Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle Read Online Free Page A

where doctors are still desperately needed. I’ve been working in an inner-city practice where patients are a mix of trendy twenties, urban aboriginals, homeless youths, prostitutes, Asian migrants and long-term street people. Probably not unlike this area you work in, although, from the article I read, most of your patients are the indigenous Toba people, so you don’t get the same mix.’
    Pleased with herself for answering as if the tension in the air between them wasn’t twisting her intestines into knots, she kept going. Talking was better than thinking. Unfortunately for this plan, Ella chose that moment to knock over a second pile of books.
    ‘Oh, blast,’ Caroline said as she hurried towards the mess, but Jorge was there before her. ‘I really should control my daughter better.’
    The words were no sooner out than she realised how stupid they had been.
    ‘Our daughter,’ she amended, but knew it was too late. She was kneeling now, directly in front of him, looking into Jorge’s deep brown eyes, eyes she’d once fallen right into and drowned in, losing her heart, soul and body to the man who owned them.
    And because she was looking, she saw the pain, readit as clearly as words written in white chalk on a black background.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, though for what she wasn’t certain.
    For the lost years?
    For him not knowing he had a daughter?
    For hurting him by not showing enough love that he could have depended on it four years ago, depended on it enough not to have written that email?
    Though surely pride had written that email—his pride, not her lack of love.
    She didn’t know.
    He stood up without a word, walking back to the kitchen where the
mate
sat on the small kitchen table. Leaving Ella to restack the books, Caroline followed him, picking up the gourd and taking another sip, trying to get back to polite conversation because anything else was too painful.
    ‘It must be an acquired taste,’ she said, handing the gourd over to him and hoping he’d think she’d been considering
mate,
not love and the pain it caused as she’d sipped. ‘And obviously very popular! We saw people drinking it everywhere—walking along the street in the city, even waiting at bus stops.’
    ‘It is a custom not only in Argentina but all over South America.’
    Caroline smiled but she knew it was a sad effort, memories of the past hammering in her head as they both tried gamely to keep the stupid conversation going.
    ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ she said quietly, ‘that we who talked about everything under the sun should be reduced totourist-talk? But now that Ella has found her land legs after the journey, perhaps it is time for you to meet her properly.’
    She turned, calling to her daughter, who’d selected a book with a red cover, settled herself into a tattered armchair and was reading herself a story from it. As it was almost certainly in Spanish and quite possibly a lurid medical text, Caroline wondered what Ella would choose to make of it. At the moment she was hooked on
The Three Robbers,
which also had a red cover, so possibly that was the story she was telling herself.
    ‘Ella!’
    The little girl looked up from the book as Caroline said her name.
    ‘Come over here and meet Jorge properly.’
    Caroline pronounced his name as best she could, although she’d never fully mastered the deep-throated ‘h’ sound that was more like an x than the English pronunciation of
g.
    Ella came to stand beside her, her lips moving so Caroline knew she was trying out the name.
    ‘Hor-hay?’ she queried, and to Caroline’s surprise Jorge knelt in front of her and politely shook her hand.
    ‘It is a hard name for you to say,’ he told her. ‘Perhaps before long we can find something else for you to call me, something easier.’
    ‘My
name is easy,’ Ella, ever confident, ever up for a chat, told him. ‘It was my grandma’s name—the grandma I didn’t know. I knew my other grandma but I don’t