She missed things for Amanda—so many times, so many days that Amanda should have seen and never had. The white-hot anger she’d first felt for her had now been replaced with a gentler understanding, a tolerance for others that had been a surprisingly welcome gift that helped in so many different areas of her life.
She could accept and listen and nurture the good bits about the twins’ mother without barging in and judging her. And not for a single second had Molly wavered from her decision.
Molly and Luke were ready to face anything life hurled at them.
Because love ruled!
There were a fair few additions to their photo gallery. The small wedding—because it had been for both their second—hadn’t, in the end, been quite so small after all.
Amelia taking centre stage as the flower girl.
Angus a very serious page boy.
And a beaming Anne Marie the Matron of honour, grinning as if she’d engineered the whole thing—which in a way she had.
Luke—well, just his usual gorgeous self, and as for Molly…
She’d looked awful!
Had wailed when the photos had come back—at her massive stomach and pale reflection and sickly face. And for someone six months into her paediatric intensive course who was married to a doctor it was rather embarrassing really how long they’d taken to work it out.
Lying flat on her back and no doubt snoring her head off after a particularly gruelling shift, she’d woken up to Luke probing her abdomen, swearing he’d just seen something move.
‘Wind,’ Molly had reasoned.
‘About twenty weeks’ worth…’ Luke had grinned.
Idiopathic.
How Bernadette had chewed over that word—how Molly had too.
Meaning no known cause…
No reason that she couldn’t have children…
Till Luke had come back.
Till Luke had come back and, despite her doubts, despite being sure that you could have no such thing, finding out that she could have it all and so could he. Finding out that dreams were actually achievable when you had someone truly supporting you from the sidelines.
‘Change of plan!’ Luke yawned as he came back into the lounge. ‘Amelia can’t find her snowglobe so she’s decided that she’ll “make do” with Hamish.’
Taking Hamish from her, Luke smiled down at him. ‘Bed!’
‘It’s eight o’clock!’
‘And he’ll be up at eleven! Come on.’ He hauled her to her feet, and Molly followed, stopping at the twins’ room, kissing them goodnight, nestling Hamish in his bassinet, too tired to even attempt moisturiser.
‘You’ll go to pot!’ Molly scolded her reflection, but her reflection just shrugged and told her to replace her breast pads.
‘Who are you talking to?’ Luke called, lying on the bed and looking too gorgeous to be married to such a fat blob—not that you could tell, though, from the way he was looking, with that look as Molly crossed the room.
‘No one,’ Molly croaked, and did a U-turn to apply some moisturiser.
Damn!
Frantically rubbing moisturiser into her face, Molly told herself it was too soon.
Hamish was only five weeks old, for God’s sake. What sort of sex maniac was she married to?
Only she’d had her check up on Wednesday and the OB had said they could try.
‘Too fat!’ Molly stared at the massive bosoms and tried not to think of her stomach.
Oh, God, she had sworn she’d be the perfect mother.
Tidy, organised, and back into a boxy little suit within a couple of weeks.
Not that she owned a boxy suit any more.
Grappling in the cupboard for a razor, Molly eyed with dread the boxes of condoms.
Boxes!
Multi-coloured, multi-flavoured.
‘Luke!’
Luke was there in an instant, as naked as the day he’d been born, only tall and blond—and as erect as a church steeple, which didn’t really help matters.
‘Six boxes!’ Molly roared. ‘It’s a bit intimidating!’
‘Oh, that!’ Luke winced as the church steeple dimmed. ‘I can explain. I always wondered how I’d be—you know, if I met Richard.’
‘You met him?’
‘At the supermarket.’ He was idly playing with her big fat tummy, sort of stroking it as he spoke. ‘In the medicinal aisle.’
‘Oh?’ He was playing with her dimply bum now, and for reasons Molly didn’t even want to think about she was playing with him, raining little kisses on his nice big chest and stroking him, and even if she wasn’t dressed in black and wearing some strappy little number, it felt just as good as she pictured the image of Luke bumping into her ex. ‘Tell me,’ Molly said, then pinched his shoulder. ‘Tell me,’ she urged. ‘I need details.’
