Christmas-Eve Baby (3 page)

‘Thank you for last night, it was wonderful,’ she said, and, leaning over, she kissed him goodbye.

It seemed horribly, unbearably final.

Mid-November

‘R
IGHT
,
Lucy and Dragan, don’t forget I’ve booked you both off this afternoon for the MIU meeting with the St Piran consultant. He’s coming about two-thirty,’ Kate said.

‘Pointless,’ Nick said flatly. ‘I don’t know why you’ve booked him in with Lucy. Can’t you reschedule it for when I’m around? She won’t be in a position to implement the changes and we’ve got more than enough to think about at the moment. We won’t need all the extra hassle while we’ve got a locum in. I think we should forget it for now.’

‘No,’ Marco interjected. ‘The community needs more than we can offer, Nick, and we do need to do this as soon as we can. We’ve talked it over endlessly.’

‘So why Lucy? Why not us? It’s our practice.’

‘Because she’s the most appropriate person,’ Kate pointed out calmly. ‘Apart from the fact that you’ve shown no interest in being involved in this up to now, emergency medicine is her area of responsibility in the practice, and this was all her idea. It’s only a feasibility study, Nick,’ she went on, ‘planning for the future. Someone’s got to do it, so why not her? Be
sides,’ she added before Lucy could interrupt and point out that she was still, actually, in the room, if they’d all finished talking about her, ‘they’ve worked together before, so it makes sense.’

They had? When? Or more importantly…

Nick’s brow pleated into a scowl. ‘Who is it?’ he asked, yet again before Lucy could speak.

‘Oh—didn’t I mention that?’ Kate said guilelessly. ‘It’s Ben Carter.’

‘Ben?’ Lucy said, her heart lurching against her ribs. Oh, no. Not Ben! Not when she still hadn’t told him…

Her father’s frown deepened. ‘Carter!’ he growled. ‘Why the hell is
he
coming?’

‘Because he, like Lucy, is the most appropriate person for the job—and he volunteered.’

Really? Why on earth would he do that, seeing that the last time she had spoken to him it had been to agree that they shouldn’t see each other again because of the situation between him and her father?

Nick was emphatic. ‘No. Not Carter. I don’t want him in my practice.’

‘Our practice,’ Marco pointed out mildly. ‘And anyway, it’s irrelevant what you or I or anybody else want. If we’re going to do this, we need an expert, and he’s the best.’

‘Rubbish, the man’s incompetent.’

‘Dad, no! You cannot go around saying things like that about him.’

‘Why not, if it’s the truth?’

‘Because it isn’t! The inquiry exonerated him absolutely.’

‘It was a whitewash. Utter whitewash, and if you weren’t so hoodwinked by the man you’d realise it.’

‘Nick, that’s not fair,’ Kate said gently. ‘He’s very well regarded.’

He stood up and banged his mug down on the draining-board. ‘Think what you like, he’s the last person we need here,’ he said stubbornly. ‘It doesn’t matter what any of you say, you’ll never convince me otherwise. Ben Carter’s bad news, and I don’t want anything to do with him.’

He spat Ben’s name as if it were poison, and Lucy’s heart sank. Was he ever going to be able to see this clearly? Because if not…

‘Nick, you’re getting this totally out of proportion,’ Kate said firmly. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to have anything to do with him. You’re busy with your antenatal stuff, Marco’s concentrating on the paeds, this is all Lucy and Dragan. Mostly Lucy. And if they’re all happy about it, I really don’t see why it’s such an issue. It’s not as if he’s going to be having any involvement in the running of the unit.’

Nick opened his mouth to reply, but Marco cut him off.

‘She’s right. Move on, Nick. Let it go.’

He shut his mouth, opened it again, and then turned abruptly and stalked towards the door. ‘Fine. Don’t any of you mind me, I’m just the senior partner,’ he snapped, and slammed the door shut behind him.

Lucy winced, Marco shrugged, Dragan shook his head and frowned and Kate smiled briskly at everyone and headed for the kettle. ‘Right. That’s that settled. Coffee, anyone?’

Lucy couldn’t believe it was Ben.

Of all the people to be coming, why did it have to be him?

Although she had to see him some time, and preferably soon. Unless she just wasn’t going to…

No. That wasn’t an option. She just wanted time to think it through, to work out the words, to find a way of introducing the subject.

