‘Don’t ask,’ he’d said softly. ‘Please, Katie. Don’t ask.’
It was actually easy to give comfort without knowing what it was for, because it was an expression of love. Unconditional.
The images that flowed from that point were ones Kate could easily suppress if she wasn’t alone. They were too private and too precious.
The taste of that first kiss.
The smell of Rory’s skin.
The touch of his hands and lips.
Her breath escaped in a soft sigh of submission. The pull was too strong.
Kate was almost there, on the other side of the depart ment. Ready to focus completely on the people who needed her now. In the present. She just couldn’t stop herself taking one last peek into the past.
To where Rory was, once again, sitting alone.
Except he wasn’t.
He was right there, a step behind her, and he still had that look of grim determination on his face. He walked right past her into Resus 1, where there were two new patients crowding the area.
Braden Foster was bent over a small boy who was on one of the beds.
He nodded at Rory, who stepped towards the other bed onto which ambulance staff were transferring a grey-haired woman who had to be Mary Ballantyne.
‘Tell me about this patient,’ he instructed a paramedic.
‘Kate?’ Braden Foster caught her glance. ‘Could you give me some cricoid pressure here, please? We need to intubate this lad.’
Her focus was narrowed to just one of the patients occupying this area set aside for major trauma, but Kate was aware of Rory in the same room. Aware that he’d stepped through some kind of personal barrier to be here.
For her? For his children? Because of what she’d said?
It didn’t matter. He was here, and her heart had been right not to let her believe the worst about him.
He was still the man she thought he was.
The man she loved.
CHAPTER FOUR
THIS WAS A NIGHTMARE.
Not quite his worst, but only because he was tasked with treating the older female patient tucked into the corner of the area and not the little boy who was the primary focus of concern.
He could still hear the alarms going off on the monitoring equipment, however. Hear the tension in the voices of the staff dealing with the emergency.
‘Oxygen saturation dropping.’
‘Blood pressure’s dropping.’
‘Heart rate’s irregular. Ectopics increasing.’
‘I need some suction, here. Can’t see a damn thing.’
Focus, Rory told himself. Shut it out. You don’t have to take responsibility for that patient. Look after the one you’ve got.
On first glance it didn’t look good. Strapped to a spinal board, the woman was wearing a neck collar, and her face was largely obscured by blood and an oxygen mask.
‘Facial injuries,’ the paramedic had informed Rory. ‘This is Mary Ballantyne and she’s seventy-two years old. She was driving the mini-bus and thinks her face hit the steering wheel as they went over the bank.’
‘Are you having any trouble breathing, Mary?’
‘By dose is blocked.’
‘Keep breathing through your mouth for the moment.’ Rory turned back to the paramedic. ‘Was she knocked out?’
‘I don’t think so.’ The paramedic had a hint of a smile. ‘GCS was fifteen on arrival. Mary was trapped, but still trying to organise everybody else—including the emergency services.’
‘I’b fine,’ came a surprisingly strong voice from the bed. ‘Get be out of this ridiculous con trap tion. I need to look after by children.’
Rory smiled at the feisty tone. He leaned closer. ‘I’m Rory McCulloch, Mrs Ballantyne. I’m the doctor who’s going to be looking after you.’
‘Get on with it, then, young ban,’ his patient directed. ‘And call be Bary. Everyone else does.’
Mary’s nose was still bleeding. Rory pulled on gloves as the paramedic lingered to pass on all the information they had gathered so far.
‘All she’s complained of is a sore nose and nausea, which is probably due to the amount of blood she’d swallowed by the time we got her out. She denied any cervical tenderness but, given the mechanism of injury, it seemed prudent to immobilise her spine.’
‘Let’s get that nose packed,’ Rory directed. ‘I don’t want her losing any more blood. I’ll get a line in and we’ll hang some fluids. What’s the blood pressure now?’
‘One-fifteen on sixty,’ a nurse relayed.
Not too bad, considering. ‘Do you have any medical history I should know about, Mary?’
‘No.’
‘No problems with your heart or blood pressure or breathing?’
‘I get a bit of angina. Nothing buch.’
‘Any chest pain at the moment?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to loosen this collar and check your head and neck, but I don’t want you moving just yet, OK?’ Rory was surprised to see just the flash of a twinkle in the pale blue eyes watching him. Was Mary actually weighing up whether she would co-operate or not?
‘OK,’ she agreed.
Rory smiled. He could see beneath that twinkle. He could see the fear that her condition might prevent her doing what she desperately needed to do, which was to look after all the children she had chosen to take into her care. The trust being put in him was one he would do his utmost to honour. He admired what this woman was doing with her life, and how she was coping with a potentially disastrous situation.
He would do whatever he could to help her, and it was a privilege to be in a position to do so. He’d missed this part of medicine more than he had allowed himself to admit.
‘We need X-rays,’ he ordered moments later, having checked for obvious injuries to Mary’s head and neck and found nothing. ‘C-spine, chest and pelvis. The sooner we can clear Mary, the sooner we can untie her.’ They couldn’t use the overhead X-ray facilities in this trauma area because they were over the bed the boy was occupying. ‘Is X-ray free?’
