Bachelor Cure Read Online Free PDF Page B

then so does Strop.’ He paused, and his smile faded. ‘But what about you? I gather you’re practically a valley girl yourself. I’m not local myself, but Mike says you’re Henry Westcott’s granddaughter. And he also says you’re a doctor…’
    His eyes asked all sorts of questions, but he didn’t voice them. Not yet.
    Finally, his tour at an end, Bill showed her into a gleaming little kitchen, introduced her to Mrs Thompson, the hospital cook, and left her to be fed. A meal was no trouble, Tess was assured. No trouble at all.
    She certainly needed it. Tess ate Mrs Thompson’s meat pie with potato chips and lashings of salad. She washed everything down with two huge tumblers of milk and she hardly felt the meal touch sides. Thinking back, she couldn’t remember when she’d last had a meal. Maybe she’d fiddled with something on the plane, but how long ago was that? Too long, her stomach said.
    Replete for the moment, Tess tentatively broached the idea of she and Mike taking food out to the farm with them. With the size of this hospital, a sole doctor must be run off his legs, and she was starting to feel really guilty about dragging him away.
    She needn’t have worried about the reaction of the cook. Mrs Thompson practically beamed.
    â€˜That’s a really good idea,’ the middle-aged ladytold her, hauling a picnic basket out of a top cupboard. ‘Doc Llewellyn hardly stops to eat, and he’ll miss dinner entirely if you don’t bully him into it. Either that or he’ll eat six pieces of toast and three eggs at midnight, which is his usual way. No, dear. I’ll pack you a meal fit to feed six of you, including dog food for that misbegotten hound of his, if you promise to see he eats it.’
    â€˜He works too hard?’ Tess asked cautiously, and the woman nodded with vigour.
    â€˜Driven—that’s what our Dr Mike is,’ she said. ‘There’s demons driving him, that one. He’ll end up in an early grave, mark my words.’ Then her look softened. ‘But you’ve more to be worrying over than our Dr Mike. Oh, child, I’m so sorry about your grandfather. I just hope…’ She sniffed vigorously. ‘I just hope the end was quick!’
    â€˜Thank you,’ Tess said weakly. She didn’t know what else to say.
    While her picnic was being prepared, she retreated to her bedroom. She needed the privacy. The hospital was abuzz with who she was, and every nurse and patient in the place was burning with the need to know more. Like…did she have any ideas where her grandpa was?
    And there was so little she could tell them.
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    Mike collected her an hour later.
    He walked into her room and stopped in stunned amazement at the transformation. He’d seen Tessa bloody and exhausted and in pain. He hadn’t see her like this.
    Tess was certainly a beauty in anyone’s book. He’d thought so last night and he’d thought it when he’d seen her asleep in her hospital gown. In fact, he thought it every time he looked at her.
    She wasn’t a classical beauty, but she was a beauty none the less. She was slim and neat and her legs stretched on for ever. In her figure-hugging jeans, she seemed all legs.
    Or all eyes, depending on which end you looked at, he thought. Tessa’s face had the pale, creamy complexion of a redhead and she’d come straight from the end of a United States winter. There was a faint spread of faded freckles over her nose—echoes of last summer. Tessa’s mouth was rosebud-shaped, her nose pertly snub and her face almost all eyes, the greenness framed by her red-gold hair.
    She was thin. Well, maybe not too thin, he thought to himself. She was just…just well packaged. She was thin where it counted and not thin where it counted more! In her figure-hugging jeans and close-cut T-shirt, her figure was revealed to perfection. She had an old