‘I don’t know how we’re going to fit everybody into the waiting room,’ Chrissie said, looking distinctly harassed as she pushed her way through the throng. ‘Malcolm’s taken out all the chairs, but even so—’
‘He’s back from the seminar?’ Hugh interrupted, then frowned when he saw his partner coming out of their small office. ‘Played hookey for the last session, did you?’
‘You bet I did,’ Malcolm replied. ‘It was the same old, same old, and I had no intention of missing the first of Alex’s classes.’
‘You just want to make fun of us,’ Chrissie protested. ‘Alex, tell Hugh and Malcolm they’re banned from watching,’ she continued as Alex stowed her helmet under the reception desk.
‘No can do, I’m afraid,’ Alex replied. ‘They want to satisfy themselves that I’m not doing anything which will put the entire female population of Kilbreckan into traction, but don’t worry. If they cause any sort of trouble, I’ll get Mrs Allen to eject them. Give me ten minutes to change into my costume and I’ll be right with you.’
Malcolm gulped as Alex disappeared and Chrissie began ushering the women through to the room normally used by their visiting physiotherapist.
‘By costume, you don’t think Alex means the full…you know…’ Malcolm gestured awkwardly towards his chest and his legs. ‘That sort of costume?’
‘Even if she does,’ Hugh said firmly, ‘I’m sure we’ve both seen a lot more feminine skin when we’ve been down at the beach in the summer.’
‘Not on Kilbreckan beach, we haven’t,’ Malcolm muttered. ‘Most women wear thermals on Kilbreckan beach in the summer if they don’t want to catch pneumonia.’
‘Malcolm, we’re doctors,’ Hugh protested. ‘We see women’s bodies every day of our working lives.’
But not like this, he thought, as Alex reappeared, and his mouth went suddenly dry. No woman had ever come into his surgery wearing a green sequinned bra that fitted a pair of small yet surprisingly full breasts like a second skin. No woman had ever stood before him clad in a green and gold, floor-length skirt, split almost to her waist, that sat tantalisingly low on her hips, revealing a flawlessly smooth stomach, and a pair of surprisingly long legs.
‘Alex, you look lovely,’ Malcolm said, admiration plain in his voice. ‘Just like a woman. I mean, I know you’re a woman,’ he added quickly, crimsoning slightly, ‘but usually…I mean, at work…that’s to say…’
‘It’s all right, Malcolm.’ She laughed as his cheeks began to resemble those of a ripe tomato. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘She does look lovely, doesn’t she, Hugh?’ Malcolm continued, giving him a pointed look, and Hugh cleared his throat.
He’d called her a pixie, a water sprite, because she was so small and willowy, but the woman standing in front of him was also unmistakably—indisputably—a woman. A woman with slender hips and shapely thighs. A woman with a woman’s breasts and, as he found his eyes travelling down to them, he jerked them back her face, and kept them there.
‘She…’ He cleared his throat again. ‘She looks very nice.’
Stunning would have been more accurate, he thought, and for a split second he thought he saw hurt and disappointment in her eyes but, before he could rectify what he’d said, be more complimentary, she’d turned to face the assembled women.
‘OK, let’s get this class started,’ she said.
‘Alex, it doesn’t need both Malcolm and me to assess the safety risks of your class,’ Hugh said quickly, but before he could retreat she put out a hand to stop him.
‘Stay right where you are, Hugh Scott,’ she exclaimed. ‘No way are you going to weasel out of watching after all the fuss you made about it not being safe. You’re going to stay, and eat your words.’
He didn’t want to stay. He didn’t want to be anywhere near her at all, not when he couldn’t keep his eyes off her, but she’d already closed the door, and was explaining to the women that the first step they were going to learn was something called the Egyptian Walk.
A walk that was clearly extremely difficult if the lack of success being displayed was anything to go by when Alex switched on her cassette, and a rhythmic tune began to play, and the women in the room attempted to copy what she was doing.
‘Are they all supposed to look like drunken sailors leaving the pub at closing time?’ Malcolm muttered, his teeth sunk deep into his bottom lip to keep himself from laughing out loud, but Alex heard him.
