she began to fish under the table for the shoes she’d kicked off soon after she’d arrived, trying to find the words to thank him, not only for the delicious meal but also for standing by her while she faced Colin down, yet still allowing her to deal with the situation herself.
She was just drawing a breath to bring the evening to a close when his mobile phone began to vibrate its way across the centre of the table.
‘Carterton.’ His brisk response told her she wasn’t going to have to eavesdrop on a one-sided private call and the resigned expression that came over his face was enough to tell her that Sheelagh Griffin’s baby had lost his fight.
‘Poor woman,’ she whispered, her heart heavy for the couple who would have to start the whole IVF process all over again if they were ever to have the family they wanted.
Before Daniel could comment his phone was ringing again, but this time the shocked way his eyes widened told her the news he was getting was totally unexpected and it wasn’t good.
Listening in on a call that largely consisted of one-word questions was both frustrating and frightening, especially when she saw the regret fill his face.
‘What?’ she demanded as soon as the call ended. ‘What’s happened? Oh, no! Is it Aliyah? How bad is it?’
He raked his fingers through his thick dark hair and swore ripely, something she very rarely heard him do.
‘It’s not Aliyah,’ he said but before she could let the relief flood through her he added, ‘it’s her husband. He coded in ICU and it took five tries to get him back.’
Jenny felt close to tears when she remembered what a lovely caring man Faz was and how concerned about Aliyah and their baby. ‘How long was his heart stopped? Do they know why?’
‘They’ve taken him back to theatre. There’s blood building up in the pericardium that’s stopping the heart from working properly. It nearly stopped it permanently.’
‘Surely they would have checked for other sources of bleeding when they were retrieving the bone fragments from the broken ribs and sorting out the collapsed lung?’
Daniel’s expression was wry because they both knew that such things could be missed when a patient presented with so many life-threatening injuries at once, especially if the damage was small enough to make any bleed insignificant amongst all the other gore.
Sadly, she realised that their almost idyllic evening was over—the outside world back with a vengeance—and suddenly her exhaustion made everything more than she could bear—the situation with Colin and their embarrassing confrontation, the worry that Aliyah might be losing her longed-for babies, Sheelagh Griffin’s accident right at the hospital’s gates and the loss of both of her precious babies. Now this! The horrible events still seemed to be piling up.
With barely a second’s warning her breath caught in her throat and her eyes burned as they filled with tears.
‘Oh, Daniel,’ she wailed, then whirled towards his door, wanting nothing more than to escape before he saw them start to stream down her face.
‘Hey!’ He caught her arm as she fumbled with the lock on the front door and swung her gently around. ‘Are you going without your shoes?’
The concerned frown pleating his forehead was the final straw, releasing the first sob from the dammed-up agony in her throat, and when he pulled her into the sanctuary of his arms the floodgates burst.
‘Shh!’ Daniel soothed helplessly as he awkwardly patted her back, realising wryly that, for all his extensive education, he had no more idea of how to deal with a crying woman than any other man.
And the fact that a large part of his brain was taken up with registering just how perfect Jenny felt in his arms wasn’t something he had any control over, either.
She was such an energetic person with such a lively personality that it was all too easy to forget just how slender she was, especially when she was swathed in a shapeless uniform or several bulky layers of off-duty clothing—one of the down sides of spending her working days in a heated building.
Now that he had her wrapped in his arms he realised that she was more than a head shorter than he was, easily able to burrow herself into the angle under his chin as she clung to him.
The hand that started stroking her back traced the perfect curve of her spine from the silky hair at the base of her skull all the way down to the top of her jeans, and he was almost certain that, had he tried, he could have wrapped both hands completely around her waist, fingertip to fingertip.
And as for her legs, those deceptively long legs, one of which he was bracketing with his own as she leaned against him, sparking his imagination to fill with images of how they would feel without the layers of fabric separating them, how it would feel if they were both naked with those endless legs wrapped around his waist as he.
‘Oh, Daniel, I’m sorry,’ she whimpered against his throat and he had to swallow a groan as the puffs of moist warmth on his bare skin ratcheted his pulse still higher even as he tried to remind himself that he was supposed to be supporting and comforting her, not wasting his time imagining impossible scenarios in which.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ he growled, hoping she couldn’t hear the way his voice betrayed the effect she was having on him.
‘I sh-shouldn’t be falling apart all over you,’ she hiccupped. ‘It’s not fair to you to have to m-mop me up.’
‘You let me worry about that,’ he reassured her, even as he tried to push to the back of his brain all the other things he’d be willing to do for her. To her. With her. ‘Everyone needs a friend they can let the barriers down with, otherwise we’d all go crazy in a high-stress job like ours.’
He rested his cheek briefly on the crown of her head just long enough to draw in the fresh scent of the shampoo she’d used earlier mixed with the indefinable something that belonged to no one but his little Jennywren.
‘It never seems to get to you,’ she complained. ‘Even when you came back up to tell us about Sheelagh Griffin’s babies.’ The thought sent her off into renewed sobs and he realised that, as it didn’t look as if she was going to be fit to leave any time soon, it was time to make them both more comfortable.
She was weeping so hard that she was probably almost unaware that he’d half-led, half-carried her back into his living room. In fact, she only reacted when he lowered himself into the corner of his oversized settee and tried to settle her on his lap.
‘Daniel, no,’ she objected, floundering in her attempts at getting her feet on the floor. ‘You don’t have to do this. It’s not. You can’t want. I shouldn’t …’
‘Calm down, sweetheart,’ he said, thwarting her halfhearted efforts by drawing her closer to his chest. ‘It’s not a problem.’ Well, that was a blatant lie for a start, because having her squirming on his lap was quickly becoming a big problem, and if she squirmed much more, she would discover just how big.
‘It’s difficult to calm d-down,’ she sobbed against his throat. ‘All I can think of is those poor people and everything they’ve l-lost and … and …’
She turned her head to look up at him just as he angled his to press his face against hers and somehow, accidentally, fleetingly,
