SUSANNE MCCARTHY - Second Chance For Love

Automatically her hand reached out for her cigarettes, but then with a muttered curse she remembered that she had smoked the last one half an hour ago. She had known that she was running short, but she hadn’t liked to ask Tom to buy some for her.

But now she was beginning to feel that uncomfortable craving. How far was it to a shop that might sell cigarettes? It was so frustrating to feel so weak—even to think of walking a hundred yards made her want to cry with exhaustion. And first she would have to get upstairs to her bedroom to fetch her purse.

If only she could give the horrible things up. She knew the unpleasant smell of tobacco smoke clung to her hair and clothes, and she had lately noticed that her teeth were starting to turn yellow from the nicotine. And she had read somewhere that smoking caused the skin to age prematurely—she’d used to have good skin. But she needed a smoke—needed it as a starving man needed food.

The stairs seemed like Mount Everest, but with grim determination she managed to climb them. She had to sit down on the edge of the bed to recover, and at that moment the sound of a car drawing up beside the house came to her ears, and from Jethro’s excited barking she guessed that it was Tom. Damn, why did he have to come back now , and catch her?

She heard him come in, and speak a few words to Jethro, and then he was coming up the stairs two at a time. She rose to her feet, ready to confront him, feeling as guilty as a naughty schoolgirl—though she knew she had every right to go out and buy herself a packet of cigarettes if she wished to.

On the threshold he paused, a look of angry impatience crossing his face. ‘What are you doing up here?’ he demanded.

‘I…I’m sorry.’ Automatically she was apologising again. ‘I didn’t mean…I just came up to——’

‘You shouldn’t be climbing the stairs when there’s no one in the house,’ he grated. ‘What if you’d fallen?’

Her temper—strained by the nicotine craving—was close to snapping. ‘All right—I’m not completely stupid, you know,’ she retorted tartly. ‘If I’d thought I might fall, I wouldn’t have tried it.’

The sharpness of her response had startled her as much as it did him, and as he frowned at her she sighed inwardly, waiting for him to bite her head off. But instead, quite unexpectedly, that incredible smile unfurled. ‘I’m sorry,’ he conceded wryly. ‘I was just worried—you should be resting.’

She couldn’t quite meet his eyes, conscious that her cheeks were tinged a delicate shade of pink. ‘I…I’ve been resting all day,’ she managed, trying hard to keep her voice steady. ‘I ought to be ready for a five-mile run.’

A little stiffly, she rose to her feet. She would go without the damned cigarettes now. Maybe he was right—if she could manage to give them up when she was at such a low ebb, she would never need them again. ‘Oh…by the way,’ she added, slanting him a covert look from beneath her lashes, ‘there was a woman here to see you a little while ago. Something about her horse. She said she might call you later.’

‘She didn’t leave a name?’

‘No. She…seemed to think you would know who it was.’

A flicker of some expression passed across his eyes, but it was gone too quickly for her to read it. ‘I see,’ was all he said.

Having asserted that she was sure she wouldn’t fall, she was alarmed by how dizzy she felt as she gazed down the steep flight of stairs. But she wasn’t going to let him see that—he might offer to carry her again. Resolutely gritting her teeth, she took hold of the banister and slowly made her way down.

It was quite a relief to get back to the settee. She sank down a little more heavily than she had intended, leaning back and closing her eyes. It was hard to believe that just that small amount of effort could be so exhausting. Beside her she heard Tom laugh drily.

‘You’re not quite as fit as you think you are, are you?’ he remarked, a sardonic glint in his eyes.

‘No, I’m not,’ she conceded. ‘I feel perfectly all right when I’m sitting down, but when I try to move around it catches up with me.’

‘You’ll be better in a day or two,’ he assured her, his voice surprisingly gentle. ‘I’m just going to put the kettle on. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘Y-yes, please.’ It made her nervous when he was being kind to her—it felt much safer when he was shouting.

Why did he have to be so utterly gorgeous? Aver-agely good-looking she could have coped with, but in her present highly susceptible state this just wasn’t fair. She watched him covertly from beneath her lashes as he made the coffee, fascinated by every economical movement.

There was something so very self-sufficient about him; he was a man who didn’t need a woman around. He had Vi to take care of his domestic comfort, and probably a whole posse of willing young ladies to minister to his other needs, without ever being offered much in the way of commitment. He got all the close companionship he needed from his dog.

But, though he wasn’t married now, had he been once? She judged him to be maybe in his middle thirties—surely even he hadn’t been able to get off scot-free all these years? There were so many things she wanted to know about him, but she guessed that he wouldn’t easily be persuaded to talk about himself.

He brought her coffee, and then folded himself into the battered old armchair beside the fireplace, his long, lean legs sprawled across the stone hearth. Jethro collapsed in a bundle at his feet, his head draped over his ankles, his eyes closed in sheer bliss.

Josey sipped her coffee, searching her mind for something to say, simply to make conversation. ‘This is a nice cottage,’ she remarked, trying to keep her tone light and casual. ‘Have you lived here long?’

