The Pregnancy Proposition

by Meredith Webber

  Amelia looked startled, then shocked, then despairing—each emotion chasing across her face as clear to read as block printing.

  ‘Oh, Mac!’ she whispered, and the dark eyes filmed. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Mac felt something shift in his chest—but he’d been told so often he didn’t have a heart, not an emotional one, it couldn’t have been that. He covered his momentary confusion by reaching out and pulling Peterson into his arms, tucking her body close to his.

  ‘We’ll start with breakfast. I know a place that has a variety of breads and pastries, and great teas and coffees. There’s sure to be something there to settle a nauseous stomach.’

  He eased her away so he could tilt her face up and look into her eyes.

  ‘And after that we’ll simply take it one step at a time. Whatever you want to do and however you want to do it. OK?’

  Amelia straightened in his arms and smiled, then drew away and laughed.

  ‘Oh, dear, I wish I’d taped that, Mac,’ she said, still laughing. ‘The moment I decide on something that doesn’t fit in with your grand plans, you’ll be ordering me around the way you always do.’

  ‘I will not,’ Mac retorted, but he was pleased to see the old argumentative Peterson had resurfaced. The wan, uncertain Peterson had been affecting him in strange ways and making him feel a macho protectiveness which he knew the real Peterson would regard as a source of vast amusement and endless mockery.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THOUGH there was no way she was going to admit it to Mac, Amelia did feel better after a cup of a strange flavoured tea, recommended by the proprietor of the café Mac suggested, and a small, but delicious, seeded bagel, spread with a morsel of cream cheese and a sprinkling of sultanas.

  So, by the time she arrived at work, physically she was fine, though mentally she was a write-off. If her brain had been like jelly the previous week, today it was filled with cotton wool. She was aware that she needed to think about the situation—really needed to think about it—but the woolly fluff in her head prevented anything but the most basic of messages getting through.

  She just hoped the work-oriented part was still functioning, a hope confirmed with her first patient, a small boy who’d somehow lodged a watch battery in his ear.

  Sam Watson, aged three, was relatively subdued—or perhaps overawed by the hospital atmosphere. First he’d had to sit in the cavernous waiting room with a lot of noisy strangers, then he’d been taken into a small, poky little room, where a lot of strange paraphernalia would have worried even the bravest of children.

  ‘Children seem to feel obliged to stuff things in the holes they find around their head,’ Amelia said to his mother—who seemed long-suffering rather than concerned. Amelia settled Sam on an examination table, found a mirror and magnifying eyeglasses, and, explaining what she was doing to both child and mother, peered into the small opening.

  ‘It’s lodged in the outer ear canal and there’s no sign of the tympanic membrane being punctured,’ she said, hearing someone enter the room behind her and assuming it was Rick Stewart, the registrar on her team today.

  ‘So we’ll try syringing it out first,’ a deep voice said, and at the same time a hand brushed across her arm, startling her body into awareness.

  ‘Is the department so short-staffed you’re working on non-urgent cases?’ she asked Mac, handing him the head mirror and turning away to get a syringe and saline to flush the ear.

  ‘No, but my office wasn’t very appealing and, besides…’ he flashed one of his rare but ravishing smiles at Mrs Watson ‘…ears are my special love.’

  Amelia shivered, remembering how Mac had tantalised her with little nips and nibbles on her ear lobes on that one momentous night. She glanced his way and saw a little twist of the smile had remained on his lips, and guessed he’d said it deliberately.

  ‘But, looking at this one, I don’t think a syringe will shift it. Would you get an angled probe for me, please, Sister?’

  ‘Oh, so polite, Mac?’ Amelia murmured at him, but she found the probe he wanted—one with a curved end which could be slid in over the foreign object and used to pull it out.

  ‘We use this,’ Mac said, showing it to the patient and his mother but addressing the information to the parent, ‘because tweezers might push the object further in. Though your mum won’t need to know that, will she, Sam, because you won’t ever do this again, will you?’

