Like living in some amazing mansion that had an indoor swimming pool and a private beach.
Like having enough money to make her overseas experience one long holiday instead of small snatches of time sandwiched between jobs.
Bella was still holding Lady Dorothy’s hand. Stroking it very, very gently. Feeling the shape of her joints and knowing how much pain and frustration they were causing her.
And then she looked up and caught Lady Dorothy’s gaze and suddenly everything fell into place with a very obvious clunk.
This wasn’t about any financial incentives.
It wasn’t about Oliver Dawson.
It was about a woman who just happened to be his mother and the look in this elderly woman’s eyes. The plea in them. It could be her beloved nana looking at her right now.
She’d been too late to do much for Nana. To help her get to a space where she could still have a good quality of life for however many years she had left. But she could do it… for Lady Dorothy.
Shewantedto do it. More than she wanted anything else that was on the immediate agenda, like working with babies or heading for Europe. Six months would be long enough to make a real difference, wouldn’t it?
It seemed long enough to be able to accomplish anything.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said softly. ‘I’d really like to be your nurse, Lady Dorothy.’
5
It had been one of those days.
Oliver Dawson wanted nothing more than to retreat to his favourite place in the world – the old, slightly ramshackle summer house that had been tucked into the cliffside at the bottom of the garden, just beside the steep, overgrown steps that led down to the beach.
The semicircle skeleton of iron and wood had long since been taken over by roses and jasmine and honeysuckle, and at almost any time of the year there was a glorious perfume. The built-in seating was wide enough to be used as a bed and if the cushions were well past their use-by date, it didn’t matter a bit. Not when the view was so compelling. Mile after mile of sea. A view that pulled you into its enormity and made everything else irrelevant.
A place of complete relaxation. No pressure. No disappointments. No expectations at all, just a blessed nothingness. Exactly what he needed after a day like today.
Not that he was complaining, of course. Having a crisis appear from nowhere and demand so much skill and concentration that he was left feeling drained was precisely the kind of thing that had drawn him to neurosurgery in the first place.
It had been fifteen-year-old Tyler this afternoon. The innocent victim of a gang-related drive-by shooting, he’d had surgery for his head injury two days ago. Routine surgery. All it had needed had been a bit of debridement and a careful check to make sure there was no major damage. And there hadn’t been. Tyler had been incredibly lucky.
When he’d had a seizure completely out of the blue that afternoon, Oliver had been paged instantly. He’d arrived to find the boy’s level of consciousness had deteriorated, and there were other ominous signs, like the one-sided drift when he was asked to hold his hands palms upwards and close his eyes. The diagnosis had been obvious. A post-op bleed happening just behind the surgery site had been an emergency that couldn’t wait a minute longer than absolutely necessary. A theatre had needed to be found and staffed. They’d had to lift the bone flap, excavate the clot, find the source of the bleeding and make sure it stopped.
It had been a battle with a time limit, and the tension had made the case all the more exhausting to end a day with.
All the more satisfying that it had appeared to have been successful, but Oliver wouldn’t be completely satisfied until he was sure that Tyler hadn’t been left with any lingering neurology, and it was still too soon to tell. That meant that some of the tension was still with him. The buzz of the race against time was still there too. He might be absolutely drained but Oliver was still far too wired to relax. He needed the summer house. Maybe a good workout in the gym first, to get rid of the kink in his neck and the ache in his back and to burn off the last of the adrenaline he could still feel coursing through his body. He knew exactly what he needed to do in order to centre himself again because it was a well-practised and cherished routine.
Having parked his luxurious but entirely practical BMW sedan in the garage complex, Oliver opened the front door of his house, threw the keys into the antique beaten silver bowl on the hall stand and then stopped dead in his tracks.
He could hear music.
Countrymusic.
He actually closed his eyes for a long, long moment. In the comfort to be found in anticipating his wind-down routine, he had completely forgotten how much things had changed in his home.
His mother was still in the early stages of rehabilitation and coming to terms with any new limitations she would be left with. He couldn’t just greet her in passing, knowing that she understood that he would be back to spend time with her when he’d dealt with any aftermath of his demanding job.
And that was only the thin edge of the wedge of change. Bella was living there. She had been there for a week now. And she was the only person who could possibly be responsible for the sound of Johnny Cash wafting from the conservatory. Part of Oliver wanted nothing more than to block his ears and ignore the sound, but he knew it was impossible. Just as impossible as ignoring the fact that Bella Graham was living in his house.
If he’d had the slightest inkling of how pervasive her presence would be, he would have somehow talked his mother into hiring another nurse. He only had himself to blame, didn’t he? He’d been entranced by the instinctive people skills Bella seemed to possess and then he’d been overwhelmed by a sense of relief that a way forward, albeit temporary, had been found. One that was making his mother happier than he had seen her for a long, long time, which was extraordinary, given what she was having to deal with now.
He’d thought it wouldn’t impinge on his own life at all. His own wing was virtually self-contained and he could eat out instead of using the main kitchen facilities. Surely Bella wouldn’t be on duty twenty-four-seven, so he probably wouldn’t encounter her very often when he popped in every day to check on his mother.
How naïve had he been?
