Seven Dials Read Online Free Page A

little restaurant I know in Soho where they actually manage to fry chicken the way it ought to be done, Southern style.’ And she’d look up at him with those considering narrow green eyes under those straight brows and after a moment she’d smile and say, ‘Of course - that would be lovely - ’
    But there his fantasy shivered and collapsed, and he smiled brightly at Sister as she handed him another chart, and tried tobanish Miss Charlotte Lucas and her disturbing effect on him from his mind in order to concentrate on the matter in hand. But it wasn’t easy. The senior registrar on the other surgical firm piqued him and fascinated him in equal measure and that was a heady combination, and the last thing he needed. He was quite susceptible enough to women without one who owned her upsetting qualities coming along to make matters more difficult for him.
    He did his rounds, punctiliously checking every detail in every patient’s notes, inspecting yesterday’s gastrectomy’s wound and drainage tubes, removing stitches with his own hands from the very difficult bilateral hernia he’d repaired last Friday and going over with Sister the treatment charts and medication lists for every one of his patients, for no one could ever complain that Mr Haversham Lackland was anything but the most careful of surgeons into whose hands any and every patient could safely be entrusted. He knew himself to be less than reliable in matters to do with his private life, but when it came to his work he was good and no one would ever be able to deny that.
    After he’d left the ward and was sitting in the shabby surgeon’s room in the main theatres, waiting for his first case of the day to be anaesthetized, he let his thoughts go back to Charlotte Lucas. Why was she able to creep into the interstices of his concentration so easily, disturbing his thinking, getting in the way of work? It wasn’t that she was so remarkably good looking, after all. A rather gawky girl in some ways, with a long lean body and a small neat head on which she wore her dark hair piled in a rather severe chignon. Her face was a long oval, with a thick pale skin that looked translucent in some lights and she had a full, slightly drooping mouth and a rounded chin that were far from obviously beautiful. Perhaps it was her eyes, those odd narrow green eyes which looked so oddly dramatic because their lower lashes were of the same length as the upper ones; a strange quirk, that, and one he wanted to look at a lot. Yes, he decided, it was her eyes that captured him. Or maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was that drooping mouth after all, which looked as though it could be a sensual one and -
    Damn it all, he thought furiously, there I go again, thinking about that wretched woman with her cool stares and her lookof scorn; why let her get under my skin this way when there’s that staff nurse on Casualty who’s shown me every way she knows how that she’s interested, and she’s a good five years younger than the Lucas madam. Why do I let her do this to me? I must be mad -
    In more ways than one. Why did he tomcat around this way with women at all, when there was Lee at home? Most of the senior men around Nellie’s deeply envied him his Lee; he knew that from the way they looked at her when she arrived at hospital functions, as she so often did these days now she was a Governor. And when he looked at her himself he knew why; she was a lovely woman, absolutely lovely, and as good as she looked too, warm and responsive and cheerful, a superb housekeeper - no man could be better cared for than he was - a loving and attentive mother, and a charming hostess. Yet Harry looked at other women, and often did more than look. He pursued, he wooed, and there were times when he won. More than one of Nellie’s student nurses had suddenly decided that she didn’t want to train after all, and had left in the middle of her second or even third year, unable to cope with seeing Harry around the