  The child looked up at him with fearful blue eyes.

  ‘It won’t hurt,’ Amelia assured Sam, taking his hand as Mac bent over the little boy.

  But she was no longer thinking of either Sam or Mac. Seeing those eyes had triggered something inside her, had somehow confirmed the fact that her child—hers and Mac’s—was right now becoming more than just a cluster of cells, or a rather scary thought.

  It was a reality—she was pregnant—and in eight months or so she’d have a child.

  A swear word she kept for really desperate occasions fluttered through her lips, but it was more wondering than desperate or despairing—her reaction more miraculously amazed than distressed.

  Mac’s whispered, ‘No swearing in front of the patients,’ told her he’d heard, but Mrs Watson, who was lifting Sam off the table and talking reassuringly to him, didn’t appear to have noticed anything amiss.

  ‘Something bothering you?’ Mac asked, trapping Amelia in the cubicle when the pair had departed.

  Amelia looked at him and shook her head.

  ‘It’s just getting through to me,’ she said, the wonderment causing the head shaking to continue. ‘That I’m pregnant. That I’m going to have a baby.’

  Mac held his hand against her cheek.

  ‘That we’re going to have a baby. Our baby,’ he said firmly.

  Amelia stopped shaking her head, but wasn’t up to nodding just yet.

  ‘I think I need to get used to my side of things first, Mac,’ she said. ‘There are so many implications—so many things to consider.’

  ‘Dr McDougal to Emergency Admissions—Dr McDougal, Emergency Admissions.’

  ‘Take your time,’ he said, then added a warning. ‘But not too much.’

  He touched her lightly on the shoulder and walked away, and Amelia pressed her hand against her cheek, feeling the warmth where his palm had been.

  Not too much, he’d said. The way she felt now, if she had the gestation period of an elephant, she still wouldn’t be ready for the implications of it being ‘our’ baby when the ‘our’ in question was herself and Mac.

  Or had he said ‘not too much’ because if she decided to terminate the pregnancy then the sooner she did it the better?

  For all his assurances that he’d like to have a baby, all his talk about paying the expenses because he really wanted a child, was he hoping she’d decide not to go through with it?

  Once again she found her hand resting on her stomach. One thing she knew for sure. Not going through it just wasn’t an option. She’d wanted a baby from the time she’d married Brad, but in recent years it had seemed like an impossible dream.

  No, fate might possibly intervene, but there was no way she would do anything to not have this baby.

  She sighed, but a sense of well-being and excitement flooded through her, as if her body was telling her she’d made the right decision.

  For her.

  But was it the right decision for Mac? And what would be the implications of having Mac’s baby?

  Somehow, she’d have to find out.

  ‘The problem is, Mac,’ she said, when he’d found her, two hours after her normal finishing time, in the little office behind the admissions desk, where she was putting the finishing touches to a suggested list of courses for A and E nursing staff, ‘it’s not just a matter of deciding whether or not to have the baby—it’s all the implications of it. For a start, there are all that lot out there. How would we handle them?’

  Amelia waved her hand to where the normal hustle and bustle of the department w
as continuing, with conversation, occasional shouts for help or equipment and the odd bit of gossip floating in the air.

  ‘I mean, I can’t keep a pregnancy hidden for ever—I’m not the right shape for a start—and then when the staff realise it’s yours, well, yours and mine…’ The sentence died, Amelia unable to voice the enormity of the impact their news would have.

  ‘They’ll handle it,’ Mac said stoutly, but he didn’t sound all that stout. In fact, he sounded startled, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him—while the frown accompanying his words also gave the lie to his statement.

  ‘They’ll have a ball is what you mean,’ Amelia told him. ‘It will be the talk of the hospital and, what’s worse, they’ll think you and I have something going—that we’re in a relationship, that we’re a couple…’

  She looked at him, trying to read his face. He was still frowning. If anything, the frown had deepened, and apparently she’d caused that increase in indentation as it was directed at her.

