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She frowned at him in puzzlement. ‘Lies?’
‘You said you didn’t like me.’
She laughed shortly. ‘God, that’s some ego you’ve got.’
His smile was slow and lazy. ‘Abbie, Abbie — don’t beat around the bush. You like me — even though you might not want to. and you want me — even though you think it’s a lousy idea. I do, too, but ——’ His shrug was Gallic and very expressive.
She blushed. ‘Dream on,’ she muttered.
‘Oh, Abigail. You’re lovely — but then you know that, don’t you?’ His fingers sifted through her hair, fanning it out against her shoulders. ‘Beautiful — like sunlight trapped in autumn leaves. It feels wonderful …’ He let it fall from his fingers and sat back with a sigh. ‘What’s the matter, Abbie? Am I too direct for you? Should I pretend for the sake of convention? Perhaps for the first few days — a fortnight, maybe? Or wait even longer, until you’ll believe me if I say I love you, so your conscience is satisfied as well as your body?’
She drew herself away from him, so that the last strand of her hair fell from his fingers, as if breaking the contact would defuse the tension that zinged between them.
He was right, of course. She did like him, and want him, and she did, indeed, think it was a lousy idea. Furthermore, acting on her feelings was the very last thing she intended to do, and she told him so.
‘Why?’ he asked softly, and his fingers invaded her hair again, sifting the strands with sensuous slowness.
Her heartbeat grew heavier, so that she could feel the blood pulsing through her body, bringing it alive. She pulled away again.
‘Are you always so damned unsubtle?’
‘Unsubtle?’ He smiled. ‘I’m wounded. I thought I was being very understanding.’
She glowered at him. ‘I don’t know you!’
‘There’s time.’
‘A year. That’s all. I’m here for a year.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s OK. I can handle a long-term relationship.’
‘Long-term?’ she exclaimed. ‘I meant only a year!’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Damn it, Abbie, I’m not proposing. All I’m suggesting is that we spend some time together — a mutual scratching of itches.’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing,’ she replied tightly, ‘and certainly not with egotistical doctors!’
‘No? You should. You might enjoy it.’
‘I doubt it.’
He shook his head slowly. ‘What a waste. Oh, well, if you change your mind, I’m here. We’d better get to the hospice.’
For the rest of the short drive Abbie sat scrunched up at her side of the car, hardly daring to breathe in case he made some suggestive remark, and wondering all the time how he could possibly have qualified as a doctor when his morals were so clearly askew.
Then she saw him in action at the hospice, and all her preconceptions about him were eroded at a stroke.
They arrived at the modern, purpose-built hospice just as the sun broke through the clouds, and Abbie felt peace steal over her immediately. The buildings were low, constructed in mellow golden brick, and the whole atmosphere was one of tranquillity.
‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ he said softly. ‘There are other kinds of healing apart from the physical. It’s so easy to forget that, and most hospitals are soulless places, but I love coming here. Every visit refreshes me, even when, as so often, it signals the end. Even so, there’s a lightness about it.’
Abbie could feel the lightness seeping into her as they stepped into the airy, quiet reception area.
‘Ladies’ loo,’ he said with a nudge of his head towards a door. ‘I’ll have a chat to the staff for a minute.’
She escaped gratefully, and hurried back to find him deep in conversation with a diminutive little nurse in sister’s uniform.
‘You must be Dr Pearce,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Welcome to St Saviour. We’ll look forward to seeing you when Leo comes on his clinic days, shall we?’
She mumbled something non-committal, unaware that Leo even did clinic days at the hospice, and then they left the sister and went towards the little four-bedded ward.
‘We’re going to see Mary Tanner,’ Leo told her. ‘She’s forty-two, had a mastectomy three years ago and she’s got skeletal metastases. Recently she’s had some back pain so she’s had a course of radiotherapy to try and halt the pressure on the nerves, and she’s in for convalescence and drug review before going home again. Lots of emotional problems, obviously. They’ve got two girls just coming up for their teens.’
