Guilty Secret Page 13

  Decadent and self-indulgent.

  And when she’d finished eating she was going to fall into bed with that romance novel she’d been meaning to read for weeks, and when she finally went to sleep it would be in the knowledge that she didn’t have to get up until eight.

  She was up at seven, hanging over the toilet being violently sick.

  Too many spices,’ she groaned when she finally recovered enough to rinse her mouth out. ‘Either that or the flu’s finally got me.’

  She crept out to the kitchen to put the kettle on, wondering if her stomach would let her have the cup of tea she wanted. Perhaps if she had a piece of toast it would settle down, the way it used to when she was pregnant with the girls.

  If it didn’t, she was going to have to phone the practice at eight to leave a message to find someone to cover for her.

  She sighed wearily. This was the first time in a while that she’d managed to get her weekend shifts sorted out just right with plenty of work to fill the lonely hours until the girls came back. It would be just her luck to spend the time ill and to have to make up the duty when the girls were with her.

  In the event, she was feeling a bit better by eight, and half an hour later was parking her car in a staff slot outside Denison Memorial ready to see whoever turned up for morning surgery.

  Several times she heard Nick’s voice in the corridor outside her consulting room and once, when she’d been called along to do some suturing to a young girl’s face after a fall from her pony, she heard him organising an X-ray of a patient who’d come off his motorbike.

  Each time she tried to ignore the fact that her pulse rate doubled, but it was impossible.

  What was it about the man that just the sound of his voice was enough to make her hands tremble? How on earth was she going to manage to live and work in Edenthwaite without going completely mad? It didn’t seem very likely that he was going to be moving any time soon. Vicky had returned to her roots here, and he seemed to be more than willing to put his roots down, too.

  She hoped that uprooting herself and her daughters wasn’t the only solution because she really didn’t want to leave.

  Anyway, where would she go?

  Laura and Katie could hardly remember living anywhere else and had developed a wide circle of friends. They would be completely lost if they had to move to another school in another area.

  Oh, Frankie knew it wasn’t impossible. The families of members of the armed forces could move as many as seven times in as many years and they seemed to survive.

  But why put her girls through that if it wasn’t necessary? All she had to do was develop a little self-control.

  ‘Yeah. That’s all,’ she scoffed when she found herself looking to see if Nick’s four-by-four was still in the car park.

  ‘Get a life!’ she exclaimed as she slammed the door of her car and put the key in the ignition, suddenly realising just how apt her children’s catchphrase was.

  Perhaps that was her problem. She’d spent so many years living her life around the needs of her children and her patients that she’d forgotten to fulfil her own needs.

  ‘So, what am I going to do about it?’ she demanded, then had to smile at the nonplussed motorist beside her at the traffic lights who seemed to think that she was talking to him.

  ‘Perhaps I need a hobby,’ she mused on her way to examine a suspicious rash on a toddler who had just started play school. What were the chances that there was something infectious just about to sweep through the community? Chickenpox, maybe?

  ‘What about taking up a sport?’ she continued to herself. ‘Or maybe joining some sort of group? Amateur dramatics? Writing circle? Embroidery?’

  She laughed derisively.

  ‘Why not do all of them? After all, you’ve got so much spare time on your hands.’ She concentrated on her driving for a moment, negotiating one of the cattle grids that separated the open moorland from the rest of the area.

  ‘Let’s face it, Frankie,’ she said on a sudden chuckle that had more than a hint of hysteria. ‘What you really need is a wife so that you’ll have time to take up some of these things. A round of golf with Norman and his cronies, maybe.’

  Or a husband, her subconscious said in a sly voice. Someone like Nick. Willing to collect children from school. Good at participating in family outings. Great at helping them with their homework. And if he happened to be the best lover in the world…

  ‘The trouble is, I think there’s only one Nick, and he’s already spoken for,’ she said in a sad voice, knowing she’d just come full circle.

  Depression meant she didn’t sleep much that night, most of it spent curled up in the corner of the settee with another in a seemingly endless stream of cups of tea. Even the book she’d been enjoying so much couldn’t hold her attention and it was almost a relief when Sunday arrived and she could go back to Denison Memorial on the pretence that she had paperwork to do.

  After her relief at seeing the girls leave so that she could have some peaceful time to herself, now she couldn’t wait for them to return to bring some life back to the house.

  Except, when they did return, they were both more subdued than ever, quiet enough for Frankie to worry if they were sickening for something.

  Neither of them felt as if their temperatures were raised and each said that they felt all right, but she’d never seen them like this. It wasn’t quite distress but it was definitely close to misery, and the most frustrating thing was that neither of them would talk to her.

  ‘Perhaps you’re just tired,’ she suggested, normally the signal for both of them to perk up instantly.

  ‘Maybe,’ Laura agreed listlessly, and Frankie knew that there was something wrong. The thing she didn’t know was how to find out what it was.

  ‘Give it twenty-four hours,’ she told herself as she came back down after seeing them to bed. ‘Either they’ll have bounced back from whatever it is, or it’ll be time to ask some hard questions. If there’s a problem, I need to know if there’s something I can do to solve it.’

