A Very Special Proposal

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said with a smile that answered his relief, and suddenly knew that there was more to the words than their social meaning.

  It had only been a matter of hours since she’d been tempted to try to track him down on an internet website. Not wanting to destroy her teenage fantasies, she’d decided against finding out what had happened to him but, as if by magic, he’d reappeared in her life.

  ‘So, where do I go from here?’ she murmured, groaning as she tried to stretch the kinks out of her neck and shoulders after long minutes spent retrieving far too much of a shattered windscreen from a child’s face. It was going to take the expert techniques of their most experienced plastic surgeon to minimise the scarring that would be a permanent reminder of this day. In the meantime, she could step out of the way while the cubicle was cleared of debris and readied for the next patient and lean back against the nearest wall to allow her spinal muscles to recover. She didn’t even have the energy to remove her gloves or apron.

  ‘You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?’ Zach demanded, his shoulder almost touching hers as he joined her against the wall. ‘I thought you were settled in the area?’

  Amy blinked at the unexpected questions, belatedly realising that she must have spoken her own thoughts aloud.

  What could she say? I was just wondering whether I had any more chance of attracting you now than I did as a teenager?

  ‘I am settled, I think. I’m close enough to my parents so that visiting them doesn’t have to be a major time-consuming trek, yet far enough away so I can call my life my own…’…More or less, she added silently, hoping she hadn’t grimaced at the thought of the way the two of them still tried to organise her life for her.

  Which reminded her, she thought with a barely stifled groan.

  There had been a message on her phone earlier, reminding her that she was supposed to be attending some ‘do’ this evening. She certainly couldn’t remember what it was about—with her father a stalwart member of so many prestigious committees and boards of governors, there was usually something at which it was ‘imperative’ she show her face.

  She also had a sneaking suspicion that, now that a year had passed since she’d been widowed, her mother was trying to be surreptitious about using the events to introduce her to a selection of ‘suitable’ men from whom she would be expected to choose another husband.

  Not that her parents could ever find fault with her first choice, as they told her ad nauseam, but if she was ever to provide them with the grandchild they needed if they were to pass on their inheritance…

  For just a second she toyed with the idea of inviting Zach to go as her partner, but it was definitely a less shocking idea than it would have been when he’d sported his unruly hair and an attitude to match. He might still ride a motorbike, but as a fully qualified doctor, the rebel was now well and truly part of the establishment.

  Anyway, if she did ever get up the courage to invite Zach to go out with her—or vice versa—the very last place she’d want to go to fulfil her fantasy would be anywhere under her parents’ eagle eyes.

  She glanced up at the clock, hoping for a moment that the current workload would give her the excuse to phone and cancel, but no such luck.

  ‘Clock-watching?’ Zach asked while she was still trying to work out some way of avoiding an evening of tedium. ‘Got a hot date this evening?’

  ‘Hardly!’ She laughed. ‘Just a command performance at some semi-formal function—some committee or other—and the very last thing I want to do after a shift like this. I can’t imagine anything worse than being herded into a room full of people spouting inanities, plied with white wine so acid that you could use it to clean drains and offered very pretty-looking “nibbles” that are totally tasteless unless they’ve been overloaded with salt and artificial flavourings when I’d far rather have a hearty plate of spaghetti Bolognese or carbonara.’

  Zach chuckled. ‘I remember that about you—the way you could always put away about twice the calories of any other woman and still stay so slim. And you had the best brain in the class. No wonder the other girls were jealous of you.’

  Simultaneously embarrassed by the praise and delighted that he’d noticed anything personal about her, she forgot to keep a tight rein on her tongue.

  ‘If they were jealous of me it was because I had the sexiest boy in the class as my lab partner,’ she countered, then groaned in humiliation, mortified that she couldn’t remember what she’d last touched with her gloved hands and so couldn’t even cover her red face. Furious with herself for putting her foot in her own mouth, she stripped the gloves off and flung them into the bin then made a performance about donning a clean pair.

