‘SO, CAN I give you a lift home?’ Quinn offered diffidently as he met her on the library steps.
His hand was clenched nervously around his keys but as they were hidden in his pocket, Faith would never know how much his confidence depended on her answer. He still couldn’t believe that she actually seemed to enjoy spending time together while they completed their homework assignments.
‘You passed your test?’ Faith demanded, a delighted grin on her face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because I wanted to get the car on the road first, so I could take you out to celebrate.’ He also hadn’t been certain that the car would be deemed roadworthy, in spite of the number of hours he’d spent rebuilding it.
‘You finished the car!’ Her excitement made him feel almost ten feet tall. ‘Where is it? Show me! Oh, I’m so jealous! Mother’s never going to let me have a car and if she ever does, it won’t be something fun like your Mini.’
Right then it hardly felt as if his feet touched the ground. It had been worth every scraped knuckle and missed hour of sleep to know he had her admiration. And as for the fact that they would now have the means to travel further afield no matter what the weather…that they could be together in the secluded confines of a car with their bodies just inches apart…
He hastily tamped down the enticing image of the two of them parked in some secluded place with their arms around each other and their lips…
‘Your carriage awaits, my lady,’ he said with a flourish, gesturing with one hand towards the nearby parking area where he’d left the car while he offered her his arm.
‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said with a giggle, and, instead of taking his arm, handed him the heavy pile of books she was carrying to call over her shoulder. ‘If I get there first, can I drive it? Please, pretty please?’
‘Women!’ Quinn muttered into the midnight darkness of his bedroom. ‘Will men ever understand how their minds work?’
He heard the echo of his own words and laughed aloud. ‘What’s to understand? Whatever goes wrong, it’s always the fault of the nearest man, even if he had nothing to do with it.’
He sighed heavily, seeing again in his mind’s eye the distress on Faith’s face. ‘And all I did was ask to have a few words with her.’
He’d finally been standing face to face with her after sixteen years and for several long moments while all his hormones had suddenly woken up to the reason for their existence, all he’d been able to think was that she was more beautiful than ever, so cool and poised and every inch a sophisticated woman. Then had come the realisation that he’d missed seeing all the steps that had taken her from coltish teenager to this and it was such an agonising wrench that he’d suddenly been gripped by the need to know why.
He laughed into the silence of the room and heard how hollow it sounded. How lonely.
Was he mad, that he could be affected by her like this, even after so long?
No. Not mad.
He couldn’t do his job so well if his brain didn’t work as well as it did. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a small corner of his heart that had never recovered from the blow she’d dealt him. There was one small corner that was still filled with anger and disbelief and that still needed to know why she’d suddenly changed her mind like that…or had it changed for her…
All he’d wanted had been a few minutes with her before she left the Barton again, this time, perhaps, for ever. Just enough time to ask her why she’d brushed him off so swiftly when they’d spent months planning for their future. Why she’d refused even to speak to him, let alone give him a chance to change her mind.
It might have been youthful arrogance, but he’d been so certain that he could change her mind, if her mother didn’t interfere. He’d been so certain of the strength of the love they’d shared that the last thing he’d expected had been that she would refuse to see him.
He hadn’t even been allowed over the Barton’s threshold, for heaven’s sake, as though he might contaminate it in some way.
Still, he might not be mad, but he would have to admit that the memories of that long-ago day must have been festering inside him. Today, he hadn’t really thought beyond his need to know the reasons for her actions. He’d all but forgotten that her day had already contained more than enough distress until he’d seen the tears welling up in those beautiful blue eyes even through the camouflage of her tinted glasses.
He’d immediately been struck by the once-familiar need to comfort her, and when she’d turned to the young man beside her instead he’d felt a deadly jealousy grip him.
Thanks to the intrusiveness of the various branches of journalism he knew more than he ever needed to about the louche lifestyles of the rich and famous. To see Faith, his down-to-earth, sweet Faith with some young pretty-boy’s arm wrapped around her had been almost more than he could bear.