They went into the ward, and he was greeted with gentle warmth by the staff, and genuine respect and affection by the patient, Mary Tanner, and her husband Gerry.
He introduced Abbie to them, then perched on the bed and asked Mary how she was feeling now.
‘Oh, heaps better. My back feels nearly OK now already and the pain’s much better controlled. I feel almost human again,’ she said with a low laugh, and Leo smiled.
‘Good. Home soon, then?’
‘Oh, yes, I think so — if Gerry can cope.’
‘Of course I can cope,’ he told his wife, but his eyes were sad. Abbie looked away, feeling like an intruder, and Leo stood up to leave, dropping a kiss on Mary’s cheek.
‘I’ll pop in and see you again once you’re home. Come with us, Gerry, and we’ll have a chat to the staff about when she can leave.’
As they approached the reception area, Leo turned to Gerry. ‘How are you really coping?’
He shrugged. ‘I just feel so guilty. I’ve really enjoyed being able to slouch around and take the kids out for long walks without worrying about her, and I feel a real louse because she’s the one with the problems, really, and I feel I ought to be offering her more support, but I don’t know, I just can’t — not all the time. I feel better now, but — oh, I don’t know; it’s just such hard work trying to be cheerful …’
Leo squeezed his shoulder gently. ‘Don’t feel guilty, Gerry. I’m sure Mary understands, you know — and I think in a way it’s a relief for her to have some time away from you all when she doesn’t have to be brave and cheerful all the time, too.’
‘Really?’ He looked doubtful, but was clearly desperate for reassurance, and Leo gave it to him.
‘Yes, really. This situation’s very emotionally demanding on all of you and you need to recharge your batteries. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be more use to her, and her to you. Don’t feel guilty. She’ll be home to you soon, and you’ll be glad you’ve had a rest.’
Gerry smiled, more relaxed. ‘You’re right — as always.’
Leo tapped on the sister’s door, and they all trooped in and discussed Mary’s progress and decided she should go home at the end of the week unless she had any further set-backs.
As they parted at the door, Gerry turned to Leo and smiled wearily. ‘Thanks for dropping by.’
Leo shook his hand warmly. ‘My pleasure. See you soon. And don’t feel guilty. If you need to talk, you know where to find me.’
Gerry nodded and turned away, walking back to his wife and the crisis in their lives.
‘Do you know them well?’ Abbie asked, remembering the kiss he had given Mary as they left her bedside.
‘No — well, only since Mary’s mastectomy. I’ve spent a lot of time with both of them since. Why?’
She shrugged. ‘Just wondered. You kissed her.’
His mouth quirked. ‘Jealous, Abbie? The offer’s still open.’
So they were back to that, were they? ‘Of course I’m not jealous. It just seemed — odd, that’s all.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t find it odd to greet people with physical contact. I’m a toucher, Abbie …’
His hand was resting lightly on the small of her back as he spoke. She stepped away.
‘I’d noticed,’ she said shortly.
‘Whereas you — you’re a buttoned-up little virgin.’
‘I am not!’ she denied hotly, acutely uncomfortable with the sudden shift in the direction of the conversation, and he laughed, a low, smoky laugh that did incredible things to her system.
‘Well, then, all I can say is that whoever you’ve had affairs with didn’t even get close to the real you.’
Abbie made no attempt to correct him. What was the point? He was so absolutely right.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_89b561e6-2d4b-57b4-9978-83948a3eb8a3)
AS THE days passed, so Abbie’s disordered impressions of life in general practice settled down to a sort of pattern.
Peter Sargent, she realised, was the sort to skate through life with cheerful inefficiency, constantly chivvied by the secretarial staff who were quite unmoved by his ingenuous charm.
She discovered that Ravi Patel was single, thirty-four and after Leo, who did precious little to discourage her despite his protestations to the contrary.
