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  ‘Oh, dear, don’t talk about it! It’s driving me mad. It’s been getting worse and worse, but I’ve been ignoring it because Rebecca’s home for the summer and I’ve been enjoying her company, but now I can’t go anywhere with her and it’s just ridiculous!’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll soon have you sorted out. How’s she getting on? Enjoying Liverpool?’

  Mrs Green rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, loves it! She says the social life is brilliant. Tom misses her, though. I didn’t think he would because they fight all the time, but he’s really enjoyed having her back for a while. I don’t know what we’ll do without her when she goes back.’

  Mrs Green came to a halt just outside the door, and tugged at Anna’s sleeve. ‘This new man—Dr Carter. What’s he like?’ she whispered.

  A total pain in the neck, she wanted to say, but professionalism prevailed. ‘He’s good,’ she said truthfully. ‘I’m sure you’re in good hands.’

  ‘Have you seen him do anything?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes—two ops this morning. He’s very careful and thorough.’

  Mrs Green relaxed visibly. ‘Good,’ she said in relief. ‘I was so worried when I realised Suzanna had gone on maternity leave. I thought it wasn’t for another week or so, but then I saw her in the shop yesterday and I was worried all night!’

  Anna smiled and patted her arm. ‘No need to worry. He’s fine. Come on in, I’ll introduce you. I’m sure you’ll get on like a house on fire.’

  ‘Hi.’

  Anna looked up, straight into the most stunning blue eyes she’d ever seen, and felt her heart crash against her ribs.

  ‘Hi,’ she replied, and wondered if it was just her imagination or if she really sounded that breathless. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Tantalising thought,’ he murmured, a lazy, sexy smile teasing those sensuous lips. ‘Actually, I’m looking for the senior partner. I’m Max Carter, the locum.’

  She took his outstretched hand, and felt a jolt of electricity up her arm. ‘Anna Young. I’m the practice nurse. Well, I am at the moment. I expect I’ll be tealady in a minute. John’s out on a call. Shall I put the kettle on and fill you in?’

  He followed her into the tiny kitchen, his presence making the air so thick with tension that she could hardly breathe, and watched her as she made coffee for them both.

  ‘So, what’s it like here?’ he asked as they sipped their drinks a moment later.

  ‘Crazy,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Everyone’s lovely. All you need is a sense of humour and you’ll survive.’

  He did more than survive. He fitted right in, and every time Anna emerged from her room he seemed to be there. On his third day, he invited her out for a drink. She went, and it was wonderful. They shared the same zany sense of fun, liked the same music, chose the same food from the bar snacks menu.

  Then they came out of the restaurant and Max hailed a taxi, and when they fell into it, giggling, he looked at her and said, ‘Where to?’

  Suddenly the laughter died, replaced by a blazing heat which had been simmering gently under the surface for the whole week. ‘You could come back for coffee,’ she offered.

  He nodded, and she leant forwards and told the taxi driver her address. Five minutes later they were there, letting themselves into the once-elegant Georgian terraced house where she had a flat.

  They didn’t bother with the coffee. Instead, as the door closed behind them they went into each other’s arms, and their mouths met in hungry, devouring kisses that left them both aching for more.

  He stayed that night, and the night after, and the night after that. Then it was Monday, and he was on call, and he went—reluctantly—back to his own flat and stayed there for a couple of nights.

  He was tired. They both were, hardly having slept for the previous nights, and in order to preserve their sanity and professional competence they agreed to stay in their own homes. In practice this meant one or other of them getting up and getting dressed in the middle of the night, and after a while they gave up again and resigned themselves to exhaustion, unless Max was on call.

  Then he stayed alone at his flat, and Anna missed him the entire time. They’d become so close it seemed strange

  Then, during the third week, Max became a little distant. He seemed tired, more so than usual, and she sometimes caught a preoccupied expression on his face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him on one occasion.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I’m fine. Just thinking about something.’

  ‘A patient?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, a patient,’ he agreed.

