Chapter 6 #2
Lady Dorothy was still staring out to sea, totally unaware of his presence.
The lights were on but nobody was home and Oliver knew exactly what was happening.
He didn’t have to touch her skin to feel how clammy and cold it was.
Or to pick up her wrist to feel the rapid pulse.
His mother’s blood sugar was dangerously low and she was only seconds away from losing consciousness completely.
And she was standing outside. By herself.
With a speed and control fuelled by fury, Oliver picked his mother up in his arms as if she weighed nothing and strode back into the house. Through the conservatory and back towards the kitchen, almost colliding with Bella as she came flying down the staircase.
‘Oh, my God,’ she gasped, the colour draining from her face. ‘What’s happened?’
Oliver kept going without saying a word, aware of Bella following because he could hear her breath hitch in a half-sob.
Carefully, he put his mother down on a chair beside the kitchen table, pausing for a moment to check that she was still conscious enough to remain upright.
Bella crouched beside the chair, her arms outstretched to offer support.
Lady Dorothy sat there in her robot-like state, apparently unaware of Bella’s horrified face even though she was staring straight at her nurse.
‘What’s happened,’ Oliver finally snapped as he headed for the fridge, ‘is that you left my mother alone, outside, to have a hypoglycaemic attack.’ He wrenched the fridge door open and jerked out the drawer that held the insulin supplies.
Amongst all the preloaded syringes were some clear plastic sachets.
He was ripping one open as he turned back to his mother.
‘I’d only been gone for a couple of minutes.’ Bella’s voice was strained, her face as pale as his mother’s was. ‘Lady Dorothy thought of somewhere else her necklace might be and she said I had to go and look right now in case she forgot later…’
Oliver ignored the flow of words that were obviously supposed to be excusing the inexcusable.
He was rubbing the glucose gel from the sachet across his mother’s gums and over her tongue.
She could still swallow safely, thank goodness, but if it was necessary, he had the supplies available to administer intravenous glucose.
His anger hadn’t faded at all yet.
‘I have a job I have to go to, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ he told Bella. ‘I can’t be in two places at once so, unless I give up my position at St Patrick’s, I can’t take total responsibility for my mother’s health care. That’s what you were employed for and I thought you could be trusted.’
Bella wasn’t saying anything. Oliver ignored the tiny sniffle he heard. Why did women seem to think that crying was going to fix anything? He glanced at his watch. If the glucose gel was going to work, it should be starting to have an effect by now.
He would call an ambulance if he had to, of course, but remembering how upset his mother had been the last time such a fuss had been made, it would be preferable to avoid such drastic measures.
And the glucose she was rapidly absorbing through her mucous membranes seemed to be working finally. He could feel the tone returning to her sagging body and saw her blinking her eyes.
‘Oh… my…’ Lady Dorothy’s voice sounded surprisingly strong. ‘Where am I?’
‘In the kitchen,’ Oliver said. ‘You had a hypo, Mum.’
‘Oh, dear. I’m sorry, darling.’
‘There’s no need for you to be sorry,’ Oliver growled. ‘It was hardly your fault.’
* * *
It was her fault.
Bella didn’t need Oliver’s barbed, indirect comment to hammer the guilt home.
She couldn’t look at him either because she didn’t want to see the look that told her how hopeless he thought she was.
‘I’ll go and get the glucometer,’ she muttered, scrambling to her feet. They would need to check Lady Dorothy’s blood-sugar level to be sure that whatever measures they were taking now were effective enough to ensure that her patient didn’t lapse into a coma later tonight.
And die in her sleep.
No wonder Oliver was so furious with her.
How stupid had it been to follow directions that had left Lady Dorothy on her own straight after an insulin injection?
There were all sorts of reasons why a reaction could be stronger or more rapid than usual, and the control of Lady Dorothy’s diabetes had been noticeably more fragile since she’d become ill.
If she’d been there, she might have heard the elderly woman’s speech become slurred or noticed that her behaviour was unusual.
Or seen the sheen of perspiration on pale skin.
Noticing that kind of change was precisely why Lady Dorothy needed a nurse with her and not just a companion who could encourage her to do her exercises and keep her spirits up while she coped with the aftermath of the episode of acute rheumatoid arthritis.
