Fling with Her Hot-Shot Consultant
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Kate Hardy
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PROLOGUE
GEORGIE HAD BEEN secretly haunting the website for a week now.
Job swap.
The idea was that you’d swap your job and your house with a stranger for six months. Various health trusts across the country had signed up to the initiative, so all you had to do was find a match. Someone who did the same job as you; someone who maybe wanted some experience in a different place to enrich their working life.
Was it running away? Or was it just what she needed to give her a fresh start?
It wouldn’t be without complications. She’d be letting Joshua down, for a start. Her elder brother was a single dad who relied on her for help with childcare for his daughter Hannah—and Georgie loved her brother and her niece dearly. She didn’t want to let them down.
But over the last year London had become more and more of a prison; and she was oh, so tired of being seen as Poor Georgie, widowed at twenty-nine and being so brave about carrying on. Poor Georgie, who hero husband Charlie had been part of a team of emergency doctors helping after an earthquake and had been killed trying to save someone.
Poor, poor Georgie...
If only everyone knew the truth about Charlie. But how she could shatter everyone’s illusions? His family and friends didn’t deserve that. The way she saw it, they should be able to mourn the man they’d loved without seeing the side he’d kept hidden. Which meant she had to keep his secrets. So far, she’d managed it, because in a weird sort of way keeping that secret was protecting her, too; but she was getting to the point where she felt as if she’d explode if she didn’t get away from all the memories and the pity.
So today she’d look at the website again to see if there was a match. If there wasn’t a suitable match for her, she would take it as a sign to stay exactly where she was and stop being so pathetic and just get on with things. If there was a match, then it was a sign she should leave.
Location.
That meant hers: west London.
Position.
So far, so good: paediatric registrar.
Desired location.
That was harder. ‘Anywhere’ meant just that. And, even though she wanted to get out of London, she didn’t want to go somewhere really remote. Not, she supposed, that there were that many remote hospitals. That field was probably meant for the GPs—ones who maybe wanted to swap an isolated rural practice to gain experience in the fast pace of a city practice; or maybe those who were burned out by inner-city medicine and craved a country idyll for a while.
Somewhere by the sea...
No. She could’ve run away to her parents’ at any time, but she hadn’t taken that option then and she wouldn’t take it now. This was the chance to make a fresh start. She shook herself and chose the ‘anywhere’ option.
Time frame.
That was an easy one. Now.
Then she clicked the ‘Find Your Match’ button.
The system thought about it. And thought some more.
Clearly there wasn’t a match, or perhaps the system was down. Georgie was about to give up and close the page when the screen changed.
One match found.
She clicked on her result. Edinburgh? She’d never been to Edinburgh.
All she really knew about the place was that it was the capital of Scotland and it had a castle, a very famous comedy festival and an amazing Hogmanay party.
One match. Meaning that this was fate giving her a little nudge to keep trying.
She clicked ‘connect’ and wrote a short email, doing her best to sell her job in London. And everything she wrote was true: the Royal Hampstead Free Hospital was a great place to work, her colleagues in the paediatric department were utterly lovely, and her comfortable flat in Canary Wharf with its balcony and fold-back doors overlooking the Thames was only a short walk from the Tube station.
Put like that, it would make anyone wonder why she wanted to leave. What wasn’t she telling? What was the catch in what looked like a perfect life?
The whole truth wasn’t something she wanted to tell anyone, let alone a complete stranger. ‘Personal reasons’ was too vague and likely to net her a rejection. So, instead, she stuck to a simplified version of the truth.
I was widowed almost a year ago and I feel I need a fresh start, away from the pity.
Pity that would be so much worse if people knew the truth. Charlie had been cheating on her with Trisha for months; his mistress, who had been killed in the landslide with him, had been pregnant at the time.
In Georgie’s view, nobody, but nobody, needed to know about Trisha and the baby.
She stared at the words for a while. And then she took a deep breath and pressed ‘send’.
It didn’t mean she was definitely going to leave. The other paediatric registrar might not want to live in this part of London, or might change his or her mind about doing the job swap. But she’d made the first move. If this didn’t work out, her next attempt would be easier. And then, for the first time since she’d learned the truth about her husband, Georgie could stop feeling as if she was weighed down by the whole world.