  ‘The sexiest boy in the class?’ he repeated with a dawning grin. ‘Really? If only I’d known!’

  ‘You must have known!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s why you always grew your hair so long, wore the leather jacket and rode the motorbike…a motorbike, by the way, that everyone in the class, male or female, wanted an invitation to ride.’

  ‘Ready for your next one?’ prompted Liz in the doorway behind them while Amy was still desperately wanting to call back her words. If only there was a way of turning the clock back just one minute. ‘We’re down to the last few who were delayed by the influx from the motorway.’

  ‘Wheel them in,’ Zach invited in a resigned tone that completely disappeared as soon as Liz’s head did from the doorway. Then he took several long strides to bring him close enough that their shoulders touched as he leant against the wall beside her, his broad muscular one against her more slender one.

  Below the short sleeves of their faded green scrubs his firm flesh was hot and darkly tanned against her cooler, paler skin, but she shivered at the intimacy of the contact, overwhelmingly aware that he was doing it deliberately.

  ‘One day,’ he murmured for her ears alone, ‘I might tell you why I really dressed that way.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ZACH leant back into the corner of the wooden bench, swung his feet up onto the other end of the seat and sighed with relief.

  It felt as if it had been days since he’d last had time to sit down and it wasn’t just his feet doing the complaining.

  He took a cautious sip of the outsized mug of coffee, then a deeper draught when he found it had cooled enough on his journey out to this little courtyard area hidden in an angle of the building housing the A and E department.

  His view of the night sky was disappointing. It wasn’t fully dark yet, but many of the stars would always remain invisible because there were so many streetlights around.

  It hadn’t been like that at the refugee camp. There, when night had fallen, the only light to break the complete darkness had been the occasional flickering of firelight or the generator-powered lights in the operating theatre. There, the sky had been full of billions of points of starlight, all so clear and bright that it had seemed as if he could almost reach out and grab a handful of them.

  Fanciful nonsense, of course, just like his dream last night that Amy was riding on the back of his motorbike, her arms wrapped around his waist and her body pressed tightly against him as they sped through the night together.

  Had his subconscious somehow known that she was about to reappear in his life? Had it been warning him, or was it that age-old wishful thinking? If he’d known that the elegant woman bending over the elderly hit-and-run victim had been his ABC he might have managed to introduce himself in an adult manner. As it was, he’d had a hard time trying not to swallow his tongue as all those old feelings had flooded over him in a maelstrom.

  ‘Ha!’ he snorted into the darkness. ‘Even my dreams are stuck in an adolescent time warp. You’d think I’d manage to come up with something new in the last fifteen years!’

  It wasn’t as if he’d received any encouragement from her, then or now. She would always be the princess to his pauper, something that was obvious even when they were both wearing unisex scrub suits. She would
never look anything less than cool and elegant while he…

  He glanced down at the crumpled state of the shapeless garb and chuckled at the thought of covering the top half, at least, under his leather jacket. That was the way he’d coped at school, camouflaging the fact that although they were perfectly clean, his clothes were disintegrating with age because there was so little money to replace them.

  Anyway, it wasn’t as though smart clothing would have made any difference at school. According to his teachers, he had been thick and stupid and on the fast track to oblivion. Amy had been the only one who’d spoken to him as if he’d had more than two brain cells between his ears. She’d been the one who’d made him think that, perhaps, there might be another road to travel than the one to perdition, that, maybe, she would be interested in him if he were to ask.

  He’d soon found out that the princess’s interest had been anything but personal, and for a week or two had gone into self-destruct mode. Luckily, that hadn’t happened until after he’d taken all his exams, and by the time his successful results had come through he’d got his head on straight again and his eyes fixed on that distant goal.

  ‘And it’s staying that way!’ he declared into the darkness, even as the alarm on his watch reminded him that it was time to get ready for the hospital fundraiser he’d been conned into attending.

