A shadow flickered in his eyes, and his smile was wry. 'Any time, Sal,' he murmured gruffly. 'Any time.'
* * *
It was a long old day, Sally thought. She was calm now, but tired, and all she wanted to do was escape. Still, she had a shift to get through before she could leave, and the day was predictably busy.
'I don't know why we do this job,' she grumbled to Sophie as they cleared up after an ungrateful woman who'd threatened to complain if she didn't get an X-ray.
'It hurts!' the woman had said, but Sally's assurances that she was just bruised had counted for nothing. She'd had to have her X-ray, and Ryan had grumbled about wasting resources and unnecessary exposure to radiation.
'Tell her that,' Sally had said crisply, so Ryan had, and the woman had gone away threatening legal action for verbal abuse.
'What else would you do?' Sophie asked, and an image of little babies sprang instantly to mind.
Stifling it, Sally shrugged. 'I don't know. It's the same everywhere. Most people are really grateful, but there's always one ready to take legal action if you treat them when you have a cold.'
Sophie chuckled, and Sally stripped the paper cloth off the examination couch and replaced it, cobbling the old strip up and putting it in the bin.
'How's your grandmother?' she asked.
'Fine. Mum's found a home. She spent all day looking for one, and yesterday evening we went and had a look, and Gran loved it. She's moving in on the weekend.'
'Wonderful. I hope it works.'
'Oh, it'll be hard at first, I'm sure,' Sophie said philosophically, 'but she knows it's best in the end.'
Meg stuck her head round the door. 'Sally? Someone here to see you—a Mrs Jerome?'
'Mrs Jerome?' Sally said, puzzled, and followed Meg out to the front.
'Over there,' Meg said. 'In the blue dress, with the crutches.'
She'd never seen the woman before, Sally was sure, and yet there was something familiar about that profile.
'Mrs Jerome?' she said, walking up to her. 'I understand you wanted to speak to me.'
The woman turned and smiled tentatively. 'Sister Clarke? Sally? Is that right?'
Sally nodded. 'Yes, that's right. I'm sorry, I don't think I know you.'
'That doesn't surprise me,' the woman said. 'I wasn't looking at my best, I don't suppose. I wanted to thank you for saving my life.'
'Your life?'
'Yes—in the car. I had air leaking from my lung, and you put a needle in and let the air out, and I understand if you hadn't done that I would have died. I just wanted to thank you.'
Sally laughed softly. 'Of course I remember you— I just didn't recognise you, and we didn't have much of a conversation. How are you?'
'Fine. Well, I will be. I've got a few broken ribs and my ankle was broken, but apart from that I'm. fine—thanks to you. I just wanted to give you this.'
She handed her an envelope, and Sally shook her head and pushed it back.
'I can't accept money—'
'It's not money. It's an invitation. My husband and I run a little concert orchestra. It's a pair of complementary tickets to our next performance at Snape Makings in three weeks. It's nothing, really, just a little thank you—embarrassingly little, compared to what you gave me.'
Touched, Sally took the envelope and gave Mrs Jerome a careful hug. 'Thank you. I'll be sure to come. I'll look forward to it. And you take care, now.'
'I will.'
Mrs Jerome limped out of the door, leaning on her crutches, and smiled up at a man who was obviously waiting for her. He waved at Sally, and she waved back and tucked the envelope into her pocket.
'Did you know her?'
'Yes—I saved her life, just after Nick started when we went out to that pile-up. I didn't recognise her. She gave me tickets for a concert.'
'That's nice.'
'Mmm.' Nick would enjoy it, she thought, and he talked me through the procedure at the accident. Perhaps I'll give them to him. He can take his mistress.
No. It wasn't fair. Mrs Jerome had wanted her to have them, and so she'd go, if necessary alone. Perhaps she'd take Nick, just as a friend.
The phone rang, Ambulance Control giving them advance warning of a seriously injured casualty, and she put the concert tickets out of her mind and concentrated on the job.
It was an RTA victim, a man who hadn't been wearing a seat belt, and he'd been flung against the steering-wheel and had rearranged his face.
