Swallowbrook's Winter Bride

‘I have no feelings either way about him,’ she said and followed it with, ‘I do have patients waiting, Nathan, so shall we proceed? What hours would you be available to join us here?’

‘Half past nine to three-thirty when the primary children finish,’ he said promptly. ‘We’ve been to see the headmaster before coming here and it’s sorted for Toby to start tomorrow. Today I’m going to take him into town for his uniform and a satchell.

‘If it’s all right with you, I feel that Wednesday would be a good day for me to settle back into the practice. It will leave me with tomorrow free in case Toby is reluctant to go when the moment arrives. He’s had so many changes in his life over recent months I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘Wednesday will be fine,’ she assured him, and had to admire the way he had his priorities sorted. Getting back to the reason for his presence on the premises, she informed him, ‘Your father’s consulting room at the opposite end of the corridor is vacant, and as all the staff are new since you were last with us, apart from Gordon, the practice manager, I’ll introduce you to them while you are here if you like.’

‘Yes, sure,’ he said easily. ‘It would seem that the only things familiar to me are going to be the layout of the place … and you, Libby.’

In your dreams, she thought. She would accept him as a neighbour because she had no choice, and as a colleague because she knew his worth as a doctor, but that was the limit of it. Familiar she was not going to be.

Nathan didn’t stay long after the introductions had been made. He separated Toby from the assortment of toys provided to keep small patients happy and took him for his school uniform of dark green and gold, leaving Libby to ponder on how much, or how little, she was going to enjoy working with him again.

She saw the two of them go past the surgery window the following morning and a lump came up in her throat to see the small boy resplendent in a green and gold blazer and matching T-shirt and shorts with Nathan holding his hand and looking down at him protectively.

She’d once dreamed of a similar scenario for the two of them, loving each other, loving the children they created, but that was all it had been, a dream. In utter foolishness she’d turned to someone else and that had been a nightmare, so where did she go from here? she wondered.

Yet she knew the answer to the question almost before she’d asked it of herself. She and Nathan were going nowhere. That way she would steer clear of any more heartbreak connected with the men in her life. She’d shown herself to be a poor judge when it came to that.

She’d thought sometimes during the long years he’d been gone, Why shouldn’t he have said what he did? At least he hadn’t strung her along into thinking he was interested in her when he wasn’t, which was what Ian had done, pursued the attractive young doctor at the practice when she was at her most vulnerable to satisfy his ego.

But there was work to do, patients to see, and she needed normality to keep her mind free from the events of a very strange weekend.

As she rose from her desk, intending to make a quick coffee before the next patient appeared, Nathan was passing again, homeward bound this time. When she waved he smiled, gave the thumbs-up sign and went on his way, leaving her with the feeling of unreality that had been there ever since she’d opened her door to him on Friday night.

Henrietta Weekes was a regular visitor at the practice with most of her problems associated with a failing heart due to having had scarlet fever when she was a child. A smart, intelligent woman, she usually coped with them calmly with little fuss, but today she was in distress and needing to see a doctor.

After checking her heart, Libby exclaimed, ‘How on earth have you managed to get here in this state, Henrietta?’

‘My son has brought me,’ she gasped.

‘I’m glad to hear you haven’t walked,’ she told her soberly. ‘Your heart is completely out of control and is affecting your lungs. I’m sending you to the coronary unit at the new hospital straight away by ambulance. You will be attended to more quickly that way than if your son was to take you. I’ll get one of the nurses to help you back into the waiting room to join him while I send out an emergency call. You’re an amazing woman, Henrietta, I’m not giving up on you. Once they get you into Coronary Care, you’ll be in safe hands.’

‘If I live that long,’ she said with a grimace of a smile, and Libby thought it was typical of the woman that she was facing up to what might happen with the same sort of stoicism that was always there in every crisis that brought her to the surgery for help. Her family, who were devoted to her, must live on a knife edge where their mother’s health was concerned.

As the day progressed like any other busy Monday at the practice there was no time to wonder how Nathan was occupying himself until Toby came out of school, or let her thoughts wander to how a small orphaned boy might be coping on his first day. Maybe she would find out tonight when her day at the practice was over and she was back at the cottage.

She was about to make a snack meal for herself that evening when there was a knock on the door, and when she opened it Toby was smiling up at her and announcing, ‘Uncle Nathan says would you like to come and eat with us?’

Clever uncle, she thought. He knows I won’t refuse if he sends Toby with the invitation, but didn’t he get the message when we were on the steamer and I came up with an excuse for not accepting the invitation to join them at his father’s place?

He was gazing up at her innocently, waiting for an answer, so she said, ‘Yes, that would be lovely, Toby. When shall I come?’

Taking her hand in his, he tugged her towards him and said, ‘Now, Dr Hamilton.’ And having just been given her full title once again, she thought that if she and Toby were going to be seeing much of each other he must be allowed to call her something simpler than that.

