Hot-Shot Doc, Christmas Bride / Christmas At Rivercut Manor

by Joanna Neil / Gill Sanderson

  Alison laughed. ‘You’re treading on thin ice there. Don’t say you weren’t warned…But I dare say we’ll be here to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart. That’s what friends are for, after all.’

  The doorbell rang just then, but by now Taylor and Sam had come to join them in looking through the collection of films. Katie picked out a DVD, and Sam gave it a dismissive glance.

  ‘We’re not sitting through another soppy romance,’ he complained. ‘Anyway, you chose last time.’

  ‘You needn’t think I’m watching one of your spy films,’ Katie retorted.

  Alison left them squabbling like children and went to answer the door. She found her neighbour’s children, Jason and Rachel, standing in the porch, their young faces earnest and anxious at the same time.

  ‘Hello,’ Alison greeted them. ‘What’s wrong? Do you want to come in? You look as though you need to offload on someone.’

  Neither of the children moved. ‘It’s the puppy,’ Jason said, leaving Alison thoroughly bewildered. What puppy was he talking about?

  ‘We found him yesterday,’ he tacked on. ‘He was wandering around in the cold down by the brook, and we’re looking after him, but now he’s poorly and we don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Alison murmured. ‘I didn’t realise you had a new pet. Has your mother called the vet?’

  Rachel’s face crumpled. ‘She said we can’t afford to pay a vet’s bills,’ she managed, blinking heavily to stop herself from crying. Tendrils of her fair hair trailed across her cheeks and she brushed them away. ‘He’s just a stray, and he doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t know where he’s come from, but he looks really bad. He’s trembling and his face is swelling up.’

  ‘Oh, dear. That is a worry, isn’t it?’ Alison glanced down at her watch. ‘And this time of the evening I expect the free vet’s surgery is closed. I wonder if they have a number we could ring for advice?’

  ‘Will you come and have a look at him for us, Allie?’ Jason’s expression was pleading, his blue-grey eyes showing desperation. ‘You might know what to do.’

  ‘All right.’ She nodded. ‘Of course I’ll do that. But I’m not a vet, and I don’t know very much about treating sick animals.’

  Rachel looked relieved all the same, but just as they were about to head off towards the house next door, a long, sleek car drew up by the roadside. It was a gleaming graphite-coloured convertible, beautifully streamlined, and for a moment or two Alison simply stared. Who did they know who owned such a fabulous car?

  Then the driver’s door opened and Josh stepped out, locking the vehicle with a light thumb pressure on his key fob. He came towards them, greeting the children with a nod and a smile, and a quiet, ‘Hello, there.’ To Jason, he said, ‘How’s the knee?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jason murmured.

  Then Josh looked at Alison and said softly, ‘Hi. I wasn’t sure whether you would be at home. I just came to drop off these notes for Taylor. He wanted to know about special techniques in orthopaedics and I promised I’d hunt out some journal articles for him.’

  Perhaps it was the deeply masculine timbre of his voice that made her pulse quicken, or maybe it was his strikingly male appearance. He was wearing a suit, all clean lines and understated elegance, as though he had come from work or a business meeting. Either way, Alison was not doing so well—and, whatever the reason, her heart suddenly seemed to slip into overdrive.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she managed. ‘You didn’t need to make a special journey for that. I’m sure he would have been glad to receive them whenever you’re back at work.’

  She wasn’t sure what to make of his sudden appearance in their neighbourhood, and she couldn’t quite make out why he should have such a strange effect on her. Maybe it was something to do with seeing him away from work—or perhaps it was his sheer masculinity that took her breath away. He was long and lean, flat-stomached—perfect in every way. An odd fluttering started in her abdomen, something she’d never experienced before.

  ‘I was passing by,’ he murmured by way of explanation. ‘I’ve just been to make a house call on a private patient, so it seemed logical to stop while I was in the area.’ He studied her thoughtfully. ‘If it’s inconvenient I could leave.’

