Kiss Me on This Cold December Night by Charlotte Phillips Read Free Book Online Page B

sat down next to her and she looked out across the rink, the white fairy lights giving it a magical touch. Music from the band drifted across the ice.
    â€˜There you go,’ she said. ‘Isn’t this loads better than sit-up-straight napkin-in-your-lap fine dining? You can keep your Michelin stars.’
    Her eyes sparkled and the tip of her nose was pink. He wanted to kiss it.
    â€˜OK,’ he conceded. ‘Maybe it was. Maybe I’ve got a bit stuck in a rut of dinner in restaurants.’
    â€˜Is that what you’ve been up to then, since we last met? Fine dining and behaving responsibly?’
    The dullness of his life smacked him squarely between the eyes in the face of her vibrancy. He took a sip of his cider, the alcoholic kick of heat spreading in his abdomen.
    â€˜You want a potted history? I can give you that in the space of about a minute.’
    He could hear an edge of bitterness in his own voice and he curbed it, forced a neutral tone. Wasn’t that what he’d been doing for years now? Forcing himself to be neutral, not to feel aggrieved or resentful. He was duty-bound after all. Resentment of that was a pointless waste of time.
    â€˜After we met I finished my medical degree. Then I did a couple of years foundation training as a junior doctor.’ He paused. ‘Then training for general practice.’
    â€˜With your father?’ she said.
    He nodded. His had been a family strong on tradition, generations of doctors before him.
    â€˜That’s right.’
    â€˜He must be really proud of you, following in his footsteps like that.’
    There was a wistful edge to her tone that registered somewhere in his subconscious. He didn’t answer that. He wasn’t really sure pride came into it. He’d known his long-term career plans for so long that sometimes it felt like he’d been born with them. Any prospect of deviating from them might have been possible once, but not anymore. Not since his father’s stroke and the slow decline of his health.
    â€˜So you’ll be a GP in your home town. At your family practice?’
    â€˜That’s right.’
    â€˜You don’t sound so thrilled about that,’ she said. ‘I thought you wanted to work abroad. Weren’t you going to work as a medic in war-zones or poor areas or something?’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I got that mixed up, it was a long time ago.’
    A wistful pang stabbed him somewhere below the ribs and he jumped a little as it made him realise how resigned he was to letting go of that particular dream.
    â€˜That was just an idea I had back in college,’ he said dismissively. ‘It never came to anything. Things change. My priorities didn’t allow for it in the end.’
    And so he’d gone on to GP training instead of specialising elsewhere.
    â€˜Your priorities?’
    He shrugged.
    â€˜Family stuff,’ he said vaguely. ‘Would you like another drink?’
    â€˜What about girlfriends? she said, when he sat back down, her voice completely neutral as if she couldn’t care less. It gave him a surge of hope that she asked at all.
    â€˜No one special,’ he said.
    At first that had been down to the hard work and gruelling hours of his medical training. Later, when one relationship after another failed in its early stages, he had to admit that maybe there might be more to it than that. Accused of being distant, of not really investing himself fully in the relationship, in actuality his lack of interest hadn’t been conscious. Unfortunately the kind of woman who really spiked his interest was the kind who had little inclination to settle down to a by-rote predictable life. Unfortunate, because with his life mapped out the way it was, that kind of woman would surely be the perfect addition to the jigsaw.
    Had there been anyone since Ella, with her drive to have fun and live in the moment, who’d really rocked him? For the first time he