  Monday morning started early…too early.

  The alarm hadn’t even rung but Frankie was already up…or rather down, on her knees in the bathroom in front of the toilet.

  By the time she stopped being sick she didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

  It was impossible.

  She’d spent nearly two years sleeping with Martin without anything happening. She’d spent two nights with Nick and must have become instantly fertile because she was as sure as she could be without taking a test that she was pregnant.

  She rinsed her mouth and sagged weakly onto the lid of the toilet, her head propped in her hands.

  What on earth was she going to do?

  She’d counselled any number of women over the years, from naive underage teenagers to menopausal divorcees, enumerating their choices and advising them to try to balance their own situation with the needs of the new life they were carrying.

  Some had opted for abortion, but she already knew that it was something she couldn’t do. It might be the worst possible time for a pregnancy, with all the stresses of her non-relationship with Nick and Martin’s threat to take the children. But she’d always longed to have another child, and to have one that had been fathered by Nick, the man she’d fallen in love with but could never have, was an almost miraculous bonus.

  Not that he would see it that way, she realised soberly. From what she’d learned of him since he’d joined the staff at Denison Memorial, he was basically a very moral man with a well-developed sense of responsibility. If he knew she was expecting his child he would probably call off his marriage to Vicky.

  She sighed heavily, knowing that she was going to have to find some way of hiding her condition until the two of them were married.

  He wouldn’t be happy, once he realised what she’d done, but it was the only answer. After the twelve years it had taken them to get together, he and Vicky deserved each other. She couldn’t risk r
uining everything for them.

  Damn, this mountain of guilt was going to grow so big that it finally crushed her.

  ‘Mum? Are you all right?’ Laura demanded, looking impossibly young and innocent standing in the bathroom doorway with her hair all sleep-tangled around her worried face. ‘I heard you being sick.’

  For a moment Frankie’s mind was paralysed, unable to come up with a single intelligible word.

  ‘Ah, just one of the perils of being a doctor,’ she improvised after several dreadful seconds of blankness. ‘I must have caught something from someone.’

  Yeah, caught a pregnancy, the mocking voice inside her head quipped. How are you going to explain this after your mother-daughter talk about the birds and the bees and safe sex?

  Frankie winced. She didn’t want to think about that, not when she hadn’t got used to the idea herself. Anyway, she needed to do a test first to make sure of the diagnosis.

  I’ll be all right, sweetheart,’ she said, hoping she sounded reassuring as she forced herself to concentrate on the normal everyday Monday morning routines. ‘Has the alarm gone off yet? Do you want first go in the bathroom?’

  Surely Laura’s gaze was far too watchful for an eleven-year-old. Frankie almost found herself cringing as if she were the child.

  ‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ her daughter asked, and suddenly she was an uncertain girl again.

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine, sweetheart. I promise,’ Frankie said, and held an arm out.

  Like a shot Laura was burrowing against her side, almost as though she were only five again, and all the upset over the disco seemed to have vanished.

  ‘I love you, Mum,’ she muttered, and Frankie’s heart swelled inside her.

  ‘I love you, too, Laura,’ she said, and tilted the precious face up towards her own before she added, ‘I love you more than I can tell you. Even if you sulk and slam doors, I still love you. I might not like you very much…’

  ‘But you still love me,’ Laura finished, completing their family saying with a chuckle. Then she cocked a sly eyebrow. ‘Enough to make porridge with sugar and cream again?’

  By the time all three of them met at the table for breakfast it was almost as though the last few angst-ridden days had never happened.

  Almost.

  There was still a shadow behind the smile Laura threw her when she saw the swirl of cream decorating her bowl of porridge, but now that they were talking again Frankie was sure she would confide eventually.

  Katie was back to her old self, bouncing with enthusiasm over the fact that she would be taking her next swimming test this afternoon.

  Topics covered during the meal ranged from a query about whether Katie had remembered to put her costume and towel in her bag to a reminder that they needed to collect their books together for a trip to the library.

  What Frankie could never have predicted was that Laura would look up from her empty bowl to ask, ‘Mum, what’s a vasectomy?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  SEVERAL hours later, Frankie still couldn’t believe that they’d had that conversation.

  There hadn’t really been any way to duck it, not with Katie still finishing her breakfast and Laura looking as if she was going to sit there until she got an answer.

  ‘It’s a permanent method of contraception,’ she’d said eventually, wondering what on earth had prompted the question in the first place and hoping that her explanation would be enough.

  She should have known it wouldn’t. That was one of the curses of having intelligent children who’d been brought up with the idea that if they didn’t ask, they wouldn’t learn.

  ‘I know about contraception,’ Katie piped up smugly. ‘That’s condoms and things for when you do sex and don’t want to have a baby. I read about it in one of the magazines.’

  ‘But vasectomy is different?’ Laura probed. ‘How?’

  ‘Because it involves an operation to cut or tie the man’s tubes so the seminal fluid can’t get past any more,’ Frankie detailed simply. ‘He should only have it done if he doesn’t want to have any more children because it’s a very difficult operation to undo.’

  ‘So he wouldn’t be able to plant any more seeds to grow babies,’ Katie added, reverting to the terminology she was more comfortable with.

