‘Are you all right, Nadia?’ asked a husky voice, and she blinked, horrified to realise that she had no idea how long her thoughts had been rambling while Gideon had been sitting there beside the cot.
‘Pardon?’ she said, stalling for time. Had he been speaking to her, asking her questions? It was unforgivable that her concentration should have been so distracted, for even a moment. What if something had happened to Amy or Adam and she’d been so wrapped up in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed?
A monitor shrilled in the bay behind her and a nurse scurried over to it, and she realised that could never happen. The sensors were set so finely that sometimes they seemed to go off for no reason at all, and there was no way she could ever ignore one of them.
‘I wondered if you’re all right,’ he said, and she was surprised by his obvious concern for her. She knew he watched every little thing that happened with the babies but this was the first time that she’d realised that he might be keeping an eye on her, too. ‘You seem a little…subdued this morning.’
‘Probably. I’m just a little tired,’ she said by way of excusing her inattention. ‘It has been a long, stressful night and it is nearly the end of my shift.’ As if that would make her brain switch off to Amy’s and Adam’s condition. She probably worried more about them when she was away from them than when she was here and able to do something for them.
‘Do you live far away?’ he asked, startling her with the personal question.
‘Not far,’ she said with an evasiveness that had quickly become second nature to her once she’d realised she was going to have to rely on her own efforts to escape Laszlo for good.
‘Walking distance or have you got a car?’ he prompted.
‘Why?’ The defensive question popped out before she could soften its bluntness.
‘Just that the area around the hospital isn’t the safest place for a woman to be alone at this time of the morning,’ he said easily. ‘If you were walking, I was going to offer you a lift, especially as it was starting to rain quite heavily as I arrived and the forecast doesn’t speak of it getting any better all day.’
‘Oh.’ Surprise made her all but speechless. She could hardly remember the last time anyone had shown her such consideration. Still, her wariness was too ingrained for her to willingly let anyone know where she was living. ‘Thank you, but it’s only around the corner and it’s probably quicker to walk there than go by car, especially with the one-way system.’
He must have read something of the tamped-down fear in her eyes or on her face because there was definitely a new watchfulness to the way he was looking at her.
Not that anyone else would have noticed it, unless they’d been spending as much time in his company as she had. His attentiveness towards Amy and Adam was every bit as intense, and his delight when she asked him to hold his son for a moment while she changed the bedding in the cot was almost incandescent.
‘Hey, little man,’ Gideon murmured softly to the little scrap of humanity that was barely longer than his hand. ‘This isn’t quite the way I thought I’d hold you for the first time, but…’
Nadia heard his voice grow thick as the emotions of the moment closed his throat, and she was hard-pressed not to cry herself. Only the fact that she was juggling the handful of tubes and wires attached to Amy gave her something to concentrate on to keep her composure. Still, her heart swelled with sympathy, and her respect for a man who clearly didn’t care who saw the emotional tears slipping down his cheeks grew by the minute.
Gideon didn’t think he’d ever forget the moment that Nadia placed Adam in his hands.
He was so tiny as to be almost weightless, a collection of desperately fragile bones covered in the thinnest of tissue-paper skin, but there, in that little chest, was a heart smaller than a walnut that was beating fast and furious in his determination to live.
And that was what it felt like.
Adam was so small and there were so many reasons why he shouldn’t be alive, having been born this premature, but there, sprawled in his hands, Gideon was convinced he could feel that his son had no intention of doing anything but survive.
It wasn’t until Adam had been returned to his cosy temporary home and had settled down peacefully again beside his sister that Gideon realised that his face was wet with tears he hadn’t even been aware of shedding.
For just a second he’d been startled to realise that he’d lost control like that, then decided that he really couldn’t care less if anyone else had been aware that he was crying. If the first moment a man held his son wasn’t a time for emotions to overflow, then what was?
And, anyway, he rationalised as he surreptitiously mopped up the evidence, this room must have seen more than one person cry since the unit had opened. These walls must have contained more than their fair share of heartbreak along with the uplifting successes along the way.
A quick glance at Nadia told him that she was fully occupied with resetting the monitors after the babies’ brief excursion out of their humidicrib, but he didn’t doubt for a moment that she’d noticed his tears.
Did she think any less of him for his loss of control? He was unlikely to ever know. She was such a self-contained person that it was difficult to tell how she felt about anything…except the babies. It would only take a second for a complete stranger to know how she felt about them.
It was strange, now that he thought about it. There was a different person caring for the twins at each shift change, but in his mind it was Nadia he saw as their carer.
Was that because she genuinely seemed to care about them—monitoring their every hiccup and the minutest progress they made—as if they really mattered to her?
Not that the other specialist nurses didn’t give them every bit as much attention when it was their turn, but somehow it was almost as if Nadia saw them as her babies, and consequently watched over them with the vigilance of a mother lion.
