A Very Single Woman

by Caroline Anderson

  ‘A bath sounds wonderful, but I haven’t got any towels here, and I don’t have a curtain, and since I don’t intend to give the neighbours a peep show I guess I’ll just have to go back to the surgery and shower.’

  ‘Spoilsport,’ he said with a smile. ‘Maybe the neighbours would like a peep show.’

  ‘Pervert.’ She grinned.

  ‘No, just hopeful.’

  He threw the last broken pieces of tile into an empty bucket and picked it up, swept bits of dust into a dustpan, tipped it into the bucket and moved towards the door. She was standing in the way, and as she leaned aside he squeezed past her, brushing against her. Tired as she was, her body reacted to him, and she felt her heart skitter in her chest.

  ‘You could always come back to my place for a bath,’ he suggested, pausing beside her on the landing. ‘I expect you could do with a long soak, too, and we’ve got two baths, so it’s not a problem.’

  She was incredibly tempted, and it didn’t take him long to persuade her. Once again leaving her car on her drive, she followed him down the garden in the dusk, slipping through the gap in the fence and making their way to his house. An owl hooted as they walked, and on her own, she realised, she might have felt a little nervous. As it was, with Nick at her side, it just felt romantic.

  ‘It was good of Linda to have Sam again so you could help me,’ she said as they went in. ‘I ought to get her a little something as a thank you.’

  ‘That would be nice, but I doubt if she expects it. We often help each other out.’

  ‘Yes, but this time she helped me, and I owe her.’

  He smiled at her. ‘You know, you really are a very nice person,’ he said softly.

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not that nice,’ she said, ‘at least, not at the moment. I might be nicer once I’ve had a bath.’

  He laughed softly, pulled open the door of the airing cupboard and threw her a towel. ‘Here you are, go and have your bath. You know where the bathroom is.’

  She soaked for ages, until all her skin had wrinkled on her fingers and the water had grown cool, and then she got out, dried herself and contemplated her dirty clothes. Just then there was a tap on the door.

  ‘At the risk of losing any more of my wardrobe, I’ve put another pair of jeans and a shirt outside the door for you, and the coffee’s done.’

  She heard his soft footfall going down the hall, and opened the door to retrieve the clothes. The jeans were a little looser, probably because they were still in use, unlike the others, but the shirt was silk and felt like butter against her skin. Her bra was grubby and dusty from her day’s work, so she’d bundled it up with her other clothes, and the fine fabric of the shirt teased her bare breasts like the warm touch of a lover.

  She went along to the kitchen and found it in darkness, but she could hear soft music coming from the sitting room, and going in there she found Nick slumped on the sofa, his feet up on the low table, a cup of coffee propped on his belt buckle. He looked utterly relaxed and absolutely gorgeous, and as she went in he looked up and patted the cushion beside him, a welcoming smile in his eyes.

  ‘Come and sit here,’ he murmured.

  It wasn’t a hard decision to make. Helen settled herself beside him, and the arm which had been resting on the back of the sofa slipped down to circle her shoulders and ease her against him. With a contented sigh, she rested her head on his shoulder and allowed herself to relax.

  ‘This is so nice,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Don’t forget your coffee,’ he reminded her, but she couldn’t be bothered to move. She just lay there, like a boneless cat, and all but purred. She felt a chuckle rumble through his chest under her ear, and an involuntary smile played around her mouth.

  Nick fed her chocolate mints, dipped in his coffee, and then he dropped one. It skidded down her chin and landed on his chest. She picked it up and ate it, and he wiped the shirt, but then he looked at her and put his coffee down. ‘Come here,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’ve got chocolate on your chin.’

  She held her chin towards him for him to wipe it, but he didn’t wipe it—he leant forwards instead and licked the chocolate off with his tongue. Her eyes widened, and she saw the heat flare in his.

  ‘Dammit, woman, you have the sexiest eyes,’ he muttered, just before he took her mouth.