  ‘You shouldn’t bring your work home,’ she scolded gently, cuddling up to him. ‘Want to talk about it?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. It’s OK, really.’ He turned his head and looked down at her, snuggled against his shoulder. ‘Want to go to bed?’

  She smiled. ‘I always want to go to bed with you,’ she teased.

  His smile was thin and weary. ‘I could do with sleeping,’ he warned. ‘Don’t expect a wild night of passion.’

  She chuckled and stood up, pulling him to his feet. ‘You can sleep. There’s always the morning.’

  But in the morning he was gone when she woke, and she found him at work, peering at something down the microscope they used for quick checks on bloods and things.

  ‘You sneaked off,’ she grumbled gently, standing behind him and hugging him over the back of the chair.

  ‘Sorry. Work to do,’ he told her, still peering.

  She let him go and went into the kitchen, putting the kettle on. When she came back out he was putting some samples into a path lab envelope. ‘I just want to take these up to the lab,’ he said, and left her there.

  She shrugged, made herself some tea and curled up in

  Odd, at that time of the day. Oh, well. Perhaps it was some histological sample he’d taken the day before. Maybe he was in a hurry for the result.

  They went out for dinner again that night, and afterwards they went back to her flat.

  He wasn’t tired that night, she thought. Far from it. Their lovemaking reached new heights, and left them both shaken with the intensity of it.

  ‘I love you,’ she said softly, and his arms tightened convulsively.

  ‘Anna,’ he whispered.

  He didn’t say the little words, but she knew he meant them.

  At least, she thought she did.

  Then she woke in the morning to find him gone, a note from him propped up against the kettle. It filled her with foreboding, and she held it with trembling fingers for an age before she could open it.

  Dear Anna,

  By the time you see this I’ll be gone. I’m sorry to leave you like this, but I can’t stay. There are all sorts of reasons why I have to go, but I’ll miss you, you’ve been a lot of fun. Don’t have regrets. Life’s too short for regrets. Just remember the good times.

  Max

  She screwed up the note and threw it in the bin, then, without even stopping to dress, she jumped in her car and drove to his flat. He was gone, a neighbour told her, peering curiously at her nightdress.

  She went home, curled up in a chair and howled. Handfuls of soggy tissue later, she had a bath, got dressed and walked miles, ranting at him as she paced up and down the Cotswold hills in a fury of bitter recriminations and desperate longing.

  He couldn’t have gone—not for ever! How would she cope without him?

  She phoned her mother and blurted out the whole sorry mess, and her mother gave her telephone hugs and said, ‘Come home for the weekend.’ So she did.

  And there, lo and behold, was a vacancy for a practice nurse. Too gutted to stay in Cheltenham, she handed in her notice, moved back to Wenham Market and then discovered to her absolute horror that she was expecting a baby.

  Anna deliberated for ages, then wrote a letter to Max and waited with bated breath for his reply.

  It never came. All that came was her own letter, with RETURN TO SENDER—NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS stam
ped all over it.

  She tried again, but the same thing happened.

  She wrote to the locum agency that he’d come through, asking for a new forwarding address, but was told that he’d stopped working for them and there was no way to contact him.

  Then Harry was born, undoubtedly the best thing that had ever happened to her in the whole of her twenty-six years, and she put thoughts of Max on the side and concentrated on giving her baby the best start in life she could manage.

  It was hard—impossibly hard at first—and financially always difficult, but she managed, and it had slowly grown easier. People had accepted her and Harry, and she’d felt very much a part of the community.

  And it had been fine until last week, when Max had turned up again out of the blue and thrown her carefully ordered emotions into pandemonium.

  He finished Mrs Green’s foot, leaving her with just the central section of the nail so that the painful tightly curled edges were gone and wouldn’t trouble her again. Anna bandaged the battered and bloody toe and reflected that she hadn’t registered anything he had done.

