Читать книгу Brides of Penhally Bay - Vol 1 - Sarah Morgan, Caroline Anderson - Страница 9

‘RIGHT, Lucy and Dragan, don’t forget I’ve booked you both off this afternoon for the MIU meeting with the St Piran consultant. He’s coming about two-thirty,’ Kate said.

‘Pointless,’ Nick said flatly. ‘I don’t know why you’ve booked him in with Lucy. Can’t you reschedule it for when I’m around? She won’t be in a position to implement the changes and we’ve got more than enough to think about at the moment. We won’t need all the extra hassle while we’ve got a locum in. I think we should forget it for now.’

‘No,’ Marco interjected. ‘The community needs more than we can offer, Nick, and we do need to do this as soon as we can. We’ve talked it over endlessly.’

‘So why Lucy? Why not us? It’s our practice.’

‘Because she’s the most appropriate person,’ Kate pointed out calmly. ‘Apart from the fact that you’ve shown no interest in being involved in this up to now, emergency medicine is her area of responsibility in the practice, and this was all her idea. It’s only a feasibility study, Nick,’ she went on, ‘planning for the future. Someone’s got to do it, so why not her? Besides,’ she added before Lucy could interrupt and point out that she was still, actually, in the room, if they’d all finished talking about her, ‘they’ve worked together before, so it makes sense.’

They had? When? Or more importantly…

Nick’s brow pleated into a scowl. ‘Who is it?’ he asked, yet again before Lucy could speak.

‘Oh—didn’t I mention that?’ Kate said guilelessly. ‘It’s Ben Carter.’

‘Ben?’ Lucy said, her heart lurching against her ribs. Oh, no. Not Ben! Not when she still hadn’t told him…

Her father’s frown deepened. ‘Carter!’ he growled. ‘Why the hell is he coming?’

‘Because he, like Lucy, is the most appropriate person for the job—and he volunteered.’

Really? Why on earth would he do that, seeing that the last time she had spoken to him it had been to agree that they shouldn’t see each other again because of the situation between him and her father?

Nick was emphatic. ‘No. Not Carter. I don’t want him in my practice.’

‘Our practice,’ Marco pointed out mildly. ‘And anyway, it’s irrelevant what you or I or anybody else want. If we’re going to do this, we need an expert, and he’s the best.’

‘Rubbish, the man’s incompetent.’

‘Dad, no! You cannot go around saying things like that about him.’

‘Why not, if it’s the truth?’

‘Because it isn’t! The inquiry exonerated him absolutely.’

‘It was a whitewash. Utter whitewash, and if you weren’t so hoodwinked by the man you’d realise it.’

‘Nick, that’s not fair,’ Kate said gently. ‘He’s very well regarded.’

He stood up and banged his mug down on the drainingboard. ‘Think what you like, he’s the last person we need here,’ he said stubbornly. ‘It doesn’t matter what any of you say, you’ll never convince me otherwise. Ben Carter’s bad news, and I don’t want anything to do with him.’

He spat Ben’s name as if it were poison, and Lucy’s heart sank. Was he ever going to be able to see this clearly? Because if not…

‘Nick, you’re getting this totally out of proportion,’ Kate said firmly. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to have anything to do with him. You’re busy with your antenatal stuff, Marco’s concentrating on the paeds, this is all Lucy and Dragan. Mostly Lucy. And if they’re all happy about it, I really don’t see why it’s such an issue. It’s not as if he’s going to be having any involvement in the running of the unit.’

Nick opened his mouth to reply, but Marco cut him off.

‘She’s right. Move on, Nick. Let it go.’

He shut his mouth, opened it again, and then turned abruptly and stalked towards the door. ‘Fine. Don’t any of you mind me, I’m just the senior partner,’ he snapped, and slammed the door shut behind him.

Lucy winced, Marco shrugged, Dragan shook his head and frowned and Kate smiled briskly at everyone and headed for the kettle. ‘Right. That’s that settled. Coffee, anyone?’

Lucy couldn’t believe it was Ben.

Of all the people to be coming, why did it have to be him?

Although she had to see him some time, and preferably soon. Unless she just wasn’t going to…

No. That wasn’t an option. She just wanted time to think it through, to work out the words, to find a way of introducing the subject.

