Falling for the Brooding Doc by Annie Claydon

Author:Annie Claydon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-04-12T18:02:50+00:00

* * *

Laurie had been sitting here for over an hour, waiting for a moment that never seemed to come, when she could get in touch with her feelings and make some sense of them. All she could feel right now, on the anniversary of the death of her older brother, was overwhelming pain and terrible guilt.

Maybe she’d been waiting for Ross, to come out here and make sense of it all for her. That was rather too much to ask of anyone.

He was back before she could make any sense of wanting him here either, putting the waders onto the ground next to the bench and sitting down.

‘Who’s the boat for, Laurie?’

Good. Questions that were easy to answer.

‘My older brother, Tom. He died when I was fifteen.’

‘He must have been young.’ Ross shook his head, understanding the terrible waste of a life that should have been just beginning.

‘He was twenty-one.’ Laurie puffed out a sigh and suddenly it became a little easier to talk. ‘My father pushed all of us to strive for sporting careers. Tom was going to be the tennis player, but my younger brother Ben was always more talented. My father pushed and pushed and...he pushed Tom too hard.’

‘What was he best at? The thing you’d most like to remember him for?’

No one asked that. Tom had been caught in a cycle of the wrong expectations and failure, and that was what defined his death as well as his life.

‘He was kind, and very funny. He used to make me finger puppets when I was little and we’d make our own plays with them. Tom always came out with the best lines.’ All the warmth came flooding back at the memory. Along with pain. But it was better than the emptiness that she’d been sitting here with.

‘He sounds great.’

‘He was really creative and he used to tell the best stories. For my tenth birthday, he made me a book about a dragon who made everyone around him do as he said...we both knew that was really my father. One day he had so much steam coming out of his ears that he exploded. It was...’ Laurie choked suddenly, tears spilling down her face.

‘Breathe.’ Ross murmured the word, putting his arm lightly around her shoulders. ‘Breathing helps.’

A great gasp of air did help. Somehow the tears were helping as well.

‘My father wouldn’t see that he wasn’t cut out for sport, it wasn’t what he wanted to do and he wasn’t that good at it either. He just pushed and pushed, telling Tom he was a failure and that our younger brother was better than he was. Tom got hold of steroids from somewhere, in an attempt to make himself acceptable in my father’s eyes, and...’

‘The usual side effects?’

Laurie nodded. ‘Yes, lack of impulse control and aggression. Combined with all the frustration and rejection he was already feeling. He was cycling home and...the lights were against him and he should have given way, but he didn’t. He just rode at a lorry, expecting it to stop, and there was no way it could.

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