Ridiculous. She’d had months to talk to him, months to think up the words. She was just a coward—a coward with a patient who was staring at her a little oddly, waiting.

‘Right, Mrs Jones, I’m sure you’ll be all right. I’m confident that as I first thought it’s just a little bit of fluid on your lungs from your heart problem, so I’m juggling your pills a little and we’ll see if you improve. Here’s your new prescription, but in the meantime the injection I’ve just given you should start to shift it soon, and the extra frusemide should do the trick in the long term.’ She clipped her bag shut with a little snap, and picked it up. ‘If I don’t hear anything from you, I’ll come back and see you next week to make sure it’s cleared up, but if you’re at all worried, you call me, OK? No being stoic.’

Edith Jones nodded. Recently widowed, she was struggling to cope with her new independence, and Lucy worried about her. Her heart condition had been fine until her husband’s sudden and traumatic decline, and since then she’d been neglecting herself. Not any more, though. Lucy simply wouldn’t let her. Edith was still a little breathless, but even in the short time since Lucy had given her the diuretic injection, she’d noticed an improvement.

‘I’ll be fine, Doctor,’ Edith said with a smile. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’

‘My pleasure. You stay there, I’ll let myself out.’

‘No, that’s all right, I’ll see you to the door. I have to get up to go to the toilet anyway. That’s one of the problems with your medicine!’

Good. More evidence of the drugs working, but just to be on the safe side, Lucy warned, ‘Don’t forget to keep drinking. I don’t want you thinking you can keep the fluid off your lungs by dehydrating yourself. That’s not how it works. Cut down on your salt intake, and have lots of water and fruit juice, and not too much of that mega-strong tea you like to drink, or you’ll be getting problems with your waterworks to make life even more interesting! And don’t forget—if you aren’t entirely convinced it’s working, ring me.’

‘I will, Doctor. Thank you.’

She waved goodbye, got into her car and drove the short distance back to the surgery. It was ten past two, and Ben would be arriving in twenty minutes. Just time for a bite of lunch and a little hyperventilation before she had to see him again…

He was early.

He hadn’t meant to be, but the morning had gone badly and he hadn’t stopped for lunch in case the roads were busy, then they’d been clear and he’d found himself at the practice at five past two. So he was sitting in his car and killing time, staring out over the harbour and wondering whether he should go in and what kind of reception he would get from Nick Tremayne.

Hopefully better than the reception he’d got in May when he’d come to the barbeque here. Still, Nick had agreed to their meeting, so presumably Lucy had finally talked him round. Not that he expected miracles. A chilly silence would be more like it, but even that might be better than outright hostility.

A vessel caught his eye, a little fishing smack coming into the harbour, running in on the waves. The sea beyond the harbour mouth was wild and stormy today, the water the colour
of gunmetal. It looked cold and uninviting, and he was glad he didn’t make his living from it.

He turned his head and studied the cars in the car park, wondering which one of them was Lucy’s. The silver Volvo? No. That was most likely to be Nick’s. The little Nissan? Possibly. Not the sleek black Maserati that crouched menacingly in the corner of the car park, he’d stake his life on it. That, he’d hazard a guess, was Marco Avanti’s.

He was just psyching himself up to get out of the car and go inside when a VW turned into the car park and drove into one of the spaces marked ‘Doctor’.

Lucy. His pulse picked up, and he took a slow, steadying breath to calm himself. After all, the last time he’d seen her had been in early May, and they’d both made it clear it wasn’t going anywhere. He was sure they could be adult about this—even if it had taken weeks to get her out of his mind again.

Longer still to get her out of his dreams, but he’d done it, finally, by working double shifts and staying up half the night trawling the internet in the name of research. And he was over her. He was.

So why was his heart racing and his body thrumming? Crazy. He shouldn’t be here. He should have let someone else do it—one of the other A and E guys…

She was getting out of the car, opening the door, and in the rear-view mirror he could see her legs emerging, and then her…body?

He was on his feet and moving towards her before he had time to realise he’d moved, before he’d thought what he was going to say, before he’d done anything but react. And then, having got there, all he could do was stare.

‘Ah, Mr Carter, welcome!’

He realised Kate Althorp was beside them, talking to him, and over the roaring in his ears he tried to make sense of it. She was holding out her hand, and he sucked in a lungful of air, pulled himself together and shook it, the firm, no-nonsense grip curiously grounding. ‘Ben, please—and it’s good to see you again, Mrs Althorp. Thank you for setting this up.’

