Chapter 12
12
They reached the bar, which was crammed with thirsty revellers. As they edged their way to the counter, Carole shoved thoughts of Steven Weaver from her mind. She was determined to get on with enjoying this wedding reception. Now that she’d exchanged a few words with Steven, such as they were, and listened to him prattling on about himself, hopefully he’d leave her alone for the rest of the night.
“What can I get you to drink?” Carole asked Tom.
“Just a lemonade, thanks.”
Carole joined Tom in ordering the same thing. She’d had her fill of prosecco and wine, and a bit of rehydration was in order.
The next hour flew by. There was more dancing and chatter with the other guests, and then it was time for the evening buffet while the band took a break. The bride and groom cut the wedding cake to much cheering. Once everyone had topped up on food and much needed tea and coffee, the band reappeared and the dancing started again.
Tom twirled her around the dance floor, and made her laugh when her nieces appeared and insisted he perform the dance moves they’d taught him earlier. Carole enjoyed the looks on her nieces’ faces as Tom larked around for their amusement and sent them into fits of giggles by pretending to throw his back out thanks to the ludicrous routine. By the time they raced off to rejoin the other flower girls and hatch further rhythmic torture to inflict on other unsuspecting adults, Carole was helpless with laughter.
And then he made her swoon a little when he took her in his arms and danced to a sweet love song with her.
She knew he only did it because it would’ve been weird to suddenly stop dancing just because the band were playing a slow dance, but that didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy it.
In fact, she enjoyed it rather a lot.
“This is fun,” Carole said as Tom twirled her before pulling her back into his arms. “You know some decent moves.”
“Not according to your nieces,” he grinned. “They said that as far as the Grotty Grot dance is concerned, I’m hopeless.”
“The Grotty Grot dance? What on earth is that?”
“That’s the name of the dance they just made me perform. Didn’t you hear them calling it that while they were shouting instructions at me?”
“Sorry, I was too busy laughing.”
“Glad I could keep you entertained. I think they made up the whole thing just to torture me.”
Carole laughed again, amused by her evil little nieces and by Tom’s patient indulgence of the pair. Slowly, they shimmied across the dance floor to the love song. It was nice being in Tom’s arms, just dancing and enjoying herself.
She looked into his eyes, saw the humour twinkling there, and saw too the softness in his gaze as he held her close. The lovely moment, the ease of it, made her heart do a mad little flip inside her chest.
Tom really was an incredibly handsome man, Carole thought as she smiled at him. And he really knew how to wear that gorgeous suit…
Sudden movement on the other side of the room caught her eye. In one awful flash that lasted no more than a few seconds, Carole watched a sequence of events unfold that left her gasping in dismay.
Steven Weaver stood at the edge of the dance floor, swaying not to the music but on account of his drunkenness. Jilly stood beside him and the two were quite obviously exchanging harsh words as she tried to take the wine glass from him.
Steven whipped the wine glass out of her reach, but the jerky motion sent the contents of the glass sloshing over the rim. An arc of red wine shot through the air and splashed onto a woman who was dancing right beside him. She let out a shriek when the red wine hit her pale gold dress, ruining it instantly.
Realising what he’d done, Steven lurched forward, arms waving, already mumbling a drunken reply.
Which is when he tripped and stumbled and fell hard.
Luckily for Steven Weaver, there was someone there to break his fall.
Unfortunately, that person was Carole’s father, Frederick.
With Steven barrelling into him from behind, Frederick didn’t stand a chance of avoiding the collision. The full weight of the drunken man hit him in the back and sent him crashing to the floor.
Carole watched in horror as the scene played out in ugly, jerky flashes. The whole thing only took about four or five seconds, but as she shrieked at the sight of her poor father falling hard to the floor, Carole felt like it was happening in grim slow motion.
Steven let out a grunt as he landed on Frederick, and Frederick, pinned beneath him, in turn let out a howl that turned Carole’s blood to ice in her veins.
She sprinted to where the men lay tangled on the floor, with Tom running alongside her.
The drama of the collision and fall scattered the nearby dancers who were lucky enough to realise what was happening and jump out of the way before they, too, were felled. As Carole rushed to where her father lay on the floor, the music stopped playing and people began to press forward to offer help.