‘Dr Scott—Dr MacIntyre!’ she exclaimed, fixing them both with her green eyes. ‘You’re not wearing scarves round your hips.’
‘Alex—belly dancing—it’s a woman’s thing,’ Hugh protested, and she shook her head.
‘No, it’s not. It’s become a female dance because of its links with mother nature and fertility, but in the past young men used to belly dance.’
‘Come on, Dr Scott,’ Mrs Allen shouted. ‘You’re always telling us how beneficial exercise is, let’s see how fit you are.’
‘No—really—perhaps some other time,’ Hugh began, holding up his hands in apology. ‘I’m just an observer this evening.’
‘Thirty-nine going on sixty, Hugh,’ Alex said as she bore down on him with a scarf in her hand and a look on her face that told him she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Chrissie tying a scarf round Malcolm’s ample hips despite his protestations. Short of making a run for the door—a run Hugh strongly suspected that MrsAllen with her considerable girth and experience of raising eight sons would assuredly forestall—there was nothing he could do but give in with as much grace as he could.
‘I look stupid,’ he muttered as Alex wrapped a scarf round his hips.
‘And that matters?’ she said, her voice uncharacteristically brittle, and before he could reply she’d returned to the front of the class, leaving him feeling like a prize idiot with nowhere to hide.
He felt even more stupid as the class progressed because no matter how hard he tried he just couldn’t get the steps right. It was so much more difficult than it looked, and he had to acknowledge that Alex had been right when she’d said belly dancing was good exercise. All around him he could see faces screwed up in concentration as the women tried to mimic what Alex was doing, faces that became redder and redder as Alex demonstrated more and more difficult moves, and he could feel a trickle of sweat running down his own back.
‘OK, I think that’s enough for this evening,’ Alex declared after an hour. ‘Same time next week, ladies?’
A chorus of ready assent went up, and Hugh let out a sigh of relief that it was over until Ellie Dickson put up her hand.
‘Could you show us what a complete dance looks like, Dr Alex?’ she said. ‘So we know what can be achieved after a few more exercises?’
‘Yes, go on, please,’ the rest of the women entreated, and Alex smiled.
‘OK. I’ll do a short dance for you, incorporating as many of the moves as I can, and then finish up with what’s called a shimmy, but I don’t want any of you to try this at home. You’ll all need quite a few more lessons before you’re supple enough.’
Hugh didn’t know what a shimmy was, and neither could he have identified any of the steps Alex incorporated into her dance, but he did know when she began to dance that what she was able to do was pretty special.
Who would have thought, he wondered, as he stared at her whirling, undulating body, that a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, or a pair of leathers, hid a body that was capable of performing such intricate and complicated moves? But, as he continued to watch, and Alex danced faster and faster, dipping and twirling and spinning, he suddenly realised something else.
That the libido he’d believed long dead had suddenly and very painfully come alive. That his body was stirring and hardening as he stared at her, and he wanted to reach out and caress the breasts she was somehow making quiver and tremble to the music. He wanted to bury himself between the smooth pale thighs that glistened and gleamed with the
effort of the dance, and he was appalled.
‘You OK, buddy?’ Malcolm said curiously when Alex’s dance had ended, and the assembled women began to clap and cheer, and Hugh pulled the scarf off his hips and crumpled it into a tight ball in his fist.
He could see Alex staring at him from across the room, her face flushed, her breasts rising and falling rapidly from her exertions, her expression a little uncertain, a little hesitant, almost shy. She was waiting for him to compliment her on her dance, he knew she was, but he had to get away, just had to. Blindly he turned on his heel, but he got not further than the car park before he heard her calling his name, and, unwillingly, he turned to face her.
Her crazy red hair was sticking out all over the place from her exertions, but what he was most aware of was how very large her eyes were in the moonlight, and how lost she suddenly looked. A lost water sprite with lips that looked soft, oh, so soft, and as he stared down at her he felt his heart lurch against his rib cage, heard a rushing in his ears, and he wanted to kiss her, so very much wanted to kiss her, and it was wrong.