‘She suffers from terrible migraines, apparently…’
‘Bliss,’ Molly whimpered, as his hand left her bottom and worked its way around.
‘And what with a toddler and a baby and everything, it’s a stressful time…’
‘Keep going,’ Molly moaned in glee.
‘So I just started chucking condoms in the basket.’ Luke winced. ‘I know it’s pathetic, but every time he reached for the paracetamol or the nasal spray I chucked another box in…’ Luke flinched at his own immaturity. ‘You know, to show him that I needed them and he didn’t.’
‘Perfect!’ Molly beamed. ‘I couldn’t have imagined better myself.’
‘Bloody embarrassing at the checkout…’ Luke started, only he couldn’t finish. His mind was on the same thing as Molly’s.
‘Hey, steady!’ Luke gasped. ‘Aren’t I supposed to be persuading you?’
‘Shut up,’ Molly whispered, right into the shell of his ear, back in the saddle now and rising happily to the trot. ‘Just close your eyes and concentrate on us.’
The Children’s Doctor and the Single Mum
Lilian Darcy
‘Which ones are yours?’ Laird asked, beside Tammy. ‘The kids, I mean.’
‘Oh. Which ones? All of them!’
‘All five?’
‘Yes.’ Was he turning pale? She wouldn’t blame him. People often did.
‘I somehow thought it was three,’ he murmured.
‘No, it’s five.’ She held up the correct number of fingers, just to drive the point home. ‘Three four-year-olds—’
‘Triplets!’
‘You’ve turned pale.’
He really had.
‘Five kids, including triplets,’ she went on. ‘That’s why I need five ice-creams.’
‘And you’re on your own with them.’
Was he horrified or impressed? She couldn’t tell.
He’d looked quickly down at his coffee, but somehow a memory had imprinted in his mind and he couldn’t seem to let it go.
I want her. In my bed. In my life.
Bestselling romance author Lilian Darcy has written over seventy novels, for Silhouette Special Edition, Mills & Boon® Medical™ Romance and Silhouette Romance. She currently lives in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, with her historian husband and their four children. When she is not writing or supporting her children’s varied interests, Lilian likes to quilt, garden or cook. She also loves winter sports and travel. Lilian’s career highlights include numerous appearances on romance bestseller lists, three nominations in the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award, and translation into twenty different languages. Find out more about Lilian and her books or contact her at www.liliandarcy.com
CHAPTER ONE
‘WE NEED another nurse,’ Laird muttered.
He had one standing right beside him, checking the two resuscitaires, plugging in tubing for oxygen, laying out the plastic wrap that would help keep the twins warm once they’d been born. He could see the nurse mentally confirming that all the equipment on the resuscitaire trolleys was in place—laryngoscope, endotracheal tubes, Magill for-ceps—and she moved adroitly around the awkward
positioning of various fixtures in the operating theatre.
She looked as if she knew exactly what she was doing.
All well and good, but one nurse wasn’t enough. The scrub nurse and circulating nurse adding to the crowd in the operating theatre would be fully occupied on the surgical side. They weren’t here for the babies themselves. This patient was about to have a Caesarean delivery.
Two paediatricians, one NICU nurse, two twenty-seven-weekers about to be born—it didn’t add up, especially when the babies had stage three twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. You really needed two medical people for each twin when they were going to be so fragile and small and ill and would need transfer to the NICU as soon as they were stabilised after birth. At least Sam Lutze was a good doctor, and the one neonatal nurse they did have seemed unfazed by the whole situation.
But she’d heard his muttered complaint.
‘Sorry, but there’s only me,’ she said, calm and matter-sof-fact, still checking her equipment. ‘Someone’s just gone off sick. We have a supernumerary and we’re shifting things around, but for now… Yeah. You’ve got me.’
‘It’s not good enough,’ he muttered again.
‘I know. But we have a whole NICU full of sick prems. Someone’s on the phone, seeing if there’s anyone we can transfer to another hospital. We’re doing our best.’ She glanced over at the operating table, where their pregnant patient was about to be delivered, by Caesarean. ‘Give Dr Lutze the recipient twin, if he’s the strongest, and you and I can take care of the donor. Would that be the way to go?’
