by Rebecca Lang
THE SURGEON’S CONVENIENT FIANCÉE
BY
REBECCA LANG
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ONE
DEIRDRE FIRST UNDERSTOOD that something was wrong when she failed to get off the bus at her customary stop.
It was odd, really, because that was definitely the right stop, she thought as the bus started up again after letting someone off.
As she watched, unable to move, she felt as though her legs were two sacks filled with heavy stones that she could not possibly lift to put one foot in front of the other. Her whole body had become a heavy, leaden thing that refused to obey her internal command. She could not understand it at first, this stubborn refusal.
She should have got off there, the nearest stop to the house, because she had four heavy plastic bags of groceries to carry. There they were beside her on the seat. Of course they were hers, she knew that in a distant sort of way because she remembered having walked around a supermarket very recently, pushing the usual metal cart. The memory of that was very clear in her mind.
As the bus jerked forward she felt slightly sick, the feeling reminding her that she had forgotten to have any sort of lunch, and now it was the end of the afternoon. There was so much on her mind these days that she even forgot to eat. No doubt her blood sugar was low, she speculated, her nursing training coming to the fore.
Too late now to get off the bus. It was picking up speed, bowling along towards the next stop, which was two blocks away. Deirdre wondered vaguely, with a sense of fear, whether she was going mad. Coupled with her odd inertia was a reluctance to look at her wristwatch. She wanted time to be still for a while so that she could just sit and not have to do anything, or think about anything in particular. In a vague way she understood that.
Slowly, reluctantly, she gathered up the plastic bags that were bulging with groceries and got off the bus when it came to a halt at the next stop. Momentarily she felt lost, although she knew where she was—of course she did.
‘What now?’ she said aloud, causing an elderly man near her to look at her sharply, and then away again quickly.
As she began to walk back the way she had come, it was as though she were split into two people—one felt lost and vulnerable, the other distanced from that self, logical, sensible, almost like a mother figure who was taking care of the other half. By getting off the bus two blocks further on, she was giving herself time to think, to distance herself.
Jerry would be back in town that evening. She ought to be pleased at that, as it meant that she could return to her own home and would not have to sleep in Jerry’s house to be with the children. Instead, she felt an odd feeling of panic, and she did not really want to leave them with him…
It was a crisp November day, quite cold, beginning to get gloomy now. There were few people about in this part of the city, which bordered on a residential area. As she walked, she realized that she had not been this way for a very long time. So long, in fact, that she had almost forgotten about the existence of the hospital in the centre of the first city block that she had to pass, the Stanton Memorial Hospital. It was a relatively small hospital, affiliated to a large teaching hospital downtown, and one that had escaped the cost-cutting closures of some other small hospitals in recent years.
Beyond that, Deirdre knew little about the hospital—having worked in the large teaching hospital herself before the budget cuts—except that it took interns and some residents-in-training on a rotating basis from the bigger hospital. Strange, really, she thought now that she, a nurse, who lived so close to the hospital, should know so little about it, especially when she had so desperately wanted to find another job in a hospital after she had been laid off. But then, of course, she had taken the job with Jerry, looking after the children. It had been a stopgap job, which had somehow taken over her whole life so that she had stopped looking for jobs in nursing.
As she came level with the hospital she could see that there was a noticeboard, enclosed in glass, like a cupboard, set in the garden facing the street, next to the sidewalk and between the curving entrance and exit driveways. With the heavy bags at her feet, glad of a rest, she looked at it. Inside the locked case were a variety of notices pertaining to hospital business as it related to the general public. Then she saw the notice headed ‘Employment Opportunities’ and her heart quickened with interest.
‘But you’re not free,’ the persistent voice inside her head reminded her, the one that chattered a lot. Nonetheless, her eyes moved down the list until she came to ‘Operating Room Nurses’. There were vacancies for full-time and part-time registered nurses in the operating suite. A refresher course would be nice, because she felt that her skills were rusty. No doubt there would be a two-to three-week orientation period.
Deirdre wrote down the telephone number of the human resources department, to which one had to apply for a job. The act of doing so only served to highlight her problem of not being free. How wonderful it would be to go to work in the morning, work a set number of hours, then go home again, to her own home. Yet it seemed that fate had somehow directed her here. Sometimes she believed in that kind of fate—serendipity, or whatever it was called.
She began to plod forward again, burdened with the bags. Her mind seemed to be all over the place, searching this way and that for a way out of her dilemma. A light rain had begun to fall, and the early evening gloom was deepening prematurely. If only she didn’t love the children so much. Because she loved them, she felt trapped, was trapped. It wasn’t as though Jerry and his mother-in-law paid her a decent salary, anywhere near what she was worth. No doubt if he had had his way, he would not have paid her anything at all after a while, out of his own pocket, for the work that she did to benefit him and his house. He would have coerced her into a relationship and said to her, ‘We’re as good as married.’ Heaven knew, he had tried. She hadn’t wanted that: she did not love him and never would. As it was, she found him more or less repulsive. She had known from the beginning that most of the money for her salary came from the children’s maternal grandmother.
