Summer Seaside Wedding Read Online Free Page B

exhaustion of yesterday,’ and as he made no move to take the hint, she said, ‘Goodnight to you, Dr Fenchurch.’
    He nodded. ‘Goodnight to you too, Amelie.’ At which she opened the door and disappeared from sight and he drove back to where Georgina and the others were waiting.
    ‘So who was the woman?’ someone asked jokingly.
    He sighed and surprised them by saying, ‘Her name is Amelie Benoir. She’s the French doctor who is joining the practice for a few months. I only met her yesterdayand I’m concerned that she is on her own in a strange place where she knows no one except me because Harry asked me to go to the airport to meet her last night. Does that satisfy your curiosity?’ he questioned mildly.
    ‘Yes,’ the joker said laughingly, ‘and we’ll all be sure to ask for Dr Benoir when we’re sick.’
    As he listened to the friendly banter Amelie’s face came to mind, framed by a glossy black bob, with a snub nose and wide mouth. So anyone who wanted glamour and the trappings that went with it would need to look in Georgina’s direction.
    It was hard to imagine anyone not being keen to marry the boutique owner except himself, and if anyone should ever ask him why, the answer would be that he couldn’t see her as the mother of any children he might have.
    In what seemed like another life he’d wanted Delphine, sweet and bubbly, to give him young ones when the time came, but it hadn’t worked out that way.
    They’d met at college, where so many romances began, and had known from the start they’d wanted to be together for always, but his love for her had been rent with an anguish that had ended in despair when she’d been rushed into hospital with a serious undetected heart problem and it had been too late to save her.
    The pain he’d felt then had set the pattern for the years to come. It had been something that he never wanted to have to go through again. He was pursued all the time by women and laughed and joked withthem, sometimes had the odd fling, but that was it. None of them could bring the kind of joy to his life that Delphine had.
     
    When Amelie had told him that she was all right, it had been partly to reassure him and also because his kindness and concern on her behalf had helped to turn what could have been a ghastly day into a bearable one, and now she was determined that she wasn’t going to lie sleepless and fretting about what might have been.
    Antoine Lamont had been a junior doctor at the same hospital as herself. When he’d started paying attention to her she’d thought that the quiet, low-key guy, who had often been on the same shift as herself, had seen her as the right kind for him because she was as average as he was.
    Gradually they’d drifted into an engagement with the promise of a white wedding on the very day she’d arrived in Devon with her heart set on a new life far away from the hurts of the previous one.
    Her surmise that Antoine had chosen her because she had been the least demanding and overpowering of some of the women he’d known had been shattered when she’d called at his apartment unexpectedly one night in the hospital grounds and found him in bed with one of the nurses, a brassy, auburn-haired creature who was anything but average when it came to looks and curves.
    It had been the end of her dream of contentment with a man she could love and trust and the beginning of pain and loneliness because of the deceit of it.
    He’d tried to make amends, pleading that it had just been a one-off with the nurse, but she hadn’t wanted to hear his pleas and subsequently Antoine and the girl he’d been in bed with had left the hospital together, leaving her to face the pitying looks of others as best she could.
    Yet deep down Amelie thought she might have had a lucky escape and accepted that maybe she’d been more in love with the idea of getting married than with the man in question. But as she lay beneath the covers in the master bedroom of the big house