Betty Neels - Small Slice of Summer

Letitia had tried so hard to stay awake; not to miss a moment of his company. She said, her voice stiff with annoyance at herself, “I’m so very sorry. I tried to stay awake….” She stopped, aware that she hadn’t put it very well, and he laughed again.

“Would you have gone to sleep if Karel had been driving?” he asked.

“No, for he would never have given me the chance—you should have given me a poke.”

She wondered why he sighed as he put his arms around her. “This instead,” he said, and kissed her.

She stared up at him, her emotions churning around inside her so that she really had no sense at all. Then she stretched on tiptoe and kissed him back.

But when he did nothing about it, Letitia said in a hopeless voice, “Oh, Jason, goodbye,” and fled through the door and across the entrance hall.

She was appalled at her behavior and at the strength of her feelings when he had kissed her, but then no one had ever kissed her like that before….

Romance readers around the world were sad to note the passing of BETTY NEELS in June 2001. Her career spanned thirty years, and she continued to write into her ninetieth year. To her millions of fans, Betty epitomized the romance writer, and yet she began writing almost by accident. She had retired from nursing, but her inquiring mind still sought stimulation. Her new career was born when she heard a lady in her local library bemoaning the lack of good romance novels. Betty’s first book, Sister Peters in Amsterdam, was published in 1969, and she eventually completed 134 books. Her novels offer a reassuring warmth that was very much a part of her own personality. She was a wonderful writer, and she will be greatly missed. Her spirit and genuine talent will live on in all her stories.

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

BIG BEN struck midday, and the sound, though muffled by the roar of London’s traffic, struck clearly enough on Letitia Marsden’s ear, causing her to put down the recovery tray she had been checking and look expectantly towards the doors separating theatre from the recovery room. Mr Snell had begun a Commando operation some three hours earlier; at any moment now the patient would be handed over to her care. The doors swung silently open at that very moment and she pressed the buzzer which would let the orderly know that she must come at once, and advanced to meet the theatre party and receive the still figure on the trolley from the hands of the scrub nurse.

‘Hi, Tishy,’ said that young lady in a cheerful whisper. ‘Everything’s OK, buzz if you want any help.’ They cast a combined professional eye over the unconscious man between them. ‘He’s been a nasty colour once or twice, so keep your weather eye open.’

Letitia nodded. ‘What’s next? A cholecystectomy, isn’t it?’

Her friend and colleague nodded. ‘Yes—this one should be fit to move before Sir gets through with it, though. The anaesthetist will be out presently—he’s new by the way, filling in for Doctor van den Berg Effert.’ She raised her brows in an exaggerated arch. ‘Super, too.’ she handed over the theatre slip, cast an eye on the clock, murmured: ‘So long,’ and slid back through the doors.

Letitia began her work, silent save for the muttered word now and then to the attendant orderly, one Mrs Mead, a middle-aged lady of great good sense, who had the added virtue of doing exactly what she was asked to do without arguing about it—her whole mind, save for one minute portion of it, concentrated upon her task, and that tiny portion concealed so deliberately beneath her calm cringed away from the grotesque appearance of the patient; the flap of skin already grafted, later to be used to cover the extensive operation on his throat, gave the man, lying so still, a quite unhuman appearance, and yet she was fully aware that later, given skilled nursing, expert skin grafting and time, his appearance could be made perfectly acceptable even to the most sensitive. She noted his pulse, his pupil reactions and his breathing, charted her findings, and because his colour wasn’t quite to her satisfaction, turned on the oxygen. She was adjusting it when the door opened and a gowned and masked figure came unhurriedly in, to join her at the patient’s side. A large man, very tall, and when he pulled down his mask, extremely handsome with it, with fair hair already flecked with grey, bright blue eyes and a long straight nose whose winged nostrils gave him a somewhat arrogant expression. But his mouth was kind when he smiled, and he was smiling at her now. She didn’t smile back; since her unfortunate experience with the Medical Registrar she distrusted men—that was to say, all men under the age of fifty or so. She frowned at him, her eyes beneath their dark brows as bright a blue as his, her ordinary face, with its run-of-the-mill nose and large generous mouth, framed by the theatre mob cap which concealed the great quantity of dark brown hair she wore in a well-ordered coil on the top of her head.

‘OK?’ asked the giant mildly.

She handed him the chart with its quarter-hourly observations. ‘His colour isn’t quite as good as it was,’ she stated, ‘I’ve started the oxygen.’

He nodded and handed back the chart, looking at her now, instead of the patient. ‘Call me if you want me,’ he answered her, still very mild. ‘The name’s Mourik van Nie.’ He turned on his heel and slid through the doors, making no sound, and moving, considering his size, very fast.

She got on with her work, saying what was necessary to Mrs Mead, her mind on her patient. It was only after an hour, when the giant had been back once more, pronounced the patient fit to be transferred to the Intensive Care Unit and gone again, that she allowed herself to speculate who he was. Dutch, she supposed, like Doctor van den Berg Effert, one of the few men she liked and trusted and wasn’t shy of; but then he was married to Georgina, her elder sister’s close friend; they had trained together and now Margo was Sister on the Children’s Unit, and Georgina lived in the lap of luxury and a state of married bliss in Doctor van den Berg Effert’s lovely home in Essex. She and Margo had been there to stay once or twice and Letitia, living in a fool’s paradise in which the Medical Registrar was the only important being, had imagined herself living like that too—only it hadn’t turned out like that at all; he had taken her out for a month or two, talking vaguely about a future, which she, in her besotted state, had already imagined into a fact which wasn’t fact at all, only daydreams, and then, when she had refused to go away with him for the weekend, had turned the daydream into a nightmare with a jibing speech about old-fashioned girls who should move with the times, and ending with the remark that she wasn’t even pretty… She had known that, of course, but she had always thought that when one fell in love, looks didn’t matter so very much, but she had been too hurt to say anything, and how did one begin to explain that being the middle girl in a family of five daughters, strictly but kindly brought up by a mother with decidedly old-fashioned ideas and a father who was rector of a small parish in the depths of rural Devon was hardly conducive to being the life and soul of the swinging set.