Prognosis Baby Daddy: A hot medical romance

by Amy Andrews

  She had a fleeting moment of indecision as sleep claimed her that maybe she should change into her pyjamas in case Ben came back. But she was so tired and what if he did? The gown covered her from neck to toe.

  It was her last conscious thought for five hours.

  *

  Ben opened the door, ready to greet her, when he completely lost his train of thought. Katya was fast asleep on her back on the bed, a vision in white towelling. The belt at her waist had loosened and the lapels of her robe gaped slightly to reveal delicate collarbones and pale, milky skin. His eyes followed the gaping fabric, which showed a glimpse of the curve of her waist, the rise of one bony hip and the dip of her flat stomach.

  Her legs were almost totally exposed with just a scrap of white cotton hiding her modesty from him and the whole room smelled of cinnamon.

  Smelled of her.

  His frustrations from the day, from the last God knew how many days, all surged to the surface and he was overwhelmed by the urge to completely part the robe and just look at her.

  All of her.

  He walked across the room to the bed, as if drawn by an invisible force, and sat on the edge. The way she looked, relaxed and peaceful, made the air hard to breathe, and the room shrank until there was just him and her and the bed. His hand shook as he lifted it and hovered it over her stomach, over the place his baby was nestled and he gave in to the urge to touch her there, to cradle his baby as he had seen her do so often.

  Katya’s eyes flew open. It took her a few seconds to break free of the clinging folds of the best, dreamless sleep she’d had in weeks. She was disorientated, momentarily confused by her surroundings. ‘Ben?’

  Had she conjured him up?

  ‘Sorry.’ He withdrew his hand. The creamy inner curve of her breast played peek-a-boo with the gape of the gown lapels. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  Katya shook a head still filled with cotton wool. ‘Did you want something?’

  You. Under me. Now. If only he could think of something to say that didn’t involve the damn bed.

  ‘Ben?’

  Katya searched his face in the gloomy late afternoon light of the room. The heavy cloak suddenly evaporated and she was captivated by the desire in his eyes. She’d seen that look before. Still remembered the pleasure that had followed.

  His brown gaze was hot. He wanted her, she could see it. A flare of heat seared her pelvic floor muscles. She felt them contract and the rub of cloth against her sensitive nipples was so excruciating she thought she might faint if he didn’t soothe it with his hot, wet mouth.

  He looked sexy as hell in his scrubs and her mind was full of images of how much sexier he looked out of them. She became acutely aware of her own state of undress. Nights of erotic dreams had left her ripe for this moment.

  ‘I just came to check on you,’ he said, his voice husky.

  ‘Oh.’

  Ben willed himself to move away but didn’t seem to be capable of anything more vital than breathing. ‘Have you been asleep all this time?’

  She nodded. If he didn’t get out of here soon she was going to scream. Or combust. Or demand that he make love to her.

  Ben saw the blaze of desire in her blue eyes and knew his choices were running out. He should move away, leave the room, immediately. Or maybe he could just kiss her? They were hardly strangers. They’d slept in this damn bed every night for weeks. She was pregnant with his child.

  She looked like she wanted him to kiss her.

  Just then Katya felt a quick sharp jab down low. ‘Oh!’ she said, fanning her hand across her stomach.

  ‘What?’ Ben asked, his brow puckering.

  It happened again. Was it? Could it be? ‘The baby,’ she said looking up at Ben, ‘it’s...moving. I think I can feel it moving.’ She looked at him uncertainly, the sexual haze disappearing. She was eighteen weeks gone. She’d felt the odd fluttering sensation a few times this last week, dismissed it as nothing, but this was a definite jab.

  Ben’s frown slowly disappeared and a big grin split his face. ‘Really? Can I feel?’

  She nodded and reached for his hand, guiding it beneath hers, placing it down low and despite the lifting of the sexually charged atmosphere, it was somehow suddenly more intimate than earlier. Ben’s heart pounded as they waited, staring at her tummy, at their linked hands.

  ‘We scared it away,’ Katya whispered. She felt strangely disappointed. The feeling had been difficult to describe. She’d felt...connected to the baby for the first time. And she desperately wanted to feel it again.