As for Leo himself, he was thirty-two and a constant thorn in her side, rattling through his patients at twice the speed of light so that by the time she finally emerged exhausted but triumphant at the end of her surgeries he was long gone on his visits and she was unable to ask him the inevitable string of questions that the consultations had generated.
‘Well, you shouldn’t dawdle about for so long,’ he would tell her, and then would sit and rip through the seemingly knotty problems, so that she felt a complete fool for not having seen the answers herself.
Not that he ever tried to belittle her medical knowledge. He didn’t have to. Frankly, she was more than aware of the glaring lapses in her understanding of certain conditions.
As for the paperwork, it defeated her utterly, to the point that when the receptionist told her she should fill in her PC4 she asked where she could find it, much to everyone’s amusement.
Leo, not even trying to disguise his mirth, explained cheerfully that a PC4 was a course of four tablets taken as post-coital contraception — hence the name.
Peggy Taylor, the practice manager, took pity on her and told the others off, but it did little to dilute Abbie’s humiliation.
It wasn’t that she minded being teased — lord, she was used to that. She had two brothers who had taken it as their filial duty to torment the life out of her in her childhood, until, in her teens, she’d suddenly changed into the object of their friends’ lascivious attention. Then they’d closed ranks protectively, but even so they still teased her gently to this day.
So it wasn’t being teased that troubled her, rather the glaring gaps in her knowledge that the teasing had exposed.
Leo found her later sitting in her surgery surrounded by a heap of textbooks, and came and hitched a lean hip up on to the corner of her desk.
‘Boning up on methods of contraception, Abbie?’ he teased.
She ignored him huffily.
‘Tut-tut,’ he admonished. ‘Wallowing in self-pity?’
‘Oh, go to hell,’ she muttered, her voice clogged.
He stuck a finger under her chin and tipped her head up, studying her face intently. She turned away, embarrassed that he should see the traces of tears on her cheeks.
‘Leave me alone.’
He stood up, but instead of walking away he came round her desk, pulled her to her feet and wrapped his long arms round her.
At first she was stunned into immobility, but after a few seconds she gave in to the luxury of his undemanding embrace, dropping her head forward into the hollow of his shoulder and sighing shakily.
His hand came up and smoothed her hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I’m sure Jackie didn’t.’
‘It’s not that,’ she mumbled into his shirt. ‘I just feel so inadequate. I should have known what a PC4 was.’
‘Probably,’ he agreed, ‘but nobody’s perfect. Stop torturing yourself.’
She lifted her head and looked up into his eyes. ‘But what if it’s something important? Something life-threatening, and I don’t know about it? I could kill someone!’
‘Do you really think you’re that bad?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you really think you would have got so far in medicine if you were a danger to your patients?’
She gave a shaky laugh. ‘Perhaps I just scraped through — perhaps it was all a fluke. Maybe I just got the examiners on a good day. Who knows?’
Leo sighed. ‘You really don’t have a very high opinion of yourself, do you?’
Numbly, she shook her head. ‘There’s so much to know, and I always feel I’m fumbling in the dark. It terrifies me, Leo, knowing I’m responsible for whether somebody lives or dies.’
He chuckled. ‘In general practice? In the average week the most drastic thing you’re likely to come across is a nasty case of piles.’
She giggled despite herself. ‘You know what I mean. What if I miss something? What if someone dies because of my ignorance?’
‘You can always ask,’ he assured her. ‘Peter or Ravi or me — any of us. Don’t feel you have to cope alone.’
‘What about when you’ve all gone and I’m still here trying to get to grips with this stupid machine?’ She flicked a contemptuous glance at the computer, and Leo laughed.
‘Does it still hate you?’
‘Does it ever,’ she grumbled.
‘You need a break — have supper with me tonight.’
She realised she was still standing in his arms, although she wasn’t crushed up against him any more, but she might just as well have been because she could feel the warmth of his body, could remember the feel of it, long and hard and lean, all sleek, solid muscle and sinew, terrifyingly, overwhelming male.
She stepped back a little further. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ she said as firmly as she could manage.
