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‘Good.’
Just to underline the point, she added, ‘How’s Lucy?’
‘Fine. I’ve just had the results back and they’re pretty much what I expected, so I’ve written up the drugs and admitted her. How come she didn’t go to her GP before? She must have had symptoms.’
‘She’s just been promoted. She’s been busy at work, thought maybe she was going through the menopause early and she’d picked up a bug that was doing the rounds.’
‘A pulmonary bug?’
Holly nodded, knowing that a pulmonary infection was the most common event that could spark off a thyroid storm. ‘Thanks for seeing her for me.’
‘Pleasure.’
She wished he hadn’t said that word. She scrunched her cardboard cup into a ball and threw it at the bin. It went straight in first time. ‘I’d better get back to my patients. I told Michelle I was just taking five minutes. And we’re short today.’
‘Right.’
She’d half expected him to say, See you. But he hadn’t. Just as well. Because she didn’t want to see David any more than she had to.
Did she?
CHAPTER TWO (#u43aa7374-bf7c-536f-8c6a-1d04a08f2c51)
IT WASN’T working.
Holly gritted her teeth, adjusted the incline on the treadmill and increased the speed. But running uphill to the beat of the rock music she was playing on headphones—even at high volume—wasn’t enough to drown out her thoughts. It wasn’t enough to stop her remembering.
The past is over, she reminded herself harshly. You got through it. You don’t have to go back there. You’re thirty years old, you’re a registrar in the emergency department and everybody at London City General respects you. You are not eighteen years old with your world collapsing round your ears. Get a grip.
But the pep-talk didn’t work.
Even though she knew it was pointless and stupid and wasn’t going to change anything—yada, yada, yada—she still couldn’t get David out of her head. Couldn’t stop the memories replaying. David, leaning over her in the orchard next to her parents’ house. Those blue, blue eyes, the same colour as a midsummer sky, glittering with love and laughter. The smile on his face, making him more handsome than ever—and then suddenly growing serious as he lowered his mouth to hers. Kissed her. Made love with her, their textbooks and revision forgotten. Skin to skin with sunlight dappling over them, the scent of apple blossom in the air and the sound of birdsong all around.
Stop. Just stop. Holly slammed the ‘stop’ button on the treadmill, switched off the music and leaned with her arms on the supports and her forehead resting on her arms.
She hadn’t thought about this for years. Hadn’t allowed herself to think about it for years.
Oh, who was she trying to kid? She faced it every time there was an obstetric emergency. Every time a child was brought in. Faced it for a second, blanked it and made the professional in her take over. She was a doctor. First, last and always. Nothing else.
And yet her hands crept instinctively to her flat stomach. Rubbed. Splayed in the protective gesture that all newly pregnant women made, cradling the little life in their womb.
The little life hadn’t been there for long. Just long enough to disappoint her parents—nice, middle-class Mr and Mrs Jones, in their big house in the posh bit of Liverpool, with their orchard and their two big cars and their terribly nice, clever children.
Ha. She’d hit eighteen and she’d let them down. Her brother Daniel had waited until he was nineteen before he’d gone off the rails, and he still wasn’t quite back on them. They’d both been a disappointment. And Holly’s career hadn’t quite redeemed her in her parents’ eyes. After all, she was in east London, practically the slums as far as they were concerned, when she could have lived somewhere so much more upmarket.
‘Holly, how could you be so stupid?’
The words echoed again and again in her head, in her mother’s cut-glass tones.
Stupid. She’d been that all right. Stupid enough to think that David would stand by her. OK, so it would have changed their plans a bit, having a baby. A lot, even. She’d have had to take a gap year for starters. But there were nurseries, day-care centres, crèches. They could have coped. Studied together and watched their baby grow up into a toddler and start primary school. Qualified. Moved to a little cottage in the country where they’d have been the village GPs, with four children, a couple of dogs and a rabbit and a guinea pig and maybe a pony for the kids.
Everything they’d wanted. Just as they’d planned—except one of the children would have been a teensy bit older.
