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She stared at the line on the stick, checked the packet’s instructions to make sure she was reading it properly, checked the line again, then gave a whoop of joy.
She was pregnant! It had happened!
She couldn’t stop smiling. To have a baby—to have a child on whom she could lavish a mother’s love—the love she’d missed out on as a child. Yes, her father had been wonderful, but she knew instinctively a mother’s love was different.
Theo!
How could she be so excited when she felt, deep in her heart, Theo really didn’t want another child?
Although now they knew each other better, might things not work out?
Might she not be able to have Theo and a child?
But the excitement she’d felt when she first saw the confirmation failed to return. She might have fallen in love with Theo, but in no way had he indicated he had similar feelings for her…
At least she’d have his child…
Meredith Webber says of herself, ‘Some ten years ago, I read an article which suggested that Mills and Boon were looking for new medical authors. I had one of those “I can do that” moments, and gave it a try. What began as a challenge has become an obsession—though I do temper the “butt on seat” career of writing with dirty but healthy outdoor pursuits, fossicking through the Australian Outback in search of gold or opals. Having had some success in all of these endeavours, I now consider I’ve found the perfect lifestyle.’
Recent titles by the same author:
THE HEART SURGEON’S SECRET CHILD** CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, MEANT-TO-BE WIFE† THE SHEIKH SURGEON’S BABY* DESERT DOCTOR, SECRET SHEIKH* A PREGNANT NURSE’S CHRISTMAS WISH THE NURSE HE’S BEEN WAITING FOR†
**Jimmie’s Children’s Unit
*Desert Doctors
†Crocodile Creek
JIMMIE’S CHILDREN’S UNIT
The Children’s Cardiac Unit, St James’s Hospital, Sydney. A specialist unit where the dedicated staff mend children’s hearts…and their own!
BY
MEREDITH WEBBER
CHAPTER ONE
SHE was tall, she was blonde and she was beautiful. Theo Corones watched from the back of the team meeting as all the men in the room, most of whom were married, registered this fact.
‘Grace Sutherland, paediatric cardiac surgeon, trained in Cape Town, South Africa, then further studies in the UK. My main area of expertise is paediatric heart transplants.’
‘Of course, you’re a South African and following in famous footsteps,’ Alex Attwood, the head of the paediatric cardiac surgery team at St James’s Children’s Hospital, teased gently.
Was it because he was still thinking how beautiful she was that Theo saw the puzzled look on her face? She was intelligent enough to know from his voice that Alex was teasing her, so it seemed she wasn’t used to being teased.
Theo thought back to the briefing notes he’d had on the two new surgeons. Jean-Luc Fournier was from France, thirty-four years old and already considered good enough to head up a new unit at a hospital in Marseilles, and Grace Sutherland, thirty-five…
Surely by thirty-five you’d got used to being teased.
The meeting proceeded and Theo turned his attention to it, but that expression on Grace Sutherland’s face was like a missed note in a piece of music, so it stuck in a corner of his mind.
‘Grace, you’ll be working on Phil’s team, while Jean-Luc will work on mine. This is only for the first three months, then you’ll swap over so you both have a chance to see the two of us at work. Not that you’ll be observers—no, you’ll be operating with us and, when we’re not available, for us. And for that reason it’s important you know the whole team. Maggie Park, Phil’s wife, usually works as my anaesthetist—take a bow, Mags—while Aaron Gilchrist is the anaesthetist on Phil’s team.’
Aaron waved his hand at the two newcomers, while Alex went on to introduce the other theatre staff, nurses, registrars and residents who worked with the team.
‘And so we come to Theo, who works on both teams. At the moment we only have the one bypass machine—well, we have three but two are being modified to different specifications. Theo is working with the engineers in what spare time he gets—so he works with whoever is doing a procedure that requires bypass.’
Theo nodded his acknowledgement of the introduction but as both newcomers turned towards him he saw Grace Sutherland’s eyes for the first time. A pale clear blue, like the aquamarine stone in a ring his mother wore—like morning sky after a night of rain had cleared the dust and smog from the city…
‘Theo!’
