Maggie Kingsley – A Consultant Claims His Bride (страница 1)
His mouth twisted into something not quite a smile. “Are we still friends, Nell?”
“Of course, we are,” she insisted. “You’re my pal, my best mate.”
Oh, hell.
Deep breaths, Nell. Take deep breaths. True, your heart is thudding like it’s about to explode, but don’t say anything rash because if you’ve got this wrong, if you’ve misunderstood him, you are going to look really, really stupid.
“Jonah, I…” She moistened her lips. “When you say that you wish you were, do you mean that you wish…that you…that…?”
He put down his teacup. “Nell, I’ve always been lousy with words so maybe…” He reached out and cupped her face gently with his hand. “Maybe this might make it clearer?”
Oh, hell. Oh, double, triple hell. His eyes were dark and hot, and he wasn’t doing anything, simply cupping her cheek gently with his fingers. She knew he was giving her plenty of time to back away, plenty of time to get to her feet, but she didn’t want to back away, and she didn’t want to get to her feet.
“Nell?”
So much conveyed in one little word. So much implied, and asked, and understood. And though a niggling little voice whispered at the back of her mind that this was a very bad idea, the hand cupping her cheek was trembling, and so was she. Nell wanted so much to kiss him, to know what it would feel like, so when his lips came slowly toward hers, she leaned forward to meet them without any hesitation at all.
Dear Reader,
I’m always being asked where I get my characters from, and the truth is I don’t know! My characters usually just creep into my mind when I’m doing the most ordinary of things, like washing the dishes, driving to the shops or even peeling a batch of potatoes. Jonah and Nell were different. When I was writing The Good Father I became so fond of Jonah and Nell that I knew I had to tell their story. The trouble was that although Jonah was a terrific neonatal-intensive-care-unit doctor, he was also a nice, ordinary man, and nice, ordinary men don’t make good heroes, do they? And then I thought, why couldn’t a nice, ordinary man be heroic? After all, in a crisis situation, it’s often the ordinary Joe—or in this case, the ordinary Jonah—who surprises everybody. So I set out to show that Jonah had hidden depths, and, more important, to make sure that Nell finally saw them, which was trickier to achieve. I hope I succeeded. They’ve become two of my favorite people, and I hope you like them, too!
Maggie
A Consultant Claims His Bride
Maggie Kingsley
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
SHE’D been dumped. No matter how hard Nell Sutherland stared at the email on her computer screen, she knew it wasn’t going to change. She’d been dumped. And not in person, not even in a phone call or a letter, but in a sodding email sent to her at work.
I expect you’ve realised we’ve grown apart.
Well, actually, no, I hadn’t realised that, Nell thought. In fact, it would have been kind of hard for me to know anything when I’m here in Glasgow, and you’re in New York, and for the last six months you’ve ended all your phone calls with the words ‘Love you—miss you.’
I’ve met a wonderful girl called Candy.
And what does that make me? Nell thought with a spurt of anger. You must have thought I was wonderful once, Brian, or you wouldn’t have lived with me for a year, or suggested we get engaged before you went to the States. And what sort of name was Candy? Candy was sweets, not women. Unless, of course, the woman in question was eye-candy and she’d bet her next ward manager’s pay cheque that Candy was.
‘Nell, Tommy Moffat’s blood test results are back from the lab.’
Nell minimised the email quickly, fixed a bright and perky ‘all’s right with my world’ smile to her lips, and turned to face the neonatal intensive care unit secretary.
‘Good news, or bad?’ she said, and Fiona frowned.
‘Frustrating would be a better word. Tommy doesn’t have anaemia, or any sign of an infection, so it looks like you’re back to square one.’
‘Damn,’ Nell muttered, taking the results the secretary was holding out to her. ‘Jonah was sure his failure to thrive was due to another bout of sepsis. He’s going to freak when he hears it’s not.’
Jonah would. The specialist registrar had always been a dedicated doctor but since Gabriel Dalgleish, the consultant in charge of the neonatal intensive care unit at the Belfield Infirmary, had left him temporarily in charge of the unit while he was away on his honeymoon, Jonah’s dedication to the babies had gone into overdrive.