Holly took a shuddering breath, willing herself not to cry. She’d cried enough over David the day she’d phoned him to tell him the news. The news that she’d gone into Liverpool the previous day and bought a pregnancy testing kit from a chemist’s where nobody had known her or would report back to her mother. She’d done the test secretly that morning. Squirreled the test stick back to her bedroom and watched for five agonisingly slow minutes until the results had shown up. And then she’d known her missed periods and nausea had been nothing to do with exam stress.
Except he hadn’t been there.
And he hadn’t returned her call—that day, or the next, when she’d phoned him again. She’d believed in David. He wouldn’t let her down. He wouldn’t desert her when she needed him most…
But he hadn’t called her back. It had reached the point where Holly had suspected he’d actually told his mum to lie on the phone and tell Holly that he wasn’t there.
He’d been doing biology A level, so he’d have been perfectly capable of working it out for himself. Missed periods probably equalled baby. But he had also been a teenage boy. Full of testosterone and panic. It had taken her long enough to work it out, but in the end she had appreciated his logic. Warped, but understandable. He’d gone for the easy way out. If he didn’t contact her again, his girlfriend would eventually realise that he’d dumped her. No mess, nothing to face, nice and clean.
For him.
Not for her.
At least her parents hadn’t gloated. Hadn’t gone into the I-told-you-so routine. Laura Jones had simply held her daughter and gone into organisation mode. Not for nothing was Laura the chair of the local WI, the Rotary Group and the local school governors.
‘We’ll get through this. You know you can’t possibly keep the baby. Not unless you want to ruin your career before you’ve even started. So I’ll get you booked in somewhere to deal with it. Concentrate on your exams—and we’ll get your exam centre changed. You can sit them without having to worry about seeing him.’
Holly hadn’t wanted a termination. OK, so the baby hadn’t been planned, and the father didn’t want to know, but plenty of people coped in the same situation. Maybe once the baby was born, her mother would come round to her way of thinking. She’d get decent A-level grades, take a gap year, then start her course when her baby was around nine months old.
If her parents wouldn’t support her, she’d find a way. She’d become a damned good doctor, and she’d be all the family her baby would ever need. She’d do it all on her own if she had to.
Except it hadn’t turned out like that.
It had all come crashing down, two hours before her first A-level exam.
Holly scrubbed at her eyes. Stop being such a wimp, she told herself fiercely. You’ve got everything you want in London. The best possible friends and the best possible job—a job where every single minute’s different. And where there wasn’t any time to think and wonder about what might have been.
So what if her two best friends had both just got married and she’d been their bridesmaids? So what if, a year or two down the line, Zoe and Jude would have babies and ask Holly to be godmother?
It didn’t change her plans. Not at all.
And neither did David’s arrival. He was her colleague and they were going to be working the same shifts, but she didn’t need to have that much contact with him. They’d agreed to be polite to each other and work as a team, for the sake of the ward. That was enough.
Outside London City General, she’d stay well clear of him. She wasn’t going to get sucked back into that old attraction. She wasn’t going to fall for those beautiful blue eyes. Or the well-shaped mouth that knew exactly where and how she liked being kissed. Or the clever hands that she’d known would be gentle with patients but were passionate with her.
Get a grip, Holls, she told herself again. Physically, he’s your type. And, yes, the sex was good. But that was in another life, another world. It was over between you years ago. He’s probably married. Married, with children. She linked her hands across her abdomen and pulled tight to take away the emptiness, the memories of the child they’d made who hadn’t been born. And even if he isn’t, he’s not the kind you can rely on. He’s not worth it. Just forget him.
So who was the real Holly Jones?
The question had been nagging at David all day. And even an hour’s unbroken swim hadn’t driven the question out of his head.
Who was she?
She was a doctor. Caring. Kind to patients—he’d discovered that she’d lent her own fan to Lucy, their patient with the thyroid storm, before Lucy had been transferred to the ward. It was the kind of thing that the Holly he remembered would have done.
