Because you wanted to see him smile, said a sneaky little voice inside her.
He’d smiled at her just now from the doorway of the break room, and she’d smiled back, as if they knew each other quite well. She hadn’t noticed in the delivery suite on Thursday night how good-looking he was—not exactly male model material, because he was too seasoned for that and he frowned too much, she could tell from the lines that had begun to etch into his forehead, but definitely at the more attractive end of the male doctor spectrum.
She had only looked after the Thornton baby during Eleanor’s break, and hadn’t taken much notice of little Cameron or his mum, except to note that he looked far too big and strong for this unit, while Mrs Thornton looked too experienced and sensible to be worrying this much.
Hmm. So maybe that meant that she was right.
As a mother of five herself, Tammy trusted the great unwritten rule of paediatrics—listen to the mothers. She’d known her third pregnancy was different two days after she had missed her period. And she’d picked up Ben’s prematurity-related eye problems when his next follow-up test was weeks away.
The day around six years ago when Sarah, her eldest, then aged almost three, had innocently entertained herself by heaping three thick feather pillows on top of four-month-old Lachlan in his bassinet while Tammy had been in the bathroom, something about the quality of the silence coming from the baby’s bedroom had alerted her. She’d stopped mid-moisturise, so to speak, with three blobs of white goo dotted on her face.
She’d raced down the passage and snatched the sound-muffling pillows out of the bassinet, while Sarah had started to giggle at such a funny joke—Mummy looked so silly, throwing the pillows on the floor—to find the baby red-faced and screaming healthily, thank heaven, before any damage had been done.
Yes. Very often, a mother knew.
But what did Mrs Thornton know?
She couldn’t say. ‘Something,’ she repeated stubbornly.
Tammy began to understand why the highly intelligent, highly capable, highly non-vague and non-intuitive Dr Laird Burchell had found this particular mother so irritating and why he had opted for the doctor’s privilege of passing the problem on to a lower hospital life form such as Tammy herself.
The Parry boys were behaving themselves at the moment, and she had a window of eight whole minutes before their next clustered care routine. She decided to stop for a chat beside Cameron’s special premmie crib.
The rest of the unit was humming along in its usual way, the bulky pieces of medical equipment with their lines and screens and alarms dwarfing the tiny babies over whom they kept guard. There were softening touches, though. A bright toy nestled in a humidicrib or a picture taped to the transparent sides. Cards and balloons. A wall of photos of their ‘graduates’—smiling toddlers who couldn’t possibly have ever been so small.
‘How was the pregnancy, Mrs Thornton?’
The mother nodded, understanding the intention behind the question. She was an intelligent woman. ‘It was trouble-free.’ She was standing, too, and rubbed her lower stomach as she spoke. She still seemed fairly sore and stiff after a powerful labour that had been abruptly ended by the emergency Caesar. ‘We were in Japan for the first half of it, though, if that makes any difference.’
‘Wow, Japan. That must have been interesting!’ Tammy said sincerely. She’d been as far as New Zealand, on her honeymoon ten years ago, but that was about it. ‘And not easy, with five kids.’
‘It’s a fascinating country. There was a lot to love, and a lot to adjust to, especially with the kids, as you say.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Alan—my husband—had a sabbatical. Someone organised a terrific house for us, out in the countryside. He commuted into the city. When we discovered I was pregnant again, we found a doctor who spoke English, but I found him difficult to understand. And I don’t think he understood me much either.’
‘Was the prenatal care similar to what we have here?’
‘Mostly. As I said, it was an easy pregnancy. I only saw the doctor three times, I think, for routine checks, then we came back here when I was at about five months. I did have an ultrasound there.’
‘At eighteen weeks, like we do here?’
‘Yes, just under.’ Mrs Thornton frowned. ‘Actually, I guess it was more like fifteen weeks, if Dr Lutze was right that Cameron was at thirty-four weeks when he was born, not thirty-six weeks, like we thought. I should change his nappy,’ she added.