'I'll get Tom Kievenaar down,' Nick murmured, after they'd established a satisfactory airway. 'He's going to need urgent reconstruction.'
There was a great deal of swelling, so it was hard to see how depressed the facial bones were, but the X-rays didn't lie.
'He looks nearly as bad as that girl who jumped off the balcony,' Sally said thoughtfully as they studied the plates with the faciomaxillary surgeon a few minutes later.
'Jodie Farmer? She's doing fine, slowly. Still a bit of a mess, but Plastics will have a go once I've finished messing her about and you'll hardly be able to tell. Her pelvis is more of a problem. She's going to have a permanent limp, I gather.'
'Silly girl.'
'Her boyfriend had just tried to kill her, and then killed himself. She was in quite a mess. She's getting help now, though, and she should be all right. As for our man here, I think a little intervention is going to be in order. OK. Let's get him prepped for Theatre and get him straight up, can we? I'll see what I can do.'
Sally glanced at her watch as she left the hospital. It was four-thirty, only an hour and a half after she was supposed to stop. She called by the flower shop in the main entrance and bought a little posy and a block of florist's foam in a tray, and then retrieved her car from the car park and set off along the country lanes.
It was a lovely afternoon, and after the devastating emotions of yesterday, she felt curiously at peace. Still, she just wanted to touch base...
The car park beside the village hall was deserted as usual, and she made her way over to the row of tiny graves under the spreading arms of the old yew tree. As she approached, she could see that someone had brought flowers recently to one of the graves, and then suddenly, her steps slowed.
They were on Amy's grave.
She walked slowly up to it and looked down, her eyes filling. They were beautiful flowers, not huge, ornate lilies but little dainty things, baby's breath and freesias and tiny rosebuds in soft yellow and creamy white—the same colours she'd chosen to bring with her that afternoon.
Sally knelt down on the grass a little abruptly, and stared at them.
Nick.
He'd brought his daughter flowers, the only thing he could do for her. The tears clumped on her lashes and spilled over, and she brushed them away.
There was no message tucked in amongst the blossoms. Nick wouldn't be given to sentimental outpourings or public displays of emotion. Instead, he would have come here alone and placed them solemnly on her grave in a private moment of farewell.
Oh, Nick, she thought, I'm so sorry.
Her hand reached out to touch the petals, and she focused on them with effort. Some of the flowers were a little tired now, so she eased them out and replaced them with the ones from her posy, squeezing the rest in around the edges, then sat back on her heels and stared at them sightlessly, deep in thought.
If Nick had brought flowers to Amy, then maybe that had been why he'd asked about a florist? Maybe he didn't have a mistress. In fact, it seemed unlikely, really, unless he'd ordered the flowers for Amy as an afterthought while he'd been ordering the others, but she didn't think he'd do that.
Not the first time, at least.
In which case...
'I need to talk to your daddy, my darling,' she said to Amy. 'Wish me luck.'
She blew a kiss to the little headstone, scrambled to her feet and ran back to the car, her heart pounding, impatience clawing at her.
She drove back to Nick's house, drumming her fingers on the steering-wheel as she sat in the rush-hour
traffic, but then finally she was there, parking the car down the side of the garden by his fence.
His car was on the drive, to her relief, and screwing up her courage she hurried to the front door and rang the bell, her heart in her mouth. Her palms were damp, and she scrubbed them against the sides of her dress while she waited. He must be there. He must have heard her.
A shadow moved and the door swung open. He smiled a little cautiously. 'Hi,' he offered. 'Are you OK?'
'I don't know. Maybe. Can I come in?'
'Of course.' He stepped back, and closed the door behind her. 'Tea?'
'Not now. Can we go into your study?'
'Sure.' He led the way up the spiral staircase to the lovely leafy room, and she absently noticed her little bonsai tree in pride of place on his shelves. It looked well. Oh, Lord, where to start—
'Sally?'
Her eyes snapped to his face, then away again, then back, holding this time, hanging on for dear life to the steady blue flame of his eyes.
'You took flowers to Amy,' she said abruptly.
