She heard him mutter something behind her and for just a moment it sounded as if he’d said, ‘I’m not sure I will.’ But she must have been mistaken, because when she turned back he was already disappearing around the corner in the corridor.
Angry and disappointed, Ella dumped the rest of the uneaten pizza in the bin and made her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth.
The miserable face looking back at her in the mirror went part way to bringing her back to her senses. So what if she’d paid a silly amount to have blonde highlights put in her hair to mimic the effects of sunlight on the dark auburn strands. And she might as well not have bothered with freshening up her makeup for all the good it had done her.
‘If you looked like that when he kissed you, then it’s no wonder that he didn’t want to do it again,’ she said, deliberately pulling an ugly face at herself. ‘And it’s understandable that a consultant might be worried about the proprieties, especially if we’d gone any further…’
Gone any further? She couldn’t help a huff of disbelieving laughter when she remembered just how close she’d come to spontaneous combustion—and there hadn’t been a thought in her head about stopping him…them. Never before had she felt one tenth…one hundredth…one millionth of what she’d felt when Seth had kissed her.
Before, even in the midst of an embrace, she’d always had to think about what response she should make to what was happening to her—whether she should put her arms around the man, whether she should open her mouth when he kissed her.
With Seth, for the first time in her life it had just happened, unleashed by that first heated glance.
It was only now that she was thinking about it that she remembered instinctively wrapping her arms around his shoulders so that their bodies had met like two halves of a perfect whole. Only after it was all over did she remember the way their lips had met and their tongues had duelled in the dark secrecy of their mouths, giving and taking in perfect mimicry of the seamless way their bodies would have joined.
‘And he said it shouldn’t have happened,’ she whispered into her pillow as the first tear trickled down the side of her nose. ‘It was the most perfect moment of my life and he…he apologised for it.’
‘Happy Christmas, Gabriella,’ she said sadly the next morning as she opened the solitary present—a brightly wrapped gift from Sophia that she’d found tucked into her pigeonhole—and which she’d carried home from the hospital last night.
A negligee set, in a shade of green so dark that in the folds it seemed to be black, slithered out of the nest of tissue paper onto her lap. She held it up to admire it, knowing that it was the perfect choice against her pale skin and auburn hair.
It was pure silk, if she wasn’t mistaken, and absolutely the most beautiful thing she’d ever owned, but just the thought of wearing it in this chilly flat gave her the shivers. Anyway, she didn’t have anyone to wear it for.
She’d already opened the card that went with it, and read the bubbly letter it enclosed, full of the wedding plans so far. As she’d guessed, Sophia was spending the holiday with the family she would be joining in March.
As for her, with five years’ difference in age between them they had spent too many years apart to be really close. It probably hadn’t occurred to Sophia, floating around on her little pink cloud of happiness, that her little sister might be feeling a bit lonely in a new job in a new town.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ she snapped suddenly, flipping the lingerie over the arm of the chair and tilting her chin up. ‘Are you going to sit around feeling sorry for yourself or are you going to do something about it?’
She thought about the frozen meal waiting to be nuked into relative palatability and pulled a face.
‘They’re having turkey and all the trimmings up on Obs and Gyn, if it’s anything like my last hospital,’ she mused, considered her options for a moment longer and then reached for the phone.
‘Well, all I can say is you’re a glutton for punishment,’ Jo said when Ella joined her little more than half an hour later. ‘Not that I’m not glad to see you, but I think you are the only person I’ve ever known that’s rung in on Christmas Day to see if there’s anything for them to do.’
‘Actually, don’t tell anyone, but it’s all part of a clever plot so I don’t have to cook myself a meal,’ Ella said in a stage whisper. Jo would never guess just how much truth there was in the joke.
‘Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad you rang when you did because I’ve got pregnant women coming out of my ears.’
‘I’ve heard that this is the place for it,’ Ella teased.
‘Yes, but not all in labour at the same time,’ Jo retorted. ‘Honestly, the things some women will do to get out of spending Christmas with their families.’
Ella laughed, but to her own ears there was a slightly hollow sound to it. She would actually have loved to have had a big boisterous family surrounding her at this time of year. From what she could remember before Sophia had left home, there had been a lot of noise and colour and laughter. Ever since they’d lost their parents, the only ‘family’ she’d had to share the season with had been her hospital colleagues.
‘Joking apart, what have you got that you want me to do?’ Ella asked. ‘Are any of the mums ones that I would remember from the hospital’s antenatal classes?’
‘One of them, I think. An older lady called Mrs Vincenti. Early forties, first baby, overweight, gestational diabetes.’
Ella groaned. ‘How could I forget when you nicknamed her “the walking disaster area”? The perfect example of everything that could go wrong and did.’
It wasn’t quite true. At her age Maria Vincenti had been a prime candidate for the complication of a Down’s syndrome baby, but the tests had given her the all-clear.
As for the rest of it, far too much was accurate.
Ever since she’d discovered that she was pregnant at long last, the volatile Italian restaurant owner had taken the old wives’ tale of ‘eating for two’ to extremes. It hadn’t been much of a surprise when her GP had notified them fairly early on in the pregnancy that he’d diagnosed gestational diabetes.