She had been twenty-three when she had gone to work for him and the grandmother, so desperate for work—an idealistic twenty-three, if not totally naïve. ‘I hate him,’ she said aloud. ‘I wish he would disappear off the face of the earth.’ Quickly she looked behind her to see if anyone was within earshot. These days she had taken to talking to herself, a sign of loneliness, perhaps…or worse. There was no one around.
Deirdre stepped off the kerb, looking straight ahead, to cross the exit driveway of the hospital. There was a screech of brakes and she screamed as a large dark blue car came to a halt a few inches away from her. Confused and shocked, she registered too late that she had stepped off the kerb without looking, even though the car had its headlights on.
One of the plastic bags slipped from her grasp and she watched two tins roll away from her across the driveway and various packages spill out at her feet. A man got out of the driver’s seat.
‘Are you all right?’ he said. He sounded both angry and concerned. He had every right to be angry, Deirdre thought as she stared back at him in shock, knowing how close she had come to being an accident case. She would have seen the inside of an operating room all right, but not in the way she had envisioned. A wave of despair came over her as she
looked back at him, and she could only nod, not being able to find a voice. In fact, to her mortification, she wanted to burst out crying, as though a breaking point had been reached, that this was the thing that her refusal to get off the bus had been leading up to; it was as if this thing was giving her permission to cry. For a few seconds she fully understood what the term ‘accident prone’ really meant. Most likely it was a cry for help.
Jerry was often angry these days, the thought came to her; angry at everyone and everything, it seemed.
The man who had got out of the car came up closer to her. He was tall, slim, very good looking and sophisticated in appearance, quite young, probably a doctor, she thought. ‘Are you all right?’ he said again, sounding more concerned this time. He had a nice voice, deep and somehow gentle, even though he was frowning at her as though he thought she was the greatest klutz in the world, maybe someone who had a death wish.
‘I’m all right,’ she said, looking at him in horror, managing to find her voice. ‘I…I’m sorry. I guess I stepped off the kerb without looking.’
‘You did,’ he said curtly. Deirdre saw that he wore a fine black cashmere turtleneck sweater under a loose-fitting soft leather jacket in a very dark brown colour that looked very, very expensive and blended perfectly with his dark grey, beautifully tailored trousers and black Oxford shoes. In spite of her acute distress, she took all this in, as though her perceptions were heightened by a sudden surge of adrenaline. He was clean-cut, with short dark hair, a pale skin and blue-grey eyes. His firm mouth and square jaw hinted to her that he was not a man to trifle with. There was certainly an air of authority about him. ‘Are you in the habit of not looking where you’re going?’
‘No.’ The word came out in a whisper. ‘Sorry.’ Then, to her embarrassment, tears began to run down her face, out of her control. Vaguely, she looked around her at the spilled shopping.
The sight of the tears galvanized the man into action and he took her elbow. ‘Stand back on the kerb,’ he said authoritatively, drawing her back. ‘You’ve had a shock. Don’t worry about your shopping, I’ll pick it up.’
Standing safely on the sidewalk, she watched him chase the errant tins that had rolled to the other side of the driveway, then looked on while he picked up her other groceries.
‘I’m a doctor in this hospital,’ he said. ‘Let me drive you home. Do you live around here?’
‘Yes, not too far away,’ she said, feeling infinitely weary, grateful for his suggestion yet embarrassed that he had to offer. ‘Thank you.’ Surreptitiously she wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand.
He placed her bags at her feet, then reached into an inside pocket for a card, which he handed to her. ‘No doubt you were told by your mother not to get into a car with a strange man,’ he said, smiling slightly for the first time, his tone softening. ‘Very good advice.’
Deirdre glanced down at the card, blinking hard, trying to read the small print when her eyes were swimming with tears. There was a name, with a string of professional letters behind it. She took in none of it. He then fished in the outside pocket of his jacket and produced a laminated card which had a photograph on it.
‘Here’s my hospital ID,’ he said. It showed the head and shoulders of the man in front of her, dressed in what she recognized as the top of a dark green scrub suit. By the light from the headlights of his car she could just make it out.
‘Yes…I can see it’s you,’ she said, still not being able to read the name in the growing darkness. Also, she felt strangely distanced from the scene in which she was taking part, as though it had nothing to do with her. A few tears continued to run down her face and drip from her chin.
The man, whose name she still did not know, picked up her bags and deposited them on the back seat of his car. ‘Come on,’ he said, more gently now. ‘I’ll drive you home.’ It sounded to her that, having ascertained she was not injured, he wanted to get her home and out of his hair as quickly as possible.
In the next moment she was in the front passenger seat of his very comfortable car, sinking into the capacious soft leather seat, realizing now that she was cold. ‘Thank you,’ she said, once again wiping the tears away with her fingers. Tactfully, he had not asked why she was crying. No doubt he assumed it was because she had very nearly been run over. ‘I live on Renfrew Street.’ She pointed in the general direction.
‘I know it,’ he said, easing the car out into the traffic.