Ridiculous. She’d had months to talk to him, months to think up the words. She was just a coward—a coward with a patient who was staring at her a little oddly, waiting.

‘Right, Mrs Jones, I’m sure you’ll be all right. I’m confident that as I first thought it’s just a little bit of fluid on your lungs from your heart problem, so I’m juggling your pills a little and we’ll see if you improve. Here’s your new prescription, but in the meantime the injection I’ve just given you should start to shift it soon, and the extra frusemide should do the trick in the long term.’ She clipped her bag shut with a little snap, and picked it up. ‘If I don’t hear anything from you, I’ll come back and see you next week to make sure it’s cleared up, but if you’re at all worried, you call me, OK? No being stoic.’

Edith Jones nodded. Recently widowed, she was struggling to cope with her new independence, and Lucy worried about her. Her heart condition had been fine until her husband’s sudden and traumatic decline, and since then she’d been neglecting herself. Not any more, though. Lucy simply wouldn’t let her. Edith was still a little breathless, but even in the short time since Lucy had given her the diuretic injection, she’d noticed an improvement.

‘I’ll be fine, Doctor,’ Edith said with a smile. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’

‘My pleasure. You stay there, I’ll let myself out.’

‘No, that’s all right, I’ll see you to the door. I have to get up to go to the toilet anyway. That’s one of the problems with your medicine!’

Good. More evidence of the drugs working, but just to be on the safe side, Lucy warned, ‘Don’t forget to keep drinking. I don’t want you thinking you can keep the fluid off your lungs by dehydrating yourself. That’s not how it works. Cut down on your salt intake, and have lots of water and fruit juice, and not too much of that mega-strong tea you like to drink, or you’ll be getting problems with your waterworks to make life even more interesting! And don’t forget—if you aren’t entirely convinced it’s working, ring me.’

‘I will, Doctor. Thank you.’

She waved goodbye, got into her car and drove the short distance back to the surgery. It was ten past two, and Ben would be arriving in twenty minutes. Just time for a bite of lunch and a little hyperventilation before she had to see him again…

He was early.

He hadn’t meant to be, but the morning had gone badly and he hadn’t stopped for lunch in case the roads were busy, then they’d been clear and he’d found himself at the practice at five past two. So he was sitting in his car and killing time, staring out over the harbour and wondering whether he should go in and what kind of reception he would get from Nick Tremayne.

Hopefully better than the reception he’d got in May when he’d come to the barbeque here. Still, Nick had agreed to their meeting, so presumably Lucy had finally talked him round. Not that he expected miracles. A chilly silence would be more like it, but even that might be better than outright hostility.

A vessel caught his eye, a little fishing smack coming into the harbour, running in on the waves. The sea beyond the harbour mouth was wild and stormy today, the water the colour of gunmetal. It looked cold and uninviting, and he was glad he didn’t make his living from it.

He turned his head and studied the cars in the car park, wondering which one of them was Lucy’s. The silver Volvo? No. That was most likely to be Nick’s. The little Nissan? Possibly. Not the sleek black Maserati that crouched menacingly in the corner of the car park, he’d stake his life on it. That, he’d hazard a guess, was Marco Avanti’s.

He was just psyching himself up to get out of the car and go inside when a VW turned into the car park and drove into one of the spaces marked ‘Doctor’.

Lucy. His pulse picked up, and he took a slow, steadying breath to calm himself. After all, the last time he’d seen her had been in early May, and they’d both made it clear it wasn’t going anywhere. He was sure they could be adult about this—even if it had taken weeks to get her out of his mind again.

Longer still to get her out of his dreams, but he’d done it, finally, by working double shifts and staying up half the night trawling the internet in the name of research. And he was over her. He was.

So why was his heart racing and his body thrumming? Crazy. He shouldn’t be here. He should have let someone else do it—one of the other A and E guys…

She was getting out of the car, opening the door, and in the rear-view mirror he could see her legs emerging, and then her…body?

He was on his feet and moving towards her before he had time to realise he’d moved, before he’d thought what he was going to say, before he’d done anything but react. And then, having got there, all he could do was stare.

