And Holly’s career hadn’t quite redeemed her in her parents’ eyes. After all, she was in east London, practically the slums as far as they were concerned, when she could have lived somewhere so much more upmarket.
‘Holly, how could you be so stupid?’
The words echoed again and again in her head, in her mother’s cut-glass tones.
Stupid. She’d been that all right. Stupid enough to think that David would stand by her. OK, so it would have changed their plans a bit, having a baby. A lot, even. She’d have had to take a gap year for starters. But there were nurseries, day-care centres, crèches. They could have coped. Studied together and watched their baby grow up into a toddler and start primary school. Qualified. Moved to a little cottage in the country where they’d have been the village GPs, with four children, a couple of dogs and a rabbit and a guinea pig and maybe a pony for the kids.
Everything they’d wanted. Just as they’d planned—except one of the children would have been a teensy bit older.
Holly took a shuddering breath, willing herself not to cry. She’d cried enough over David the day she’d phoned him to tell him the news. The news that she’d gone into Liverpool the previous day and bought a pregnancy testing kit from a chemist’s where nobody had known her or would report back to her mother. She’d done the test secretly that morning. Squirreled the test stick back to her bedroom and watched for five agonisingly slow minutes until the results had shown up. And then she’d known her missed periods and nausea had been nothing to do with exam stress.
Except he hadn’t been there.
And he hadn’t returned her call—that day, or the next, when she’d phoned him again. She’d believed in David. He wouldn’t let her down. He wouldn’t desert her when she needed him most…
But he hadn’t called her back. It had reached the point where Holly had suspected he’d actually told his mum to lie on the phone and tell Holly that he wasn’t there.
He’d been doing biology A level, so he’d have been perfectly capable of working it out for himself. Missed periods probably equalled baby. But he had also been a teenage boy. Full of testosterone and panic. It had taken her long enough to work it out, but in the end she had appreciated his logic. Warped, but understandable. He’d gone for the easy way out. If he didn’t contact her again, his girlfriend would eventually realise that he’d dumped her. No mess, nothing to face, nice and clean.
For him.
Not for her.
At least her parents hadn’t gloated. Hadn’t gone into the I-told-you-so routine. Laura Jones had simply held her daughter and gone into organisation mode. Not for nothing was Laura the chair of the local WI, the Rotary Group and the local school governors.
‘We’ll get through this. You know you can’t possibly keep the baby. Not unless you want to ruin your career before you’ve even started. So I’ll get you booked in somewhere to deal with it. Concentrate on your exams—and we’ll get your exam centre changed. You can sit them without having to worry about seeing him.’
Holly hadn’t wanted a termination. OK, so the baby hadn’t been planned, and the father didn’t want to know, but plenty of people coped in the same situation. Maybe once the baby was born, her mother would come round to her way of thinking. She’d get decent A-level grades, take a gap year, then start her course when her baby was around nine months old.
If her parents wouldn’t support her, she’d find a way. She’d become a damned good doctor, and she’d be all the family her baby would ever need. She’d do it all on her own if she had to.
Except it hadn’t turned out like that.
It had all come crashing down, two hours before her first A-level exam.
Holly scrubbed at her eyes. Stop being such a wimp, she told herself fiercely. You’ve got everything you want in London. The best possible friends and the best possible job—a job where every single minute’s different. And where there wasn’t any time to think and wonder about what might have been.
So what if her two best friends had both just got married and she’d been their bridesmaids? So what if, a year or two down the line, Zoe and Jude would have babies and ask Holly to be godmother?
It didn’t change her plans. Not at all.
And neither did David’s arrival. He was her colleague and they were going to be working the same shifts, but she didn’t need to have that much contact with him. They’d agreed to be polite to each other and work as a team, for the sake of the ward. That was enough.
Outside London City General, she’d stay well clear of him. She wasn’t going to get sucked back into that old attraction. She wasn’t going to fall for those beautiful blue eyes. Or the well-shaped mouth that knew exactly where and how she liked being kissed. Or the clever hands that she’d known would be gentle with patients but were passionate with her.
Get a grip, Holls, she told herself again. Physically, he’s your type. And, yes, the sex was good. But that was in another life, another world. It was over between you years ago. He’s probably married. Married, with children. She linked her hands across her abdomen and pulled tight to take away the emptiness, the memories of the child they’d made who hadn’t been born. And even if he isn’t, he’s not the kind you can rely on. He’s not worth it. Just forget him.
So who was the real Holly Jones?
The question had been nagging at David all day. And even an hour’s unbroken swim hadn’t driven the question out of his head.
Who was she?
She was a doctor. Caring. Kind to patients—he’d discovered that she’d lent her own fan to Lucy, their patient with the thyroid storm, before Lucy had been transferred to the ward. It was the kind of thing that the Holly he remembered would have done.
But she had a reputation here for being that little bit unapproachable. Scary. And she’d been ambitious enough to dump him just before their A levels, concentrating on her work rather than her relationship. She’d even made arrangements to sit her exams elsewhere—and when she hadn’t turned up at Southampton he’d realised the truth. She never had wanted to do the village GP thing with him. She’d just been playing with him, marking time. Holly Jones had gone off to conquer the world.
His mum had been the one to tell him.
‘Sorry, son. She rang while you were out. She doesn’t want to see you any more.’
He hadn’t believed her. His mother had never liked Holly, saying that she was stuck-up and was only slumming it with David to pass the time. He’d always been able to shrug it off, until he’d gone down to the phone box on the corner to ring Holly. And then he’d spoken to her mum.
‘Sorry, David. She doesn’t want to see you again.’
‘I’d just like to speak to her, please, Mrs Jones.’
‘I’m afraid she won’t come to the phone. She really doesn’t want to be bothered with you, David.’
He’d refused to leave it at that. As soon as he talked to Holly they’d be able to sort out the problem, whatever it was. He knew it. So he’d tried hanging about in the street in the hope that he would see her. But the one occasion when he’d seen her
