‘Yes. Lucy rang. She says she’s in labour and she doesn’t hang about. I’m just about to bail, I’m afraid.’
He swore silently, closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them to find Connie smiling knowingly.
‘Yes,’ she said.
He let out something halfway between a laugh and a sigh and introduced them. ‘Connie, this is Andy Gallagher. Andy, this is Connie Murray. I worked with her several years ago, and she was obviously so inspired by me she became a trauma specialist.’
Andy eyed her hopefully. ‘Tell me she’s our new locum.’
‘She is, indeed, as of—well, virtually now. Say hello to her very, very nicely. She wasn’t due to start for a fortnight.’
‘Oh, Connie—I’m so pleased to meet you,’ Andy said fervently, his shoulders dropping as a smile lit up his face. ‘I thought I was about to dump a whole world of stuff on James, so to know you’re here is such a relief. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. And his,’ he added with a grin. ‘Probably especially his.’
This time James gave a genuine laugh. ‘Too right. You’ll be out of here in ten seconds, if you’ve got any sense, and utterly oblivious to the chaos you’re leaving in your wake, which is exactly how it should be. Go. Shoo. And let us know the minute it’s born!’
‘I will!’ Andy yelled over his shoulder, heading out of the department at a run.
James let his breath out on a low whistle and pushed open the door of Resus. ‘You guys OK in here, or do you need me?’
‘No, we’re all done. He’s on his way to ICU. They’re just coming down for him.’
‘OK, Andy’s gone but I’m around, page me if you need me. Pete’s on later, and I’ll be in tomorrow morning first thing. Oh, and this is Connie Murray. She’s our new locum, starting tomorrow. Be really, really nice to her.’
They all grinned. ‘You bet, Boss,’ one of them said, and they all laughed.
He let the door shut, turned to Connie and searched her eyes, still not quite able to believe his luck.
‘Are you really OK with this?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, mentally running through the logistics and counting on her fingers. ‘Look, it’s eleven o’clock. I can get home, grab my stuff and be back here by eight tonight at the latest. That’ll give me three hours to pack and clean the house, and it won’t take that long.’ She hoped. ‘Can you cope with Saffy if I leave her? I can’t get her and all my stuff in the car.’
‘Sure. She can help me scrub out the cabin.’
‘Yeah, right. Just don’t let her run off,’ she warned as they walked briskly back to the car.
‘I won’t. Don’t worry, Connie, the dog’s the least of my problems. You saw that cabin.’
She ignored him. ‘Put her in the crate if you have to go back to the hospital,’ she said as she put on her seat belt. ‘She’s used to it. And she has a scoop of the dry food twice a day, morning and evening, so you might need to feed her if I’m held up in traffic—’
He stopped her, his hand over her mouth, his eyes laughing. ‘Connie, I can manage the dog. If all else fails, I’ll bribe her with fillet steak.’
* * *
She left almost immediately when they got back to the cottage, and as she was getting in the car he gave in to impulse and pulled her into his arms and hugged her.
‘Thank you, Connie. Thank you so much. I’m so, so grateful.’
‘I’ll remind you of that when I’m driving you crazy,’ she said with a cheeky grin, and slamming the door, she dropped the clutch, spraying gravel in all directions. ‘See you later!’
‘Drive carefully,’ he called after her, but she was gone, and he watched her car until she’d turned out onto the road and headed away, the imprint of her body still burned onto his.
‘Well, Saffy,’ he said softly as he went back into the garden and shut the gate firmly. ‘It’s just you and me, old thing, so no running off. Shall we go and have a look at this cabin?’
* * *
It was worse than he’d thought.
Dirtier, dustier, mustier. Oh, well, he could do with a bit of hard physical graft. It might settle his raging libido down a bit after that innocent hug.
He snorted. Apparently there was no such thing as far as his body was concerned.
He threw open all the windows and the doors, took everything including the bed outside and blitzed it. He vacuumed the curtains, washed the windows, mopped the walls and floors, slung the rug over the veranda rail and bashed it with a broom to knock the dust out before he vacuumed it and returned it to the now dry floor, and finally he reassembled it all, stripped the bedding off the bed upstairs and brought it all down and made up the bed.
And through it all Saffy lay there and watched him as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. He trusted her about as far as he could throw her, but she seemed content to be with him, and once it was all tidy and ready for Connie’s return, he took her out for a walk, picking up his phone on the way.
And he had a message, a text with a picture of a new baby. Very new, a mere two hours old, the caption reading, ‘Daniel, eight pounds three ounces, both well’.
He felt something twist inside him.
‘Congratulations!’ he texted back, and put the phone in his pocket. Saffy was watching him closely, head cocked on one side, eyes like molten amber searching his face.
‘It’s OK, Saffy,’ he said, rubbing her head, but he wasn’t sure it was. Over the years countless colleagues had had babies, and he’d been happy for them. For some reason this baby, this time, felt different. Because the possibility was being dangled in front of his nose, tantalising him?
The possibility of being a father, something he’d thought for the past eleven years that he’d never be? He’d said no to Connie, and he’d meant it, but what if he’d said yes? What if he’d agreed to give her a child?
