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He moved a different way, blocking her path.
‘I’ve kept you from your dinner. Do you have far to go to your home?’
Politeness?
Or did he want more from her?
Positive! In control!
‘Dinner can wait,’ she said lightly, waving her hand in the air in case he hadn’t picked up the nonchalance in her voice. ‘And, no, my home’s not far. Walking distance actually. I live in an apartment by the river in a parkland area called South Bank.’
Explaining too much again, but the antidote wasn’t working—not at all—and the man’s proximity—his body standing so close to hers—was affecting her again, making her feel shaky and uncertain and a lot of other things she hadn’t felt for so long it was hard to believe she was feeling them now.
‘South Bank? The hospital administrator to whom I spoke earlier was kind enough to book me into a hotel at South Bank. You know of this hotel?’
Only because it’s across the road from my apartment building! How’s that for fickle fate?
‘I know it,’ she said cautiously.
‘Then, perhaps you will be so kind as to wait while I collect my backpack then guide me on my way.’
He was a visitor to her country so she could hardly refuse, and to flee in desperate disorder down the corridor might look a tad strange.
‘Where’s your backpack?’
‘It is in the office on the ground floor, behind the desk where people enquire about patients or ask for directions. A kind woman on the desk offered to look after it for me.’
‘Of course she would,’ Marty muttered, then she remembered this man had super-sensitive hearing and was wise to mutterings. She’d better stop doing it forthwith.
‘I’ve got to change so I’ll meet you in the foyer,’ she suggested, leading the way out of Gib’s office and along the corridor to a bank of staff lifts. ‘If you turn left when you come out on the ground floor, you’ll find the information desk without any trouble.’
Positive! In control!
She was moving away, intending to sneak a few minutes in the NICU before changing—not one hundred per cent in control—when his hand touched her shoulder and she froze.
‘Thank you,’ he said, though whether his gratitude was for her directions, her explanations or her kindness to his daughter, Marty had no idea. He’d lifted his hand off her shoulder almost as soon as it had touched down, and then stepped into the lift and disappeared behind the silently closing doors.
They collected his backpack and she led him out of the hospital, into the soft, dark, late January night. Humidity wrapped around them as they walked beneath the vivid bougainvillea that twined above the path through the centre of the park, while the smell of the river wafted through the air.
Usually, this walk was special to Marty, separating as it did her work life from her social life—if going to the occasional concert, learning Mandarin and practising Tae Kwon Do could be called a social life.
But tonight the peace of the walk was disturbed by the company, her body, usually obedient to her demands, behaving badly. It skittered when Carlos brushed his arm against her hip, and nerves leapt beneath her skin when he held her elbow to guide her out of the path of a couple of in-line skaters. If this was attraction, it was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before, and if it wasn’t attraction, then what the hell was it?
She was too healthy for it to be the start of some contagion, but surely too old, not to mention too sensible, to be feeling the lustful urges of an adolescent towards a total stranger.
‘This is my apartment block and your hotel is there, across the road.’
Given how she was reacting to him, it was the sensible thing to do but as she stood there, banishing this tired, bereaved, confused man to the anonymity of a hotel room, she felt a sharp pang of guilt, as if her mother was standing behind her, prodding her with the tip of a carving knife.
‘You’ll be OK?’ she asked, then immediately regretted it. He couldn’t possibly be all right after all he’d been through. But he let her off the hook, nodding acquiescence.
‘I will see you again,’ he said, before shifting the weight of his backpack against his shoulders and crossing the road to the hotel, a tall dark shadow in the streetlights—a man who walked alone.
She turned towards her apartment building, free to mutter now, castigating herself for feeling sorry for him, but also warning him, in his absence, that the ‘seeing you again’ scenario was most unlikely.
Emmaline had a family now—there’d be no need for her to provide that special contact all babies needed. Emmaline’s father was best placed to do this for her and it was up to him to decide where the little one’s future lay.
Her heart might ache as she accepted these truths, but it was time to be sensible and make a clean break from the baby who had sneaked beneath her guard and professionalism, and had wormed her way into her heart.