‘Call me Kate—and it’s my pleasure. Lucy, I’ve put tea and biscuits out in my office for you, so you won’t be disturbed. Dragan Lovak’s had to go out on a call—he’ll be joining you later. But since we’re here now, why don’t we have a quick guided tour before the clinics start, and then I’ll leave you both to it?’

And he was led inside, Lucy bringing up the rear, her image imprinted on his retinas for life. He followed the practice manager through the entrance to Reception, smiling blankly at the ladies behind the counter, nodding at the patients in the waiting room, vaguely registering the children playing in the corner with the brightly coloured toys. He saw the stairs straight ahead, easy-rising, and the consulting rooms to the right, on each side of the short corridor that led to the lift.

‘It’s a big lift,’ Kate was saying as the doors opened and they stepped in. ‘Designed for buggies and wheelchairs and so on, but not big enough for stretchers, although we don’t have any call for them really. If people collapse and have to go to hospital in an ambulance, they’ve probably been in to see one of the doctors, and as most of the consulting rooms are downstairs anyway, that’s more than likely where they’ll be. If not, the paramedics usually manage to get them down in the lift without difficulty. The trouble is the building wasn’t designed to be a surgery, so it’s been adapted to make the best use of what we have.’

‘How long has the practice been here?’

‘Two years. After Phil died there wasn’t a practice here in Penhally Bay until two years ago. A neighbouring practice closed and they lost the last of the local doctors, and Marco Avanti and Nick set up the practice here where it is now to fill the gap.’

The lift doors opened again and he found himself at the end of a corridor the same as the one downstairs, with rooms to left and right. ‘We’ve got the nurses’ room and a treatment room up here, and our MIU, such as it is. I’ll let Lucy show you that, she’ll know more about it than me.’

‘What about a waiting area?’ he asked, forcing himself to concentrate on something other than Lucy. She was going through a door marked ‘Private’, closing it firmly behind her. Damn.

‘We have a couple of chairs out here but we don’t tend to use them except in the summer when it’s busier,’ Kate was saying. ‘Usually they call the patients up one at a time from downstairs. Our staffroom and shower and loo are up here, too, as well as another public toilet and the stores, and this is my office.’

She opened the door and ushered him in. ‘Have a seat,’ she said. ‘Lucy won’t be a moment. I’ll put the kettle on.’

He didn’t sit. He crossed the room, standing by the window, looking out. It was a pleasant room, and from the window he could see across the boatyard to the lifeboat station and beyond it the sea.

He didn’t notice, though, not really. Didn’t take it in, couldn’t have described the colour of the walls or the furniture, because there was only one thing he’d really seen, only one thing he’d been aware of since Lucy had got out of her car.

The door opened and she came in, and with a smile to them both Kate excused herself and went out, closing the door softly behind her, leaving them to it.

Lucy met his eyes, but only with a huge effort, and he could see the emotions racing through their wary, soft brown depths. God only knows what his own expression was, but he held her gaze for a long moment before she coloured and looked away.

‘Um—can I make you some tea?’ she offered, and he gave a short, disbelieving cough of laughter.

‘Don’t you think there’s something we should talk about first?’ he suggested, and she hesitated, her hand on the kettle, catching her lip between those neat, even teeth and nibbling it unconsciously.

‘I intend to,’ she began, and he laughed and propped his hips on the edge of the desk, his hands each side gripping the thick, solid wood as if his life depended on it.

‘When, exactly? Assuming, as I am, perhaps a little rashly, that unless that’s a beachball you’ve got up your jumper it has something to do with me?’

She put the kettle down with a little thump and turned towards him, her eyes flashing fire. ‘Rashly?
Rashly?
Is that what you think of me? That I’d sleep with you and then go and fall into bed with another man?’

He shrugged, ignoring the crazy, irrational flicker of hope that it was, indeed, his child. ‘I don’t know. I would hope not, but I don’t know anything about your private life. Not any more,’ he added with a tinge of regret.

‘Well, you should know enough about me to know that isn’t the way I do things.’

‘So how do you do things, Lucy?’ he asked, trying to stop
the anger from creeping into his voice. ‘Like your father? You don’t like it, so you just pretend it hasn’t happened?’