Melting the Argentine Doctor's Heart / Small Town Marriage Miracle by Meredith Webber / Jennifer Taylor Page A

glaring at her across the table, his dark eyes as hard as stones.
    ‘Of course,’ she agreed, hearing pain he’d probably never spoken of in his voice. ‘But unfortunately it’s the visible ones people react to. They don’t see the broken bits inside or the mess terrible injuries can cause in the way a patient thinks of himself. But it seems to me in just the few hours I’ve been here that you’ve risen above that—that you’ve rebuilt yourself the way you built this house, bit by bit.’
    Had she made too light of it that he pushed his plate away and walked out of the room, out of the back door of the hut?
    Should she follow him? Put her arms around him?
    Kiss the scarred skin and show him how little it meant to her?
    But if he didn’t love her—if his words had been the truth—how humiliating that would be for both of them, and she sensed he’d suffered enough humiliation already, enduring people’s stares and carelessly hurtful remarks.
    So much for pointing at the elephant!
    She ate her stew, which was extremely tasty, scraped his back into the saucepan and put the lid on it, then washed both plates. She found an earthenware pot, painted with broad white and black stripes, perhaps local pottery, and filled it with water from the container outside, sneaking looks into the darkness to see if Jorge was lurking somewhere.
    Lights were on in the clinic so presumably he was over there. Perhaps their patient had a fever. Perhaps he had to talk to the people he called wardens.
    Sighing with frustration—there was nothing she could do—and a little disappointment as well—she’d have liked so much to sit and talk with Jorge—she brushed her teeth, drank some water, then went to bed, pulling a book out of her handbag but finding it too difficult to concentrate on the words, so letting it slide and remembering instead.
    Her light was on but she was asleep, asleep as he’d so often seen her, with an open book resting on the bed covers, a little bundle beneath the quilt beside her showing where Ella lay. He should have turned out the light and walked away, but he indulged himself for a moment,doing nothing more than looking, not at the bundle that was his daughter but at Caroline as she slept. Her silvery hair was splayed across the pillow, and her pale eyelashes rested on faintly pink cheeks, but it was her mouth that drew his gaze—that wide, generous mouth with the full, rosy lips.
    Jorge sighed. He knew about physical attraction, had shared it with the women he’d had in his life since Caroline, not many but enough to know that physical attraction without love was not enough—well, not for him.
    But another love had come into his life as well—a simpler love to feel, though perhaps a far more complex love in the long term.
    He looked from the mother to the child, the only visible bit a tangle of brown curls.
    ‘Que te duermas con los angelitos
,’ he murmured, using the saying first his mother and then his father had used to him as they’d turned out his light at night.
    ‘I hope you sleep with little angels.’
    It sounded just as good in English.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T O CAROLINE’S surprise, Jorge made no objection to her attending the clinic the following day. In fact, he offered a young female nurse as an interpreter for those who didn’t speak Spanish and suggested Caroline conduct the mothers’ and children’s clinic due to start at 8:00 a.m.
    ‘The nurse usually conducts it,’ Jorge had explained over a breakfast of fresh sweet pastries and delicious, milky coffee. They were on their own as Ella had woken with the birds and insisted on being taken outside to explore her new surroundings.
    ‘Go back to bed,’ Jorge had told Caroline. ‘I will take her to the bakery up on the main road. If she tires, I can carry her on my shoulders.’
    He’d not only bought the pastries but had fed Ella then watched her play with the children who had gathered outside until Mima had appeared to take over her