‘Ah, Mr Carter, welcome!’

He realised Kate Althorp was beside them, talking to him, and over the roaring in his ears he tried to make sense of it. She was holding out her hand, and he sucked in a lungful of air, pulled himself together and shook it, the firm, no-nonsense grip curiously grounding. ‘Ben, please—and it’s good to see you again, Mrs Althorp. Thank you for setting this up.’

‘Call me Kate—and it’s my pleasure. Lucy, I’ve put tea and biscuits out in my office for you, so you won’t be disturbed. Dragan Lovak’s had to go out on a call—he’ll be joining you later. But since we’re here now, why don’t we have a quick guided tour before the clinics start, and then I’ll leave you both to it?’

And he was led inside, Lucy bringing up the rear, her image imprinted on his retinas for life. He followed the practice manager through the entrance to Reception, smiling blankly at the ladies behind the counter, nodding at the patients in the waiting room, vaguely registering the children playing in the corner with the brightly coloured toys. He saw the stairs straight ahead, easy-rising, and the consulting rooms to the right, on each side of the short corridor that led to the lift.

‘It’s a big lift,’ Kate was saying as the doors opened and they stepped in. ‘Designed for buggies and wheelchairs and so on, but not big enough for stretchers, although we don’t have any call for them really. If people collapse and have to go to hospital in an ambulance, they’ve probably been in to see one of the doctors, and as most of the consulting rooms are downstairs anyway, that’s more than likely where they’ll be. If not, the paramedics usually manage to get them down in the lift without difficulty. The trouble is the building wasn’t designed to be a surgery, so it’s been adapted to make the best use of what we have.’

‘How long has the practice been here?’

‘Two years. After Phil died there wasn’t a practice here in Penhally Bay until two years ago. A neighbouring practice closed and they lost the last of the local doctors, and Marco Avanti and Nick set up the practice here where it is now to fill the gap.’

The lift doors opened again and he found himself at the end of a corridor the same as the one downstairs, with rooms to left and right. ‘We’ve got the nurses’ room and a treatment room up here, and our MIU, such as it is. I’ll let Lucy show you that, she’ll know more about it than me.’

‘What about a waiting area?’ he asked, forcing himself to concentrate on something other than Lucy. She was going through a door marked ‘Private’, closing it firmly behind her. Damn.

‘We have a couple of chairs out here but we don’t tend to use them except in the summer when it’s busier,’ Kate was saying. ‘Usually they call the patients up one at a time from downstairs. Our staffroom and shower and loo are up here, too, as well as another public toilet and the stores, and this is my office.’

She opened the door and ushered him in. ‘Have a seat,’ she said. ‘Lucy won’t be a moment. I’ll put the kettle on.’

He didn’t sit. He crossed the room, standing by the window, looking out. It was a pleasant room, and from the window he could see across the boatyard to the lifeboat station and beyond it the sea.

He didn’t notice, though, not really. Didn’t take it in, couldn’t have described the colour of the walls or the furniture, because there was only one thing he’d really seen, only one thing he’d been aware of since Lucy had got out of her car.

The door opened and she came in, and with a smile to them both Kate excused herself and went out, closing the door softly behind her, leaving them to it.

Lucy met his eyes, but only with a huge effort, and he could see the emotions racing through their wary, soft brown depths. God only knows what his own expression was, but he held her gaze for a long moment before she coloured and looked away.

‘Um—can I make you some tea?’ she offered, and he gave a short, disbelieving cough of laughter.

‘Don’t you think there’s something we should talk about first?’ he suggested, and she hesitated, her hand on the kettle, catching her lip between those neat, even teeth and nibbling it unconsciously.

‘I intend to,’ she began, and he laughed and propped his hips on the edge of the desk, his hands each side gripping the thick, solid wood as if his life depended on it.

‘When, exactly? Assuming, as I am, perhaps a little rashly, that unless that’s a beachball you’ve got up your jumper it has something to do with me?’

She put the kettle down with a little thump and turned towards him, her eyes flashing fire. ‘Rashly? Rashly? Is that what you think of me? That I’d sleep with you and then go and fall into bed with another man?’

