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
