Gold Coast Angels: Two Tiny Heartbeats

Maybe he was wrong. He knew nothing about her. ‘Perhaps you’re not pregnant. Could be gastro. Lack of food. You could try a pregnancy test. I have some in my rooms. Might even be negative.’

She looked at him, he saw the brief flare of hope, and she nodded. ‘That seems sensible. Of course I’m not…’ She blushed, no doubt at the blurting out of the indiscreet information she’d given him. He’d have liked to have been able to reassure her he could forget her indiscretion—no problem—but he wasn’t sure how.

She didn’t meet his eyes. ‘It could just be the excitement of the day. Would you mind?’

‘It’s the least I can do after scaring you like that.’ He smiled encouragingly and after a brief glance she smiled back tentatively. ‘Follow me.’

He glanced sideways and realised she’d had to skip a little to keep up. He guessed he did take big steps compared to hers, and slowed his pace. ‘Sorry.’ He smiled down at her. ‘It’s been a busy day and I’m still hyped.’

Lucy slowed with relief. She’d been hyped, too, until his random suggestion had blown her day out of the water.

Neither of them commented as she followed him to the lift, luckily deserted, an ascent of two floors and then along the corridor to the consultant’s rooms. Lucy’s lips moved silently as she repeated over and over in her head, I am not pregnant, I am not pregnant!

CHAPTER TWO (#uc8cb3156-19c4-52df-9071-780206a9a837)

TEN MINUTES LATER that theory crashed and burned.

Lucy sank into the leather chair in Nikolai’s office with the glass of water he’d given her in hand and tried to think.

She shook her head and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I’m my mother all over again.’

When she opened her eyes he was smiling gently. ‘All mothers are their mothers.’

She sat up with a sigh. ‘Well, I really am mine. On the brink of a career I’ve worked so hard for and I’ve ruined my life.’ She could not believe this.

‘It’s been a shock. Can you remember when…?’ He paused delicately and Lucy felt her cheeks warm again. This just got worse and worse. ‘The night of our graduation.’ Her hand crept over her stomach. This could not be happening, but the tiny bulge of her belly, something she’d been lamenting over the last week and blamed on the huge box of rocky road chocolate she’d been given, suddenly took on an ominous relevance to her queasiness.

How could she have been so stupid not to notice? She was a midwife, for pity’s sake! But she’d been so excited about her job, and the house-sitting opportunity that would allow her to save money. She’d always been someone who got car sick, plane sick, excitement sick, thanks to an anxiety to please she’d thought she’d beaten.

It was a wonder she hadn’t been throwing up every morning if she was pregnant, the way her stomach usually reacted to change. ‘I can’t be pregnant. It must be something else.’

He had such calm, sympathetic eyes. But she could tell he thought the test was valid. She guessed he had experience of this situation. Well, she didn’t.

‘Would you like me to run a quick ultrasound to confirm the test?’

She wanted to say, no, that would be too real. She knew a little about ultrasounds in early pregnancy. She had seen obstetricians during her practical placements using the machines on the ward when women were bleeding.

Find the sac. Foetal poles. Heartbeat if far enough along. She didn’t want to know how far she had to be along. Somewhere around fourteen weeks, seeing as that had been the only time she’d ever had sex. Did she want more proof?

Maybe it was something else. Yeah, right. Fat chance. And she may as well face the reality until she decided what she was going to do and how she was going to manage this.

He was asking again, ‘Would you like me to ask a nurse to come in? My receptionist has gone home. Just while we do this?’

God, no. ‘No, thank you, if that’s okay. Please. I don’t want anyone to know.’ She covered her eyes. She didn’t want to know, but she couldn’t say that.

‘I understand.’ His voice was low, that trace of accent rough with sympathy, and she had the sense he really did understand a little how she was feeling.

Maybe she was even glad he was there to be a stabiliser while she came to grips with this, except for the fact she’d have to see him almost every day at work, and he’d know her secret.