His face grew wary. 'Yes. I'm sorry—I should have asked.'
'Asked?' she said, astonished.
'Yes, asked—if you minded. I never meant to upset you. I'm sorry. I didn't think about it.'
'Why should I mind?' she asked, genuinely puzzled. 'She was your daughter, Nick. Of course I don't mind. You have every right to take her flowers as often as you like.'
'I don't think so,' he said softly, sadly. 'I let you go. I didn't keep in touch, I didn't get back to you when you phoned. I lost the right to call her my daughter.'
'No!' Sally said firmly. 'Oh, no. No, you didn't. It was my fault. I should never have let you get out of touch. I knew where you were, I managed to track you down, I should have persisted. I should have told you when I knew I was pregnant, instead of keeping it a secret, and then you would have seen her, and held her...'
Tears of regret splashed down her cheeks, but she ignored them. 'I'm so sorry, Nick. I kept her away from you, and I shouldn't have done, and I'm so, so sorry. If I could turn back the clock—'
She broke off, and he stared at her, motionless, for a moment.
'What?' he asked in a strangled voice. 'What would you do?'
She lifted her chin defiantly. 'I would never have let you go. I wouldn't have moved with you, at least not at first, but I would never have let you walk out of my life like that. I loved you too much to lose you.'
She took a steadying breath, and carried on. 'I love you too much now to let you go without a fight.'
'No fight,' he murmured, shaking his head slowly from side to side. 'I spent the last two years or so looking for you intermittently, in between bouts of common sense. I'm not going to lose you now I've found you.'
'Oh, Nick,' she whispered raggedly, and then she was in his arms, and he was kissing her as if he'd die without her. Her arms slid round him, her hands tracing the powerful column of his spine, and he groaned and lifted his head and looked down at her, his eyes on fire.
'I want to make love to you,' he said gently.
'Well, don't let me stop you,' she said with a weak attempt at humour, and he smiled and took her by the hand and led her down the spiral staircase and up the other one to his bedroom.
There he turned her into his arms and kissed her tenderly again, brushing the hair back off her face and trailing hot, moist kisses over her jaw and down the soft column of her throat.
She stopped him with his hands on the fastening of her uniform dress, and he looked up to her eyes and paused. 'What?' he murmured.
'Are you having an affair?' she asked nervously.
He laughed, a wry, choked little laugh without humour. 'An affair. You really think I'd be doing this to you if I was having an affair?'
She shook her head. 'No. Well, at least, I hoped not, but...'
'What?'
'Ryan said you were asking about flowers.'
'Flowers?' he echoed, and then his face cleared. 'For Amy,' he reminded her. 'Only for Amy. There's only one woman in the world I want to be having an affair with, and she keeps stalling.' His mouth was smiling, but the smile didn't reach his eyes.
The tension went out of her, together with the last shred of doubt. She reached up her hand and cradled his jaw, relishing the slight roughness of the stubble against her trembling palm. 'That's all right, then,' she said with a slow smile, 'because I've stopped stalling now.'
'Thank goodness for that,' he said, and he claimed her lips again.
Sally lay sprawled across Nick, her fingers idly tracing the light scatter of hair on his chest as she listened to his heartbeat. One leg was wedged between his, her toes snuggled against his calf, and she could feel one hand stroking her lightly, feathering caresses down her spine.
'Did I imagine it, or did you say you'd been looking for me?' she said, and his hand stilled.
'No, you didn't imagine it.'
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. 'So how come, then?'
He shrugged. 'I couldn't get you out of my mind. Every time I tried to have a relationship, it failed. After a while I realised that it was because they weren't you.'
'Sounds as if you were busy,' she said, stifling a pang of jealousy. Of course he'd had affairs! He was young and healthy—
His soft laugh cut off her train of thought. 'Hardly. Most of them fell at the first hurdle and we didn't get past the initial date, but there was one—I told you about her. Marilyn. It seemed to be working for a while. We were reasonably happy. Then she started dropping hints, and her mother kept making little noises about wedding bells, and I just realised suddenly that I didn't love her. I was fond of her, she was a lovely girl, but I wasn't in love with her.'
