‘Watch me.’ She sighed. ‘You’re just upset because my sign is bigger than yours.’
‘Some of us have ethical standards.’
‘Well, bully for some of us,’ she snapped. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I have a sign to write and I’ve just decided it needs work. It needs to be bigger.’
He stared at her for a long moment. But there was no more to be said. They both knew it.
Finally he turned and stalked up to his surgery door. He disappeared, slamming the door behind him.
He left blue footprints all the way.
Ally was left staring after him. What to do now?
Nothing, she told herself. There was nothing she could do. Just get on with it.
‘Whoops,’ she said again. She took a deep breath-and then grinned into the morning sun. Whether she had Darcy Rochester’s approval or whether she didn’t, she was home again and nothing and no one was going to interfere with her happiness.
CHAPTER TWO
THROUGHOUT the next few days Darcy worked on as if she wasn’t there. Well, why not? What did a massage therapist have to do with him?
Nothing.
The fact that the entire population was talking about her was none of his business either.
At least he had work to distract him from a woman who was dangerously close to being distracting all by herself.
In truth, he’d seldom been as busy as he was right now. The fine autumn weather broke the afternoon of Charlie Hammer’s funeral, meaning the fishing fleet couldn’t leave port. The town’s fishermen decided en masse that if they were in port anyway they may as well kill time getting their assorted ills seen to, swelling his already too-long patient lists.
Then the little community in the hills above the town-alternative lifestylers who didn’t believe in getting their children immunised-were hit by an epidemic of chickenpox. As he had three kids with complications and parents who agonised and discussed ad nauseam every treatment he advised-and then refused to let him treat them anyway-he was going quietly nuts.