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

by Carol Marinelli

  She hadn’t slept a wink last night. And she had arrived home, tearful and in despair, only to find that Will wasn’t even there. He had been out with Anthony. Her flight from Nathan’s, her thoughtless words that had hurt him so deeply and created completely the wrong impression, had all been for nothing. Feeling horribly alone, she had curled up on her bed, her arms wrapped around herself, her brain struggling to come up with a workable plan on how to explain things to Nathan.

  Her gaze lingered on his tense, silent frame. Even the shapeless scrubs he wore couldn’t detract from his impressive looks and masculinity. At the moment he refused to even look at her, so how was she ever going to get him to listen to what she needed to say? It would be difficult, but she had to tell him the whole truth…and then she could only hope he could forgive her.

  She couldn’t imagine the rest of her life without Nathan being part of it. Or how she had survived the last five years without him. The extent of her self-delusion, her denial and her mistakes took her breath away. As did the uncomfortable knowledge that she had never even considered how Nathan might have felt when she had left him. She’d been so selfish. Where had he been these last five years? What had happened to him? And why wasn’t he a specialist registrar already?

  She had so many questions but, having kept him at arm’s length and lied to him, the tables were now turned on her and it was Nathan who was blanking her.

  Annie’s troubled thoughts were interrupted when the staffroom door opened and Will all but bounced into the room. In contrast to Nathan’s pale face and bleak expression, Will looked happiness personified—a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the other staff in the room.

  ‘You look even more disgustingly chipper than normal, Will,’ one of the nurses teased him. ‘I thought you were off today?’

  ‘I swapped shifts with Gus—Julia isn’t feeling well, so he’s taking her for a check-up with her obstetrician.’

  As Will explained his unexpected presence, Annie noticed Nathan heading towards the door. She rose to her feet, determined to follow him and try to arrange a time to talk. Before she could move, however, Will was scooping her up and swinging her around.

  ‘And I am disgustingly chipper,’ he said, laughing in answer to the other part of the nurse’s comment. ‘Because I’m in love!’

  Seeing the hurt and anger in Nathan’s dark eyes as he cast her one fulminating glare before leaving the room, Annie smothered a cry of frustration and wriggled out of Will’s arms.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, stepping back, a frown of concern sobering his face.

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ she whispered, anxious that no one should overhear. ‘I have to catch Nathan.’

  By the time she reached the corridor Nathan was striding ahead of her and about to disappear around the corner. She ran after him, calling his name. He hesitated, glancing over his shoulder, clearly reluctant to stop.

  ‘Please,’ she begged as she closed the distance between them, conscious that other people were milling about, affording them no privacy.

  ‘Not now, Annie.’

  ‘When, then?’ An edge of desperation crept into her voice. ‘I need to talk to you—to explain things.’

  He strode off towards the A and E department. ‘I’m not interested in whatever arrangement you have going on with Will.’

  ‘It’s not like that!’

  She wanted to protest further, but was worried about making a scene in public. The department was hectic, crowded with staff and patients, and already people were looking at them. However much she wanted this settled, she couldn’t shout out in front of everyone that Will was gay. Neither did she want her colleagues to know how badly she had behaved, nor that she had lied. Caught in a trap of her own making, she could do nothing but wait.

  As Nathan walked away from her Annie hesitated, unsure whether to go after him or not. Wrestling with indecision, she was startled when Gail came up beside her.

  ‘Give him some space, love,’ the older nurse advised.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Gail’s smile was understanding. ‘Now isn’t the best time for Nathan,’ she added, explaining what had happened with baby Millie.

  ‘Oh, no.’ A lump lodged in Annie’s throat. She wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but she feared his rejection. ‘Nathan will be devastated.’

  ‘He’s taking it hard. It was upsetting for all the team.’

  ‘No matter how many times you see these things, you never get hardened to it,’ Annie mused sadly.

