‘They always teased me that they’d taken all the growth genes, which hadn’t left much for me.’
Mac stirred and the hand which had lain quiescent in hers moved so his fingers could return her clasp.
‘Good genes,’ he murmured. ‘Glad about that.’
‘He’s still very confused,’ a voice said, and Amelia turned to see a tall, dark-haired, hazel-eyed woman enter the room. ‘I’m Charlotte. Do you usually wear jeans that he’s talking about them?’
Amelia stood up, knowing the rule about one visitor at a time in the ICU. Then, because it was the easy way out, she agreed with Charlotte that, yes, she usually wore jeans.
Reluctantly, she left the unit, wanting so much to be the one who stayed with Mac. The one to whom he turned when the veil of darkness lifted for a few precious seconds.
‘You can go back in the morning,’ she reminded herself, then, as an aide turned to look suspiciously at her, she realised she’d spoken aloud.
The man who was in with Mac when Amelia arrived very early the next morning was so much an older version of his son that Amelia felt a beat of familiarity pulse through her veins.
‘Ah! So you’re Peterson,’ he said, leaving the room and joining her outside, extending his hand to Amelia then, instead of shaking it, clasping her fingers in a warm and welcoming grip. ‘I’m sure you must have a prettier name than that.’
‘Amelia,’ she said, looking at the man, wondering why he should be calling her Peterson when his wife and daughter both knew her as Amelia.
‘Well, Amelia, I think your visit did the trick,’ Mr McDougal told her. ‘He’s been far more alert during the night. Not all the time. He sleeps a lot, but the doctor says it’s an easier sleep, which shows the effect of the concussion is lessening.’
The man hesitated, shifting uneasily and eyeing her cautiously as if waiting for her to say something.
‘That’s great,’ she said, and realised from his expression it wasn’t the something he’d been hoping for.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said, and waited again, but the situation was already confused enough, with Mac’s family assuming she and Mac had something going between them.
Well, they did as far as the baby was concerned, but not a relationship…
‘I’ll leave you, then,’ Mr McDougal said, and he walked quietly across to the nurses’ station, presumably to check how they felt Mac was doing. But as Amelia walked into the very un-private room, she knew he’d turned to watch her through the glass.
Was he expecting her to greet Mac with a kiss? Watching to see if she did?
She kept her back to the window as she took his hand.
‘It’s me, Peterson, Mac. I’m back and I’m going to keep coming back and nagging at you until you get yourself out of here.’
‘My father knows your father.’
It was such a bizarre thing for him to have said, Amelia decided to ignore it. After all, his eyes were closed and he showed no sign of being conscious, so maybe the statement was part of his confusion.
‘Well?’
His eyes opened as he made the demand and he turned his head towards Amelia.
‘Aren’t you going to say something? Don’t you realise what this means? Have you told your family yet?’
Amelia slumped down into the chair, still clutching Mac’s hand but more to keep a lifeline to sanity than for any other reason.
‘Mac, just how conscious are you? Do you know what you’re talking about?’
He frowned crossly at her.
‘I’m better,’ he snapped. ‘And I’m talking about our baby and trying to get through into your thick head that as all my family now know about it, and my father apparently sees your father on a fairly regular basis—insurance and golf if I can remember rightly—then the sooner you break the news to your family the better.’
‘Well, so much for you doing it with me!’ Amelia snapped right back at him, relief at hearing him speaking so rationally touching off post-anxiety anger.
‘I can hardly get myself out of here to visit your family,’ he grouched. ‘And, anyway, it’s your fault I’m in here so you’ll just have to cope on your own for a bit longer.’
‘My fault you’re in here? My fault?’
‘I was thinking about you, Peterson,’ he said, ‘and then the lights went out. Someone told me a car hit me, but I’m sure I would have been able to dodge it if you hadn’t distracted me.’