She rode the lift up to her floor, then opened the apartment door, walking through the darkened rooms to stand on the balcony and look out at the river, reminding herself of all the positives in her life—a job she loved, a great apartment, interests and friends—but neither the river nor her thoughts filled the aching emptiness within her, and she hugged herself tightly as she went back inside to find something for her dinner.
CHAPTER TWO
‘I MAY join you?’
Had he been watching for her that she’d barely left her apartment when Carlos appeared by her side? A shiver ran down Marty’s spine, not because he might have been watching but because of the way his voice curled into her ears.
She turned to look at him in daylight—to see if a night’s sleep had softened the hard angles of his face. If anything they were sharper, while the skin beneath his eyes was darkly shadowed. The man looked more strained than he had the previous day.
Not that dark shadows under his eyes made any difference to her internal reaction to the man. Looking at him caused more tremors along her nerves than listening to him.
Determined to hide these wayward reactions, she went for professional.
‘Didn’t sleep much?’ she diagnosed, and saw a flicker of a smile.
‘The hotel is comfortable, but there was much to think about, and air-conditioned air—how do people sleep in it?’
Marty took it as a rhetorical question and didn’t try to explain that for a lot of people it was the only way they could sleep in the hot, humid summer.
The major question was, why was he here?
Had his sleepless night convinced him of his responsibilities?
Could he be interested enough in his daughter to be visiting her at seven in the morning?
‘You’re going to the hospital?’
‘I am.’
Maybe everything would work out for Emmaline! But Marty had barely registered her delight for the baby when he squelched it with his next statement.
‘I arranged things when I spoke to the administrator. For the next month I will be working there. Not for money, but for useful things to take back with me—equipment the hospital no longer uses because it has been superseded. No equipment is too old-fashioned for us as long as it works.’
The information about the equipment was interesting and she’d have liked to ask what kind of things he found most useful, knowing there were store-cupboards full of obstetrics gear that no one ever used tucked away at the hospital.
But something he’d said at the beginning of the conversation needed following up before she started donating old bedpans.
‘Working at the hospital? I’m sure if you asked they’d give you whatever they didn’t need anyway, so why would you want to work? Haven’t you heard of holidays?’
And shouldn’t you be spending your time getting to know your daughter—making arrangements for her care?
‘I try to work at other hospitals whenever I’m on leave, but not only in the hope of getting some useful equipment. My specialty is surgery and I have plenty of accident experience but there is always a time when I realise how little I know and when I wish I’d learnt more of other specialties. Your own field, obstetrics, is one of my weaknesses. Oh, I can do the basics but in Sudan I’m not needed for basics. There, the women look after each other and have good midwives, so mainly I’m needed for emergencies and this is where I fail my patients.’
‘You can hardly be held responsible for failing patients with complicated obstetrics problems,’ Marty told him. ‘Even obstetricians do that at times.’
‘I should know more,’ he said, refusing her excuses. ‘So, at the hospital I will work in the A and E Department and take the obstetrics patients, assisting, of course, a specialist such as yourself.’
Great! Flickering along her nerves she could put up with if it only happened occasionally, and was time-limited—like for a day or two! But a month? When he’d be around all the time?
Maybe she’d get over it.
She sneaked a look towards him, catching his profile as he turned to watch a pelican skid to a landing on the river’s surface, and knew she probably wouldn’t get over it. Whatever was happening inside her body was getting worse, not better, which was weird to say the least, because she wasn’t sure she even liked the man.
‘And Emmaline?’ she asked, knowing if anything was going to put her off him, his attitude to his child surely would.
‘I will have a month to think about the situation. As you said, the doctors want to keep her in for another fortnight, so the need to do something isn’t urgent. At the moment—well, at the moment I don’t know.’
His voice told her the subject was closed, but this was Emmaline, so as far as Marty was concerned it had to be reopened.
‘Don’t know if you want her, or don’t know what to do with her?’ she persisted.
‘How could I want her? I knew nothing of her existence! And a baby—it is impossible to fit a baby in my life. But she is my responsibility and I will make such arrangements as I see fit!’