For just a moment he allowed himself the luxury of imagining his fist spoiling the young man’s perfect nose with a splatter of scarlet blood and loosening a few of those perfect teeth, but the insanity didn’t last long. He’d been the victim of too much violence himself to ever want to inflict it on another.
‘Why, Faith?’ he demanded in the empty silence. ‘You were the last person I would have expected to need a toy-boy on your arm to make you feel good.’ Then he gave a snort of self-derision. ‘Tell the truth, Quinn. It made you feel old, didn’t it?’ he jeered softly. ‘There she is looking good on the arm of someone almost half her age while you…When was the last time you had anyone on your arm—other than eighty-seven-year-old Mrs Cobbledick when you helped her out of her chair this morning?’
Yes, he’d been jealous. Absolutely radioactive-green with it, but he’d never have deliberately made her cry, especially today of all days.
Not that there was anything he could do about it now, even if he could find the words to apologise…Or was there?
For several moments he lay there in the dark while he searched his memory, his pulse beginning to skip with the enormity of what he was thinking, the blatant stupidity of it, then he rolled over and switched on the bedside light even as he reached for the telephone.
As he tapped out the numbers he silently admitted that he hadn’t really needed to search them out in the back of his memory. For some reason he could recall them every bit as easily as in the days when he’d used them frequently. All he had to do now while he waited for a connection was decide whether he wanted the call to go through without a hitch or to find that the line had been cut off at some time in the last sixteen years.
‘Hello?’ The sound of her sleepy, husky voice was enough to stop his breath in his throat and send every hormone on that newly familiar mad sprint south. He’d never heard a voice as sexy as Faith’s when she was half-asleep.
‘Did I wake you?’ he asked, suddenly remorseful that he’d disturbed her much-needed slumber.
‘Quinn?’ Now there was disbelief in her tone and as she woke up she was losing that arousing huskiness. ‘Is that you, Quinn?’
‘Were you asleep?’ he demanded, trying to tamp down the elation that whirled through him when she recognised his voice without hesitation. ‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ she grumbled, and to his surprise there was a familiar hint of laughter in her voice. ‘How did you get this number? It’s unlisted.’
‘It wasn’t unlisted sixteen years ago,’ he reminded her, not realising just how revealing his words were until they’d been spoken.
He’d as good as told her in words of one syllable that he’d never forgotten her number. What sort of a sad, pathetic…?
This phone call had obviously been a bad idea. Who knew what else he was going to blurt out while his brain stalled through lack of blood? But still he couldn’t bring himself to end it.
‘So,’ she said after an achingly long pause, leaving him wondering just what she was thinking. ‘Why?’
‘Why, what?’ He’d definitely lost the thread. He’d probably lost the plot, too.
‘Why did you wake me up?’
‘It wasn’t intentional, Faith. I just came in after dealing with a baby with breathing difficulties—bronchiolitis,’ he added before she could ask, knowing that their long-ago study of biology would tell her what he was talking about. ‘I hadn’t realised how late it was when I picked the phone up.’ He’d been so intent on speaking to her that he hadn’t even glanced at the time. ‘I could hang up if you’d prefer.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ she exclaimed quickly. ‘I’d never get back to sleep for wondering how the baby is, or why you rang. You’ll have to tell me now.’
He chuckled. ‘You haven’t changed, then. You could never keep a secret and couldn’t bear anyone keeping one from you. You remember how you always had to buy presents at the last minute so you wouldn’t give the game away?’
‘That was a long time ago,’ she said quietly, her voice infinitely sad. ‘We all have to change.’
Before he could seize on her words as a lead into what he wanted to ask, she continued. ‘Take you, for example. You were determined to be a doctor but I was sure you were going to specialise in oncology. I don’t think you ever mentioned going into general practice.’
Now it was his turn to be assailed by sad memories.
‘Both choices were because my mother died of cancer,’ he said, and it wasn’t until he heard her soft gasp of dismay that he realised it must have been something he’d never told Faith before.
