At that moment she heard Ross’s voice outside in Reception and she flung herself towards the door, ready to make a quick departure, but she wasn’t fast enough. She heard him knock and then the door was opening and the next second he was there, observing them keenly and asking, ‘So what do you think of the new arrangements, Izzy?’
‘I was just about to explain,’ Paul said as he got slowly to his feet and as Isabel watched him it dawned on her what Ross meant.
‘You’re coming back into the practice, aren’t you?’ she breathed, observing him with outraged violet eyes. ‘You’re going to take Millie’s place.’ She swivelled to face her father. ‘That’s why you’ve been biding your time instead of getting the vacancy filled. You’ve been negotiating in the background and neither of you thought fit to tell me.’
Her father cleared his throat.
‘We had our reasons.’
‘I’ll bet. You no doubt thought that if I knew what was being planned I might throw a wobbly…might become a clinging vine, like I was before.’
‘Izzy, let your father finish what he has to say, then you might understand,’ Ross said quietly.
‘I’m going to retire, Isabel,’ Paul said. ‘It’s been on my mind ever since Millie went. I’m tired and I envy her the contentment she’s found in that lovely modern apartment by the river. But I couldn’t let go until I knew the practice was in safe hands, and now it will be with Ross in charge and you to back him up. I’ve never worked with a better doctor than him and one day you will be as good. So what more can I ask for the practice that has been my life’s work?’
‘I see,’ Isabel said slowly. ‘So that’s something else you didn’t think fit to tell me.’
‘I was waiting until the time was right, and now that Ross has arrived it is.’
Under any other circumstances she would have been full of concern to hear that her father was giving up the reins that he’d held in his capable hands for so many years, but the way of her finding out was demeaning and hurtful. Did these two men think she was still a child?
She turned to Ross and the outrage was still there in the eyes that had been full of tears the last time he’d been on the surgery premises.
‘You never mentioned any of this when we met earlier. I can be trusted to behave in an adult manner just as long as I’m treated as one. Thanks for letting me waffle on at the tearooms without telling me that you are going to be my boss!’
‘At that time I didn’t know how much your father had told you,’ he said in the same quiet tones.
‘Well, now you do. He’s told me nothing!’ And on that proclamation she emphasised her annoyance by striding past him, through Reception and out into the small garden at the back of the limestone building that was the village surgery.
As she gazed mutinously towards the wooded ridges of the peaks Isabel wished she could drive up there to lick her wounds in solitude, but afternoon surgery was due to start in ten minutes, which meant that after flouncing out she was going to have to go back and face Ross and her father again almost immediately.
A footstep on the flagged path behind her had her turning swiftly, and she found Ross observing her sombrely.
‘I’m sorry you weren’t told about my coming back into the practice,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t how I wanted it to be, but your father…’
She shook her head, disbelief still strong within her, and told him coldly, ‘I know what Dad is like. He doesn’t take to his affairs being made public, but I don’t class myself as “public”.
‘I’ve been rushed off my feet ever since Millie left, so obviously I’m going to welcome the arrival of a new doctor in the practice, but the fact that it’s going to be you, and from now on just the two of us, isn’t easy to accept. I would much rather be working with a stranger instead of having the clock put back.’
‘I can be a stranger, if that’s what you want,’ he said, without raising his voice, ‘and as for turning the clock back, all that was a long time ago. It’s forgotten as far as I’m concerned, has been for a long time. You’re a woman now with a mind of her own, it would seem, so shall we call a truce? I’m leaving in a moment as I know that surgery is due to commence. Also, I want to go back and help Sophie clear up after the afternoon rush and I have to look for somewhere to stay as there’s no room above the tea shop.’
‘Why don’t you ask your fellow conspirator to put you up?’ she suggested coolly. ‘Dad has plenty of room since I moved out.’
Ross shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. Your father won’t want to be bothered with an unexpected guest. I’ll book a room at the hotel. The Pheasant is still there, I presume.’
‘Yes. Nothing has changed much since you left.’
‘You have,’ he said abruptly.
‘Yes, well, it’s like I said before. Did you expect to find me in some kind of teenage time warp?’
‘I’m the one who’s been suspended in time,’ he told her, a flat monotone replacing his abruptness.
She observed him with puzzled violet eyes.
‘I’m going, Izzy. You need time to adjust to the news that has upset you so much. I’ll be in touch when you’re ready to talk.’
As she watched him walk away Isabel thought that she certainly needed to adjust. Her life had been turned upside down. Ross had come back into it, and how! They were going to be meeting workwise and socially all the time.
What she had wept for all that time ago was being handed to her on a plate, but did she want that? No way. Although Ross was even more heart-stopping now than he’d been then.
She wished she could say the same for herself. Her hair was still golden blonde, her eyes the unusual shade of violet, but the face that looked back at her from the mirror wasn’t going to make any man’s heart beat faster, and the figure inside the neat suit that she wore for the practice was coltish rather than curvy.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,’ her father said before they began to see their patients. ‘I was keen to have Ross back in the practice, but I didn’t want to tell you until I knew it was settled. His return will solve quite a few things. It means that I can retire with an easy mind, Sally will be happy to have him back home, and your load will be lightened. It’s been approved by the primary care trust so that side of it is sorted.’
