Tempted by Dr. Daisy Read Online Free PDF

you get there, surely? Doesn’t Yorkshire have lovely beaches?’
    â€˜Oh, yes. Gorgeous. And Lancashire, on the west coast. It’s just a bit of an expedition. London wasn’t any better.’
    â€˜Is that where you’ve just come from?’ she asked, trying not to be nosy but failing.
    He grinned, his teeth flashing white in the streetlights. ‘For my sins. How about you? Are you Yoxburgh born and bred?’
    â€˜No. I’ve only been here two years. I’ve got a friend working here, and she persuaded me to come.’
    â€˜Good move?’
    â€˜Oh, yes, for all sorts of reasons. Nice town, and the hospital’s great, much nicer to work in than my previous one, and—well, further from someone I needed space from.’
    Now why had she brought that up? Idiot! She could see the question forming in his eyes, but she was saved from having to explain by their arrival at the restaurant, and by the time they were seated and the waiter had given them menus and water and a basket of warm, squashy bread, they’d moved on.
    Thankfully.
    â€˜So why obstetrics?’ he asked her, reaching for the bread.
    â€˜I love it. Less keen on the gynae, except some of the surgery’s quite interesting and technically challenging, but mostly it’s the babies. Making a difference, saving such vulnerable little lives—I’m a sucker for it. The friend I toldyou about’s a midwife, and I guess she influenced me a bit. You?’
    He shrugged. ‘All sorts of reasons, really. My father’s a vet and my brother and I used to go out with him on calls sometimes when we were kids. We helped with the lambing and the calving, and sometimes there’d be a foal, and I just loved it. And of course all the cats and dogs had litters, and we always watched them giving birth, and my mother’s a midwife, so when I went into medicine it just seemed the obvious choice. My brother’s an obstetrician, too, but he’s a bit more focussed on his career than me.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘It’s been a bit difficult recently. Life sort of threw a spanner in the works.’
    â€˜That’s divorce for you,’ she said without thinking, and could have bitten her tongue off, but he just shrugged again and smiled sadly.
    â€˜Yes, it is. Are you divorced?’
    â€˜Me? No! Single and proud of it,’ she lied. Well, not about the single part, because she was, profoundly, since Mike had walked away, but she wasn’t proud of it. She was more—well, lonely, really, she admitted, but she’d rather be single than in the situation she’d been in. And for all the difference it would have made, in many ways she felt divorced. Would have been, if Mike had ever got round to asking her to marry him instead of just stringing her along for years. She scraped up a chirpy grin. ‘Mad spinster lady, that’s what I am. Didn’t you notice the cat?’
    â€˜I thought you had to have more than one to be a mad spinster?’ he said softly, his eyes searching even though there was a smile teasing his lips, and she felt her heart turn over.
    No! No no no no no!
    â€˜Oh, well, I’ve only got the one, so that’s all right, then,I’m not a spinster, just mad,’ she said lightly, and turned her attention to the menu. Fast.
    Ben watched her. She was distracted, not concentrating. The menu was the right way up, but it could have been in Russian or Japanese for all the difference it would have made, he was sure. She was flustered—by him?
    Interesting—except that she was a colleague, and his neighbour, and he’d just got out of one horribly messy relationship and he was in no hurry to get into another.
    Even if she was the most attractive, interesting and stimulating person he’d been near in what felt like decades.
    He shut his menu with a snap, and her body gave a tiny little jerk, as if the sound had startled her.