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“I’ve also seen you in between, milking your cows and generally just getting on with life. In between will be most of the time, and that’s good too.”
“What about the…uh…topping thing?”
“What? That I’m really good at it?”
I tried to roll my eyes, but to be honest, my eyelids felt too weighed down with boulders. So I kept them closed as his lips landed on my temple again.
“I’ll remind you again just how good I am when you get home. We might have to leave it a few days, though.”
“What if I don’t get home?”
Another fuzzy kiss landed at the corner of my mouth. “Then I’ll adopt Zeus and top someone else.”
CHAPTER 12
“I’m still alive,” I whimpered, a tad dramatically.
A familiar reassuring hand squeezed mine. “Of course you’re still alive, you daft arse. You’ve had keyhole hernia surgery, not a bloody heart-and-lung transplant. It took less than an hour!”
Huh. I wasn’t entirely sure Evan’s bedside manner was to my liking. I was back in the ward with the curtains once more closed around us. He patted my arm. “You were very brave, sweetheart.”
Now I was being patronised. “It hurts.”
“Someone has made holes in you with a knife. It’s supposed to hurt. But you told the nurse your pain was three out of ten, so it sounds like it’s under control.”
My throat had been sandpapered, and my belly inflated with a high-pressure jet wash, but God, having Evan help me sit up and then supervise a few sips of water was the most marvellous of experiences. Coupled with being alive, of course. Everyone had said it was minor surgery, but they weren’t the ones having it, were they?
“How…how does it look?” I croaked.
He ruffled my hair, which I decided wasn’t patronising but actually quite nice. I bravely lifted my head from the pillow to confront my mutilated belly, but it was all tucked away underneath a layer of blankets. Maybe Evan had done that to spare me the trauma. “Go on, tell me how it looks.”
“Exactly the same as before, but now you have three small white dressing squares covering three wounds. The longest is about an inch; the other two are tiny. If you stop behaving like a dying duck, we’ll have you home in an hour.”
He’d said the magic word. Home. There was no place like it. X212 had been a little down on the milk yield yesterday, and M967 had a touch of colic. Zeus would be pining, and Watermelons never slept very well if we missed our goodnight chat. And I’d bet good money the hens hadn’t laid.
My minder drove me home in the replacement BMW, an immaculate and shiny replica, minus the dents and the hawthorn hedge. Bucket seats were not designed for victims of hernia surgery. In fact, I concluded, as we swept smoothly out of the hospital car park, BMWs were hugely overrated; you could stick a German car badge on a dead hedgehog, and someone would buy it. But it was pristine on the inside, and Evan seemed ever so pleased, so I stayed quiet, concentrating on not whining about every bump as we meandered down the lanes leading into Rossingley.
Once home, he settled me on the sofa. Though as soon as he exited the living room, I promptly stood and attempted to discreetly shuffle away. A challenge while waddling like John Wayne, and a traitorous Zeus signalled my every move with a thump of his raggedy tail.
“Er…and where do you think you’re off to?” Evan halted me in my path, on his return from hauling two shopping bags of food from the car, one in each hand. I’d have bet the farm neither of them contained a string of sausages or a pork pie.
“Um…nowhere? Just…um...you know, stretching my legs?”
He placed the bags down on the kitchen counter, all cheerful-like. “Bill warned me you’d do this.”
“Do what?” Fuck, they were ganging up on me already. “And when did you see Bill?”
Having rid himself of the shopping, he stood before me, with a hand on each shoulder. I’d like to have interpreted this as affectionate but had a sense it was more…obstructive. “I bumped into him as he was leaving just now. We had a very useful conversation. He seems nice, by the way.”
Huh. I’d thought so too until he’d had a useful conversation with Evan. He probably wondered where the guy with the smart BMW had suddenly materialised from, but at least Bill didn’t frequent the Rossingley Arms. Whatever he made of it, no gossip would come from that quarter. “And what did chatty Bill have to say?”
“That you would wait until my back was turned and then try to nip out and visit the cows?” He threw me the sort of look teachers used at school before you walked into their trap. “But I can’t believe you’d do that for a moment, would you, Rob? Not after listening to all the sensible advice Heather gave before you came home, about taking it easy and avoiding heavy lifting.”
“She was very thorough.” So thorough I could almost believe someone had set her up to deliver an extra especially stern lecture to this particular patient.
“And,” Evan was obviously going to get his tuppence worth since he'd caught me, “Bill said to tell you that M967 is much better and that he’s put Watermelons in his pen for the night because rain with a thirty percent chance of thunder is expected at four, and apparently, Watermelons doesn’t like thunder.”
Evan raised his eyebrows, forcing me to style it out with a serious stare. He could think what he liked; Watermelons hated electrical storms, edgy and off his food for days afterwards. If I could just distract the immovable handsome surgeon blocking my path, then I’d pop and see him, check on M967 and the rest of the girls in general. But the eyebrows didn’t descend, and the hands stayed at my shoulders.
