She looked at him sharply and saw he was laughing at her. ‘I don’t think this is very funny.’
Marcus smothered his mirth. ‘Sorry.’ He held up his hand. ‘Look, I have a skewed view. I know that. My mother has three divorces to her name, my hardly-ever-there father two and me one. I have two sisters that are divorced and one who’s a single mother. Not good odds. But, hey, I’m sure you and Simon are going to be blissfully happy.’
Why did he make it sound so silly? So quaint? His criticism
of Simon came back to her and his casual attitude to something that deserved more than that, was pissing her off. She stopped walking, suddenly not wanting his negativity anywhere near her.
Veering off to the side of the footpath, she held up her hand at a passing taxi.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m tired of this conversation and I don’t want to walk with you anymore.’
The cab on the opposite side of the road indicated it was turning around for her.
‘Very mature,’ he said.
She could hear the smile in his voice but refused to look back at his open shirt and his damn six-pack. ‘I thought so.’
The cab pulled up and Madeline waved at Connor as she opened the door, throwing over her shoulder, ‘Oh, Marcus, talking about mature, I’m sending you a patient called Connie first thing in the morning. Does that suit?’
Marcus eyed her suspiciously, liking how her eyes glittered and her cheeks glowed. ‘She’s a mess, isn’t she?’
She laughed. ‘You’re the one with the crystal ball — you tell me.’ And she slid into the taxi and shut the door.
‘Did you make her mad, Uncle Marcus?’ asked Connor, coming to a sliding stop beside him.
Marcus winced. ‘I think so...’
‘She’ll never be your girlfriend if you make her mad.’
Great. Just what he needed - dating tips from a six-year-old.
‘Don’t you know anything?’ Connor asked, looking at his uncle like he was the village idiot.
Marcus laughed and ruffled his nephew’s hair. He knew two things. One, he loved a challenge. And, two, Madeline Harrington, as unavailable as she was, was completely and utterly delicious.
CHAPTER FIVE
MARCUS had half an hour before the arrival of his first-ever patient in his new practice. He could smell the nose-hair stripping aroma of paint, built up to near toxic levels from the offices being shut up all night, and he quickly opened all the windows and lit an incense stick placing it on the front counter to help disperse the chemical odour.
He wandered into his office and approved of how it looked. It was tranquil, the neutral wall colour had the slightest hint of green and natural light filled the room from the skylight he’d had installed in the ceiling. On two walls he had a sequential series of framed paintings. The scenes depicted a rainforest at different times of the day. Marcus loved their restful quality.
On the wall where his desk was positioned he had his framed qualifications because, more often than not in his line of work, people demanded to see them. He smiled, thinking about it — no one ever asked their GPs for their qualifications! On the fourth wall there was a variety of different charts. One was a map of the iris for iridology purposes, another the foot for reflexology, and the last one mapped the human chakras.
Many of his conventional medical colleagues who grudgingly accepted his homeopathic beliefs balked at the mention of chakras or zones of energy within the body. As a university-trained medical doctor he knew that such ideas didn’t have any foundation in Western medicine. But he also knew that illness was multi-factorial and that everything needed to be taken into account, including the metaphysical.
He sat at his desk in his swivel chair and turned it until he was facing the shut cupboard behind him. He opened the doors and pulled out one of three wide shallow sliding drawers and looked with great pleasure at the rows and rows of little brown remedy bottles. He picked up a couple and ran his fingers over the labels before replacing them and shutting the doors.
Pushing away from the desk he moved to the next room, which he had set aside for massage therapy. He was a fully qualified masseur with certificates in remedial, deep tissue and sports massage, as well as specialising in Bowen therapy.
The massage table was in the centre of the room. An old-fashioned dresser that he had bought at an antique store was at the far end and held all his towels and equipment such as essential oils, CD player and CDs. The walls were the same soothing colour and the ceiling had a rainforest mural painted on it, the central skylight representing the sun and its life-sustaining energy.
He was pleased. It felt much more like his own place than his office in Melbourne ever had. He had inherited that, along with the client list from a retiring colleague, and because it had been part of an office complex with strict limitations on alterations and was already a really successful practice, Marcus hadn’t felt able to put his own personal stamp on it.
But here — it was all his and pride glowed in his chest as he walked out to the reception area. It looked like any other doctor’s reception with one exception — no secretary. Unless he became exceptionally busy, Marcus planned on doing the reception stuff himself.
Consultations were usually lengthy so it wasn’t as if he had to juggle a hundred patients a day. In fact, ten patients a day was his upper limit. And, in between clients, he could use the state-of-the-art computer system on the desk to update client information and note their progress.
A few fat squishy leather lounges, sourced from op-shops, gave it a retro feel and the wall art was modern but restful. There was a variety of magazines, from alternative health glossies through to the tabloid