  ‘No, please don’t do that,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. I just didn’t want you to be put out on our account.’ She made an effort to pull herself together. So he made house calls, did he? ‘Do you want to go and let yourself in? I left the door on the catch. Taylor’s in the sitting room. For myself, I have to go with Jason and Rachel to help out with their new puppy. He’s in a bad way, apparently.’

  ‘Is he?’ He frowned, his gaze moving briefly over the children. ‘I’m sorry about that.’ He looked back at Alison. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  His offer took her by surprise, but she was more than happy to accept. ‘If you want to come along, that would be really good.’ She glanced at the children for confirmation, and they nodded. ‘Thanks,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps between us we might be able to figure something out.’

  ‘He was all right this morning,’ Rachel said as they hurried along the path to her house. ‘We found him wandering on the common yesterday, and he was cold and wet, but he started to wag his tail and came to us for some fuss. I think he was lonely. We stayed with him for a little while, and then he followed us home.’

  ‘Mum said we should clean him up and get him nice and warm,’ Jason put in. ‘So we did, and he stayed at our house last night. He likes being with us. He’s been playing out in our garden nearly all day.’

  By now they had reached the back door of the house, and Rachel went inside, inviting them in. ‘Mum’s looking after him,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what to do. My dad’s not here. He went to see someone about starting a job at the factory down the road.’

  Rachel’s mother came to meet them in the kitchen, and Alison quickly introduced her to Josh. ‘Hi, Martha,’ she said. ‘Josh and I work together at the hospital. He just called to see us at the house, but we thought perhaps between us we can work out what we might need to do.’

  ‘Thank you so much for coming over.’ Martha Selby grasped Alison’s hands in a friendly gesture. She was clearly relieved to have someone there to help out. Her blue eyes were troubled. ‘I’ve been trying to ring the vet, but according to the girl answering the phone he’s on his way to a call. I don’t know what to do. I can’t afford to pay vet’s bills, but the dog is in a really sorry state. I don’t know whether it’s something he’s eaten that’s caused all his problems. He’s been pulling up plants in the garden and chewing on twigs and so on, and even in the house nothing is safe.’

  She sighed, and ran a hand through her fair hair in frustration. ‘I told the police I would look after him until someone claims him, but I’m beginning to think he must have been abandoned. No one could put up with that amount of chewing for long…and now I feel awful for thinking badly about him because he’s so ill.’

  She showed them into the living room where the puppy, a cross between a border collie and something indistinct, was standing in a corner, breathing with great difficulty, trembling and looking greatly distressed. He was much larger than Alison had expected. She could see that his face was swollen, especially around the eyelids, so that he could barely see out through the slits that were left.

  ‘It looks like an allergic reaction of some sort,’ Josh said, checking him over. ‘He’s a bit thin, so he may have been fending for himself for a while, and of course it’s been very cold outside of late. I doubt he’s been affected by that, though, if as the children said he was playing happily with them earlier today.’

  He knelt down beside the dog, running a hand over his body, talking to him in a manner that was gently soothing. ‘You’re a poor young fellow, aren’t you? What have you been up to, I wonder?’ The dog’s tail stayed in a drooped position, but he allowed Josh to touch him and gave no sign that he
might become aggressive.

  Josh tried to gently prise open the dog’s mouth, and Alison guessed he was checking to see if there was any inflammation there. ‘His mouth looks okay as far as I can tell,’ Josh said. ‘There’s some swelling, but no burns, so whatever he ate was probably not caustic.’

  ‘We can’t give him an antihistamine, though, can we?’ Alison said, going to join him. ‘What if we’re mistaken? And how do we know that our drugs can be used on dogs?’

  Josh shook his head. ‘We can’t, but I’ve seen something like this before. One of my stepsisters had a dog that kept eating things it shouldn’t, and he had a reaction like this.’ He looked up at Martha. ‘Do you have any Milk of Magnesia in the house?’

  ‘Yes, in the medicine cupboard,’ she answered, looking puzzled. ‘Why do you ask? Will it help?’