For a moment he was surprised. He knew that the trauma of watching his frail parent die by inches had affected his life deeply. It had taken years before he could bear to mention it at all, but he’d honestly thought that in the months that they’d come to know each other he and Faith had shared everything of their pasts as well as their hopes for the future.
Then he thought back and remembered that he hadn’t made the final decision to become a GP until he’d been part-way through his training.
‘I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor, long before she became ill,’ he said, deliberately omitting all mention of his father’s lifelong resentment and disappointment. ‘You were right about the oncology, though. For a while I was determined to go into that or cancer research. It was a typically high-minded knee-jerk reaction, of course—an idealistic teenager wanting to prevent other boys from losing their mothers the way I’d lost mine.’ He gave a soft snort of derision when he remembered just how deep that idealism had gone. ‘By the time I was ready to think about which branch of medicine really appealed to me most, I was a little more rational about it. I’d realised that she would have had a far better chance of beating the cancer if her GP hadn’t been so pushed for time that he missed a straightforward diagnosis.’
He knew, now, that his mother should have been referred immediately to the nearest oncology unit for specialist care, the way he did with his own patients. Instead, she’d been fobbed off. With a misdiagnosis of a minor infection, she’d been given prescription after prescription for antibiotics because it had been a quick and easy route to take and hadn’t required much thought.
‘Oh, Quinn,’ she whispered. ‘I know the words are always so inadequate but I am sorry.’
‘Me, too,’ he agreed hoarsely, the memories that swept over him suddenly as sharp as if it had been just days since it had happened rather than years. ‘She was a special person, Faith. She always seemed very quiet and gentle—’ especially next to a bully such as his father, who’d always maintained that it was her fault that he’d been robbed of a glittering future, ‘—but underneath, she was as brave as a lion. She never gave up fighting, right to the end.’
‘Remember,’ he heard her soft voice saying inside his head. ‘Anything worth having is worth fighting for.’
Faith was silent for a moment before he heard her whisper. ‘I’ve found that sometimes you have to pick your battles…to know when a war is impossible to win. Sometimes you have to save your energies for the ones that are.’
It was almost as though she’d been reading his mind, but there was such misery in her voice that it twisted something around his heart. What had happened in the last sixteen years to make her feel that way? She’d always been such an optimistic person and by all accounts she’d been living a charmed life since they’d parted company, her career a phenomenal success almost overnight and the world at her feet.
Quinn pulled a wry face. Looking back, it was laughable how arrogant he’d been. He’d actually believed that she would trust him to protect her when she finally left her mother’s over-protective grasp to take up her place at medical school.
Had her mother been right all along? She hadn’t needed to tell him that she could do more for her daughter than he ever could, and Faith’s obvious success was proof enough that she hadn’t needed his support.
Was that why Faith had made her decision? Had money been the reason why she’d changed her mind? Unlike him, she’d grown up with more than enough for her every need, and if her mother had decided to control her choice of career by refusing to help finance her through medical school…
‘So, tell me what happened with your little patient,’ she said into the turbulent silence of his thoughts, the edge on her false cheer cutting through his depressing introspection. ‘Not the confidential stuff, of course, but…is she all right now? Were you able to help her?’
‘I had to send her to hospital,’ he said, reliving the heart-clenching moment when he’d realised just how sick the little child was. ‘Her lungs were so badly inflamed that she was barely breathing. She’ll probably be on a ventilator for several days before we know how she’s going to be.’
‘Oh, Quinn,’ he heard her murmur softly. ‘I can just imagine how helpless that made you feel.’
‘Yes, well, there are some days when that’s the only feeling I get. Helpless to treat patients who’ve left it too long to come for help, helpless to do anything to relieve the misery of patients waiting their turns on operating lists, helpless to do anything to ease the day-by-day traumas for the families watching their children inching towards death.’
Suddenly realising that his frustrations had boiled over into a tirade, he groaned.
