin skin as she ran both thumbs up his neck, one on each side of his cervical vertebrae.

  Emily could feel the tension in every one of his muscles, but whether that was as the result of the pain or because she was touching him she didn’t know. All she knew was that she needed to help him if she could…and if he would let her.

  ‘Relax,’ she urged as she began to gently massage the knotted muscles at the base of his skull. ‘Is it too painful to bend your knees up and rest your forehead on them?’

  Relax?

  Zayed stifled a groan as he contemplated his alternatives: humiliate himself by attempting to crawl off the beach on his hands and knees or pillowing his head on his stacked forearms and letting her continue.

  Didn’t the woman know she was asking for the impossible? He hadn’t been relaxed since he’d looked up from Abir’s bedside and seen her standing in the doorway.

  She’d been like a ray of sunshine with her blonde hair and pale summery clothes sprinkled with flowers, and as for those eyes…their limpid green had seemed cool and soothing as they’d taken his measure across the room, even as they’d sparked something impossible deep inside him.

  Impossible?

  Yes, he reminded him
self bitterly.

  She was nothing like Zuleika, and even if she had been, he was not free to do anything about this unwelcome attraction. He would never be free of the guilt.

  ‘It is not necessary,’ he argued brusquely, hating the weakness that made this unavoidable, then gave in to the inevitable and settled his head on his arms.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she countered, ‘unless you’re prepared to spend the night on the beach. And the local police will be around in a while on their patrol to check for drunken kids, and worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ he repeated, hazily aware that his brain function appeared to be strangely sluggish. All he seemed to be able to concentrate on was the musical sound of her voice, the light floral scent that was swirled around him by the sea breeze and the fact that she was touching him as if she actually cared about his pain.

  ‘Drugs,’ she said, and for a moment he couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about.

  Was she recommending analgesia for his pain or…?

  ‘In some of Cornwall’s coastal towns it’s quite common, particularly during the summer holidays,’ she continued, even as he was still trying to marshal all the reasons why blunting his physical and mental responses wasn’t a good idea. ‘So far, Penhally seems to have escaped, but that’s probably because, in spite of the influx of holidaymakers each year, it’s essentially the same close-knit community it’s always been, with everyone looking out for each other…and keeping an eye on each other.’

  He agreed with her assessment of the special charm of Penhally and its inhabitants. It was a major reason why, when he’d decided to set up a unit dedicated to the less fortunate of his little people, he’d wanted it to be close to this area. And when the big house up on the cliff had become available…

  Ah, it was so hard to follow a single train of thought. The things she was doing to his muscles with those clever fingers, searching out each knot in turn and concentrating on it until it finally loosened. It almost seemed as if she had magic in her hands so that, for the first time since he’d rejected the mind-numbing effects of the analgesics his surgeons had prescribed, he was free of the gnawing pain.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, her voice so soft that it was barely audible over the rhythmic susurration of the waves over the sand.

  Immediately, he felt himself grow tense.

  There was no way that he could tell this woman about the violence and destruction that had resulted in his injuries. For all that she was a professional woman, there was something essentially innocent about her that would probably be destroyed if she were to hear of the chaos and misery that he had brought down on his family and friends.

  ‘I’m not asking what caused your original injury,’ she hurried to add, almost as if she was able to read his reluctance through her fingertips. ‘I meant, what happened today to set this off? You’re not usually this bad.’

  ‘How do you know I am not always like this?’ he asked, grateful that she wasn’t trying to pry. ‘We only met for the first time this morning. Perhaps I am always this crippled.’

  It was her turn to tense up, her fingers ceasing their painful but ultimately soothing ministrations.

  He heard her mutter something under her breath but before he could summon up the energy to turn and face her she began speaking.

  ‘It’s true that we met this morning when I came to the unit for the first time, but…well, I’ve seen you before, several times. Here, on the beach.’

  The final words emerged in a rush, as though there was something shameful about them. He shook his head. It was more likely that she was making things up for some reason of her own.

  ‘That is impossible. I never come down here until the beach is empty. I deliberately leave it until the light is fading, but I would have seen you.’

  ‘Not when I’m sitting in the shadows at the base of the cliff,’ she said firmly, her fingers taking up their rhythm again. ‘There’s a place in between the jumble of rocks behind us where I used to come as a child…my thinking place, I used to call it. I discovered it shortly after I came to live with my grandmother.’

  ‘So, while I have been thinking I have the beach to myself, you have been…’ He paused, tempted to say spying, but that was a harsh word for someone who’d accidentally ended up sharing a public space.

  ‘I’ve been watching over you, I suppose,’ she confessed, sounding rather uncomfortable about making the admission.