‘Yes,’ a nurse responded. ‘Helen’s just gone through to the plaster room.’
‘Let’s move Mary, then.’
There was huge relief in being able to issue the instruction. He could move away from what was happening in here. An intubation attempt to secure the airway of a child that had clearly failed.
‘Bag him,’ Braden Foster was ordering. ‘I need a guide wire, Kate. We’ll have one more try.’
Rory almost managed to escape. The bed Mary was on was being wheeled through the door and he was following. Relieved to be moving. Confident that a broken nose was the worst of Mary’s injuries and that she was in no immediate danger.
It was Braden’s voice that caught him.
‘Rory?’ The tone was quiet—a warning all by itself. ‘I need you.’
He had to turn. To face the concern he knew he would see in his colleague’s face. The fear that he was losing his young patient.
God, he knew that fear. He had lived with it every day he had been a practising doctor. Statistically, it was a ticking bomb. You couldn’t be a specialist in emergency medicine without losing the battle to save a paediatric patient at some point.
It hadn’t happened to Rory, but the fear had finally crippled him. Would have destroyed him if it hadn’t been for Kate. And he could feel even before his gaze moved the way Kate was looking at him.
There was a plea in her eyes. She knew how much he didn’t want to do this. Maybe she knew he was convinced he couldn’t do it, because there was also encouragement in that steady gaze. A belief in him.
You can do this, her gaze told him.
For just a heartbeat he could feel it again. The memory of her touch. The feeling that he was worth the space he took up on the planet because this woman felt that way. The seed of strength he had taken with him to the most distant corner of the planet he’d been able to find.
He couldn’t let her down.
Facing that fear again was his worst nightmare, but he had to step into it. He had to try. He owed Kate that much, at least.
IF ANYONE COULD save this child, it was this man. Rory McCulloch.
And Kate was there. Right beside him.
There were lots of other people as well, of course. Other doctors and nurses, technicians and a surgeon with his registrar, but it was Rory who took over trying to make sure this boy could breathe—because if he couldn’t he was going to die, very, very quickly.
Rory had fresh gloves on by the time he reached the head of the bed. So did Kate. She unrolled a kit onto the top of a trolley, containing what she knew Rory would need.
‘Fold a towel and slip it under his shoulders,’ Rory directed another nurse. ‘Kate, can you prep the skin, please?’
Wordlessly, Kate picked up a swab in some forceps and dipped it into the anti sep tic solution someone was tipping into a kidney dish for her. She swabbed the front of the boy’s neck, swallowing hard herself as she thought of what had to be done.
She watched Rory feel for the anatomical land marks and then stab il ise the small Adam’s apple with one hand. His other hand reached out to Kate and she placed a scalpel into it.
Their hands touched for only an instant in time, but Kate could feel Rory’s tension. She held her breath. Everyone else seemed to do the same and movement stilled, the atmosphere so tense it felt as if the world might shatter at any moment.
Rory didn’t hesitate. His movements were smooth and sure, despite the grim necessity of actually cutting into the little boy’s throat. The tube was slipped into place and suction used to clear it. Then the bag mask unit was attached.
And finally the small chest rose as air entered the lungs. Everybody breathed out in a collective sigh of relief in time with the boy’s outward breath, but Rory wasn’t finished. He was watching the respiratory efforts intently.
Braden handed Rory his own stethoscope and Kate allowed herself to watch his face, because he was too intent on his patient to notice her scrutiny. It was ridiculous to feel so proud of him, but there it was. Kate had to blink the threat of tears away.
Rory turned his attention to the monitors next, and then to his colleagues. A theatre was on standby, but they had to make sure that their patient was stable enough to transfer and find out the extent of the trauma they would need to deal with. Kate left the room for a minute or two while a series of X-rays was being taken. She returned as the images were coming through on the computer, but she still stood back.
This felt so right. As if Rory had never been away. If it wasn’t for the huge bump of her belly it would have been easy to dismiss the gap in time. He was here again, now, doing the job he did so brilliantly, and another life had just been saved.
How could he have walked away from doing this? From being able to make such a difference?
The little boy, Michael, was now breathing well on a ventilator, and his vital signs were stable and within acceptable limits. His care was passed to the paediatric surgeon who led the team transferring him to Theatre. Braden was going to accompany the entourage.
‘I’ll be back directly,’ he said as they left the resuscitation area. ‘We’ve dealt with the worst here, but there are still a lot of patients that need attention. Rory, I hate to ask, but—’
Rory’s smile was lopsided. ‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘I’ll help if I can.’
‘You already have,’ Braden told him quietly. ‘Thanks, mate.’
RORY WAS STRIPPING off his gloves as Kate reached his side. Other staff had dispersed to urgent tasks. Only a nurse aide was left, and she was busy cleaning up. Kate couldn’t help her wide smile.
‘I knew you could do it.’
He didn’t return the smile. ‘You knew more than I did, then.’
