The Heart Surgeon's Proposal

by Meredith Webber

  They kissed their way through the kitchen, risked serious injury continuing it up the stairs, then finally he guided her onto his bed, still kissing, but now his hands were exploring her body, and hers his, further inflaming the passionate desire that flared between them.

  Maggie could feel heat, but couldn’t tell if it was his or hers. The inner heat was hers, but skin heat—that was different. Skin heat brought her nerve endings to life in a way she’d never before experienced, so they zapped and tingled at the slightest touch, the merest brush. She nuzzled her lips against the hot satiny skin of his shoulder and nibbled at his ear-lobe, while his hands explored her belly, fingers tickling at her belly button, sliding lower, her escalating desire causing little whimpering noises of delight and demand to flutter from her lips.

  ‘So sweet,’ he whispered, as his lips found hers once again, while his fingers worked a magic of their own. ‘Sweet tempestuous delight, Mags, that’s what you are.’

  Maggie was beyond speech, which was probably just as well, for her words might just have been words of love, confessions of feelings too deep to be spoken of in other situations.

  Then Phil slid over her, his body hard and soft and hot and made, it seemed, to fit hers, for he filled all the aching emptiness within her as they joined in the wild joy-ride of love.

  Love-making, some remaining shred of common sense amended, but Maggie didn’t care. This was Phil, taking her on a voyage of discovery of her own body and the sensual delights it could yield. And all the time he talked to her, sweet murmurs of allure, approval, passion and incitement, but never love, and although the final climax was momentous, leaving Maggie weak and trembling in his arms, that one small shred of common sense picked up that omission and clung to it, warning Maggie of just where she stood—or lay—in this relationship.

  Phil was gone when Maggie woke on Monday morning. In her bed, not his. They’d shifted beds some time during the day, after foraging in the kitchen for food, and deciding Alex, as the landlord, had probably had the best bed in the house, and as it was now Maggie’s bed, they were duty bound to try it.

  Maggie felt a blush rising up from her toes as she thought of some of the other things they’d done, but it had all been fun, and the sex had been great, and they’d laughed in each other’s arms and held onto each other as they’d slept.

  ‘Like lovers!’ Maggie whispered into the cold morning air. ‘Which we are, of course,’ she added, patting her stomach so the baby would know she was talking to it, and not think its mother was some nut who talked to herself.

  And would continue to be, her head reminded her. After all, it would be stupid—not to mention hypocritical—to go on living in the same house and not continue to enjoy the physical delight they could offer each other. As Phil had pointed out some time yesterday, they’d already wasted two weeks.

  She smiled at that and other memories, refused to think about the ‘L’ word that was absent from the equation and eased out of her nice warm bed. If she didn’t get moving soon, she’d be late for work. Work! Had Phil been paged that he was already up?

  She listened for noises in the house but heard none, and frowned, wondering why he hadn’t woken her—let her know he was going.

  No answer came to mind so she showered, blushing again at memories, dressed and went downstairs.

  A note and a strange bouquet of leaves and berries from the garden were waiting for her on the kitchen table, the note explaining he had woken early and gone up to the hospital to get a start on the day, and apologising for the paucity of this floral offering, but it was all he’d been able to find so early in the morning.

  Maggie smoothed the note with shaking fingers.

  ‘Oh, Phil!’ she whispered quietly. ‘Don’t be nice to me and make things harder than they already are.’

  Then she wrapped her arms around her body and slumped down at the table.

  He was so very much what she’d always wanted in a man, yet she was so wrong for him.

  And because she loved him, she knew she couldn’t marry him, condemning him to the loveless marriage his parents had endured.

  Reminding herself there’d be no need to make any decisions if she lost this baby too, Maggie turned her thoughts to work. No paeds cardiac operations today, but she was scheduled to spend some time in another operating theatre, working in a supervisory capacity with some students doing their first paediatric anaesthetic.