He shrugged, ignoring the crazy, irrational flicker of hope that it was, indeed, his child. ‘I don’t know. I would hope not, but I don’t know anything about your private life. Not any more,’ he added with a tinge of regret.

‘Well, you should know enough about me to know that isn’t the way I do things.’

‘So how do you do things, Lucy?’ he asked, trying to stop the anger from creeping into his voice. ‘Like your father? You don’t like it, so you just pretend it hasn’t happened?’

‘And what was I supposed to do?’ she asked, her eyes flashing sparks again. ‘We weren’t seeing each other. We’d agreed.’

‘But this, surely, changes things? Or should have. Unless you just weren’t going to tell me? It must have made it simpler for you.’

She turned away again, but not before he saw her eyes fill, and guilt gnawed at him. ‘Simpler?’ she said. ‘That’s not how I’d describe it.’

‘So why not tell me, then?’ he said, his voice softening. ‘Why, in all these months, didn’t you tell me that I’m going to be a father?’

‘I was going to,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘But after everything—I didn’t know how to. It’s just all so difficult…’

‘But it is mine.’

She nodded, her hair falling over her face and obscuring it from him. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s yours.’

His heart soared, and for a ridiculous moment he felt like punching the air, but then he pulled himself together. Plenty of time for that later, once he’d got all the facts. Down to the nitty-gritty, he thought, and asked the question that came to the top of the heap.

‘Does your father know it’s mine?’

She shook her head, and he winced. ‘So—when’s it due?’

‘The end of January.’

‘So you’re—’

‘Thirty weeks. And two days.’

He nodded. That made sense, but there was another question that needed answering. ‘You told me you were on the Pill.’

She bent her head. ‘I was, but because it was only to regulate my periods I probably hadn’t been as punctual all the time as I should have been. I used to take it in the morning, but I didn’t remember till the Tuesday, by then it was too late.’ Because she’d been crying since the moment she’d closed her front door behind her on Sunday morning and retreated into the sanctuary of her little home, wearing his shirt day and night until she’d had to take it off to shower and dress to come to work after the bank holiday, and then she’d found the pills…

‘So why not take the morning-after pill just to be safe?’

Why not, indeed? She shook her head. ‘I didn’t have any, and by the time I was able to get them from the pharmacy it would have been too late. And anyway, I thought I was safe,’ she told him, and wondered, as she’d wondered over and over again, if there’d been a little bit of her that had secretly wanted to have his baby. And when her periods had continued for the next two months, she’d put it out of her mind.

Not for long, though. Eventually it had dawned on her that things were different, that the lighter-than-usual periods had been due to the hormones, and she’d kept it a secret as long as she could. Eventually, though, the changes to her body had become obvious, and her father had been shocked and then bossily supportive.

And he hadn’t asked about the father, not once she’d told him that he was out of her life for good and she didn’t want to think about him any more. Not that she had wanted Ben out of her life, but he was, to her sorrow and regret, and she didn’t want to think about him any more. She’d been sick of crying herself to sleep, missing him endlessly, wishing he could be with her and share this amazing and fantastic thing that was happening to her body.

Her stomach rumbled, and she gave the biscuits a disinterested glance. OK, she could eat them, but she really, really wanted something healthy, and if Dragan was held up…

‘Have you had lunch?’ she said suddenly.

‘Lunch?’ he said, his tone disbelieving. ‘No. I got held up in Resus. There wasn’t time.’

‘Fancy coming back to my house and having something to eat? Dragan can ring when he’s on his way back and we can meet him here. Only I’m starving, and I’m trying to eat properly, and biscuits and cakes and rubbish like that just won’t cut the mustard.’

‘Sounds good,’ he said, not in the least bit hungry but desperate to be away from there and somewhere private while he assimilated this stunning bit of news.

She opened the door, grabbed her coat out of the staffroom as they passed it and led him down the stairs. ‘Kate, we’re going to get some lunch. Can you get Dragan to ring me when he’s back?’

‘Sure,’ Kate said, and if Lucy hadn’t thought she was being paranoid, she would have sworn Kate gave her and Ben a curiously speculative look.

No. She couldn’t have guessed. It had been months since she’d seen them together.

