A Family for His Tiny Twins

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘I suppose they were hurrying here and didn’t see the lights,’ he murmured, easily able to visualise the scene and its unintended consequences.

  ‘Not at all,’ Nadia corrected him instantly. ‘It was the van that ignored the red light. They were the ones who caused the accident. I saw it because I was about to cross the road.’

  Whatever the rights or wrongs of the situation, no one seemed to have come off completely unscathed, he thought as he made his way to the whiteboard and checked to see if there was a pregnant woman listed.

  ‘There’s no one in labour.’ He showed Nadia after he untangled the codes required by the hospital’s insistence on patient confidentiality. ‘Perhaps she was transferred up to the maternity ward.’

  He made his way across to Sophie at the triage station, knowing that she had an amazing memory for names and cases.

  ‘Sophie, can you tell me where you sent the pregnant woman who came in from the RTA—Maternity or Theatre?’ he asked when she paused to draw breath. ‘Her first name was Maria, but I don’t have a surname.’

  ‘The RTA with the Chelsea tractor full of kids? Was she a friend of yours?’ Sophie asked even as her eyes widened at the blood-spattered state of the woman beside him.

  ‘Not really. Nadia was a bystander at the scene of the accident and wanted to know where to go to visit her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Nadia, but she didn’t make it,’ Sophie told her gently. ‘The accident caused a tear in the aorta and she bled out before they could get her here. She was dead on arrival.’

  ‘And the baby?’ Nadia prompted urgently, even as someone else tried to catch Sophie’s attention. ‘They were able to save the baby?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Sophie shook her head and Gideon marvelled that such a busy woman could make the attempt to break such unhappy news as gently as possible. ‘I heard that he’d been too long without oxygen by the time they got him out. They couldn’t get his heart started.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Gideon saw the colour drain out of Nadia’s face. For a moment she swayed on her feet and he wondered briefly if he was going to have to catch her.

  He should have known better. A woman who could deal with the high-stress life of dealing with some of the most vulnerable patients in the hospital was bound to be made of sterner stuff. It took her a second or two, but he actually saw her draw on some hidden inner resources to keep herself on her feet.

  ‘Thank you for telling me this,’ she said quietly, her formal words sounding almost quaintly old-fashioned in the fast-paced surroundings of a modern A and E department.

  ‘Are you ready to take your next patient?’ Sophie asked, almost apologetically. ‘We’ve got several who need to be seen in the next fifteen or twenty minutes.’

  Gideon’s gaze immediately went to Nadia and his strange need to be there for her warred with his ingrained sense of duty to his profession.

  ‘Go. Do your job, Gideon,’ Nadia said, almost as though she was able to read his mind. ‘I am all right…or I will be when I can find some soap and water,’ she added with a grimace towards her hands. At least her jacket was dark enough that any bloodstains were virtually invisible, but the same couldn’t be said for the pale sweater she was wearing underneath it.

  ‘I can get her something to wear,’ Sophie suggested quickly, then turned to Nadia with a smile. ‘Provided you don’t have any objection to wearing mismatched tops and bottoms from some sets of prototype uniforms that got left in the cupboard a while ago?’

  Gideon left them discussing the vagaries of hospital administrators trying to design nurses’ uniforms when they had little idea of the needs of the people who would be wearing them, but it was the lost expression in Nadia’s eyes that followed him into the few quiet moments during that shift.

  He could appreciate that her soft heart would grieve at the thought of a precious little life being lost through a driver’s moment of stupidity, but the more he thought about it, the more he came to believe that there had been something deeper behind the look she’d worn…something that had resonated personally with her.

  Was there something in her past? he wondered as he waited for a translator to explain the need for his elderly Bangladeshi patient to be admitted to hospital urgently for treatment to a foot that was rapidly heading towards gangrene, the result of undiagnosed diabetes.

  Perhaps something that had happened to Nadia in her own country…something serious enough that it had left her with that air of sadness under her gentle cheerfulness?

  And what were the chances that she would ever speak about it, when she didn’t even trust him enough to allow him to give her a lift in the pouring rain? Slim to nonexistent, he admitted wryly, but that wouldn’t stop him from offering, especially after that shock today. He’d honestly believed that she’d been attacked when he’d seen her standing there, covered in blood.

  His thoughts ground to a sudden halt as he suddenly realised that something fundamental had changed. For the last few weeks, ever since his two babies had been born, almost every thought that had come into his head had begun and ended with their welfare. If most of his thoughts about Nadia had been in relation to the fact that she was taking care of Adam and Amy with the sort of dedication that she would show if they were her own children.

  At least, that had been the case until he’d seen her standing there and had been convinced that something awful had happened to her. And, just like that, the concern he’d been feeling towards her—concern that he’d convinced himself was just a normal caring human trait—had crystallised into something deeper, something far more personal. And thinking about his reaction now, he was startled to realise just how much the idea had affected him, how empty his days would feel if, for some reason, she was no longer a part of them.