Alex’s voice wasn’t exactly sharp but it made it clear Theo had missed some part of the conversation.
‘Sorry, Alex, you were saying?’
‘I was telling Grace and Jean-Luc you also ran the ECMO machines and would walk them through the way we use both machines later today.’
‘I’d be glad to,’ Theo replied, annoyed with himself for missing this conversation the first time. He was always focussed on work. And to be distracted by a blonde with aquamarine eyes—impossible!
Grace studied the man who worked the bypass machines. She’d been intrigued by his background when she’d read the notes she’d been given—brief bios of all members of the team.
What was different about Theo was that while most perfusionists—people specially trained to run bypass and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines—were from a nursing background, Theo had been—and still was, she assumed—a doctor. A surgeon, in fact, who, for reasons unmentioned in the bio had turned from operating on small children to running the machines that kept them alive, before, after and during delicate operations.
It was a puzzle and she didn’t like puzzles. She’d have to ask him about it.
And now she’d sorted that out, she should stop looking at him—looking at him wasn’t going to provide an answer. But looking at him had made her register that he was a particularly good-looking man, big without being bulky, black hair shot through with silver here and there, dark eyes below well-shaped eyebrows. Her father always kept his eyebrows tidy, bemoaning the fact that many men, as they aged, didn’t bother.
It was, she realised, even as she considered Theo Corones’s eyebrows, a totally absurd thing for her to be thinking about in a team meeting and, sadly, a reflection of just how unlike other women she was! Other women, she was sure, would be checking out the straight nose and the full, well-defined lips and the way his profile resembled that of old Greek statues, but not her—she’d picked on eyebrows as a feature in his favour.
She sighed, aware she was so unlike other women she needed a planet of her own. Men were from Mars, women from Venus, and Grace from a galaxy far, far away…
The meeting broke up, and Jean-Luc, who would be living in the flat beneath hers for the six months she would be working in Sydney, was chatting to Maggie Park. That was another thing about people from galaxies far, far away—they couldn’t chat.
‘Would you like to see the machines now?’
She was pondering her inability to chat and assuring herself, for perhaps the millionth time, that it didn’t matter, when Theo asked the question. He’d come from somewhere behind her so she’d had no warning of his approach, and, being unprepared, his deep, velvety voice had sparked a peculiar reaction in her skin—prickly, like mild sunburn making its presence felt at the end of a day at the beach.
‘I could come now but Jean-Luc looks as if he’s busy,’ she replied, checking out Theo’s eyebrows close up and confirming they really were wonderful—strong, but neat, and with a decided arch.
‘Then I will show you first and Jean-Luc some other time,’ Theo said calmly, putting out his hand as if to usher her ahead of him.
‘Isn’t that a nuisance for you?’
Grace had no idea why she was feeling unsettled, but she was—and even more unsettled when he added, ‘It will be my pleasure.’
He didn’t mean it in any other way than that he loved showing off his machines and twice was better than once, while his tone of voice suggested nothing more than cool politeness. She knew that, but the prickly sunburn effect continued as she left the room with him.
‘Why the switch from surgery to perfusionist?’ she asked as they entered the lift to go down a floor to see the infants on ECMO.
He looked at her for a moment, then smiled, his teeth very white against his olive skin.
‘Straight to the point,’ he said. ‘Are you always so blunt?’
Grace pretended to consider this—for all of two seconds—before replying.
‘I hope people don’t think of me as blunt but, yes, I do find asking questions is the easiest way to get answers.’
Theo ushered her out of the lift, nodding as he went.
‘Cuts out a lot of chit-chat,’ he agreed. ‘What’s the next question?’
‘Why aren’t you married?’