‘I’m sorry, Faith. I don’t know where all that came from. I didn’t ring you up to whine about the downside of things.’
‘It sounds as if you’ve had what they call “one of those days,” but that reminds me. Why did you ring? I presume there was a reason.’
‘Yes, there was a reason. A very simple one,’ he said softly, wondering if it was the only simple thing left in the world. His emotions, for so long held firmly under control, were now a ferocious tangle of regret and guilt and loss and even admiration, all with Faith Adamson tied up in the middle of them. ‘I made you cry today, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry.’
She was silent for so long that he began to wonder if the connection had been broken, then he heard her draw in a slightly tremulous breath.
‘Apology accepted,’ she said softly. ‘But it wasn’t entirely your fault. The last few days have been…Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t want to have to go through them again.’
‘Emotional overload,’ he agreed. ‘But I would have thought that you’d be accustomed to being in the limelight all the time.’
‘Actually, I spend very little time “in the limelight,” as you put it,’ she countered. ‘Far more of it—months at a time, in fact—is spent composing and arranging. Then there are the manic days when we’re in the recording studio, trying over and over to get it perfect.’
‘What about the concerts?’ In spite of his sneaking desire to find her choice of lifestyle a poor second to the one they’d planned together, he couldn’t help his fascination at this insight to the life she’d chosen. ‘You have to spend an awful lot of your time travelling.’
‘I did at first,’ she agreed. ‘Far more than I wanted to and probably far more than I needed to after the first couple of years. You wouldn’t believe how many times my luggage went adrift. I was so glad I didn’t have to take a piano with me, or the airlines would probably have lost that, too!’
‘Tell me about it!’ he exclaimed wryly. ‘The last time I went away, they lost the bag with my wash-kit in it. And the free soap supplied by the hotel brought me out in a rash.’
‘That’s nothing!’ Faith countered. ‘Once they left me without a stitch of clean clothing. It took them three days to track my suitcase down, but in the meantime I had a concert to perform and no evening dress available. I nearly had to go on stage in the hotel’s courtesy towelling robe.’
Quinn laughed out loud at the image that painted inside his head and in spite of the fact that it was past midnight, settled down for a round of their once-familiar version of the game of one-upmanship.
‘Oh, and there’s some private post for you, Quinn,’ Joan called after him the next morning. ‘I put it with the other letters on your desk.’
He thanked her over his shoulder as he set off towards his consulting room, juggling a wire basked full of serried ranks of patient notes ready for morning surgery and the brimming cup of coffee that he hoped was going to kick-start his system into life.
He was late…well, late for him. Usually, by this time in the morning he’d already opened all his post and dealt with most of it before the first patient was due. Today, everything was out of order because he’d forgotten to set his alarm. That in itself was almost unheard of. He was far more likely to set it unnecessarily on a day he didn’t have to start early.
That wouldn’t have mattered if he’d woken up at his usual time, but he hadn’t finally gone to sleep until the early hours of the morning. He’d lain awake for hours, replaying his midnight conversation with Faith over and over in his mind and trying to figure out why she’d been so much more willing to talk at the end of such a long and trying day than in person.
Was it just that he’d caught her with her defences down when he’d woken her like that? She’d certainly been far more relaxed than when they had been standing face to face. He’d actually been able to hear glimpses of the Faith he’d known sixteen years ago; the Faith who had captivated him with her humour, her sweet nature and her intelligence; the Faith who had stolen his heart and forgotten to give it back when she’d left.
He automatically dumped the basket of patient notes in their usual place on his desk, gulping down several large swallows of scalding coffee even as his eyes went to the heavy cream envelope on top of the pile of letters Joan had placed in the middle of the blotter.
‘That looks a bit flash for a drugs company promotion,’ he muttered with a grimace of distaste. ‘If they’re wasting money on expensive stationery, they’re probably overcharging on the drugs.’
He was tempted to toss it onto the pile with the rest of the non-essential things—the ones he always intended reading when he had some free time—but something stayed his hand.
