Miracle Times Two

‘I’d told him in words of one syllable that I had no intention of ever going out with him again—and that was more than two weeks earlier—so where he got the idea that he had the right to insist on partnering me for the evening … to virtually take over control of my life …’ It did Daniel’s heart good to hear the anger in her voice, knowing she was coping with her near miss. The fact that she was talking about it at all was far better than bottling it up inside, and that she was comfortable using him as a confidant …

‘Well, he could hardly leave you to make your own way home if you were three sheets to the wind,’ he pointed out, trying to be fair even while he was rejoicing, inside, that she’d obviously seen through the little toady.

‘I suppose not, even if it was his fault for topping up my glass without asking.’

Just the thought that the man might have set the whole thing up deliberately, that he had been within seconds of locking the two of them in Jenny’s flat, was enough to have a red haze of protective fury descend over him, again, and he had to force himself to swallow the bile that rose in his throat at the very idea of this precious unattainable woman being at the mercy of that.

‘I just feel so stupid that I didn’t realise what he was doing until it was nearly too late. I’m just so grateful that you were there to …’

‘No thanks necessary,’ he said, again, hoping she wouldn’t think to ask why he’d ‘just happened’ to be there at that time of night. He could hardly tell her he’d been watching her during the dinner and had a bad feeling about her escort’s intentions, could he?

‘Well, I certainly won’t be getting into that sort of situation, again, even if it means suffering from dehydration,’ she announced grimly. ‘At least, then, I’d be sober enough to kick him out of my flat.’

‘You? Kick someone out?’ He raised an eyebrow and ran a teasing glance over her slender frame, mentally estimating that, while Colin wasn’t particularly overweight—yet—he must be more than a head taller than she was and weigh at least half as much again. Any future escort was unlikely to be very much smaller, so her chances of overpowering an adult male were virtually nil.

‘Remember, I went to those self-defence classes?’ she prompted, and he almost groaned aloud at the swiftly repressed memory of the one and only time when he’d been cajoled into being her practice partner. He’d barely survived with his sanity intact after an hour of Jenny’s sweetly curvaceous body climbing all over him in her attempts to pin him to the floor.

‘Actually, I probably wouldn’t need to do much more than twist his arm behind his back to frogmarch him to the door. He’d probably be squealing that I was damaging his hand and destroying his career,’ she muttered and he couldn’t help snorting with laughter.

‘The mouse that roared,’ he teased and tapped her on the nose, wishing he dared linger long enough to enjoy the silky texture of her skin, but they could never have that sort of relationship.

‘Hey! Who are you calling a mouse?’ she demanded, smacking his hand away. ‘Not that I’m not grateful for your help, but I’m sure I’d have been able to deal with him if he hadn’t been topping up my glass all evening.’ Then her shoulders slumped and she sighed into her coffee. ‘Unfortunately, he’s been bombarding me with calls, messages and texts ever since. If there was a way I could strong-arm him into leaving me alone …’

‘Do you want me to have a word with him?’ he offered, relishing the thought of even the slightest chance of messing with pretty boy’s perfect dentistry.

‘I couldn’t ask you to do that,’ she said, the light striking coppery sparks off her hair as she shook her head, adding firmly, ‘I’m a grown woman. I should be able to deal with situations like this for myself. Anyway, he’s bound to get tired of it, eventually.’

‘Well, at least I can sort your phone out for you.’ He held out his hand. ‘Tell me the weasel’s number and I’ll set it up so his calls are barred.’

‘How come you know how to do that?’ She pushed the slender gadget across the table with a surprised expression on her face.

‘Perhaps it’s a boy thing,’ he joked and had to duck her retribution as he accessed her contact details and pressed the relevant buttons to refuse all future calls from Colin Fletcher’s mobile even as he added his own number to her phone book. ‘There you are; all done. He’s history.’ He paused a second, but his ingrained sense of honesty forced him to admit what else he’d done. ‘I’ve also put myself as number one on your speed dial—in place of the Chinese takeaway. So if you have any further problems…’

His offer was cut off by the insistent sound of the pager clipped to his belt and he reached for his own phone to return the call.

‘This is Daniel Carterton. You paged me?’ he said tersely, knowing the call was unlikely to be trivial. It very rarely was in his chosen specialty.

‘One of your at-risk mums is on her way in,’ the voice on the other end responded equally crisply. ‘It’s Aliyah Farouk. She says she’s started having contractions.’

‘Send someone down to A and E to bring her straight up to the unit. Whatever you do, don’t let her get trapped down there by the paperwork police. I’ll be there in four minutes.’ He cut the connection before he swore ripely under his breath.

‘Problems?’ Jenny demanded, already on her feet and straightening the hem of her top and smoothing both hands over her hair to ensure it was tidy, all trace of laughter gone from her lively face.

‘Apparently, Aliyah Farouk’s having contractions,’ he said, knowing he didn’t need to say any more to Jenny for her to know the seriousness of the situation.

‘Damn,’ she muttered forcefully. ‘We thought we’d got away with it; that she was finally on the home stretch,’ she added as she followed him out of the door at a rapid clip, and sudden warmth wrapped around his heart that she’d automatically referred to the two of them as we. That was something, he consoled himself as he strode along the corridor. At least he could savour the two of them linked together as we in a work situation.

‘If she is in labour, let’s see if we can do something about slowing things down … at least long enough so we can do something to give the babies’ lungs a chance,’ he said, putting such thoughts to the back of his head with all the other things about Jenny that he had to ignore, like her surprisingly long legs that almost enabled her to keep pace with him. Instead, it was time to concentrate, setting his brain working to produce a list of possible complications that could have sparked this situation with Aliyah.

