Abigail Gordon - His Christmas Bride-To-Be

Back in the taxi once more, having been given the house keys, she’d given the driver the directions for the last lap of her journey back to her roots and had thought grimly that it was some homecoming.

Gazing down at the keys, the memory was starkly clear of how she’d packed her cases and left the place that was dear to her heart that same night, intending to start a new life to replace the one that Jeremy Chalmers had shattered and made to sound unclean.

Her only thought as she’d driven out of the town that lay at the foot of the Gloucestershire hills had been to go where she could use her medical skills to benefit the sick and suffering of somewhere like Africa and start a new life as far away as she could get.

Until then they had been contained in the role of a junior doctor in a large practice in the place where she had been happy and content, but that night the urge to leave Glenminster had been overwhelming.

The last thing Emma had done before departing had been to drop a note off at the home of Lydia Forrester, the practice manager, to explain that she was about to do something she’d always wanted to do, work in Africa for one of the medical agencies, and that had been it without further explanation.

Time spent out there had been a lot of things, fulfilling, enlightening, exhausting and lonely. If she stayed and went back to work in the practice that she’d known so well in the busy town centre, would the memory of that night come crowding back, she asked herself, or would it be like balm to her soul to be back where she belonged and lonely no more?

Yet was that likely to be the case in the house where it had happened and which was just a short distance from the surgery where her stepfather had been senior doctor?

Emma had joined the staff there as soon as she’d got her degree in medicine and had been carefree and happy until that awful day. The job had absorbed her working hours and mixing happily with her own age group in her free time had made up for the atmosphere at home, where there had just been Jeremy Chalmers and herself, living in separate vacuums most of the time.

She’d lost her gentle, caring mother too soon and had been left with only him as family—a bridge-playing golf fanatic in his free time, and at the surgery a popular GP with an eye for the opposite sex. He had proved how much on the night when he’d told her that she was going to have to move out, find herself somewhere to stay, as he was getting married again and his new wife wouldn’t want her around.

‘Fine,’ she’d told him, quite happy to find a place of her own to settle in, but the way he’d said so uncaringly that he was going to replace her mother and that she was in the way had rankled and she’d said, ‘I am your daughter, you know!’

He’d been to the golf club and had told her thickly, ‘That is where you’re wrong. I married your mother to give her respectability and you a father figure. You’re not mine.’

‘What?’ she’d cried in disbelief. ‘I don’t believe you?’

‘You have to. You’ve no choice,’ he’d said, and added, turning the knife even more as he’d begun to climb the stairs, ‘She never told me who your father was, so you can’t go running to him.’

As the door swung back on its hinges at last, reality took over from the pain-filled past. Nothing had changed, Emma thought as she went from room to room. There had been no modernisation of any kind.

The new bride must have been easy to please. So where was she now that her father had died from a heart attack on the golf course? It was all very strange. Had the widow moved out at the thought of a new owner appearing?

It would be time to be concerned about that when she’d spoken to the person who had taken over the running of the practice after her father’s death. The absence of the new woman who had been in his life could be shelved until she, Emma, had been brought up to date with the present situation there.

But first, before anything else, there was the matter of arranging a suitable farewell for the man she’d thought, for most of her life, was her father. Jeremy had been well known in the town and there would be many wanting to show their respects.

The first she had heard about his death had been a month after the event, when the organisation she was working for had contacted her in a remote region of Africa to inform her of it and had explained that back in the UK her presence was required to organise the funeral as she was his only heir and would need to be the executor of his will.

It was a chilly afternoon, winter was about to take over from a mellow autumn, and having become accustomed to tropical heat Emma was grateful to discover that it was warm inside the house with the old-fashioned radiators giving out welcome heat.

Once her unpacking was finished hunger began to gnaw at her and when she looked in the refrigerator she found it was stocked with the kind of food that had become just a memory while working in the heat and dust of Africa.

It was a comforting moment. Someone had been incredibly thoughtful and had pre-empted her needs on arriving back home in such sad and gloomy circumstances, yet who had it been? There had been no evidence of anyone living there as she’d unpacked her clothes.

It was a Friday, and once she’d been to the law firm the following morning the weekend was going to be a long and empty affair until she’d got her bearings. With that thought in mind she wrapped up warmly, which wasn’t the easiest of things to do as all her clothes were for a hotter climate, and decided to walk the short distance to the practice in the town centre before it closed to see if there was anyone left on the staff that she knew.

The darkness of a winter night was all around Emma by the time she got there and the surgery was closed with just an illuminated notice board by the doorway to inform the public what the opening hours were and what numbers to ring in an emergency.

As she turned away, about to retrace her steps, a car door slammed shut nearby and in the light of a streetlamp and the glare coming from the windows of a couple of shops that were still open she saw a man in a dark overcoat with keys in his hand walking towards the practice door with long strides.

On seeing her, he stopped and said briskly, ‘The surgery is closed, as you can see. It will be open again at eight-thirty tomorrow morning and will close at twelve, it being Saturday. So can I help you at all?’

‘Er, no, thank you, I’m fine,’ she told him, taken aback by his manner and sudden appearance.

‘Good. I haven’t a lot of time to spare,’ he explained. ‘I just came back to pick up some paperwork, and after that have to be ready at any time to welcome back the prodigal daughter of our late head of the practice, which is a bind as I have a meal to organise when I get in.’

Emma was observing him wide-eyed. He was no one she recognised from the time when she’d been on the staff there and she thought he was in for a surprise.

‘I have no idea who you are,’ she told him, ‘but obviously you’re connected with the practice, so maybe I can save you one of the chores that you’ve just described. My name is Emma Chalmers. Does it ring a bell? I’ve returned to Glenminster to take possession of the property that my … er … father has left me and to find occupation as a doctor should I decide to stay.’

As he observed her, slack-jawed with surprise, she turned and began to walk back the way she’d come.

It was nine o’clock when the doorbell rang and Emma went to open the door cautiously because her knowledge of neighbours or local people was scant after her absence, so she slipped the safety chain into position before fully opening the door to her caller.