‘We’re having fish fingers and ice cream, Toby’s choice,’ Nathan told her when she appeared hesitantly in the kitchen doorway, ‘to celebrate his first day at school,’ adding in a low voice that was for her ears only, ‘which he has enjoyed, thank goodness.’

‘I can imagine how relieved you are about that,’ she replied with her glance on the boy who had gone into the garden and was kicking a ball around while he waited to be fed.

He nodded sombrely but didn’t reply. Instead he asked, ‘How do you like my efforts to make it seem like a home to him?’

She looked around her. ‘Impressive. Just the right blend of luxury and cosiness.’

‘That is what I wanted to achieve. There wasn’t much of that about where I was based in Africa, and since I’ve become involved in adopting Toby we’ve been living in a rented apartment in London while I’ve been sorting out his parents’ affairs for him.

‘Now that we’ve crossed the hurdle of his first day at school and are settling into this place I’m hoping that we can put down some roots and become part of the community, the same as I was before.’

‘You can’t be a much bigger part of the community than serving them as a GP,’ she pointed out, ‘or have you changed your mind about tomorrow?’

‘No, of course not. I’m looking forward to it even if you aren’t.’

He watched the colour rise in her cheeks and thought that where she’d been beautiful before, now she was divine. Still, she’d made it quite clear that their relationship was to be purely professional and he supposed he deserved no more after the way they had parted.

But only he knew the truth of the affair that had ended in him going to work abroad. He still shuddered at the thought of it, and the fact that Libby had been dragged into its aftermath that day at the airport would always be on his conscience.

His broken engagement to Felice Stopford all that time ago had made him wary of romantic love. It was an emotion he’d felt he hadn’t fully understood, and it had come through in the way he’d been so dismissive when Libby had told him how much she cared for him.

To Felice ‘love’ had meant money and position, expensive gifts, wining and dining, holidays abroad in plush hotels, and he had begun to realise that she was not for him about the same time that Libby had joined the practice.

He’d met his fiancée at a charity luncheon where he had been asked to speak about health care in the area and she’d stood out amongst the soberly dressed audience like a beacon on a hilltop. Dark-haired, voluptuous and quite charming, she’d made a beeline for him when it had finished and introduced herself as an American fundraiser representing similar organisations back in the States.

Her invitation to lunch had been the beginning of a romance that had started on a high and finished on the lowest of lows because he’d gradually discovered that her values were not the same as his. He’d found her to be greedy and shallow as he’d got to know her better and been uneasy about her eagerness for them to marry.

When he’d called the engagement off she’d gone storming back to the States and shortly afterwards he’d discovered through a colleague of hers that she’d had a doting elderly husband back there that she’d been eager to unload to make way for someone like himself.

That item of news had sickened him, made him feel tarnished, and pointed him in the direction of working overseas, which was something he’d been considering before he’d got to know Felice and been sidetracked. It was into that state of affairs that Libby had opened her heart to him. Felice had made him suspicious of love and ultimately it was Libby who’d suffered. The least he could do for her now was to abide by her terms and respect her wishes where their relationship was concerned.

By the time they’d finished eating Toby’s eyelids were drooping and Nathan said, ‘It’s been a long day for him, Libby. If you’ll excuse us, I’ll get him tucked up for the night. There are magazines or the TV if you want to wait until I come down.’ And picking the sleepy child up in his arms, he carried him upstairs.

When they’d gone she went into the kitchen. He’d mentioned magazines and television but there was the tidying up after the meal that would be waiting for him when he came back downstairs. If there was one thing she could do for him it was that, then she would go as quickly as she had come while her resolve to be distant with him was still there.

The kitchen was immaculate and she was seated at the table, scribbling a note to say thanks for the meal, when he came down. As she swung round to face him he was observing her with raised brows.

‘I was about to go and was leaving you a note,’ she explained.

‘Making your getaway while I wasn’t around?’ he questioned dryly.

‘Yes, something like that,’ she told him with cool defiance.

He sighed. ‘Go ahead, then, Libby, don’t let me stop you. I can see it’s going to be a bundle of laughs at the surgery tomorrow.’

‘Not necessarily,’ she told him levelly, ‘as long as we both behave like adults.’

His jaw was set tightly. ‘Why don’t you come right out with it and tell me that I’m not forgiven for what I said at the airport that day?’ And have regretted ever since.

This was laying it on the line with a vengeance, she thought, but was in no mood to bring her innermost feelings out into the open. She’d had a disastrous marriage since then and was older and wiser in many ways.

‘What you said long ago is in the past. I never give it a thought. We’ve both moved on after all,’ she said flatly. With a sudden weakening of her resolve, she added, ‘So why don’t we just get on with living next door to each other, working side by side at the practice, and leave it at that?’