Resisting Her Rebel Doc

Resisting Her Rebel Doc
Joanna Neil

The one that got away!Paediatrician Caitlin Braemar moved back home to Buckinghamshire for a fresh start! She never expected to find her first love – and still drop-dead-gorgeous – Brodie Driscoll, living next door…or that he’d be her new boss!In the past, Brodie’s always lived up to his bad boy reputation, but as they work to save the little lives in their care, Caitlin starts to see Brodie in a whole new light!And it’s becoming clearer that she might just be the woman to tame him…

When JOANNA NEIL discovered Mills & Boon

, her lifelong addiction to reading crystallised into an exciting new career writing Mills & Boon

Medical Romance™. Her characters are probably the outcome of her varied lifestyle, which includes working as a clerk, typist, nurse and infant teacher. She enjoys dressmaking and cooking at her Leicestershire home. Her family includes a husband, son and daughter, an exuberant yellow Labrador and two slightly crazed cockatiels. She currently works with a team of tutors at her local education centre, to provide creative writing workshops for people interested in exploring their own writing ambitions.

ResistingHer Rebel Doc

Joanna Neil

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Table of Contents

Cover (#u148013de-037c-5168-bca6-3b639f320f07)

About the Author (#u14daa55d-e28d-5835-8f2d-39f16122bea9)

Title Page (#ue6b77941-ca87-5acf-bd75-cd4479bf9607)

Dear Reader (#ulink_7877bbb4-03d2-5a84-a0fe-a9cb2abdaf9d)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_8b436c8e-e8f2-522c-be76-473336add4d9)

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6a58b799-7d71-563d-aa51-c22d3ab30f5b)

CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

Dear Reader (#ulink_5f127745-bd54-57dd-a4ab-d60371012abe),

First love, young love … such an intense, wonderful experience. Is it possible that it can survive the ravages of time and be a ‘for ever’ kind of love?

Well, the answer to that is maybe. Sometimes it needs to change and mature, to grow into something else before young lovers can reach the fulfilment they long for.

Life in general—along with a broken romance and a troublesome background of family secrets—manages to get in the way and mess things up for Caitlin and Brodie when they meet up again in the beautiful surroundings of rural Buckinghamshire.

I hope you enjoy reading about their skirmishes and triumphs as they find one another once more.

With love

Joanna

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_8bca3c08-9519-502e-8ed2-b0a90e740cfb)

‘WHAT WILL YOU DO?’ Molly stood by the desk at the nursing station, riffling through the papers in a wire tray. ‘Will you go to the wedding?’ She sent Caitlin a sympathetic glance. ‘It must be a really difficult situation for you.’

Caitlin nodded. ‘Yes, it is, to be honest. These last few weeks have been a nightmare. It’s all come as a complete shock to me and right now I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with it.’ She pulled a face, pushing back a couple of chestnut curls that had strayed on to her forehead. Her shoulder-length hair was a mass of wild, natural curls but for her work at the hospital she usually kept it pinned back out of the way. ‘I don’t want to go but I don’t see how I can avoid it—when all’s said and done, Jenny’s my cousin. My family—my aunt, especially—will want me to be there for the celebrations. I don’t want to be the cause of any breakdown in family relationships by not going. It will cause a huge upset if I stay away.’

Yet how could she bear to watch her cousin tie the knot with the man who just a short time ago had been the love of her life? She and Matt had even started to talk about getting engaged and then—wham!—Jenny had come along and suddenly everything had changed.

Her usually mobile mouth flattened into a straight line. When she’d opened the envelope first thing this morning back at the flat and taken out the beautifully embossed invitation card, her spirits had fallen to rock-bottom. She’d had a sick feeling that the day was headed from then on into a downward spiral.

Sure enough, just a few minutes later as she had opened the fridge door and taken out a carton of milk, her prediction was reinforced. She’d shaken the empty carton in disbelief. One of her flatmates must have drained the last drops of milk and then put it back on the shelf. She’d stared at it. No coffee before starting work? It was unthinkable!