Six months, one week and two days, to be exact. And Kate, before she’d become practice manager, had been a midwife.

Damn.

They walked to her flat, along Harbour Road and up Bridge Street, the road that ran alongside the river and up out of the old town towards St Piran, the road he’d come in on. It was over a gift shop, in a steep little terrace typical of Cornish coastal towns and villages, and he wondered how she’d manage when she’d had the baby.

Not here, was the answer, especially when she led him through a door into a narrow little hallway and up the precipitous stairs to her flat. ‘Make yourself at home, I’ll find some food,’ she said, a little breathless after her climb, and left him in the small living room. If he got close to the window he could see the sea, but apart from that it had no real charm. It was homely, though, and comfortable, and he wandered round it, picking up things and putting them down, measuring her life.

A book on pregnancy, a mother-and-baby magazine, a book of names, lying in a neat pile on the end of an old leather trunk in front of the sofa. More books in a bookcase, a cosy fleece blanket draped over the arm of the sofa, some flowers in a vase lending a little cheer.

He could see her through the kitchen door, pottering about and making sandwiches, and he went and propped himself in the doorway and watched her.

‘I’d offer to help, but the room’s too small for three of us,’ he murmured, and she gave him a slightly nervous smile.

Why nervous? he wondered, and then realised that of course she was nervous. She had no idea what his attitude would be, whether he’d be pleased or angry, if he’d want to be involved in his child’s life—any of it.

When he’d worked it out himself, he’d tell her. The only thing he did know, absolutely with total certainty, was that if, as she had said, this baby was his, he was going to be a part of its life for ever.

And that was non-negotiable.

What on earth was she supposed to say to him?

She had no idea, and didn’t know how it could be so hard. When they’d worked together, he’d been so easy to talk to, such a good friend, and they’d never had any tension between them. Well, that was a lie, but not this sort of tension.

The other sort, yes—the sort that had got her in this mess.

No. Not a mess. Her baby wasn’t a mess, and she wasn’t ever going to think of it as one.

She put the sandwiches on plates, put the plates on a tray with their two cups of tea and carried them through to her little living room. ‘Sit down, Ben, you’re cluttering the place up,’ she said softly, and with a rueful little huff of laughter he sat, angled slightly towards her so he could study her.

Which he did, with that disconcertingly piercing gaze, the entire time she was eating her sandwich.

‘We could get married,’ he said out of the blue, and she choked on a crumb and started to cough. He took the plate and rubbed her back, but she flapped him away, standing up and going into the kitchen to get a glass of water.

And when she turned he was right behind her, so close that she brushed against him, her bump making firm and intimate contact with his body. For a moment he froze, and then his eyes dropped and he lifted a hand and then glanced back up at her, as if he was asking her permission.

She swallowed slowly and nodded, and he laid his hand oh, so tenderly over the taut curve that was his child. Something fierce and primitive flickered in his eyes, and then he closed them, and as the baby shifted and stretched she watched a muscle jump in his jaw.

His hand moved, the softest caress, and he opened his eyes, lifted his head and met her eyes.

‘I felt it move,’ he said, and there was wonder in his voice, and joy, and pride.

And for the first time she felt the tension ease and some of the dread fade away.

‘It’ll be all right, Lucy. Don’t worry. I’ll look after you.’

‘We aren’t getting married, Ben.’

‘Don’t close your mind to it,’ he said softly.

‘It’s too soon.’

‘Of course it is—but it’s one of our options.’

Ours?

She would have moved away from him, but he had her pinned up against the sink and in the narrow kitchen there was nowhere to go. So she turned her back to him, but it didn’t help because he simply moved up closer, sliding his arms around her, resting both hands on her tummy and drawing her gently back into his warm embrace. ‘Don’t be scared.’

‘I’m not scared,’ she lied. ‘I just don’t like you turning up out of the blue and telling me what to do.’

‘Out of the blue? I hardly abandoned you, Lucy. The last conversation we had, you told me it wasn’t going to work. Too much baggage.’

‘And you agreed.’

‘So I did,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But that was then, and this is now, and things are different. The baggage certainly is. I can’t let you face your father alone.’

‘And you really think you being there, telling him you’re the baby’s father, will help?’

