‘You’re welcome. Any time.’
Alison went back to A&E in a jaunty mood, and she was more than ready to assist Josh when he judged Martyn well enough to be taken to Radiology.
‘I’m going to inject a small amount of a tracer substance into your vein,’ he told Martyn. ‘When the scanner is in operation it will show us images on the computer monitor, and if there are any blockages in your blood vessels we’ll be able to see them. We’ll also be able to tell if there are any problems with your heart.’
A few minutes later Josh and Alison retreated into the computer room beyond the scanner. The images that came up on screen were crystal-clear.
‘There’s a massive blockage in the coronary artery,’ Alison said, watching the screen. ‘I’d say he was a candidate for angiography, wouldn’t you?’
Josh nodded. ‘And I think we should do it this morning. Before the clot has a chance to cut off the blood supply any further and cause damage to the heart muscle. We can’t afford to wait or he might not see next year. I don’t want to even contemplate the possibility of those children losing their father. I’ll book the angiography suite for the procedure. We’ll take a couple of hours, to enable us to talk to him and his wife about what’s involved and to prepare him.’
Alison was fully conscious of what was at stake here. Josh was always calm and in control, and she knew how skilled he was as a vascular surgeon, but would he be able to save this man’s life? She didn’t dare think about what might go wrong.
Despite their worries, the atmosphere in A&E was light as the staff worked to bring about a feeling of seasonal goodwill. And somewhere around mid morning Josh’s voice came out over the hospital radio, announcing the imminent arrival of a very special visitor. Alison put down the lab test results she was reading and listened. His alteregos, the wacky duck and the downtrodden dog, had a comical, animated conversation about the event, hotly debating the question of who the visitor might be, and what it was that could be wrong with him. In the end, as they apparently saw the man coming in through the door, they decided the problem was that he’d been eating too many pies and must have a huge tummy ache.
The maintenance supervisor walked into Reception just then, heavily disguised and padded out as Santa Claus, and began distributing presents to any children who were unfortunate enough to be spending the day there. With a twinkle in his eyes he stooped down to talk to Martyn’s children, and then pressed large parcels into their hands. They gazed up at him in open-mouthed wonder, their eyes wide, and then hastily began to tug the wrapping paper from their gifts.
‘I’ve got a racing car,’ the boy exclaimed. ‘Look, Mum, it goes all by itself.’ The car zoomed along the floor of the waiting room, shooting out into the reception area.
‘That’s great,’ his mother said, smiling in spite of her anxiety about her husband’s condition. ‘But bring it back in here, where it won’t get under people’s feet.’
The little girl carefully opened up her box and lifted out a baby doll in a cradle. ‘She has her own feeding bottle,’ she said, her voice tinged with excitement. ‘Isn’t she lovely? My very own baby.’
Alison watched them. Now all she and Josh had to do was make sure that Martyn would be around to stay with them through the coming years.
Josh came back into A&E after finishing the live part of his broadcast. His stride was vigorous and he exuded energy, so that Alison, watching him, felt her heart skip a beat.
‘I think we’re all set up to go ahead with the operation,’ he said, walking with her to the observation ward where Martyn was resting. ‘I’d like you to administer the sedative and keep an eye on his blood pressure. I’ll prepare the stents, and the nurse will help to keep him calm and relaxed.’
Josh had to insert a catheter into a blood vessel in Martyn’s leg. From there it passed into the artery of the heart, and Josh had to work using tiny instruments on the end of the catheter to remove the blood clot that was causing so much trouble. If the clot broke up and split into smaller pieces there was a risk that Martyn would suffer another heart attack.
She gave a sigh of relief when he sucked the clot back through the tube. ‘Okay, let’s get the stents in place,’ he said. The stents were small wire mesh tubes that were inserted into the artery to hold open the blood vessel. They remained in place, allowing the blood to circulate freely around the heart.