‘All of which sounds very cosy,’ Isabel said tightly, ‘but did you stop to think how I might feel after the way I behaved when he said he was leaving all those years ago? I cringe when I think about it.’
She could have gone on to say, I had no one to turn to for comfort. I needed my mother and she wasn’t there. All you cared about was my career, and Ross’s only concern was to get as far away from me as possible. But she didn’t.
Her father cleared his throat. ‘That’s all in the past. Maybe I handled it wrong. But this is a time of new beginnings for all of us and I hope that you’re going to be sensible about it.’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘You’ll be happy enough once it’s happened,’ he said, not giving a direct answer, and before she could reply to that he went to the door and called in his first patient, which left no further room for immediate discussion.
* * *
‘I believe that Ross Templeton is here to see his mother,’ Isabel’s first patient of the afternoon said as she seated herself.
Jess Hudson owned the post office and general store that was the focal point of the village and could be relied upon to be first with any news—but not this time, Isabel thought bleakly.
The postmistress might have seen Ross, but she didn’t as yet know that he was going to take her father’s place in the practice and that Paul was about to retire.
‘Yes,’ she said noncommittally and followed it up with, ‘What can I do for you, Jess?’
‘It’s my face,’ the chubby fifty-year-old said. ‘It began to swell a couple of days ago and now it’s spreading down my neck and onto my shoulder.’
‘Hmm, I can see that,’ Isab
el told her. ‘Is it painful?’
‘No. not really. Just feels a bit funny, that’s all.’
As Isabel felt Jess’s neck it was clear that her glands were up, but she didn’t think that was responsible for the swelling.
‘I can’t be sure at this stage,’ she told her patient, ‘but I think you might have a blocked saliva duct. I’m going to put you on a course of antibiotics and we’ll see what that does. If they don’t clear whatever is causing the swelling we will have to pursue it further by sending you for X-rays.’
The postmistress nodded.
“I thought it might be something like that. Just as long as it isn’t mumps. Though I’m past having to worry about my fertility.’
‘It’s the men and the boys who have to be concerned about that,’ Isabel told her, and Jess smiled.
‘Yes. I know. I was joking.’
She got to her feet and when she reached the doorway she turned and said, ‘I’m told that Sophie is going to organise a welcome-home party for Ross and that all the village is invited. I take it that you’ll be going.’
‘I doubt it,’ Isabel told her. ‘Since Millie left us I’ve had very little time for socialising.’ Yet almost before the words were out she was telling herself that it would look strange if she wasn’t there. Ross might think she was trying to avoid him, and he would be right. Yet what chance would there be of that when he took over the practice? Once again her anger began to spark at the way her father had kept her in the dark.
They’d never been close. In the days when her mother had been alive he’d been a different man. Gillian West had been a warm, bubbly woman, adored by her husband and small daughter, and when she’d died suddenly from an embolism Paul had withdrawn into a morose shell and left the bewildered small girl mostly in the care of a housekeeper.
It had only been when Isabel had announced in her teens that she wanted to become a doctor that he’d seemed to become aware of her existence and things had changed.
Her father had liked the idea of a family practice, father and daughter working together, and had suddenly become interested in her every movement. Yet he hadn’t latched onto her blossoming feelings for his partner, Ross Templeton, until Isabel had fallen head over heels in love with him and Paul had visualised all his hopes and schemes coming to nothing.
When Isabel had seen her last patient off the premises she went to seek out her father again, but his room was empty. His car no longer parked outside and she knew he would be on his way to Millie’s, where she would have a sherry waiting for him and a meal ready to serve.
Why those two had never got married she didn’t know. Maybe it was because they’d already had one failed romance connected with the surgery, and with cheeks burning at the memory Isabel went to greet those that were waiting for her homecoming—the patient Labrador, Tess, and the sleek, preening Puss-Puss.
CHAPTER TWO
A GREY heron, standing amongst rushes by the riverbank, was enjoying a tasty snack of fish when Isabel took a sun lounger into the cottage’s small back garden after her evening meal.
Suddenly the tensions of the day didn’t seem as daunting. She loved the river and the creatures that lived in and beside it, like the long-legged heron by the opposite bank, with its bright yellow beak rarely coming out of the water without a struggling fish in its grasp, and the vivid-breasted kingfishers that appeared from time to time.
The cottage was small and far from luxurious, but she didn’t mind. She’d chosen it for its position and tonight, with Tess curled up contentedly beside her and Puss-Puss licking her paws beneath what was still a hot sun for the time of day, she would have been content if it hadn’t been for the thought of what the future held.
Maybe she was making too big a thing of Ross’s return, she thought, closing her eyes against the sun’s glare. He probably hadn’t given her a thought since the moment he’d packed his bags and left all that time ago.