  She whimpered and leant into him, and he turned her beneath him on the sofa, shifting his weight so they lay full length along it, breast to chest, hip to hip, thigh to thigh.

  His mouth devoured her, feasting eagerly on her lips, tracking over her throat and down over the silk to take her nipple in his mouth.

  Because she wasn’t wearing a bra she felt the heat instantly, and as his lips settled over the straining peak he groaned and lifted her up against his mouth, suckling her hungrily through the fine, soft fabric.

  She cried out and bucked against him, and he left her nipple, lifting his head and staring down into her feverish eyes.

  ‘Dear God, I want you,’ he whispered tautly. ‘Helen, stay with me. Spend the night here. Let me make love to you.’

  Her whole body ached for him, her limbs trembled, and she had a burning need only he could fill.

  Even so, from somewhere she found the strength to shake her head.

  ‘No. I can’t. Nick, please.’

  ‘Why?’

  She couldn’t answer, because she couldn’t say the words aloud.

  She couldn’t tell him why she mustn’t stay—that it was because she loved him, and if she stayed with him, let him love her, let him fill her, then she’d be wide open to all that hurt again, and she’d promised herself she wouldn’t be, not after Tony.

  She’d thought she could indulge in an affair, but maybe she was wrong. Whatever, panic filled her, and she struggled to sit up.

  ‘I just can’t. Please—let me go.’

  He didn’t move for a moment, but then he shifted his weight, swinging his legs over the side of the sofa and standing up. He crossed to the window, standing rigidly with his back to her, frustration etched in every line of his body.

  She knew all about that. Her own body was screaming with need, and the little bit of her that was pleading for common sense was almost drowned out by this wanton desire he’d awoken in her.

  ‘I’ll walk you back to your car,’ he said tersely, and she stood up, tugging the damp silk away from her nipples, her feet searching blindly for her shoes.

  She went out to the kitchen and scooped up her clothes, then paused in the doorway.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she said quietly, and with a sigh he turned towards her. His face was carefully expressionless, but his eyes were unable to disguise the frustration and need that stalked him.

  It made her want to cry. She’d never meant this to happen, never wanted it, but she was aching too. She turned away, unable to look at him any more, and he fell into step beside her.

  Nick walked her back to her car in the front garden of her cottage, but he didn’t touch her again. He didn’t trust himself. He watched her taillights disappear down the road, and then strode quickly down her garden, slotted the fence panel back into place and made his way back to his house.

  The sitting room had no appeal for him. He gave the sofa a black look, collected up the coffee-cups—hers untouched, as she’d left it—and threw the last of the chocolates into the bin. He didn’t need any reminders of the cause of his frustration.

  He went to bed, alone in the empty house, and lay for ages staring at the ceiling.

  Frustration tortured him. He could easily have dealt with the physical manifestation of his need, but it was the emotional aspect that was like a twisting blade inside him, and nothing would alleviate that.

  Nothing except Helen beside him. Under him. He rolled over, burying his face in the pillow, and fought down the tears of frustration and loneliness that rose up to swamp him.

  He needed her.

  Dear God, he loved her.

  ‘Bloody fool,’ he muttered, his voice cl
ogged with tears. ‘Whatever made you think you could talk her into it? You’re just making an idiot of yourself.’

  He tried to think about Sue. Her memory usually soothed him, but tonight he couldn’t even picture her. She was lost to him, and he felt more alone than he had in the whole of the last five years.

  A sob rose in his throat, and he pressed his fist against his mouth and held it back, but it wouldn’t be held.

  ‘Damn,’ he whispered, and then the tears came, hot, scalding tears that washed away the frustration and left nothing behind but emptiness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE following morning the tension between the two of them could have been cut with a knife. They walked around each other as if they were treading on eggshells, and Julia, after a few abortive attempts at conversation, gave up and left them to it.