  ‘It may do. Give him a good tablespoon of it every hour while you wait to hear what the vet has to say. I don’t see that it can do any harm, but it will help to speed whatever toxic substance he’s eaten on its way through his intestines. It’ll slow down the absorption of the toxin as well.’

  Martha hurried away to find the medicine, and Alison tried to comfort the children who were standing by, looking anxious.

  ‘Is he going to die?’ Rachel asked, a quiver in her voice.

  ‘We’re doing what we can to prevent that,’ Alison told her, putting an arm around the girl’s shoulders. Jason sidled up to her and she embraced him, too. He had already formed a bond with this bedraggled young dog, and she felt his unhappiness as though it was her own.

  Josh looked at them, a musing expression on his face. He stayed in a crouching position beside the dog. ‘He’s quite a big puppy, isn’t he? I wonder how old he is?’

  ‘Dad says he must be about six months old.’ Rachel looked up at Alison. ‘He says we should call him Dusty because he’s like a dustbin. He takes everything in.’

  ‘That’s a horrible name,’ Jason put in. ‘We’re not calling him that. We should call him Chaser, because he’s always chasing us about.’

  ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Martha said, coming into the room and sliding a dog bowl on to the floor in front of the dog. ‘He doesn’t have a name on his collar, so we have no idea what he answers to. Anyway, someone might claim him, so I suppose it won’t really matter.’ She gently stroked the dog. ‘Come on, lad, drink this.’

  The dog was listless, but he briefly sniffed the contents of the bowl and moved away.

  ‘Oh, dear. That didn’t work, did it?’ Martha frowned. ‘Do you think I should add some milk to make it more palatable? But I heard that milk wasn’t good for dogs.’

  ‘That’s because most dogs are lactose intolerant,’ Alison said. ‘They don’t have the enzyme which allows the digestive system to break down the kind of sugar that is found in milk. I shouldn’t imagine a small amount would do any harm, though.’

  Josh nodded. ‘That’s true, and it will help to coat his stomach and intestines.’

  Martha took the bowl away and returned a moment or two later. This time when she laid the bowl on the floor in front of the dog he tentatively obliged, slowly licking the bowl clean. Alison watched him, feeling a sense of relief, and Josh must have picked up on her thoughts because he glanced up at her and smiled. Then the dog moved away from the bowl and stood some distance away, facing the wall, continuing to tremble and struggle with his breathing. He looked thoroughly miserable, his tail resolutely down.

  ‘I’ll try the vet’s number again,’ Martha said. ‘I can at least ask the girl to let him know what we’re doing.’

  Josh got to his feet, and both he and Alison continued to watch the dog, who stood unmoving, head down in dejection, as though he didn’t know what to do with himself.

  ‘C’mon, Chaser,’ Jason coaxed, going over to him and rubbing his fingers lightly behind the dog’s ears. ‘You have to get better, ‘cos we love you.’

  Rachel added her pleas. ‘We do, Chaser. We need you to get better.’

  Martha placed the phone back on its hub. ‘The woman who answered managed to get through to the vet and told him what’s happening and what we’re giving him. He says that sounds okay, but he’ll ring us as soon as he finishes delivering a foal. Apparently it’s a tricky birth.’

  ‘At least the vet approves of what we’re doing,’ Alison said. ‘That’s something, at least.’

  Martha nodded and looked over at her children. ‘They’ve taken to the dog more than I would have ever thought possible,’ she said softly. ‘Before this they were begging us to let them have a puppy for Christmas, and I said we couldn’t possibly afford to keep one. But now I don’t know how they’re going to cope if someone comes along and claims him.’

  ‘From the sound of things, I wonder how you’ll manage if you keep him,’ Josh murmured with a faint smile. ‘You said yourself that he chews everything in sight…and he looks as though he’ll grow into a big dog.’

  Martha rolled her eyes. ‘I’m a fool taking him on, I know.’ She glanced over to where the children were trying to coax the dog to lie down on an old blanket that they’d placed on the carpet by the radiator. ‘Still, I could see he was in a sorry state, and I didn’t want him to be locked up in a police kennel.’ She looked back at Alison and Josh. ‘I’ll put the kettle on and make us some tea, shall I? We can have coffee and walnut cake with it, if you’d like? I’m going to have some. I feel as though I need cheering up, one way or another.’