  She made toast and ate it with a glass of milk. She found milk nearly as revolting as tea, but she dutifully tried to drink some every day. Then she walked up the road to work, going straight to the paediatric ward where the children who would be her patients were waiting for her.

  ‘We depend so much on patient weight in deciding the amount of drugs we give that if ever you have the slightest doubt about the weight of a child, weigh him or her again,’ she told the three students. ‘Ruby here is five and looks as if she might be light for her age, so the seventeen kilograms is probably right. Carry a weight-age chart so you can check if you need to, and when in doubt weigh.’

  The students all nodded dutifully, then listened while Maggie explained to Ruby what she was going to do.

  ‘I need to put a needle in the back of your hand so the doctors can put medicine in there,’ she told the little girl, already drowsy from the pre-med. ‘Just a prick and we’re done. You look at Mummy’s face and see her scrunch it up when I put the needle in you. You watch and you’ll think it’s hurting her more than it’s hurting you.’

  While Ruby watched her mother who obligingly screwed up her face and said a loud ‘Ouch!’ Maggie sited a cannula in Ruby’s hand and taped it into place.

  ‘Ruby will be wheeled to Theatre by an orderly with a nurse accompanying her,’ Maggie told the students. ‘Because she’s not on a ventilator, there’s no need to bag her on the way, but with children who need oxygen, we bag them manually as they’re moved. Although nurses usually do this, I like to go along with them.’

  The orderly arrived to move the bed and Maggie, with the students trailing behind her, followed the little girl towards Theatre. Outside the door, Ruby’s mother was asked to sign the consent form and agreed that, yes, it was her daughter going into Theatre and, yes, she was to have an appendicectomy.

  Maggie was leading her crew into the changing rooms when a theatre sister who’d worked with the team a few times came out.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said, beaming good-naturedly, then, as Maggie moved on, thinking the woman was talking to someone else, she thought she heard the sister add, ‘He seems a great bloke, if something of a flirt.’

  Puzzled, Maggie turned towards the two women students with her, but neither of them seemed to be responding to the conversation, and as the sister had, by now, disappeared from view, Maggie couldn’t call her back to ask who she’d been talking to.

  She found out later when, with Ruby and two other children safely out of the recovery room and back in their ward, she made her way to the rooms, hoping Annie might have been too tied up to eat lunch at the normal time and be willing to join her for a quick bite.

  Annie wasn’t in. In fact, apart from Becky, the rooms were empty. The secretary, who was usually full of good cheer, was obviously too busy for a chat, casting a glance towards Maggie then turning resolutely back towards the computer screen. So Maggie made her way down to the canteen alone.

  ‘Oh, Maggie, I’m so glad for you.’

  Annie was waiting for the lift on the ground floor and as Maggie stepped out, her colleague enveloped her in her arms and gave her a huge hug.

  ‘It’s so wonderful, being married, and I know you love Phil. I can’t believe he’s finally realised what a great woman you are. To think you’ve been there under his nose all this time while he played around with his blondes. Though I shouldn’t be saying this, I know, but I really began to wonder about Phil—that he couldn’t see just how good for him you’d be.’

  Maggie, squashed in Annie’s arms, took all this in, but h
er brain refused to process it.

  Then the enormity of what Phil must have done struck her, and she was surprised she didn’t self-combust so fiery was the anger that consumed her.

  She broke away from Annie’s embrace and opened her mouth to deny whatever lie Phil had spread, then saw the joy in her friend’s face—joy that Maggie was sharing the happiness she and Alex had found—and knew she couldn’t wipe that joy away.

  Not now—not yet.

  ‘Where is Phil?’ she asked, hoping his name didn’t come out as if she’d chewed broken glass before saying it.

  ‘Just finishing lunch with Alex. He said you were busy today or we’d have waited.’

  ‘I was busy,’ Maggie said, stalled in the foyer outside the lift. She could hardly go into the canteen and rip Phil’s head off—which was what she felt like doing—in front of Alex, and with this new news churning inside her, she doubted she could eat.