‘I do have a car,’ she said, feeling she ought to say something, ‘but it’s out of action.’
Renfrew Street was a quiet little backwater, several short streets away from the busier street on which the hospital was situated. It was a nice street, she had to admit that, and at first she had loved the house for many reasons, not least because it had seemed like home and because that was where the children lived. Now she felt more and more claustrophobic in it.
Jerry’s dark good looks, his charm—which she had come to see was carefully cultivated and calculated—his obvious need of her to look after the children had bowled her over at first. Now it all seemed so obvious and hackneyed. What had been, and was, genuine was the need that the children had of her. Children could do much to make a house seem like a home. Now all she cared about was them… and that was the trouble.
‘What number?’ her companion asked as he turned his car into Renfrew Street.
‘Five three six,’ Deirdre said, reluctant to leave the warm cocoon of the luxury car. ‘Towards the other end.’
As they moved slowly down the street, she saw Jerry getting out of his car which he had parked on the street outside the house. From another car emerged three men who were obviously with Jerry and all four of them moved towards the front door of the house, intent on their animated conversation. The house was quite large, yet with no features to distinguish it from its neighbours on either side. It was a showy yet bland house, rather like its owner. Built in the California style, covered with prefabricated stucco, it was not really appropriate for the rainy and often cool climate of British Columbia, Canada.
‘Oh, no!’ Deirdre whispered the words. As he so often did, Jerry had brought home some colleagues, clients or friends for drinks and dinner, without warning her in advance, expecting her to do the housekeeping and cooking bit, to provide a good dinner regardless of how much food she had in the house. That was also in spite of the fact that she had been engaged to take care of the children, to cook for them but not for him.
Gradually over time she had unwisely taken on more and more work, for which she was not adequately paid. Well, maybe now was the time to call a halt. Maybe now she was approaching her breaking point. Everyone had one, she knew that.
Instinctively, in an act of self-preservation, she slid down in the seat. ‘Please,’ she said to the man next to her, ‘drop me off at the end of the street. I’ve just seen someone I don’t want to meet.’
The man looked at her keenly. As well he might, she thought despairingly. He must think she was off her rocker. Doing as he was asked, he went to the end of the quiet, leafy residential street and pulled over to the kerb. It was almost dark now.
‘Hadn’t you better tell me what’s bothering you?’ he said quietly. He was looking at her with interest, as one might look at an intriguing specimen under a microscope. ‘Perhaps I can help in some small way. Often it helps to be able to talk to a stranger. Why are you crying? Perhaps we could start there. I’m a surgeon at the Stanton Memorial, by the way, in case you didn’t take in that card I was showing you.’
‘Thank you for the ride,’ she said, grateful for the semi-darkness that was penetrated inadequately by street lighting. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know your name. I couldn’t read the card.’ Of course, she didn’t have to know his name, although she would like to use it to thank him. In a few moments he would be out of her life as abruptly as he had entered it.
‘I’m Shay Melburne,’ he said. ‘And you?’
‘Deirdre,’ she said. ‘Deirdre
Warwick. Thank you, Dr Melburne, for your help.’ Suddenly she was very aware of him physically in the confined space, aware of his attractiveness. With that awareness came the realization that she had lacked the company of men she found attractive, as well as any decent relationship with one, in the two and a half years that she had been in her current job.
‘Deirdre of the Sorrows,’ he murmured. ‘Rather appropriate, I would say.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You could say that.’
‘A Gaelic name…like mine,’ he said thoughtfully, half-turned towards her as though he were seeing her really for the first time. ‘A lovely Irish name. Deirdre was a great beauty, so legend has it.’
‘So I believe…if she really existed.’
‘I believe she did. Why the tears, Deirdre of the Sorrows? Not because I almost ran you over, I suspect. Perhaps it was because you were crying that you didn’t look where you were going. Hmm?’
‘I wasn’t crying then,’ she said. ‘It’s a long story. I really can’t tell you. I don’t want to bore you. And…and…I don’t suppose you have the time.’
‘I have the time,’ he said.
‘Why would you bother?’ she said, not believing he could be interested in hearing her story.
‘Shall we say the interest of one fellow human in another?’ he said. ‘No other motive. I sense that you need help. I’m not saying I can provide it, but I can listen. Perhaps you can start with why you didn’t want to go into that house. I’ve got all the time in the world.’
Deirdre cast around in her mind for a good starting point to present to this stranger. Not wanting to go into the house seemed to her to be approaching an end point, a crisis.
‘I used to be a nurse,’ she blurted out, ‘working in the operating rooms at University Hospital.’ She named the hospital downtown in Prospect Bay, where they were now, the place that had been a stop on the way to gold-mining country in the late 1800s in British Columbia. It had started off as a one-horse town and had grown into a place large enough to be called a city, growing in fits and starts over the decades. ‘I loved that job. Don’t want to bore you with the ins and outs of it. Got laid off about two and a half years ago…was given a pink slip, along with a lot of other nurses. In my case, it was last hired first fired. Cost-cutting…I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about that.’