‘We’ll see how it pans out. I haven’t met you before,’ Laird said.
He couldn’t help turning the statement into a challenge. It was one in the morning and Sam Lutze had called him in half an hour ago—Laird had only left the NICU two hours before that—when Fran Parry’s obstetrician had decided her labour was unstoppable.
Laird had seen the latest scans and tests on the babies. They would have needed an emergency delivery within the next few days anyway, because the recipient twin had heart problems developing, while the donor twin just wasn’t getting enough blood.
This woman…
What was her name? He discreetly checked her badge. Tammy Prunty. Was he reading that right?
She had better be more than competent at her job.
‘No, you haven’t met me,’ she answered. ‘But plenty of people at Royal Victoria NICU have. Dr Cathcart, Dr Leong, Dr Simpson. I was there for eight years, on and off, before I came here.’
Here being Yarra Hospital, several kilometres northeast of Melbourne’s city centre, while Royal Victoria was closer in.
‘Sorry, I wasn’t pushing for your résumé.’
‘Well, I can understand why you wanted it.’ She unkinked a cable, switched something on. She had a comfortable figure—some people might call it plump, others voluptuous—but her movements were fast, deft and sure, and Laird had the grudging realisation that she seemed to know her way around the equipment better than he did.
‘Don’t tell me this is your first shift here, though, please!’ He could hear all too well how crabby he sounded, but the prospect of staffing issues affecting a high-risk birth like this one always got to him.
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Second.’
‘Oh, great!’
‘But so far it’s pretty similar to how we did things at RV. Everything’s the same colour!’
Her calm good cheer soothed his irritation, and his impatience seemed to have affected her like water on a duck’s back, thank goodness. Her disposable cap stuck out all around her head, like a cross between a pancake and a Madonna-blue halo, and her pale forehead was shiny above a pair of brilliant blue eyes. If she had hair, he couldn’t see it.
They were ready for the babies now.
Or as ready as they’d ever be.
‘Everything all right, Mrs Parry?’ asked her obstetrician, Tim Wembley.
‘I can’t feel anything now.’ Her voice sounded shaky, and her husband squeezed her hand and hissed out a tense breath. Both of them were understandably frightened and emotional. They were in their late twenties, which was starting to look young to Laird at thirty-four.
‘That’s the way we want it.’
‘Good to go here,’ the anaesthetist said.
‘Not long now,’ said one of the two theatre nurses, giving Mrs Parry’s shoulder a pat. She was circulating, not scrubbed and sterile like her colleague. Both women had kept up a cheerful stream of reassurance, explanation and general chat as preparations for the Caesarean birth were completed.
‘Dr Burchell, Dr Lutze, how are we over there?’ Dr Wembley asked.
‘We’re good,’ Laird answered, and Sam nodded, too.
Dr Wembley made the initial incision, working cleanly and with no fuss. When the babies were so fragile, they needed speed as well as a gentle touch. Being born could be a jarring process, even for a healthy baby at full term.
Laird watched, standing at the resuscitaire so that he’d be ready to work on the first baby as soon as he was freed from his mother’s womb. The latest scan suggested this would be the smaller and frailer of the two—the so-called donor twin.
The Parrys understood the terminology by now. Laird had seen them in his office last week after it had become clear that the amniotic fluid reduction procedures weren’t doing enough to help the babies.
They seemed like a pretty sensible couple. They knew that roughly fifteen per cent of identical twins developed TTTs, with varying degrees of severity, and that it occurred when the webbing of blood vessels in the babies’ shard placents grew unevenly, creating a circulation system that favoured one twin at the expense of the other.
They’d asked him a whole lot of questions, which he’d done his best to answer. Unfortunately there’d been a couple of factors, including a badly positioned placenta, that had made laser surgery on the placental blood vessels a very risky option. This had meant that any treatment, including the amnio reductions and steroids to develop the twins’lungs, had only been an attempt to head off worsening problems, and had done nothing to deal with the underlying condition.
