A Nurse in Crisis by Lilian Darcy

Author:Lilian Darcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

‘MRS DEUTSCHKRON, I was a little worried to see your name on my appointment list again so soon,’ Marshall said to his elderly patient on Friday morning.

It was less than twenty-four hours since her last visit, and Deirdre had had to squeeze her in between two longstanding appointments. She didn’t have her daughter with her, and she’d come by taxi.

He was already feeling less than brilliant this morning. He’d asked Aimee about her visit to Sarah last night, and had received only a brief, sanitised reply, as if she regretted the way she’d let him into her personal life yesterday.

Sarah was much more comfortable, Aimee had said. Her uterine contractions had settled. There was no cervical dilatation. Marcus was cautiously optimistic, and Jason and Sarah were both in good spirits.

‘So I might actually be able to earn my keep in this practice today, you’ll be pleased to hear!’ she’d finished, as if he’d only asked because he was keeping tabs on her performance.

Her wilful misreading of his motives saddened him, and would have made Rebecca furious, he knew, if she’d overheard. Thankfully, she hadn’t.

And now Mrs Deutschkron…

‘There’s no need to worry,’ she said firmly, with an emphatic German flair to her accent. ‘I am here to countermand the rubbish I gave you yesterday. I will have the treatment, please! Can it commence soon? Please, tell me how it is to be managed!’

‘You’ve changed your mind,’ he clarified. One of the most crashingly superfluous statements he’d made in a while.

‘I have,’ she confirmed. ‘And I am very sorry to have wasted your time.’

There was an unmistakable zest to her which had been entirely absent yesterday, and he leapt to the conclusion which should have been obvious—would have been, if he’d been thinking clearly at the moment—from the second she walked in.

‘You’ve had some good news.’

‘I have had some marvellous news,’ she assured him. ‘My daughter is getting married. About time! She is thirty-eight! And I am going to be at that wedding—and it is going to be a proper wedding, I have told them, which will take weeks and weeks to organise. No using my health as an excuse to rush off to the register office in a knee-length dress, thank you!’

She wasn’t smiling as she said all this. It was clearly far too momentous and important for the frivolous indulgence of a grin. But her whole manner was electrifying in its determination and happiness.

The entire complexion of Marsh’s morning changed, and he urged her to tell him the whole story as there was clearly a story to tell.

Mrs Deutschkron got comfortable in her chair. ‘Well,’ she began, then immediately interrupted herself, ‘Why it is that a parent cannot be told these things, I don’t know! But it appears that Marianne has been going out—what do they do these days? They don’t go out! They stay in! with this gentleman for a year. She has not mentioned it to me, she says, because she “did not know where it was heading”.

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