he watched her bite into hers. ‘Is that seven today or in three years’ time?’
‘No, today,’ she said with a laugh, taking down her hair and twisting it back up again into a knot. Pity. He preferred it down. It looked soft, silky, and he could almost imagine sifting the long, dark strands through his fingers—
He stirred his coffee for something safe to do with his hands and dragged his mind back in line again. ‘So how come he’s available this quickly? Usually if a tradesman’s any good, you have to wait weeks. Do you know him?’
She nodded. ‘Yes. He’s doing it as a favour to me, and he is good. He refitted my bathroom for me.’
‘Ah. Yes. Your lovely bathroom. I’m afraid I left it in a horrendous mess.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s fine, I’ll deal with it later.’
‘So did he charge a fortune, or did your landlord pay?’
‘Landlord? I don’t have a landlord,’ she said ruefully. ‘It’s my house, and he was very reasonable, as plumbers go.’
‘You’re buying it alone?’ he added, fishing, although it was none of his business and utterly irrelevant, he told himself firmly. He was not interested.
She nodded and pulled a face. ‘Although sometimes I wonder how I got myself in this situation. I must be mad. I wanted my own house because I was fed up with unscrupulous landlords but I’m not quite convinced I’m really grown up enough!’
Oh, he was sure she was. She was certainly grown up enough to satisfy his frankly adolescent fantasies, he thought. She was biting into the sticky bun again and it was giving him heart failure watching her lick her lips.
And they were colleagues and neighbours? Sheesh, he thought, and was hauling his mind back to work when she spoke again.
‘So how about you?’ she asked, her clear green eyes studying him curiously. ‘I mean, you’re a consultant, so clearly you’re old enough to have a house, but—well, without being rude, what’s a consultant doing buying a run-down little semi in a place like Yoxburgh?’
Good question—and one he had no intention of answering, but at least it had dragged his mind out of the gutter. ‘What’s wrong with Yoxburgh?’
She shrugged. ‘Nothing. I love it. It’s got the best of both worlds—good hospital, nice community, the sea, the countryside—it’s a lovely town.’
‘Exactly. So why should I be flawed for wanting to be here?’ he asked, curious himself and trying to divert attention back to her and off his personal life.
‘Oh, no reason. It’s not Yoxburgh, really. It was just—I would have expected you to have a better house. Bigger. More in keeping …’ She trailed to a halt, as if she felt she’d overstepped the mark—which she probably had, but she’d rescued him before six o’clock in the morning without batting an eyelid, lent him her shower, cleared up his mess, got him a plumber …
‘I’m divorced,’ he admitted softly, surprising himself that he was giving so much away to her, and yet oddly knowing it was safe to do so. ‘And it might be modest, but the house suits my needs perfectly—or it will, when the plumber’s been and I’ve thrown a whole lot of money at it. Besides, maybe I don’t want to live in anything flashy and ostentatious—more “in keeping”,’ he added, making little air quotes with his fingers.
She coloured slightly, her thoughts chasing each other transparently through her eyes, and he had to stifle a smile as she gathered herself up and sucked in a breath.
‘Sorry. None of my business,’ she said hastily. ‘And talking of suits, I dropped yours into the dry cleaners in the main reception on the way in, and it’ll be ready at five—and before you panic, I told them to take good care of it.’
‘Chasing brownie points, Daisy?’ he murmured, and she laughed.
‘Hardly. I didn’t know who you were then. I’m just a nice person.’
‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘Not that nice. I’ve still got my eye on dinner,’ she said with a teasing grin that diverted the blood from his brain, and he wondered how the hell he was going to keep this sudden and unwanted attraction in its box.
With huge difficulty. Damn.
He turned his attention back to his coffee, and then she said quietly, ‘Thanks for covering for me so smoothly, by the way. Evan’s a stickler for punctuality, and he was getting all ready to flay me later.’
‘It was the least I could do. I was hardly going to throw you to the wolves for bailing me out—literally! And Evan doesn’t strike me as the friendliest of characters. He was pretty dismissive when you asked about that patient.’
A flicker of what could have been worry showed in her eyes. ‘Oh, he’s OK really. He can come over as a patronising jerk, but he’s a good doctor. He’s just a bit miffed that you got the job, I think. He was advised to apply for it, and I reckon he thought it was a shoo-in.’
‘And then they had to advertise it by law, and I applied. And with all due respect to Evan, I would imagine my CV knocks spots off his.’
‘Exactly. So he won’t welcome you with open arms, but you should be able to rely on him.’
He gave a choked laugh. ‘Well, that’s good to know.’
Her mouth twitched, and those mischievous green eyes were twinkling at him again. ‘So, I hope you’ve got some good ideas about what I was supposedly doing for you?’
He leant back in his chair and met her eyes with a twinkle of his own. ‘Oh, let’s say finding me some statistics on twins on the antenatal list. That should cover it. Anyway, I thought it was pretty good for a spur-of-the-moment thing. Sorry if it sounded a bit patronising, but I thought it was better than explaining I’d already had a shower in your bathroom,’ he said softly, and then felt his legs disintegrate when a soft wash of colour touched her cheeks.
He cleared his throat.
‘Tell me about Yoxburgh Park Hospital,’ he suggested hastily, and she collected herself and gave a tiny shrug.
‘It’s old and new, it’s on the site of the old lunatic asylum—’
‘How delightfully politically incorrect,’ he said drily, and she chuckled.
‘Isn’t it? Nearly as politically incorrect as locking up fifteen-year-old girls because their fathers or brothers had got them knocked up and if they were put away here for life then the family could pretend they’d gone mad and carry on as normal.’
‘Lovely.’
‘It was. It was a workhouse, really, and the pauper lunatic label was just a way of covering up what they were doing, apparently. I mean, who’s going to go near a lunatic asylum? You might end up inside, and so they got away with murder, literally. But life was cheap then, wasn’t it?’
‘So was building, which I guess is why the old Victorian part is so magnificent.’
‘Oh,
