Читать книгу The Nurse's Christmas Temptation / A Mistletoe Kiss For The Single Dad - Ann McIntosh - Страница 16

CAM STOOD WITH his head bowed as John Harris read out the list of islanders who’d served in World War I and World War II. The Armistice Day ceremony was being held at the cenotaph at the north end of the village green, and Cam was aware of Harmony standing next to him, all her attention on the elderly wheelchair-bound gentleman.

He was one of the patients she’d be checking on when she was on her rounds, and Cam had promised at least to point out those who were attending, even if he didn’t get a chance to introduce her to them all.

As the “Last Post” was played by a cadet, Cam watched in his peripheral vision as Harmony fished a tissue out of her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. He was always moved by the “Last Post” too—the long first call, and the trill of the bugle running and then coming back to the mournful last notes.

John Harris, ninety-eight years old and a veteran of World War II, had tears streaming down his cheeks too, and Cam knew he was probably remembering his old friend Dougal, who’d died the year before. The two men had enlisted together, served together, and had been friends all through their lives.

After two minutes of silence the National Anthem was sung, then the crowd began to disperse and Cam took Harmony over to meet John Harris and his son Martin.

From then on it was a round of introductions, which seemed to last forever, before they could break away and head back to the office.

“Oh, my…” Harmony said, almost as though she were apologizing. “Those ceremonies get to me. My father’s family are almost all military, so they always strike home, but I think Grandie would have approved of this one. He liked a nice simple observance rather than a lot of pomp and circumstance.”

“I’m glad to hear you think he’d have approved,” Cam replied. “Was your father in the military too?”

Her lips pursed as she shook her head. “No. He had a congenital heart defect which made him ineligible. He tried to sign up, to follow in his father’s, uncles’ and cousins’ footsteps, but the army turned him away.”

“That must have been hard on him.”

Cam wondered why the subject of her father had made those lines come and go between her brows. But they were at the side door of the surgery now, and he opened it so she could step through.

“I guess so,” she replied, with a touch of frost in her voice. “But he made up for his disappointment.”

Before he could figure out what to say to that, she turned toward the staircase leading to her apartment.

“I’ll see you at a quarter to one,” she continued. “I promised the CIs I’d meet up with them for lunch and I want to change before you and I go on our tour.”

“Don’t let them talk you into doing anything you don’t want to. The Winter Festival gets crazy, and they’ve already been trying to get me to recruit you to help. I’ve been valiantly staving them off.”

She paused, her hand on the railing, one foot on the lower step, and looked back at him over her shoulder. “Why?”

Self-conscious under her golden perusal, he shrugged. “You just didn’t seem too keen whenever I mentioned the festival or Christmas.”

Her lips twisted briefly to the side, then softened into a rueful little frown. “Sorry,” she muttered, and then cleared her throat. “It’s not that I don’t want to help, it’s just… I’m a little low on Christmas spirit this year.”

It shouldn’t matter to him why. In fact, he should be glad of it, as it meant she’d be disinclined to get too involved, giving him time to get over this unwanted attraction. Yet his curiosity was stronger than any sense of self-preservation. Harmony didn’t seem the type to open up very often, so her showing him even a little chink in that practical armor was enticing.

“How come? Just too far from home?”

“That doesn’t bother me,” she said, but he heard uncertainty in the stout declaration.

Then she sighed, and turned back to face him.

“The truth is my gran died earlier this year, and Christmas was always a special time for us to celebrate together. It just won’t be the same without her and Mum.”

“Well, you have space here. You could ask your mum to come up and spend the holidays with you.”

The cheerful note he’d tried to infuse into his voice seemed to have the opposite effect to what he’d intended as she slowly shook her head.

“Mum’s finally getting a life of her own. Her new gentleman friend has invited her to Yorkshire to meet his family, so that’s a non-starter.” Drawing herself up to her full height and tipping up her chin, she continued, “But it’s fine.”