‘She’s a child, not a responsibility!’ Marty muttered, forgetting that muttering was out.
And he did hear her, for he turned towards her, his face harsh with anger.
‘You are wrong, Marty Cox, and you are allowing emotion to cloud your thinking. A child must be the greatest responsibility a person can have.’
‘You’re right as far as that goes,’ Marty conceded, ‘but surely a child is a responsibility that should be considered with love, not just as a duty. Emotion has to come into it.’
‘Never!’ he argued, his deep voice rolling out the word with such certainty Marty frowned at him. ‘Emotion clouds too many issues—it makes us stupid, that’s what emotion does. A parent would be neglectful if he allowed emotion to sway the decisions or arrangements he makes for his child. He would be irresponsible.’
Was that true?
Should emotion be set aside in responsible decision-making?
Surely not, when how you feel about something at a gut level should always count in a decision. And wasn’t gut-level thinking emotion?
But, then, how could she, who had no child, argue that point?
‘As you say, you have a couple of weeks,’ she said lamely.
They walked on in silence, Marty perturbed enough by his ‘emotionless arrangements’ idea to barely notice the way her body was behaving.
Would his arrangements include putting the baby up for adoption?
How would she fare in the ranks of adoptive parents? A single parent who worked full time? There were so many childless couples out there, and those who could be full-time parents—social workers would surely favour such families for a healthy little baby like Emmaline. And shouldn’t she have been on a list?
Her mother would love a grandchild and she’d be happy to mind her while Marty worked.
But surely there was that list of hopeful adoptive parents—a list without the name Marty Cox even at the bottom…
Private adoptions?
She’d read of them, but did they really happen?
She glanced at the man again, but trying to read his face was like trying to read a blank sheet of butcher’s paper.
‘You are concerned?’
She’d turned away so had to look back at him.
‘Concerned?’
‘You sighed.’
‘I never sigh!’
‘Never? Not in the dead of the night when sleep won’t come and your thoughts are too confused to be sorted into shape? Not even when people’s stupidity creates problems for themselves and others? Why would you not sigh?’
‘Because it’s defeatist!’ Marty snapped, remembering something her mother had told her when she’d been very young and had probably been sighing about the unfairness of fate. ‘Why bother sighing, when you could be doing something about whatever is wrong? And if you can’t do anything about it, then again, why sigh? It doesn’t achieve anything.’
‘But it does release some tension or emotion, does it not?’
‘So does Tae Kwon Do, and it has the benefit of keeping you fit at the same time.’
‘But you can hardly kick out at your opponent in the operating theatre,’ Carlos said, and Marty, hearing something in his voice, turned to see a slight smile on his face.
He was teasing her!
And she didn’t like it one bit!
Did she really never sigh, or had she simply been making conversation?
Carlos studied his companion as she strode along, her eyes focussed on the path ahead of them, her thoughts who knew where?
Her slight figure moved briskly—a no-nonsense woman, this Marty Cox—no-nonsense, like her name. No-nonsense hair, cut short to hide, he suspected, a tendency to curl. No-nonsense muddy blonde, not highlighted as so many women wore their hair these days. It feathered around her neat head, a lighter colour at the tips, where it brushed against the almost translucent skin on her temples.
And though slim, she had curves in all the right places, and his body had already registered an attraction.
Not that she’d respond!
No-nonsense through and through would be his judgement, except that her eyes belied it. He remembered them slanting towards him as he’d asked a question—a greenish, bluish colour with gold pinpoints around the pupils. Dreamer’s eyes!
He shook his head. The sleepless night could be blamed for this fantasy, although not for the attraction he felt towards this woman. Had Natalie’s princess-like beauty captured Marty’s imagination, prompting her deep compassion, her involvement? Was that why she’d taken so much interest in Natalie’s baby?
Natalie’s baby?
He hadn’t thought of the baby that way before.
And wouldn’t again if he could help it—the idea distasteful somehow.
As the forthright Marty Cox had pointed out, Emmaline was his baby.
But Emmaline?
A fantasy name from the forthright woman?
She was indeed an odd mix.