But she had a reputation here for being that little bit unapproachable. Scary. And she’d been ambitious enough to dump him just before their A levels, concentrating on her work rather than her relationship. She’d even made arrangements to sit her exams elsewhere—and when she hadn’t turned up at Southampton he’d realised the truth. She never had wanted to do the village GP thing with him. She’d just been playing with him, marking time. Holly Jones had gone off to conquer the world.
His mum had been the one to tell him.
‘Sorry, son. She rang while you were out. She doesn’t want to see you any more.’
He hadn’t believed her. His mother had never liked Holly, saying that she was stuck-up and was only slumming it with David to pass the time. He’d always been able to shrug it off, until he’d gone down to the phone box on the corner to ring Holly. And then he’d spoken to her mum.
‘Sorry, David. She doesn’t want to see you again.’
‘I’d just like to speak to her, please, Mrs Jones.’
‘I’m afraid she won’t come to the phone. She really doesn’t want to be bothered with you, David.’
He’d refused to leave it at that. As soon as he talked to Holly they’d be able to sort out the problem, whatever it was. He knew it. So he’d tried hanging about in the street in the hope that he would see her. But the one occasion when he’d seen her get into her mother’s car she’d averted her eyes. She’d refused even to look at him.
Then David had finally realised that his mother was telling the truth after all. Holly had grown bored with him. She hadn’t even had the guts to tell him to his face that it was over. So maybe his mother’s prejudices had been right all along.
He grimaced and went for a shower. The water was almost scalding hot but he didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel anything.
Because Holly was back in his life.
Holly. The woman who’d ruined him for relationships. The woman who’d been a ghost throughout his marriage—as his ex-wife had thrown at him the day she’d walked out on him.
He’d learned not to do relationships any more. So now he was a dedicated doctor. A good one. He’d be able to treat Holly as just another colleague.
Wouldn’t he?
The emergency department was trialling a different way of working shifts: instead of the usual internal rotation of two or three earlies plus two or three lates for three weeks, then four nights in the fourth week, they were trying two earlies, two lates, two nights, four off. Which would have been fine by David if Holly hadn’t been on his team—because her shifts were identical to his.
If he asked for a change, people would notice. Especially as he’d admitted to knowing her at school. The hospital grapevine was definitely stronger here than it had been in Southampton or Newcastle, and he didn’t want to become the focus of gossip. He knew Holly wouldn’t take it well either. So he had to put up and shut up.
His doubts lessened as the week went on because Holly stuck to the rules: she treated him as just another colleague, giving him as much information as he needed about patients and steering well clear of anything remotely personal. Which suited him fine.
Until the Friday night, when David was treating a patient with chest pains and heard an almighty racket coming from Reception.
He glanced at the clock. Yep, just as he’d thought: chucking-out time from the pubs. It sounded as if there were a number of drunken people wandering round Reception, demanding treatment. Probably a punch-up, he thought. Bruises, lacerations, the odd fracture.
But they’d probably demand immediate treatment and would harry the receptionist until they were seen. Which meant he needed to step in before things escalated.
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ he promised the elderly man. ‘Keep breathing the oxygen for me. Slow breaths. In and one and out and one,’ he counted, checking that his patient was keeping the same time. ‘That’s great. If the pain gets any worse, press the buzzer here.’
Oh, great. Just what they didn’t need on a busy Friday night. Six men in their early twenties who’d all drunk way too much beer. Probably with a few vodka or tequila chasers. And they were getting aggressive with Siobhan.
If she didn’t do something, right now, this could escalate into something really nasty.
Holly strode over to them. ‘I believe you gentlemen require assistance?’
As she’d hoped, they turned away from Siobhan, giving the receptionist a chance to hit the panic button. All Holly needed to do now was to keep them talking until Security arrived.
‘You going to kiss it better for me, then?’ One of them swaggered over to her.