That should have been the end of it, but he knew all too well what she was going through—the loneliness that cloaked the soul after the loss of someone pivotal in your life. The feeling that nothing would ever be the same without them, and the unsure sensation of the world being off-kilter, perhaps never to right itself.

“I get it. Really I do,” he found himself saying. “Those firsts are always the hardest. When my grand-da died I didn’t feel like facing the holidays either.”

Harmony’s lips came together in what he’d previously thought of as her disapproving expression. But now he was left wondering what it really meant, considering the pain lingering in her eyes.

“You were close to your grandfather?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. Closer to him than to my parents. I lived with him for a couple of years, and I used to come here every holiday I could to be with him. Even when I got older, if it was reading week at university, you name it, I’d be on Eilean Rurie. It was only after I started working with the aid agency that I didn’t get back as often as I’d have liked.”

“My gran had lived with us since my dad died, when I was six,” she replied. Then, as though suddenly aware of what she was saying, she added, “I’m sorry. I don’t usually have a pity party in front of my boss. I think the ceremony this morning has made me a little emotional.”

“Don’t apologize, please. I don’t mind.”

Those big golden eyes, slightly misty with tears, drew him in…had him fighting not to step forward. She was all he could see. The world had shrunk to just the woman in front of him, so valiantly battling for complete composure.

Normally he shied away from too much emotion, never trusting it to be genuine. His mother had been a master of using feigned sadness or disappointment to manipulate—until she’d realized it no longer worked on him and had turned it off like a tap.

Harmony Kinkaid was just his temporary employee—a woman he’d known for a couple of days. Why, then, was the urge to comfort her so overwhelming?

His heart was suddenly hammering, and alarm bells were going off in his head, but he paid the warning no mind. Instead he stepped closer and rested his hand on her shoulder, rather than on her cheek the way he wanted to. Her lips were soft now, full and inviting.

Begging to be kissed.

Cam exerted a Herculean effort and dragged his gaze away from her mouth to focus once more on her face.

“I’m sorry you won’t be with your family this year, and that you’ve lost someone so important to you that it doesn’t even feel worthwhile celebrating, but it’ll be okay. You just wait and see.”

And his chest grew suddenly tight as tears gathered at the corners of her eyes again. When the first one slipped free, before he could give in to the urge to wipe it away, she turned and started up the stairs, leaving him staring after her, confusion his only companion.

Cam had been right about the CIs trying to corral Harmony into helping with the festival, but she’d told them she’d only just got to Eilean Rurie and really needed more time to find her feet. While they’d grumbled about it, by the time they’d left the pub Harmony thought they’d given up on the idea.

Crossing the green to the surgery, Harmony thought again about her earlier encounter with Cam. She’d been obsessively going over it, alternately ashamed of telling him anything and grateful for his sympathy. But what totally floored her was her visceral reaction to having him so close.

When he’d touched her shoulder she’d wanted to make the tiny movement that would have been necessary to get close enough to hug him. The simmering attraction she’d felt from the first moment she’d seen him had threatened to boil over. For an instant she’d thought he was going to make the first move…kiss her. She was almost sure his gaze had dropped to her mouth. The anticipation that had fired through her had been like an electric jolt, and just remembering it brought another shock of desire.

“Get a grip, Harmony,” she admonished herself out loud, letting herself into the building, her cheeks hot, her insides fluttering as if a wild bird had invaded her stomach. “He was just being kind.”

Besides, she hardly knew him. And he was her boss. And she was off men, to boot.

It was imperative that she got herself together and got real. She was here to do a job and that was all. Not to play Santa Claus, nor to make a fool of herself because she was feeling like Scrooge. And certainly, definitely, not to lust after her gorgeous daredevil boss, who had “heartbreaker” written all over him.

The CIs had been quick to tell her that Cam was single, and she’d been thoroughly grilled on her own status. She’d had no problem telling them about her break-up earlier in the year, although not in detail, since it had got them off the subject of Christmas.

