A Case of Heart Trouble (20 page)

“Darling. . . .” The endearment was very soft, and it made her shiver, as if already his arms had closed round her, and an anticipated ecstasy was upon her. “My sweet, adorable Dallas! Has it occurred to you that I haven’t asked you to marry me yet? And if I don’t ask you to marry me how can you come with me to Switzerland, and stay at a very comfortable hotel where we shall have to be registered as Dr. and Mrs. Martin Loring!” All at once his voice grew husky, and the hand beneath her chin was not as steady as it might have been. “You do want to marry me, don’t you, Dallas? Say you want to be my wife more than anything in the world! ”

For a moment Dallas hesitated, and then her pride was cast aside.

“Oh, Martin! . . . Yes, yes! ” she answered, and his arms closed round her, and for the third time she felt his mouth on hers. Only this time there was no releasing her, no letting her go even for a moment, and the glorious feeling of security his arms imparted to her more than made up for moments of acute unhappiness in the past. She could sense the desperate urgency in his hold, but at the same time he was unutterably gentle with her, almost womanishly tender.

“I love you,” he told her, while his lips hovered a bare fraction of an inch away from her lips, and his hand encircled her slender white throat.

“More than I ever dreamed I could love any woman! Does that surprise you, Dallas? You know I’ve been married before. You know I had a very beautiful wife. But the possession of a beautiful wife isn’t everything. In fact, sometimes it’s just nothing at all!”

“Martin darling,” she breathed agitatedly, near to him, “don’t tell me if you don’t want to. I don’t want to pry into the secrets of your past. I only want to think about the future. Our future!”

“I know, my precious, but sometimes the past impinges on the future. And we can’t begin afresh unless you know everything.” Wildly, she wondered should she tell him what Joanna had told her, and then decided not. It was best to leave Joanna out of it. “Maureen, my wife, and I were happy together for the first six months of our marriage, but never after that. I suppose she was in love with me in a kind of way, and I must have felt something like love for her when I married her . . . but it all went up in smoke in that second six months of our marriage.” He drew a little away and agitatedly selected a cigarette from a box near him. “Perhaps I didn't love her enough ... that was it! She wanted what I hadn’t got to give, and so my career became everything ... and she a thing of secondary importance. And being so lovely and desirable—to almost every man she met! —she turned elsewhere, and I closed my eyes to one or two affairs until she fastened on Brent, my cousin.”

“I'd never liked Brent very much, but I liked him less after he found out what a miserable farce my marriage had become. I suppose my pride was hurt. It was certainly nothing more. But I refused to grant Maureen a divorce so that she could marry him. I believe they were desperately in love, but I wasn’t interested. I was a bit inhuman. I insisted that things went on as they had been going on for three miserable years.”

“And then?” Dallas asked, as she watched him grinding his halfsmoked cigarette out in an ash tray.

“She caught some sort of an infection, and she died.” He turned and looked at her, his face blank. “She was abroad at the time ... in Spain. She and Joanna were very fond of Spain. Joanna still is.”

“I know,” Dallas whispered. “She told me so, and a lot of her best pictures were painted in Spain.” Once more he put his hand under her chin and lifted it so that he could look deep into her eyes.

“Dearest, I know you thought—in fact, believed —that I was interested in Joanna, but to me she was never anything but a replica of her sister. And after what I’ve told you do you think I would have been satisfied with another Maureen? That tragic affair is over, and it was my fault, because I married when I knew nothing about love . . . love as I understand it now! Oh, my darling,” gathering her into his arms, “do

you think I could bear it if you ever ceased to love me? Do you think there is anything in the whole wide world that could ever be more important to me than you are?”

“I know there is nothing—nothing!—that could ever be more important to me than you are!” she answered him.

She felt his lips devouring her, covering every inch of her face and throat, exacting a heady toll from her lips that made the room sway round her. And when she clutched at him as if it actually was swaying round her he became remorseful and begged her to forgive him because, until the last few hours, she had been his patient, and she looked adorably fragile in her golden dress.