It hadn’t been like that for her, though. She’d cried at night when no one else had been able to hear and had spent the days moping around the surgery, supposedly helping out.
By the end of her first year at medical school she’d become resigned to never seeing Ross again and had started to enjoy herself, but there had been no romances, just the odd flirtation now and again, which sometimes made her think that her fixation for Ross when she had been eighteen had spoilt her for any other relationship. It was a fact that she’d never met anyone who could match him when it came to looks and personality, but she could cope with that now. She was older, more mature, and though the looks were just as mesmerising as ever, the personality, from what little she’d seen of him so far, seemed to have been damped down somewhat.
Whether it was intended for her benefit, as a warning to stay at a distance, or that the life he’d lived during the last seven years had taken away some of the easy charm that had captured her heart, she didn’t know. But he need have no worries on that score. She was over it. The mad obsession had burned itself out long ago.
A shadow fell across her, shutting out the brightness of the sun, and when she opened her eyes he was there, standing by the wicket gate that led down to the riverbank.
‘Ross!’ she exclaimed, struggling to a sitting position as the familiar red tide began to rise on her cheeks.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked as his glance took in the small flower-filled garden behind the dry stone wall.
‘Yes, of course.’
Isabel was on her feet now, thinking that she’d seen enough of him for one day. What could he possibly want now?
‘I thought I’d let you know that I’m booked in at the Pheasant for a few days until I can get myself sorted. My mother isn’t too chuffed with the idea as she’d like me to stay with her and Sophie but, as I explained to her, short of sleeping on the tea-shop counter with my head up against the coffee-machine, which wouldn’t be in the best interests of hygiene, I can’t think of an alternative.’
He was smiling and she found herself smiling back at the thought of the long, lean length of him on the hard counter. At the same time she was telling herself that Ross hadn’t been back five minutes and already she was discovering that the charm was still there. Though not to the extent that she was going to tell him that she could suggest alternative accommodation. She had a spare room that was available. But to mention it would be an invitation for disaster and Ross would probably refuse in any case after what had happened in the past.
So she said instead, ‘I’m told that the Pheasant ranks as one of the best hotels in the neighbourhood. I’m sure you’ll be comfortable there.’
‘Mmm. I’m sure I will,’ he said smoothly, and she felt as if he’d read her mind. If that was the case, she hoped he wasn’t tuning in to her dismay regarding what he was saying now.
‘I imagine that your father will be looking for somewhere to move to in the near future, so once it’s vacant I suppose I could live in the flat above the surgery. It would seem to be the logical thing to do, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said with a lukewarm smile.
She wanted him to go. He’d shattered her contentment. She felt unsettled and floundering.
But it seemed as if Ross was in no hurry. He was strolling down to the water’s edge and for the lack of anything better to do she followed him. As they stood side by side, looking down into the river’s clear depths, he said, ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful the village is.’
‘Surely you’ve seen better places than this during the time you’ve been away.’
He shook his head and he wasn’t looking at the river now. His glance was on her. ‘The charm of a place very often depends on those that live there. Wherever I’ve been over recent years it has always been in my mind that this is the place where those I care about are to be found.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she agreed hastily. ‘Sally must be very happy to have you back.’
He nodded and silence hung between them for a second. Turning back towar
ds the cottage, Ross said, ‘I’d better be off. I said I’d help Sophie with the baking for tomorrow.’
Surprised, she asked, ‘In what way?’
‘The famous Eccles cakes, what else? It will be just this once, I’m afraid, as from tomorrow I’ll be involved with the practice.’
‘So soon!’ she groaned, before she could stop herself.
‘Listen, Izzy,’ he said levelly. ‘I know you’re not happy to see me again, but that’s how it’s going to be, I’m afraid. As long as my mother’s health is cause for concern and the village practice still exists, I’m going to be around. If you want me to behave like the stranger you wish I was, I think I can manage that. For the rest of it, I’m here to do a job and so are you, which means that we are going to have to find some level of compatibility.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ she said angrily. ‘You’ve been away from the village for years. We’ve seen neither sight nor sound of you, and now you’re back you’re laying down the law. I’ve kept the faith. You are the one who strayed.’
‘Strayed!’ he spluttered, and pointed to Puss-Puss still sunning herself and Tess sniffing around his feet, ‘You make me sound like one of your animal friends. And for your information I’ve been back here a few times over the years.’
‘When?’ she asked in amazed disbelief.
‘They were just quick stopovers whenever I got the chance. Occasions when I came to see if my mother and Sophie were coping all right.’
‘Timed for when I was away at college, no doubt.’
‘Possibly. I didn’t want to upset you.’
‘You already had…big time.’
‘Yes, I know. That is why I didn’t want to cause you any further distress.’
‘You needn’t have concerned yourself. If I had been around when you came to visit it wouldn’t have bothered me. That other time I was young, mixed-up, missing my mother and had been left with a dry stick of a father. You made me laugh. Made me forget that I was no raving beauty. But I soon got over it. You could have come back whenever you wanted with an easy mind.’
Coming Back For His Bride Page 2