  He swung his feet to the ground and levered himself upright with a groan. ‘So, just you remember that you learned your lesson the first time around,’ he reminded himself sternly. ‘Princesses and paupers don’t mix.’

  Except the reminder didn’t stop his pulse rate rocketing into the stratosphere when he saw Amy enter the room an hour later, her honey hair freshly coiled in some elegant arrangement high on her head and her slender body draped in a fluid column of something dark blue shot with shimmering strands of silver that instantly made him think of stars in a midnight sky.

  ‘Fanciful nonsense,’ he muttered under his breath as he turned his back on her and accepted a glass from the brimming tray offered by a smiling waiter. But, even though he set off to circulate in the opposite direction, somehow he always seemed to know exactly where she was, the pale gold of her hair attracting his gaze like a candle flame across a dim room.

  Finally, with an audible groan that startled the heavily bejewelled matron beside him, he gave in to the inevitable.

  ‘Dr Willmott, I presume?’ he said when he joined her at one side of the crowd. ‘You look a little different.’

  ‘Zach!’ The pleasure in her eyes when she caught sight of him gave his spirits a nitroglycerine lift, as did the subtle widening of her pupils when her eyes travelled over his evening suit. ‘You scrub up well, too. I’ve never met a man yet who didn’t look good in a DJ—a bit like James Bond, all suave and sophisticated.’

  ‘Suave and sophisticated?’ he repeated with a blink, never having thought of himself that way. ‘I think I like that.’

  ‘Not that I didn’t like your old leather jacket and your snazzy motorbike leathers this morning,’ she teased.

  ‘Zo, tell me,’ Zach said in a heavily faked Germanic accent. ‘How long have you had zis leather fetish?’

  Amy chuckled aloud, the serene grey of her eyes gleaming with her appreciation of his nonsense, and his spirits lifted still further.

  ‘If I’d known you were coming to this thing, too, perhaps we could have come together,’ he suggested, deliberately stifling the logical voice in the back of his head that was telling him to walk away now, while he still could. ‘That way I wouldn’t have had to dread standing around all by myself in a room full of strangers.’

  ‘You needed someone to hold your hand?’ she teased, and for just a moment he was tempted to do just that. He’d done nothing more than accidentally brush against her when they’d been tending a patient today, and the contact had felt electric. Had it been some sort of fluke reaction, or merely static electricity? Or had the awareness that had caused his teenaged self to spend endless hours fantasising survived fifteen years intact?

  ‘Amy, dear,’ said a cultured voice behind them. ‘Do introduce us to your friend.’

  The hairs went up on the back of his neck. It had been fifteen years since he’d last heard that voice but he’d never forgotten it…probably never would.

  ‘Father,’ Amy said with a smile as they turned to face the older couple standing behind them, but he took petty delight in the fact that it was a far less carefree one than those she’d bestowed on him. ‘Hello, Mother. I’ve always loved that colour on you.’

  ‘Amy.’ The well-preserved woman returned her daughter’s hug with such a restrained gentility that it seemed to Zach as though she was more worried about their greeting creasing the burgundy fabric of her dress than embracing her only child. ‘Darling, why aren’t you wearing the dress I sent over for you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but I didn’t see it until I was almost ready to leave the house. If I’d stopped to change at that point, it would have made me late,’ Amy said with every appearance of regret, but somehow Zach knew it was faked. There was a definite subtext to this conversation that was probably far more interesting than what was actually being said. He would have to get Amy to explain it later.

  ‘And are you going to introduce us to your friend?’ her father prompted, his grey eyes steely as he looked Zach over, no doubt totting up to the nearest small coin how much his evening suit had cost.

  ‘Of course! How rude of me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Zach, these are my parents, Fiona and William Bowes Clark. Mother, Father, this is Dr Zachary Bowman. He’s just joined the A and E staff at the hospital. You probably won’t remember, but we actually went to school together in our final year before medical school.’

