Risk of a Lifetime (Mills & Boon Medical) (10 page)

But on Thursday morning, of course, she came on duty as he was going off, and he had to hand over the patients to her.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she said as he was leaving, and he nodded curtly.

‘Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.’

His smile felt tight, but she just smiled back, recognition of his frustration in her eyes, and she gave him the tiniest wink before she turned away.

Hell’s teeth.

He went home, went to bed, then got up again, because clearly he wasn’t going to sleep, and put on his running gear. He cut up past the hospital, out on the lanes into the open country and picked up the river wall to the harbour, then slowed to a walk and carried on along the sea wall, up the steps to the top and across the clifftop car park near his grandparents’ house.

He was hot and sweaty, but he’d have a drink with them, check that everything was OK and then borrow the car and go home to shower and change and then come back. Maybe even take them out for lunch—except the way Grumps had been lately, that was unlikely.

They were in the garden, and Marnie greeted him with a smile and went to hug him.

‘I shouldn’t touch me, if I were you. I’ve been running, I’m pretty rancid,’ he warned with a laugh. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Oh, good today. Ed’s here, darling.’

His grandfather looked up. ‘Edward. Been ages. Too busy, I suppose.’

Ages?
He shook his hand. ‘I’ve been around, Grumps. How are you today?’

‘Oh, all right. Stupid legs and things. Marnie, get drinks. Gin and tonic.’

‘Ned, it’s only eleven-thirty! You don’t have your gin and tonic until six.’

The old man frowned, his muscles slow to react. ‘Sure?’

‘Quite sure. And, anyway, I’ve made lemonade. You know you like my lemonade.’

‘I’ll get it,’ Ed said, leaving Marnie to deal with him. She’d perfected the art of distraction, and it usually worked like a charm.

He rejoined them a few minutes later, and all was tranquil again. ‘Here—I found some biscuits, too.’

‘He won’t eat his lunch if he has biscuits,’ Marnie murmured, but he shrugged.

‘It doesn’t matter. He hardly eats anything now. He just needs calories.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ she muttered, rolling her eyes, and he chuckled and shook his head.

‘You’re lovely. Have half a biscuit. I’ll have the other half.’

‘Only if I let you,’ she said with a laugh.

He stayed with them for an hour, then borrowed the car, drove home and showered and went back for the rest of the day. He’d had in mind taking his grandfather out for a push along the prom, but Marnie needed to go shopping, so he stayed with him and tackled some of the gardening while his grandfather dozed in the shade.

‘I tell you what,’ Marnie said after she came back. ‘The forecast for tomorrow is good, too. If you aren’t too busy, why don’t we go down to the beach hut in the morning?’

Because he’d been going to get the house ready for Annie, but what, realistically, was there to get ready? The bed?

Don’t think about the bed.

‘That sounds good. I’ll come over first thing to give you a hand, and then we can go down as soon as we’re ready. There might be some sailing boats out there for him to watch.’

‘Thank you. I do appreciate it and he will, too, even if he doesn’t show it,’ she said, going up on tiptoe and kissing his cheek. ‘You need a shave,’ she scolded, but he just grinned.

‘I never shave on my days off. It’s part of my bad-boy image.’

She tutted and smacked his hand, and he laughed and hugged her. ‘Right, I’m off. I’ll see you later, at bedtime.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. It’s a pleasure.’

‘Now I know you’re lying.’

He couldn’t help the wry laugh. ‘OK, then. It’s a privilege. Is that better?’

‘Oh, Ed...’ She caught her breath and hugged him fiercely. ‘You’re such a good man. You should be married, with children.’

Pain slammed into him, taking him by surprise. ‘Marnie, I haven’t got time in my life for that,’ he said gruffly, ‘and anyway, I’ve never met a woman I’d want to spend my life with.’

Until now
.

And where the hell had
that
come from?

He kissed her goodbye and left, walking swiftly away from her less-than-subtle innuendo and loving interference, but he couldn’t outrun Annie, it seemed. The house was full of her, and, exhausted though he was, he couldn’t just crawl into bed and sleep for a few hours because the bed had become the biggest memory-magnet of them all.

He went into the sitting room, about the only room in the house she hadn’t been in, and fell asleep in the corner of the sofa, waking with a crick in his neck to the sound of the phone ringing.