“Oops, sorry old fella,” Steven said, rolling off Frederick and attempting to get up. “Tripped over my own feet.”
He let out a drunken laugh, as if it was just one of those things, but as Carole got down on her knees to help her father who was still lying flat on his front, she realised this was serious.
Frederick’s face was contorted in pain and blood was seeping from the side of his head that had hit the wooden floor with a thud.
“Dad!” Carole shouted, alarm making her heart rate spike. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
Still lying on the floor, her father looked dazed. Carole’s mother appeared beside them along with Carole’s sister, their expressions panicked as they too saw the blood dribbling down Frederick’s head.
“Freddie!” Nina said. “You’re bleeding! What on earth happened?”
“I fell over,” Frederick mumbled.
“You didn’t fall,” Carole said and threw an angry look at Steven, who’d now made it to his feet. “You were pushed by that idiot there.”
Steven swayed a little and looked at the man he’d knocked to the floor, his expression baffled and embarrassed as the surrounding guests stared at him.
Frederick shifted in an attempt to sit up. The instant he moved, he let out another howl of pain.
“Oh God!” Nina said, reaching out to him. “Don’t move, Freddie! You’ve got a head injury!”
“It’s not my head that’s the problem,” Frederick said, wincing as he rolled from his front and onto his side. “It’s my arm. I think… I think it might be broken.”
Carole looked at her father’s left arm, which he was now holding gingerly against his body, and saw the unnatural angle his wrist hung at. She gasped at the sight of it, and she wasn’t the only one shocked by the injury.
Her first aid training kicked in. Working as an NHS mental health counsellor kept her one remove away from many of the physical conditions her patients might suffer from, but she valued the ability to render aid in an emergency and kept her basic skills up to date.
Staying calm in the face of unexpected injuries was important, and never more so than when the patient was your own father.
“Dad, do you think you can stand up if we help you?” she asked.
Frederick closed his eyes and nodded. “Yes, it’s just my arm that’s sore. I think my legs are fine.”
“Okay, let’s get you up off this floor, Dad. We’ll brace you until you’re upright and then we’ll sit you in a chair.”
Without needing any instruction, Tom shifted to Frederick’s other side. Jane hurried off the dance floor and returned with a chair from a nearby table. Nina, still crouched beside her husband, wiped at the blood on his head wound with a paper hanky. The other wedding guests around them stepped back to create some space, a few of them lingering in case their help was needed once Frederick began to stand up.
“Give me a second, love,” Frederick said. “Let me catch my breath before I try to get up.”
Carole listened to her father’s ragged wheezing. The fall had literally knocked the wind out of him. She was only vaguely aware of what was going on around her as she focused on her dad.
The hotel staff arrived on the scene along with a manager, ready to help. Steven Weaver was led away by Jilly, even as he protested that he hadn’t meant any harm. A nearby guest instructed someone to fetch brandy from the bar to help the accident victim deal with the shock.
She was both aware and unaware of all this activity taking place around her. But it was the sound of sobbing on her left that made Carole look up from her father.
On the edge of the dance floor, she saw her two little nieces, Nancy and Lily, ashen-faced and crying as they stood with their father, his arms around them.
“Is Grandpa okay?” Lily sobbed.
“He’s fine, sweet pea,” James replied. “He just bumped his head and is feeling a bit dizzy, but he’ll be fine.”
“I want to cuddle him and help him get better,” Nancy said in a hitched voice.
“You can cuddle him in a minute once he’s up on his feet.”
Frederick must have heard this exchange between his granddaughters because he drew in a long breath and turned in their direction.
“I’m fine, girls, don’t you worry about me,” he said, his voice shaken but determined. “Your Auntie Carole and her friend Tom are going to help me get up on my feet and then I’ll be as right as rain, won’t I Carole?”
“Of course he will,” Carole said, throwing her nieces a wink of reassurance. “But I bet your grandpa will want a nice cold drink once we get up him on his feet. Why don’t you two girls go with your daddy and fetch that for him? That would be a really big help.”
Carole was grateful when James caught her drift and steered the girls away from the dance floor and towards the bar. The last thing she wanted was them seeing their beloved grandfather wincing in pain as they hauled him upright—or worse, falling over again if it turned out he’d also sustained an injury to his legs or feet that he hadn’t yet registered.