  Ben was about to remove his hands when the baby kicked again. Katya gasped. ‘There!’ he exclaimed. ‘I felt it!’

  Katya saw the excitement and wonder on his face and it was utterly contagious. She smiled back at him, feeling incredibly close to the baby, like she knew it suddenly. They waited again, eager for another kick.

  ‘I think the show’s over,’ Ben said a few minutes later, reluctant to remove his hand.

  The tiny foetal movements had been thrilling to be part of and he wished suddenly that it was he carrying their baby. To be able to play a more intimate role in their baby’s development.

  It was one thing feeling its first movements through his hand, but to feel it from the inside must be truly wondrous indeed.

  The baby had gone from being an abstract, slightly terrifying idea to being a real live little human in an instant.

  A rush of emotion rose in his chest.

  They were having a baby.

  He became aware again of his hand on her stomach. Her soft, warm skin, his hand grazing the line of her hipster knickers. He couldn’t remember a time when she’d looked sexier and he wanted her even more than before. Wanted to feel her beneath him, around him. He trailed his hand up the milky path the parted robe afforded him, stopping when he reached the valley between her breasts.

  Desire flare in her eyes again. ‘I’m going to kiss you,’ he said.

  Katya heard the rough texture of his voice and a rush of longing heated her belly and tingled between her thighs, the baby forgotten in the overwhelming urge to have his mouth against hers. Her nipples beaded again, his hand so close and her mind begged him to slip his hand beneath the fabric and touch one.

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ she said quietly, her gaze flicking to his full mouth.

  At least her head was still grounded in reality. They really, really shouldn’t. She had been adamant about the rules of their cohabitation.

  ‘I want to,’ he said as he edged closer.

  ‘It’ll complicate things.’

  ‘You want it, too.’

  Katya swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. Was it that obvious? She watched in fascination as he slowly lowered his head, his mouth creeping inexorably closer. ‘No,’ she said softly, with absolutely no conviction.

  There was silence as Ben’s lips halted their approach. ‘I keep thinking about that night,’ he said, his voice a husky whisper, his fingers sliding slowly beneath the fabric of her gown.

  ‘So do I,’ she admitted, her teeth biting into her bottom lip, her breasts aching for his touch.

  ‘I want to look at you.’ His heart thudded as his fingers found her scrunched nipple, the pad of his thumb stroking it impossibly higher.

  A moan escaped Katya lips, her back arching involuntarily, pushing herself into his hand, moaning again when his hand cupped her entire breast. Her face flamed at her wantonness and she licked parched lips. ‘I want to look at you too,’ she whispered.

  ‘Katya,’ he whispered and closed the distance between their mouths.

  Ben groaned, the smell of her skin was intoxicating, the taste of her mouth divine. His hand tightened against her breast as he lavished her mouth with sweet, slow kisses that burned his mouth and seared his soul. He wanted to touch her, kiss her all over, know every inch of her skin, possess every inch of her body.

  At the touch of his lips Katya flamed with passion, ignited by his taste and his smell and his deep erotic groan
. She could feel the glide of his lips and the prickle of his stubble and the tease of his fingers at her nipple, and she opened her mouth wider, wanting to feel him deeper, closer.

  She lost track of time and thought, caught up in the all-consuming sensation of his mouth and his hand and their increasingly desperate kisses. She felt wanton and female and when he yanked her gown completely open she felt a surge of heat and desire pulse between her legs.

  A knock on the door was a sharp intrusion into their passion and they broke off, shocked both at the interruption and at their recklessness. It was if someone had walked in and thrown a bucket of cold water all over them.

  ‘Benedetto? Carmella is asking for you,’ someone called in Italian.

  Ben closed his eyes and rested his head against Katya’s shoulder, sucking in air, his hand still resting on her breast, the nipple still temptingly hard. He noted with some satisfaction the harsh rise and fall of her chest and was pleased to see she was similarly affected.

  ‘Momento,’ he called out, and was grateful to hear the retreat of footsteps.