‘Protheroe and Smythe, Solicitors,’ he read in one corner of the embossed envelope, and his heart gave a sudden jolt of apprehension.
Medicine was becoming increasingly litigious these days, with some patients seizing any opportunity for the chance of a big pay-out, not realising that they could be ruining a blameless doctor’s career. It hadn’t happened to him, thank goodness, but he knew there was a growing number in the profession who had become the victims of greedy patients only too willing to perjure themselves for what they saw as ‘free’ money.
For a moment he wondered if it would be better to see his patients before he read the letter, but knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate properly if a corner of his mind was wondering what it was about.
The telephone on his desk gave a single ring as he picked up the letter-opener and slid the point under the flap—Joan’s signal that his first patient had arrived. He glanced up at the clock on the wall and saw that he had about a minute and a half to satisfy his curiosity.
Except, even when he’d read the letter from end to end twice, he was no wiser. All he knew was that he was requested to ring at his earliest convenience to make an appointment with Protheroe and Smythe to discuss a confidential matter.
‘So it could be anything from a multimillion damages suit to…to a long-lost great-aunt leaving me seventy-three cats and an island in the Pacific!’ He threw his hands up in the air and seriously contemplated ignoring the whole thing.
‘Except you’re just as bad as Faith,’ he admitted wryly as he glanced over the frustrating letter again. ‘You won’t be able to rest until you know what it’s all about.’
Another glance at the clock told him he’d run out of time. Much as he would have liked to have made the phone call straight away, he had a responsibility to his patients. It was no more permissible for him to keep them waiting unnecessarily than it was for them to break an appointment without notification.
He picked up the phone. ‘Could you tell Mrs Draper to come in, please, Joan?’ A quarter of an hour with the stubborn, self-opinionated seventy-nine-year-old would nail his feet firmly to the floor.
‘Good morning, Doctor,’ she said brightly as she marched in, as energetic as most women half her age.
‘Good morning,’ he echoed, stifling a grin as she hopped up onto the chair like a sprightly elf and began to swing her legs almost like a little child. At an inch or two below five feet, she wasn’t much taller. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she said pensively. ‘Probably just set my mind at ease more than anything.’
‘If I can,’ he said, leaning back in his chair to rest his steepled fingers over his lips. He had learned the first time she’d visited that he would have to compose his soul in patience while she got to the point of her visit. He’d also learned that he would probably need to hide a grin more than once.
‘Well, it’s these tablets I was thinking of taking,’ she began. ‘It’s all on account of Joe Fletcher.’ She paused long enough to demand, ‘You know who I mean? He’s sexton at the churchyard. Not bad-looking with all those muscles he gets from the digging and still got most of his teeth…well, he’s at least five years younger than I am, so there you are.’
Quinn was lost and not just in the thought of Joe Fletcher’s muscles.
‘So, what are these tablets, then?’ he asked, returning to the point in her monologue when he’d lost the thread.
‘That’s what I was telling you,’ she said sharply. ‘Joe told me several weeks ago about these tablets he’s been taking—herbal they are—and he swears they’ll be doing me a power of good…well, there’s not much point in only one of us taking them, is there?’
‘And what exactly are these tablets for?’ Quinn asked, deciding he ought to get a little more information before he went into his usual warning about the wisdom of checking for unexpected reactions between prescription drugs and self-prescribed herbal remedies.
‘Well, for our sex life, of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘On our pensions we couldn’t afford that Niagra stuff, or whatever they call it, but these tablets seem to do the same thing.’ She delved in her pocket and took out a packet, hopping down to pass it across the desk before she returned to her seat.
Quinn was glad to have a moment to read the information printed on the outside of the box. It would give him time to get his face under control. Life would never be boring with patients like Hetty Draper around to keep him on his toes.
‘So,’ he said when he reached the end of the glowing claims and the list of ingredients, ‘it doesn’t look as if there’s anything untoward in them. Have you taken any? Were there any adverse reactions?’