A well of emotion came up and lodged in his chest, making it hard to breathe, and he hauled in a lungful of sea air and set off, Saffy trotting happily at his side as he broke into a jog.
He ran for miles, round the walk he’d taken Connie on yesterday, but with a detour to make it longer, and Saffy loped easily along at his side. He guessed she ran with Connie—another thing they had in common, apart from medicine? Maybe.
He wondered what else he’d find. Art? Music? Food he knew they agreed on, but these were irrelevancies. If he’d agreed to her suggestion, then she’d be bringing up his child, so he would have needed to be more concerned with her politics, her attitude to education, her ability to compromise. It didn’t matter a damn if they both liked the same pictures or the same songs. It mattered if she thought kids could be taken out of school in the term time to go on holiday, something he thought was out of the question. How could you be sure they wouldn’t miss some vital building block that could affect their entire future?
And what on earth was he doing worrying about that? He’d said no, and he’d meant it! He had! And anyway, there were bigger things to worry about. Things like his ability to deal with the emotional minefield that he’d find himself in the moment her pregnancy started to manifest itself—
‘What pregnancy?’ he growled, startling Saffy so that she missed her stride, and he ruffled her head and picked up the pace, driving on harder to banish the images that flooded his mind.
Not images of Cathy, for once, but of Connie, radiant, glowing, her body blooming with health and vitality, the proud swell of her pregnancy—
He closed his eyes and stumbled. Idiot.
He stopped running, standing with one hand on a fence post, chest heaving with emotion as much as exertion. This was madness. It was hypothetical. He’d said no, and she was going to a clinic if she did anything, so nothing was going to happen to her that involved him.
Ever.
But that just left him
feeling empty and frustrated, and he turned for home, jogging slowly now, cooling down, dropping back to a walk as they hit the sea wall and the row of houses. And then there was Molly, out in the garden again with David and their children, and he waved to them and Molly straightened up with a handful of weeds and walked over.
‘So who’s your friend?’ she asked, openly curious as well she might be, because he hardly ever had anyone to stay, and certainly never anyone single, female and as blatantly gorgeous as Connie.
‘Connie Murray. She’s a doctor. I’ve known her for years, she was married to a friend of mine.’
‘The one who died? Joe?’
He nodded. ‘She’s going to be here for a while—she’s taking the locum job I’ve been trying to fill, and she’ll be living in the cabin.’ He got that one in quick, before Molly got any matchmaking ideas, because frankly there was enough going on without that.
But it didn’t stop the little hint of speculation in her eyes.
‘I’m glad you’ve got someone. I know you’ve been working crazy hours, we hardly ever see you these days.’ She dropped the weeds in a bucket and looked up at him again. ‘You should bring her to my private view on Friday.’
‘That would be nice, thanks,’ he said, fully intending to be busy. ‘I’ll have to check the rota, though.’
‘Do that. And change it if necessary. No excuses. You’ve had plenty of warning. We told you weeks ago.’
He gave a quiet mental sigh and smiled. ‘So you did.’
She laughed and waved him away. ‘Go on, go away. We’ll see you on Friday at seven. Tell her to wear something pretty.’
He nodded and turned away, walked the short distance to his house while he contemplated that sentence, and let Saffy off the lead in the garden.
She found her water bowl on the veranda while he was doing some stretches, drank noisily for a moment and then flopped down in the shade under the bench and went to sleep, so while she was happy he ran upstairs and showered, then on the way down he gathered up Connie’s things from her bedroom, Molly’s words still echoing in his head.
Tell her to wear something pretty.
Like the top she’d worn last night which was lying on the chair, together with the raspberry red lace bra and matching lace shorts that sent his blood pressure into orbit? Or then there were her pyjamas. Thin cotton trousers and a little jersey vest trimmed with lace. They were pretty, but nothing like substantial enough to call pyjamas, he thought, and bundling them up with the other things, he grabbed her wash bag out of the bathroom and took them all down to the cabin.
Saffy was still snoozing innocently, so he topped up her water bowl, filled a glass for himself and drained it, then put the kettle on to make tea and sat down with the paper and chilled out.
Or tried to, but it seemed he couldn’t.
Connie would be back in a very few hours, and from then on his space would be invaded. He wasn’t used to sharing it, and having her around was altogether too disturbing. That lace underwear, for example. And the pyjamas. If he had to see them every morning—
He got up, prowling round the garden restlessly, and then he saw the roses and remembered he’d been going to put flowers in her room yesterday, but he’d run out of time.
So he cut a handful and put them in a vase on the chest of drawers and went back to reading the paper, but it didn’t hold his attention. The only thing that seemed to be able to do that was Connie.
And going to Molly’s private view with her just sounded altogether too cosy. And dangerous. He wondered what pretty actually meant, and how Connie would interpret it. He was rather afraid to find out.
But how the hell could he get out of it?
* * *
It didn’t take long to pack up her things.
Much less than the three hours she’d allowed, and because she’d cleaned the house so thoroughly on Sunday there was nothing much to do, so she was back on the road by three-thirty and back in Yoxburgh before six.