  Katya lay very still, his hand hot against her aching flesh, struggling to come out the other side of the sexual fog and regain control of her breathing. God, what had she been thinking?

  This was not going to make their cohabiting any easier.

  ‘I’d better go,’ Ben said pushing away from her. He grasped the lapels of her gown and pulled them gently together, covering the temptation of her aroused breasts. He stood up reluctantly, already dismayed to see her heady sexual stare from moments ago retreating. He wanted to throw caution to the wind, forget about Carmella and stay, kiss Katya until it came back again.

  Katya nodded, too aroused and shocked at her behaviour to speak. She watched him walk out the door and then rolled on her side, pulling her knees up and her gown around her to try and ease the hot, deep ache between her legs. How on earth was she going to sleep next to him now?

  Ben rang an hour later to tell her he was going to be caught up for a few hours with Carmella. They were working on trying to get a patient to Italy and had run into bureaucratic red tape. He was hitting the phones, calling in favours. He was very brisk and businesslike, for which she and her still raging hormones were grateful.

  Any other day Katya would have gone and helped or at least watched, but she knew it was best to be apart from him at the moment. So she ate tea with some of the live-in staff and retired back to their quarters early, pleading a headache. She feigned interest in a book but by ten, and much to her surprise, she was falling asleep. Ben still hadn’t returned and she was relieved she’d be asleep when he did.

  She was up early the next day and didn’t see him until the theatre list was due to start.

  ‘Avoiding me, Katya?’ he asked in a low voice as they scrubbed up together.

  ‘Yesterday was a mistake,’ she said, paying an inordinate amount of attention to scrubbing her fingernails. ‘Let’s just forget it, OK?’ She placed her soapy hands beneath the tap, the automatic spray clicking on and rinsing the suds away.

  Forget it? How the hell was he supposed to forget it? He’d hardly slept a wink, thinking about it. The first thing he’d wanted to do when he’d arrived back at the room had been to pick up where they’d left off. Glide his hand around her stomach, pull her into him, see if he could feel the baby moving again and then take it from there.

  Instead, he’d turned his back to her, clamped his hands between his thighs and balanced precariously on the edge of the bed, not trusting himself to get any closer. There was no way he was going to last the next few months.

  No way.

  Katya was conscious of Ben’s weighty stare as he joined her at the table and was grateful for the routine as the first operation got under way. They had months to get through yet and Ben needed to know that one slip-up didn’t mean that she was losing focus.

  The first case was four-year-old Ten-ti. The child was, without a doubt, one of the cutest little girls Katya had ever seen. She had gorgeous eyes, a gappy grin and soft black hair that fell in crazy layers around her face.

  She was a happy little thing, chatting away merrily to everyone in her native tongue and had a giggle that was wickedly infectious. She had taken a particular liking to blonde-haired Katya and in the two days she’d been at the clinic Ten-ti had drawn at least a dozen pictures of her favourite nurse.

  Katya had taken Ten-ti down to the garden with her that morning and the little girl had crawled into Katya’s lap and laid her head against Katya’s chest and waved and smiled at everyone who had come past as if to say, look at me, look how important I am.

  The foundation had found Ten-ti at an orphanage. She had been abandoned at the age of one by her family when her condition had shown no signs of improving. It was hard to believe that the little girl was so happy. When Katya thought about how abandoned Ten-ti must have felt, it broke her heart.

  At least she wasn’t going to give her baby a chance to get attached.

  Katya looked down at the defect now as Ben made his first incision. The haemangioma was impressive. The vascular benign tumour protruded from Ten-ti’s skull over her temple. It was quite large, about the size of a grapefruit, and its typical bright red colour was marred in the centre by a large, ugly, grey-black patch where it was badly ulcerated.

  It looked like something out of a science fiction magazine. Like a maniacal cartoonist had dreamt it up — a beautiful child with a mushroom-like growth protruding from her head. A soft spongy mushroom.

  The nuns that ran the orphanage had been told that it would gradually get smaller and disappear, as the majority of hemangiomas did, but Ten-ti’s had shown no such propensity. At the age of four there were no signs of the tumour involuting and the ulceration, with its associated bleeding and pain, had made her a perfect candidate for surgery.