It felt good to know that someone besides him cared what happened to them, especially as it was obvious that the woman who had carried them all those months clearly didn’t give a fig.
He’d actually made a special trip up to the ward to tell Fiona how the babies were doing and had been shocked by her callous dismissiveness.
Of course, he’d tried to convince himself that that it could be the woman’s way of coping with the emotional wrench of giving away her babies, but somehow he doubted it. After all, her first reaction to learning that she was carrying two foetuses hadn’t been the usual delight at the news of one of nature’s magical surprises, but to immediately demand double the agreed fee, with a bonus if both survived.
No, she certainly didn’t care about the babies the way Nadia did, and it had been clear from Fiona’s parting words and the way she’d turned her back on him that her only concern was that she might not be able to collect that bonus.
‘Please, Gideon.’ Nadia’s soft voice broke into his musings. ‘Promise me that you will sleep.’
He blinked up into eyes filled with concern and for just one crazy moment his heart gave an extra beat at the thought that she really cared about him, too.
‘I will not be able to rest if I am worrying about you as well as the babies. You need to be strong for them, not collapsing over them when they need you the most,’ she continued, and he suppressed a wry smile. He should have known that her focus would be entirely on those precious babies. That was the way Nadia was.
Except…his logical mind added as he vainly tried to court sleep in the corner of the staffroom settee a few minutes later. Except it had felt as if there had been something personal in the way she’d pinned him down to that promise, and there had definitely been something…some awareness between them in the way neither of them could touch each other without feeling the jolt of a current of electricity at the contact. And he knew that she was feeling it, too, by the way she so carefully avoided touching him.
Was that where her wariness had come from when he’d tried to offer to see her
safely home? Obviously, some caution was sensible when dealing with strangers, but he felt there had been a definite edge to her caginess about letting him know where she lived.
‘Or perhaps she just thought you were being inappropriately nosy,’ he muttered, and felt the tips of his ears burn with a blush at the possibility that she might believe he was trying to inveigle himself into her private life.
Where had that question come from this morning, asking her where she lived, for heaven’s sake? It was none of his business where she lived, or with whom, even if he did find himself worrying about her safety as she made her way through the early-morning city streets.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘AREN’T you glad to be back in A and E?’ John taunted him as Gideon stripped off his vomit-stained scrubs with a grimace and threw them in the laundry bin.
‘Overjoyed,’ Gideon agreed as he grabbed a towel and stepped towards the shower cubicle. ‘Drunken louts spoiling for a fight while I try to stitch their stupid heads are my favourite patients.’
He could hear his colleague’s laughter over the sound of the pounding water, but concentrated instead on the pleasure of ridding himself of the garments decorated with second-hand beer and some lurid-coloured takeaway meal and letting the hot deluge take the sour stench away.
Down here felt like another world when he compared it to the relatively calm oasis of the unit upstairs. Was it just because many of the tiny patients up there at the moment were on ventilators and were largely unable to voice their dissatisfaction at what was being done for them? That certainly wasn’t the case down in A and E. Even when the staff here were doing their absolute best for the patients, the thanks and praise were thin on the ground.
Take his last patient, for example. He had no idea whether the man had been the aggressor or the victim in the affray that had resulted in his injuries and didn’t really care. All he’d been interested in was assessing the severity of the head injury, checking the bloodshot pupils for their reaction to light to gauge the likelihood that he was suffering from concussion and pulling the laceration in his scalp together with a neat row of stitches.
Unfortunately, his patient had been one of those who became combative after a long night of too much alcohol rounded off by some fast food of dubious quality. He’d started swinging punches as soon as Gideon had come towards him with the syringe full of anaesthetic to deaden the wound. Then, coinciding with the very first stitch, came the vomiting episode. Now, as soon as Gideon found some clean clothes, he’d have to try to ascertain whether the nausea had been the result of everything the man had put in his stomach or whether it was a more worrying symptom related to his head injury.
And all the time he would spend sorting out the drunkard’s problems, one small part of his brain would be upstairs, wondering why neither of the babies had started putting on weight yet, and worrying whether Adam had finally kicked off the infection that had set him back so dangerously.
‘West!’ The call was accompanied by a bang on the shower-cubicle door. ‘RTA coming in,’ a voice informed him, shouting over the drumming of the water. ‘Reports say it’s a Chelsea tractor stuffed with kids, broadsided when it jumped a set of lights. ETA six minutes.’
‘I’ll be there,’ he called back as he reached out to shut the water off with one hand and for the towel he’d flicked up over the top of the door with the other.
It wasn’t easy dragging a clean set of limp cotton scrubs over wet legs and he could already feel the water trickling down the back of his neck from his wet hair and soaking into the fabric of the V-necked top as he strode back out into a scene of chaos.
The ambulance must have made good time because the first delivery of shocked, tearful children had already arrived in Triage.