  ‘Exactly,’ Frankie confirmed, still mystified that the topic had come up at all. ‘Where did you hear about it? Health education classes at school?’ She’d been under the impression that the curriculum wouldn’t be going into it that deeply until they reached senior school.

  Katie began to speak, only to be silenced by Laura, and Frankie almost missed the swift glare Laura had directed at her younger sister.

  ‘It’s just something I heard and wondered what it meant,’ Laura said blandly, but some motherly instinct told Frankie there was more to it than that.

  Unfortunately, time was marching on and there wasn’t time to explore it now if they were going to get to school and work.

  Yet another topic to delve into at a later date, she reminded herself with a silent groan as she chivvied them out of the door.

  Now she had a full morning of patients and because she hadn’t dared to eat anything more than a small square of toast at breakfast for fear of being sick in front of the girls, she was now starving.

  ‘Coffee?’ Jack offered when she stuck her head around the door just long enough to grab the post from her pigeonhole.

  Frankie would have loved to have said yes but she remembered only too well the effect the smell of coffee had on the equilibrium of her stomach in the first few weeks of a pregnancy.

  ‘I think I’ll just dunk a teabag and grab some biscuits,’ she said, suiting her actions to her words while concentrating on breathing as shallowly as possible near his steaming mug.

  She was just about to make her escape when he called her back.

  ‘Frankie, have you seen much of Nick recently?’ he asked, his usually cheerful face almost as overcast as the weather.

  ‘Well, around the practice,’ she hedged uncomfortably. ‘I heard his voice when I was in on Saturday but other than that, not since he collected the girls the last time, I think.’

  ‘What about Vicky? Have you seen her?’

  ‘Not since she lent a hand when Joe dislocated his shoulder.’ She frowned. ‘Jack, what’s this about? Have the two of them eloped or something?’ Her stomach clenched at the thought and it had nothing to do with morning sickness.

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Jack muttered, and her curiosity was piqued enough to bring her back into the room in spite of the waft of coffee.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked, feeling almost guilty to be inviting his confidence. Hopefully he would never know that she had a personal interest in Nick’s relationship with Vicky.

  ‘I don’t know whether there’s a problem or not,’ he admitted, clearly puzzled. ‘When they got engaged, Vicky was floating so high that I needed to tie a rope round her ankle to pull her back down to earth and she was spending all her spare time making lists and rushing around making arrangements for the wedding.’

  ‘And?’ She perched on the arm of a chair and began to nibble absently on a biscuit.

  ‘And nothing,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Suddenly everything’s gone quiet. I haven’t even been told the date of the wedding—have you?’

  ‘Sorry, not a word,’ she confirmed, fighting to subdue the unreasonable bubble of hope that insisted on trying to surface.

  Were the two of them having second thoughts? It hardly seemed likely, not when it had taken them twelve years to progress to this point. There had only been that one brief conversation about breaking his engagement and she was almost certain that idea had been the result of Nick’s fear that she might be pregnant. He certainly hadn’t said any more about it to her.

  ‘Well, if you hear anything…’

  Frankie made commiserating noises then set off on her thoughtful way towards her consulting room, only to walk straight
into the woman in question. It was almost as if she’d been surreptitiously lying in wait to catch her.

  ‘Frankie, could I have a word? Have you got a minute?’ Vicky asked, clearly uncomfortable.

  As ever, Frankie couldn’t help feeling guilty in her presence but the younger woman looked so nervous that she needed to do something to lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘As long as you don’t mind if I finish my breakfast,’ she joked, holding up the handful of biscuits. ‘One of the penalties of being a full-time working mother.’

  She led the way into the room and dumped the armful of paperwork on the desk before she sat in one of the chairs in front of it, gesturing to Vicky to take the other to strike a less formal setting.

  ‘How can I help?’ she offered, and took another bite, careful not to drop crumbs on the clean floor.

  ‘I don’t know if you can,’ Vicky muttered, but perched on the edge of the chair anyway. ‘It’s just…Well, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a bit of an outsider in Edenthwaite so you wouldn’t have the same sort of axe to grind as some of the others. And you’re a woman.’

  Frankie thought it was best to let her ramble her way to the point. She was obviously troubled about something and pushing might make her clam up.

  ‘I know you’re about ten years older than I am,’ she began again, and Frankie had to keep her indignant correction to eight years inside her head. ‘But do you think it makes a relationship more difficult when there’s more than a couple of years’ difference in age between a couple?’

  There was only six years between Nick and Vicky, a fact she must have known for the last twelve years. Why was she suddenly worrying about it now?

  ‘It depends on the individuals involved,’ she replied carefully. ‘Some people are very mature for their age and others are very young. Personally, I would be wary of anything more than a generation because of the relative life expectancy of the partners.’

  ‘You mean the older one is likely to die earlier.’

  ‘Statistically,’ Frankie agreed. ‘But that’s not to say that you don’t get some people dying in their thirties and others going on past their century, so if you pick someone with the right genes…Anyway, there’s only six years between you and Nick, so it doesn’t really apply, does it.’