Oops! That surprised even her, although undoubtedly her subconscious mind had sorted through the list of staff, checked the bios and, like a good computer, come up with four possible candidates for her Grand Plan—which probably should be labelled Grace’s Silliest Idea Yet. Theo was one of these, Jean-Luc another. Living in the flat above his, she’d have ample time to check out Jean-Luc, but she wasn’t sure how often she’d come into contact with Theo.
Hence the question…
Not that he’d answered either of her questions, parrying the first with one of his own and ignoring the second! She hoped it was because they’d walked into the paediatric intensive care unit, not because he was so insulted he’d never speak to her again. She found it difficult enough to make friends—to trust people enough to let them into her life—without setting colleagues against her from the first meeting.
‘This is Scarlett Robinson. She was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome and although Phil and Alex at first decided to do the first-stage operation, she hasn’t been well enough and now they’re considering heart transplantation if we can get hold of a donor heart.’
‘Without doing even the first-stage op—a Norwood to connect the right ventricle to the aorta?’ Grace asked, looking down at the tiny baby girl and wondering, as she always did, why some embryonic hearts formed perfectly while others, like Scarlett’s, had a very underdeveloped left side.
‘She’s not tolerating drugs particularly well,’ Theo explained, ‘and after a lot of thought and consultation her parents, who live way out west in the bush, decided that rather than weaken her further with the first of the three HLHS ops, we’d list her for a transplant.’
Grace stared at the little girl, all alone in the hospital, and though she told herself Scarlett didn’t know she was all alone, and in fact she wasn’t, surrounded as she was by staff, Grace still felt a flutter in the region of her heart which could only be sympathy for the baby.
But the one thing she’d learned very early on in her medical career was never to show what she was feeling—especially not when babies were concerned. It was her job to be detached because, as numerous lecturers and professors and even her own father had told her, she could be more help to the patient that way.
So in case Theo had caught a glimpse of her momentary weakness, she spoke with cool, calm competence as she pointed out the downside of this.
‘And in the meantime, she’s on ECMO which could have devastating consequences on her other organs if she’s on it for too long.’
Theo turned to her and shook his head.
‘You certainly believe in telling it like it is,’ he said, but Grace thought she detected a smile behind the words. ‘You’re right, of course, but it was up to her parents to make the decision and now my job is to keep her alive on the least amount of support she can handle. Because of her condition she has to be on full support, so the machine is helping both her lungs and her malformed heart do their jobs, but by gearing it down as much as possible I’m hoping to avoid things like brain haemorrhages or kidney problems.’
‘Hard to get a heart small enough for her,’ Grace murmured, her eyes feasting on the tiny infant, thinking of other newborns she’d operated on—thinking of other infants.
Or one other infant…
One hypothetical infant…
Could she do it? Could she ask some man…?
‘But they do come up,’ Theo said, and Grace stared at him, struggling against the thoughts that kept intruding, thoughts she knew were stupid and sentimental and all the things she didn’t want to be—thoughts about a baby of her own…
She pulled herself together, hiding the moment of weakness behind a bland observation.
‘It’s usually women who are unrealistically optimistic,’ she said.
Theo frowned.
‘I don’t consider optimism a gender-based trait, and pointing out that small hearts do become available was stating a fact, not being unrealistic.’
As the words came out he realised he was being as blunt as his colleague—was it catching, this brusqueness of hers?
And as for the question he hadn’t answered earlier, what business was it of hers why he wasn’t married?
Ah! He’d answered his own question. He probably wasn’t getting as snappy as Grace Sutherland, but she’d prodded a sore spot he rarely thought about these days, and his brusqueness was reaction to her prodding.
‘Where are her parents?’
Another question but at least one he could answer.
‘Her mother was here. She flew down with the Royal Flying Doctor Service when they brought the baby to us. But she had to go home to the rest of the family—she’s hoping to get down again next week but even with really cheap accommodation available at the hospital, she still has to pay air fares and, I imagine, pay someone to mind the other children at home.’
‘Poor thing, it must be so hard to not be able to be with her baby,’ Grace murmured, but in such a way Theo had to look at her. Did she really feel for Scarlett’s mother or was she mouthing a platitude while thinking something else entirely?