‘He’s working too hard,’ Fiona observed, as though she’d read Nell’s mind. ‘Can’t you get him to relax or, better yet, find him somebody to relax with as you did for Gabriel?’
Nell laughed. She’d been as amazed as the rest of the staff to see their brusque and aloof consultant fall in love with her cousin Maddie, but finding somebody for Jonah Washington was another thing entirely.
‘If I had a flat tyre, Jonah would be the first man I’d call,’ she said. ‘If I needed help moving some furniture, it would be Jonah I’d ask. He’s my best friend next to my cousin Maddie, but…’
‘But no wow factor,’ Fiona finished for her, and Nell nodded.
Jonah was…well, Jonah was just Jonah. A six foot four inches, solid bear of a man with light brown hair, and dark brown eyes, he was a rock any sensible woman would want to cling to in a storm but he definitely had no wow factor.
Brian had the wow factor by the bucketful. Tall, blond, with deep blue eyes and a devastating smile, he’d arrived at the Belfield Infirmary two years ago as the new consultant in charge of the anaesthetics department. He’d also arrived with a reputation as a heartbreaker but as Nell had never for one second imagined he’d be interested in a girl who was five feet nine, with a figure even her best friends described as ‘generous’, she’d treated him casually, dismissively, only to be completely stunned when he’d asked her out.
I’ll always be very fond of you, Nell, but it’s better for us both to know now that it would never have worked out than for us to have got married and been unhappy.
Yes, but better for who, Brian? she wondered, feeling tears prick at the backs of her eyes.
She was the one who was going to have to tell everybody at the Belfield their engagement was off. She was the one who would have to endure the false sympathy, the pitying looks, the whispered comments of how they’d all known it wouldn’t last, not a girl like her with a man like Brian, while he was safe in New York.
‘Nell, are you OK?’
A slight frown was creasing Fiona’s forehead and Nell forced her bright and chirpy smile back into place.
‘Fine, absolutely fine,’ she said, getting briskly to her feet. ‘I’d better take these results along to Jonah and Bea. They’ve been stressing about them all morning.’
‘It must be odd, watching someone else doing your old ward sister’s job,’ Fiona said, as she followed Nell out of her small office.
‘It is,’ Nell admitted, ‘but Bea’s settled in really well even if she will persist in calling me Sister Sutherland instead of Nell.’
‘Apparently, the ward manager of her last NICU was a real stickler for protocol.’
‘Then her last ward manager needed to get a life,’ Nell declared. ‘My main concern is the smooth running of the unit, not whether people call me by my surname or my first name.’
Fiona laughed. ‘Yes, but, then, you’ve never been big on attitude, have you?’
She hadn’t, and maybe that had been her mistake. Maybe if she’d insisted on going to New York with Brian, instead of meekly accepting his decision that she should stay in Scotland, none of this would have happened.
‘It would be crazy for us both to uproot ourselves from the Belfield Infirmary for just a year,’ he’d said. ‘I’m only going because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to see how an anaesthetics department works in the States. I know we’ll miss one another but I’ll be back in Glasgow before you know it.’
Except now he wouldn’t. He would be staying in New York with Candy. Candy who was probably a petite and perfect size six, with gleaming white teeth and the kind of tumbling blonde hair that wouldn’t look out of place in a shampoo commercial.
‘Nell, are you sure you’re OK?’
Fiona’s eyes were curious now, speculative, and Nell hitched her smile up so high it was a wonder her face didn’t crack.
‘I’ve just got a bad attack of Monday morning winter blues, that’s all.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Fiona said with feeling. ‘I hate October. It’s such a depressing, absolutely nothing sort of a month, isn’t it? I wish it was Christmas. It will be George’s first, you know.’
And, as the secretary babbled on about her baby son, Nell made polite noises and scarcely heard her.
Where had it all gone wrong? How had it all gone wrong? She loved Brian. She’d thought he loved her. He’d said he did. He’d even said he loved her curves, but he’d also never objected when she’d told him she was going on yet another diet. Maybe if she’d stuck to the diets. Maybe if she hadn’t confessed to him that her blonde highlights were fake and she was actually a dull and mousy brown underneath. Maybe if…