Spring Proposal in Swallowbrook (6 page)

Maybe he was beginning to feel like this about her because with Ruby he had a choice—she asked nothing of him. With Patrice and her children there had been
no choice
and he had let it cloud his judgement in those first days of Ruby’s arrival in the village.

He went up to bed at last with no answers for his thoughts and wondered what tomorrow would have in store for the two of them.

The main topic of conversation at the surgery the next morning was that Gordon, the elderly practice manager, had decided to retire, and the news was generating pleasure because they were all invited to a meal at the end of the month on his last day, and side by side with the pleasure was curiosity as to who would be taking his place.

For Ruby, who had just expressed to the other doctors her confidence regarding going it alone on the home visits and got their approval, the retirement of the practice manager wasn’t of that much interest because she hardly knew him, and did she want to socialise in Hugo’s company once more and start the heart-searching all over again?

The days were flying by and their relationship in the surgery was good, but almost non-existent away from it.

She had discussed how she was attracted to him at length with her mother and Jess Hollister’s heart had twisted to hear that her beloved daughter might have met the man of her dreams and was having to do all she could to put him out of her thoughts, which wasn’t going to be easy, working in the same environment.

‘Shouldn’t you explain the circumstances to him?’ she’d suggested gently. ‘There might be a way round it.’

‘Mum, we both know that there isn’t, don’t we?’ she’d said, ‘and in any case the attraction is all on my part. Hugo seems intent on keeping things strictly business, so there really is no need to worry about my feelings for him.’

CHAPTER FIVE

A
S
THE
night of the practice manager’s farewell approached spring was settling upon Swallowbrook in all its fresh delight, with new lambs in the fields of the surrounding farms, green shoots on the branches of the trees, and the fells had lost the gaunt look of winter.

The cafés and shops were filling up with early visitors, the village was alive again, and the magic of it was helping Ruby to count her blessings and be sensible by keeping out of Hugo’s way other than at the practice, which wasn’t too difficult as he was thinking along similar lines.

Yet it wasn’t blotting out his curiosity about her, or slowing down the racing of his pulse when she was near. He knew he could take his pick of several attractive women locally who were free agents if he wanted to, and that to keep Ruby on the fringe of his life was the right thing to do, but neither solution appealed to him because those moments beside the lake when he’d kissed her kept coming back. How her eyes had been wide with wonderment as she’d looked up at him from the circle of his arms, and how he’d managed to control the desire she’d awakened in him and had merely brushed his lips against hers.

The leaving event was to take place at the hotel where Hugo had taken Ruby to eat that night straight from the surgery. It would be the second retirement from the Swallowbrook practice in recent months with John Gallagher having stepped down not long before, and Gordon was planning a big affair.

Although an elderly bachelor, he had many friends and a scattered family who would all be coming for the occasion, as well as all the surgery staff and the local chemist.

The invitations asked that guests and their partners should wear evening dress, reminding Ruby that whilst she had the dress, she’d no one to escort her. The obvious solution was not to go, to send her apologies with some sort of believable excuse, as she wouldn’t know anyone if she did go, apart from the folks at the surgery, and they would be with husbands and wives or partners.

She knew that Libby and Nathan were having to take Toby with them for lack of a reliable childminder and suggested that she would look after him if they wished as she was too new to the village as it was now to fit in well with those present at the retirement party, and Hugo, according to surgery gossip, was bringing one of the medical reps who’d been invited.

They were reluctant to accept her offer at first, but she insisted that it would be a pleasure, which was true compared to being the odd one out at the gathering, so it was arranged that she would go to the cottage across from the surgery at seven o’clock on the evening of the event and take care of Toby.

She would enjoy looking after him, she was thinking as she drove down to the cottage on the night of the party, and it would take her mind off Hugo and the medical rep, who was glamorous and glossy and would be a perfect foil for his dark attractiveness.

She was unaware that taking the rep to the party was something that Hugo had been loath to do, but Bryony Matthews had told Libby that she would love to come if she could sit next to him, so he’d reluctantly agreed to do the honours.

