A wife for the baby doctor

by Josie Metcalfe

  Those were dangerous thoughts, especially now that she was living with him.

  ‘Correction,’ he growled when his body responded all too predictably to that thought. ‘Now that she’s sharing the flat.’

  And then there was the message he’d just sent her. As soon as he’d pressed the button he’d realised just how cosily familiar it sounded, as if they were an old married couple leaving the modern equivalent of the note on the kitchen table.

  The crazy thing was, even though he knew it was an impossibility, he’d like nothing better than to know that they would be coming home to the same place every night for the rest of their lives.

  It was driving him round the bend at the moment, to walk in the front door and just know from the way the air felt that she hadn’t arrived home yet. And as for following her through the bathroom, when the whole room was filled with the lingering scent of her soap and one end of the shelf had a collection of her jars and bottles all set out in a neat little row, the way she always arranged them…

  He’d even found himself reaching for one of them this morning, tempted to open it and breathe in the familiar scent so that he could pretend that she was standing nearby.

  ‘Pathetic!’ he accused himself with a stern shake of his head. ‘The sooner she finds somewhere else to live, the better.’ But even as he said the words he knew he was lying. He knew it was a temporary situation and that she would eventually move out…would eventually meet a man and marry him and he probably wouldn’t see her more than a couple of times a year…

  His heart clenched inside his chest at the thought, already prepared to hate the man who took her away from him permanently. It would happen, sooner or later, he had no doubt about that. How could he have, knowing Dani the way he did, and knowing the way other men responded to her? The only surprise was that she seemed so totally unaware of the way her petite perfection affected the rest of his gender.

  ‘I give up,’ he growled and flung his hands up, knowing that he had little chance of thinking about anything else while he sat there. He might just as well go out and do the shopping as wait for her to arrive. He might have a better chance of concentrating on something else if he was jostling his way through a crowded supermarket.

  He was just thrusting his arms into his jacket sleeves when he heard the sound of Dani’s key in the door.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ she asked brightly, but he could almost fool himself into believing that there was a hint of disappointment in her expression. Had she actually been looking forward to seeing him again?

  ‘Shopping,’ he said shortly, telling himself he was a fool for indulging in wishful thinking. ‘The fridge is empty. Any preferences?’

  ‘You mean, apart from anything containing chocolate?’ she said with that irresistibly impish grin.

  ‘I mean, real food.’ He tried to be stern, but he already knew that it was a lost cause. No one could lighten his mood the way Dani could. There was just something so bright and shining about her attitude to life that it seemed to spread to everyone around her.

  ‘You mean, chocolate’s not one of the major food groups? It would be possible to live without eating it.’ She deposited the bag containing her study books on the end of the kitchen counter, grabbed a couple of shopping bags and her purse and was standing in front of the door in a matter of seconds. ‘Ready to go?’ she asked, as eager as a puppy waiting to go for a walk.

  Not for the first time Josh was impressed by the fact that Dani was so supremely unconcerned by her appearance that she hadn’t even thought to say she needed some time to change her clothes and apply make-up.

  ‘Ready,’ he agreed and reached for the catch, only realising when his fingers wrapped around hers that she’d reached it first.

  Her fingers were as slender and dainty as a child’s, and the skin was so much softer and paler than his own that he didn’t seem to be able to drag his eyes away from the contrast.

  ‘Josh?’ There was a definite quiver in her voice and he suddenly realised that he must have been standing there staring down at their entwined fingers for some time.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, dragging his hand away in a hurry so that she was finally free to open the door. ‘Got distracted…thinking about what we need to buy.’

  And if she believed that, just a few miles away there was a beautiful old stone-built bridge he could sell her…

  The shops weren’t far enough away to make it worthwhile taking the car, not with the amount of traffic on the roads, and much to his relief the number of pedestrians made it difficult to walk together long enough to carry on a conversation.

  Once they were in the shop it was a different matter and he suddenly realised that this was the first time that the two of them had gone shopping together since she’d been a schoolgirl.

  ‘Any dietary preferences?’ he asked as they set off down the aisle stacked with more varieties of fruit and vegetables than he could name.

  ‘Not me!’ she said with an infectious giggle. ‘Don’t you remember? I’ll eat anything that stands still long enough for me to get my teeth into it.’

  ‘Don’t remind me,’ he groaned, suddenly remembering that she seemed to have been born with her metabolism permanently stuck on high speed. From the moment that tiny little scrap of humanity had decided that she was going to fight for life, she’d taken to food with a single-minded intensity that had only been replaced by her studies once she’d decided she wanted to follow him into medicine. ‘You could always eat like a pig without ever putting on an extra ounce. It used to drive Mum to distraction, especially when people asked if she was feeding you properly.’

  Her laughter pealed out, drawing smiling glances all around, and suddenly it seemed as though the whole tire some task of shopping had become pleasurable entertainment, over far too soon.

  ‘Shall we grab a bite to eat on the way home?’ he heard himself suggesting and wondered what had happened to his common sense. It hadn’t been too difficult to persuade himself that this was nothing more than the sort of shop ping trip that they’d undertaken for so many years during her childhood, but it was something else again to deliberately spend time together in more secluded surroundings.