‘Hi, Aliyah,’ Jenny called as soon as she caught sight of their white-faced patient being wheeled swiftly into the unit by a uniformed paramedic. ‘You love us so much that you couldn’t stay away?’

‘S-something like that,’ the young woman muttered through trembling lips, then burst into noisy sobs. ‘P-please help me,’ she begged, clutching at Jenny’s hand as tears coursed down her elegant cheeks. ‘I can’t lose my babies. I can’t … not after everything we’ve gone through. You must save my little boys, even if you can’t save …’

‘Aliyah, no!’ her darkly handsome husband interrupted fiercely before dropping to his knees in front of the wheelchair. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you,’ he said before breaking into an impassioned speech in his own language.

‘Jenny …’ said Daniel’s familiar deep voice behind her, and instantly she snapped out of her unexpected fascination with the scene in front of her.

She quickly slipped into her proper role, escorting Aliyah through to Daniel’s examination room and taking her vital signs in preparation for his evaluation of the situation, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t feel a residual ache of envy for the depth of love between Aliyah and her husband.

‘So, let’s see what’s going on, then, shall we?’ Daniel said as she finished adding the latest findings to Aliyah’s file. ‘Your blood pressure’s up and so is your pulse—which is perfectly logical in a stressful situation—but they shouldn’t be raising your temperature.’

Jenny had thought the same thing and had the necessary vials ready when the decision was made to do a range of blood tests.

‘In the meantime, you say you haven’t been spotting but you have been experiencing pains.’ His dark brows drew together thoughtfully. ‘Shall we do an ultrasound to check up on your little passengers before we do anything else?’

‘Please!’

‘Yes, please!’ The Farouks answered almost simultaneously, making everyone smile in spite of the tension in the room.

‘Well, let me get you a nice big glass of water before we set everything up,’ Jenny said. ‘For some reason, that’s the preferred method of torture used by ultrasound technicians … to make pregnant women waddle around with a baby pressing on a full bladder.’ It was a joke that she often told to pregnant women in an attempt at sidetracking their thoughts, but it rarely worked very well with women as stressed-out as Aliyah Farouk, finally pregnant after a string of unexplained spontaneous abortions.

This whole side of the unit was relatively new to Jenny, who’d spent several years working with the most fragile of their premature babies under the unit’s director, Josh Weatherby. Then Daniel had joined the team, the focus of his attention being the at-risk mothers and babies—those who needed his special skills if they were to have a hope of a successful pregnancy—and she’d found herself fascinated by the new field.

Of course, as soon as word had gone round that he was good-looking, heterosexual and single, there had been much laughter among the existing staff about the sudden influx of nurses wanting to join his specialist side of the unit even if it meant undergoing further training, but for Jenny, that had just been a particularly delicious bonus.

She had decided to take advantage of the opportunity when it was offered, as a way to step back from the constant minute-by-minute stress of caring for babies who could stop breathing at any moment, or suffer from a catastrophic intracranial bleed with very little warning, or develop necrotising enterocolitis, or any one of dozens of other complications.

She hadn’t realised until it was too late that it could be every bit as stressful caring for the pregnant women referred to the unit and the children they were fighting to carry, especially as she grew to know them over the weeks of their pregnancy. Anyway, by the time she’d realised it, she was hooked on the job and the delight of working with someone as focused and professional as Daniel. The fact that he also had a wicked sense of humour and was one of the best-looking and sexiest members of staff, causing a spike in her pulse rate whenever he entered a room, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Aliyah Farouk had been one of the first patients she had met in the at-risk category, and she’d immediately warmed to the woman, feeling an empathy for her desire to continue with her legal work as long as possible. It had been during a wait for an earlier ultrasound that Aliyah had confided the details of her battle with her ultra-traditional parents to be allowed to study the law that had struck a chord with Jenny’s own battles after her decision to become a nurse rather than follow her parents’ preferred route as a third-generation doctor.

‘Let’s see if we can get a clear picture, yet,’ the ultrasound technician said a while later as she squirted a small mound of clear pale blue gel on the neat swell of Aliyah’s belly. ‘And there’s absolutely no truth to the rumour that we keep that gel in the fridge so we can shock the baby into running around.’

A shoulder pressed firmly against hers as Jenny craned her neck to see the shadowy image appearing on the screen and she didn’t need to glance at the lean muscled body or draw in the mixture of soap, hospital laundry starch and warm man to know that it was Daniel standing beside her. Her galloping pulse had already told her that.

‘Well, baby one is still definitely there,’ the technician said as she gestured towards the patterns of dark and light that differentiated between foetus and the surrounding water and maternal tissues. ‘And there’s a second very healthy heart there, too. Listen.’

The rapid patter of two foetal heartbeats, one after the other, filled the room and one of the little creatures suddenly seemed to react to the fact that they were all intruding on what should have been a private place, almost seeming to wave a fist at them.

‘All right, little ones,’ the technician chuckled as she tapped the necessary buttons to record the scan and silence the Doppler. ‘We’ve seen that you’re both safe and sound in there, so we’ll go away and leave you in peace, now.’

Aliyah burst into noisy sobs of relief and Jenny was certain that there was a suspicious gleam in her stoic husband’s eye, too, as he cradled her dark head against his shoulder.

‘So, if there is nothing wrong with the babies, why is Aliyah having pains?’ he demanded, apparently only allowing his fear to show now that his wife couldn’t see his face. ‘Is there something wrong with her?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out with the tests we’ve taken,’ Daniel explained calmly. ‘It shouldn’t be long before we have the first of the results back.’

‘Now that the ultrasound’s been done, it would be a good time to do some urine tests, too,’ Jenny suggested. ‘Aliyah’s probably desperate for the bathroom by now.’