  Lawrence was back, and Helen met him for the first time that morning. He was older than Nick, a little shorter, a little stouter, and his hair was thinning on top, but he had the kindest eyes that Helen had ever seen. She got the distinct feeling that they were also very good at divining her innermost secrets, so she vowed to avoid spending too much time with him.

  Nick, however, wasn’t able to indulge himself in that luxury. He had to hand over all the admin, and Lawrence, of course, took one look at him and realised something was seriously wrong.

  ‘I think we’d better have a bit of a chat after surgery,’ the older man suggested just before they started work. ‘Go over a few things.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Nick agreed, hoping he’d be able to keep the conversation strictly to business, but, of course, Lawrence had known him far too long, and through far too much, to be fobbed off with any feeble attempt at subterfuge, and he didn’t think for a moment he’d get away with it.

  Still, he’d got a couple of hours’ grace. Maybe he’d think up something convincing to put him off the scent in that time.

  Helen went into her consulting room, closed the door and sighed. Working with Nick under these conditions was going to be a nightmare. Still, at least they didn’t have to work side by side. It was just the time between patients that was going to be awkward, and she could engineer her way around that if she was clever enough.

  She pressed the button for her first patient, and for a while her surgery moved smoothly, all her appointments arriving on time and taking only the allotted number of minutes, by a miracle.

  And then Mrs Hardy arrived and pulled out a sheet of paper.

  ‘I don’t see the doctor very often,’ she said with an apologetic smile, ‘so I’ve made a list.’

  Helen sighed inwardly. She could see the list from where she was sitting, and it was numbered down the side from one to five.

  Five, for heaven’s sake! It would take half an hour to work her way through that lot, and it would totally throw her timekeeping for the rest of the morning. Still, she didn’t have anything after her surgery, and it was better to be busy under the circumstances. God forbid she should have too much time to think!

  ‘I tell you what, Mrs Hardy, why don’t you read me your list, and then tell me in order of priority what you think is your most urgent problem? Then we’ll see what we can get through. You might need to make another appointment for some of the things.’

  Mrs Hardy looked slightly astonished. ‘Oh, well, I thought it would save time, as I was here.’

  ‘Well, it probably would,’ Helen agreed, ‘but I have eight patients an hour, so technically we’ve only got seven and a half minutes for your appointment. That’s really not very long to deal with so many things.’

  Her face fell. ‘Oh, I see, I didn’t realise. I thought I could just sort it all out at once.’

  ‘Well, let’s just have a look and see what we can deal with. Why don’t you read me the list?’

  So Mrs Hardy went through her list, starting with a problem that had brought her to the surgery that day, a persistent pain in her right foot when she walked.

  ‘Have you twisted it? Or bought new shoes that put your feet into a different or unaccustomed position?’

  ‘Ah, now I think about it, I have got some new shoes, a little bit higher than I usually wear.’

  ‘OK, what’s next?’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s nothing much really, but I keep getting alternate bouts of diarrhoea and constipation from time to time, and it’s just a bit wearing.’

  Helen jotted that down, and looked up. ‘Next?’

  ‘My knees ache.’

  ‘All the time, or just when you go up and downstairs, or if you walk a long way?’

  ‘On the stairs, really,’ she offered.

  ‘And is that recent?’

  Mrs Hardy shook her head. ‘It’s been getting worse for a couple of years.’

  ‘What’s next?’

  ‘I feel tired all the time, but I’ve put on weight, so I expect that might be something to do with it, but I was a bit worried, with the bowel thing—and a cousin of mine had bowel cancer, so I’m a little bit wary.’

  ‘I expect the tiredness and the knees and the weight gain are all connected,’ Helen said, thinking aloud. ‘So, what have we got? The foot, the tummy trouble, the knees, feeling tired, putting on weight?’

  ‘That wasn’t one of them.’

  ‘So what’s left?’

