The Pregnancy Proposition

by Meredith Webber

  ‘And who appointed you my keeper?’ Amelia demanded, so angry with his attitude her hands clenched into fists and she wanted to batter them against his chest.

  Not that they’d have done much good—like a flea bashing an elephant.

  ‘I did,’ he said, stepping towards her, his hands reaching out so for a moment she thought he was going to lift her into his arms again.

  In the hospital?

  She ducked away, but wasn’t fast enough to escape his hand, which latched itself around her shoulders and drew her close.

  ‘Get used to it, Peterson,’ he growled, bending low so she couldn’t miss either the words or the intonation. ‘That’s my baby you’re carrying in there and, though I’m willing to give you time to come to terms with it and let you do things your way, eventually every damn worker in this hospital is going to know it.’

  The pride in his voice made Amelia’s knees feel so weak she almost, but not quite, forgot the buzzing in the rest of her body.

  Mac drove her home, ignored her assurances she could make it up to her apartment without an escort, but left her at the front door.

  ‘Make sure you have something to eat as soon as you get up. Better still, how about I come around in the morning and take you to the same place for breakfast? You said the tea agreed with you.’

  Amelia studied him for a moment.

  ‘You haven’t had a personality transplant, have you, Mac?’

  ‘Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, Peterson,’ he growled, then he touched her cheek. ‘But you’re too tired for me to be arguing with you. Go to bed.’

  He bent his head and brushed his lips against hers.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  Dazed by the kiss, she propped herself against the door as two long strides took him back to the lift. He pressed the button, then turned back to her, digging through his pockets and finally producing a crumpled piece of paper from one of them and a pen from the other.

  He scribbled something as the lift arrived and the doors slid open. He stuck his foot in the opening to hold them ajar, crumpled the paper even more and threw it across to her.

  ‘My phone number and mobile and pager number, Peterson. If you need me for anything at all, from a cup of tea to a hug, you make sure you call.’

  He waggled his fingers at her in a most un-Mac-like manner, then the doors slid closed. Amelia straightened out the piece of paper and read the numbers.

  Would she ever feel the need to call any of them?

  She thought of the times when she’d longed for a man’s comforting hug—from someone other than one of her brothers—and shook her head, considering the dangers of hugging Mac. Then idly, to distract her mind as much as for any other reason, she turned the piece of paper over.

  It was a receipt for dinner for two at Capriccio’s—not for the night she’d been his partner but, according to the date in the top right-hand corner, for the Tuesday after he’d made his offer of a ‘dinner-and-sex’ arrangement between them.

  ‘It didn’t take you long to find a replacement,’ she muttered at the departed guest. ‘Just four short days!’ She crumpled the paper in her tightening fist and flung it hard against the wall.

  Then she retrieved it, and carefully straightened it out again. If ever there was an omen, this was it. Mac could talk all he liked about marriage—because he considered it the best option for a child he undoubtedly wanted—but marriage without love didn’t work. Not for her! She’d found that out with Brad, when she’d realised she’d mistaken attraction and friendship for a deeper emotion.

  Mac might want this baby—the pride in his voice when he’d spoken earlier had confirmed that fact. So it was only fair he had some involvement. Also, it would be good for the child to know its father. But to live with Mac—with anyone—in a loveless marriage?

  No way would that be happening.

  She’d go it alone—well, she and the baby, there’d be two of them—and first thing tomorrow morning, she’d tell him.

  Mac drove away from the building feeling curiously flat.

  Tiredness, he told himself. It’s been a long day—a long couple of days.

  But this rationalisation failed to reassure him, especially as the excitement he’d felt since realising Peterson might be pregnant had been damped down by this new sensation.

  He frowned into the night, irritated by the fact that he couldn’t pinpoint the cause of his gloom. He prided himself on his self-knowledge and was the first to admit to his flaws and faults, so where did this flatness come from?

  From the fact you’re driving home when you’d rather be in Peterson’s flat?

  The question, hitting him out of nowhere, shocked him into braking suddenly, causing the car behind him to blast a reprimand. It was a timely reminder, he told himself. Forget your mood and concentrate on driving. Most of the people heading out of the city at this time of night have been out enjoying themselves—probably having a drink or two—so you have to be alert, not lost in non-productive conjecture.

  He swung onto the entrance to the motorway which would take him out of the city towards his suburban townhouse and accelerated up the sharp curve of the on-ramp. At first the sudden blaze of light confused him, while the noise of sirens echoed in his head.

  Then the lights went out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AMELIA paced the floor of her living room. Surely Mac had said he’d pick her up and take her to breakfast—and he certainly didn’t know how furious the receipt had made her. Or anything of the decision it had helped her make.

  So where was he?

  Backing out of the marriage situation—that’s where!

  He’d been kind the previous night—and the night before that—but out of sight was obviously out of mind with Mac, and he’d forgotten.

  Well, that suited her just fine!

  Tired of waiting, and increasingly nauseous, she made her own cup of tea and nibbled at a piece of dry toast, neither of which improved either her restless stomach or her temper.

  ‘Heard about Mac?’