'So you ended it.'
'So I ended it,' he agreed, 'and I spent a few weeks trying to track you down, but it was four years since I'd heard from you, and the trail was well and truly cold. Not that I expected anything else, because I'd failed to find you four days after you called, never mind four years, but I tried, anyway. First I tried all the hospitals—do you have any idea how many hospitals there are in the country, and how many Sally Clarkes there are, and how incredibly cagey everyone is about revealing information about staff?'
'I'm sorry,' she murmured, and kissed him.
'Mmm. I can stand a lot of that.'
'Not till you've told me how you found me.'
'Oh, that. I gave up. I tried phone books. There are probably four million S. Clarkes listed, but none of them were you.'
'Three years ago? I was living with my mother and stepfather.'
'Ah. Right. And two years ago, and last year?'
She smiled apologetically. 'I lived in the nurses' accommodation for a while, and then I had a flat and a mobile phone. I only got a land line and went in the phone book about six months ago, after I bought the house.'
'By which time I'd found you,' he said.
She sat up straighter and stared down at him. 'You found me six months ago?'
He nodded. 'Oh, yes. Someone came to Peterborough from here, and they were talking one day after one of the nurses let rip about something, and he said you think that's bad, you haven't seen Sally Clarke's temper!' His smile was wry. 'That struck a chord,' he said drily, 'so I asked a few questions, and it sounded like you—right age, right physical description—'
'Right temperament?'
He grinned. 'You do have a wicked temper, my darling,' he teased gently, and she snuggled down into the crook of his arm and smiled to herself.
'Go on. I want to know how you wangled the job.'
'It was advertised. It was sheer coincidence. I applied for it, got the job, and came for interview. You were here.'
'You saw me?' she said, jackknifing upright again and twisting to look down at him indignantly. 'You saw me and you didn't say anything?'
He shook his head. 'I couldn't. I was being towed down the corridor by Ryan, and, anyway, I was so stunned I don't think I could have spok
en to you. Ryan was talking to me, telling me about the department, and I didn't hear a word. I was just poleaxed.'
'How do you think I felt when I saw you the first time the other week?' she asked. 'You could have warned me.'
He reached up a hand and touched her face. 'I'm sorry, Sal. I didn't want to warn you. I wanted to see your face, to read your reactions so I knew how to play it.'
'And?'
His smile was wry. 'And I thought you were still angry with me. I wondered if moving here had all been a dreadful mistake, but I was locked .into the contract and I still had a few weeks to consider the consultancy—'
'What consultancy?' she squeaked, kneeling up beside him and glaring at him. 'You haven't mentioned a consultancy!'
'That's because it's still hush-hush, and they haven't advertised yet. They're expanding the department. They've got another consultancy post coming up in January. Ryan wants me to have it. I said I'd give him my answer in a few days.'
She sat back down on her heels abruptly. 'And?' she asked, fear gnawing at her again. 'What will you say?'
'That depends on you,' he told her, his eyes serious now. 'I don't know if you want me to take it, or if you want more time to think about us...'
'What about us?' she asked warily.
'About whether or not you want to marry me,' he said quietly.
She felt the fear ease, and smiled. 'Why don't you ask me?' she suggested.
He pulled a wry face. 'Because I'm afraid you'll say no?'
'Not in this lifetime,' she assured him, and with a groan of relief he drew her down into his arms and kissed her hungrily.
'Uh-uh,' she said, wriggling out of the way. 'Ask me, please! You have to do it properly.'
'On one knee?'
She shook her head. 'That would mean letting go of you.'
'OK.' He smiled down at her, then his eyes grew serious. 'I love you, Sally,' he said softly. 'I know we screwed up before, but I won't let it happen again. Marry me—please? Have my babies? Let's be a family. I've missed you so much. I don't think I could bear it—'
'Yes,' she said, and, wrapping her arms around his neck, she drew him down for a kiss. 'Yes,' she said again after a long, mind-drugging minute. 'Oh, yes...'
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