Spring Proposal in Swallowbrook

by Abigail Gordon

  She was unaware that taking the rep to the party was something that Hugo had been loath to do, but Bryony Matthews had told Libby that she would love to come if she could sit next to him, so he’d reluctantly agreed to do the honours.

  Reluctant because he’d been intending asking Ruby if she would be his partner. He had wanted to allow himself the treat of spending the evening with her. Just being with her at the surgery was beginning to feel like not enough. He kept telling himself it was crazy with them living so close, yet seeing so little of each other out of surgery hours.

  He was coming to terms with her presence in his life, aware that she was different from other women he’d met, with none of the vanities and ploys that some of her sex had attempted to use to get him into bed…without succeeding. Any moves in that direction would come from him, when if ever he felt that the time was right.

  Ruby made him smile, and at the same time made him curious about what was underneath the mixture of competence that she displayed in the surgery and her lack of confidence otherwise. Yet she’d obviously found herself a partner for the night of Gordon’s party, as there had been no softening on her part in their unspoken determination to cool it between them and he hadn’t felt the need to ask who.

  Sufficient that he had been lumbered with Bryony Matthews, who he was far from keen on as she always brought personal matters into the conversation when she called at the surgery to push a new drug that her company was merchandising.

  No doubt it would be the same tonight, he thought grimly as he dressed for the evening ahead, but Libby had asked him to partner Bryony as a favour because she belonged to one of the top pharmaceutical firms in the country and always gave Swallowbrook priority regarding what was going on in the world of medication.

  Yet there could be one consolation during the evening ahead. If he could get her alone he was going to explain to Ruby what his intention had been before he had been shanghaied into entertaining Bryony.

  It was against his nature to allow himself to be put in a situation like the one with the pharmaceutical rep when he was wanting to get to know Ruby better. Apart from the fact that she was the junior doctor at the practice and had once lived in the village, he knew very little about her. She kept information about her family to a minimum as well as everything else she’d been involved in before appearing in his life, yet why shouldn’t she keep her affairs to herself if she wanted to? Ruby was doing a good job as one of the doctors of the Swallowbrook Medical Practice, so why couldn’t he accept that was all that mattered?

  Patrice rang from Canada just as he was about to leave the house and by the time she’d finished chatting he was on the last minute for the party.

  The apartment was in darkness so obviously Ruby had already left and there would be no time to speak to her before the meal, which was before the presentation that the practice was making to Gordon, so it would be halfway through the evening before he got the chance to be near her.

  When he entered the dining room of the hotel the first thing he saw was a pouting Bryony patting the seat of the empty chair beside her. As he hurried across to join her his eyes were raking the room to find Ruby and it soon registered that she wasn’t there, and neither was the opportunity to find out why as the hotel staff were already coming round with the food.

  The meal was over, the presentation had been made, and the guests were mingling by the time he got the chance to ask Libby where Ruby was. He had a ghastly sinking feeling that she was ill, alone in the apartment or something similarly unpleasant, and was dumbstruck when she said, ‘Ruby had no one to come with, Hugo, and so offered to babysit for us to save us having to bring Toby to something that is far past his bedtime.’

  ‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t she tell me she had no one to partner her?’

  ‘She would have known you were going to be with Bryony, wouldn’t she? So obviously she wouldn’t push herself forward,’ she said mildly, surprised by his reaction.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he agreed begrudgingly.

  ‘If you want to speak to her we’ll be going in about an hour and then she’ll be free,’ she informed him, ‘but don’t expect her to come here, Hugo, she isn’t dressed for it.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he replied, and thought there was nothing to stop him from going there…now!

  After noting that Bryony had a circle of male guests gathered around her he said to Libby, ‘I’m going to pop round to your place if that’s all right with you.’

  When she nodded, still bemused, he went striding off, the most attractive man in the room, resplendent in black dinner jacket and trousers, dazzling white shirt and bow-tie, not caring a damn how he looked or that Bryony’s gaze was following him.

  He couldn’t bear the thought that Ruby had been tucked away like some sort of outcast at Libby and Nathan’s cottage while he’d been…what? Not enjoying himself, that was for sure, because the moment he’d realised she wasn’t at the party it had died a death, and now he was going to go and find out why she hadn’t told him what she was planning to do.

  Having been bathed, fed and read to, Toby had fallen asleep on the sofa and Libby had just picked him up gently and was about to carry him up to bed when the bell rang.

  With Toby cradled against her, she went to the door and, managing to lift the latch with some degree of difficulty, found Hugo in the porch, and the sight of him took her breath away.

  ‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

  ‘Er…yes.’ she said, unable to conceal her amazement. ‘But keep your voice down. If Toby awakens at the sound of it he could take forever to go back to sleep.’ Her voice had trailed away as he’d stepped inside in all his magnificence, and finding it again she said, ‘I was just taking him up to bed.’

