to a daughter along with the dreadful feeling of inadequacy that was always there when she thought about the future.
It hadn’t hit her so much at first. In her early teens she’d brushed it to one side, but as she’d grown older the magnitude of the problem had hit her like a sledgehammer. She’d gone for genetic counselling and finally made the heartbreaking decision that she wasn’t going to have any children.
She’d been doing well so far with casual dates that meant little to her, but had always known that the day would come when she would meet ‘the one’! The man she would love for ever. She’d often wondered how would she cope with that and now the time of testing might be here, unless she could keep Hugo on the fringe of her life.
‘Thanks for those kind words, Hugo, and obviously we are going to get to know each other better to a degree, both of us working at the practice and you being my landlord, and I will be quite happy with those arrangements as they stand.’
He sighed. Ruby couldn’t make it much plainer how she felt about their relationship, and not so long ago he would have been happy to hear her comments, but not so much now.
The degree of his disappointment when she hadn’t been at Gordon’s party the night before had shaken him with the force of it and brought into focus how much it was beginning to mean to him having her near.
When they’d met unexpectedly at the lakeside café early that morning he’d been only too happy to offer to take her to pick up her car. It would give him the opportunity to spend some prime time with her, he’d thought, help to lessen the disappointment of her non-arrival at the party, and that was how it had been, until in the aftermath of the accident she’d made light of his praise and the suggestion that they see more of each other.
‘I’m not sure if by what you’ve just said you are letting me off lightly, or are deliberately misunderstanding me,’ he commented flatly, ‘so shall we get back into our cars and point ourselves homeward once more?’
‘Yes’ she agreed meekly, and thought they wouldn’t be stopping to eat somewhere after that and she was starving, but she was wrong. He pulled up outside a restaurant beside one of the smaller lakes in the area and when she drew level said, ‘I suggest that we stop off here.’
She nodded, willing to agree to anything after that childish attempt to warn him off, and as they were shown to a table said in a low voice, ‘I think it’s time that you were my guest, Hugo.’
‘Not at all,’ he said dryly. ‘It was my idea that we stop here.’
They ate the food put before them in silence and were soon on the last lap of the journey with Swallowbrook not far away, to Ruby’s relief.
She was desperate to be back in the apartment with just her own thoughts to answer to, and as soon as they both pulled up on the drive of Lakes Rise she was out of her car and after thanking him for taking her to Manchester and for the meal they’d stopped off for, she was gone.
The simplest thing would be to find a job near home instead of continuing to live her dream in Swallowbrook, she thought once she was inside the apartment and huddled in a chair by the window. That way she would be immune from the longing that Hugo aroused in her and hopefully in time she might forget him.
When she looked up he was striding purposefully across the short distance that separated the apartment from the house and a moment later was ringing the bell. She opened the door to him reluctantly and as if he had read her mind Hugo said, ‘Just a quick word. I’ve been on to the hospital about the mother and baby and they told me that the reason for her losing control of the car was because she’d had a heart attack, which it was impossible for us to diagnose from the position she was in.’
‘And what’s the situation now?’ she asked anxiously.
‘She’s in Coronary Care and has fractures of the cheekbones from being
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