He sighed and moved away at last, giving her room to breathe, to re-establish her personal space and gather her composure around her like a security blanket.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You haven’t finished your sandwich. Come and sit down and put your feet up and tell me what you were planning.’

She laughed wryly. ‘I didn’t have any plans,’ she confessed, feeling suddenly lost again. ‘I was just winging it, getting through a day at a time. And Dad hasn’t really asked very much about the baby’s father. Just how could I have been so silly and that I’d have his support. He wants me to move back in with him, but I don’t want to.’

‘Lucy, you can’t stay here,’ he said, his voice appalled, and she felt her mouth tighten.

‘Why not? Don’t come in here and start insulting my home, Ben.’

‘I’m not insulting your home, sweetheart, but look at it. It’s tiny, and it’s up a steep hill and a narrow flight of stairs, with no parking outside—where do you keep your car? The surgery? That’ll be handy in the pouring rain when you’ve got a screaming baby and all your shopping.’

She bit her lip, knowing he was right and yet not wanting to admit it. Of course the flat wasn’t suitable for a baby, and she’d been meaning to find somewhere else, but anything rented was usually in holiday lets in the summer, and she couldn’t afford those rates, not unless she went back to work, and buying somewhere in the village on a part-time salary probably wasn’t an option either.

‘I don’t suppose he’s any nearer to accepting that I wasn’t to blame for your mother’s death?’ he suggested, and Lucy shook her head.

‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t very pleased this morning when Kate announced that it was you coming.’

A frown pleated his brow. ‘Really? But it was decided weeks ago. Kate said everyone was fine with it. I assumed he must know.’

She met his eyes, and realisation dawned. ‘She’s worked it out,’ she said slowly. ‘She knows you’re the father. Well, at least, she knows I don’t have a life outside Penhally, because she can see the surgery car park from her house up behind it, and she’ll know my car’s always there unless I’m out on a call or visiting friends, and she can see my window here—that’s her house over there,’ she said, pointing out to him the pretty little cottage tucked against the hillside above the surgery. ‘So there’s nothing I can do without her knowing, and if I had a man, believe me, Penhally would be talking about it. And the last man I was seen with was you, and of course she knows we’d worked together, that we were friends.’

‘I don’t know how you can stay in this place,’ he said gruffly, and sighed. ‘You reckon she knows?’

‘I think so. She gave us a look as we left the surgery.’

‘A look?’

‘Yeah—one of those knowing ones.’

He grinned a little crookedly. ‘Ah. Right. And do you think she’ll tell your father?’

Lucy felt a little bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her chest. ‘I wish. Maybe that way he’d calm down before I had to talk to him about it.’

‘You really think it’ll be that bad?’

She stared at him blankly. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? Because you haven’t seen him since Mum died, apart from the lifeboat barbeque. Ben, he—’ She broke off, not knowing quite how to put it, but he did it for her, his voice soft and sad.

‘Hates me? I know. I’ve already worked that out. And I can see why.’

‘But it wasn’t your fault!’ she said, searching his face and finding regret and maybe a little doubt. ‘Ben, it wasn’t. The inquiry exonerated you absolutely. Mum died because she didn’t tell anyone how sick she was until it was too late. I wasn’t there, Dad was too busy setting up the practice with Marco, and she downplayed it just too long.’

‘Lucy, she died because when she arrived in the A and E department she didn’t check herself in straight away, so nobody flagged her up as urgent, nobody kept an eye on her, nobody realised she was there until they found her collapsed in the corner. There’d been a massive RTA, there were ambulances streaming in, we were on the verge of meltdown—I don’t have to explain it to you. You know the kind of mayhem I’m talking about, you’ve seen it all too often. I was trapped in Resus, the walking wounded were way down the list. Too far. And the other people waiting just thought she was asleep, instead of which she’d all but OD’d on painkillers and by the time we got to her it was too late.’

‘They said her appendix had ruptured. She must have been in so much pain. I knew she’d been feeling rough but I had no idea how rough. It must have been agony.’