He didn’t know this woman so he had no idea and, really, did it matter? Yet again he sensed a puzzle…
They’d moved away from Scarlett’s crib, out of the PICU to the lift foyer where they met up with other members of the team waiting to go down.
‘Grace and I are barely settled in and, speaking for myself, I need to shop before I can eat,’ Jean-Luc said, joining his and Grace’s names in a way that suggested a relationship, although as far as Theo knew they’d only met since their separate arrivals in Australia. ‘Is there a good restaurant close by?’
‘Scoozi!’
Jean-Luc had spoken to Aaron who was standing beside him, but the reply was chorused by most of the team.
‘It’s the other side of the park,’ Jasmine Summers, one of the PICU nurses added as they all stepped into the lift. ‘Some of us are going there now, so do come along. You’re coming, aren’t you, Theo?’
He had intended going home to do some work on a wood-fired oven he was building in his tiny courtyard, but he had to eat.
And Grace Sutherland, for all her blunt questions, intrigued him…
‘Oh, do come, Theo.’ Now she added her entreaty, and though he had the strangest—and strongest—feeling he was being manipulated, he agreed.
Out of curiosity, he told himself, and in part that was the truth, because there was something about Grace Sutherland that didn’t quite ring true—some mystery inside the beautiful packaging.
That she was physically attractive to him was a secondary matter, or so he assured himself. He didn’t get involved with work colleagues so the physical attraction would never be explored, but the intrigue? It wouldn’t hurt to investigate that, surely…
The group walked in a straggle of twos and threes down the road that ran alongside the park towards the restaurant. Grace walked in the lead with Phil, Theo behind them with Maggie and Aaron, and though he was listening to the conversation about titration rates of drugs during open-heart surgery in very small infants, he wasn’t taking in as much of it as he usually did.
She walked with a peculiar grace—what a stupid thing to be thinking about a woman called Grace!—but the way she strode along, her pace matching Phil’s, suggested an athleticism that wasn’t often seen in specialists of either gender, most of whom were too busy to get to the gym with any regularity or to work out in other ways.
The staff at Scoozi, seeing the mob from the hospital arrive, pushed together a number of tables, but was it chance that Grace sat next to Theo, who had taken the chair at one end?
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ she said, answering his own query—the seating arrangement had not been chance.
‘Question?’ he parried, although he knew full well what she’d asked. But now, rather than consider the woman’s grace, he was considering her lack of it. And her lack of good manners! It was none of her business why he’d switched from surgery to perfusion.
‘Why aren’t you married?’
He’d forgotten that one! He stared at her, aware his disbelief was probably written on his face. It must have been for she looked embarrassed, but only for a moment, recovering her composure beautifully and smiling an apology.
‘I know that’s personal, but I’m only here for six months and if I want to get to know everyone in the team, then I have to ask questions.’
That kind of made sense—or did it?
‘Do you really want to get to know everyone in the team? After all, as you say, you’re only here six months, after which you’ll go back to South Africa, send emails for a few months, Christmas cards for a few years, then forget the lot of us.’
‘Probably not Christmas cards, I’m not good with them.’ She looked embarrassed, as if he’d been spot on in the reading of her character. Not that she was going to let him get away with it. She shifted slightly in her chair then continued, ‘But professionally it’s good to keep in touch with people, especially those with more experience, because you never know when something comes up you haven’t personally experienced before, and you can always ask.’
She hadn’t answered his question, but her comments made him wonder even more about this woman. In his life, women were the ones who kept the strands of friendship sewn together, his mother and aunts keeping in touch with the family’s friends, while his ex-wife had been forever on the net, talking to one friend or another, and had turned the sending out of Christmas cards into a kind of ‘who gets the most’ contest. But, then, Lena was like that…
‘You’re thinking about some woman now,’ the exasperating South African said, her clipped accent seeming to turn the remark into a rebuke.
