Bachelor Cure. Marion Lennox

car in the valley. The salesman brought it up here for a test drive and drove it too fast, putting it through its paces. Strop was lumbering across a road on a blind bend and the salesman couldn’t stop. Mike felt dreadful, and then the woman who owned him said he was a stupid dog anyway and seeing Mike had hit him then Mike could put him down. As you know, the Aston Martin only has two seats. The salesman drove to the vet’s with Mike carrying Strop, and by the time they reached the vet’s there was no way he was being put down. So in one afternoon Mike got the sleekest car and the dopiest dog in Christendom.’

      ‘You’re kidding.’

      ‘No way. And, believe it or not, he is a great dog.’ Bill’s grin deepened. ‘The patients love him and all the valley knows now that if Mike pays a house call 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.

      ‘That’s a really good idea,’ the middle-aged lady told 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.’

      ‘He works too hard?’ Tess asked cautiously, and the woman nodded with vigour.

      ‘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!’

      ‘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.

      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 windcheater draped around her waist, and the trainers on her feet were nearly as old as the clothes he’d changed into, but the age and the casualness of her clothes didn’t detract from her beauty one bit.

      It was all he could do not to whistle.

      He didn’t, though. He paused for one millisecond—and then caught himself, smiled and picked up the picnic basket.

      ‘Provisions, Dr Westcott? Hasn’t the hospital fed you?’

      ‘Mrs Thompson has personally insisted I eat enough to feed a small army,’ she assured him. ‘But I wouldn’t be the least surprised if I feel the need to eat again quite soon. Even my toes seem hollow.’

      He grinned. ‘No anorexia, then? Excellent. I like a girl with a healthy appetite.’

      ‘Do you want a cure for anorexia?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve just invented it. Put a girl on a plane for thirty-six hours with airline food for company and fear in her stomach, and then toss her among pregnant pigs and dislocate her shoulder. Then put her to sleep for fifteen hours and—hey, presto—you’ve a girl with a healthy appetite. Magic, Dr Llewellyn! I think I’ll write it up as a new wonder treatment for one of our prestigious medical journals.’

      ‘You’ll make your name as a medical whizkid,’ he told her.

      ‘I know,’ she agreed, and fluttered her eyelids in assumed modesty.

      Whew! Good grief! He smiled at her, and Tess chuckled—and when Tess Westcott smiled, his body started to heat from his trainers up.

      ‘OK, then, Tess,’ he told her finally, and only a faint hesitation under his words hinted at what he was feeling. ‘You’re fed and rested. Are you ready to face the farm?’

      Tess nodded. ‘I’m ready.’

      ‘OK. Strop’s waiting in the car. Let’s go.’

      She set her face, and Mike saw grimness replace the laughter behind her eyes. Hell, she had courage. She knew what could lie ahead of them.

      This was some woman!

      And suddenly he wasn’t the least sure he was ready to spend any time with her. There was something deep inside that was telling him he should run a mile.

      But there was something else that was telling him to stay.

      The farm was dreadful. Even Strop, having made the first half of the trip straddling the gearstick and the second half where he really wanted to be—sitting high on Tessa’s lap with his ears flapping out the window—seemed depressed by the place. His mournful ears flopped lower and his eyes welled with moisture. Good grief, you just had to look at the dog and you’d burst into tears! He lumbered off to sniff in the bracken and Tess was pleased to see him go. She was depressed enough without him.

      They made a courtesy call on Doris first. She was too preoccupied with her eight babies to notice human visitors. Jacob had done his job well. Mike had rung him early this morning and asked him to make sure the sow was fed and watered, and there was nothing more she needed. Now she had everything she could want, except maybe a spare set of teats.

      After paying their social call on Doris, they tackled the house.

      There was nothing here to help them—no clues as to where Henry could be. The place was deserted, but it still held the signs of an occupant who hadn’t intended to leave. There was milk curdling in the refrigerator. Someone had taken a heap of sausages