It was Marnie.

‘Darling, I just wondered when you were coming, because Ned’s getting a bit restless.’

He blinked at his watch, swore silently and scraped a hand through his hair.

‘Ah—um, I’ll come now. Sorry. I sat down for a minute. I must have dropped off. I’ll be right with you.’

He stood up, stretched out the kinks and without allowing himself to think about it he got back on the merry-go-round.

* * *

‘Can we go to the beach, Mummy? Pleeeeeeease?’

‘And can we take the buckets and spades and make a sandcastle?’

The beach? What a good idea. It was a glorious day, and the beach would be perfect. She grinned at the girls. ‘Why not? You get the toys out of the sandpit, and I’ll find your swimming things. Shall we take a picnic?’

‘Yay! Can we have cheese and pickle sandwiches?’

‘And cherry tomatoes and grapes and chocolate biscuits—’

‘I don’t think we can take chocolate biscuits on a hot day,’ she pointed out, laughing, and pushed them both gently towards the door. ‘Shoo. Go and get the buckets and spades or the sun will have gone by the time you’ve finished talking about it.’

‘Is MamaJo coming?’

She looked at her mother. ‘Mum?’

‘I don’t know. Go and get your things and I’ll think about it.’

The girls tumbled out of the patio door, and Annie searched her mother’s eyes. ‘You don’t have to. If you want time to yourself, I’m quite happy to take them on my own.’

‘Are you? I’ve got a new book to read and I’d love a quiet hour or two. I might come down later. Are you going to take the windbreak?’

‘Probably. I’m going to drive, so we can go to the nice bit of beach near the cliff. There’s a café there and an ice-cream kiosk and loos, so it’s really handy.’ Not to mention close to where Ed’s grandparents lived, so she could eye up the houses and speculate...

Her mother nodded. ‘OK. I’ll read for a while, and come down and join you later if I get bored. Don’t forget your phone. And suncream.’

‘As if,’ she said, rolling her eyes and throwing the picnic together. Twenty minutes later they were out of the door, all three of them in their costumes and beach dresses and sunhats, the picnic and sandpit toys were in the car and they were on their way.

It really was a fabulous day, the warmest day yet this year, and although the sea would probably be too cold the beach would be lovely, and it would be fun building sandcastles with the girls. Relaxing.

She could do with something relaxing, because it was Friday, and that meant—she checked her watch—less than twelve hours to her secret tryst with Ed. Her heart thumped at the thought, her senses leaping into life.

The suspense was going to kill her!

She pulled into the clifftop car park, facing the houses that looked out across the car park at the sea beyond. They were interesting houses. Some had been built in the thirties, all curved glass and gun-emplacement architecture, others were newer, with a modernist feel, and all of them were highly desirable.

So which...?

‘Mummy, come on!’

The girls were bouncing in their seats, and she was behaving like a crazy stalker. She pulled herself together, loaded them up with as much as they could carry, grabbed the cool bag, the windbreak and everything else and struggled down the steps to the beach. They found a spot midway between the bottom of the steps and the café, by which time her shoulder was screaming from the weight of all the apparently necessary equipment that was hanging from it.

‘This’ll do fine,’ she said in relief, and while she set up the windbreak and found the suncream, the girls stripped off and started to dig.

She smothered them in factor fifty, taking particular care with Grace with her fairer skin, gave herself a squirt of factor twenty and settled down on her towel with a book while the girls amused themselves building a sandcastle.

She’d help if they asked, but it was too easy to take over and there were already two of them squabbling about who was doing it best without her sticking her oar in.

In the end she had to intervene, and with a sigh she put her book away and went and joined them. ‘Why don’t we dig a moat all round the outside and you can fill it with water?’ she suggested, and they spent the next ten minutes digging it and then got their feet cold and wet, fetching water from the sea.

The girls shrieked and ran back, laughing, leaving Annie to scoop up the water, and of course the hem of her dress got wet and then as she was turning away she stumbled and another wave came and drenched her while she was on her knees.

‘Oh! It’s freezing!’ she wailed, and the girls giggled and jumped up and down gleefully. ‘Little horrors. It’s mean to laugh,’ she said, trailing soggily back to the sandcastle with water streaming off her dress and running down her legs.