‘I can see how awkward it is for you.’ Molly sighed, bringing Caitlin’s thoughts back to the present. ‘Families are everything, aren’t they? Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do in order to keep the peace. I just wish you weren’t leaving us. I know how you feel about working alongside Jenny and Matt but we’ll miss you so much.’

‘I’ll miss you too,’ Caitlin said with feeling. Molly was a children’s nurse, brilliant at her job and a good friend, but now, as Caitlin looked around the ward, she felt sadness growing deep inside her. She’d been working at this hospital for several years, specialising as a children’s doctor, making friends and getting to know the inquisitive and endearing children who had come into her care.

It would be such a wrench to put it all behind her, but she knew she had to make a fresh start. She couldn’t bear to stay while Matt was here. He had betrayed her and hurt her deeply. ‘We’ll keep in touch, won’t we?’ she said, putting on a bright face. ‘I won’t be going too far away—Buckinghamshire’s only about an hour’s drive from here.’

Molly nodded. She was a pretty girl with hazel eyes and dark, almost black hair cut in a neat, silky bob. ‘Are you going to live at home? Didn’t you say your mother needed to have someone close by her these days?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Actually, I thought it would be a good chance for me to keep an eye on her now that she’s getting on a bit and beginning to get a few aches and pains. It’s been worrying me for quite a while that I’m so far away.’ She smiled. ‘I think she’s really quite pleased that I’ll be staying with her for a while, just until I can sort out a place of my own.’

She started to look through the patients’ charts that were neatly stacked on the desk. Her whole world was changing. She loved this job; she’d thought long and hard before giving in her notice, but how could she go on working here as long as Matt was going to be married to her cousin? And, worse, Jenny was going to take up a job here too.

She shuddered inwardly. It was still alien to her to think of him as her ex. They’d been together for eighteen months and it had been a terrible jolt to discover that he’d fallen out of love with her and gone off with another woman.

‘I shall have to look for another job, of course, but there are a couple of hospitals in the area. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find something. I hope not, anyway.’ She straightened up and made an effort to pull herself together. No matter how much she was hurting, she knew instinctively that it was important from now on to make plans and try to look on the positive side. She had to get over this and move on. She glanced at Molly. ‘Perhaps we could meet up from time to time—we could go for a coffee together, or a meal, maybe?’

‘Yeah, that’ll be good.’ Molly cheered up and began to glance through the list of young patients who were waiting to be seen. ‘The test results are back on the little boy with the painful knee,’ she pointed out helpfully. ‘From the looks of things it’s an infection.’

‘Hmm.’ Caitlin quickly scanned the laboratory form. ‘It’s what we thought. I’ll arrange for the orthopaedic surgeon to drain the fluid from the joint and we’ll start him on the specific antibiotic right away.’ She wrote out a prescription and handed it to Molly.

‘Thanks. I’ll see to it.’

‘Good.’ Caitlin frowned. ‘I’d like to follow up on him to see how he’s doing, but I expect Matt will take over my patients when I leave here. I’ll miss my little charges.’

Caitlin phoned the surgeon to set things in motion and then went to check up on a four-year-old patient who’d been admitted with breathing problems the previous day. The small child was sleeping, his breathing coming in short gasps, his cheeks chalky-pale against the white of the hospital pillows. He’d been so poorly when he’d been brought in yesterday and she’d been desperately concerned for him. But now, after she had listened to his chest and checked the monitors, she felt reassured.

‘He seems to be doing much better,’ she told his parents, who were sitting by his bedside, waiting anxiously. ‘The intravenous steroids and nebuliser treatments have opened up his airways and made it easier for him to breathe. We’ll keep him on those and on the oxygen for another day or so and you should gradually begin to see a great improvement. The chest X-ray didn’t show anything untoward, so we can assume it was just flare-up of the asthma. I’ll ask the nurse to talk to you to see if we can find ways of avoiding too many of those in the future.’

‘Thank you, doctor.’ They looked relieved, and after talking with them for a little while longer Caitlin left them, taking one last glance at the child before going back to the central desk to see if any more test results had come in.