‘You did it,’ Alison said, smiling up at him as he left the angiography suite a few minutes later. He’d changed out of his green scrubs and was wearing a crisp pale-coloured shirt and dark grey trousers. He looked immaculate. She wanted to hug him there and then. ‘You saved his life.’
‘That’s why we do this job, isn’t it?’ he answered in a droll fashion. ‘To save lives so that people can be with their loved ones.’ They walked together along the corridor until they reached the lift bay. ‘And that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to spend Christmas with the person I love most in all my life.’ He pressed the button for the lift and then gazed at her. ‘I want to spend it with you…not just for now, but for all the Christmases to come.’
She was stunned by his words. ‘You love me?’ she said. ‘Am I hearing this right or am I imagining things? Am I caught up in the middle of a dream? Tell me again what you just said.’
The lift doors opened and they both walked inside, waiting until the lift doors closed on them.
He reached for her, his mouth curving as he drew her into his embrace. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you for such a long time, but I thought you were sworn off men after Rob. And I had this worry that love is something fickle that never lasts. I was afraid that I’d be forever living on the outside, looking in.’
His hand stroked her, gliding along the length of her spine, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. ‘Then I realised that I’ve never loved anyone before this. I’ve never felt so completely out of my depth. But I know that with you my life will be complete. I’ve discovered that love can be for ever, and that people can grow old together and know the joy of being a contented, loving family. I saw that when I met your parents, your grandparents and your brother.’ His hands lifted to stroke the golden strands of her hair. ‘And, yes, I would love to go with you to your grandparents’ house and stay with you over Christmas.’
She laid her head against his chest, sighing in contentment. Then, on a sudden thought, she looked up at him and said, ‘What about your mother? Won’t she be expecting you to go and be with her?’
‘I think she’ll understand. I went to see her last night and we had a long talk. I told her how I feel about you, and she told me to forget about the problems that she and my father had and go with my instincts.’
‘And that’s what you’ve done?’
He nodded, but Alison was still uncertain. ‘What about your notion of working in the States? Is that still on the cards?’
‘It was never an option. I just said that I would think about it, but I already knew I preferred to work here. After I met you it was never going to be something I would consider. I know how much your family means to you.’
She lifted her hands and cupped his face, drawing him gently down towards her so that her lips made fiery, passionate contact with his. ‘I’m so happy to hear you say all that,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve known for a long while now that you’re the only man for me. I love you so much.’
The lift doors opened and they both stared bemusedly out into the corridor. ‘I don’t remember pressing the button for the ground floor,’ he said. ‘But perhaps it’s just as well that we’re here now.’
‘Is it? Why?’ She looked at him in confusion as he led the way outside the hospital to a paved area in a secluded spot, bordered by trees and shrubs.
‘Because otherwise I might have ended up proposing to you in a lift. That would never do, would it? Imagine telling our children that I proposed in a hospital lift. Even I have more romance in my bones than that.’
‘Our children?’ she murmured. �
�Isn’t that jumping the gun a bit? You haven’t actually asked me anything yet.’
‘Oh…Well, I can sort that,’ he said. Then he smiled, and it was like the sun glittering on a wide blue sea. ‘Will you marry me, Alison? Please? Will you be my wife and share my life and my family, share all your Christmases with me from now on?’
‘I will,’ she answered softly.
He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her—a thorough, sweet, perfect kiss that sent the blood straight to her head and made her toes curl. ‘You’ve made my dreams come true,’ he said softly. ‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.’
‘Me, too. That’s exactly how I feel about you.’
He kissed her again—a long, wonderful kiss that left her heady with delight. Then he looked down at her, his fingers tracing the contours of her face.
‘I love you,’ he said again, then seemed to hesitate. ‘Alison…?’ he murmured, breaking off his words.
‘Yes?’
‘Let’s go inside, shall we? It’s freezing out here.’