‘Hugh, what is it?’ she said, her face no longer flushed but pale. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Alex…’
He took a step towards her, but women were beginning to stream out of the surgery, chattering and laughing, and unconsciously he shook his head, and Alex half stretched out her hand to him, and then Grace Allen was beside her, talking animatedly, and he headed for his car, not looking back, not trusting himself to look back.
No, his brain declared emphatically, as he drove home, scarcely seeing the road. No, it repeated, when he opened his front door and strode into his sitting room. What he had felt when he’d watched Alex dance was a betrayal of Jenny’s memory. A betrayal of all that had been good and pure and decent between them.
He pulled files out of his bag, and tried to concentrate on them but it didn’t work. He switched on the television and tried to lose himself in the documentary that was showing, but that didn’t work either. All he kept seeing was Alex, with her green eyes shining. Alex’s lithe stomach undulating, and her breasts straining against the fine fabric of her bra.
Desperately, he took the photograph of Jenny from his wallet and stared down at her familiar smiling face. This was real, he told himself, not what he had felt this evening for Alex, this was real, but, as he continued to gaze at the photograph it wasn’t Jenny’s face he saw, it was Alex standing in the car park, Alex looking so lost, so very lost and alone.
A sob broke from him, and he put his fist to his mouth to quell the others he knew would come, and then from a great distance, he suddenly heard his wife’s voice.
‘Let me go, Hugh,’ she whispered. ‘It’s time for you to let me go.’
He had loved Jenny so much but she was right. She wouldn’t have wanted him to spend the rest of his life grieving for her. She would have wanted him to go on, to keep living, and he hadn’t been living since she died, only existing, and with an effort he put Jenny’s photograph back into his wallet, then stumbled to his bed, and eventually fell asleep. But for the first time in two years he didn’t dream of Jenny.
He dreamt of Alex.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘HUGH and Malcolm are both ready for the post-surgery debriefing,’ Chrissie declared as she opened Alex’s consulting-room door. ‘Shall I tell them you’ll be along, or…?’ The receptionist’s gaze fell on the folders lying scattered on Alex’s desk. ‘Do you need a few more minutes to finish your paperwork?’
‘Tell them I’m coming,’ Alex replied, hitching a smile to her lips, but she groaned when the receptionist disappeared.
She hadn’t even started her paperwork. For the past hour she’d done nothing but stare into space, and doodle on her notebook, and what had she drawn? Boxes. Dozens and dozens of boxes.
‘Freudian, or what, Alex?’ she muttered, quickly tearing the top sheet out of her notebook, and tossing it into her waste-paper basket, but it didn’t help.
She could still see the boxes and herself trapped inside them.
Savagely she bit her lip. She should never have worn her belly dancing costume that night. She hadn’t needed to, not for the first lesson, and certainly not when she’d known Hugh was going to be there, but when she’d got back to Kilbreckan that night, after meeting Bunty Soutar, some malignant demon had whispered, Put your costume on, put it on, and what had been the result?
‘You look nice,’ Hugh had said when he’d first seen her.
She’d been so disappointed, so hurt, and when she’d danced for him—and she had danced for him, she knew she had—he’d walked away from her, not once but twice, but since then…
Everywhere she went in the surgery he seemed to be there, hovering. Every time she looked up at post-practice meetings, his eyes were on her, thoughtful, pensive, and yet also with something else that made her heart skitter and her pulses race.
But that’s what you wanted, her mind pointed out. That’s why you put on the costume, because you wanted him to realise that you’re a woman, and now he obviously has, what’s the problem?
I don’t want to hurt him, her heart cried, and I know I will. I don’t want to be hurt again myself, and I know I will. I should have thought it through, stayed in my sweatshirt and jeans, remained good old sexless Alex, but I didn’t, and I was wrong.
‘Sorry, Alex, memory like a sieve this morning,’ Chrissie declared apologetically as she reappeared at Alex’s consulting-room door. ‘Hugh says he’d like a word with you after the meeting if that’s OK with you?’
