Carol Marinelli – Hot Single Docs: The Playboy's Redemption: St Piran's: Rescuing Pregnant Cinderella / St Piran's: Italian Surgeon, Forbidden Bride / St Piran's: Daredevil, Doctor...Dad! (страница 7)
‘I enjoyed it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t be walking through car parks on your own at night.’
He really didn’t get it, Izzy realised.
He was possibly the only person in the hospital who didn’t know her past, or he’d never have said what he just had.
She turned on the engine and as she slid into reverse he knocked on her car window and, irritated now, she wound it down.
‘Sing in the shower!’ He said. ‘Twice a day.’
‘Sure’ Izzy rolled her eyes. Like that was going to help.
‘And by the way ,’ he said as she was about to close her window, ‘I’m not!’
Izzy pulled on her handbrake and let the engine idle and she looked at those lips and those eyes and that smile and she realised exactly why she was annoyed—was she flirting?
Did twenty-eight weeks pregnant, struggling mentally to just survive, recently widowed women ever even begin to think about flirting?
No.
Because had she thought about it she would never have wound down that window some more.
‘Not what?’ Izzy asked the question she had refused to ask earlier, her cheeks just a little pink.
‘I’m not a frustrated doctor,’ Diego said, ‘as many of your peers seem to think every male nurse is.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Izzy said, and took off the handbrake, the car moving slowly beside him.
‘And I’m not the other cliché either!’ he called, and her cheeks were on fire, yet for the first time in the longest time she was grinning. Not forcing a smile, no, she was, from ear to ear, grinning.
No, there was absolutely no chance that Diego Ramirez was gay!
‘I’d already worked that out!’ Izzy called as she pushed up her window. ‘Night, Diego!’
* * *
‘It went well, Mum!’ Izzy buttered some toast as she spoke to her mother and added some ginger marmalade. ‘Though it was strange being back after...’ Izzy stopped, because her mother didn’t like talking about before, so instead she chatted some more, told her mum about Toby, but her mum didn’t take the lead and made no mention of Izzy’s pregnancy.
‘So you had a good day?’ her mother checked as Izzy idly opened the brown paper bag and took out a handful of tiny tomatoes. They tasted fantastic, little squirts of summer popping on her tongue, helping Izzy to inject some enthusiasm into her voice.
‘Marvellous,’ Izzy said, smiling at the choice of word and remembering Diego’s smile.
It was actually a relief to hang up.
She was so damn tired of putting others at ease.
So exhausted wearing the many different Izzy masks...
Doctor Izzy.
To add to Daughter Izzy.
Domestic Abuse Victim Izzy.
Grieving Izzy.
Mother-to-be Izzy.
Coping Izzy.
She juggled each ball, accepted another as it was tossed in, and sometimes, sometimes she’d like to drop the lot, except she knew she wouldn’t.
Couldn’t.
She could remember her mother’s horror when she had for a moment dropped the coping pretence and chopped off her hair. Izzy could still see the pain in her mother’s eyes and simply wouldn’t put her through it any more.
Oh, but she wanted to, Izzy thought, running her bath and undressing, catching sight of herself in the mirror, her blonde hair way-too-short, her figure too thin for such a pregnant woman.
How she’d love to ring her mum back—ask her to come over, to take over.
Except she knew she couldn’t.
Wouldn’t.
Since that night, there had been a huge wedge between them and Izzy truly didn’t know how to fix it. She just hoped that one day it would be fixed, that maybe when the baby came things would improve. Except her mother could hardly bring herself to talk about the impending arrival.
Damn Henry Bailey!
Whoosh!
The anger that Jess had told her was completely normal, was a ‘good sign’, in fact, came rushing in then and, yes, she should do as Jess said perhaps, and write pages and pages in her journal, or shout, or cry, or read the passage in her self-help book on anger.
Except she was too tired for Henry tonight.
Too fed up to deal with her so-called healthy anger.
Too bone weary to shout or cry.
She wanted a night off!
So she lit six candles instead, the relaxing ones apparently, and lay there and waited for them to work, except they didn’t.
She had to relax.
It was important for the baby!
Oh, and it would be so easy to cry now, but instead she sat up and pulled the plug out, and then she had another idea, or rather she decided to try out Diego’s idea.
She’d fake it.
Cramming the plug back in the hole, she topped up with hot water and feeling stupid, feeling beyond stupid, she lay back as the hot water poured over her toes and she sang the happiest song she could think of.
A stupid happy song.
And then another.
Then she sang a love song, at the top of her voice at midnight, in her smart townhouse.
And she was used to the neighbours banging on the walls during one of her and Henry’s fights, so it didn’t really faze her when they did just that. Instead she sang louder.
Izzy just lay there in the bath, faking being happy, till her baby was kicking and she was grinning—and even if, for now, she had to fake it, thanks to a male nurse who wasn’t a frustrated doctor and certainly wasn’t the other cliché, by the time her fingers and toes were all shrivelled up, Izzy wasn’t actually sure if she was faking it.
For a second there, if she didn’t analyse it too much, if she just said it as it was...
Well, she could have almost passed as happy!
DIEGO was not in the best of moods.
Not that anyone would really know.
Though laid back in character, he was always firm in the running of his unit. His babies came first and though friendly and open in communication, he kept a slight distance from his staff that was almost indefinable.
Oh, he chatted. They knew he loved to swim in the Cornish sea, that he came from an affluent long line of doctors in Madrid, they even knew that he was somewhat estranged from his family due to his career choice, for Diego would roll his eyes if any of them rang him at work. His staff knew too about his rather pacy love life—the dark-eyed, good-looking Spaniard was never short of a date but, much to many a St Piran’s female staff member’s disgust, he never dated anyone from work.
No, the stunning women who occasionally dropped in, waiting for him to finish his shift, or called him on the phone, had nothing to do with hospitals—not public ones anyway. Their hospital stays tended to be in private clinics for little procedures to enhance their already polished looks.
There was just this certain aloofness to Diego—an independent thinker, he never engaged in gossip or mixed his private life with his work.