‘It was my uncle’s place. We were partners for a while, but he retired about five years ago—though he still comes in to help with the small animal clinic a couple of afternoons a week.’

‘You…were born around here, then?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘My parents have got a farm, over by Withingham. Cows, mostly, and a few pigs. But my brother does most of the work now—he’s the farmer out of the two of us. My father’s nearly seventy—though he insists he isn’t quite ready to retire yet!’

His tone was quite friendly, and, emboldened, she risked probing a little further. ‘Had you always wanted to be a vet?’

‘Ever since I was a kid,’ he responded with a grin. ‘I was always over here, pestering my uncle to let me help him. I used to drive him mad, bringing in birds that had broken a wing, or a rabbit I’d let out of a farmer’s gin-trap. That didn’t make me very popular in certain quarters, either,’ he added darkly. ‘Sometimes I think that, the more I know about people, the more I prefer animals.’

‘It must be hard work,’ she mused.

He laughed drily. ‘Yes, it is—damned hard work, and there’s no money in it.’ He slanted her a look of hard mockery. ‘Not the sort of money that would run to a Porsche, anyway.’

She blinked in shock—that gibe had stung.

‘So what sort of work did you do in London?’ he persisted, a cynical edge in his voice, as if he was expecting something totally frivolous.

‘Oh, I…used to be a secretary,’ she stumbled. ‘But I haven’t worked for several years now. My…husband didn’t want me to.’

‘How long have you been married?’

‘Nearly nine years. A long time, isn’t it? You can get less than that for murder these days.’

He lifted one dark eyebrow in sardonic enquiry. ‘It seemed like a prison sentence?’

‘Worse!’ She was unable to keep the bitterness from her laugh. ‘At least with a prison sentence you get time off for good behaviourl’

‘But on the other hand, you wouldn’t get to serve your sentence in some posh Docklands penthouse, or drive around in a flash sports car,’ he pointed out with a touch of asperity.

She flashed him a look of angry indignation. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you weren’t exactly in a hurry to leave, were you?’ he taunted.

‘Well, no…but I——’

‘Nine years—was it worth it for all that comfortable lifestyle?’ he sneered. ‘The clothes, and the jewellery, and the fast cars…’

‘That’s not true!’ she protested, stung. ‘How can you judge me? You don’t even know me.’

‘I don’t need to know you—I just have to look at you.’ His eyes lashed her with icy disdain. ‘What is it they say—“You can never be too rich or too thin”? You’ve dieted so much to fit the fashionable image you’re practically a bag of bones, and you’re so screwed-up you can’t get by without those things.’ He cast a contemptuous glance at the empty cigarette packet on the table beside her. ‘I’ll tell you something—if you put on a bit of weight you might look halfway decent, but until you sort out what’s going on in your head, you’ll never——’

His words were interrupted by a sharp ring at the doorbell. He rose swiftly to his feet and crossed the room, to admit a tall, ruddy-faced young man, still in his muddy wellington boots. In his arms he was carrying a drooping bundle, wrapped in an old blanket.

‘I’m sorry to barge in like this, Tom—I know it ain’t your surgery tonight. But it’s our old Shep,’ he blurted out, agitated and upset. ‘He was perfectly all right this morning, but when the missus came in from fetching the kiddies from school he was like this—couldn’t move, couldn’t get up, wasn’t even interested in his bone. Daft old mutt, he is, and getting on a bit now, but the kids love him. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do.’

‘That’s fine, Bob,’ Tom assured him swiftly. ‘Bring him through to the clinic.’

‘Do you…think he’s going to be all right?’

Tom hesitated, casting a doubtful eye at the bundle in the young farmer’s arms. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he promised.

DRAWN by an instinctive concern for the little dog, Josey followed them. The veterinary clinic was through a thick oak door at the end of the passage. A cluttered office led into a much larger room, with a rubber-topped table in the middle of it and all manner of important-looking equipment stowed neatly around the walls.

‘Put him down, Bob,’ Tom instructed, gesturing towards the table. ‘You get off home now—I’ll have a look at him, and see what I can do.’

‘Right.’ The farmer’s voice was suspiciously thickened, and Josey noticed him surreptitiously wipe a tear from the corner of his eye. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it, then. Maybe I’ll give you a ring in a couple of hours to see what’s what.’ Reluctantly he turned away from the table, barely even noticing Josey as he stepped past her.

She moved over to the table. The dog was a medium-sized black and white mongrel, with thick shaggy fur and a tail just made to be wagged. But now he was still, and even Josey could see that he was tense with pain. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’ she asked, unconsciously echoing the farmer’s words.

Tom was bending over his patient, his sensitive fingers gently examining the small, trembling body. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted wryly. ‘I’ve a nasty feeling he’s got peritonitis—maybe from a ruptured appendix or a punctured intestine. I’m going to have to open him up and have a look.’

He didn’t sound very hopeful, and Josey felt tears rise to prick the backs of her eyes. Some children were going to be very sad if their pet didn’t make it. ‘Is there…anything I can do to help?’ she asked.