  ‘And now I’m going home,’ she said. ‘Forgot to pick up the shopping list before I left this morning, and as I’m off this afternoon I may as well shop.’

  Home indeed! she thought as she strode down the road. It’s a house, nothing more. The hide of the man, telling people we’re engaged when I told him I wouldn’t marry him.

  I did tell him, didn’t I?

  Yes, I’m sure I did.

  Berating Phil, mentally at least, kept her moving quickly towards the house, but once there she had no idea why she’d come. She’d shopped on Saturday so certainly didn’t need to shop again, but maybe she could pack her things and shift back to her sister’s place.

  But living there again, with her sister’s four children, including two-year-old twins, might put her off children for life—right when she was hoping desperately to bring one into the world.

  In thirty-something weeks…

  Maybe…

  Forget maybe, be positive!

  ‘But with all that time ahead of us, why’s Phil told people anything now?’

  Even asked aloud, the question offered no answer, so Maggie went up to her bedroom, shut the door and collapsed onto the bed, staring at the ceiling and hoping some solution to her dilemma might just come to her.

  Ripping off Phil’s head still seemed the best solution, but some of her anger had dissipated by the time he came home later that afternoon, so all she did was yell.

  ‘How dare you tell our colleagues we were engaged! I said no, Phil, remember, when you talked about marriage? No! No! No! Don’t you understand the word?’

  He looked dazed, as well he might, having breezed into the house with, this time, florist flowers in his hand, and an ‘isn’t life great’ smile on his face, to be greeted by a small but furious woman.

  ‘But I thought we’d established that yesterday,’ Phil said lamely, offering the flowers then, realising they’d probably be flung at his head, dropping his hand back down so the bright blooms hung by his side.

  ‘All we established yesterday,’ an icy voice informed him, ‘was that we were compatible in bed. Extremely compatible. Extraordinarily compatible if you like, but we probably suspected that from the first time. Marriage is more than compatibility in bed, Phil Park, and I would have thought even you were mature enough to have realised that!’

  She wheeled away from him and stalked to the kitchen, her backside swaying so seductively it was all he could do not to scoop her up in his arms and take her back up to one or other of their bedrooms, where he could, he felt sure, sort the whole problem out in no time flat.

  No, she thinks I should have some maturity, he reminded himself, but as no other solution offered itself, he followed her into the kitchen, allowing the fantasy to play in his mind.

  ‘You’ll have to tell everyone it’s not true,’ she told him as he entered, again proffering the flowers as if the second time around they might be more acceptable.

  They weren’t.

  He set them down on the table and absorbed what she was saying.

  ‘But why? Isn’t marriage the best solution? Don’t you think, as two mature adults, we can make a marriage between us work? Do you really want your baby to grow up with an absentee father?’

  The last question snagged in his gut, and he had to protest it before she had time to answer.

  ‘No, even if you do, that just wouldn’t be acceptable to me, and as I’m half of the decision-makers here, I’m entitled to state that it won’t happen. This baby will have two parents, both of whom live in the same house as he or she does, so there’s absolutely no doubt in his or her mind who he or she belongs to.’

  He got to the end of this appalling statement and realised why it had been so difficult, and why it probably didn’t make sense.

  ‘Should we give the baby a name now—some kind of unisex name like Mop or Gonk that we can refer to him or her by—so we don’t have to keep saying he or she all the time?’

  Maggie was staring at him as if he’d gone mad, but she didn’t seem quite so angry. He considered trying the flowers again, then decided he was better off stopping while he was ahead so he crossed to the sink, searched under it until he found a jug, filled it with water and took it back to the table, where he picked up the flowers and stuck them into it.

  ‘You should take them out of the paper, undo the string around them and cut off the bottom of the stems so they can take up fresh water,’ the woman for whom they’d been intended said coolly, then she went to the fridge, took out the milk and some cheese, looked at both, put them back in, shut the door and sat down in a chair.

  Suddenly.