She wondered if James would be around, but he was there, sitting on the veranda in a pair of long cargo shorts with Saffy at his feet, reading a newspaper in the early evening sun.
He folded it and came down to the gate, leaning on it and smiling as she clambered out of the car and stretched.
‘You must drive like a lunatic.’
She laughed softly and shook her head. ‘That was Joe. I’m not an adrenaline junkie. There was practically nothing to do.’
And not that much in the way of possessions, he thought, looking at the back of her small SUV. Sure, it was packed, but only vaguely. She handed him a cool box out of the front footwell. ‘Here, find room for that lot in the fridge,’ she said, locking the car and coming through the gate to give Saffy a hug. ‘Hello, gorgeous. Have you been a good girl?’
Saffy wagged her tail and leaned against her.
‘She’s been fine. We went for a run.’
‘Oh, she will have enjoyed that! Thank you. She loves it when we run.’
‘She seemed to know the drill.’
‘What, don’t stop in front of you to sniff something so you fall over her? Yeah. We both learned that one the hard way.’
He laughed and carried the cool box up to the kitchen, shocked at the lightness in his heart now she was back, with her lovely smile and sassy sense of humour.
‘So how did you get on with the cabin?’ she asked, following him up the steps to the kitchen.
‘OK, I suppose. It’s clean now, but I’m sure you’ll want to do something to it to make it home.’
He turned his head as he said that, catching a flicker of something slightly lost and puzzled in her expression, and could have kicked himself.
Home? Who was he kidding? She hadn’t had a proper home for ages now, not since she’d met Joe. They’d moved around constantly from one base to another, and she’d had to move out of the married quarters pretty smartly after he’d died. By all accounts she’d been on the move ever since, living in hospital accommodation in the year after Joe died, then out in Afghanistan, then staying with a friend. It was only one step up from sofa-surfing, and the thought of her being so lost and unsettled gutted him.
But the look was gone now, banished by a smile. ‘Can I put my stuff straight in there?’
‘Sure. I’ll put Saffy in her crate, so she doesn’t run off while the gate’s open. The door’s not locked.’
Connie opened the cabin door, and blinked. The dust was gone, as was the stack of garden furniture, and it was immaculate. He’d made the bed up with the linen she’d had last night, and her pyjamas were folded neatly on the pillow, her overnight bag on the bed. She stuck her head round the bathroom door and found her wash things on the side, and when she came back out she noticed the flowers on the chest of drawers.
Roses from the garden, she realised, and a lump formed in her throat. He hadn’t needed to cut the roses, but he had, to make her welcome, and the room was filled with the scent of them.
It was the attention to detail that got to her. The careful way he’d folded her pyjamas. The fact that he’d brought her things down at all when it would have been so easy to leave them there.
‘I hope you don’t mind, I moved your stuff in case you were really late back, so you didn’t have to bother.’
‘Mind? Why should I mind?’
And then she remembered she’d left yesterday’s clothes on the chair—her top, her underwear. Yikes. The red lace.
Don’t be silly. He knows what underwear looks like.
But she felt the heat crawl up her neck anyway. ‘It looks lovely,’ she said, turning away so he wouldn’t see. ‘You’ve even put flowers in here.’
‘I always put flowers in a guest room,’ he lied, kicking himself for doing it in case she misinterpreted the gesture. Or, rather, rumbled him? ‘I would
have done it yesterday but I ran out of time. Give me your car keys, I’ll bring your stuff in.’
She handed them over without argument, grateful for a moment alone to draw breath, because suddenly, with him standing there beside her and the spectre of her underwear floating in the air between them, the cabin had seemed suddenly airless.
How on earth was she going to deal with this? Thank God they’d be busy at work, because there was no way she could be trusted around him without him guessing where her feelings were going, and there was no way she was going to act on them. He was a friend, and his friendship was too important to her to compromise for something as fleeting and trivial as lust.
‘So where do you want this lot?’
He was standing in the doorway, his arms full, and she groped for common sense.
‘Just put everything down on the floor, I’ll sort it out later.’
She walked past him, her arm brushing his as he turned, and she felt a streak of heat race through her like lightning.
Really? Really?
This was beginning to look like a thoroughly bad idea...
CHAPTER FIVE
‘SUPPER AT the pub?’
She straightened up from one of the boxes and tried to read his eyes, but they were just looking at her normally. Odd, because for a second there—
‘That would be great. Just give me a moment to sort out some work clothes for tomorrow and I’ll be with you.’
‘Do you want the iron?’
She laughed. ‘What, so I make a good impression on the boss?’
He propped himself up on the doorframe and grinned mischievously. ‘Doesn’t hurt.’
‘I think I’ll pass. I’ll just hang them up for now and do it when we’ve eaten—if I really have to. Have you fed Saffy?’
‘Yes, just before you got back. She seemed to think it was appropriate.’
‘I’ll bet,’ she said with a chuckle, and pulling out a pair of trousers and a top that didn’t cling or gape or otherwise reveal too much, she draped them over the bed and gave up. ‘Right, that’ll do for tomorrow. Let’s go. I’m starving, it’s a long time since breakfast.’
The Secret in His Heart Page 7