Kate held his gaze. Maybe he wasn’t relaxed enough to smile, but that unbearable level of tension was gone. And there was something else in both his look and those words. Something that recognised the link between them. An acknowledge ment that Kate knew more than anyone else because she’d been there that night. She had seen him in a space no one else here would dream he could ever be in.
He’d let her share that space then. Would he let her in again?
‘What I don’t know,’ Kate said cautiously, ‘is why you stopped doing this. Why you had to leave.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Was it because of me?’
That shocked him. He was holding his gloves over the rubbish bin, but he forgot to let them go. ‘Good God, Katie! Why on earth would you think that?’
He’d called her Katie again. It was a struggle to keep her tone light. To give a shrug that belied her history of painful agonising over this.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘You’d never taken any notice of me. Not in—um—that way. And then we had that amazing night. But you creep out of my room hoping that I’m still asleep and—’
The flush of colour would have been welcome on his pale face if it hadn’t been due to embarrassment. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘No. I pretended to be, because it was obvious you didn’t want to talk to me.’
‘I—’
‘And then,’ Kate rushed on, ‘I get to work to find you’ve gone. Resigned. Vanished. Can you blame a girl for thinking that you’d gone to rather extraordinary lengths so that you didn’t have to see her again?’
The quiet sound he made was almost a groan. Rory dropped the gloves into the bin and caught Kate’s shoulders.
‘Don’t ever think that,’ he said softly. ‘You have no idea how important it was. How often I thought about that night.’
‘As often as I thought about it?’ Kate’s voice caught. ‘I don’t think so, Rory.’
There was a moment’s silence as they stared at each other. There were too many questions hanging in the air between them. So much that was a mystery. But one thing was clearer now.
He hadn’t been avoiding her. Kate knew with a certainty that gave her a new sense of peace that she had had nothing to do with his decision to leave. That the decision had been made well before she’d met Rory that night.
And he remembered their time together.
It had been important.
A glimmer of something like joy flickered within Kate, but then Rory’s gaze dropped. To her belly.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ Kate responded steadily.
His gaze flicked up. ‘Really?’
She drew in a deep breath. How could she tell him she already loved these babies because of the way they had been conceived? Because she’d known for a very long time that she would never love another man the way she loved their father?
She couldn’t tell him. Not when he was ‘sorry’. Sorry that he’d made a mistake in allowing it to happen.
The faint glow of joy was snuffed out. Perfect timing for someone to come close enough for them both to be distracted.
‘Could I ask you both to help mop up in the cubicles?’ Judy asked. ‘There’s a woman next door to your mother, Dr McCulloch, who needs a head wound sutured. There’s nobody available from Plastics, and if anyone could do a job that won’t leave too much of a scar it would be you.’
Rory didn’t seem to notice the compliment. ‘Is my mother still asleep?’
‘Yes. Quite peacefully, and her temperature’s still dropping.’ Judy’s smile was openly admiring as she turned to hurry away again. ‘Fabulous job there with Michael. Just like the old days.’
Rory said nothing, but Kate kept pace with him as he headed in Judy’s wake.
‘She’s right, you know.’
‘Is she?’
‘You stepped back just the way you left. In a blaze of glory.’
Rory stopped just in front of the double doors that led from the resuscitation area back to the main department. The halt was so sudden Kate almost bumped into him. Her belly brushed his hand.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘The last case that day. Don’t y
ou remember? The toddler with meningitis?’
‘I remember.’
‘He’d been discharged,’ Kate continued, speaking fast because she knew they were needed elsewhere, but this was somehow important. ‘The houseman had filled him up with paracetamol to get his fever down and decided his rash was due to fleabites. You ran after them. Stopped them driving out of the car park. Made the parents bring him back.’
‘I remember,’ Rory repeated, grimly enough to let Kate know she wasn’t wrong in assuming the importance she was assigning to this part of their history. ‘It was why I had to leave.’ He was moving again, his hand on the doors. He didn’t want to talk about this.
‘But you saved him.’
Her words were quiet. A thought that was spoken aloud unintentionally. But Rory turned his head.
‘It wasn’t enough,’ he growled. ‘Not that day. Come on, Katie.’ He pushed open the swing door. ‘We’ve got work to do. There’ll be plenty of time to talk later.’
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CASUALTY DEPARTMENT of St Bethel’s Hospital had gone from being ‘restful’ to completely chaotic.
A nurse was walking up and down in front of the central desk, holding the toddler who’d come in with the first wave of patients. Danni was still crying.
‘Someone needs to check that child again,’ Rory said.
Other patients had come in while they’d been involved in the resuscitation area drama. Cubicles were full and staff were flat out. An ECG machine was being wheeled to one bedside. Someone was having a seizure in Cubicle 6 and a very inebriated person in a Santa costume was yelling for attention in Cubicle 5.
And there seemed to be children everywhere they looked. Cubicle 1, beside the woman they were assigned to see, had a thin, worried-looking girl peering out.
‘Rhys?’ she called nervously. ‘Alex? Come back here!’
A small girl, maybe four or five years old, was tugging on an older child’s arm.
‘Lucy? Why is Father Christmas shouting? I want to go home!’
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