  ‘So it would seem. Give him to me,’ he told her, with his annoyance abating and tenderness taking its place at the sight of her with the sleeping child in her arms. As she obeyed and followed him up the stairs she couldn’t believe that her Cinderella position had been reversed. Prince ‘not so’ Charming, if his expression was anything to go by, had arrived.

  As Hugo watched her gently tucking Toby beneath the covers he said, ‘He’s a great little guy. I wouldn’t mind a house full of children like him one day.’

  When she straightened up there was yearning in her expression, or maybe something deeper, he thought. Did it border on sadness? Yet she was smiling as they went down the stairs together and at the bottom she turned to him and asked, ‘So how can I help you, Hugo?’ and the spell of the moments of togetherness they’d just shared was broken.

  ‘I’m here because you’ve missed Gordon’s party, for one thing,’ he said flatly, ‘and for another because you didn’t tell me you intended giving it a miss because you had no one to go with. Why didn’t you let me know what you had in mind?’

  ‘You’re asking why!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why do you think? We haven’t exactly been communicating of late out of working hours, have we? And you were hooked up for the evening with the pharmaceuticals rep. I didn’t think you would want a threesome.’

  ‘Quite right, I wouldn’t have, but it would have been Bryony who was the surplus one. I was furious when Libby told me you were here looking after Toby while the rest of us were being wined and dined.’

  He wasn’t going to explain that he’d looked for her in vain amongst the guests and been dismayed to discover that she wasn’t there, though in truth he had only himself to blame for not checking out her arrangements for the evening beforehand.

  ‘You’re making a fuss about nothing, Hugo,’ she said calmly, and as he observed her dressed in jeans and a cotton top that contrasted sharply with his own elegance the comment brought his disappointment to a head.

  Before she could resist she was in his arms and this time the gentleness of that other occasion was replaced by a n
eed that was raw and demanding as he said softly, ‘Fussing, am I? We’ll see.’

  It was no gentle brushing of his lips against hers this time. He kissed her until she was gasping for breath, weak and pliant in his arms, and it had to stop! As she wrenched herself away from him she said weakly, ‘That has just made everything more confusing for both of us.’

  What had just happened had left her feeling so vulnerable she could have wept because that was what she couldn’t afford to be. She had to make him see that they couldn’t be anything more than colleagues and friends.

  She didn’t want it to be like that, it would be so easy to let the attraction they were developing for each other take its course and fall in love with this wonderful man. But to end it now would be the least painful solution in the long run and in keeping with that line of thought she said, ‘Please don’t do that again. It was totally uncalled for.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he replied levelly.

  Before he had the chance to make any further ambiguous comments she said, ‘I think you should go, Hugo. It will seem odd if Libby and Nathan find you here when they come back from the party.’

  ‘Yes, maybe I should,’ was his answer to that, ‘but I hope you realise that I wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t been so cagey about your arrangements. Libby asking me to partner Bryony was a diplomatic move on behalf of the practice that I could hardly have refused to fall in with, or I would have been taking you.’

  ‘You seem to be missing the point,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t mind coming here to look after Toby. I insisted, in fact, so that Libby and Nathan could stay as long as they liked without having to take him with them to something that could be over quite late.’

  She wasn’t going to explain that she’d decided if she couldn’t be with him at the gathering, the next best thing would be to do a favour for the other two doctors by babysitting for them. Better Hugo should think that his place in her world was only on the edges of it.

  He was about to do as she’d requested and go back to the party, having made a fiasco of coming to seek her out. But he’d been driven to do it by the disappointment of finding her not there and had come to discover what her motives had been in offering to stay with Toby when there must have been other members of the village community that Libby and Nathan would have trusted with the task.

  But the moment he’d seen her with Toby in her arms and observed how gentle she was with him his thoughts had moved into other channels and he had found himself picturing her with children of her own, patient and caring beneath the mantle of motherhood, the kind of woman he would choose for a wife one day.

  Unaware of the direction of his thoughts, she was observing him questioningly and bringing them into line he said, ‘I’m going back to the party, Ruby. Sorry to have disturbed you.’ And before she had the chance to speak he was in his car with the engine running and within seconds disappeared from sight.

  She watched him go dry eyed, but was weeping inside. What had just happened between them had made her even more aware of the futility of her feelings for him. For a few ecstatic moments she’d felt that she was where she belonged, in Hugo’s arms, but reality had been sharp in following those sentiments and nothing had changed, she told herself bleakly.

  When Libby and Nathan came home not too long afterwards, concerned that they might be keeping her too long in her role as babysitter, she was leafing through a magazine, outwardly tranquil with no indication that not so long ago she had been kissed until she was breathless by the fourth member of the practice.

  Yet Libby was observing her thoughtfully, remembering how Hugo had disappeared as soon as she’d told him why Ruby wasn’t at the party, how he’d gone looking anything but festive and returned in an even more sombre mood.