  The middle-aged woman looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Well, it’s my husband who’s suffering from this one,’ she said with an embarrassed little laugh. ‘I don’t know, I just don’t seem to be interested in our love life any longer. To be truthful, I find it all a little uncomfortable, especially afterwards, a couple of hours or so later. I get a really deep ache, right inside, and it just puts me off.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Helen said sympathetically. ‘Actually, Mrs Hardy, this all makes sense. I think what you have is an irritable bowel, which can give you pain on or after intercourse, constipation and diarrhoea alternately, and if it’s caused by a food intolerance, such as wheat or dairy products, it can also affect your joints. So that would take care of the tummy, the knees, feeling tired, maybe putting on weight, and certainly the pain on intercourse.’

  She smiled. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well you brought the list, because it’s made it easier to track it down. Now, all we have to do is find out what’s causing the problem, and avoid it. Then you should start to see an improvement.’

  She scribbled on a few blood test forms and handed them to her. ‘Right, I’d like you to see the practice nurse for some blood tests, to check for allergies and so on, and then I think the best thing to do is to make you an appointment with the dietician, and she can work on an exclusion diet with you. In the meantime, eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, lots of fibre, and ask your husband to be patient. I’m sure, if you’re resourceful, you can find a way to avoid doing the things that hurt you without sacrificing too much of your fun.’

  She sent Mrs Hardy off to make an appointment with the nurse and the dietician, apologised to her next few patients for the delay, and ended her surgery only twenty minutes late.

  Nick dawdled through his surgery, hoping Lawrence would find himself something to do, but no such luck. Julia turned him straight round, and he found himself tucked up in Lawrence’s room with a tray of coffee and biscuits and that avuncular gaze fixed firmly on him.

  ‘How’s your father?’ Nick asked, in a vain attempt to sidetrack him.

  ‘Not good. None of us are, really, but you just have to move on.’ He stared at his coffee thoughtfully, and looked at Nick. ‘So, how’s it been without me? Young Dr Moore seems to have settled in well.’

  There was a pregnant silence, and Nick was obliged to fill it. ‘Yes, she’s been excellent, she was a real find.’

  ‘In more ways than one, I think,’ Lawrence murmured, and Nick shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  This time he refused to fill the silence, because there was nothing he could say that wouldn’t dump him in even hotter water.

  ‘So that’s how the land lies,’ Lawrence s
aid softly.

  ‘Lawrence, butt out,’ Nick told him with exaggerated politeness.

  His partner chuckled. ‘I wondered how long it would take for you to wake up again. You’ve been on ice for the last five years, and I’ve often wondered what kind of a woman it would take to bring you back to life.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Nick muttered. ‘She’s just a colleague.’

  ‘And pigs fly,’ he said mildly. ‘I take it things aren’t going smoothly in the land of hearts and flowers—has she got some kind of previous entanglement that’s made her wary?’

  Nick snorted. ‘Apparently so. She thinks all men are bastards when it comes to love.’ He didn’t tell him the details—mostly because he didn’t have them to give. Only that very scant outline that hinted of unimaginable pain and humiliation.

  ‘So prove you’re not.’

  ‘I’ve tried, Lawrence,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ve done my damnedest, and every time I think I’m getting somewhere, she shuts down on me.’

  ‘So don’t give her time to think.’

  Good advice, he thought, but hard to implement. He didn’t think he’d given her much time to think last night, but apparently there’d been a chink of light that had broken through and blown it. He shook his head slowly.

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ he asked gruffly, still too raw to want to revisit the scene of the crime, and for once Lawrence relented.

  ‘Tell me all about the practice,’ he said. ‘Fill me in on what’s been going on.’

  So Nick told him about the problems that had afflicted his patients—that Mrs Emery had been to see Helen twice and she’d advised her to get a job, which caused Lawrence to chuckle, and that Mr Palmer had had a heart attack and Helen had had to deal with him.

  ‘Does it still smell as bad out there?’ Lawrence asked, and Nick gave a little huff of laughter.

  ‘Apparently so. She doesn’t think the sheets have been changed in years.’