From that point on, her diet had been a battleground in which every skirmish won by the antenatal staff had been routed by a major counter-offensive. If human pregnancy hadn’t been limited to nine months, Ella had wondered whether the woman might have eventually grown as wide as she was tall.
‘She’s full term?’ Ella brought up the computer entry for her notes.
‘Plus five days, much to her disgust,’ Jo said with a chuckle then leant closer to confide. ‘She actually came in on the due date demanding to know why she hadn’t gone into labour. She said that she couldn’t run a successful business if people didn’t deliver when they said they would, and it was no wonder the health service was in such a state!’
Ella burst out laughing. That alone was enough to banish her blue mood.
‘Did the midwife on duty point out that it was the patient’s body at fault rather than our department?’
‘Do you think it would have made any difference?’ Jo countered, answering question with question.
‘Having met Mrs V., not a bit.’ Ella rolled her eyes. ‘Ah, well, let’s hope she doesn’t find anything else to complain about while she’s in labour.’
Just as she finished speaking there was a blood-curdling shriek that lasted for several mind-numbing seconds.
Ella cringed and whirled to face along the corridor towards the sound.
‘What on earth was that?’ she demanded with her heart pounding.
‘That was Mrs Vincenti,’ Jo said with a pained wince. ‘Apparently she can remember her grandmother telling her that women shriek in labour to frighten the devil away. That way he won’t be waiting around to pounce as soon as the head emerges.’
‘Oh, my…’ Ella sighed. ‘I hope you’ve prepared some tactful explanations about what’s going on for your patients.’
‘Eve
n better than that.’ Jo held her hand out with a grin to reveal several packets of disposable earplugs. ‘To conform to health and safety guidelines. They don’t stop you hearing what she’s saying, but they do stop your ears ringing when she starts shrieking.’
Ella tore open the little package and took out the little foam cylinders. It was the first time she’d ever had to resort to these measures, but she wasn’t willing to take her chances spending any time next to a woman who sounded like Concorde taking off.
‘Good morning, Mrs Vincenti,’ she said brightly as she sailed into the room a moment later, cutting the latest shriek short by several blissful seconds.
‘Where have you been?’ Maria demanded instantly. ‘I have been in this room for many hours with only a nurse. I am having a baby and I am in agony and nobody cares. You are the doctor who will make it come, yes?’
‘I’m the midwife,’ Ella corrected her, opting not to get into an argument about the length of time since she’d been admitted and the fact that the young woman she’d scathingly labelled as ‘only a nurse’ was a trainee midwife not far from the end of her course.
‘You are not the consulente?’ she exclaimed and burst into an over-excited flood of Italian, complete with windmilling arms.
Unfortunately, Ella couldn’t speak Italian, but her mother had made sure that she understood enough to get by in an emergency.
‘No, I’m not the consulente,’ she confirmed, breaking into the recriminations firmly. ‘I am a levatrice—’ heaven only knew how she’d remembered the word but it had come to her just when she needed it ‘—who has delivered many babies and I will be looking after you until your little one arrives. Katy, here, is a fully qualified nurse who is nearly at the end of her training as a levatrice, and she will be extremely good at her job because she has small hands.’
Katy’s eyebrows shot up towards her hairline at that recommendation and Ella had to look away or she would have giggled, but it was the effect on Maria Vincenti that was the most interesting.
‘Small hands?’ she repeated with a puzzled frown that suddenly cleared when she made the anatomical connection with what she was going through. ‘Ah. Small hands,’ she said again, her dark eyes going from one to the other as though comparing their comparative glove sizes.
There was no time for further conversation as the expression on the woman’s face told them that another contraction was starting.
Before Ella could say anything she’d drawn in a deep breath and was shrieking at the top of her voice, pausing only to take in more air.
By the time the contraction died away Ella’s ears were ringing in spite of the protection of the plugs. How Katy was coping after nearly half an hour of it, she didn’t know. What she did know was that she was going to have to find some way to put a stop to it.
In spite of the antenatal clinic’s best efforts, the woman was dreadfully overweight and was already panting and sweaty with at least an hour and probably more to go.
A glimmer of an idea slowly brightened, but how to present it?
‘You come from the south of Italy?’ she posed casually. ‘From the country region?’
‘Not at all,’ she snapped as though mortally offended. ‘I am from Bologna, in the north. More sofisticato. Raffinato. We have the oldest università in the world,’ she said proudly, clearly affronted that Ella might have mistaken the fact.
‘Well, that is strange,’ Ella said with a frown and a slow shake of her head. ‘I thought it was only in the south that the women hadn’t learned about modern childbirth.’
She sent up a mental apology to all the wonderful modern medical establishments in the south of Italy and the thoroughly modern people who used them.
‘What do you mean, modern childbirth? I am here and this is a modern hospital with all the modern methods, no?’
‘Yes, but you are screaming in the old way. These days, we know that it will only waste your energy, making you too tired to help your baby to be born.’
‘But I must scream. I must frighten away the diavolo so he will not get my baby.’