  She’d been miles away, reliving those wonderfully romantic moments in his arms, and it seemed almost intrusive of him and Mrs Green to be there. She’d tuned them out so absolutely that she wondered if she’d done anything stupid.

  Apparently not, because Max said nothing, and he would have done. He didn’t tend to hold back.

  The rest of the day was routine and passed without incident, until she reached the end of her day. Then she found a note from Max in Reception.

  Would like to come round tonight to see photos etc. Would nine o’clock be all right? That should give you time to put Harry to bed. Leave me a note to confirm.

  M

  Not even ‘Max’. He was getting briefer, she thought drily. Soon he’d be signing things with a cross.

  ‘Nine is fine. See you later. Anna.’ Her reply was even more brief.

  She went home, looked around and had a guilt-driven tidying fit. Then she shoved the vacuum round, rescued Harry’s toys from the dust collector and wormed the cat, which took the hump and stalked off, tail twitching furiously.

  ‘Bedtime,’ she said to Harry at seven-thirty.

  He whinged, grumbled and squirmed all the way up the stairs, through the bath and into bed, but in the end he fell asleep in seconds.

  Then, just when she thought she might grab a moment to change and clean herself up, the doorbell rang.

  She opened the door to find Max there, looking disgustingly appealing in a faded blue shirt, which matched the changing blue of his eyes, and a pair of jeans that did wicked and wholly unprintable things to his body.

  Help, she thought, I’m going to be alone with him!

  She took him into the sitting room, put on the overhead light on maximum and pulled out the baby albums, then headed for a chair. ‘Here you go. Baby photos.’

  He sat down next to her and took the albums, then lifted the first one. He opened the cover, stared at the pictures for a moment then closed his eyes.

  ‘You could have been there, if you hadn’t disappeared so effectively. I tried to write, but there was no getting through to you. Not known at this address and all that. Anyway, Mum was with me.’

  He nodded, then looked down at the pictures again. She glanced across, and felt her face colour. He was looking at a picture of her breast-feeding the newborn Harry.

  ‘I’d forgotten that one was in there,’ she muttered, embarrassed that he should see something so personal.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said softly. ‘I’m glad you breast-fed him. There’s something so primitive—so erotic and right about it. I wish I could have seen it.’

  ‘You could have seen it. All you had to do was stick around,’ she reminded him—again.

  He shook his head. ‘No.’ He turned the pages in silence, except for the odd question, and she could feel the tension radiating off him.

  After a while he shut the albums and stood up. ‘I think I’ll call it a night, I’m tired. Mind if we do this again? I’d like to ask you more.’

  She realised with a shock that it was after eleven o’clock.

  ‘Sure. Not tomorrow, I’ve got something on. Maybe Thursday?’

  His mouth moved automatically in a polite, social smile. ‘That would be lovely,’ he agreed, and turned away, but not before she’d seen the pain in his eyes.

  He could have been there—he could have had it all, she reminded herself as she watched him walk away. He could have, and he’d chosen not to.

  Well, having made the bed, he could lie in it, she thought

  It was five years too late to appeal to her sense of decency. Frankly, he was lucky she was prepared to do this much.

  She closed the door, turned off the sitting-room light and went to bed, evicting the cat from the middle of it. He came back, though, and she let him. He was undemanding company, and conversation with him wasn’t complicated by lies and half-truths and mixed emotions.

  It took her ages to go to sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘IS THERE any chance you could get a babysitter for tomorrow?’ Max asked Anna the following morning.

  She stared at him, puzzled and a little suspicious. ‘A babysitter? I thought you were coming to me. That’s what we agreed.’

  He looked down at his hand, his fingers tracing a pattern on the edge of the desk. ‘I thought perhaps you could come to me—I could cook something.’

  She laughed. ‘You? Cook? No,’ she said bluntly. It was too scary—too much like a date, and that made her nervous. She had weak enough defences around him, without him setting up some big seduction scene.

  He sighed. ‘I’m not trying to proposition you, Annie,’ he said, proving for the nth time that he could read her mind. ‘I just want to be able to talk openly, and with Harry in the house it’s difficult. Anyway, there’s something I want to tell you.’