  The actual excision of the haemangioma was relatively easy and Katya watched as Ben expertly sliced and slowly divided the tumour from the scalp. She handed him a metal kidney dish as he performed his last slice and he dropped the spongy mass into the metal receptacle.

  Katya stared at it. On Ten-ti’s head it had looked huge. A nasty, poisonous-looking, disfiguring mass that had isolated her and flawed her features. And now, after four years of marring her life, causing her to be abandoned, it lay there, looking incongruous.

  Impotent.

  Katya turned slightly and placed the kidney dish on her trolley, draped with sterile towels and returned her attention to the procedure. There was now a sizeable area on Ten-ti’s head, about six centimetres across, where there was no skin to cover the skull.

  ‘Closure device,’ said Ben.

  She had already anticipated his needs and he held out his hand at the precise time she was handing him the instrument. The transfer was seamless. No pauses or fumbling, just smooth and flawless. Textbook. A well-oiled team.

  Katya had never seen these devices until now. There hadn’t been much call for them in the MedSurg environment. Ben used them quite a bit and she’d even seen him use them under local anaesthetic at the bedside. They looked a bit like a fancy can-opener to her but the results were fantastic.

  Ten-ti’s wound was too wide for normal closure. The wound edges were too far away from each other to sew together and would normally require a skin graft. But this tricky little device was designed to stretch the skin so the margins could be brought together and then safely sutured or stapled. It worked by applying a controlled amount of tension evenly along the wound margins and exploiting the elastic properties of skin while minimising its tendency to recoil.

  Ten-ti’s head had been shaved around the tumour site to allow easy visualisation of the wound edges and Ben now applied the device to them. When he was satisfied with the placement he locked the device in place and started to turn the tension knob, beginning the stretching process. After twenty minutes Ben was satisfied with the approximation of the edges of the wound and he sutured it closed, using the conventional method.

&
nbsp; ‘There,’ he said, turning to Katya. ‘She’ll be as pretty as a picture.’

  Katya couldn’t wait to see Ten-ti’s reaction when she woke up and realised that the disfiguring growth, which had bled and caused her so much pain, was no more.

  That was going to be a smile worth seeing.

  Almost as good as the one that sparkled in Ben’s eyes. His excitement and satisfaction at a job well done was palpable. He so obviously thrived on how his brainchild, the Lucia Trust, was making a real difference. She grinned back at him under her mask, struck by how different he was from the man she’d known before.

  He was still as handsome, as toe-curlingly gorgeous, but at MedSurg he’d been cocky and arrogant and conceited. Overly confident. He’d matured in a few short months and she wondered about the catalyst for that. Had it just been Mario’s death? She had the feeling, the more time she spent in his company, there was so much more she didn’t know about him.

  Would never know about him.

  A few hours later, Katya hurried from the theatre to visit Ten-ti. A wizened old woman with no teeth and a navy blue nun’s habit smiled at Katya as she entered the room. The foundation always paid for a carer to accompany the patient and one of the nuns from the orphanage had escorted Ten-ti.

  ‘Is she still asleep?’ Katya asked, sitting on the opposite side of the bed.

  ‘Yes,’ the nun replied.

  Katya had been surprised to find that Mi-tung had a smattering of many languages and spoke quite good English. The old nun had kind eyes and Katya was pleased that Ten-ti had known this woman’s kindness.

  Ten-ti stirred at the sound of Katya’s voice and her eyes fluttered open. Her gaze fell on Katya, and Ten-ti gave her a weak smile. Katya smiled back and stroked the little girl’s hair. There was a small dressing over the suture line but that was all there was to remind everyone that a few hours ago a large growth had disfigured this little girl’s beautiful head.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ Mi-tung said in her quiet voice. ‘Thank you,’ she added, bowing to Katya. ‘We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.’

  The old woman had tears in her eyes and Katya felt humbled by her emotion. She reached across the bed, over Ten-ti, and held out her hand. Mi-tung didn’t hesitate and took it immediately. The old woman’s hand felt soft and wrinkly and they kept their hands clasped as they watched Ten-ti sleep.