She looked tired and uncomfortable, and Tammy found herself offering to do the change, even though she usually breathed a sigh of relief whenever a parent’s help lightened the workload.
‘Thanks,’ Mrs Thornton said. She sat down, and confessed, ‘I skipped the postnatal exercise class this morning. I’m slack!’
‘You know all too well what’s waiting for you at home.’ Tammy grinned. ‘I have five kids myself.’ She was working as she spoke, deftly untaping the sides of the nappy, gently lifting the little legs and bottom.
‘Then you understand!’ Mrs Thornton said with feeling.
The nappy felt very light. You became pretty skilled at estimating urinary output by the weight in your hand. Dry, versus slightly wet, versus nicely soaked. This one felt dry.
‘When did you last change him?’ she asked his mother.
‘Oh, it would be a couple of hours ago. What’s the time now?’
‘Almost seven-thirty.’
‘That late! In that case, it’s about four hours since I changed him.’
‘Was he very wet then?’
‘The nurse weighed the nappy. Just a few mils, she said. I think she wrote it down.’ She didn’t ask if the low output could be a problem, but Tammy could see she’d gone on the alert.
‘Let’s get you into a new one, little man,’ she murmured to the baby, wondering if this could be the source of Mrs Thornton’s nebulous worry. He shouldn’t be dehydrated. There was no obvious distension in his lower abdomen. And newborns often didn’t pee very much at first.
Still… She took his temperature, although he wasn’t due for it, and found that it had gone up a few points—38.1 degrees Celsius. He was officially febrile now, and fever in a premmie newborn wasn’t something you ignored.
She found Dr Burchell at the far end of the unit, studying the notes of a baby girl with a serious heart defect, and told him, ‘I’m not sure if this earns me that coffee you mentioned…’
‘Good coffee, right? Freshly brewed, in a china cup.’
‘That’s the one… Could there be a kidney problem? He doesn’t seem to be putting out much urine.’
‘Newborns don’t.’ Dr Burchell’s mind was clearly still on the heart baby, whose blood gases were getting worse.
The tiny girl needed surgery, Tammy knew, but she really wasn’t strong enough. They’d wanted to get her weight up higher, but it was going in the opposite direction, and her little body was exhausting itself getting that tiny, damaged heart to work.
‘He’s five days old,’ Tammy persisted, even though she understood Dr Burchell’s tight face and the frustrated way he paged through the notes and looked at the heart baby. He wanted to focus on the more serious case. ‘He’s started feeding. And his temp’s over 38.’
OK, she had his attention now. Hopefully he wouldn’t ask how much over 38 degrees. His grey eyes—a deep, liquid grey—fixed themselves on her cap, narrowing with something that was probably annoyance, and she wondered if bits of her hair were making an unauthorised escape bid. They often did.
‘You’re thinking there’s a partial blockage, and he’s having urinary reflux?’ he asked. Grey eyes, but possibly with some chips of green in a different light, Tammy mentally revised.
‘Giving him an infection, yes, that’s what I’m wondering.’
He was already looking back down at the heart baby. ‘Look, we’ll do an ultrasound. Rule it out.’
Rule it out.
His faith in her diagnostic
skills clearly wasn’t high. It didn’t look as if she was getting that coffee any time soon.
‘Thanks, um, Tammy,’ he added.
‘No worries,’ she told him cheerfully, and went back to her charges, prepared to think no more about it.
Eleanor had returned from her break and was gently urging Mrs Thornton to have a relaxing shower. Little Cameron’s next nappy would probably weigh twice as much as a dry one, and Tammy would feel like an idiot for her rash diagnosis.
Yeah, that would be good.
She had a nagging suspicion that the kilos on her butt, the zeros in her bank account and the five kids at home might not be quite enough to keep her safe from a man like Laird Burchell. Tall, broad-shouldered, lovely neck, not a hint of a receding hairline, intelligent and caring and capable…and then there were those deep, perceptive eyes.
