Innocent Secret. Josie Metcalfe

      

      It didn’t matter how attractive Vicky was…

      Or any other woman, for that matter. It didn’t matter how good it felt to have her hand wrapped around his arm, knowing that the contact was giving her the support she needed. It didn’t matter that he could smell the hint of flowers and musk drifting from her skin, or that her long blond hair was like spun gold against the dark fabric of his suit. It didn’t matter that the last hour had made him feel more alive than he had in several years and that he was actually looking forward to sharing a meal with her.

      As the common idiom went, he’d been there and done that already, and had the scars on his heart to prove it.

      Dear Reader,

      A while ago I was lucky enough to spend a week in Cumbria, in the northwest of England. As I was revisiting places I first came to know when our children were small, I found I was looking at them in a completely different way.

      Suddenly, the quaint little market town of years ago was growing and becoming the background for a whole new cast of characters working in and around Denison Memorial Hospital. This book is the third in a series of stories about those characters, and I hope you enjoy them.

      Perhaps along the way I can give you a taste of what it was like to live surrounded by such magnificent scenery and the inimitable Cumbrian people. I will certainly be going back again.

      Happy reading!

      Innocent Secret

      Josie Metcalfe

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CONTENTS

       COVER

      Dear Reader

       TITLE PAGE

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       COPYRIGHT

       CHAPTER ONE

      ‘DO YOU take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?’

      Vicky Lawrence heard the time-honoured words drifting towards her, and with them knew that a dream that she’d treasured for nearly half of her life was finally over.

      She’d loved Nick ever since she was twelve years old but he’d never looked at her the way he was looking at Frankie, the woman who was making her promises to him.

      She didn’t begrudge him his happiness—how could she when the two of them looked as if they’d been made for each other?

      Still, she wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel a pang of regret for what might have been. She’d believed all her Christmases had come at once the day he’d proposed to her, and the months when she’d been busily planning their perfect wedding had been the happiest of her life.

      She still didn’t know what had changed, or why, or even when. All she did know was that when Nick had sat her down with that serious look on his face and confessed that he wanted to break their engagement, she couldn’t have been more delighted.

      It should have hurt to find out that he’d fallen passionately in love with a fellow GP working in the unit that was part of Denison Memorial Hospital. The fact that she knew and liked Frankie as a colleague should have made her feel betrayal, not gratitude.

      Yet here she was, standing surreptitiously at the back of the room so that her presence wouldn’t cast a shadow over the proceedings, and she hardly felt a qualm.

      She’d searched around inside her heart, almost like probing at a painful tooth with her tongue, and had barely raised an ache, but if she’d admitted as much to any of the people in the room they wouldn’t have believed her.

      ‘Are you all right?’ had been the most frequent question she’d heard over the last few weeks, accompanied by a look of such cloying pity that she’d wanted to scream.

      ‘I’m fine,’ she’d been saying with a bright smile when what she’d wanted to say had been, ‘I couldn’t be more delighted that Nick fell in love with Frankie because it saved me from making a monumental mistake.’

      However, the world and his wife had cast her in the role of broken-hearted waif and wouldn’t look beyond to see that there was something far more important than Nick’s defection filling her mind.

      ‘Are you all right?’ murmured yet another voice as someone came to stand just behind her, and the soft burr of his Scottish accent told her who it was without needing to see him.

      This time her reaction to the question was very different. This time the voice was the one that, over the last couple of months, had begun to fill her mind and heart with more desperate longing than she’d ever felt for Nick. She hadn’t realised that she’d had little more than an adolescent crush on her long-time hero until she’d learned about the real thing. There was no comparison.

      ‘I’m fine,’ she whispered over her shoulder, looking up almost six inches into the sombre, handsome face of GP Joe Faraday and straight into the changeable hazel of his eyes. It was her usual reply, honed over the last roller-coaster weeks and, as usual, she could tell that she hadn’t been believed.

      Sometimes she didn’t even believe it herself. It wasn’t quite as easy as that to let go of something that had been the bedrock of her existence for half her life.

      She took another long look at the handsome man now slipping a wedding ring on the finger of his petite new wife. She’d dreamed of him doing that to her one day, but he’d never have worn that same look of utter devotion as he did with Frankie, neither would he have thrown a cheerful smile of resignation at ten-year-old Katie’s whispered interruption.

      She sighed, knowing that Nick was doing the right thing, knowing that they had both made the right decision.

      Not that any amount of certainty was going to make the next few weeks any easier to bear. That was one of the penalties of living in such a place as Edenthwaite. It was a caring community with most of its members connected by blood or work, but that also meant that the world and his wife had heard at least one version of the story currently going the rounds.

      Unfortunately, most of them were determined to see her in the role of jilted bride-to-be and were treating her as if she’d suddenly turned into eggshell porcelain.

      Wondering just how long it would be before life returned to normal, she sighed again and was startled to feel the warm weight of a decidedly masculine arm encompass her shoulders.

      ‘We don’t have to stay,’ Joe murmured, his voice a deep rumble close to her ear that sent a sharp shiver of awareness right through her.

      For a moment Vicky was lost in the sensation of quiet strength