Tulips for Augusta

“I had hoped this afternoon… But no, you are determined to make me into the villain of your imagination. I thought that you might change your mind when you got to know me a little, but I see that it is useless.” He sighed loudly, took a couple of strides across the little room, and caught her by the shoulders, not at all gently. He said, in quite a temper, “Well, my pretty—if you want a villain, how’s this for a start?”

No one had ever kissed her like that before. It took her breath and emptied her head of sense and set her heart thudding. When he let her go, she stood, with huge green eyes shining with the tears she had no intention of shedding—not in front of him anyway.

“I’m too angry to think of anything to say,” she said icily, “but when I do I shall say it.”

Romance readers around the world were sad to note the passing of BETTY NEELS in June 2001. Her career spanned thirty years, and she continued to write into her ninetieth year. To her millions of fans, Betty epitomized the romance writer, and yet she began writing almost by accident. She had retired from nursing, but her inquiring mind still sought stimulation. Her new career was born when she heard a lady in her local library bemoaning the lack of good romance novels. Betty’s first book, Sister Peters in Amsterdam, was published in 1969, and she eventually completed 134 books. Her novels offer a reassuring warmth that was very much a part of her own personality. She was a wonderful writer, and she will be greatly missed. Her spirit and genuine talent will live on in all her stories.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

MISS AUGUSTA BROWN climbed the old-fashioned staircase leading to the Private Patients’ Wing, planting her small feet, shod in regulation black lace-ups, with a deliberation which amounted to slow motion. She was seething with temper, disappointment, and a burning sense of injustice, for half an hour previously she had been sent for by Matron, to be told by that somewhat awe-inspiring little lady that she was to go to Private Wing for an unspecified period, until such time as Staff Nurse Bates returned from sick leave. Augusta disliked Bates anyway—a tiresome girl, making the most of a grumbling appendix—and she loathed Private Patients. She had told Matron so, her pleasant voice sharpened by determination; but it had been useless, of course. She had returned to Men’s Surgical, where she had been staffing most happily for the year since she had qualified, and told Sister and such of the nurses and patients who happened to be around. She told Archie Dukes too—he had been houseman on the ward for the last six months, and they had become good friends. Now she wouldn’t be able to see so much of him; junior house surgeons didn’t find their way to PP very often…they would have to rely upon the odd meeting in one of the hospital’s innumerable corridors, and trust to luck that they would occasionally be free at the same time; a not very likely chance, for she had often heard Bates grumbling about the number of split duties she had…it was the best way to get work done on PP, because most of the patients had visitors each afternoon, so that any treatment needed was set aside until after tea, when the staff nurse could cope with it when she returned at five o’clock. A fine state of affairs, thought Augusta resentfully, who had been in the habit of sharing alternate duties with Sister.

She reached the top of the stairs, pushed open the swing doors before her, and went, still slowly, into Sister’s office.

Sister Cutts was sitting at her desk—a tall, lean woman, who had reached middle age without making any effort to do something about it. Her greying hair was strained back into a scanty bun, her thin face, devoid of lipstick, bore traces of the wrong shade of powder. She had beautiful, dark, melancholy eyes and splendid teeth. Augusta, studying her as she reported for duty, thought for the hundredth time that it was a great pity that no one had taken Sister Cutts in hand…she was an excellent nurse, and treated her staff with an aloof fairness which they found distinctly daunting, and she had no close friends. She looked up as Augusta entered, smiled briefly and said:

‘Good morning, Staff Nurse Brown. Sit down, will you? I’ll be ready for you in a minute.’

She returned to whatever she was doing and became instantly absorbed in it, leaving Augusta to sit and stare out of the window. PP was on the fourth floor, well away from the noise and bustle of the courtyard below. She watched an ambulance slide rapidly up to the Accident Room entrance, reflecting at the same time, with an uplift of her spirits, that she would be going on holiday in three weeks’ time anyway, and probably by the time she got back, Bates would be on duty again. She interrupted her thoughts for a moment, to watch while the ambulance men threw open its door and carefully drew out a stretcher and bore it away out of sight. She wondered what it was—not an accident, for the flash wasn’t on; she mulled over the possibilities and then abandoned them for the more cheerful subject of holidays. She would go home for a day or so, to the small village in Dorset where her father was the local vet, and then she would go over to Holland; to Alkmaar, where her mother’s two elderly aunts lived. It would be quiet staying with them, but it made a change, and as her mother often reminded her, it was good for her Dutch.