Recent titles by the same author:
THE REBEL AND THE BABY DOCTOR
THE SURGEON SHE’S BEEN WAITING FOR
CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, SOCIETY BRIDE
Christmas at Rivercut Manor
By
Gill Sanderson
Gill Sanderson, aka Roger Sanderson, started writing as a husband-and-wife team. At first Gill created the storyline, characters and background, asking Roger to help with the actual writing. But her job became more and more time-consuming, and he took over all of the work. He loves it!
Roger has written many Medical™ Romance books for Harlequin Mills & Boon®. Ideas come from three of his children—Helen is a midwife, Adam a health visitor, Mark a consultant oncologist. Weekdays are for work; weekends find Roger walking in the Lake District or Wales.
To Oliver and Joe, latest grandchildren. Have a good life.
Chapter One
DISTRICT NURSE Grace Fellowes looked at the patient in front of her with mild exasperation. The trouble with these moors farmers—even ones like Albert who’d long since handed over the reins to his son—was that they thought if they slowed down for more than a few minutes they’d be dead. She put on a severe expression. ‘You’ve been walking on this leg, haven’t you?’
Albert shifted his ulcerated leg irritably on the footstool. ‘Give over, young Grace. As if you haven’t already found out from my boy that I just stepped down to the barn to run my eye over the flock and a sheep got in my way.’
‘I’m not young Grace today, I’m your nurse and I know what I’m talking about. One in fifty people over the age of eighty get ulcers like yours and because of your bloodpressure problems there isn’t enough new blood getting to the tissue to repair it very quickly.’
In truth, almost the only hope with venous ulcers was to dress the wound and then cover it with a compression bandage, but Grace didn’t mention that. ‘We’ve kept the germs out so far, but you must be more careful when you move about. Your son’s right to be worried about you. How does your leg feel now?’
‘Not too bad. Sometimes it itches, sometimes there’s a sort of heavy feeling.’ He watched as Grace dusted on the dressing, then covered the ulcer with an antiseptic pad and eased on the elasticated support stocking. ‘Thanks, lass. That’s tight, but I can feel it working. Still seems odd, you junketing all over the moors to see to us. Who’d have thought twenty years ago that young Grace Fellowes from Rivercut Manor would grow up to be our district nurse.’
Grace stood, went to wash her hands in the sink at the side of the farmhouse kitchen and then put on her fleece jacket. ‘Be glad I am,’ she said lightly. ‘You might have a fearsome stranger telling you off instead. I’ll be back in a week for another look. Any problem before that—give me a ring. And don’t go banging into anything!’
‘I suppose,’ said Albert. He hesitated. ‘Before you go—I’m sorry you’ve had to put the old place up for sale.’
Grace swallowed. ‘Ah, well. That’s life. I’m luckier than most. I’ve got a job I love, a cottage that needs hardly any housework and the nicest patients in the world.’ She blinked to clear her eyes and walked quickly to the farmhouse porch, slipping her feet out of her comfortable flatties and into her Wellingtons. It might look a bit odd—a nurse in a smart blue uniform with rubber boots up to her knees—but in most farmyards it was necessary even when they weren’t ankle-deep in snow like today. A couple of quick words with Albert’s son and then she was back in her car.
As she drove through the high moor tops Grace grinned. ‘Young Grace from the Manor’ indeed! When was Rivercut valley going to emerge into the twenty-first century? It was a bit isolated—but not that much. You could get to London from York in three hours. Then she chuckled. Provided you could get to York at all with the North Yorkshire moors snowed up as they were at the moment.
The back road she was on dropped down into a narrow valley. She slowed, seeing that the surface ahead was covered in water. This often happened in winter—the drain under the road was just not big enough to cope with the stream that ran through it. It was fortunate that Grace had grown up here and knew all about the local hazards. Her elderly Land Rover only skidded a little as she carefully drove through the flood.
Climbing the hill again, she caught her breath at how beautiful the countryside was with its blanket of white. Snow had come very early this year—this was only the beginning of December. And the forecast was that the snow was going to last. She knew a cold winter would cause trouble but they were used to it round here. Garages would be stocked with snow chains and antifreeze, dispensaries would have supplies of cough linctus and crutches.