  ‘You and Nathan are such good doctors because you haven’t lost your compassion and the ability to care.’ Gail gave her hand a squeeze. ‘I’ve sensed from the first that you two have something of a history. It’s the way you look at each other. Whatever’s gone wrong, Annie, I’m sure you can work things out.’

  Touched, Annie managed a watery smile. ‘Thanks, Gail.’

  As the kindly woman left, Annie sucked in a ragged breath. She hoped her friend was right and it wasn’t already too late to make amends with Nathan. From across the crowded department she saw him standing at the desk, reviewing the next set of case notes from the tray. He looked so distant, so sad, so alone. And it was all her fault.

  There was nothing she could do at this moment to right the wrongs she had committed against him, but later she would try again. Despite all the setbacks, she was determined she was going to see this through. Far too late she acknowledged just how much she had always loved him—still loved him. Whether or not she had hurt him one too many times for him to forgive her, and whether or not they could ever have another chance at being together, she wouldn’t rest until she had apologised and explained everything—she owed Nathan that much at least.

  * * *

  With the department stretched to capacity, Annie scarcely had a moment to draw breath. Amongst the many patients she saw, whose problems were varied and ranged in levels of seriousness, were two regulars. One was a nineteen-year-old girl battling a drug problem, who had been brought in for the second time since Christmas after being assaulted by a man who had picked her up on a street corner. Annie was very concerned at the danger the girl was placing herself in as she tried to get money to feed her habit. Frustrated that the system and target pressures didn’t allow her the time necessary to spend talking to the girl, Annie finally persuaded her to visit the drop-in clinic, where she would get full support, care and advice from Thorn and his staff and hopefully help to come off the drugs and get her life back on track.

  Her second regular was a middle-aged alcoholic man who had been found collapsed in one of the town’s parks by a morning dog-walker. He had apparently fallen while making his unsteady way home from the pub in the early hours, spending the night in the cold with a broken leg that needed plating, a very sore head and mild hypothermia. Annie finished the paperwork and handed him—and the battle with the hospital’s bed manager for an admission slot—over to the orthopaedic registrar.

  Although time passed in a blur of activity, she found it uncharacteristically hard to focus on her job. All she could think about was Nathan. She caught herself straining to hear the sound of his voice, or trying to catch a glimpse of him as she hurried from Reception to waiting room to examination cubicle, from one patient to another.

  A couple of hours ago, while chasing up X-ray and blood test results for a twenty-seven-year old man with sudden-onset abdominal pain and vomiting, who had been given analgesia and was being monitored pending further investigations, she had managed to exchange a few words with Will—sufficient to inform him of her latest faux pas with Nathan.

  ‘For someone who is normally so intelligent, sensible and attuned to people’s feelings, you’ve been a complete idiot over Nathan,’ he’d told her, shaking his head and holding nothing back. ‘You have to tell him everything, Annie.’

  ‘I’m trying to! But he won’t speak to me. Not that I blame him.’

  Thankfully Will had refrained from saying I told you so.

  Back in A and E,
and with the results of the young man’s tests suggesting caecal volvulus—a twisting of the bowel—she signed him over to the surgical team, who were anticipating the need to perform a right hemicolectomy to correct the problem. Next she was caught up in treating casualties of the third motorway traffic collision of the day. She had long since given up hope of grabbing a reviving cup of coffee, let alone any lunch.

  She was at the desk, wiping the details of the patient she had just dealt with off the whiteboard, when further chaos erupted in the shape of two burly, heavily tattooed men. Dripping blood from assorted cuts and bruises, they were escorted inside by five harrassed-looking police officers. Voices were raised and language was foul. The entourage had barely crossed the threshold before the head receptionist, without whom the department would cease to function, was calling for additional security and organising things so that existing patients would be disturbed as little as possible by the new arrivals.

  Robert Mowbray emerged from an examination cubicle to speak to the police sergeant in charge, and Annie hovered at Reception in case she was needed, instinctively keeping herself between the children’s play area nearby—where a volunteer nurse was keeping watch over three youngsters—and the swearing, bloodied men, who were trying to fight each other and the policemen struggling to restrain them.