  ‘Would that be so totally disastrous, Peterson?’ he demanded. ‘Not the gossip—that’s nothing. It lasts a day or two, a week at most, then something else comes up and takes its place.’

  He waved his hand to dismiss the gossip as negligible, then continued, ‘But the couple thing. I mean, I’d kind of already suggested it earlier and you got all huffy, but now, with a baby on the way—if that’s what happens—wouldn’t being a couple be the best way to handle it?’

  ‘I had every right to get huffy! What you “kind of suggested” was anything but a relationship, if I remember rightly,’ she reminded him. ‘It was more a series of one-night stands, because you were, as you pointed out, hopeless at relationships.’

  ‘But this would be different. I’m talking marriage here, Peterson. I think that’s the right thing for the baby.’ Mac made it sound as if even a two-year-old should understand. ‘On top of that, we know each other pretty well, and we did enjoy the physical side of things that night, so what could be a better basis for a marriage?’

  Amelia realised there was absolutely no point in mentioning the ‘L’ word. She’d seen enough of Mac’s reactions to other members of the staff foolish enough to declare their love for each other in his hearing to know it wasn’t in his vocabulary.

  ‘So that’s all you want out of marriage—sex and the baby?’

  He looked startled but recovered well, growling at her about women always taking things the wrong way, and how they’d always been friends so they’d have friendship—companionship—going for them as well.

  And that’s as good as it’s going to get, Amelia realised, battling a ridiculous sense of disappointment.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued briskly, as if there was no more to be said on the subject of relationships, ‘we don’t have to rush but we do have a lot to sort out. You have to think about the wedding. Considerations like family come into it. I assume those brothers of yours would eventually notice a pregnancy. And even if they didn’t, mothers tend to catch on quite quickly when their daughter starts growing a bump where one hasn’t been before.’

  Amelia repeated the swear word she’d used earlier, but with considerably more force. Her brothers? Her mother? And what about Dad?

  ‘How the hell am I going to tell them?’ she muttered, to herself, not Mac, though naturally he heard, and with the un-Mac-like generosity he was displaying in this situation he leapt in with yet another plan.

  ‘I’ll do it for you. You can take me to visit, and I’ll tell them how I’ve lusted after you for years then finally you saw the error of your ways and decided to accept my suit, and we’re getting married and having a baby.’

  He spread his arms, as if expecting applause for this absolutely, utterly, totally and comprehensively ridiculous solution.

  Amelia’s mind had caught the least important bit and, instead of applauding, she asked, ‘Have you?’

  His puzzled look told her he didn’t understand so she elaborated.

  ‘Lusted after me for years?’

  Momentarily taken aback, he hesitated, giving Amelia time to answer for him.

  ‘Of course you haven’t, and, anyway, I think lust would be the wrong word to use with my parents—not that we’re going to do anything like that.’

  Mac smiled at her, and the little buzz of attraction which now was a permanent feature in her body whenever she was near him became a big buzz.

  ‘Adored you from afar?’ he offered. ‘And don’t be silly. Of course we’ll tackle your family together. It’ll be a quid pro quo thing, Peterson, because I sure as hell will need you with me when I tell mine.’

  Amelia frowned severely at him.

  ‘Bad choice of words, Mac,’ she said. ‘If I remember rightly, and I do, it was one of your “quid pro quo” things that got us into this.’

  Mac chuckled, a sound so unexpected it spread its warmth through Amelia’s blood and started messages of need deep down in the innermost part of her body.

  Dangerous messages of need!

  Not good when she knew in her heart of hearts a marriage based on sex and a baby wouldn’t work for her.

  She pushed the chair back, which brought her closer to where he was perched on the side of the desk so their conversation couldn’t be overheard by anyone in the outer office.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she told him.

  Unfortunately, her efforts to back away from him tipped the chair over, and she’d have followed it if he hadn’t caught her by the shoulder.