She was also unclipping her pager from the waist of her jeans.
‘Hospital—A and E,’ she said briefly, picking up the pace of their progress, taking strides that seemed too long for such a petite woman.
He paced beside her.
‘What is your usual procedure with a page? Do you phone in?’
‘I would if I was at home, but we’re only minutes away now, so I’ll be there almost as soon as a phone call. The specialist on night duty must have his hands full for A and E to be paging me.’
They crossed the road and she led the way through a back entrance into the emergency department, lobbing her small backpack onto a shelf behind a manned desk by the door and grabbing a folded scrub suit to pull on over her clothing.
Then, as she thrust her arms into the sleeves, she turned towards him and smiled.
‘Well, get yourself ready. We’re on!’
Her smile wasn’t at all forthright. It was sweet, and slightly shy, as if unrelated to her confident manner and brisk words.
He glanced towards her, hoping she’d smile again, but she was talking to the nurse behind the desk, explaining about the page.
‘Oh, it must be the woman in the car they want you for,’ the nurse said. ‘Her husband’s driven into the laundry bay out the back. Let me check.’ She leafed through some notes on her desk then explained, ‘Full term, breech presentation, feet already out.’
‘At least someone had the sense not to try to move her,’ Marty replied, then she turned to Carlos. ‘Out this way. Have you delivered a breech? Normally it would have been picked up in prenatal care but a lot of women still don’t bother with it—or with much of it. When they present here in early labour and we realise it’s a breech, we’d do an ultrasound to work out foetal weight, a flat-plate abdomen X-ray to determine if the head is normally flexed or hyper-extended, and we’d do a clinical evaluation of the woman’s pelvis. Quite often, if there’s time, we can turn the baby. If the baby’s too big, or the pelvis is too small, or the head is in the wrong position, we’d consider a Caesar, but with the legs, and by now possibly the body, already delivered, we have to go ahead with a vaginal delivery.’
‘I remember the danger in a breech is in the delivery of the head, but you will do this in the car?’
She was snapping on a pair of gloves, but she smiled again, as if pleased he knew that much.
‘I imagine if you’re doing it back in Sudan it could be in far worse circumstances than the back of a car.’
‘Sometimes,’ he conceded, ‘although where I work there is now a hospital of sorts—the people themselves built it for me, with a thatched roof and mud brick walls, and the people are accepting it and coming if they need help.’
They reached the car and found a nurse kneeling at the open rear door, with a wheelchair, a gurney and several onlookers clustered nearby. The nurse stood up to make room for Marty.
‘FHR is strong, the feet showed then retracted but are well out now. I know theoretically about gentle traction on the feet, legs and pelvis in a breech delivery, but what’s gentle?’
She introduced Marty to the woman and her husband.
‘You’ve done just fine,’ Marty assured the nurse, squatting down so she could say hello to the woman and introduce Carlos, explaining who they both were and what she had to do, then taking hold of the protruding legs and body and slipping the forefinger of her left hand along the baby’s back so she could rotate his torso while his shoulders came free.
‘It’s a gentle pressure,’ she explained to Carlos. ‘We wait for a contraction, then use a finger to get the shoulder blades free. You’re doing really well,’ she added to the mother. ‘This isn’t your first?’
‘It’s her fifth,’ the father replied. ‘We had all the others at home but this was a new midwife and she felt the baby was in the wrong position and couldn’t turn it so told us to come to the hospital, then, while we were stopped at traffic lights, this happened. My wife had to push and I saw the feet!’
‘They’ll both be fine,’ Marty assured the man, who had obviously been prepared to deliver his child head first but had panicked at seeing feet. She was also reassured herself. After four children the woman’s pelvimetry should be flexible enough to expand to release the head. She turned her attention back to the labouring woman. ‘You’re the boss, so we’ll wait until you’re ready to push again then rotate him so his arms follow each other out.’
She turned to check the instrument tray, seeing the Piper forceps on it, should she need them to help deliver the head. She’d prefer not to, but if the baby’s head was hyper-extended, they’d definitely be needed.
