Free Heart Surgeon in Portugal by Anna Ramsay

spelling a challenge.
    Damn damn damn , Ellie was thinking. ‘I’m not thick, you know,’ she muttered. I’ve got three science A levels. I could have been a doctor too, if I’d wanted!
    Rafe was gathering up his papers which were now dry. ‘Indeed you are not, Miss Robey,’ he said mysteriously. ‘Very far from it.’
    ‘I’m finished here. I want to drop in at the Centre on my way to the restaurant.’
    ‘But don’t you want -’
    ‘See you at breakfast,’ he called over his shoulder, heading indoors to shower and change.
    And half an hour later he was gone in a spurt of exhaust and an eagerness to get away that excluded her completely.
    Without its dynamic owner the place seemed to settle into a limbo of suspension. The very air was flat and stifling in the heat. It seemed to Ellie that there was a crackle of energy when Rafe was around; a lifelessness without him. Now as brother Jon had promised, the Casa de la Paz was exclusively hers. For the rest of the afternoon and the long, long evening ahead…
    She wandered aimlessly round the grounds of the Casa, imagining what the Cardiac Centre must be like. Staffed with gorgeous Portuguese women doctors and nurses - far more exciting than she. Undoubtedly Rafe was planning to take one of them out to dinner. He must have some kind of a sex-life. He wasn’t an automaton.
    ‘Ellie Robey,’ she scolded herself aloud, ‘that is none of your business! You know your trouble? You feel fine. You want to be back on the wards. You’re not used to this quiet life.’
    A surprise was waiting for her by the swimming pool. There was Jon’s shirt, draped over the back of a chair and left to dry. Rafe had fished it out and left it there for her to find.
    Ellie was touched by this kind gesture. She had supposed he’d thrown it straight in the bin. It was already drying, the fabric stiff and hard and when she pressed it to her nose, smelling of pool water. She would wash it and hang it in her bathroom to dry, well out of sight of the unpredictable surgeon.
    This done, she went in search of Giovana to let her know she was going for a walk so that Giovana could lock up the Casa when she had finished. There was the old Portuguese woman watering the lemon trees, nodding and smiling over Ellie’s earnestly halting attempts to communicate by a mixture of signs and words. So charming, this Ellie - so bela.
    The scrawny grey cat was rubbing affectionately round Giovana's black-stockinged legs. It crossed to an empty saucer placed thoughtfully in the shade of the back door and mewed appealingly at its audience of two.
    There was a rim of dried milk round the edge of the dish. ‘Who's been spoiling you , then, Miss Moggs?’ wondered Ellie.
    ‘The medico ... ees all heart,’ pronounced Giovana. ‘Ees all heart ,’ she repeated more confidently, beaming at the pretty English girl with the face red from too much sun.
    ‘All brain, you mean,’ said Ellie, quite forgetting that communication between the two of them was strictly of the pidgin variety. She went back to her room for her Nike trainers and the khaki baseball cap bought years ago on a trip to Eurodisney Paris. As she crossed the meadow her thoughts of Rafe Harland were too intense for Ellie to notice the thorns attacking her bare legs. What an enigma the man was; clever, ruthless, bad-tempered. Yet with a kind and tender side to him, moved by a little cat’s piteous cries - because although it came from Giovana’s farm, everyone knew farm cats had to fend for themselves.
    Ellie sighed deeply and there and then made up her mind. ‘I am not ,’ she declared to the birds, and the bees, and the insects buzzing around the clumps of herbs sprouting out of the sun-baked ground, ‘I am not going to think about Rafe Harland any more today. He is banished from my mind. I shall concentrate on tomorrow. Because I,’ she said loudly, ‘am going back to the Fish Market with my good friend Vivienne Carr.’
    She strode along,