One Summer At The Lake: Maid for Montero / Still the One / Hot-Shot Doc Comes to Town

Zoe turned her head on the pillow and aimed a look of simmering dislike on him. He wanted to know what she felt like? Fine, she’d tell him.

‘I feel like death warmed up. Happy?’ She lowered herself with a groan onto the pillow. ‘And I suppose I look that way, too.’

‘Pretty bad,’ he agreed, his mocking smile vanishing as her lips began to tremble. ‘Are you crying?’

‘Oh, well, so sorry I couldn’t manage to put on my make-up for your benefit, but nobody asked you here.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

‘Georgie came to get me.’

‘Oh, God, she shouldn’t have.’

‘They are worried.’

Zoe clapped a hand to her aching head and groaned. ‘I told them I’m fine. It’s just a bug or something.’

‘Symptom-wise, could you be a little more precise?’

‘If I tell you will you go away? I have cymbals playing in my head, I ache all over and I feel sick…’ She gave a him a narrow-eyed glare of ‘Is that precise enough for you?’

‘Very succinct. I am assuming our date tonight is off.’

Zoe didn’t have the energy to prise her eyelids apart but she found the strength to correct him.

‘We don’t have a date. It’s just sex. Do I know it’s just sex? he asks me, like I’m a total idiot,’ she mumbled. The comment he had made in the aftermath of the frantic love-making session they had fitted in while the children were having their riding lesson had been playing in her head all through the long interminable night.

‘So how is our patient?’

This time Zoe’s eyes didn’t open as she resisted the temptation to declare she was nobody’s patient.

‘Doctor, who sent for you?’ He had to have heard what she’d said. She comforted herself with the thought that doctors, like priests, couldn’t blab about their patients. Presumably the Montero name, or possibly the cheque book, had made the man forget that GPs no longer made house calls at the weekend, she brooded, with a cynical sniff that became a cough.