  Mac didn’t speak, but the surprise in his eyes suggested he, too, had felt the surge of awareness that had jolted through her body.

  ‘Not here,’ she murmured as his hand gently tugged her closer.

  Shock replaced the surprise in his eyes, then a gleam of something that went further than amusement lit the hazel depths.

  ‘I came in to offer you a lift. I drove you to work, remember.’

  With a mouth suddenly too dry for speech, Amelia nodded. She knew exactly where the unspoken part of this conversation was leading and honesty compelled her to admit, if only to herself, that it was what she wanted.

  Mac took her arm and led her out past the two women in the outer office. Neither took much notice, though one called something to Mac.

  He kept walking, but fate caught up with them as they passed the curtained cubicles in the emergency admissions area.

  ‘Mac, thank goodness you’re still here. Paul Curry’s just fainted and I’ve told him to go home, and the intern on this shift is already off with flu. I’ve a child choking in four, and an ambulance on its way with the first of the victims from a multi-vehicle accident.’

  Loris Quinn, senior doctor on duty on the evening shift, managed to convey all this information in a very short time, then, as Mac strode off to attend to the child, she seemed to recognise Amelia.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could stay as well,’ she said. ‘Half the nursing staff have got this bug, and we’re so shorthanded I don’t know how we’ll handle the accident victims.’

  ‘One by one,’ Amelia reminded her. ‘At least they should be tagged by the time they get here. And of course I’ll stay, but I’ll check with Susie first that she’s put out an SOS for extra nursing staff. A and E should never be left short-handed.’

  She dashed away, checking in first with Susie McLeod who was senior nurse this shift. Susie confirmed help had been requested, though it was doubtful they’d get it as the entire hospital seemed to be suffering from the virus.

  ‘If you could stay just an hour or so,’ Susie said to her, as the ‘whoop-whoop’ of an ambulance siren announced it had arrived. ‘You might take this first patient.’

  Amelia nodded and joined a couple of porters outside the emergency entrance. The ambulance had stopped and the attendants were already wheeling out the first patient. His eyes were open and the green tag attached to his leg told Amelia he was priority three—treatment could be delayed if others needed help before him. Priorities one and two—immediate and urgent respe
ctively—often came in later, because the paramedics had to stabilise them at the scene before transporting them.

  Amelia took the sheet of information already gathered about the patient from the attendant, and the porters wheeled him inside. She directed them to an open cubicle at the end of the room, then turned as a second patient was unloaded from the ambulance. Her tag was also green, but she was obviously pregnant, and Amelia, conscious of the risk of any accident to an unborn baby, crossed to the phone and put out a call for an O and G registrar to report to A and E.

  Susie came out of cubicle four and took charge of the woman, directing Amelia back to the cubicle where the man had been taken. Once there, she spoke to him, asking what had happened, checking vital signs at the same time, moving, watching, listening. A young doctor she didn’t know appeared, examined the patient and ordered X-rays, then, as the man was being wheeled away, another ambulance arrived.

  ‘Come with me—we’ll take this one,’ the doctor, whose ID proclaimed him to be Dean Richards, said.

  Amelia followed him out to the ambulance bay. It was the beginning of a few hours of organised chaos. Cries for tests, blood, plasma, saline and instruments were going up from all the cubicles and echoing back from the walls. Voices cursed and shouted, nurses ran between the curtained alcoves, delivering whatever was required, fuming at impatient orders but carrying them out in any case.

  ‘What the hell are you still doing here?’

  The department had returned to normal and Amelia was leaning against the wall in the corridor, wondering where she’d find the strength to walk out the front entrance and lift her arm high enough to wave down a taxi. She opened her eyes and looked up into Mac’s glowering face.

  ‘Same thing as you, I suppose,’ she told him. ‘Responding to an emergency.’

  ‘They could have coped without you.’ The words grated harshly from his lips. ‘In your condition you should be looking after yourself, not working here until you’re practically fainting from exhaustion.’