‘Yes. Hence the painkillers. She’d obviously had a hell of a cocktail. We found codeine and paracetamol and ibuprofen and aspirin in her bag. The codeine must have knocked her out, but it was the aspirin that killed her. By the time she arrived at the hospital, she was too woozy to talk to anyone. The CCTV footage shows her stumbling to a chair in the corner and sitting down, and because she didn’t check in or tell anyone how bad she felt, she was overlooked until it was too late. You know how aspirin works—it’s an anticoagulant, like warfarin, and it stops the platelets clumping to arrest a bleed in the normal way. And with the rupture in her abdomen, she just bled out before we could get to it. If your father hadn’t phoned her mobile, she wouldn’t have been found until she was dead. It was only because the phone kept ringing and she was ignoring it that the alarm was raised. And we did everything we could at that point, but it just wasn’t enough, and everything we touched was breaking down and starting another bleed. And I can tell you how sorry I am for ever, but it won’t bring her back.’

She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut to close out the images, but they wouldn’t be banished, and she knew her father had seen it because they’d called him immediately to ask if he knew why she might be there, and he’d arrived while they had been in Resus, fighting for her life, and had insisted on going in. It must have been hideous for him, but it didn’t change the facts. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she told Ben yet again.

‘I was in charge. I know I wasn’t a consultant then, but I was the most senior person in the department that day, and so the responsibility rested with me.’

‘You’re not God.’

‘No. So I needed to be more careful, because I don’t just know everything, but things are different now that I’m a consultant and actually have some say. It couldn’t happen now. All patients are intercepted on their way into the department by the triage nurse, people waiting are checked at regular intervals, and I insist on being constantly alerted to what’s happening in my department. I can’t let it happen again.’

‘Ben, you didn’t let it happen. You weren’t negligent.’

‘Maybe not. But I can see where your father’s coming from, and I wouldn’t want a man I thought was responsible for the death of my wife, no matter how indirectly, being the father of my grandchild.’

‘Well, he’s going to have to get over it,’ she said firmly, ‘because you are the father—unless we just aren’t going to tell him?’

‘That’s not an option, Lucy,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘This baby may not have been planned, but it’s mine, and I fully intend to be involved in its life. And I can’t do that in secret. I can’t, and I won’t, so, come what may, your father has to know.’

But how? She had no idea, but at least now Ben was in the picture. One down, one to go, she thought.

But then he went on, ‘I know you’ll say it’s too soon, and you’re probably right, but I intend to look after you and my baby for the rest of your lives, so get used to the idea.’

She sat up straighter, absently massaging the bump. ‘Out of a misplaced sense of duty? No, Ben. It has to be more than that. I agree, I can’t stay here, but I’m not moving in with you any more than I’m moving in with my father. I don’t want to be someone’s duty. I’m sick of duty. I want love for my baby. And for me. Nothing else.’

‘It will be love.’

‘It will. From me, for a start. But we’re part of a package, the baby and I, and we’re both equally important, and I’m not going to do anything hasty. You and I haven’t seen each other for months, and that was a one-off. You weren’t even ready to carry on seeing me because things were too difficult. Well, if they were difficult before, they’re much worse now, and I’m not going to do anything until I’m sure the time is right.’

‘Right with who?’

‘With me—with you—with my father.’

His jaw tensed, the muscle working, and he turned away. ‘OK. So—you need accommodation. Somewhere we can have some privacy so I can share my baby with you without causing any of you unnecessary grief—is that what you’re suggesting? That we duck around, grabbing a few minutes together every now and then when your father and the rest of Penhally Bay aren’t looking? No. It’s my baby, Lucy, and I’m damned if I’m going to be ashamed of it. Your father can just learn to deal with it, and the rest of this flaming community can just learn to mind their own business.’

She stared at him, then with a choked laugh she turned away, picked up the tray and stood.

‘If you imagine for a moment that’s going to happen, Ben Carter, you’re in cloud cuckoo land,’ she said, and, taking the tray through to the kitchen, she dumped it down and brushed off her hands. ‘We’d better get back to the surgery.’

‘I thought Dragan was going to phone you.’

‘So did I, but he’s obviously been held up. There’s a lot we can achieve without him, so let’s get on with it.’ And without waiting for him to reply, she picked up her coat, slid her arms into it and headed for the door.