  ‘So tell me,’ she said bluntly. ‘Whatever it is, just tell me. It can’t be that secret or important.’

  His face closed, and she thought she’d been a little harsh, but he needed to know that he didn’t affect her any

  had to have some distance, or she was going to go crazy.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said, a little shortly. ‘You’re probably right. It isn’t that important.’ He scooped up a pile of notes, turned on his heel and headed for the door, leaving her in the office with a terrible suspicion that she had just made a very hurtful mistake.

  ‘So what? He hurt you,’ she muttered under her breath.

  David Fellows came up behind her and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘All right, my dear?’ he asked, an expression of concern on his face.

  She shrugged and eased out of reach. ‘Fine. Busy.’ And I’m not going to discuss Max with you, she thought, however kindly you might be.

  ‘Just wondered. You’ve been looking a bit preoccupied recently. Nothing to do with Max, is it?’

  ‘Of course not. We’re just colleagues,’ she said firmly, and headed for her room and a bit of peace and privacy.

  Her patients provided a little light relief that morning—children for inoculation, an elderly lady for an ulcer dressing, Mr Bryant with his sinus on his finger for a fresh dressing on the incision—she knew them all, and chatted happily to them, pushing Max Carter to the back of her mind.

  He didn’t stay there, though. She worried about whatever it was he’d wanted to tell her, and her callous dismissal of its importance, and after lunch she sought him out in the little garden behind the practice and apologised.

  ‘You got me too early in the morning—never was a morning person, remember?’ she added with a wry smile, and then regretted it, because all sorts of warm and intimate images came flooding back to her and swamped her reason.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘if you still want me to come over—yes, I could get a babysitter. I think you’re right, it would be easier to talk about Harry if he wasn’t in the house. He comes downstairs sometimes to
find me, and I wouldn’t want him to overhear something that upset or confused him.’

  Max nodded agreement. ‘That was what I thought. If it’s the idea of my cooking that’s putting you off, don’t worry,’ he said, a slow, teasing smile playing around his lips. ‘I’ve learned to be quite self-sufficient in the past few years.’

  ‘Just something simple,’ she warned him. ‘No candlelight or rubbish like that, or I go straight back home again.’

  He smiled. ‘No candlelight. There’s a fluorescent strip light in the kitchen-breakfast room of my cottage—will that do you?’

  ‘Perfect,’ she said crisply. ‘What time? I need to arrange the babysitter.’

  ‘Eight? Eight-thirty? What time does Harry go to bed?’

  ‘Six-thirty. He gets up with the lark, disgustingly cheerful,’ she told him flatly. ‘It’s another fault inherited from his father.’

  Max grinned. ‘Is that right? It must be hell for you.’

  ‘Trust me, it is. Right, I must ring the sitter and get back to work. I’ve got another surgery starting in a minute.’

  She went back inside, leaving him sitting there on the edge of a low wall in the sunshine, surrounded by all the greenery of the garden. She glanced back, and found his eyes on her, regarding her thoughtfully. For a moment their eyes locked, and then his mouth twitched in a travesty of

  More to the point, did she want to survive in this emotional and physical vacuum she’d been in for so many years? She thought again of their lazy mornings, the gentle, teasing, sensual way he’d woken her, and she almost moaned aloud.

  He had been so tender, so clever, so incredibly good at making her feel well loved. He’d been so good at it that she’d never had the desire or inclination to try again with anyone else. It hadn’t seemed fair to the very few kind, pleasant men with whom she’d had low-key, short-term relationships to expose them to certain failure.

  She pushed the thought from her mind and rang her neighbour, Jill Fraser, arranging for her to have Harry for the night. They worked a reciprocal system, and it saved her having to overuse her parents and wear out their goodwill—and just at the moment Jill owed her loads of time. Anna had had her three children more times than she cared to remember just recently, since Jill’s husband had walked out yet again.