  Zach saw the moment when Amy’s father put two and two together and knew that the man definitely did recognise his name, his new title and position only deepening the scowl.

  ‘Dr Bowman?’ he echoed in a tone of blatant disbelief, his expression more suited to someone who had just trodden in something noxious. He immediately turned to his daughter, angling his body to effectively exclude Zach from the rest of their conversation. ‘Amy, your mother has put your name down at our table, next to Jeremy Crossley.’

  Zach had been aware of the fact that Amy was incensed by her father’s rudeness towards him, but if he hadn’t been watching her, he wouldn’t have caught the flash of discomfort behind her rigid smile at his announcement of their arrangements for her. Even when he saw her chin come up a combative inch, he couldn’t guess what she was going to do.

  ‘Oh, what a pity!’ she exclaimed brightly, clearly not meaning a word. ‘I won’t be able to join your table because I’ve promised to be Zach’s dinner companion. Perhaps you can introduce me to Mr Cross another time.’

  ‘Crossley,’ her mother corrected eagerly. ‘Jeremy Crossley…you remember? I told you that he’s recently bought out one of your father’s biggest suppliers?’

  ‘How nice for him,’ Amy said blandly, and Zach was hard-pressed not to laugh aloud. Suddenly, he understood exactly what was going on. Her parents had decided that it was time to find her another ‘suitable’ husband but whether it was because they were growing impatient to spoil some grandchildren or merely the dynastic need to see their name and hefty financial inheritance passed down to the next generation, it certainly wasn’t because Amy was willing. The only thing he knew for certain was that her father definitely didn’t consider him as anything close to suitable.

  Well, that was just too bad, and if Amy wanted his help to exert her independence from their meddling, who was he to look a gift horse in the mouth?

  ‘Sweetheart, I think everyone’s started going through to find their tables,’ he pointed out as he slid a proprietorial arm around her slender waist. ‘Should we make a move?’

  He held his breath when he felt her freeze under his blatantly possessive gesture and wondered for a moment whether she would humiliate him by rejecting his touch in front of her parents.

>   For several breathless seconds her silvery grey eyes looked into his while myriad questions filled them, but then he saw the impish spark of devilment take over a split second before she took the half-step closer to press her slender frame against him.

  ‘What a good idea. It’ll give us time to introduce ourselves to our dinner companions before we start eating.’ She turned back briefly to speak to her blatantly disapproving parents. ‘Have a lovely meal. I hope it raises loads of money. And if I don’t see you again before we leave, I’ll call you at the weekend.’

  Zach wasn’t capable of doing anything more than nodding in the speechless couple’s direction before he turned to join the crowd now making their way towards a sumptuous room full of tables gleaming with cutlery and candles.

  For a start, he couldn’t believe that Amy had been so quick to come up with an excuse not to join her parents’ choice of suitable dinner companion…one that involved him. Then there was the fact that she’d barely batted an eyelid when he’d called her ‘sweetheart’, or when he’d wrapped an arm around her. Only the fact that her eyes had darkened in response had told him of the deeper effect of his gesture on her.

  Now she was actually walking by his side with her fingers deliberately threaded through his as though they were an established couple.

  ‘Sweetheart?’ she whispered out of the side of her mouth, one eyebrow raised, but her eyes were gleaming with suppressed mirth.

  ‘Would you have preferred “darling”?’ he asked hoarsely, surprised that his voice was working at all. He still wasn’t absolutely certain that this wasn’t just another adolescent dream.

  ‘I wouldn’t have cared what you called me, as long as it got me out of sitting with another of Mother’s “prospects”,’ she said grimly.

  ‘Oh, I see! I’m nothing more than the lesser of the two evils!’ he exclaimed, even as he tried to absorb the blow without showing the hurt on his face. He should have known better than to set himself up for another—