Mistletoe Mother (Medical Romance)

by Josie Metcalfe

  Her sincerity took the wind out of his sails but he glared at her for another second.

  ‘Well, tonight you’re going to be in your own bed. If anyone’s going to sleep on the floor it’ll be me.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re staying?’ Her voice rose into a squeak and she started to heave herself up so that at least she was sitting. She felt at far too much of a disadvantage lying at his feet like a beached whale.

  ‘Of course I’m staying,’ he retorted, striding across to his bags to rummage for some clean clothing. ‘Have you taken a look outside yet? It must have snowed all night.’

  ‘So you can’t leave.’

  ‘Nor do I want to until we’ve finally got a few things sorted out and, knowing our luck, that could take weeks.’

  As an exit line, it was a beauty, especially when it was punctuated with the latch of the bathroom door dropping with a sound like a gunshot.

  ‘So,’ Seth began again at the end of a largely silent breakfast, ‘are there any chores that need doing outside? Any animals to feed?’

  ‘Apart from the chickens, none that I need to tend,’ she explained as she got up to collect their dishes. ‘The family next door have been dropping hay for the sheep at the same time as they leave my milk.’

  ‘And how far away is that? Walking distance, I hope.’ He’d surprised her by following her through into the scullery as she began the washing-up, picking up a tea towel as though this was a chore they shared every day.

  ‘Not when it snows like this. If there’s any left at the drop-off point, the weather’s cold enough to freeze it so it won’t go bad. In the meantime, I’m well stocked up with dried milk so I won’t go short.’

  ‘So you’ve nothing to do except sit inside and stay warm,’ he said with a satisfied nod.

  ‘Except for my work,’ she added as she drained the sink and reached for a towel to dry her hands, and he immediately frowned.

  ‘You’re not in any state to work,’ he snapped. ‘Even midwives get maternity leave.’

  ‘Except I haven’t been working as a midwife,’ she threw over her shoulder as she went back into the living room to stoke the fire. ‘I’ve been spinning wool shorn from local sheep. Some of it I sell, the rest I knit up and sell the garments.’

  That revelation had silenced Seth completely and he watched, clearly intrigued as she positioned herself at the spinning wheel that her grandmother had first taught her to use when she was a child.

  He was fascinated by the process, not least because she was able to use her hands and feet totally independently of each other to regulate both the speed of the wheel and the thickness of the strand of wool it was twisting.

  ‘Is it hard to learn?’ he asked after several minutes, obviously itching to have a go.

  ‘Not if you can pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time,’ she teased, then brought the wheel to a stop and relinquished her seat. ‘Here. Have a go.’

  It was the first time she’d ever seen Seth truly out of his depth, the neuromuscular skills that made him such an excellent surgeon apparently deserting him when it came to this ancient craft.

  They spent several minutes absolutely helpless with laughter and it was a heart-warming sound that she’d never heard before.

  The fact that he could genuinely laugh at himself when he was all fingers and thumbs and making a total mess could only endear him to Ella, as did his determination to master the skill.

  It was nearly an hour later that he finally looked up at her with triumph written all over his face.

  ‘It might not be pretty or perfectly even, but I did it!’ he announced with all the pride of a little boy tying his own shoelaces for the first time, and Ella’s heart squeezed.

  If her child was a son, would he look like that when he mastered a new skill?

  Something of her thoughts must have shown on her face because his own grew similarly serious.

  ‘Ella, are you ready to talk, or at least to listen?’ he asked huskily, his eyes the soft grey of polished pewter.

  She sighed heavily.

  She’d been dreading this ever since she’d realised its inevitability, but she still loved Seth too much not to hear him out. Anyway, they had to find some way to clear the air for the sake of the child they’d created, even if it wasn’t the only one he’d fathered.

  That thought had been the one that had tormented her most in the months since she’d moved here, so it had to be the first question he answered.

  ‘Start off with your wife,’ she prompted. ‘Was the third attempt at IVF successful?’

  Ella could see she’d shocked him.

  ‘How did you know?’ he demanded, clearly amazed. ‘I never told anyone at the hospital anything about my private life so how do you know so much?’

  ‘Sheer chance,’ she said bluntly. ‘One of our midwives doesn’t like putting a book down without reading to the end. She worked with the two of you at one time and was hoping I knew whether the third session of IVF had been successful.’

  His shoulders almost seemed to bow under an intolerable weight.

  ‘No. It wasn’t successful,’ he said in a subdued voice. ‘But she was so obsessed…’ He shook his head then glanced up, briefly meeting her gaze. ‘It’s probably easier if I start at the beginning.’

  Ella nodded then waited silently while he ordered his thoughts.

  ‘Fran would have been a wonderful mother,’ he finally said, the words so sad that they almost sounded like an epitaph.

  ‘Almost as soon as we were married she wanted to start a family, but neither of us had finished training so we were sensible and waited a while. Then when we were ready and nothing happened we went the usual route and had tests.’

  His hands were knotted together, hanging down between his knees as he leant forward with his elbows braced on his thighs, and his eyes were fixed intently on them.