‘Absolutely. Not a problem,’ Alex replied, all chirpily upbeat but when Chrissie disappeared again she groaned again as she got wearily to her feet. ‘You shouldn’t have been drawing boxes, Alex Lorimer,’ she told the empty room. ‘You should have been drawing straitjackets, because that’s where you belong.’
‘Lady Soutar has an appointment at the hospital next week with Mr Denara for her upper gastrointestinal endoscopy,’ Hugh observed, holding out the letter to Alex.
‘Terrific,’ she replied, scanning the letter quickly, then passing it across to Malcolm. ‘Hopefully this will soon mean an end to all her midnight calls.’
‘Always providing she actually turns up for the endoscopy,’ Malcolm declared, and Alex shook her head.
‘She’ll go,’ she said with conviction. ‘Bunty’s a woman of her word, and she gave me her word, so she’ll go. What do we know about the consultant, Mr Denara?’
‘He’s good,’ Malcolm replied. ‘One of the old-school, no-nonsense types.’
‘Which is just as well otherwise Bunty would make mincemeat of him.’ Hugh laughed.
‘Look, just because she can be a bit overbearing at times, doesn’t mean it’s wrong for her to have a mind of her own,’ Alex said with considerably more edge than she’d intended. ‘She’s a widow, she’s had to take care of herself for the past twenty years. OK, she has two sons but for all we know they might be completely useless, and that’s why she’s had to become strong, because the only person she can depend on is herself.’
‘Right,’ Malcolm murmured, and, as Alex took an uneven breath and stared down at her notebook, she didn’t see the big man raise his eyebrows at Hugh, and Hugh shake his head back, clearly equally puzzled.
‘Donna Ferguson’s blood samples confirm she definitely has an underactive thyroid,’ Hugh declared, ‘but her sugar levels are still too high which would also suggest she has Type II diabetes.’
‘She could be suffering from both hypothyroidism and Type II diabetes,’ Malcolm pointed out. ‘It’s not unusual in women of Donna’s age.’
‘I know, but I just can’t help thinking…’ Hugh shook his head. ‘Oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m thinking, except I can’t get rid of the feeling that there’s something I’m missing. What do you think, Alex?’
‘I’m a great believer in gut feeling,’ she said. ‘If you’re unhappy, then I’d say keep digging.’
‘Yes, but all these tests I keep
giving her,’ Hugh declared. ‘Donna’s starting to lose confidence in me, and that’s not good in any patient/doctor relationship.’
He was right, it wasn’t, and somewhere in the back of Alex’s mind a faint memory stirred, of something she had read years ago in a medical book.
‘Is it worth asking the hospital to perform a serum transferrin saturation test on the blood samples you took?’ she said.
‘You think she could have haemochromatosis—too much iron in her blood?’ Malcolm said.
‘I don’t know,’ Alex admitted, ‘but labs don’t automatically measure the amount of iron bound to the transferrin protein, do they? You have to specifically ask them to check it out.’
Hugh’s forehead pleated. ‘Haemochromatosis is normally an inherited disease, Alex, and her father is a very hale and hearty ninety-year-old.’
‘But her mother is dead, and so is her sister,’ Alex said. ‘Yes, I know, I know,’ she continued, holding up her hand as he tried to interrupt, ‘they both died of breast cancer but haemochromatosis doesn’t usually manifest itself in women until they reach the menopause, so…’
‘You think that as neither of them lived long enough to reach the menopause, perhaps neither of them lived long enough to develop the disease?’ Hugh’s frown deepened. ‘It would certainly explain her aching joints, high blood sugar levels and underactive thyroid, but…’
‘I’d say go for it,’ Malcolm declared. ‘OK, so it’s yet another test, but what have we to lose?’
‘Unanimous decision?’ Hugh said, glancing from Malcolm to Alex, and when they both nodded, he smiled. ‘OK, we’ll ask the hospital to test her for haemochromatosis, and if you’re right, Alex, I owe you one.’
‘And she’ll collect, believe me.’ Malcolm laughed, and Hugh laughed, but Alex barely managed a smile.
Instead, she stared back down at her notebook, and Malcolm frowned questioningly at Hugh again, and Hugh jerked his head meaningfully towards the door.
A Wife Worth Waiting For Page 9