  Sally asked the question as Amelia walked into the locker room—late—to dump her handbag.

  Possibilities flashed through her mind. He was leaving, applying to be an astronaut—that should take him far enough away from her…

  ‘Heard what?’ she asked, hoping it had only been seconds not hours since Sally had spoken.

  ‘He was in a car accident last night. It was on this morning’s news, although they didn’t mention his name. A stolen car involved in a police chase crossed the median strip and came down the on-ramp as he was going up. He must have had a hot date that he was driving home from the city, not the hospital.’

  Amelia stood very still, certain all the physical functioning of her body had halted. She drew in air so she could form words to ask the question, then found she didn’t dare let the thought escape her lips lest the horror of it overwhelm her.

  Fortunately, Sally continued.

  ‘He’s up in ICU. They’re saying semi-coma, but who knows with head injury, especially an acceleration-deceleration injury?’

  Amelia’s brain had obviously started working again as it obligingly threw up a plethora of terrible information about such injuries, even an illustration of how they occurred—when the sudden cessation of forward movement threw the soft mass of the brain forward against the bony plates in the front of the skull, then slammed it back again against the hard bones at the rear.

  ‘So we’re a doctor short, though we’ve got an extra intern replacing Rick who’s off sick, and we’ll probably be a few nurses short as well.’

  Amelia realised that was good. The busier she was, the less time she’d have to worry. She locked her bag away, pulled on a clean pink coverall and followed Sally out of the room.

  But being busy didn’t stop her thinking—not entirely.

  Where did she stand with Mac? Did one night of intimacy and a pregnancy entitle her to visiting time in the ICU?

  She knew damn well it
didn’t, but that didn’t stop a feeling of urgency that she should be there, talking to him, touching him, reminding him about the baby—telling him he had to stay alive for the baby if nothing else.

  Because, if Mac should die, her child would be fatherless.

  It was one thing to decide against marriage, but her child needed a father, so Mac would have to live.

  Having made this decision, she felt a lot better, and better still when, during a lull in the influx of patients, she had time to phone the ICU. By sheer luck she found Rachel Reynolds on duty. She and Rachel had trained together and remained friends, although they rarely caught up with each other.

  ‘He’s OK,’ Rachel told her. ‘Well, as OK as you can get with head injury. Contusions and lacerations of the brain but no sign of any more dangerous developments as yet. He’s been classified as semi-coma—responding to painful stimuli but not verbal questions or commands.’

  ‘I’ve always thought that “responding to painful stimuli” was a terrible way to classify a patient—I mean, I respond to painful stimuli when I’m fully conscious.’

  ‘I know,’ Rachel agreed, ‘but until we come up with something better…’

  ‘Can I visit?’

  As soon as the question was out Amelia knew it had been a mistake, but she’d had to ask.

  ‘Why? Something going on between the two of you? I haven’t heard it on the gossip line so you must have kept it quiet.’

  ‘You haven’t heard it because nothing’s happening,’ Amelia snapped. ‘But we’ve been colleagues for a long time and he did me a favour recently.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘I care about him, Rache.’

  ‘About Mac? The ogre of A and E? We are talking about the same person?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be checking your monitors or something?’ Amelia said crossly, then she slammed down the phone.

  Somehow she got through the day, but when she finished her shift, instead of heading home, she made her way down to the library. The texts she found on head injuries were hardly reassuring, though one kindly author had drawn a graph of a patient’s progress up from coma, semi-coma, to stupor, then confusion and finally alertness. This man contended it usually happened that way, providing no further setbacks such as meningitis, lung infections, haematomas or other horrifyingly ominous complications occurred.

  At the stupor level, the next step up, if Rachel’s explanation of his condition was correct, he could be roused with difficulty but would probably respond to simple questions.

  Were there ever any simple questions? she wondered, returning the books to the shelves then making her way up to the ICU.

  Her uniform meant no one stopped her walking into the intensive-care unit, and the sister on duty behind the bank of monitors seemed to think it was natural she’d want to check on a colleague.

  ‘He’s in four,’ she said, nodding towards a window opposite the nurses’ station. ‘That’s his mother in there now. His sister came up earlier and brought her baby, thinking he might respond to her. Apparently he’s mad about the child, but it didn’t help.’

  Amelia felt her heart clench with pain. She thanked the woman and crossed the room, looking through the window at the man who lay so still.

  ‘Mac!’ she whispered helplessly, realising, when she saw the craggy profile with its stubborn jutting chin, that she might be just the teensiest, tiniest bit in love with him.

  With Mac? her head scoffed, and as the woman sitting by the bed, perhaps sensing her presence, turned, Amelia walked away.

  Of course she couldn’t be in love with Mac. The heavy lump of misery in her chest was because of the baby, not Mac. And the strung-out feeling in her nerves and the tension in her muscles were caused by the fact her baby might lose his or her father, not because she might lose Mac.

  After all, he wasn’t hers to lose.

  Five long anxiety-filled days later, Rachel finally had something good to report.