  ‘She was devastated when they told her that her Fallopian tubes were too badly scarred for her to become pregnant naturally. Apparently she’d picked up an infection some years earlier, water-skiing on an exotic holiday, and hadn’t even known it. The water is forced up at such speed that the cervix can be broached.’

  Seth flicked her a glance to see if she’d understood and she nodded.

  He looked so lonely that she wished she dared to go to him to put her arms around him. Even though he might have been unfaithful to his wife when he’d slept with her that magical night, it didn’t seem to stop her loving him and wanting to ease his pain.

  ‘Then she started on the series of drugs to stimulate egg production and was absolutely over the moon when they were able to harvest nine eggs at the first try. She was so certain that everything was going to work that when the first implantation failed she was devastated.’

  He rubbed his hands over his face almost as though he wished he could erase the memories but he doggedly continued.

  ‘Even then, I was worried that the stress was too much for her, but she seemed to shrug it off and was raring to go as soon as she got the all-clear to start again.’

  This time the pause was longer and his voice was wearier when he went on.

  ‘It seemed to be successful the second time. For two months she was absolutely ecstatic, almost bouncing off the walls, and then she started to bleed.’

  There was agony in his voice and she wondered if he’d ever admitted just how harrowing it had been for him to have to go through losing his potential children time after time. It wasn’t only his wife who had been bereft and yet he’d probably been the one doing all the consoling.

  ‘The specialist was adamant that he wouldn’t let her try again for several months, to give her body and her mind a chance to recover. She was so angry and frustrated by the decision that she became absolutely impossible to live with. We were rowing all the time and it was tearing everything that was good about our marriage apart so I moved into hospital accommodation.

  ‘It was just supposed to be a temporary arrangement, jus
t until things calmed down, I told myself. But once we weren’t living together I had to admit that I couldn’t bear the thought of going back.’

  He looked up, finally meeting Ella’s eyes with a mute appeal in them. ‘It’s my fault, you see. If I’d been living at home where I should have been, I’d have seen what she was doing. She wouldn’t have been able to get away with it.’

  ‘Get away with what?’ Ella’s imagination was reaching overload. It was a wonder the man hadn’t cracked under the strain long ago.

  ‘She started the third attempt without telling me anything about it. Somehow she’d persuaded the consultant in charge of her case that she was physically and mentally ready to give it another try. She still had some frozen embryos from the first egg collection so she didn’t need anything more from me, but because we weren’t living together any more she wasn’t certain whether I’d agree to fertilise any more eggs if the IVF didn’t work this time. I didn’t find out until later that she was so desperate that it should succeed that time that she was taking advantage of her position in the department to break all the rules. She managed to falsify her blood test results so that she could continue taking the drugs long after she should have stopped.’

  The silence stretched out, the only sound in the room the intermittent crackle of the fire.

  Finally she couldn’t wait any longer.

  ‘Seth, what happened? Did she lose the babies?’

  ‘She never got as far as having them implanted. Apparently, she started having breathing problems one day at work, but before anyone could work out what was wrong she collapsed and went into a coma.’

  ‘A blood clot,’ Ella breathed, feeling sick.

  It was one thing to be prepared to undergo all the numerous tests and procedures attendant on IVF and to undergo them time and time again, but she couldn’t imagine being so obsessed with conceiving a child that she would deliberately risk her own life by flouting all the hospital safety measures.

  ‘How bad was the damage?’

  ‘PVS,’ he said succinctly but there was a catch in his voice. ‘Absolutely no chance of recovery but she lingered for months until finally she developed pneumonia.’

  He looked up at her with a ravaged expression, his eyes nearly black.

  ‘Do you want to hear the ultimate irony?’ he demanded harshly. ‘That phone call—the one I took during your sister’s wedding reception—was to tell me that she’d just died and suddenly, after keeping the nightmare to myself for so long, I just wanted to tell you all about it.’

  ‘But I persuaded you to dance with me and then, when we went up to the hotel room, I didn’t let you talk.’

  ‘That’s what I meant about the ultimate irony,’ he said heavily. ‘The very day that Fran died as a result of her desperation to have a child was the day our child was conceived.’

  Ella couldn’t sleep.

  For a start, she couldn’t get comfortable enough, with that lump in the way, and turning over was almost impossible. Her back ached and the monster inside her hadn’t been still for hours, in spite of all the books saying that babies grew quieter towards the end of a pregnancy as space become more restricted.

  She’d actually been more comfortable on her makeshift bed last night, she thought with a scowl. This one was too soft for her to be able to move easily, but Seth had insisted that he wasn’t taking her bed for a second night, even though the first time had been inadvertent.

  She shuffled again then gave up with a huff of annoyance. It didn’t really matter what she did, she wasn’t going to be able to sleep, especially when she admitted that her insomnia was really due to all the thoughts tangled up inside her head.

  She still felt close to tears when she thought about the hell Seth had gone through in the last couple of years.