‘Ah, but that is the old country way,’ Ella said persuasively, speaking quickly because she knew that it wouldn’t be much longer before another contraction started. ‘These days, women stay as quiet as they can so they don’t let the devil know that they are having a baby. They wait until the moment the head comes out and then they shout to scare him away.’
Ella watched the woman processing the information and marvelled that such a successful business-woman should be so superstitious.
The expression on her face told them that she was definitely wavering so Ella brought out the final backup.
‘The hospital also has a priest who can come to bless you and your baby when he arrives.’
‘In the hospital?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘He would come here?’
‘Of course,’ Ella confirmed. ‘I could send a message for him now, if you like.’
Mrs Vincenti had a little time to think about her answer because a really strong contraction overtook her so powerfully that even without Ella’s crafty mental gymnastics she didn’t have the energy to scream.
‘Breathe out,’ Katy coached quietly. ‘As if you’re blowing out your baby’s birthday candle. Don’t fight the pain—it’s doing an important job. Breathe in and blow out.’
Considering the woman had attended some of the antenatal classes, she seemed to have taken very little in, and Ella had to admire Katy’s patience over the next hour.
The head was almost crowning when there was a minor disturbance outside in the department and a quick tap on the door.
‘Mr Vincenti has arrived,’ Jo told Ella, gesturing to the nervous-looking man behind her. ‘He’s not certain whether he’s welcome to come in.’
Ella couldn’t help smiling at him. He was so tall and painfully thin where his wife was absolutely the opposite.
‘Of course he’s welcome. Wait a moment while I get you a gown,’ Ella said.
‘No, no. You don’t understand,’ he said hurriedly, peering anxiously over Ella’s shoulder into the room. ‘I don’t know whether my wife will want me to come in. It was not planned this way.’
‘I can soon ask her. Just a moment.’
Ella hoped she’d managed to keep her curiosity out of her expression. While endlessly fascinating, the dynamics of other people’s relationships were none of her business.
‘Mrs Vincenti, would you like your husband to be here with you?’ she asked, waiting till her patient was resting briefly between ferocious bursts of pushing. She had to give the woman her due. Once she’d had something explained to her she put her heart and soul into it.
‘Si. I would love him to be here with me,’ she said sadly. ‘But it is not possible because we have the ristorante.’
Obviously her husband was listening for her reply, because it was followed by a rapid-fire burst of Italian that lit the exhausted woman’s face up like a child in front of her first Christmas tree.
Ella understood just enough for tears to gather behind her eyes.
‘What did he say?’ Katy hissed when she’d helped the nervous man into a gown and sat him beside his tearfully smiling wife.
‘He said that nothing, not even the restaurant, is more important than being with her when their baby is born. If I understood it right, he’s dragged all their relatives in to take over the serving of sixty meals on Christmas Day just so he’d be free to come to the hospital.’
‘Oh, wow!’ Katy’s eyes shone. ‘Now we’ve got to make sure the baby arrives safely.’
Mr Vincenti had only just arrived in time for the event because within five minutes he was watching wide-eyed as his first child slithered uneventfully into the world with an indignant yell.
‘That was enough to scare the diavolo away,’ Maria Vincenti joked weakly, and Ella laughed.
‘Seth said to tell you “well done”,’ Jo told her when the Vincentis had been transferred to the four-bedded bay closest to
the nurses’ station.
‘Oh?’ Ella couldn’t help glancing around, not certain whether she was hoping to see him or hoping to avoid him.
‘Apparently, they could hear Mrs V. vocalising all over the hospital and he came up to see if someone needed his help. Once he heard that you’d got the situation under control, he left. Mind you,’ she added with a grin, ‘he did say to give you full marks for ingenuity.’
‘Knowing that gagging her would be seriously frowned upon, it was a choice of spinning her a believable yarn or losing my hearing,’ Ella said wryly, hugging to herself the warm glow of pleasure at his approval.
That seemed to be the pattern of their working relationship over the next few weeks.
It didn’t take long for Ella to realise that Seth seemed to be deliberately avoiding her.
He could hardly stay away from the department just because she was there, but where once he might have grabbed a cup of coffee and settled himself at one of the tables in the staff lounge to go over some paperwork or read a journal, now he left straight away.
No one else seemed to have noticed the difference but, then, they weren’t the ones whose pulse rate doubled each time they heard his voice. They weren’t the ones who went to bed each night reliving that mistletoe kiss.
Apart from spending less time on the unit, Ella slowly realised that Seth also seemed to be steering clear of being near her and even avoided talking to her unless strictly necessary, and that hurt.
Wasn’t it bad enough that she was missing seeing him? Now she was also having to come to terms with the fact that she’d even lost the tentative friendship they’d started to form.
The trouble was, none of his efforts seemed to do anything to lessen the attraction she felt towards him. She was still convinced that she had found the man she had been waiting for all her life but, instead of being happy, she was miserable.
After more than two weeks of living on the frayed ends of her nerves she finally decided that she needed a break.
‘Soph? It’s Gabby,’ she announced, having waited for her break to phone her sister’s ward. ‘What are you doing over the next couple of days?’
Mistletoe Mother (Medical Romance) Page 9