course. Still, he’d see her today.
That lock of hair that kept falling forward and curving round her cheek was plaguing him. He’d been having fantasies about it all night—which was crazy because he always had fantasies about dark hair spread across his pillow in a fan, and hers was short and red. Dark red, admittedly, but red for all that, and far too short to fan satisfactorily.
Still, he wondered how it would feel sifting through his fingers …
Like silk. It was soft, heavy hair, essentially straight, with just enough bounce to curve under and curl around the pale pearly shell of her ear …
Damn.
He scooped the post off the floor in the lobby and scanned through it, grinding to a halt at the telephone bill. It was the final bill for the old house, and it took his mind off Anna and her attributes very effectively.
He opened it with grim resignation, but even his wildest expectations were exceeded by its stunning proportions. Helle must truly have spent all day, every day, on the phone to her family and friends in Denmark.
He shook his head in despair, and ran upstairs to her room, rapping loudly on the door. ‘Helle? Get up now. I want to talk to you immediately.’
There was a shuffling noise, and the door opened to reveal his hapless young au pair, her hair on end, her eyes blurred with sleep, dragging on a dressing-gown.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, looking puzzled.
‘This is the matter,’ Adam said tightly, brandishing the thing under her nose. ‘The telephone bill. It runs into four figures, Helle, and it’s not even a complete quarter. I want you downstairs dressed in five minutes, and you’d better have a damn good explanation or you’ll be packing your bags and catching the next flight home.’
‘Good,’ she said miserably, and burst into tears. ‘I want to go home. I hate it here.’
You’re a sucker, he told himself as he opened his arms and comforted the young woman while she cried. She was little more than a child herself, and it was a lot of responsibility. He should have talked to her more, been kinder to her, instead of expecting so much.
‘Come downstairs,’ he said more gently, easing her out of his arms. ‘We’ll have a cup of tea and talk about it before the children get up.’
She nodded and sniffed, scrubbing her nose on the sleeve of her dressing-gown. ‘I’ll get dressed.’
‘Good idea.’
He ran back down, put the kettle on and glanced at his watch. It was still only six-thirty, and he wondered if Anna was up yet or if she worked nine to five to cover admissions and pre- and post-ops. If she worked shifts and was on an early she’d be on her way there now. If not, she might still be in bed, her hair tangled round her face, her lashes like crescents on her cheeks, her mouth soft with sleep—
‘You need a life, Bradbury,’ he growled, and banged two mugs down on the worktop just as Helle came into the room.
She hovered apprehensively in the doorway, and he waved her in. ‘Come in, sit down, I’m not going to bite you. I just want to know what’s going on.’
She sat but, being Helle, she couldn’t just sit. She played with the salt, she shredded a paper towel that had been left on the table, tearing it systematically into tiny strips while she waited for the axe to fall.
‘Talk to me. Tell me all about it,’ Adam said softly, sliding a mug across the battered old pine table, and she looked up, her eyes like huge pools filling yet again.
‘I’m just lonely—I want my mum. I’m homesick. I thought it would get better, but then you said we were moving and I had to say goodbye to all my friends, and I thought, how will I cope in a new place?’
A tear fell, splashing on her hand, and she scrubbed it away and went on, ‘It was hard before, when my friend Silke was just round the corner. Now it’s impossible. I don’t know anybody, and the children are at school and there’s nothing to do, and I just sit and cry—’
‘So you ring your mum.’
She nodded miserably. ‘I’m sorry, Adam. I didn’t realise it would be so expensive.’
‘It’s as much as your wages,’ he pointed out, not unreasonably.
‘But some is you,’ she defended with truth, and he shrugged.
‘A little. Perhaps the first hundred pounds.’
She swallowed. ‘May I see it?’
He handed her the bill—the itemised section that ran to page after page—and she studied it in silence and handed it back.
‘Are you going to send me home?’
‘Do you want to go? Do you really want to go? Are you so unhappy? I don’t want you to be unhappy, Helle. It doesn’t help anyone—not you, not me, and certainly not the children.’
She nodded and sniffed. ‘I do want to go. I’ll miss the children, but I’m so lonely. It wouldn’t be so bad if you had a wife, it would be another woman to talk to. It’s different—I can’t talk to you like I could to a woman.’
Nothing would be so bad if he had a wife, he thought defeatedly, including his own loneliness, but it was out of the question. Lyn’s defection had scarred them all, and there was no way he was going there again.
‘I’ll ask my mum,’ Helle went on, miserably shredding another paper towel. ‘Maybe she’ll pay the phone bill.’
‘Never mind the phone bill. Just do me a favour and stay until I can get someone else, and then I’ll forget the bill—OK? Only stay off the damn phone in the daytime, please, until you go home. Deal?’
He wouldn’t understand women if he lived to be a hundred, he thought as Helle burst into tears. He found her an unshredded piece of kitchen roll and watched as she hiccuped to a halt and blotted herself up.
‘Deal,’ she said finally.
‘Good. Now, do you suppose you could get the children up in time for school today, please?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll wake them now.’
He ate a piece of toast, kissed the children hello and goodbye in one and left for work, his mind on his afternoon list. He had yet to meet the other members of his firm, the registrars and house doctors that were allocated to him in this new speciality that the Audley Memorial had set up.
Most hospitals had one or two consultants who tended to handle the paediatric work. It was unusual to find a post dedicated to it, and he was looking forward to the challenge. He understood they would take referrals from other hospitals within the region once his post was established—it would become the local specialist centre for paediatric orthopaedics, centralising treatment in Suffolk and making it more accessible for patients and their families.
That meant better visiting arrangements, which in turn meant happier patients getting better quicker. He approved of that.
Adam parked his car in the staff car park, then crossed it and palmed the door out of the way and caught himself all but running down the corridor to the ward. Idiot, he thought crossly. She’s probably not even there yet—and if she is, she’ll be busy.
She was. She was taking report, and he went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and made two mugs of tea. She wouldn’t be long.
‘Tea,’ he said, thrusting a mug at her, and Anna took it gratefully and drank it too fast, almost scalding her mouth. It was delicious—almost as delicious as him—and nearly as welcome.
‘I needed that. How did you know?’ she said with a smile as she drained it, and he gave a chuckle and made her another one.
‘I wanted to go through the notes of my afternoon list with you,’ he said over his shoulder as he stirred the teabag round. ‘I think you know some