  It might have been some time since she’d last had any connection with patients undergoing infertility treatment but that didn’t mean she’d forgotten the tremendous stress they could experience during the process. Even given the small number of couples she’d seen, she’d recognised the feelings of frustration, inadequacy and guilt. Then there had been the anger and resentment towards other successful couples, carefully camouflaged under smiles of congratulations.

  Most destructive of all was the sudden plunge from hope to despair as yet another cycle failed to achieve their dearest wish.

  It wasn’t hard to see why such an explosive mixture could destroy a marriage, no matter how committed each of the partners were at the outset, sapping their confidence in their relationship and even in themselves.

  What she didn’t understand was her part in the tangle of Seth’s life. Given the way she felt about him, she’d been stupidly relieved to find out that she hadn’t been a party to adultery, but that still didn’t explain all the other questions.

  She sighed heavily and glanced at the old-fashioned luminous dial of her grandmother’s alarm clock.

  Nearly midnight. She’d been tossing and turning…or trying to turn…for over an hour now, and was no closer to sleep.

  Was Seth sleeping? Would it wake him if she were to creep out and warm some milk, the way her grandmother would have done for her when she was a child?

  She heaved herself out of bed and wrapped herself in her fuzzy old dressing-gown, rolling her eyes when she realised exactly how far apart the front edges were now.

  Once upon a time they had wrapped over each other by a long way but even without the camouflage of oversized jumpers, she knew that her bump was growing huge.

  She patted the hyperactive bulge with a wry grin before shuffling silently to the door in her thick warm bedsocks. Thank goodness she was going to be in a hospital with plenty of pain relief available when this elephant arrived!

  She held her breath as the old iron latch gave its distinctive click then eased the door open as silently as ancient hinges would allow.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ Seth murmured, and she saw his shadowy outline silhouetted by the warm dull glow of the fire.

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you, but…I was going to make myself a drink.’ She padded across towards the fire then detoured to collect a pan and some milk.

  ‘Hot chocolate?’ he asked, sounding artlessly hopeful, and in spite of the weight of her thoughts she had to chuckle.

  ‘Hot chocolate it is.’

  Once she’d given the fire a poke it didn’t take long to heat the milk, and within minutes they were sitting with steaming mugs cradled between their hands, one on each side of the fire like bookends in their matching rocking chairs.

  It was Seth who finally broke the silence.

  ‘Are you having more broken nights as you get closer to the end?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Even by the light of the fire she could see that his eyes were on her, and when she glanced down she realised that he would be able to see clear evidence of the frantic activity going on inside her.

  That brought home to her in a blinding flash the fact that it was the first time he would have seen his child moving, and she suddenly had to add guilt to all the other emotions roiling inside her.

  The shock of thinking that she was pregnant by a married man had sent her scurrying for this convenient bolt-hole. The fact that so many people had seen her dancing with Seth, only for both of them to disappear from the room shortly afterwards, would have made conclusions only too easy to draw once her pregnancy had started to show.

  Except that he hadn’t been a married man but a recently bereaved one, and that brought her right back to her original worries.

  She rested her head back against the chair and sighed. If she wanted to sleep, perhaps she needed to take her courage in both hands and ask the questions. She might not like the answers but at least she wouldn’t be left wondering.

  ‘Seth?’ she murmured hesitantly, drawing him out of his own thoughts. ‘I was thinking about what you told me and…Well…I wanted to know…Why did you sleep with me?’ she ended baldly, suddenly opting for the direct route to what
she needed to know.

  He gave a bark of incredulous laughter. ‘Why did I sleep with you? Why do you think I slept with you? After that night I would have thought it was obvious. Because I couldn’t keep my hands off you any longer.’

  Ella quivered as a sharp burst of awareness ripped through her. It was the same every time she thought of that night, but this time she wasn’t going to let it derail her thoughts.

  Before she could respond, he continued, ‘Listen, Ella, I’ve always tried to be an honourable man, and even though Fran was in a coma, I was still legally a married man. In my book, that meant that it didn’t matter how much I wanted you, you were out of bounds.’

  It was good to know that he shared her principles about infidelity even though it could have been seen as a technicality in his situation.

  ‘But why that night?’ she persisted, finally coming to the crux of her fears. ‘Was it some sort of…release after Fran’s death or was it because you really wanted this?’ She gestured towards her prominent bulge with a trembling hand, holding her breath while she waited for his reply.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘AND I thought you were a reasonably intelligent woman,’ Seth said finally, when the silence had stretched out so long that Ella felt like screaming.

  Suddenly he surged to his feet, making her gasp as he left his chair rocking wildly in his wake as he came to loom over her.

  ‘If that was all I wanted,’ he said softly, the two hands he planted on the arms of her chair trapping her as effectively as bars on a cage, ‘would I have spent the last eight months eating my heart out, wondering where you were and why you’d left without a word?’

  ‘But you left me without a word, the very next day,’ she countered, glaring up at him furiously, barely registering the fact that she now knew why he’d lost so much weight. ‘No one knew where you’d gone or why, or even if you were coming back. Once I discovered I was pregnant I didn’t have any option but to leave, especially when I knew you were married. Too many people saw us dancing that night not to put two and two together and make four.’