  ‘He’s awake some of the time but confused and disoriented,’ she said. ‘Apparently he thinks Petra is his baby, though he’s calling her something more like Peter, and he seems terribly anxious about her. Doug Blake, the neurologist who’s in charge of him, is concerned about the confusion and the distress it’s causing. He feels if the family can’t somehow reassure him, he might have to put him into an induced coma for a while and bring him out of it more slowly.’

  Neurologists often treated their head-injured patients by inducing a coma, Amelia reminded herself, but it didn’t help the worry knotting her gut and straining her nerves to snapping point.

  She thought through what Rachel had said and brooded on possible interpretations of the confused words Mac was saying. Then she went over all the possibilities again.

  Mac had been injured after leaving her flat. Would he have been thinking about his niece, or about the recent, startling revelations in his own life?

  Would he have confused Petra and called her Peter—or was he saying Peterson, and the family, not knowing of her own existence, had assumed he was talking about Petra?

  By the time she finished work, Amelia had decided—well, almost decided—on a course of action. She shut herself into a cubicle in the washroom, the only place she knew for sure she’d be undisturbed, and went through it one more time.

  In the beginning Mac had left it up to her to decide whether she had the baby or not, but through all the subsequent conversations she’d realised he truly wanted the child she was carrying.

  As far as she was concerned, the discovery that she was pregnant had been like a miraculous gift, and though she’d been stunned—and concerned about what it would mean in terms of Mac’s involvement in her future—there’d been no ‘will I, won’t I have it’ argument in her own mind.

  Had she made that clear to Mac?

  Did he fear she might not want it?

  Was that what was bothering him?

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling as she realised for the umpteenth time that if he was worried about the baby—their baby—then she was the only person who could reassure him.

  And the sooner she did it, the better.

  Reluctantly, Amelia left her refuge and, after washing her hands and face then swiping a little lipstick on her pale lips, made her way back up to the ICU.

  As she got out of the lift her resolve faltered, and shaky knees suggested she retreat.

  Think of the baby, she told herself, straightening her shoulders and tilting her chin, as if she were preparing for a battle with officialdom rather than facing a semiconscious man.

  Every child deserved a father.

  As luck—good or bad—would have it, the woman she assumed was Mrs McDougal was coming out of the ward.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, reaching out and grasping Amelia’s arm. ‘I’ve seen you outside the window every day but when I come out to talk to you, you’ve always disappeared. I’m Marion McDougal, Fraser’s mother.’

  ‘I guessed that,’ Amelia said, then, realising it was her turn, she held out her hand. ‘Amelia Peterson.’

  ‘Peterson! Amelia Peterson. Oh, thank heavens. That’s what he’s been saying. We thought he must mean Petra because he’s talking about a baby as well, but it didn’t make sense. The two of you must be close for him to have been so very anxious about you. Why didn’t you come in? Make yourself known? Or did those stupid nurses tell you only family was allowed?’

  ‘I’m actually one of those stupid nurses myself,’ Amelia admitted. ‘Though downstairs, not up here.’

  She stopped, wondering if she was brave enough to take the plunge, then knew she had to see Mac.

  ‘I work with him—we are close. I’d like to visit if that’s all right with you.’

  Marion grasped her hands and pressed them.

  ‘All right? Of course it is. I’ve just left. I get so upset, seeing him lie there like that, I end up doing more harm than good. And Charlotte, that’s his sister, won’t be up until her husband gets home to mind the baby. My husband will come back later and
sit overnight, but if you could go in now…’

  She leant forward and kissed Amelia’s cheek.

  ‘Talk to him, tell him things. The neurologist thinks it helps. Seeing you might be just what he needs to get through this stage and up to the next level of recovery.’

  Or it might not, Amelia thought as Marion accompanied her back in and told the nursing staff that Amelia should be allowed to visit any time.

  Amelia entered the room, aware of the interest of the nurses on duty. It was only because all the other visitors had been family, she told herself, but she knew the grapevine would report differently.

  And, like the tendrils on a grapevine, the story would grow.

  ‘You could help by getting yourself out of here, Mac,’ she told the still figure on the bed. ‘You’re not achieving anything just lying there.’

  She took his hand and pressed it against her stomach.

  ‘And as you told me once, this is our baby I’m carrying. If you think I’m going to bring up the poor little blighter without a father, you’ve got another think coming.’

  The monitor on the wall showed the change in his breathing, then his eyes opened and he looked vacantly around the room for a moment before his gaze fixed on her.

  ‘Peterson? Where the hell have you been?’

  His voice was croaky from disuse, but held the usual tone of reprimand—so familiar she felt her heart squeeze with pain.

  ‘Doing your job for you down in A and E,’ she told him, holding his fingers tightly and praying she wouldn’t cry, at least until she was out of this room.

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘The baby’s fine,’ she assured him, then she smiled to herself as his eyelids slid down to cover the usually searching hazel eyes and he drifted back to the nether world he was inhabiting.

  She kept hold of his hand and carried on talking, telling him about how work was going, then, thinking it might bother him more than it helped, she talked about her family—about wanting to go into her father’s construction business with her brothers until they’d told her she’d be blown off the high-rise building sites.