Spring Proposal in Swallowbrook by Abigail Gordon

peace of mind. If Hugo discovered she was attracted to him, as he would if she didn’t conceal it, he really would want to stay clear of her in all but their time at the surgery.
    They were at the house. He waited until she’d unlocked the door of the apartment and was about to enter and said, ‘Promise me there will be no more tears, Ruby.’ She nodded mutely. ‘Perhaps some time you’ll tell me the real reason why you were so upset.’
    ‘Maybe,’ she said in a low voice, knowing that wasn’t going to happen. Her nearest and dearest were the only ones who knew the answer to that.
    ‘It surely can’t have been because I was reluctant to walk beside the lake,’ he persisted.
    There was no reply to that, so she just wished him a brief goodnight and went inside, but not to sleep. The thought uppermost in her mind as she lay gazing up at the ceiling was that she’d come to Swallowbrook to realise a dream and it had come true, but what she hadn’t come prepared for was that a man like Hugo Lawrence would be featuring largely in her new life.
    She’d had dates with some of the guys at medical college, but they’d all been light-hearted affairs without any commitments, none of them had made her blood warm, or caused her to take a good look at what a quirk of nature had done to her, except one.
    Having been out with Darren Fielding a few times she’d sensed that he had been getting serious and as she’d liked him well enough had decided that he needed to know about her problem before their relationship progressed any further.
    What she’d felt was going to be a difficult moment had been made easier when they’d attended a lecture where amongst various subjects discussed had been haemophilia, with its disastrous effects on both sexes when the illness was present.
    When the two of them had gone for a coffee afterwards she’d told Darren that Robbie, her young brother, was a haemophiliac. He’d observed her thoughtfully and then as quick as a flash had wanted to know, ‘And where do you fit in with that, Ruby?’
    ‘Having just been to the lecture, where do you think?’ she’d said woodenly. ‘I’m a carrier of it,’ and had watched him swallow hard as his glance had slid away from hers.
    In the days that had followed she’d got the message. There had been no more dates or sitting together at lectures. He had avoided her big time and it had made living with the knowledge of what nature had burdened her with harder to cope with than it had been already as she’d realised that bringing her problem out into the open in front of a man who cared for her could result in him running a mile to escape a situation that he hadn’t bargained for.
    Now she’d met Hugo, a man who under any other circumstances she might have been attracted to, but she was too afraid to enter into any serious relationship. The thought of being rejected again too much to bear.
    Common sense said that she should put her Swallowbrook dream to one side and go home, look for a position there away from the effect that he was having on her, but she couldn’t bear to do that. It was here that she belonged, working in the practice with the lake and the fells close by.
    She was making a big thing out of nothing, she decided as dawn began to lighten the sky. It wasn’t as if Hugo was attracted to her in any sense of the word. They’d only known each other a short time and for most of it he had been on his guard.
    If and when he found himself a ‘nice’ wife, as Libby and Nathan were hoping he might, it went without saying that it wouldn’t be a penniless junior doctor with very average attractions and a tight band of hurt around her heart that wasn’t ever going to go away.
    Determined to take back control of her life and focus on the reality of why she’d come back to Swallowbrook, the very next morning Ruby phoned the garage where her car was being repaired and was told they were waiting for parts, that it could be another couple of