  ‘Mr Dhasmana will be going up to the ward as soon as there is a bed free,’ the translator reported, snapping Gideon’s attention back to his patient in a hurry. ‘His wife will be taken home by their daughter to collect his personal belongings, but she is having difficulty accepting that she will not be staying here with him to take care of him.’ The young translator leaned towards Gideon to add in a lower voice, ‘This is what would have happened back in the region where they came from, many years ago, where quite often family members would perform nursing duties for patients.’

  ‘Perhaps you could suggest that she should use the next few days to rest, ready for when her husband comes home again,’ Gideon offered with a smile for the anxious woman. ‘Several nights without him snoring in the house will be good for her.’

  He knew the exact moment when that final sentence was translated because both husband and wife laughed and the tense atmosphere in the room grew lighter.

  The fact that the elderly woman had been prepared to camp out on the floor beside her husband’s bed returned to him at intervals during the remaining hours of his shift, and made him realise that he’d been doing something similar in his vigil beside Adam and Amy. In his case, his presence hadn’t been because he thought he would be needed to take care of their feeding or their personal hygiene, but because he’d been convinced that something dreadful would happen if he wasn’t there every second to will them to survive.

  Well, with him or without him, the two of them were still alive, and even though neither of them had made any great progress so far, at least they hadn’t had any bleeding into their brains, their lungs slowly seemed to be increasing in capacity so that it wasn’t quite so hard to keep up the oxygen levels in their blood, and their hearts were beating strongly. And if a large part of that was due to Nadia’s dedication to their care, it was only another reason why he found his thoughts returning to her again and again.

  Nadia heard the security lock on the unit’s outer door being activated and her pulse rate began to go up even before she recognised Gideon’s footsteps coming along the corridor towards her.

  ‘You are a crazy woman,’ she muttered under her breath, deliberately keeping her back towards the door so that she wouldn�
��t be able to watch him scrub his hands and don gloves and apron. ‘Apart from the fact that he’s a man, and you have sworn to have nothing more to do with them, he is the father of your patients and only comes here to be with them, not to be with you.’

  Except…it had seemed like genuine concern for her welfare when he’d hurried towards her in A and E, thinking that she’d been injured. Perhaps that was just because he was worried who would care for Amy and Adam if she was unable to, but she didn’t believe that for a moment. The Gideon West she was starting to know wasn’t that shallow.

  He also wasn’t one of those doctors who just went through the motions to earn his salary. From the conversations they’d had, over the last week or so, she’d heard enough to know that, for him, medicine was far more than just a job. In fact, the more she learned about him, the more she discovered there was to admire…and she hadn’t thought she would ever be able to say that about a man.

  ‘How are they?’ he asked from right behind her, but she wasn’t in the least bit startled because she’d known that he was there without hearing a single step because it seemed as if every pore in her skin was sensitive to his presence. Then she detected the warm waft of shampoo and soap that told her he’d had a shower before he’d come to the unit, and for the first time in her life she found herself imagining what he would look like with nothing more than droplets of water and rivulets of foam running over his body.

  She shook her head to banish the images and it was only when she saw the flash of panic in Gideon’s eyes that she realised how he’d interpreted her action.

  ‘No. I am sorry,’ she said hurriedly. ‘They are well.’ And only then noticed that she’d actually reached out to put a reassuring hand over his clenched fist.

  Nadia stared at the point of contact in disbelief.

  What was the matter with her? She was in the middle of cleaning around the sites where various needles entered their tiny bodies, a job that required strict hygiene to minimise the risk of introducing infection, and she’d just forgotten herself so much that she’d contaminated her gloves.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she gasped as she snatched her hand back and immediately started to strip the glove off, her fumbling attempt making it obvious that she was now trembling from head to foot. ‘I must…I need to…’ To her mortification she wasn’t even able to put a single sentence together, overwhelmingly aware that those intense green eyes were watching her every clumsy move.

  ‘Nadia, it’s all right,’ he soothed, but that only made things worse because she could tell just how concerned he was that he might have upset her in some way. She needed to reassure him that wasn’t the case but what could she say? She couldn’t tell him how frightening it was to find herself reacting to nothing more then his presence in a room, and she certainly couldn’t tell him why the fact that she’d just voluntarily touched him had made her shake.

  ‘You…you startled me,’ she managed, grabbing for the first excuse she could think of. She took a step back from him and then another, but the cot behind her prevented her from putting any more space between them even though she felt she needed it if she was ever going to be able to breathe evenly again. She certainly couldn’t draw in a lungful that was so full of the essence of Gideon without her body reacting in such crazy ways, and if he should notice…‘I was concentrating and…’

  Those gorgeous green eyes were too intelligent and far too intent for her peace of mind, especially when his steady gaze was accompanied by a frown that drew those straight dark brows together. Realising that her flustered reaction had attracted his attention, she stifled a swearword that she hadn’t even thought about in years, let alone used.

  The last thing she needed was for him to see her as anything other than the person who was caring for his babies’ needs. If he started asking questions and she had to be evasive…well, she didn’t think it would take more than a moment or two for him to see though any ambiguous answers she might give, and there was no way that she could tell him the truth about herself, not if she wanted to keep her job. She certainly wouldn’t trust her babies to the sort of woman she’d once been.