  ‘We can’t,’ Dani said, almost as if she’d heard his inner debate, then added prosaically, ‘We’ve got to take the frozen stuff home before it defrosts. Anyway, there isn’t much point in buying all this stuff if you’re intending eating out. And it costs more.’ She feigned a glare in his direction. ‘We aren’t all on a consultant’s salary, you know. Some of us have to watch our pennies.’

  And that was just another reason why he couldn’t step over the line.

  He had already attained his consultancy while she was just starting out on her career. And she was such a fiercely independent girl…woman, he corrected himself quickly…that she would hate it if any colleagues were to think that her achievements had been as a result of a relationship with him.

  ‘But that means cooking,’ he pointed out, then added with a grimace, ‘And washing up.’

  ‘You’ve got a dishwasher, for heaven’s sake!’ she exclaimed as she efficiently emptied the items out of the trolley then packed them into bags once they’d been scanned.

  When he didn’t comment she fixed him with keen blue eyes then grinned widely.

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ she crowed. ‘You’ve never used it!’

  ‘Only because I’m never home enough to use enough dishes to fill it,’ he said defensively as he got out his wallet.

  ‘That’s crazy!’ She glared at him, her pride obviously piqued when he refused her silent offer of cash towards her half of the bill, but she didn’t miss a beat in their conversation. ‘You’ve been cooking ever since I can remember. You used to do it every night that Mum was on duty…and breakfast in the mornings when she was on earlies.’

  ‘Yes, well, it always seemed more worthwhile when there were two to cook for. It hardly seems worth all the effort just for one, especially when I get stuck with the
clean-up duty as well.’

  ‘Well, there are two of us now,’ she pointed out firmly, and he was glad that she didn’t know anything about the flood of awareness that little phrase caused inside him. ‘We can go back to the old routine—whichever one does the cooking, the other one has to clear away afterwards. OK?’

  He agreed for the sake of peace, knowing that she would argue her point for ever once she’d decided her idea was the most logical, but the whole situation caused a strange hollow feeling inside him.

  On the surface, it was so close to everything he’d ever dreamed of—having Dani as a permanent part of his life—and yet in reality it couldn’t have been further away from it. Yes, she was living in his house and they would be sharing cooking and cleaning duties, but what he really wanted…well, that would be for ever impossible and it was time he stopped thinking about it.

  In the end, he had cooked while Dani had sorted the last of her laundry and ironed them each a shirt for the following morning.

  It was such an ordinary task, one that was probably being performed in thousands of homes right across the country at exactly the same time, but there was something about the sight of those slender fingers stroking and patting the fine white cotton into position that had drawn his attention as surely as if he’d been wearing the shirt and she’d been smoothing it along his arms, across his chest and down his body.

  In spite of his best efforts, that image had lingered hotly in his head so that by the time he’d finished eating he’d been so uncomfortable that all he’d been able to think of doing was taking a very long, very cold shower.

  Unfortunately, that had little effect, especially when he went to bed almost blue with the cold and had to listen to Dani showering just inches away from his bed.

  ‘Rosie’s temperature’s up’ were the first words Dani heard when she entered the unit the next morning and she was hard put not to groan aloud.

  She’d thought it was hard concentrating after a sleepless night due to the constant noise around her room in the staff accommodation, but she was no better off at Josh’s flat. Not because it was noisy. It wasn’t. Its position near the top of the purpose-built block and the high-spec sound insulation that had obviously been incorporated at the building stage meant that only the sound of emergency sirens reached her room, and even that was muffled by the double glazing.

  No, it was purely because she was so aware that Josh was there in the flat, just feet away, and she’d be lying in her own bed, imagining him in that spacious double bed with plenty of room for her to join him and…

  Was she ever going to feel as if she was alert enough to give her usual one hundred and one per cent effort to her profession again?

  ‘What about her kidney function? Is she still producing urine?’ Dani held her hand out for the latest input-output figures. She blinked when she saw Josh’s signature on the antibiotic dosage prescribed in the early hours of the morning. It looked as if he’d had even less sleep than she had, but at least he’d had the excuse of a looming crisis with one of their little charges.

  ‘It was dropping off badly until the drugs got into her system. So far, it hasn’t got any worse, but we’ll have to wait for the antibiotics to get properly into her system to see whether they knock the infection on the head.’

  And that would take more than a few minutes to happen, Dani knew from past bitter experience as she watched the little body struggling for each breath in spite of the ventilator. Little Rosie had so few reserves to draw on to fight such a catastrophic battle so soon after birth. There was a serious possibility that she might not recover from one bad decision made at the wrong moment, in spite of the round-the-clock care she was now receiving.

  An anguished hiccup behind her told Dani that Rosie’s mother had returned to her baby’s side, her tear-reddened eyes telling their own story of how the poor woman had obviously spent the night.

  ‘Have you ever wished you could turn back the clock, even for a few minutes?’ she asked Dani as she lowered herself gingerly into the chair beside the clear plastic cot. ‘I was just so certain that having her in my own home was the best thing for her…the most natural way of giving birth, so that I could feel comfortable and in control, so that there was no chance that I’d be brow beaten into accepting drugs I didn’t want.’