She determinedly pushed all thoughts of her conversation with Cam aside, focusing on work instead. A quick look at the time told her she had just a few minutes to run upstairs and comb her hair before he arrived—if he was on time.

His rather laissez-faire attitude toward the way his practice was run would have made her think him a little scatterbrained if he hadn’t been so clearly intelligent. But he’d frowned when she’d rearranged the filing system, and given her a blank look when she’d asked why there were over four hundred records when there were less than two hundred and fifty people on the island.

And she was still wondering why they needed fifteen minutes to go just down the road.

He did turn up at the appointed time, and Harmony’s heart-rate picked up as she watched him from her bedroom window. He got out of his vehicle to open the gate before driving around to the front of the building. She made herself walk slowly down to join him, neither giving in to nor showing any of the silly eagerness bubbling inside her.

Outside, she found him leaning on the hood of his car, as handsome and relaxed as a magazine model. Clearly he wasn’t suffering from the same reaction she had, and she was determined to meet his cool with all the calm in the world.

Cam explained the extra fifteen minutes while they were walking over to the Jacobsons’ cottage.

“Hugh is in denial about the terminal aspect of his mother’s disease, and he has a tendency to want to speak for her, saying how well she’s doing rather than letting her tell me the truth. He’s also a bit of a fusspot when it comes to time. If I get there a little early he doesn’t have the tea ready yet, so I get a few minutes to talk to Delores alone and find out exactly how she is, and if there are any new developments. I keep the more clinical aspects, like taking her temperature and blood pressure, for when he’s in the room, so he feels as though he’s in the thick of it.”

It made sense, and she made a note of it for future reference. Hearing his logic also made her contemplate how different this job was going to be from her last. There everything had been regulated, and although they’d got the chance to get to know some of their patients quite well, the little personal touches like those Dr. MacRurie had just described had often been missed.

The visit went as predicted, with Hugh Jacobson greeting them at the door, rushing to the kitchen to make tea, and apologizing for it not being ready when they got there. The doctor winked conspiratorially at Harmony, making her silly stomach flutter, and he pushed open the door to the front room where his patient was.

Mrs. Jacobson was a quiet lady, who smiled when she saw Dr. MacRurie and Harmony and seemed to know the drill. Wasting no time on small-talk, she answered the doctor’s questions while her son was out of the room. But then, with a quick glance toward the open door, she grasped Cam’s wrist, stopping him midsentence.

“It won’t be long now, Cameron,” she said, in her soft brogue. “But I just want to make it through Hogmanay. I don’t want Hugh to be sad every Christmas because I died around the holiday.”

Tears stung the back of Harmony’s eyes, but Dr. MacRurie just patted Mrs. Jacobson’s shoulder and said, “We’ll do our best to see you through till then, Delores.”

“Good,” she replied, seeming to relax slightly in her chair. “I want to see the lights this year, even if I can’t get out to enjoy the festival.”

Harmony couldn’t tell this sweet lady that it wouldn’t matter to her son whether she made it through to the New Year or not. Her passing would hurt him whenever it happened, and he’d miss her every holiday thereafter.

Later, after they’d drunk tea with mother and son and were walking back to the vehicle, Cam said, “She didn’t know she had hemochromatosis until after the menopause, and it had already caused extensive liver damage. She’s not the complaining type, as you could see, and attributed the symptoms to simply aging. Hopefully we can keep her going the way she wants.”

No matter how unprofessional it was, Harmony didn’t feel able to discuss it just then. Not when seeing Mrs. Jacobson had brought all the pain of losing her gran rushing to the fore.

She made an noncommittal sound. Then quickly said, “I guess you weren’t putting me on when you said there’s a Winter Festival, although it’s hard to picture.” All she saw was a tiny village—nicer today, with the sun out, than it had been the last couple of days, but nothing special.

Cam opened the passenger door of his aged utility vehicle and Harmony tried not to wince at the metallic creak.

As she climbed in, he replied, “Wait and see. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

But she was still skeptical. After all, how fancy a show could the inhabitants of a tiny place like this put on?