‘What have we got?’ he asked, and the reply was barely audible over the cacophony of sound surrounding him.
‘This lot’s mainly superficial cuts and bruises, with one Colles’ fracture,’ he was told by the rather harried member of staff. ‘They’re mostly shocked by what’s happened and, being girls, seem to love making a noisy crisis out of a second-rate drama.’
They were also taking great delight in using their mobile phones to photograph each other and send the results to their friends.
‘No telephones!’ Gideon barked gruffly, his deeper male voice cutting effortlessly through the shrill girlish squeals as though he’d wielded a well-honed machete through dense undergrowth. ‘Switch all your mobiles off now, or I’ll have to ask you to leave the department.’
A couple of the girls responded immediately, but the other two looked as though they would try to defy him until he focused his best glare on them.
‘There is sensitive equipment in a hospital, and the signals from your phones could cause it to malfunction,’ he added in a more normal voice, although he knew that the hospital’s stated reason for banning mobile phones was largely out of date with the more recent improvements in mobile telephone technology. Still, the lingering rule did mean that the various corridors and waiting areas weren’t filled with annoying ring-tones and selfishly loud one-sided conversations.
‘If we can’t use our phones, how are we supposed to let our parents know to come and get us?’ demanded one of the sulkier girls.
‘If necessary, we will call them for you,’ Sophie, the triage nurse, said. ‘But we’ll sort all that out once you’ve been checked over.’
‘I’ve already rung mine,’ volunteered another girl with a smug smile. ‘She’s going to phone all the others in the car pool to let them know where we are and what’s happened.’
Gideon stifled a groan. That meant that they had a very limited time in which to get as many of these girls as possible checked over and ready for rapid discharge. It wouldn’t be long before they were inundated with hysterical parents responding to a—no doubt very embellished—recounting of that morning’s events.
‘Right, Sophie,’ he said briskly, ‘wheel them through into the minor injuries cubicles and let’s get them out of here as quickly as possible.’
‘What about the other patients who’ve already been triaged?’ she demanded in a hushed voice, no doubt wondering if his decision would cause a riot among the patients already waiting.
Gideon pulled a face, knowing that he didn’t want to bring the wrath of the hospital’s administrators down on his head if any of the other patients breached the time restraints. ‘Direct them to the other members of staff, but if you get any problems, let me know. In that case, the girls—and their parents—will just have to wait. Don’t forget, there are still more girls to come, and they’ll probably be the more badly injured ones.’
And they hadn’t had any information about the other vehicle that had been involved in the crash yet. Were those occupants injured, too, or had they been unlucky enough that they’d be making nothing more than a brief stop in the department before they were taken to the hospital mortuary in the basement of the building.
But there wasn’t time to worry about them, not when there were tearful girls with various injuries waiting for his attention.
He’d worked his way through the girls who had injuries that required little more than a temporary dressing and had just finished checking a scalp wound for any stray fragments of windscreen when he glanced up past the edge of the curtain and saw Nadia standing in Triage, covered in blood.
Gideon could have sworn that his own blood froze in his veins at the sight. He knew for certain that his lungs ceased to function at the thought that someone had attacked her on her way home.
‘Nadia,’ he breathed, and only just remembered his responsibilities in time to direct the nurse to use cyanoacrylate glue to close the scalp wound. Then he was out of the cubicle and across the room in a flash.
‘Nadia…are you all right? What happened? Were you attacked on your way home?’
‘Gideon! No!’ Nadia fended him off, doing her best not to smear him with blood when that was the least of his worries.
Why tha
t should be was something he would have to think about later, when his heart wasn’t trying to beat its way out through his ribs. For the moment all he knew was that he couldn’t bear it if anything had happened to the gentle woman who spent her time taking care of his precious babies.
‘I am not hurt,’ Nadia said firmly, and the words finally penetrated the haze of panic that surrounded him. ‘I saw the accident and went to help. This is not my blood. It is the blood of the injured woman in the car.’
‘Are you sure?’ There was just so much of it that it seemed impossible that some of it wasn’t be hers.
‘I am sure, Gideon. All I need is somewhere to clean myself before I go home…so I do not scare anyone on the street.’
It was the glimpse of an impish grin that finally persuaded him that she really was uninjured, and it was only then that he realised that his display of concern had made him the focus of practically every one of his colleagues in the department.
‘But first,’ she added, drawing him away from the surprising realisation that he didn’t really care whether the entire hospital was gossiping about him, ‘is there some way you can find out what happened to the woman in the car?’
‘Which woman?’ Gideon had only been seeing the children injured in the crash. He had no idea how many adults had been involved.
‘Maria. The passenger in the car that was hit by the van with all the children,’ Nadia explained, and Gideon wondered what the woman who owned the expensive vehicle would think if she’d heard it called a van. ‘She told me that she and her husband were on their way to the hospital. She was in labour with their first child.’
A Family for His Tiny Twins Page 5