  Alison glanced at Josh to gauge his response, and he nodded. ‘I’d like that,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Martha. Besides, I’d like to stay around for a while and see how Chaser gets on—if that’s all right with you?’

  Martha smiled. ‘Of course. You’re a good man. I can see that. Alison said you were a great man to have around in a crisis. She said you’d only been at the hospital for two days, and you’d proved your worth already. You had a man on heart bypass at one point, but he came through everything all right, she said.’

  Alison withdrew into herself as her words were repeated. As to Josh, he began to look uncomfortable. ‘Seems to me that Alison has had rather too much to say,’ he murmured, throwing a sharp glance in Alison’s direction.

  She briefly hunched her shoulders in response. ‘Sorry,’ she mouthed.

  He acknowledged her apology with a nod, and turned back to Martha. ‘I just do what I feel is best at the time, and you know we still have to wait and hope that Chaser will come through this all right. He isn’t out of the woods yet by any means.’

  ‘Maybe, but I feel much more confident now that you’re both here, and at least we’re doing something.’ Martha led the way into the kitchen. ‘Sit yourselves down at the table,’ she said. ‘We’ll be able to keep an eye on Chaser from here if I leave the door open.’ She picked up the kettle and went over to the sink. ‘I’ll make a start on the tea. I expect Tom will be back soon, and he might be glad of a cup.’

  Alison did as she suggested and sat down at the pine table. Josh took a moment to remove his jacket and lay it over the back of the chair, but then he came and sat down beside her. His glance skimmed over her, as though he was looking at her properly for the first time that evening, and she wondered what he made of her casual clothes—figure-hugging jeans teamed with a clinging cotton top. His mouth curved briefly, and she caught a glimmer of appreciation in his gaze.

  He began to look around the room. ‘It’s very comfortable and homely in here, Martha,’ he said, glancing in approval at the neat curtains and the bright touches of colour here and there, in the fruit bowl and the wooden stand laden with ceramic mugs. There were pine-fronted cupboards all around, and open shelving that held an assortment of cups, saucers and plates.

  ‘Thank you,’ Martha said. ‘I’ve always loved this house.’ There was a hint of sadness in her voice.

  ‘Things haven’t been so good for you lately, have they?’ Alison ventured. ‘But Rachel said that Tom was seeing someone about a job?’ With any luck, her neighbour’s fortu
nes were about to change.

  ‘That’s right. It’s a long shot, and I’m not sure anything will come of it. I think they already have their full quota of workers.’ Martha finished filling the kettle with water and set it down on the worktop, flicking the switch. She brought cake out from a cupboard and set it on a plate, pushing it towards them along with side plates and cutlery.

  ‘Help yourselves.’ As she spoke, the back door opened and Tom came in. Martha looked at him and an unspoken message ran between them. He shook his head. ‘Nothing doing,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Martha went over to him and gave him a quick hug. ‘At least you tried.’

  Tom nodded, then gently extricated himself from his wife’s embrace. Alison could see that he was disappointed by his lack of progress with finding work, and guessed he was trying to be stoical about it. ‘Is the dog still sick?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t like having to leave you with him like that, but I had to keep the appointment.’

  ‘He’s still the same,’ Martha replied. ‘Alison and her friend Josh have been helping out. Josh said to give him Milk of Magnesia, and the vet agrees, so that’s what we’ve done.’

  Tom glanced their way. ‘Thanks for that. It’s difficult to know what to do, isn’t it?’ He went over to the interior door and looked at the dog, satisfying himself that his condition hadn’t worsened.

  ‘He’s lying down on the blanket,’ he said. ‘That’s perhaps a sign that he’s a bit more settled than he was.’ Then he came back into the kitchen and gave Josh the once-over. ‘So, you and Allie are seeing each other outside of work, are you? I thought she’d sworn off men.’ He frowned. ‘I hope you’re going to treat her well. She deserves the best.’