‘Just like a man!’ Amelia stood up as she spat the words at him. ‘Blame everything on a woman. I really don’t know why I bothered to come and see you.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Mac said softly, and he smiled, dousing Amelia’s anger and starting fires of attraction where it had been. ‘You want a father for your baby. I distinctly remember you telling me that.’
Then, as if knowing he’d won the point and there was nothing left to say, he closed his eyes and the relaxation of the fingers which had held hers told her he’d drifted back to sleep.
Amelia saw the improvement in Mac each time she stole upstairs for a visit, so she wasn’t surprised when Rachel phoned the following morning to tell her he’d been transferred out of the ICU and was now in the neurology ward on the floor below.
‘And congratulations, too,’ she added. ‘Talk about a dark horse—pretending you and Mac were only colleagues. Now I’m hearing about weddings and babies.’
Cold with shock, Amelia blasted Rachel with a few well-chosen words.
‘And if I find this story has spread through the hospital, I’ll know who to blame,’ she finished, trying to sound as threatening as she could.
‘What story?’ Sally, who was passing the desk at the time, asked. ‘The one about you being pregnant with Mac’s baby? Boy, did you two keep that relationship quiet!’
Amelia shut her eyes and wondered if it was possible to will oneself to faint. If she could just slide unconscious to the floor, someone would send her home, then she could emigrate to Alaska or perhaps one of the remoter parts of Russia.
She hung up the phone and glared at Sally’s back as she disappeared around the corner into the section of A and E where ambulatory patients arrived. Then she tried to think.
It was obvious even to someone with a badly functioning brain and permanently nauseous stomach that if the entire hospital now knew about the baby, it was only a matter of time before her family heard the news. Two of her brothers dated nurses and, though neither worked at St Pat’s, gossip spread by osmosis from one hospital to another.
But what did she tell her parents?
That she was pregnant as a result of a really exceptional one-night stand?
No, she’d better leave out the ‘really exceptional’ part.
‘You working today, Peterson, or are you going to sit there dreaming about the biggest grouch in the hospital? Honestly, I can’t get my head around it.’
Sally laughed as she added the final sentence, then handed Amelia a list of supplies.
‘We’re back on track with staff so why don’t you do the orders and new rosters and all that paperwork stuff you keep moaning about? After all, as senior nurse, you should be spending more work time at this desk and less with the patients. No other senior works as hard as you.’
Amelia studied the other woman, bemused by Sally’s sudden concern for her.
Sally must have read her reaction, for she grinned.
‘I’m only suggesting it to save my own skin. Imagine Mac coming back to find you worked to the bone or, worse, to discover you’d lost the baby. He’d kill the lot of us, starting with me because I’m the 2IC.’
‘But you can’t mollycoddle me right through the pregnancy,’ Amelia said, the shock she was feeling making her voice sound faint and the words feeble.
‘Of course not,’ Sally declared. ‘Just till Mac gets back, then I’m quite sure he’ll take over.’
She left the list on the desk and walked away. Amelia pulled the piece of paper towards her but her eyes wouldn’t focus on it when her
mind was following through on Sally’s comment.
Mac taking over?
It was a sobering thought—no, it was a frightening thought. Mac was a born autocrat—delivering orders like gunshots. If she let him think for one moment he could run her life as he ran A and E…
The images flashing through her mind reinforced her decision to avoid marrying Mac at all costs.
Though with his family and all the staff now assuming marriage…
Mac’s family is not your problem at the moment, she reminded herself, and turned her attention, not to the list but to how to tell her parents she was pregnant.
Gulp!
Aware of the urgency of the situation, she lifted the phone and called her mother. No reply, though the answering machine eventually came on.
‘Mum, it’s me, Amelia. I thought I’d come over for dinner tonight. If that doesn’t suit, could you phone me at work.’
Double gulp—but it was done. Now she could concentrate on work. This time she did focus on the list, and then the roster, and after that she finalised the work she’d been doing on the staff training programme and emailed her suggestions off to the DON.