“Okay, let’s do this on my count, okay?” Carole said. “Tom, are you ready?”
Tom placed his arms around Frederick’s waist, bracing him for the move. “I’m ready.”
“Dad, are you ready?”
Her father nodded.
“Okay, one, two, three .”
With Carole and Tom’s help, Frederick launched himself to his feet with a grunt of pain and then sank into the chair that was waiting for him. Nina continued dabbing at his bleeding head wound while Carole looked in dismay at his wrist.
“I think we need to get you to a hospital, Dad,” she said.
Frederick nodded, now looking more annoyed than disoriented. “I think you’re right. I’m sure it’s broken.”
“I’ll phone for an ambulance,” Jane said, already on her phone.
“I think this cut is superficial,” Nina said, accepting a handful of fresh tissues from a member of staff to apply to Frederick’s head wound. “But it is bleeding badly.”
“Do you feel sick or woozy, Dad?”
“Not sick, no. I do feel dizzy. though. But that’s just to be expected after what happened.”
“We’re here to help however we can,” said the hotel manager, or supervisor, or whoever he was.
“The emergency operator says it will be at least an hour before they can get an ambulance to us,” Jane said with dismay, tilting the phone away from her mouth while she spoke to Carole.
“I’ll drive us there,” Tom said.
“No, son, I don’t want your night being wasted,” Frederick said, a grimace on his face. “We can phone a taxi to take us to the hospital, can’t we Nina?”
“Me driving you there is the quickest option,” Tom said. “I haven’t had anything to drink and my car’s parked right outside. It’s a Saturday night and there’s no telling how long it might take for a taxi to get here.”
“They can take a while to arrive, I’m afraid,” the hotel manager said. “Out here in this rural area, they don’t just turn up straight away on demand.”
“That settles it,” Tom said. “Carole, why don’t you grab our jackets from the cloakroom and I’ll bring the car round to the front doors.”
Carole threw him a grateful look, relieved that they’d be able to get her father to the hospital so quickly. “Thank you, Tom.”
He smiled and then turned to Nina and Jane. “Are you two okay helping Frederick out to the exits?”
“I can walk just fine,” Frederick said.
“Because you hit your head, we’d prefer you to use this,” the hotel manager said, pointing to a collapsible wheelchair another member of staff was already steering in their direction. “It’s a relatively long walk from this part of the hotel to the main exit, and this will make it easier for you, sir.”
Her father seemed about to protest that he didn’t need a wheelchair, but a sharp look from Nina silenced him. Carole left Jane and her mother to accompany her father to the doors while she went to fetch everyone’s jackets and other belongings.
As her father was wheeled out of the function room, she saw her father kiss his granddaughters goodbye and reassure them that he was just fine and would see them later.
“We’ll take the girls home,” Jane told Carole in the hotel lobby. “If Dad needs anything brought from the house once he’s at the hospital, I can drive to Hamblehurst and pick it up.”
“Thanks,” Carole said, giving her sister a quick hug. “I’ll let you know once we get there.”
Outside, Tom was opening the car door and helping Frederick into the passenger seat. While Nina dealt with the seat belt, Carole climbed into the back. Once Nina joined her, Tom turned to Frederick.
“Okay?”
“As good as can be expected. Thank you for helping like this, Tom.”
“Don’t mention it. We weren’t about to leave you in pain and waiting for a taxi or an ambulance when we could just drive you to the hospital ourselves.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Frederick said. “Falling over like some old fart.”
“You didn’t fall over, Dad,” Carole insisted. “That idiot, Steven Weaver, knocked you down.”
“I never liked that man,” Frederick scowled. “He’s a damn nuisance.”
You can say that again , Carole thought as Tom sped out of the hotel grounds and into the darkness of the surrounding countryside. She might have spent the last week worrying about what might happen when she saw Steven again after all this time, but she never would’ve imagined it would be this .
An emergency dash to A&E with her father on account of Steven’s drunken, clumsy stupidity.
Tom caught her gaze in the rearview mirror and gave her an encouraging smile. Thank goodness he was here, racing to the rescue and driving her poor father to the hospital for treatment.
If there were medals for being a wedding wingman, Tom had just won gold.