Scans showed that the donor twin—the one sending too much of his own blood into his brother—was undersized and passing too little urine, while the recipient twin’s heart was enlarged and working way too hard as it attempted to deal with the excess fluid.
The Parrys already knew that their boys were lucky to have survived this far, and that one or both of the babies could still die.
‘OK, here we go,’ Tim said. ‘Yes, this is the donor twin.’
‘Adam,’ said Chris Parry firmly. ‘His name is Adam, for heaven’s sake, not The Donor Twin.’
‘Adam,’ Tim echoed at once.
Parents were sensitive at a time like this. Laird had seen the racking emotions they went through over and over again, and it kept him humble. He wasn’t a father himself. Not yet. Or not ever? Insufficient evidence to reach a conclusion on that one.
From what he regularly saw in the NICU, parenthood seemed to him like the dramatic, uncharted territory of an undiscovered island—alluring and frightening at the same time. He wondered if he’d have the same strength he saw over and over in the parents of ill babies.
‘Nice. Look at that movement!’ Tim said. It was feeble, but it was there. The baby was very pale. ‘Hey, Adam, going to breathe for us?’
He wasn’t.
No surprise.
He was blue and so small, well under a kilogram at a guess.
‘What’s our other one’s name?’ Tim was asking. After the dad’s moment of anger and Tim’s own carelessness, he’d recovered his sensitivity. These parents needed everyone to treat these tiny, fragile creatures as beloved human beings right from the start.
‘Max,’ Fran Parry said.
‘Here comes Max.’
Laird didn’t waste time waiting to see whether Adam’s breathing would happen on its own. The NICU nurse took the tiny baby from the obstetrician’s g
loved hands into the dry, pre-warmed towel she had waiting, then laid him in the heated resuscitaire and folded the nest of plastic wrap over him, leaving his head and umbilical cord exposed. Laird decided he didn’t need to suction the tiny nose and mouth. There was no evidence of meconium staining in the waters or blood visible at the baby’s mouth.
In the resuscitaire, baby Adam seemed lost in a wasteland of white mattress. The nurse dried his head and covered it with blue tubular bandage, while Laird began the resuscitation process. He found a pulse at the umbilical artery—roughly sixty beats per minute—and said after a moment, ‘We have a nice heartbeat.’ He heard tearful sounds of relief from Fran Parry. ‘We’re going to get some oxygen into you right now, little guy.’
He found the heart-breakingly small premmie intubation equipment ready for him right at the moment he needed it and took it from the nurse. He had already forgotten her name. Something a bit odd and comical, which belied her wonderful competence.
‘That’s nice. That’s good,’ he said, just to reassure the parents.
OK, here we go, tube going down. Such a tiny distance, seven centimetres, and the tube was only 2.5 millimetres wide. Gently…gently…
The nurse—Plummy, he was going to have to call her for the moment, in his head, even though he knew it wasn’t quite right—clamped and cut the cord, leaving several centimetres intact to allow umbilical line placement.
‘Max is going to need some help here…’ Tim was saying.
One of the theatre nurses took the recipient twin into a second warmed towel, laid him in the resuscitaire and wrapped him, while Sam Lutze checked his responsiveness on the Apgar scale. At a quick glance, Laird expected the one-minute score to come in at two or less. Adam’s had squeaked to three, and he wanted it higher soon. His colour had begun to improve, some pink radiating outwards towards his little limbs.
‘Swap,’ Sam muttered to Laird, about Max. The one-syllable request acknowledged Laird’s extra year of experience and his reputation for superhero skills at resuscitating the sickest babies. ‘Look at him, it’s his heart. And he’s floppy, no reflex. Give me Adam, he’s almost ready for transfer. Tammy, you’ll stay with Max and Dr Burchell.’
Six Sexy Doctors Part 1 (Mills & Boon e-Book Collections): A Doctor, A Nurse: A Little Miracle / The Children's Doctor and the Single Mum / A Wife for ... / The Playboy Doctor's Surprise Proposal Page 15