  As the scuffle intensified, one of the arrested men made a bid for freedom, punching one of his captors and knocking aside the other. With the A and E exit guarded, the man turned, his eyes wild and frantic as he searched for another means of escape. To reach the corridor to the rest of the hospital he’d have to go by the children, Annie realised, and with no other thought in her mind than sheltering them she maintained her position.

  The panicked man closed the gap between them. Annie heard shouts before the man grabbed her. Then she was aware of a sharp bloom of pain in her chest, and she glanced down in disbelief to see the man withdraw what looked like a screwdriver clutched in his hand.

  Shocked, Annie cried out as he shoved her roughly aside. Disorientated, she felt herself falling. Unable to slow the momentum, she hit the floor with a thud. She thought she heard Nathan’s familiar voice calling her name, and she tried unsuccessfully to lift her head to look for him, but her vision was blurry. People were yelling. An alarm was sounding. Running footsteps pounded closer. She knew a warm wetness on her skin under the top of her scrubs. Once again she tried to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t obey. She felt strange. Scared. Nathan’s name was a whisper on her lips. She had the crazy thought that he would never know she loved him. Then everything went black.

  Having spent time stitching up a deep cut on the leg of a middle-aged woman brought to A and E by her sister, Nathan had just finished referring her to Dr Cameron Kincaid, a specialist in self-harm at the Ackerman Centre, on the outskirts of town, when he had heard the commotion in Recepti+on. Advising the two women to wait in the cubicle, he had stepped out from behind the curtain to see what was happening, his horrified gaze taking in the scene unfolding before him as if it was happening in slow motion.

  An injured man had broken away from the police officers attempting to restrain him, and his attempt to flee was taking him close to Annie, who was near the play area. Before Nathan could react, the man was grabbing Annie, shouting obscenities. Then his arm rose, and Nathan saw that he had something clutched in his hand. It looked like a screwdriver, and he wondered how the man had managed to secrete it and get it past the policemen. He watched in horror as the man plunged his hand down at Annie’s chest, before pushing her away and rushing towards the opening to the corridor out of the department.

  ‘Annie!’

  Nathan rushed towards her, but he was too late to catch her before she hit the floor. The next moment he was kneeling beside her, every part of him shaking in fear as he looked at her too-pale face, her closed eyes. She was unconscious, failing to respond to him, her pulse thready. He checked her head and could find no sign of a fracture or a cut, although a bump was forming. And then he saw the welling of blood beginning to stain the top of her baggy scrubs.

  ‘Oh, God. No.’ Whilst aware of activity all around him, as the police and hospital security attempted to apprehend the fleeing assailant and control his cohort, Nathan’s sole focus was on the woman he loved. ‘Resus!’ he shouted, drawing attention to the desperateness of the situation. ‘I need help here. Annie’s been stabbed.’

  There was little time to lose, and Nathan scooped Annie up in his arms and carried her swiftly but gently to the resus bay, setting her down on a trolley bed just as Gail rushed to his side, immediately beginning to help him attach monitors and check Annie’s vital signs.

  ‘Her blood pressure is low and falling,’ Nathan announced, his voice rough with emotion he couldn’t hide. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Hold on,’ he pleaded with her as he worked. ‘Stay with me, Annie.’

  Two more nurses and a junior doctor arrived, wasting no time asking questions but setting to work doing what was needed, including cutting off Annie’s scrubs to reveal the site of a penetrating stab wound by her left breast, immediately over her heart. The doctor in him knew this had to be done. The man in him wanted to cover Annie up, to protect her from indignities and exposure.

  He swiftly studied the chest wound. The hole looked small, but Nathan knew from experience that the damage inside could be deadly. They needed to know what was going on and get the bleeding stopped as soon as possible. He’d always been calm, whatever the crisis, but this was his Annie, and his hands were uncharacteristically shaky as he tried to find a vein and insert a cannula in her arm.