Reluctant because he’d been intending asking Ruby if she would be his partner. He had wanted to allow himself the treat of spending the evening with her. Just being with her at the surgery was beginning to feel like not enough. He kept telling himself it was crazy with them living so close, yet seeing so little of each other out of surgery hours.

He was coming to terms with her presence in his life, aware that she was different from other women he’d met, with none of the vanities and ploys that some of her sex had attempted to use to get him into bed…without succeeding. Any moves in that direction would come from him, when if ever he felt that the time was right.

Ruby made him smile, and at the same time made him curious about what was underneath the mixture of competence that she displayed in the surgery and her lack of confidence otherwise. Yet she’d obviously found herself a partner for the night of Gordon’s party, as there had been no softening on her part in their unspoken determination to cool it between them and he hadn’t felt the need to ask who.

Sufficient that he had been lumbered with Bryony Matthews, who he was far from keen on as she always brought personal matters into the conversation when she called at the surgery to push a new drug that her company was merchandising.

No doubt it would be the same tonight, he thought grimly as he dressed for the evening ahead, but Libby had asked him to partner Bryony as a favour because she belonged to one of the top pharmaceutical firms in the country and always gave Swallowbrook priority regarding what was going on in the world of medication.

Yet there could be one consolation during the evening ahead. If he could get her alone he was going to explain to Ruby what his intention had been before he had been shanghaied into entertaining Bryony.

It was against his nature to allow himself to be put in a situation like the one with the pharmaceutical rep when he was wanting to get to know Ruby better. Apart from the fact that she was the junior doctor at the practice and had once lived in the village, he knew very little about her. She kept information about her family to a minimum as well as everything else she’d been involved in before appearing in his life, yet why shouldn’t she keep her affairs to herself if she wanted to? Ruby was doing a good job as one of the doctors of the Swallowbrook Medical Practice, so why couldn’t he accept that was all that mattered?

Patrice rang from Canada just as he was about to leave the house and by the time she’d finished chatting he was on the last minute for the party.

The apartment was in darkness so obviously Ruby had already left and there would be no time to speak to her before the meal, which was before the presentation that the practice was making to Gordon, so it would be halfway through the evening before he got the chance to be near her.

When he entered the dining room of the hotel the first thing he saw was a pouting Bryony patting the seat of the empty chair beside her. As he hurried across to join her his eyes were raking the room to find Ruby and it soon registered that she wasn’t there, and neither was the opportunity to find out why as the hotel staff were already coming round with the food.

The meal was over, the presentation had been made, and the guests were mingling by the time he got the chance to ask Libby where Ruby was. He had a ghastly sinking feeling that she was ill, alone in the apartment or something similarly unpleasant, and was dumbstruck when she said, ‘Ruby had no one to come with, Hugo, and so offered to babysit for us to save us having to bring Toby to something that is far past his bedtime.’

‘Oh, I see!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t she tell me she had no one to partner her?’

‘She would have known you were going to be with Bryony, wouldn’t she? So obviously she wouldn’t push herself forward,’ she said mildly, surprised by his reaction.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he agreed begrudgingly.

‘If you want to speak to her we’ll be going in about an hour and then she’ll be free,’ she informed him, ‘but don’t expect her to come here, Hugo, she isn’t dressed for it.’

‘No, of course not,’ he replied, and thought there was nothing to stop him from going there…now!

After noting that Bryony had a circle of male guests gathered around her he said to Libby, ‘I’m going to pop round to your place if that’s all right with you.’

When she nodded, still bemused, he went striding off, the most attractive man in the room, resplendent in black dinner jacket and trousers, dazzling white shirt and bow-tie, not caring a damn how he looked or that Bryony’s gaze was following him.

He couldn’t bear the thought that Ruby had been tucked away like some sort of outcast at Libby and Nathan’s cottage while he’d been…what? Not enjoying himself, that was for sure, because the moment he’d realised she wasn’t at the party it had died a death, and now he was going to go and find out why she hadn’t told him what she was planning to do.

Having been bathed, fed and read to, Toby had fallen asleep on the sofa and Libby had just picked him up gently and was about to carry him up to bed when the bell rang.

With Toby cradled against her, she went to the door and, managing to lift the latch with some degree of difficulty, found Hugo in the porch, and the sight of him took her breath away.

‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

‘Er…yes.’ she said, unable to conceal her amazement. ‘But keep your voice down. If Toby awakens at the sound of it he could take forever to go back to sleep.’ Her voice had trailed away as he’d stepped inside in all his magnificence, and finding it again she said, ‘I was just taking him up to bed.’

‘So it would seem. Give him to me,’ he told her, with his annoyance abating and tenderness taking its place at the sight of her with the sleeping child in her arms. As she obeyed and followed him up the stairs she couldn’t believe that her Cinderella position had been reversed. Prince ‘not so’ Charming, if his expression was anything to go by, had arrived.

As Hugo watched her gently tucking Toby beneath the covers he said, ‘He’s a great little guy. I wouldn’t mind a house full of children like him one day.’

When she straightened up there was yearning in her expression, or maybe something deeper, he thought. Did it border on sadness? Yet she was smiling as they went down the stairs together and at the bottom she turned to him and asked, ‘So how can I help you, Hugo?’ and the spell of the moments of togetherness they’d just shared was broken.

‘I’m here because you’ve missed Gordon’s party, for one thing,’ he said flatly, ‘and for another because you didn’t tell me you intended giving it a miss because you had no one to go with. Why didn’t you let me know what you had in mind?’

‘You’re asking why!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why do you think? We haven’t exactly been communicating of late out of working hours, have we? And you were hooked up for the evening with the pharmaceuticals rep. I didn’t think you would want a threesome.’

‘Quite right, I wouldn’t have, but it would have been Bryony who was the surplus one. I was furious when Libby told me you were here looking after Toby while the rest of us were being wined and dined.’

He wasn’t going to explain that he’d looked for her in vain amongst the guests and been dismayed to discover that she wasn’t there, though in truth he had only himself to blame for not checking out her arrangements for the evening beforehand.

‘You’re making a fuss about nothing, Hugo,’ she said calmly, and as he observed her dressed in jeans and a cotton top that contrasted sharply with his own elegance the comment brought his disappointment to a head.

Before she could resist she was in his arms and this time the gentleness of that other occasion was replaced by a need that was raw and demanding as he said softly, ‘Fussing, am I? We’ll see.’

It was no gentle brushing of his lips against hers this time. He kissed her until she was gasping for breath, weak and pliant in his arms, and it had to stop! As she wrenched herself away from him she said weakly, ‘That has just made everything more confusing for both of us.’

What had just happened had left her feeling so vulnerable she could have wept because that was what she couldn’t afford to be. She had to make him see that they couldn’t be anything more than colleagues and friends.

She didn’t want it to be like that, it would be so easy to let the attraction they were developing for each other take its course and fall in love with this wonderful man. But to end it now would be the least painful solution in the long run and in keeping with that line of thought she said, ‘Please don’t do that again. It was totally uncalled for.’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he replied levelly.

Before he had the chance to make any further ambiguous comments she said, ‘I think you should go, Hugo. It will seem odd if Libby and Nathan find you here when they come back from the party.’

‘Yes, maybe I should,’ was his answer to that, ‘but I hope you realise that I wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t been so cagey about your arrangements. Libby asking me to partner Bryony was a diplomatic move on behalf of the practice that I could hardly have refused to fall in with, or I would have been taking you.’

‘You seem to be missing the point,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t mind coming here to look after Toby. I insisted, in fact, so that Libby and Nathan could stay as long as they liked without having to take him with them to something that could be over quite late.’

She wasn’t going to explain that she’d decided if she couldn’t be with him at the gathering, the next best thing would be to do a favour for the other two doctors by babysitting for them. Better Hugo should think that his place in her world was only on the edges of it.

He was about to do as she’d requested and go back to the party, having made a fiasco of coming to seek her out. But he’d been driven to do it by the disappointment of finding her not there and had come to discover what her motives had been in offering to stay with Toby when there must have been other members of the village community that Libby and Nathan would have trusted with the task.

But the moment he’d seen her with Toby in her arms and observed how gentle she was with him his thoughts had moved into other channels and he had found himself picturing her with children of her own, patient and caring beneath the mantle of motherhood, the kind of woman he would choose for a wife one day.