“But I want you so much I can hardly wait for you! ” He pressed her head down into the hollow of his neck and kept it there while he stroked her hair with unsteady fingers. “Darling— sweetheart! —say that you'll marry me almost immediately, and we'll go to Switzerland for our honeymoon. I can't really afford the time for a honeymoon, but you need a change, and it's got to be an experience we'll remember all our lives! All our lives, Dallas ,” he whispered, rubbing his cheek against hers. “Doesn't that sound wonderful to you? To me it sounds like a glorious life sentence! ”

She looked up at him with adoring, radiant eyes, but he robbed her of the power to put her feelings into words. He accepted it that she was utterly and completely his, and that his passion had aroused in her an answering and rather frightening passion that shook her to her foundations.

When he took her lips more softly and devoured them more lingeringly she seemed to melt into his arms as if she was a part of him.

At last he sat back, sighed, and looked at the clock.

“You'll have to go to bed, my sweet. You should have been in bed at least an hour ago. I'm a poor physician to treat you as if you were as tough as Joanna liked to pretend she is, and as I'm afraid you'll never be. You'll have to be cosseted all your life . . . cosseted by an adoring husband! ”

And she thought of Joanna's words . . . Well, now Martin will be able to cosset the two of you!

But she didn't want him to cosset her. She wanted to be everything he needed, and more than anything

she wanted to love him for the rest of his life as she hoped he would love her.

She nestled into his arms regretfully when he again looked at the clock.

“Do you think Aunt Letty will be pleased when she hears that we're to be married?” she asked. “I always liked her enormously, and I do hope she'll be really pleased.”

“My precious,” he assured her, “she’ll be so pleased that she'll come rushing back from Grasse just to be present at the wedding. But, as a matter of fact,” he added firmly, “I intend to marry you immediately, so I doubt whether she'll do that. But she'll send us a congratulatory telegram. She wanted us to marry very badly.”

“Did she?” looking up at him in delight.

“Oh, yes, when she saw how well you handled me she decided you would make me the ideal wife.” He pinched her cheek, that was glowing so near his own. “And Matron? What do you imagine she'll say?”

Dallas looked suddenly rather startled.

“She'll get a shock, won't she?”

But he shook his sleek, dark head.

“Oh, no, my pet, she won't! I told her when I brought you back here that I had serious designs on you, and I'm sure she, too, approved.”

Dallas could hardly believe her ears.

“You told . . . Matron?”

“I told Matron! She congratulated me on my good sense. Apparently you're quite a favorite of hers.”

Dallas laid her head back on his shoulder, and sighed with utter happiness. He looked down at her, with her golden hair straying all over the front of his jacket, and suddenly his face grew dark and intense again.

“And Stephanie, too,” he whispered, before their mouths came together wildly. “I told her yesterday that one day she might have a brother or a sister— or both!—and that you would be their mother as well as hers.”

Dallas's green eyes gazed up into his as if she was bemused.

“Oh, Martin!” she whispered.

The kiss lasted until the chimes of the clock on the mantelpiece, as well as the chimes of the clock in the hall, brought them back to an awareness of their surroundings.

T H E E N D

A CASE OF HEART TROUBLE

by SUSAN BARRIE

Dallas Drew was the youngest and prettiest, and certainly the most inexperienced, nurse at Ardrath House Nursing Home, so when the glamorous and popular Doctor Martin Loring became a patient there she was not allowed to take a hand in nursing him.

Thus it came as a considerable surprise when he picked her to accompany him to his country home in Yorkshire to supervise his convalescence. What was his reason for choosing Dallas? Would she, when actually living in the same house with him, be able to withstand the attraction she had felt for him from the start? And, most important of all, what was the beautiful Mrs. Loring going to think about it?

A

HARLEQUIN