Even Kate had been annoyed with her that morning. Virtually accused her of being unable to focus. Scatterbrained. Always losing things.
Oliver was making a cheese sandwich for his mother by the time she got back to the kitchen. Lady Dorothy had clearly recovered. ‘It was my own fault,’ she was saying to her son. ‘I sent Bella away to look for my necklace.’
‘What necklace?’
‘The lovely garnet one, you know? You found it in a junk shop when you were about ten and gave it to me for my birthday.’
Bella cringed inwardly as she peeled open the foil packet containing a test strip and then fished a lancet from the kit. So the necklace had been a gift from Oliver? A sentimental treasure?
Her day was just going from bad to worse. She twisted the tiny plastic square from the base to expose the hidden pin of the lancet.
‘Sorry, Lady Dorothy,’ she murmured, reaching for a hand that still had painfully swollen joints. ‘Small prick coming.’
The fact that the reading was already within a normal range failed to lift Bella’s spirits.
‘I’ll have my dinner and then a bath,’ Lady Dorothy declared. ‘And then I’m going to watch all the episodes of Coronation Street that I’ve missed this week. You can have the night off, Bella. I’m sorry to have given you a fright, dear.’
Bella didn’t meet the glare she could feel coming from Oliver’s direction. ‘I’ll have to check your BGL every so often,’ she said apologetically, ‘but I’ll try not to disturb you if you want an evening to yourself.’
‘I do,’ Lady Dorothy said firmly. ‘I’m embarrassed that this happened. It won’t happen again, I promise. Can I have my dinner now, please, Bella?’
‘Of course.’
‘Will you join me, Oliver?’
‘I’ll have to eat later, at the gala,’ he said. ‘And I’d like to get a workout in but I’m all yours for a while, Mother. Remind me who I need to be polite to tonight.’
Bella served dinner in the dining room but left Oliver alone with his mother.
She wasn’t hungry herself and she certainly didn’t want to hang around.
She ran a bath for Lady Dorothy and made sure the recorded episodes of her favourite television programme were ready for her in her private sitting room.
She checked Lady Dorothy’s blood-sugar level again, ignoring the elderly woman’s impatience with the procedure.
‘I’ll be back to do it again in an hour,’ she warned.
Bella went to her own room, but it felt like a prison. What was she doing here when she couldn’t even do her job properly? When she couldn’t even look after her patient’s precious, sentimental piece of jewellery?
With nothing better to do and a determination to put at least one thing right today, Bella set off, tracing every single footstep she’d taken on the day the necklace had gone missing.
A path that led, inevitably, to the gymnasium with its swimming and spa pools.
It was just after 8 p.m. and the last rays of a blood-red sunset were bathing the gymnasium in a glow that needed no artificial enhancement.
Bella hadn’t expected the area to still be in use.
Okay, Oliver had said something about needing a workout before he went off to some glitzy function but that had been hours ago.
Surely he’d had time to get himself exercised and cleaned up and drive off to meet up with whoever the woman was that she’d overheard Oliver mention when she’d been serving dinner?
Monique. The name sounded as posh as the charity ball or whatever it was.
He’d ‘arranged a suitable partner’, Oliver had been telling his mother in response to an unheard query.
He’d said it with a finality that had seemed like yet another rebuke in Bella’s day.
As if she might have been thinking he could have asked her.
As if!
Bella was on a different planet as far as the social circle the Dawsons moved in was concerned.
Right now she could feel the space between herself and Oliver as clearly as if there was a solid glass panel in place.
Maybe that was why she didn’t run away when she saw that Oliver was still using the exercise machines in the gym.
It felt safe to stop for a moment and stare through the invisible window.
He was wearing nothing more than boxer shorts, his back to where Bella stood, in the middle of a routine that involved holding a free weight in each hand.
He was doing squats and lunges and arm raises that made the muscles all over his body bulge and ripple and the sheen of sweat shine in the sunset glow from outside.
Bella was transfixed.
She had never, ever seen a more glorious specimen of a male body.
The strength in those muscles. The control of the hold in positions that had to be painful.
The elegant grace with which he moved from one position to another.
The attraction was enough to make Bella’s knees feel weak.
She actually leaned against the doorframe as desire like none she had ever experienced stole through her body.
She knew she shouldn’t be doing this but couldn’t help herself.