Doing No Harm by Carla Kelly

Author:Carla Kelly [Carla Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Cedar Fort, Inc.
Published: 2015-11-10T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

That’s as close to a lee shore that I ever want to float,” Douglas told Olive as they left the Hare and Hound. “I swear I’m getting too old for this much drama.”

“You’ll be happy enough to push on in a few months and find a peaceful place that needs a surgeon, and that’s all?” Olive asked.

“Well, yes. I’ve had such a life. I have earned a peaceful practice,” he told her.

“You’ve only been here two weeks,” she said, which made him stare at her.

“It feels like three years since I snatched Tommy Tavish out of his mother’s arms,” he said. “Only two weeks? Olive, I’m just tired.”

She didn’t know Douglas Bowden well, but she doubted he meant to use such a petulant voice. “And you think I am not?” she wanted to say. Then to her embarrassment, she realized she had said precisely that. She opened her mouth again to apologize but then closed it. Edgar was her village. Its problems were her problems and she knew them well. She was wrong to think anyone else would care as much as she did, even a surgeon.

They stared at each other. She looked at every wrinkle around his tired eyes, and the tightness of his lips, and the way he carried his shoulders so high. This was a man so tightly wound that she had no words for that much exhaustion.

They stood in the street and she watched his eyes as he looked around, almost as though anticipating where the next crisis would begin, trying to identify it and buy himself a few more seconds to cushion himself against whatever the crisis might be. Was this what it meant to go to war? She could probably apologize from now to the twentieth century for living in a shabby village in Scotland that needed him so badly. Douglas Bowden had already given every last ounce of his strength to a country at war for a generation; he was done with misery. What right did she have to complicate his life when all he wanted was peace and quiet?

“I am so sorry,” she began, “so sorry. I … We needed you and we took from you without even asking. We won’t ask any more.”

She did something then so forward, right there on the street. She kissed his cheek, patted his shoulder, and gave him a little push toward his rented house.

“Go to bed, Mr. Bowden. If I could sing you a lullaby, I would.”

He smiled at that, so Olive knew she hadn’t completely fractured whatever sort of friendship this was.

“You left out the part about warm milk and biscuits,” he said, the ragged edge to his voice receding now. “Did you ever have those?”

“Once or twice. My mother was the kind sort.” She put her hands on her hips when he continued to stand there. “I mean it. Go to bed. Flora is going home to plan world domination, for all we know. Tommy is busy in Mrs. Aintree’s cattle bier.

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