  ‘It’s nearly time for my break,’ she said, inspired by a glance at the clock on the wall behind him. At least that would give her a chance to get away from him and try to get her head on straight. After all, he wasn’t likely to want to leave Amy and Adam so soon after getting here.

  Except she was wrong.

  Much to her surprise, when she finished all her immediate tasks and handed over the babies’ care to Monica, she found Gideon close on her heels when she left the nursery to make her way to their little staffroom, and the determined expression on his face told her that he intended getting some answers.

  Well, he wasn’t going to be successful because there were some things that she would never be able to tell him…never be able to speak of to anyone who hadn’t been there.

  So, she would just have to sidetrack him with the one topic that they could share—Amy and Adam. Perhaps she could ask him a question about his preparations for the day when he would be taking them home?

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ he demanded as soon as the door closed behind the two of them.

  ‘Wrong?’ she parroted, completely caught on the hop by the fact that he’d taken the lead in a conversation that she’d never intended starting. Unfortunately, his agenda wasn’t the same as hers.

  ‘Either there’s something wrong with the babies, or with you,’ he insisted. ‘And as you’ve just told me that neither Adam nor Amy is doing anything to cause concern, that means the problem’s with you…unless I’ve done something to upset you,’ he added as a sudden afterthought, his frown returning full force. ‘Is that what it is?’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘NO, GIDEON. It’s nothing you’ve done,’ she denied swiftly, struck by guilt that he should have thought for a moment that any of this was his fault.

  In spite of the fact that they’d clashed wills on several occasions, mostly over her concern for the state of his health, he had shown her nothing other than professional respect and consideration. He’d even voiced his admiration for her skills in dealing with such tiny babies and reinforced her pride in her chosen profession, so she couldn’t allow him to think that he might have done anything to upset her. It just wouldn’t be right.

  But that left her with the impossible task of explaining her reaction to him, of finding an acceptable reason why she was doing her best to maintain as much distance between them as she could, especially when she was rapidly beginning to feel as if she just wanted to be closer to him.

  She had never envisaged a time when she might want to be close to a man, but that had been before she’d met Gideon West and witnessed his devotion to those two precious beings in the room along the corridor.

  Then there was the way he’d offered her a lift home for no reason other then the fact it had been raining heavily and she would be walking through one of the less salubrious parts of the city. She could almost make herself discount the fact that he’d hurried to her side when he’d seen her appear blood-spattered in A and E. That could have been nothing more than his automatic reaction due to his medical training.

  However, none of that explained her own reaction to the man when she’d touched him.

  She’d felt a strange shivery heat shimmer through her, making her aware of everywhere that her clothes touched her body even as it had begun to coil deep inside her. And for the first time ever there’d been a sensation of…of excitement…of anticipation, almost.

  Oh, it was so hard to describe it when she’d never felt anything like it before, and the most confusing thing of all was that she didn’t know whether she should be welcoming it or not. On past experience, there was nothing about being close to a man that had ever ended well for her…

  ‘Nadia?’

  She felt the swift wash of colour come into her cheeks when she realised that she must have been staring at him while her thoughts scurried along their own tangl
ed paths.

  Not that he wasn’t worth staring at. He certainly was, with those penetrating green eyes surrounded by the sort of long dark lashes that were wasted on a man, all set in a face that had the rugged sort of symmetry that any camera would love. His dark hair was longer these days than it had been the first day he’d rushed to his babies’ sides, as though his life was too full now for frequent visits to a barber.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, suddenly realising that she was in danger of—what was it the younger nurses called it, zoning out? ‘I was just…I didn’t mean to—’

  She nearly groaned aloud in relief when she heard the sharp intrusive tones of the paging device clipped to the narrow leather belt circling his lean waist.

  ‘Damn thing,’ he muttered as he reached for the nearby phone. ‘Don’t they realise I’m not on duty?’

  Given the time Gideon had arrived in the unit, Nadia knew that he’d already worked several hours beyond his shift today. That was, if he’d come straight up here the way he usually did, she added to herself, wondering at the sudden sharp stab of…something at the thought that he might not have come straight up, that he might have gone somewhere else and spoken to someone else, perhaps someone beautiful and willing to smile and listen attentively while he poured out all his worries about his tiny babies and their fight for life.

  As if she had any right to have any feelings one way or the other about what Gideon West did when he was out of the unit. She was just the nurse who was taking care of his babies after all, she reminded herself fiercely, even as she fought to drag her eyes away from his frowning face.

  ‘Stupid idiot!’ he snarled as he returned the handset to its cradle with a sharp click.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ she found herself asking, unable to prevent herself caring that he was obviously angry about something.

  ‘Petty bureaucracy,’ he growled as he dragged one hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up in all directions like a little boy’s. Adam’s hair might do the same thing in a few years, perhaps, and she felt a swift pang that she would never be there to see it.