Innocent Secret
Living on the edgeDr. Joe Faraday is a man who keeps his heart well hidden. Well, Nurse Vicky Lawrence has a secret, too—her feelings for this tender man contributed to the recent breakdown of her engagement. Vicky knows Joe wants her, but every time she gets close, he withdraws. She senses that some emotional trauma is holding him back, but what? They are living on tenterhooks, and Vicky wonders if anything can ever tip Joe into her arms.… And then her safety is threatened….
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It didnât matter how attractive Vicky wasâ¦
Or any other woman, for that matter. It didnât matter how good it felt to have her hand wrapped around his arm, knowing that the contact was giving her the support she needed. It didnât matter that he could smell the hint of flowers and musk drifting from her skin, or that her long blond hair was like spun gold against the dark fabric of his suit. It didnât matter that the last hour had made him feel more alive than he had in several years and that he was actually looking forward to sharing a meal with her.
As the common idiom went, heâd been there and done that already, and had the scars on his heart to prove it.
A while ago I was lucky enough to spend a week in Cumbria, in the northwest of England. As I was revisiting places I first came to know when our children were small, I found I was looking at them in a completely different way.
Suddenly, the quaint little market town of years ago was growing and becoming the background for a whole new cast of characters working in and around Denison Memorial Hospital. This book is the third in a series of stories about those characters, and I hope you enjoy them.
Perhaps along the way I can give you a taste of what it was like to live surrounded by such magnificent scenery and the inimitable Cumbrian people. I will certainly be going back again.
Happy reading!
CONTENTS
Dear Reader
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
âDO YOU take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?â
Vicky Lawrence heard the time-honoured words drifting towards her, and with them knew that a dream that sheâd treasured for nearly half of her life was finally over.
Sheâd loved Nick ever since she was twelve years old but heâd never looked at her the way he was looking at Frankie, the woman who was making her promises to him.
She didnât begrudge him his happinessâhow could she when the two of them looked as if theyâd been made for each other?
Still, she wouldnât be human if she didnât feel a pang of regret for what might have been. Sheâd believed all her Christmases had come at once the day heâd proposed to her, and the months when sheâd been busily planning their perfect wedding had been the happiest of her life.
She still didnât know what had changed, or why, or even when. All she did know was that when Nick had sat her down with that serious look on his face and confessed that he wanted to break their engagement, she couldnât have been more delighted.
It should have hurt to find out that heâd fallen passionately in love with a fellow GP working in the unit that was part of Denison Memorial Hospital. The fact that she knew and liked Frankie as a colleague should have made her feel betrayal, not gratitude.
Yet here she was, standing surreptitiously at the back of the room so that her presence wouldnât cast a shadow over the proceedings, and she hardly felt a qualm.
Sheâd searched around inside her heart, almost like probing at a painful tooth with her tongue, and had barely raised an ache, but if sheâd admitted as much to any of the people in the room they wouldnât have believed her.
âAre you all right?â had been the most frequent question sheâd heard over the last few weeks, accompanied by a look of such cloying pity that sheâd wanted to scream.
âIâm fine,â sheâd been saying with a bright smile when what sheâd wanted to say had been, âI couldnât be more delighted that Nick fell in love with Frankie because it saved me from making a monumental mistake.â
However, the world and his wife had cast her in the role of broken-hearted waif and wouldnât look beyond to see that there was something far more important than Nickâs defection filling her mind.
âAre you all right?â murmured yet another voice as someone came to stand just behind her, and the soft burr of his Scottish accent told her who it was without needing to see him.
This time her reaction to the question was very different. This time the voice was the one that, over the last couple of months, had begun to fill her mind and heart with more desperate longing than sheâd ever felt for Nick. She hadnât realised that sheâd had little more than an adolescent crush on her long-time hero until sheâd learned about the real thing. There was no comparison.
âIâm fine,â she whispered over her shoulder, looking up almost six inches into the sombre, handsome face of GP Joe Faraday and straight into the changeable hazel of his eyes. It was her usual reply, honed over the last roller-coaster weeks and, as usual, she could tell that she hadnât been believed.
Sometimes she didnât even believe it herself. It wasnât quite as easy as that to let go of something that had been the bedrock of her existence for half her life.