He was—if you had time to take notice of such things—gorgeous. If he decided she was an idiot, therefore, so much the better.
CHAPTER THREE
THE sprawling acreage of the Yarra Valley Garden and Landscape Centre on a Sunday morning was one of Tammy’s favourite places when she’d really, seriously, drastically run out of ideas and energy at home, didn’t want to spend much money, and when the playground down the road had earned a moaning chorus of, ‘But we’ve been there three times this week.’
Mum was taking a break today, leaving her little flat behind Tammy’s house temporarily empty. She deserved it about five times over, and had gone to Tammy’s brother’s place in Healesville for a barbecue lunch and a peaceful afternoon. His two boys were quiet lads in their late teens, and his wife—Tammy’s sister-in-law Jeannette—was a terrific person and spoiled Mum rotten. She would return refreshed, and probably bearing leftovers.
The kids had a good time at the garden centre, and Tammy was able to get some time alone, even though it was only in her thoughts. But when you’d spent over an hour letting the kids chase around the big glazed pots and orchard trees and ornamental fountains, or playing name-that-flower games, or swinging your four-year-old triplets on the swings in the designated kids’ area, you really owed it to the garden centre management to buy a plant.
Tammy always found it a terrible hardship to have to buy a plant.
In a more perfect world—a world where counting every penny occupied a much smaller portion of her time—she would have bought at least twelve.
That kaffir lime tree, for example. Or a pair of those cyclamens in bright lipstick colours. Some drought-tolerant grevilleas or bottlebrush. A lemon-scented eucalyptus. Oh, and herbs. She loved herbs.
She decided on a little punnet of lemon thyme, and accepted that five ice creams on sticks would have to be added to the bill. The spring sunshine had grown quite hot, and the kids were getting hungry and thirsty. The ice creams would reward them for good behaviour, and tide them over until she could get them home and make some lunch.
In the herb section, she saw a familiar figure—Laird Burchell, the last man on earth she would have expected or wanted to see here, with the possible exception of her ex-husband—and unfortunately he saw her before she could veer in the direction of the summer annuals and get out of his way.
He was wearing jeans, a blue polo shirt, a pair of scuffed work boots and a broad-brimmed Akubra hat, which made him look like a farmer. There was an air of relaxed satisfaction hovering around him that she hadn’t seen on him in the NICU.
Some doctors played with their investments during their time off.
Dr Burchell apparently preferred to play at being a man of the land.
He came up to her with arrow-like directness while she stood there with garden-centre potting mix leaking out of the holes in the bottom of the lemon thyme punnet, dirtying her hands. In the background Ben knocked over a standard rose bush, and Tammy hoped she’d get a chance to set it upright again before either the garden centre staff or Laird Burchell realised that Ben was hers.
‘Convenient, seeing you here,’ he said.
‘Oh, is it?’ She smiled.
‘I owe you a coffee.’ He’d completely skipped hello.
She understood at once. ‘You mean something did show up on Cameron Thornton’s ultrasound?’
‘I sent him down late last night, but you’d gone by the time he came back. There was a marked dilatation in the left kidney, suggesting a significant ureteral obstruction. He’s on antibiotics, and we’ll do a pyeloplasty on Monday. Mrs Thornton is not even trying to resist telling me that she told me so.’
‘Well, we did take a while to trust her intuition. She’s allowed to be smug.’
‘But I’m hoping you’ll resist telling me that you told me so, if I make good on the coffee deal.’ He gestured behind him to the garden-centre building, where there was a pretty café section overlooking the greenery.
He meant coffee right now, Tammy realised.
Well, you could get it here in paper cups, to go.
‘No paper cups, right?’ he said, as if reading her thoughts and challenging them. She remembered her joking insistence that it had to be good coffee, in a china cup.
‘That is, if you want to,’ he added, just as a man who could conceivably have been her husband picked up a punnet of parsley and one of basil and moved in Tammy’s direction.
‘Would you rather get it over with?’ she teased, letting Dr Burchell think what he liked about her relationship to the herb hunter—who wasn’t her type at all.