‘Not so far,’ she said brightly, then grinned. ‘In fact, they seem to be working very well.’
‘So, what’s the problem?’ he asked, refusing to think about the fact that even Joe Fletcher and Hetty Draper at seventy-four and seventy-nine had more exciting sex lives than he did.
‘Well, you’ve read the packet,’ she said. ‘I found where it says they’re for sexual health and so on, but I’ve read it several times and I can’t see anything there about pregnancy.’
‘Pregnancy?’ Quinn choked, sure his eyes were now standing out on stalks.
‘Of course!’ she said seriously. ‘The last time either of us was able to do it this often—with my husband and his wife in those days, you understand,’ she added in an aside, and Quinn nodded woodenly, still stunned by the direction the conversation had taken. ‘Well, we both got pregnant—several times, in fact—but I think we’re a bit past all that now. We don’t really want to be bothered with all the nappies and night feeds at our age.’
‘I see,’ Quinn said, concentrating fiercely on the packet in his hand when all he wanted to do was laugh out loud at the idea of a seventy-nine-year-old woman being worried about getting pregnant if she started making love too often.
He swivelled his chair to reach down a volume from the bookshelf behind him, quickly flipping through pages while he checked for any potentially worrying interactions with her current medication.
He looked up at her with a genuine smile. ‘Well, you definitely don’t need to worry about anything like that on these tablets,’ he said seriously. ‘There’s definitely nothing I can see in them that would let Joe make you pregnant.’ Neither, as far as he could see, was there anything that could threaten liver or kidney damage or any one of a number of similar complications that could result from unfortunate chemical interactions.
‘No matter how many times we do it?’ she demanded eagerly, and Quinn suddenly wished he had half of her energy and enthusiasm. Then he might even manage to get a social life, never mind a sex life.
‘No matter how many times,’ he agreed, getting up to bring the tablets back to her. ‘If you’re both enjoying yourselves and keeping up with the other medication you’ve been prescribed…But feel free to come back again any time if you’re worried.’
‘Oh, I doubt that I’ll need to, Doctor, but thank you for offering,’ she said brightly as she hopped down again and set off towards the door, clearly eager to go. ‘Now that you’ve set my mind at rest about the pregnancy thing, I probably won’t have the time.’
Quinn was still chuckling hours later when he finally collapsed onto his bed.
‘At least I started off the day with one bright moment,’ he groaned, every muscle feeling as if it was creaking as the tension started to unwind.
It didn’t help that every nerve was jittering, too, but what could he expect when he’d been existing on little more than coffee all day? By now, he probably had enough caffeine in his system to power a rocket to the moon, and hence very little chance of falling asleep any time soon, in spite of the fact that he was totally exhausted.
‘I need to do something physical to work off the caffeine,’ he muttered. ‘But I haven’t got the energy to do anything about it.’ Suddenly, he imagined a very pleasurable way to work off the caffeine, one that was almost guaranteed to bring a good night’s sleep, too. And he wasn’t surprised that the person who featured in his X-rated scenario was the same dark-haired, blue-eyed girl who had featured in every one of his hormone-induced fantasies once he’d met her all those years ago.
Except she wasn’t a girl, now, but a woman and he couldn’t believe that she was even more enticing now than she’d been as a teenager.
No wonder every woman he’d met in the intervening years had been unable to measure up…
His thoughts came to a screeching halt when he realised what he’d just admitted and he shook his head in instinctive denial.
‘Rubbish!’ he scoffed, scanning over the small collection of beautiful, talented, intellectually stimulating women he’d entertained over the years.
‘I even started thinking about marriage with one of them,’ he said aloud, then realised that it was hard to remember what Nerys had looked like, let alone what had attracted him to her.
‘Well, that just goes to prove that she wasn’t the right one for me—why none of them were,’ he justified, while a little voice inside his head insisted, And the reason why they weren’t right was because they weren’t Faith.