Grace’s next call was at a village called Nestoby. Not that anyone in the large Leeds nursing college where she had done her training would have called it a village. There was only a handful of houses, no pub or post office, just a corner shop that sold an incredible range of goods even though it was situated in the front room of a cottage.
Mr and Mrs Kipps ran the shop—and had done for the past forty years. They’d taken it over from Mrs Kipps’s parents. Grace parked outside, opened the shop door and was greeted by an outburst of coughing. She looked at the wizened figure bent double behind the counter. ‘Not doing very well, are we, Mr Kipps?’ she asked sympathetically.
Mr Kipps was suffering from emphysema. He had smoked all his life until he’d had a bad attack of bronchitis which had laid him up for months. Even so, James Curtis—the GP Grace worked for—had had to put the fear of God into him before he had been persuaded to stop. Now Grace called in regularly to check up on Mr Kipps’s condition and to arrange for physiotherapy visits to drain his lungs of fluid.
Mrs Kipps came through to look after the shop. She was a large, unsmiling woman and as a child Grace had found her rather frightening until she had realised her bark was worse than her bite, and most of that barking was directed at the lads who were intent on getting tuppence out of their penny-worth of sweets. ‘I’m sorry about the manor,’ Mrs Kipps said abruptly now.
Grace gave a rueful smile. ‘Thanks, but it’s the way of the world. I just hope I can sell it to a family who want to make a home rather than to some faceless company to use for corporate entertaining.’ She followed Mr Kipps into the back room to take his blood pressure, listen to his heart and check up on his general well-being. His condition was as good as could be expected for a man who had smoked forty a day for more years than the twenty-eight Grace had been alive.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked. ‘Not too much pain from the coughing? I know these cold days must be hard on you.’
A voice came from the shop. ‘He came home late last Wednesday with the smell of tobacco on him. Told me it was because he’d walked home with one of our neighbours who smokes. I told him that if I found him with a cigarette in his mouth, he’d be out on the moors all night with only his cigarettes to keep him warm.’
‘I wasn’t smoking!’ Mr Kipps wailed.
Grace decided to say nothing. The situation appeared to be under control.
Outside it was snowing again, the hard small snowflakes that landed and settled adding another layer to the smooth, soft outlines of the winter landscape. Grace loved the way snow turned the moors into a whole new land, more beautiful even than the myriad greens of the heather and scrub. She could forgive it making the drive to her last call of the day tricky. She noticed that the Christmas spirit seemed to be abroad. All the isolated farmhouses on the way to Fellowes Top had illuminated Christmas trees in the windows. Grace felt an excited wriggle inside her at the sight. She did love Christmas.
At Fellowes Top Farm she made short shrift of Young Jack Stanley (so called to distinguish him from Old Jack Stanley, his father), who seemed to think that the proper care of a pitchfork wound in his upper leg so deep that it had only just missed the femoral artery was to sweep up slurry in the pigsty. Leaving him chastened, she set off for home. It was a longish journey, Fellowes Top being the most outlying of the properties her family had once owned, but Grace quite liked a drive at the end of a good day. It gave her a chance to unwind from the busyness of health issues resolved and problems fixed.
It was dusk now and the snow was still falling. Grace’s dashboard thermometer indicated that the temperature was well below freezing. She snuggled further inside her warm fleece as she drove, thankful that the Land Rover had fourwheel drive. She really must make room in next week’s schedule for a service. Maybe Bert Machin wouldn’t charge her too much, especially as he would also have heard about the manor going up for sale. Grace bit her lip. Everybody this afternoon had mentioned it, saying how sad it was and how brave Grace was being. And Grace had smiled cheerfully and uttered platitudes and hadn’t admitted once that it was tearing her apart to have to sell her childhood home in order to pay off the twin burden of death duties and her mother’s debts.
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