She would have a latte, she decided, and she could sip it on one of the garden benches out the front, while the kids ate their ice creams. She’d tell Dr Burchell he didn’t need to stay and keep her company. He could buy his pair of matching maidenhair ferns, or whatever, and go home to put them on his glassed-in townhouse balcony.
Meanwhile, Lachlan was trying to help Ben to set the rosebush straight. There was only a little bit of spilled soil on the ground, thank goodness. But the thorny branches of the fallen rose caught in the next rosebush as Lachlan pushed it too hard, and three of the bushes fell in a heap. They’d outgrown their pots and were top-heavy. ‘Sorry, Mummy,’ he mouthed, wincing.
Oh, dear! Oh, no! Now all five children were attempting to sort out the rosebushes, and Tammy could see the green overalls of a garden-centre employee approaching behind them, ready to yell.
‘It’s going to take more than coffee,’ she said quickly to Laird. ‘That’s if you do mean now.’
‘More than coffee?’
‘Um, it’s going to take five ice creams as well.’
‘Five ice creams?’
‘I mean, I’ll pay for them, obviously, but you’ll either have to leave at once, which I’d advise because the Prunty family is about to get into trouble, or you can sit and watch the ice creams get all over my children’s—Excuse me.’
Before the fourth and fifth rosebushes could fall, she raced to the scene of rose devastation and managed to restore order, with only one resulting thorn scratch on her hand and one abject ‘Sorry’ to the garden-centre person, who did not look as if he had ever met a child, let alone had any of his own.
He checked meticulously and pointedly for damage, and Tammy revised her estimation of his previous experience.
He had met children before.
He ate them regularly for breakfast.
‘Which ones are yours?’ Laird asked, beside her. ‘The kids, I mean.’
‘Oh. Which ones? Of those? 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.
‘You said something about three parent-teacher confer-ences the other day.’
‘Three four-year-olds, one pre-school teacher.’
‘Triplets!’
‘You’ve turned pale.’
He really had.
And we’re looking at each
other a bit more often than we should be, and holding the looks for too long. It’s weird.
‘Five kids, including triplets,’ she went on. ‘That’s why I need five ice creams. I’m not making you pay through the nose for my diagnosis of the Thornton baby by eating all five myself, I promise.’
‘And you’re on your own with them. In a garden centre. Five of them.’ Was he horrified or impressed? She couldn’t tell. ‘You don’t have your husband here with you, or—?’
‘They’re pretty good, usually. They love it here.’ She added awkwardly, ‘And I’m divorced,’ because the husband-like herb man had wandered off and lost his usefulness as a decoy.
Although why she should have wanted Dr Burchell to think that she was still married, she wasn’t sure.
Yes, she was sure. Extra kilos, tight budget, five kids, being an idiot, plus the presumption on his part of her possessing a current flesh-and-blood husband. In some situations, a sensible woman needed all the protection she could get.
He looked at the kids. ‘Wow.’
‘I know. The triplets were pregnancy number three. Naturally conceived. Bit of a shock for all concerned.’
‘I bet.’ He smiled, almost tentative about it. Tammy had the impression that, like the garden centre man, he hadn’t met many children other than the fragile newborns he worked with and seemed to care about so much. But he definitely didn’t eat kids for breakfast. ‘Of course I’ll get them ice cream,’ he said heartily. ‘I still think you’re brave, bringing them here.’
‘Your lips say brave but your face says crazy,’ she joked. ‘Sometimes, though, I go crazier staying at home.’
I’m the one who’s crazy, Laird decided.
He hadn’t really been obliged to resurrect the offer of coffee at all, let alone here and now, with kids and plants and ice cream. He could easily have avoided her eye, or said a brief hello in passing, or made a very plausible assumption about the matrimonial status of the man browsing through the herbs only a few feet away, and Tammy Prunty would quite acceptably have heard about Cameron Thornton’s hydronephrosis on her next shift.
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 18