Christmas at Jimmie's Children's Unit: Bachelor of the Baby Ward / Fairytale on the Children's Ward

‘That way he won’t be a total stranger!’ He turned towards the door behind Kate and added, ‘Come on in, Angus. We were just discussing you.’

Kate was torn between wishing the floor would open up and swallow her, and wondering why a quick, embarrassed glance at a tall, dark-haired stranger should make her stomach feel uneasy.

Angus McDowell had more on his mind than some redheaded termagant—one of his mother’s favourite words—who obviously didn’t want to work with him. Hamish had thrown out a rash, the quarantine kennels had phoned to say McTavish was sick and, as he’d left the house, Juanita had given him a shopping list a mile long, telling him that as she didn’t know where the supermarket was—he’d have to find one.

But apparently the termagant was going to be working with him whether she liked it or not, so he offered her a practiced smile, and held out his hand, politely ignored the fiery blush that had swept into her cheeks.

‘Angus McDowell,’ he said as she slipped fine-boned fingers into his clasp, then quickly withdrew them, tucking her hand into the pocket of her jacket as if to save it further contamination.

‘Kate Armstrong,’ she said, her voice deeper than he would have expected in a small, slim woman. Slightly husky, too, the voice, although maybe that was a hangover from the argument she’d been having with Alex. ‘I’m to be your anaesthetist.’

It had to be jet lag that made Angus feel a splinter of ice run through his veins—she wasn’t talking about anaesthetising him! He pulled himself together and managed another smile.

‘Great,’ he said. ‘Most important part of the team, the anaesthetist—well, alongside the perfusionist—’

‘And the second surgeon, and the surgical assistant, and the scrub nurse, and the circulating—’

He held up his hands in surrender.

‘You’re right, we’re a team, and every member of it is equally important, although your job carries a lot of pressure, because you have more pre- and post-op contact with the patient and his or her parents.’

She looked at him then—really looked—pale green eyes meeting his, offering a challenge.

‘Soft-soaping me?’ she said, softening the challenge with a slight smile. ‘You obviously heard the argument I was having with Alex.’

She shrugged, shoulders in a crisp white shirt lifting slightly.

‘It was nothing personal—not against you. I’d just been looking forward to working with Alex. Not that I haven’t done ops with him—we all switch around from time to time—but I find I learn different things from different surgeons.’

It sounded weak and Angus wondered if there was some other reason this woman wanted to be on Alex’s team—a personal reason. But he couldn’t be worrying about such things when he had enough personal problems of his own to sort out.

Hamish for one, even apart from the rash…

He shut off the dark cloud of the past, concentrating on the present. He said, ‘Then I hope you will find working with me as instructive.’

He moved away from her as other members of the team filtered into the room.

Kate looked around at the newcomers. She’d met Oliver Rankin, the new paediatric surgical fellow who would be working with both teams, a few months ago when he’d spent several weeks with the paediatric cardiac surgical unit at Jimmie’s—as the St James Hospital for Children was affectionately known. But this was the first time she’d seen Clare Jackson, the new perfusionist, and from the way every male eye in the room turned to Clare as she walked in, the perfusionist was going to cause a stir in the tight-knit unit.

Admittedly it wasn’t Clare’s fault that she was tall, dark-haired and strikingly beautiful. Kate tugged at her scraggly red locks which, no matter how she tried to tame them, were always breaking out of their confinement, and wondered what it would be like to be beautiful, to be so much the centre of attention…

Not that she’d like the attention part.

The talk had turned to patients, those who had been operated on and their progress, before moving to a rough plan for the operations for the week. Rough because no-one ever knew when some baby would be born with a congenital heart defect that would need immediate attention.

‘Angus, we’ve been advised of a baby with a TGA coming down from a regional hospital on the north coast hopefully tomorrow,’ Alex said. ‘They want to stabilise him before the airlift. I know you’ve made something of a speciality of transposition of the great arteries so I’d like your team to take him when he comes.’

The new surgeon nodded, though Kate noticed he looked worried at the same time. Surely he couldn’t be concerned about the operation, not if he specialised in it and when it was one that was performed successfully so often these days.

The little frown between his eyes made him more human somehow, Kate decided, studying the face that had at first appeared stern and unyielding to her. Was it the darkness of his hair and eyes that made him seem that way, or the strong bones beneath olive skin that stretched tightly over them so the long nose between broad cheekbones and the firm jawbone were accentuated?

‘Kate, you with us?’

She looked across at Alex and nodded, though she’d have liked to bite him for drawing attention to her momentary lapse in concentration.

‘Of course!’ she snapped.

‘Then off you go. Take Angus down to the childcare centre, and when you’ve finished there, give him a general tour of the area. Apparently he’s got some shopping to do.’

She looked from Alex to the stranger with whom she was going to be working, really regretting now that she’d missed the bit of the conversation where she’d been stuck with being his tour guide. Angus was on his feet and coming towards her, smiling again…

The smile, though it seemed practiced and didn’t quite reach his eyes, caused another weird sensation in the pit of her stomach. Although maybe that was the slightly mouldy bread she’d used for toast that morning. But just in case, she turned away from the smile and hurried out of the room, assuming he would follow.

‘You’ve children yourself that Alex appointed you to show me the childcare centre?’

If she’d been a sucker for accents this one would have won her over, a soft Scottish burr overlaid with a little bit of North American. The effect in the deep voice was totally enthralling.

‘Children?’ he repeated, and she knew she had to pull herself together.

‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘but I’d like to have a family and I’d also like to keep working, at least part-time, so somehow I became involved—’

She was used enough to this conversational subject to be able to keep her voice casually light, but they’d reached the elevator foyer and she could no longer pretend she had to look where she was going, so had to turn to face him.

‘—with a move to expand the hours of the centre. It made sense to me to have it open twenty-four hours a day, so people on night shifts, or staff called in unexpectedly at night as our team often is, have somewhere to leave their children.’

Definitely too much information but the uneasiness in her stomach—not to mention the disturbing shadows she now saw in his dark eyes—had her prattling on.

The elevator arrived and they crammed inside, the conversation, fortunately, ceasing as they rode down to the ground floor where most of the passengers exited.

‘It’s in the basement?’ Angus queried, wondering about the reasoning behind keeping children in a dingy, dark environment.

His reluctant guide—he’d seen her sigh when Alex suggested she take him around—smiled, small, even white teeth gleaming in her pale face.

‘Ah, but there are basements and basements?’

‘Mostly, in hospitals, used for the morgue,’ he reminded her, while he wondered why small, even teeth should have made such an impression on him.

Teeth?

Surely he wasn’t developing a tooth fetish.

‘Not here,’ she said cheerfully, leading him out of the elevator and along a wide corridor decorated with a bright mural depicting zoo animals.

She pushed open a door and they entered a small, fenced-off foyer, beyond which Angus could see a big, bright room, bright because the whole of one wall was glass, and beyond the glass was a playground—a sunlit playground!

‘We’re in a basement?’ he queried as he took in the children in groups around tables in the big room, and beyond it another room with a wide window so he could see cots set up within it.

‘The hospital is built on a hill. It wasn’t hard to excavate a little more on this side so the children had an outdoor area.’