The Doctor by Annie Payne

Author:Annie Payne [Payne, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-04-14T12:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

She woke to the smell of coffee wafting up from the kitchen. Hurriedly grabbing a dressing-gown and tying it around her, she ran a brush through her hair. As she came down the stairs to the kitchen, the smell of bacon was added to the coffee, which was strange, because she knew she didn’t have any bacon in the house.

She went into the kitchen to find Mike standing over a frying pan. He looked up.

‘Tea or coffee?’ he asked.

‘Tea, please.’

He nodded and poured boiling water from the kettle into a teapot.

‘I thought you might be a morning tea person,’ he explained.

‘It takes a while before I can face coffee. I take it you are a coffee in the morning person.’

‘I need it,’ he admitted. ‘Mostly to counter the alcohol from the night before, although not today.’ He placed a mug of tea on the table, where he had laid a place for her. ‘And now you’re going to tell me you don’t normally eat breakfast, aren’t you?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘But this morning, you are going to need it. You’ve got the vet and the police to call before you go into work.’

She knew he was right and was surprised at how hungry she felt as he placed a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her.

‘I could only find brown bread,’ he said sadly as he put a plate of toast on the table. His expression made her laugh.

‘Next time you stay the night, I’ll be sure to get some white bread in for you,’ she said and blushed as she realised what she had said, made worse by the twinkle in his eye that said he hadn’t missed it. She quickly turned her attention to her breakfast instead.

Once she had eaten her breakfast, she picked up her phone and rang the vet’s first. She was pleased to hear that they were confident that Paws was going to recover but that they would keep him in for another twenty-four hours just to be sure everything had settled before he came home.

‘They must have left some poisoned salmon out for him, although I don’t know how they could be sure to get him and not any other wildlife,’ she said to Mike.

‘I think they must have put it through the cat flap,’ he told her. ‘I found a bit more that your cat hadn’t eaten on the mat just below it. I’ve bagged it for the police.’ She looked at the cat flap and shuddered. It was a good thing she had fed her cat before going out. If he had been hungry he would have wolfed down all of it and probably be dead.

Her second call was to the hospital to explain that she was going to be late in. It was already later than she normally arrived and apart from anything else, she needed to stop at the vet’s on the way into work and let Paws know that he was loved – and reassure herself that he was going to be all right.

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