Free The Surgeon's Convenient Fiancée (Medical Romance) by Rebecca Lang

mental equilibrium—even just admitting it brought a certain relief. But somehow she was now beginning to differentiate between the wood and the trees.

CHAPTER FOUR
    S LOWLY D EIRDRE WALKED to her parents’ house, hardly aware of the drizzle that misted her hair. There was so much to think about, yet this time she was very careful to look both ways before she crossed a street.
    Maybe she needed to see a psychiatrist, she speculated soberly, still thinking about the counselling, before she should contemplate going to work in a hospital. She had had two major losses in her life at the same time: the loss of her job and then the loss of her parents when they had left the country. Although they would be back before too long, sometimes it seemed as though they were gone for ever, and she mourned them. The stress of loss was the greatest that one had to bear.
    Even though her mood had lifted after meeting Shay, blurting out her troubles to him, she could not be sure that the moreupbeat mood would last if he were to pull back out of her life. After all, she couldn’t say that he was really in her life. No doubt he felt guilty at having almost run her down. At the time, she had taken all the blame without question, or felt she had. He had kissed her on the cheek, but so what? A lot of people kissed, and it seemed to mean nothing to them, a sort of affectation to which she did not subscribe herself. To her, a kiss did mean something special. So her mind chattered, her thoughts moving back and forth, this way and that.
    Often when she came near to her own house she had the irrational hope that her parents would be there, that one of them would open the door and give her a hug. Even though they phoned her often, sent e-mails and regular mail frequently, she never stopped missing them—it was not the same as seeing someone. If they had been there, all this angst with her job would have been easier to bear, because she would have had two wise people to talk to, apart from Fiona. She had some friends, of course, but since she had left nursing they had dispersed somewhat and did notmeet as frequently. It was also difficult to go out in the evenings when you had children to take care of. Granny McGregor had done a lot of childminding, of course, but somehow she, Deirdre, had felt responsible. Gradually you could find yourself socially isolated.
    There was someone to greet her at the house; Mollykins, their ginger, black and white cat who queened it over the house, came and went through a cat flap during the day, on most days. It meant that she, Deirdre, had to visit the house frequently when she wasn’t sleeping there, to open and close the cat flap as she could not let the cat out at night. There were coyotes at large that ate cats, that lived in the forested areas and came out in the evenings into the built-up areas.
    ‘Hello, Mollykins,’ she crooned to the cat, who came forward quickly to brush against her legs, as though she had been waiting in the hall, knowing the exact moment when Deirdre would come. Deirdre squatted down amongst the letters that had been put through the letter-box and were on the hall mat to stroke the purring Mollykins. No doubt the cat missed her parents as much as she did.
    Then she went through the letters, gratified to see that there were two from her parents.
    She opened the back door to let the cat out, then opened up the cat flap. What another momentous day it had been, starting with the words she had had with Granny McGregor, then the interesting interlude at the Stanton Memorial. Now she found herself somewhat flustered, not knowing what to do first, her mind filled with the image of Shay. In her own mind she was beginning to accept that she could refer to him by his first name, yet she dared not presume that there would be a relationship between them. The kiss he had given her on the cheek had been a kiss of commiseration at her predicament, she felt sure. Even so, it was a relief that he was not