‘You can’t know that!’ Theo growled. ‘And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s someone—usually a woman—telling me what I’m thinking.’
‘Well, you were scowling,’ Grace replied, totally unabashed. ‘The kind of scowl that suggests bad thoughts, and as you’re hardly likely to be thinking bad thoughts about your bypass machine, or the menu that’s in your hands, I guessed it must have had something to do with my question.’
He scowled some more and began to read the menu, although he knew it by heart and always ordered the Creole pizza and out of sheer politeness should have passed it to Grace, had she not annoyed him so much.
‘I’ll have the Creole pizza,’ she announced, Jasmine, on her other side, having handed her a menu. ‘Chicken, banana, sweet chilli sauce and sour cream—Italian purists must be turning over in their graves but it sounds delicious.’
Now what was he going to order? If he ordered the Creole she’d think he was copying her and probably read something into it—like he might be interested in her.
Which he was in the way a scientist was interested in a new specimen that appeared under his microscope, but no more than that, for all the unexpected tugs of attraction he was feeling.
Heaven forbid!
He ordered a steak and a glass of the pinot grigio the restaurateur, Anna, imported from Italy. Someone further down the table had ordered a plate of garlic bread and another of brushetta before anyone was seated, and these arrived as the orders were taken, the plates of bread being passed around.
‘No, thank you,’ Grace said to both.
‘Dieting?’ Jasmine asked, and Theo watched, wondering just how Grace would respond.
‘No, I never diet,’ she said, with the supreme confidence of a woman with a great metabolism.
End of conversation, although Jasmine had obviously meant it as an opening gambit.
‘Lucky you,’ Jasmine told her, not willing to let the subject go just yet. ‘I’m always dieting. I’ve tried just about every diet ever written.’
‘Oh, but surely you don’t need to diet, Jasmine.’
Other women might have said the same reassuring words without Theo even noticing, but to him it sounded as if Grace was making an effort to be nice—as if social chatter didn’t come easily to her.
Jasmine, too, must have sensed something strange for she smiled uncertainly, conveying enough apprehension for even someone as seemingly insensitive as Grace to see.
‘I didn’t mean to sound critical of diets or people who diet,’ she added quickly. ‘But research has shown that dieting fads can do more harm than good.’
For Theo it was like watching an act in a play and he waited to see if Jasmine would be mollified.
Apparently she was, for she smiled at Grace.
‘I know,’ she said with a big sigh. ‘I’ve read that too, but I think I’m addicted to diets.’
It was said as a joke, but, sensing it would go straight over Grace’s head, Theo plunged in.
‘Like I’m addicted to good pizza,’ he said, forgetting he’d just ordered steak. ‘Which is why I’m spending all my off-duty time building a wood-fired oven in my already too small courtyard.’
‘Is the pizza no good here that you didn’t order it?’
Of course Grace had picked up on his error.
‘No, the pizzas are great, I just needed a change,’ he assured her. OK, so she’d zeroed in on him again, but at least discussing food likes and dislikes was better than discussing marriage—or his lack thereof. And Jasmine was off the hook—she’d turned to talk to Aaron on her other side, so Theo took another slice of garlic bread and relaxed.
‘So, are you in a relationship?’
Had he heard correctly? He stared at the woman he thought had asked an extremely impertinent question and she gave an embarrassed shrug.
‘I told you I asked questions—I explained why,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t answer about why you’re not married, so I wondered…’
Theo studied her a moment longer, sensing something he couldn’t quite pin down behind the brash manner.
Something uncertain?
It sounded that way, but surely not!
Given the attraction he felt towards her, he knew he had to keep his distance, not find excuses to learn more of her.
‘Why?’ he asked, cool and distant again. ‘Why are you wondering—why do you need to know? As you said, you’re here for six months. I could work with people for six months and not need to know about their personal lives. In fact, there are people at this table— No, that’s not right, the team mostly know the surface things about each other’s lives, although the fact that I am single is enough for most of them to know. No one in the eight months I’ve been here has ever asked me why.’