‘Now,’ the woman gasped, while her husband, who was supporting her, leaned forward over her labouring body to see what was happening.
The arms came free and Marty continued with her instructions to Carlos who stood, bent almost double, beside her.
‘Now, with two hands, the left one underneath, you use your forefinger again, only this time you slip it into his mouth to keep his head flexed. Then with the next contraction, we pull down, then lift and pull at the same time. Wait for the push, then—bingo! One brave little boy comes backwards into the world.’
She held him while the nurse wiped his face and gently suctioned his nose and mouth, then handed the baby, who was squalling lustily, to the mother, took a soft towel from the nurse to cover him, then helped move mother and child to a wheelchair so she and the infant could be formally admitted to hospital.
‘You don’t do an Apgar score straight away?’ Carlos asked, and, still smiling about the successful delivery, she turned towards him.
‘He cried—that’s enough for me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more important for his mother to hold him—to see for herself that he’s OK. We’ll still get the first Apgar done within a minute—or pretty close to it. Then another at five minutes, but, really, with healthy babies that’s stuff to put on charts.’
Their patient was wheeled into one of the trauma rooms in A and E to await the third stage of her labour, and for her new son to be checked out and his birth documented for posterity. But first things first. Marty clamped the cord in two places then handed a pair of surgical scissors to the father so he could cut the cord.
‘A son!’ the man said, touching the cheek of the baby who was held to his wife’s breast.
‘A son!’ Marty heard Carlos echo, and, turning, saw a look of wonder in his eyes, and although she experienced this same sense of miracle each and every time a new child was born, she had to wonder if he would have felt differently towards Emmaline if he’d been present at her birth.
Or if she’d been a boy?
‘Please, no drugs,’ the woman said, as Marty gently massaged her abdomen to encourage expulsion of the placenta.
‘Providing everything is OK, I’ll go along with that,’ Marty assured her. ‘But you’ve had a difficult labour and there could be damage to the uterine wall. I won’t make any promises at this stage.’
The woman seemed satisfied with this, though it was with reluctance she gave up the baby to be checked, weighed, cleaned and dressed.
‘A fine little boy,’ Carlos said, when the woman had been admitted—for observation only, Marty had assured her—and the two of them were having a cup of coffee in the staffroom.
The remark reminded Marty of his earlier exclamation and suspicion made her ask, ‘Would that have made a difference? To you, I mean? Would it have been different if Emmaline had been a boy?’
He looked genuinely puzzled.
‘Why would you think that?’
Marty shrugged.
‘Preconceived ideas of Latin men, I suppose. Where are you from? Italy?’
‘Spain,’ he snapped. ‘And on behalf of all so-called Latin men I find your assumption offensive.’
‘Do you?’ Marty said, challenging him with her eyes. ‘I’ll retract the Latin bit, if you like, but don’t tell me that most men wouldn’t prefer at least their firstborn to be a son.’
‘Nonsense!’ Carlos exploded, so genuinely upset she knew she’d been wrong. So wrong that she held up her hands in surrender.
‘OK, I apologise, but from where I sit it was an easy assumption to make. Do you know what Marty’s short for? Martina! And, no, I’m not named after a tennis star, but after my father, Martin, who’d wanted a son and when I arrived, the firstborn, named me after himself anyway. I’d like to think that some malign fate is working on the situation but I know it’s something to do with his chromosomes. Three marriages and five half-sisters later, he’s still without a son. His attitude has skewed things for me.’
She was talking too much again, but the man made her nervous in a way she’d never felt before. She drained her coffee and stood up. She wasn’t due on duty for another three-quarters of an hour and it felt like the day was already half-over.
‘I have patients to see on the ward then a list of out-patient appointments. Have you met whoever you’ll be working under in A and E?’
‘Anxious to be rid of me?’ Carlos asked.
‘Anxious to get to work,’ Marty retorted, although her habit of getting to work an hour or two early had only begun with Natalie’s admission. Since Emmaline’s birth, she’d been coming to work earlier and earlier, checking the baby first, then tackling paperwork, so she could free up small pockets of time later in the day to spend with the newborn infant.