I’ll kick it, more like, if you don’t put a sock in it, Holly thought, but she smiled sweetly. She’d had it drummed into her at medical school that you treated all patients the same, even if you didn’t like them. Conflict slowed things down and made it more likely that you’d make a clinical error. You had to defuse volatile situations as quickly as you could.
‘I know you need to be seen, but Friday nights are always really busy, and, I’m sorry, that means you’re in a queue. We’ll be able to treat you much more quickly if you wait in a line and give our receptionist the details she needs—one at a time. If you’re all talking at once she’s not going to be able to hear you properly and that’s how mistakes get made.’
‘Bossy. Bet you like it on top, don’tcha?’ The one with the black eye leered at her. ‘You can give me one, if you like.’
She laughed it off. ‘I can tell you’ve had a bump on the head.’
‘Oi, you’ve got to see our mate. Now. He’s been knifed—he’s bleeding,’ one of them said, jabbing a finger in the air at her.
Holly kept her arms calmly by her sides and flexed her fingers to avoid her gut reaction of balling her fists ready to punch him. ‘We’ll see you all in time. But there’s one thing you should all know.’
‘Yeah?’
She beckoned the one with the black eye closer. ‘If you’re drunk, I’ll have to assume your body won’t be able to tolerate any anaesthetic—because it’ll make you ill,’ she said quietly. This wasn’t strictly true, but she was banking on his knowledge of medicine being confined to TV dramas. ‘With a bloke your size, I’m going to have to use a big needle to stitch your wounds. Without anaesthetic, it’s going to hurt.’
‘Needle?’ Black-Eye said, colour draining from his face.
Just as she’d calculated: the bigger the braggart, the more fuss he made about things hurting. Particularly needles. ‘Big needle,’ she emphasised. ‘And, of course, I’ll need to give you a tetanus booster.’ From years of experience, she kept an empty epidural syringe in her pocket when she did the night shift on Fridays or Saturdays, for just this sort of situation. She withdrew it and showed it to him.
He swore in horror. ‘That—that’s huge!’
Which was the whole point: even without the needle, it looked impressive. Her patient didn’t need to know the syringe was used for anaesthesia and guiding a tube into the spinal cord—it certainly wasn’t used to give vaccinations or local anaesthetic for suturing wounds! She managed to hide her grin. ‘If you sit quietly and don’t hassle the other patients—or my receptionist—I’ll assume you’re not drunk and I’ll make sure you get some painkillers before I sort out that cut. So it’s your choice, mate. Drunk and painful, or not drunk and painkillers?’
‘Right.’ Black-Eye looked thoughtful. ‘Come on, lads. Let’s do what the doc says. Sit down and wait.’
‘I’m not waiting. That bastard sliced my arm. I’ll bleed to death! I want it stitched now, so I can go and sort him out,’ another one said, thrusting his face belligerently into Holly’s. ‘You a doc or a dolly?’
She nearly gagged at the alcohol fumes. ‘A doctor. A female doctor. One who’s been on her feet all evening and really, really needs a cup of coffee. The longer you keep me here, the longer it’ll take to treat you. So why don’t you sit down and let me finish helping my patient, so I can start seeing to your arm?’
He glared back at her, but he sat down, just as two burly security men entered the room and David emerged from the cubicles.
‘Problems?’ one of the security men asked.
‘Not any more—are there, lads?’ Holly asked.
‘No, Doc,’ Black-Eye said politely.
David stared at Holly. ‘What did you do?’ he asked.
‘Not a lot. Just pointed out a few things.’ She shrugged. ‘Siobhan, who’s next on my list?’
Holly had just taken on six drunken men—all of whom were a good six inches taller than she was. All muscular, all drunk, and all of them had been fighting, so adrenaline was pumping through their bodies, and they’d been raising hell in Reception.
Without even raising her voice, she’d got them all to sit down. Without a fuss. Then had coolly asked to see her next patient.
The sweet, gentle Holly Jones he’d known definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that. She’d lived a sheltered life and had probably never even seen anyone drunk or violent—whereas he’d lived on a rough estate where he’d seen situations like this every single night.