  ‘Nathan, step aside,’ Will instructed, taking the needle from him.

  ‘Will—’

  ‘You’re too close, mate. Trust me.’ The other man was firm, in control, focused on inserting the cannula with the minimum of fuss. ‘Robert’s on his way. So is the anaesthetist. And Francesca—we’ll need an ultrasound scan of Annie’s chest.’

  Thankfully, both Francesca and the anaesthetist were still in the department after the day’s various emergencies, and were there in seconds.

  ‘Equal bilateral air entry—even breath sounds. No indication of pneumothorax,’ the anaesthetist reported. ‘Oxygen saturation ninety per cent, respiration rate twenty. How’s her heart?’

  ‘BP’s still dropping and cardiac output is unstable. Pulse thready,’ Gail informed him.

  The anaesthetist worked swiftly, choosing drugs and muscle relaxant with care. He soon had an endotracheal tube inserted, and Annie fully anaesthetised and ventilated.

  Nathan had to move away briefly as Francesca took a chest X-ray, but he returned at once to Annie’s right side, clutching her hand, feeling helpless and more frightened than he had ever been. He stared in numb disbelief, unable to move, his brain fuzzed as all his knowledge deserted him at the shock and pain of seeing Annie’s life draining away in front of him. He shook his head, trying to pull himself together.

  ‘I’m thinking cardiac tamponade,’ he said, as Robert Mowbray stepped up on Annie’s other side.

  ‘Get a chest drain in, Will, and gain central venous access,’ the consultant demanded as he carried out a thorough examination and double checked the vital signs. ‘Fast-bleep the cardiothoracic consultant. Are the fluids warm? I want blood cross-matched.’

  ‘Annie is A positive,’ Nathan told him.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘One hundred per cent certain. We went as blood donors together for several years.’

  Robert barked out an order for six units of A positive blood and a nurse scurried to the phone. ‘How’s the BP?’

  ‘It’s still dropping,’ Gail replied, worry evident on her face. ‘Eighty over forty now.’

  ‘Annie hit her head on the floor when she fell,’ Nathan remembered, furious he had not passed on that information sooner.

  ‘We’ll worry about a CT scan when we have her stabilised,’ Robert replied, turning to the radiographer as she did a follow-up ultrasound. ‘Francesca,
what news?’

  ‘Definite fluid in the pericardium,’ Francesca confirmed, moving back out of the way and showing Robert the images from the X-ray and scan.

  Nathan’s panic intensified. Why didn’t they hurry? He wanted to push them all aside and do the job himself, but he recognised that he was too emotional, too unsteady to be safe. He could see from the monitors that Annie was failing. Something bad was going on inside her chest, and the team needed to work fast if they were to save her life. His fingers linked with hers as he tried to instil her with the strength and determination to keep fighting, even though she was unconscious and couldn’t hear him.

  ‘Damn, the blood is pouring out of this drain,’ Will called, sounding shaken.

  ‘We’re losing her,’ Robert muttered.

  ‘No! She’s not going to die.’ Nathan refused to countenance such an outcome. Whatever had happened last night, or for the last five years, he couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t. ‘I won’t let her.’

  ‘There’s no time to get to Theatre. We’ll have to do a thoracotomy here. Now. Before it’s too late.’

  The consultant’s decision brought Nathan a mix of relief and terror. Relief that someone was going to do something—the only thing that could now save Annie’s life—and terror that it wouldn’t work. An emergency thoracotomy, which involved opening up the chest to expose her heart, was high risk—especially outside the operating room. But without it Annie would die. Nathan had assisted in a few, and had done one once during his surgical rotation years before, but only under proper theatre conditions. He wondered at the A and E consultant’s experience with the procedure.

  As if sensing his troubled thoughts, Will took a moment to reassure him. ‘Robert’s done this successfully several times,’ he murmured, as the thoracotomy tray was readied.

  Nathan was absorbing what Will had said when Gail called out more bad news. ‘BP’s fallen.’