  ‘Watching over me?’ He hadn’t needed anyone to do that since he’d moved to Cornwall. It had only been in Xandar that he’d had to be surrounded by armed security. And even then it hadn’t prevented the dissidents from…

  ‘Surely you realise how dangerous it can be to swim alone,’ she rebuked him sternly. ‘Especially when you’ve been pushing your body the way you do. And to do it in the dark is just asking for trouble. If you got cramp, or—’

  ‘So you appointed yourself my unofficial lifeguard,’ he said wryly, not quite certain how he felt about the idea, or about the fact that she hadn’t said something about it sooner. After all, they’d been working together for most of the day. Surely she could have said something about seeing him on the beach at Penhally.

  ‘Actually, I didn’t know who you were until a few minutes ago,’ she admitted, much to his surprise. ‘Because you only ever came down here at sunset, you were always silhouetted against the sky, so I never saw your face.’

  ‘But, when you saw me at St Piran’s…’

  ‘If you’d taken your clothes off, I might have recognised you,’ she joked, but the image her words planted in his head made their present situation seem far too intimate, with her hands touching his naked back.

  And he didn’t even have the option of walking away from her because he wasn’t yet certain that he could make it to his feet unaided.

  ‘So, what did happen today to get your back in such a painful mess, unless…does it just do this every so often without provocation?’ she asked, returning to her question, and he grabbed the topic like a drowning man grabbing a lifeline.

  ‘There was provocation,’ he said wryly. ‘I made the mistake of picking one of the patients up.’

  ‘But you do that all the time.’ She sounded puzzled. ‘I’ve seen you, when you’re examining them. You don’t just ask the parents to put them on the couch and examine them like a bug under a microscope—you make friends with them and put them at their ease.’

  ‘Until I forgot to take my mask off and the patient panicked,’ he told her, while a strange feeling of warmth spread through him at the approval he heard in her voice. ‘He fought me and I nearly dropped him—’

  ‘And overloaded your back,’ she finished for him. ‘No wonder it was killing you while you were operating on Abir. You should have rescheduled the surgery until you’d recovered.’

  As if anything was that easy.

  He suddenly realised that he’d been sitting there for far too long, lazing like an overfed cat while his responsibilities piled up around him, responsibilities that someone as happy-go-lucky as Emily Livingston couldn’t possibly understand. She probably didn’t have anything more pressing on her mind than picking up the threads of the social life she’d left behind when she’d left Penhally to go to medical school.

  He grabbed his scant belongings and surged to his feet, amazed that he was actually able to do it without the vicious stab of agony that usually accompanied such precipitate activity.

  ‘Would you have wanted to be the one to tell Meera and Athar Hanani that the surgery they had been steeling themselves for—the nightmare of having the head of their baby son cut open and part of his skull removed—was not going to happen today because the surgeon had a pain in his back?’

  ‘Oh, but I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Go back to your cosy little cottage, Dr Livingston,’ he interrupted rudely as anger froze all the soft warmth that spending time with this woman had created. ‘I will not be requiring your self-imposed offices as lifeguard tonight, so you can leave
with your conscience clear.’

  As he strode away from her he heard a brief sound of distress carried on the salty breeze but deliberately ignored it, ignored, too, the manners that had been drilled into him from infancy that demanded he should thank her for what she had tried to do for him.

  He couldn’t permit himself to register the fact that for the first time since the explosion his stride was almost perfectly even, or that the warmth of her hands seemed to linger in every cell of his back under the shirt he’d tugged on over his head.

  All he could allow himself to think was that he should have known that someone who looked as beautiful as she did couldn’t possibly understand the imperatives of duty and responsibility that were the only way he could assuage the crushing guilt he bore.

  In fact, someone like Emily was the last person he needed in his life or on his team. She had been a distraction today, with her soft blonde hair and sparkling green eyes, her womanly body and her ready smile, and he couldn’t afford any distractions.

  ‘She will have to go,’ he said firmly, startling a couple perusing the menu outside the door of the Anchor Hotel. He could feel their concerned eyes boring into his back for several moments as he continued past the parade of shops towards the promontory where the lifeboat station dominated that side of the bay.

  ‘I will call her into my office and tell her that it would be better if she looked for a position in her original specialty,’ he muttered as he passed Penhally Bay Surgery and Althorp’s boatyard, and had to fight down a pang of remorse that he wouldn’t get to watch her fledgling but meticulous surgical technique again.

  He’d been so impressed when she’d apparently stepped up to the table without a trace of nerves, in spite of the fact that her involvement in the surgery had come completely out of the blue. She was good, and with the right guidance, had the potential to be excellent. It was a shame that…

  That what? he challenged himself as he finally reached his car. That she was too beautiful and he was too susceptible? That certainly wasn’t her fault. And neither was the fact that he’d just jumped down her throat for suggesting that he hadn’t been in a fit state to perform Abir’s surgery.