‘You should have taken it off, Mummy, like us, and then it wouldn’t be wet,’ Grace said sagely, and Annie sighed. Clever child. And of course she would have taken it off if it wasn’t for the fact that the costume was an old one she’d had before the girls, and it was a bit on the snug side at the top end. Well, both ends, really. So much for her modesty. She peeled off the thin cotton sundress and hung it over the windbreak.

‘You’re quite right. I tell you what, while it dries, why don’t we go and get an ice-cream?’

Only of course nothing ever worked quite according to plan. The girls ran ahead, not paying attention as usual, and Grace tripped up the steps and fell hard onto her hands and knees on the sandy concrete surface of the prom.

She burst into tears, and Annie knelt down beside her and hugged her. ‘Oh, darling—are you all right?’ she asked, but Grace was sobbing and blood was already oozing from both knees and one of her hands.

‘It h-ur-rts,’ she wailed, and Annie hugged her and rocked her while Chloe patted her shoulder and made soothing noises and looked worried to bits.

‘It’s OK, she’s all right,’ Annie reassured her, but Grace shook her head.

‘Not a-all ri-ight,’ she sobbed, and burrowed into Annie’s shoulder.

Typical. The first-aid kit was in the car, Grace was beside herself and she was too heavy to carry that far.

She lifted her head a fraction and there, right in front of her, were bare feet. Strong, masculine feet, topped by well-muscled legs sticking out of a pair of faded board shorts.

There was a scar on the left knee, a scar she’d seen only the other night, and she felt relief flood through her.

* * *

He’d been watching them for a while.

Not deliberately, but they’d been right in front of him and it was hard not to. Especially when she fell in the sea and then had to strip off.

Voyeur
.

But then he’d seen the accident happen and he’d had to go and help. Not that he wanted to interfere, and they were supposed to be keeping their families out of it, but he couldn’t just sit there and ignore them while the child sobbed her heart out.

‘Annie? Can I do anything?’

He crouched down, reaching out a hand to touch her arm, and she closed her eyes and bit her lip.

‘Grace fell over. She’s only skinned her knees and hands, but my first-aid kit’s in the car.’

He gave a resigned but silent sigh. So much for keeping them all apart. ‘No problem. We’ve got one in the beach hut. Come on.’

Chloe let go of her sister, he helped Annie to her feet with Grace still in her arms and took them to the beach hut just a few yards away, where his grandparents were sitting watching.

‘Here we go. Marnie, Grumps, this is Annie. She’s a friend of mine, and her little girl’s just fallen over and cut her knees.’

‘And my hand,’ Grace sniffed, making sure they knew the full extent of her injuries.

‘Oh, dear,’ Marnie said comfortingly, rising to the occasion as she always did. ‘Well, now, I’m sure there’s something we can do about that. I think there’s some boiled water in the kettle. It should be cool enough to use. Do you want some salt in it, Ed?’

‘Please. Here, Annie, sit down and let’s have a look at the invalid, shall we?’

He shoved a little folding beach chair her way, and she sat down with a plop, as if her legs had given way. He crouched down in front of them and smiled at Grace. ‘Hiya, Grace. My name’s Ed, and I work with your mummy. Shall we see if I can make your cuts better?’

She glanced up at her mother, checking, and Annie smiled and brushed the halo of curls back off her face.

‘Ed’s a children’s doctor,’ she told her daughter seriously. ‘He’s very, very good.’

‘Will it hurt?’

‘Well, now, it might a little,’ he told her honestly, ‘but it’ll feel much better after the sand’s washed out and we’ve put some nice cream on.’

‘Are you going to put ice cream on it?’ Chloe asked, looking confused, and he chuckled.

‘
Nice
cream, not ice cream,’ he corrected, smiling at her. ‘But maybe if you’re good we can get you all an ice cream afterwards, if Mummy says yes.’

‘We were going to get an ice cream,’ Grace told him, watching him warily as he squeezed out a gauze swab and dabbed the first knee. ‘Ow!’

‘Sorry, sweetheart. I tell you what, why don’t you grab hold of my hair and if it gets really bad, you can pull it hard. OK?’

‘OK.’

He felt the little fingers grasp a lock just over his temple, and winced. She already had a death grip on it. What it would be like if he hurt her? Oh, well, no doubt he’d survive.