  Dani murmured wordlessly, just enough to let her know she was listening and to encourage her to let her tormenting thoughts out.

  ‘When the midwife said she wanted me to transfer to hospital for the delivery, I shouted at her…accused her of cheating me into thinking I was going to have a home birth when she’d always intended forcing me to come in…And I refused to listen when she tried to explain…refused to accept that anything could possibly go wrong when I’d planned everything down to the last detail.’

  The tears were pouring down her face as she was recounting her tale and Dani would have comforted her but for the fact that she had a feeling that the woman needed to talk about the situation more than she needed to be hugged.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ she continued, hollow-eyed as she gazed in despair at her precious daughter. ‘My baby’s dying and it’s all my fault.’

  That was something that Dani could argue, and did, immediately.

  ‘Your baby’s not dying,’ she said firmly, ‘not if any of us in the unit have anything to say about it.’ This time she didn’t hold back but wrapped a comforting arm around the trembling shoulders.

  ‘She’s going to be all right?’ Hope was stark on her face. ‘You promise me that she’s going to be all right?’

  ‘I can’t promise that,’ Dani said honestly, much as she would have liked to. ‘Not yet…But we’re giving her antibiotics for the infections she’s developed as a result of breathing in the meconium, and it already looks as if they’re starting to have an effect.’

  ‘Can’t you do anything to hurry them up? Give her a stronger dose, or something?’

  ‘If only it were that easy,’ Dani said wryly. ‘Unfortunately, it’s just a matter of waiting and praying and letting her know that the most important person in her world is right here beside her.’

  That made her blink. ‘You think she knows I’m here?’ Disbelief was warring with hope.

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ Dani said. ‘So it’s very important that you talk to her in the same voice you used while you were waiting for her to arrive, so she recognises you. And that means no more tears…unless you cried all the way through your pregnancy?’

  ‘No,’ the poor woman choked, almost surprised into a chuckle at the thought. ‘Actually, I sang to the baby…a lot.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’ Dani was intrigued. ‘Nursery rhymes? Pop music?’

  ‘Opera,’ she admitted diffidently, and it was Dani’s turn to blink. ‘I started by singing along with the radio, years ago, and ended up taking lessons and joined a choir, but I couldn’t possibly do that in here.’

  ‘Why not?’ Dani challenged. ‘As long as you don’t go into full Wagnerian mode in the middle of the night, I don’t suppose anyone will mind. I can always ask Mr Weatherby if he has any objections, but I don’t expect he will, especially if it helps Rosie.’

  She didn’t need the way the woman’s eyes travelled to something behind her shoulder to know that Josh had just come into the room and was now standing behind her. It seemed as if she was aware of his proximity with every pore of her skin.

  ‘Mr Weatherby has no objections as long as it doesn’t upset anyone else,’ he said with a twinkle in those warm golden eyes. ‘Just keep it soft and gentle and we’ll probably all enjoy it. You’ve probably noticed that special care baby units aren’t the most relaxed places on the planet.’

  His matter-of-fact acceptance of the idea went a long way towards making Rosie’s mother feel a little less helpless and hopeless, but it also confirmed Dani’s feelings of admiration for the man.

  She sighed as she watched him walk away after he’d checked over Rosie’s latest figures, unable to prev
ent her eyes following all the way across the room until she heard Nadia’s soft chuckle beside her.

  ‘What that man does for a pair of baggy pyjamas…not that you’ve noticed,’ teased her colleague, and Dani’s face instantly flooded with heat. ‘Mind you, I don’t blame you,’ she continued. ‘He’s a sight for sore eyes, if only he was available.’

  ‘He’s not available?’ Dani’s heart sank like a stone. ‘I hadn’t heard that he was going out with anyone. Has the hospital grapevine actually missed out on some gossip?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that he’s going out with anyone so much as the fact that he rarely seems to go out with anyone more than a couple of times,’ Nadia explained. ‘That man is seriously dedicated to his job.’

  ‘As if you aren’t,’ Dani countered, deliberately changing the direction of the conversation. ‘You could almost be agoraphobic, because you never seem to leave the unit, let alone go outside the hospital.’

  ‘So, I’m committed to my profession,’ she said with an attempt at a dismissive shrug, obviously uncomfortable now that the focus was on her. ‘I haven’t noticed you racing for the door at the end of your shift either, but perhaps that’s because you don’t want to leave the gorgeous Mr Weatherby behind?’

  If only she knew! Dani thought.

  She’d never been one to clock-watch and had actually found herself lingering on the unit when she’d first joined Josh’s team, just in the hope of seeing him or speaking to him. Now that she was sharing his flat, she’d become so aware of his presence that she was becoming afraid that she might inadvertently let him know exactly how she felt about him, and that wouldn’t do. If she were to tell him that she loved him and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, he would probably react in exactly the same way he had when she’d been eighteen, and that would destroy any headway she’d made in proving to him that she was now a grown woman who knew what she wanted.