‘Just do it.’ Lucy climbed up onto the examination couch in his rooms, feeling ridiculous, scared and thoroughly embarrassed. Lucy closed her eyes and the mantra kept running through her head. This could not be happening.

Nikolai switched on the little portable ultrasound machine he kept in the corner of his rooms. This must have been how his sister had felt when she’d found out the worst thing a sixteen-year-old Greek Orthodox girl could find out. He just hoped there was someone here for this young woman.

He tried not to notice the unobtrusively crossed fingers she’d hidden down her sides as he tucked the towel across her upper abdomen to protect her purple scrubs from the gel. He didn’t like her chances of the test strip being disputed by ultrasound.

He tucked another disposable sheet low in her abdomen, definitely in professional mode, and squirted the cool jelly across the not so tiny mound of her belly. She had silky, luminous skin and he tried not to notice.

When he felt her wince under his fingers, he paused until he checked she was okay, and she nodded before he recommenced the slide of the ultrasound transducer sideways. He couldn’t help but admire the control she had under the circumstances. He wondered if Chloe had been this composed.

He glanced from her to the screen and then everything else was excluded as he concentrated on the fascinating parallel universe of pelvic ultrasound.

An eerie black-and-white zone of depth and shadings. Uterus. Zoom in. Foetal spine. So the foetus was mature enough for morphology. Foetal skull. Measure circumference. Crown-rump length. Placenta. Cord. Another cord?

He blinked. ‘Just shutting the blinds so I can see better.’ He reached across to the wall behind her head and the remote-control curtains dulled the brightness of the Queensland sun. Zoomed in closer. Uh-oh.

The room dimmed behind Lucy’s closed eyelids and then she heard it. The galloping hoofbeats of a tiny foetal heart. No other reason to have a galloping horse inside her belly except the cloppety-clop of a baby’s heartbeat.

She was pregnant.

It was true. She couldn’t open her eyes. Was terrified to confirm it with sight but her ears wouldn’t lie.

She couldn’t cope with this. Give up her hard-won career just when it was starting. Throw away the last three years of intense study, all the after-hours work to pay for it, all her dreams of being the best midwife GCG had ever seen.

Cloppety-clop, cloppety-clop. The heartbeat of her baby, growing inside her. Her child. Something shifted inside her.

She had to look. She opened her eyes just as Dr Kefes sucked in his breath and she glanced at his face. She saw the frown as he swirled the transducer around and raised his eyebrows.

What? ‘Has it got two heads?’ A flippant comment when she was feeling anything but flippant. Was her baby deformed? Funny how the last thing she wanted was to be pregnant but the barest hint of a problem with her tiny peanut and she was feeling…maternal?

‘Sort of.’ He clicked a snapshot with the machine and shifted the transducer. Clicked again.

Her stomach dropped like a stone. There was something wrong with her baby?

‘What?’

‘Sorry. Not what I meant.’ He was looking at her with a mixture of concern and…it couldn’t be wonderment surely. ‘Congratulations, Lucy.’

That didn’t make sense. Neither did a second heartbeat, this one slower than the other but still a clopping sound that both of them recognised. ‘The measurements say you have two healthy fourteen-week foetuses.’

‘I’m sorry?’ He had not just said that. ‘Two?’

‘Twins.’ He nodded to confirm his words. Held up two fingers in case she still didn’t get it.

Lucy opened and shut her mouth before the words came out. ‘Twins? Fourteen weeks?’ Lucy squeaked, and then the world dimmed, only to return a little brighter and a whole lot louder than before—like a crash of cymbals beside her ear. She wasn’t just pregnant. She was seriously, seriously pregnant.

She watched the screen zoom in and out in a haze of disbelief. Followed his finger as he pointed out legs and arms. And legs and arms. Two babies!

‘I don’t want twins. I don’t want one,’ she whispered, but even to her own ears there might be a question mark at the end of the sentence. She couldn’t really be considering what she thought she was considering.