‘Actually going to do some real work, are you?’ Brian teased, as she came out of the cubby-hole behind the admissions desk.
‘I thought I might,’ she told him. ‘And I’m starting with an inspection of all treatment rooms and cubicles. You’ve been on restocking this week, haven’t you?’
Brian groaned. ‘Come on, Peterson. You know what this place has been like lately. You can’t expect perfect restocking. Besides, the night shift are supposed to do it.’
‘Every shift is supposed to do it,’ she reminded him. ‘A and E on the evening shift can be a war zone—it’s our duty as day shift staff to make sure everything’s on hand for the evening staff, and you know it. The place is still quiet, so I’ll give you an hour before I inspect.’
He walked away, muttering under his breath, no doubt about pregnant women being touchy, but she took no notice. She’d grouched herself about restocking from time to time. It was not only an uninteresting job, but a tedious one as well because of the forms that needed to be completed for every request. But if they had, as did happen from time to time, a patient who’d taken half his arm off in an industrial or farm accident, and there were not enough pressure pads on an emergency trolley, precious minutes could be lost.
She went back into the cubby-hole and made a note to remind herself to talk about the seemingly unimportant jobs that were part of A and E work at the next staff meeting.
The phone rang as she was leaving.
‘Sister Peterson? This is Tony Wheeler, Charge Nurse in Neurology. Could you come up?’
‘Is it Mac? Has something happened?’
‘You could say that,’ the nurse said in a tone dry enough to shrivel skin.
Amelia dropped the phone and rushed out, through to the lift foyer where, fortunately for her sanity, a lift was going up.
‘What’s happened? Where is he?’ she demanded of the only male at the nurses’ station.
‘Room six one six,’ the man replied, nodding his head in the direction of the far end of the ward.
Amelia kept going, arriving at the single room in time to hear Mac’s roar.
‘I’m a doctor and I know how I am. Do you think anyone can get better lying around in a madhouse like this? And stop arguing, Mum, because there is no way I’m going home to your unit. I’m thirty-five. Thirty-five-year-olds don’t go home to Mother.’
Amelia pushed through the door and all but ran into the backs of a nurse and Mrs McDougal who, considering the rage emanating from Mac, had bravely positioned themselves in front of the door, apparently to prevent his escape.
‘You’re obviously better,’ she said over their shoulders to Mac. ‘Right back to your rude, cantankerous self. But if I were you, I’d sit down. Your “well enough to go home” argument won’t be nearly as effective if you’re lying flat out on the floor in a dead faint.’
Mac frowned at her, but he did sit down. On the bed, not a chair, so he still looked taller and more authoritative than anyone else in the room.
‘Good. Now, what’s this commotion all about?’
Mac’s ‘I want to go home’ was echoed by two versions of ‘He wants to go home’ uttered in identical tones of disbelief.
‘Mac, you’ve just been transferred down from the ICU—you should at least spend one night here under observation.’
Mac glowered at her.
‘Under observation! Do you know what that means, Peterson? No, of course you don’t. But I’ve been here four hours and I do know. It means every time you drift off to sleep, some fussy, bossy, know-it-all nurse comes in and wakes you up to take your temperature or blood pressure or ask you how you’re feeling. I can understand why half the poor sods down in and A and E practically cry when we tell them we have to admit them. Some even die rather than face the same fate.’
Amelia listened to the delivery of his speech more than the words. After all, the words were typical Mac-letting-off-steam words, but they weren’t slurred and he definitely didn’t sound confused.
She studied the way he sat, arms folded and eyes half-closed—brooding but determined. Fraser McDougal had no intention of remaining in hospital.
‘Well, he’s probably just as well off at home as he is here,’ Amelia told the two women, ‘as long as there’s someone around who can keep an eye on him.’
She considered the ‘him’ in question and shook her head, while the nurse, with a quiet ‘He’s all yours’, disappeared out the door.
‘Stupid thing to say.’ Amelia corrected herself. ‘As if he’d listen to advice on looking after himself from anyone—but it would be good if there was someone around to phone an ambulance if he collapsed.’
