Page 88 of A Helpin g Hand for the Village Nurse

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Is it that shocking to you I might not have?’

‘I just don’t know how you’ve avoided it. I mean, they’re everywhere. You must have done.’

‘Probably,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll work on an inventory of all the films I’ve ever watched when this is finished, and you can tell me whether I’ve seen one.’

‘So we’re planning on staying a while, are we?’

‘I’m in no rush to leave,’ he said, his smile still broad but, somehow, suddenly earnest.

Ottilie blushed, grateful that he wouldn’t be able to see it in the gloom. She had to admit that they hadn’t watched a single second of Shakespeare in Love yet, they’d been so busy chatting, and she had to wonder whether Geoff and Magnus were on to something. The way they’d gone about it was misguided, but…

She shot a glance Heath’s way. He was looking at the screen. She liked the Heath she was getting to know far better than the one she’d first been introduced to.

He turned and caught her eye, and she blushed again, reaching for her wine, pretending that was what she’d been doing all along.

‘I thought you weren’t going to drink much of that,’ he said, nodding at the almost empty glass in her hand.

She hadn’t noticed how fast she’d been drinking it. ‘I…’

‘It’s good stuff, isn’t it?’ he said, pouring himself a top-up and then holding the bottle out for her. ‘I wasn’t planning on drinking that much either, but…Well, let’s just say I won’t be driving back to Manchester tonight.’

‘Lucky you have your gran around the corner then.’

Lucky my place isn’t fit to stay in too.

Ottilie allowed him to refill her glass and then took a gulp. She watched him put the bottle down and his glass up to his own lips, and it was strangely hypnotic. From nowhere, an image filled her mind, of him turning to her and kissing her. She shook it away and tried to turn her attention to the film. At this point, however, she didn’t have a clue what was going on and it was hardly a distraction at all.

‘It wasn’t bad in the end, was it?’ Heath asked as they stood outside the shop, having bid goodnight to a very smug-looking Magnus and Geoff. ‘We had a laugh, didn’t we?’

‘The film was pretty good in the end too.’

‘Was it? Not my sort of thing really, but I suppose it was all right.’

Ottilie wondered whether he’d taken in as little of the plot as she had. She’d been so busy thinking about him, acutely aware of him sitting next to her and what that was doing to her that her assertion that the film was good was a lie. She had no idea whether it had been any good or not. At least Heath seemed to be better informed on that score. Perhaps he hadn’t been thinking about her in the same way. But she couldn’t allow this to happen. It was better if he hadn’t, and she needed to stop this silly daydreaming too. It was a fantasy, and she might have decided it was harmless if seeing him almost every day, as she did currently, wasn’t such a worrying temptation.

She was feeling the effects of the wine and that wasn’t helping either. As she looked up at him, it would be so easy to reach that little further and plant a kiss on those inviting lips, but that was down to the booze, wasn’t it?

‘Have you got to walk up to Daffodil Farm?’ he asked.

Darkness had fallen, the lanes of Thimblebury ghostly silent. Ottilie glanced up at the shadow of the hills she’d have to climb to get there and was thankful that the answer to his question was no.

‘Victor is going to come and get me,’ she said.

‘Ah. I was going to say I’d walk up there with you, but no need.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘I’ll wait with you until he gets here though.’

‘It’s Thimblebury – there’s no need.’

‘Still, I’d rather. There are some dodgy-looking badgers around these parts.’

Ottilie gave a warm, wine-hazed smile. God he was sexy. It had been so long since…

Her smile faded. Since Josh. Go on, Ottilie, say it, remember it. It has been this long since you had a man because it’s this long since you lost the only one that mattered.

‘I was thinking,’ Heath said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘I could download Lady and the Tramp.’

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