  So suddenly Phil looked more closely at her, and this time he didn’t think of racing her off to bed.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he demanded. ‘Is that why you were at the fridge? Do you feel sick? If not, you have to eat. Even if you do feel sick, you have to eat. What? A cheese sandwich?’

  He was so anxious and uncertain that Maggie had to laugh, and for a moment she thought how nice it would be to have Phil around all the time—bringing her flowers, fussing over her appetite…

  Insidiously nice.

  ‘I’ll have a cheese sandwich. I’ll get it in a minute. Just felt a bit woozy and thought it best to sit down.’

  He fussed some more, insisting she stay sitting, scolding her for missing lunch, cutting the sandwich into little triangles and even finding a little bit of celery leaf to put on top so they looked appetising.

  ‘And I’ll make a pot of that decaff coffee,’ he told her when he’d given her the sandwich. ‘I know it’s not like the real thing, but you probably need it, though you should drink it with milk to get some calcium.’

  ‘Cheese has calcium,’ she managed to say, although she had to swallow down a stupid lump of misery that had lodged in her throat—hormonal activity again, only this time it made her feel weepy for no other reason than that Phil was being nice to her.

  But he was always nice to her, she reminded herself, chewing on the sandwich.

  Not this kind of nice, herself said, although she knew this was a dangerous form of weakness, to be thinking of Phil’s varying degrees of niceness and weeping over a cheese sandwich.

  Especially when he didn’t love her!

  When it was all for the baby!

  ‘None of this is making what you did right,’ she told him when her body had been fortified and her will-power bolstered by the sandwich and a ghastly cup of milky coffee.

  Phil was over at the sink, snipping the ends of the stems from the flowers. He turned his head towards her, his face serious—no twinkle in his eyes.

  ‘No, if it’s not what you want, then it isn’t. I’m sorry.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess I can just tell Alex and Annie that we’re not engaged—they’ll spread the word.’

  Maggie closed her eyes at the magnitude of that idea. Engaged one day, unengaged the next—the hospital gossips would have a ball and the grapevine would be buzzing with speculation.

  She wasn’t at all sure she could cope with the consequences. Not right now.

  �
�Maybe not saying anything would be better. People might forget.’

  ‘Of course,’ Phil said politely, not meaning one word of it.

  Neither did she, but a sudden wave of tiredness had swept over her and her brain had stopped working.

  Maybe tomorrow she’d think of something…

  CHAPTER NINE

  BUT before tomorrow could come there was tonight.

  Where would she be spending the night?

  Where would Phil be?

  She sighed, and he came and stood behind her and kneaded her shoulders, as she’d kneaded his about a hundred years ago.

  ‘You should have something more substantial than a cheese sandwich for dinner,’ he said, kneading in such a firm, unsexual way Maggie felt her whole body relaxing.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ she said, and he didn’t persist, shifting his attention to her neck, working magic on her knotted ligaments with his probing fingers.

  ‘Then when I finish you should go to bed. Have a good night’s sleep. Things always look better in the morning.’

  ‘By morning the entire hospital will have heard we’re engaged,’ Maggie said bitterly. ‘I can’t see how that’s going to make things look better.’

  Phil kept kneading.

  ‘Not necessarily. We’re isolated from most of the hospital staff, being in the unit. And it’s not as if, like Annie, you were on the staff at Jimmie’s before the unit was set up. It’s only our lot that have taken any notice of the news.’

  Maggie had to agree, but she wasn’t letting him off the hook that easily.

  ‘And it’s our lot that have to be told it isn’t true. That it was a fabrication. We’re not engaged, Phil.’

  ‘But we are expecting a baby. And some time that’s going to become obvious. What then? There’s no way I’ll have whispers about the little scrap’s paternity. I’ll make sure they know it’s my baby you’re expecting, Mags. And people will realise just how pig-headed you are at the same time.’

  ‘Pig-headed?’

  Maggie twisted away from his hands, and turned so she could glare up at him.