Ignoring the growling noise Mac was making, Amelia turned to his mother.
‘Does he have neighbours who’d look in?’
Mrs McDougal began to speak, then stopped, a flush of what could only be embarrassment creeping into her cheeks.
‘Of course not,’ Amelia guessed. ‘He’s probably been rude to all of them.’
‘I have not!’ Mac snapped. ‘Mrs Warren thinks I’m wonderful.’
‘Mrs Warren is about two hundred years old and deaf,’ Marion said, ‘and he fell out with the neighbour on the other side. And then there are the stairs—the bedroom and bathroom are upstairs, the kitchen and living room downstairs. Dr Blake said he could suffer dizziness.’
She looked helplessly at Amelia, and while Mac was explaining that the neighbour on the other side was a certified lunatic and a witch to boot, Marion McDougal said haltingly to Amelia, ‘Do you—would you—could you?’
Sleep over sometimes?
Look after him?
Perhaps have him at your place?
Amelia’s quick mind obligingly finished the halting half-sentences. Of course the woman would assume they slept together—how else could she, Amelia, be pregnant?
And the thought of Mac falling down the stairs of his townhouse was truly horrifying.
‘You’d better come to my place. I’ve got three days off, and can probably take some holiday time after that if necessary. But that’s on condition you stay here overnight. You need at least twenty-four hours of monitoring before you go home.’
She gave him a stern look.
‘So get back into bed and stop hassling the nursing staff when they’re only doing their duty. I’ll speak to Doug Blake about cutting back the obs to two-hourly, and in return you try being co-operative.’
Mac looked slightly stunned by her performance, but he did swing his legs back up onto the bed and lean back against the pillows, though the way his arms were folded suggested he was simply marshalling his next argument.
Marion, on the other hand, was obviously delighted with this outcome. She beamed at Amelia and gave her a hug.
‘You have no idea what a relief that is to me,’ she said, then she gave Am
elia another hug. ‘Or how happy I am about your other news. I know you probably didn’t mean for it to come out like this, but I know how much Fraser has always longed for a child.’
Amelia accepted the hug, but over Marion McDougal’s shoulder she caught a glimpse of Mac’s face. He was frowning again—but not his usual fierce ‘frighten all the juniors’ frown, more a worried kind of frown.
She untangled herself from the grateful arms and walked across to where Mac still sat on the bed.
‘It’ll be OK,’ she said very quietly, offering him the assurances he’d offered her about the pregnancy. ‘We’ll work it out.’
His eyes sought hers, questioning and wary.
Mac wary?
‘The thing is, Peterson—’ he began in a husky whisper, just as she decided his expression was more worried than wary.
Amelia lifted her hand and pressed a finger to his lips.
‘Shh. Not now. We’ll talk later.’
Which should have ended the matter, but Mac’s lips opened and the tip of his tongue caressed her finger, sending shocks like lightning bolts through Amelia’s body.
She was fighting the effect of these when he moved, sitting up and swinging his legs back to the floor. Then he reached out and pulled her closer, parting his legs so she ended up between his thighs.
‘Mum’s tactfully withdrawn so if we’re not talking until later, maybe we can find something better to do with our lips.’
He cupped one hand behind her head, then leaned forward so his lips met hers—sweetly, cleanly, masterfully.
His hand slipped from her head to her back, pressing her up against his torso, and when, realising this wasn’t exactly prescribed behaviour between a nurse and a patient, Amelia tried to back away, he lifted his head long enough to murmur, ‘You know you shouldn’t argue with head-injured patients, or aggravate them in any way.’ Then he continued to kiss her with a hunger that fired far too much need in her own body.
Eventually, Amelia escaped, but not before she’d given way to her own feelings and returned the kiss with unfamiliar delight.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, as she straightened her uniform and hoped she didn’t look as confused as she felt.
The Pregnancy Proposition Page 11