  She liked Ruby, who was an intelligent and caring addition to the practice but hardly likely to catch Hugo’s eye, she would have thought. But he’d been bogged down with his sister’s affairs from the moment of arriving in Swallowbrook, hadn’t had a moment to call his own, and now it was different, he was living his own life for a change and if Hugo had set his sights on Ruby, good for him.

  When Ruby arrived back at the apartment the house beside it was in darkness so Hugo must still be living it up at the party, not intending letting their earlier skirmish spoil his evening, and could she blame him?

  He’d come to the cottage out of concern for her and she’d been quite odious, especially after he’d taken her breath away with the kisses that had come out of nowhere, so he’d obviously gone back to where there was warmth, laughter and friendship, and on that assumption she went upstairs to bed but, as was getting to be a habit, it wasn’t to sleep.

  Hugo was watching the time and wasn’t in party mood. The room hired for Gordon’s retirement party was gradually emptying as midnight was approaching, but he wasn’t able to leave yet as, wanting to relieve Ruby of her duties back at the cottage, Libby and Nathan had asked if he would stay until the end and see the elderly practice manager safely home as he was drinking quite a lot of champagne. And then there was Bryony to chauffeur back to her hotel in the town, so it was a cert that Ruby would not be awake when he finally arrived home.

  The pharmaceutical rep had enjoyed herself hugely at the party in the company of various unattached men, but had commented on the way home, after they’d seen Gordon safely inside, that she hadn’t seen much of him and if she’d known that he was going to be here, there and everywhere during the evening she might have thought twice about putting in an appearance.

  But any slight niggles she might have had disappeared when after stopping outside her hotel he produced out of the boot of his car one of the beautiful flower arrangements that had graced the gathering and presented it to her. Once that was accomplished he breathed a sigh of relief and set off for home.

  He was wrong in thinking that Ruby would be asleep when he arrived home. She heard his car pull up on the drive and tiptoed to the window without putting on the light. The sight of the tall figure in evening dress walking towards the house made her want to run out to him and explain what it was that had always made her stay clear of serious relationships with men.

  Hugo was a doctor, for heaven’s sake, and if she couldn’t tell him, who could she tell? Yet she couldn’t bear the thought of watching the light go out of his eyes with the telling of it, as there was always Darren Fielding’s reaction to take into account.

  She awoke the next day to the sound of the bells of the old Norman church pealing out over the village on a Sunday morning in spring and saw that the sun was already shining in a cloudless blue sky. With the sound and the sight of those things there came the urge to be beside the lake, away from all unhappy thoughts.

  The eating places beside the water would be already open so why not go and have breakfast there and then renew her acquaintance with the nearest of the fells for a while? That way she wouldn’t be spending the morning wondering if and when Hugo was going to appear.

  When she walked into her favourite place she saw immediately that she didn’t have to wait for that to happen. He was already up and about, a solitary diner seated at a table in the corner with his attention centred on the cooked breakfast in front of him, and she almost groaned.

  The events of the night before were still painfully clear. She hadn’t wanted to meet up with him again so quickly. Tomorrow at the surgery would have been soon enough, but it was as if some unseen force had taken over her life and if she didn’t make a quick departure it would be there again, strong and compelling, drawing her to him like a magnet.

  As she turned to leave he looked up and, putting down his knife and fork, got to his feet and came across to where she was hovering in the doorway.

  ‘What’s the matter, Ruby?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘I don’t bite. Why not join me for breakfast? I can recommend the food. I always come here on Sundays and then go walking
on the fells, weather permitting.’

  He hadn’t slept much after arriving home in the early hours. Had kept remembering how she’d felt so right in his arms and how after the first few seconds she’d succumbed to his passion, but it had all ended on a flat note when she’d asked him not to kiss her again.

  Finally after much introspection he’d rejected the idea of having a lie-in and had kept to his usual routine, which would take him out of Ruby’s line of vision from the apartment, but it was as if she’d read his mind. She was here in the bistro beside the lake dressed for fell walking, if he wasn’t mistaken, in a checked shirt, jeans, a warm jacket, boots and with a woolly hat on her head.

  ‘Yes. I know you don’t bite,’ she said in a low voice, ‘but the other things you do are just as painful.’

  She was following him to the table and he said whimsically, ‘So I’m not the charmer I thought I was. I can’t recall any woman I’ve kissed before describing it in those terms. Maybe I’ve been ranking myself too high.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me, Hugo,’ she said as she seated herself opposite him. ‘I am not “any” woman. I’m my own person and will let you know when I want to be kissed, if ever.’

  The pleasure of seeing her appear in the doorway of the café was still strong upon him and letting that comment pass he pointed to the menu and said, ‘At least let me buy you breakfast,’ and beckoned for one of the staff to come to take her order.

  The food was good and having finished his own meal Hugo sat back in his chair and watched her enjoy what was put in front of her. At one point he said, ‘Do I take it that you are dressed for fell walking?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. I am. It‘s quite some time since my dad used to take me up there. He was a keen walker and loved this place like I do. It was a blow for him when we had to move because of his job.’