Twins for a Christmas Bride

by Josie Metcalfe

  How could he not have realised that she was all outward show with very little substance beneath it? Why had it taken him so long to recognise that Sara was worth a dozen of her self-centred twin?

  Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He was married, and even though he knew it had been one of the worst decisions of his life, he was not a man who broke a promise, so he certainly wouldn’t go back on a solemn vow. He would just have to be content with the fact that Sara had agreed to carry a child for the two of them … two children, in fact, he recalled with a sudden surge of the same incredulous delight that had swamped him when he’d learned of it. Although how Zara would respond when he told her that she would shortly be learning to cope with being a mother to not one but two newborn babies …

  ‘Zara?’ he called softly, stifling a sigh of resignation. His wife was not going to be in a happy mood when she saw how late it was, even though it had been her sister’s welfare and that of the babies she carried that had caused the delay. She was almost fanatical about preserving her looks with adequate sleep and certainly didn’t like eating at this hour. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but it was unavoidable. Your sister had a rather …’ He broke off with a puzzled frown.

  She hadn’t so much as stirred, even when he’d lowered himself wearily to the edge of the bed. Something rustled as it slid to the floor between the side of the bed and the cabinet—a letter she’d been reading before she’d fallen asleep? Perhaps it was a glamorous new contract she’d wanted to gloat over while she’d waited for him to come home?

  He reached out and touched her hand … her curiously lifeless hand.

  Suddenly, he switched into doctor mode as all the hairs went up on the back of his neck in a warning that something was seriously wrong.

  ‘Zara!’ he called sharply as he leant forward to take a closer look at the silent figure. He’d been standing in the doorway wool-gathering for several minutes and only now was he noticing that she was so completely still that she didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  ‘Zara, wake up!’ he ordered harshly, his fingers automatically searching her wrist to find a pulse. ‘Zara!’ He heard the panic bouncing back at him from the expensively decorated bedroom walls when there was no sign of any rhythm under his fingertips. Was that because his ordinarily rocksteady hands hadn’t stopped shaking from the moment he’d heard that Sara had been knocked down? Frantically, he probed her slender neck and breathed a sigh of relief when he felt the reassuring throb of the artery under his fingertips.

  It was slower than it should be … much slower … and her skin felt cold and clammy. It was no wonder that he hadn’t been able to see her breathing because her respiration was so shallow as to be almost imperceptible.

  But at least she was breathing and her heart was beating, so that gave him precious time to try to make a diagnosis so that he could help her survive whatever had happened to her.

  But first …

  ‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’ said a crisp voice in his ear as he continued to make his examination, trapping the phone in position with one shoulder.

  ‘Ambulance,’ he said tersely. ‘My wife has had some sort of collapse. Her pulse and respiration are both depressed and her pupils are fixed and dilated.’ He managed to give the operator his address even as he reeled with horror at the possibility that Zara was imminently going into cardiac arrest.

  Without some secure means of administering oxygen and the supplies to set up an IV line he had no way of improving her tidal volume or boosting her systolic pressure above 80. At the moment it must hovering around 70 because her femoral pulse was barely perceptible. If it dropped below 60 the carotid pulse would disappear, too, and she would be just minutes away from irreversible brain damage and death …

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ he urged as he transferred her swiftly to the floor and began carefully controlled cardiac compressions to boost the volume of blood going to her brain, desperate to hear the sound of a siren drawing closer.

  The weight of his guilt was almost crushing as he kept automatic count inside his head. If he’d come home when he’d said he would, rather than hovering over Sara and waiting till she was settled in her room, would he have arrived in time for Zara to tell him that she was feeling ill?

  Would he have been able to prevent her collapsing in the first place?

  A sudden hammering on the front door made him realise that he’d completely forgotten to release the catch for the ambulancemen to get into the flat.

  ‘She’s in here,’ he directed as he quickly led the way back to the bedroom and dropped to his knees beside her again. ‘Her systolic must have been close to 70 when I found her because her femoral pulse was barely palpable and her pupils were fixed and dilated.’ He glanced across at the man who dropped to his knees on the other side of the body to begin his primary survey, and they came face to face for the first time.

  ‘Dr Lomax!’ the paramedic exclaimed, clearly shocked to see him, but he immediately became the consummate professional. ‘Do you know what happened to her, sir?’ the paramedic asked as he bent over the ominously still figure between them to check her pulse and respiration rates for himself.

  As he did so, Dan heard the man’s foot strike something to send it skittering under the bed but no one even bothered to glance at it. At the moment nothing mattered more than giving Zara a chance to continue her vibrant life.

  Out of the corner of his eye Dan saw the man’s colleague depositing an oxygen cylinder on the carpet and he reached out for it, leaving him free to set up the defibrillator with the swift ease of much practice.

  He was ashamed to see how badly his own hands were trembling as he fumbled to tighten the mask against her face, blocking out the heart-stopping thought that Zara might already be in need of the defibrillator’s violent charge to reset her heart rhythm. It was several horrified seconds before he remembered that it could also be used as a valuable monitoring and diagnostic tool.

  ‘I’ve no idea what happened to her,’ he said, dragging his thoughts back to the question he’d been asked, frustrated when he saw that the man was having trouble finding a vein. But, then, with her blood pressure so low, it was hardly surprising. Still, he had to fight the urge to take over and do the job himself. They needed to get the IV started and the lactated Ringer’s running into her veins as soon as possible to get her blood pressure up. If she’d had some sort of spontaneous bleed that had caused a catastrophic drop in her blood pressure …

  ‘I came home from work to find her lying on the bed,’ he continued, forcing himself not to waste any time second-guessing, even as the need to do something urged him to continue CPR. ‘At first, I thought she was sleeping, but when I tried to wake her …’ he shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s when I realised how ill she was.’

  ‘Do you know if she’d had any alcohol to drink before you found her?’ he asked, and Dan almost smiled.

  ‘It’s unlikely. She never drinks anything stronger than a white wine spritzer … too many calories,’ he added.

  ‘Do you know if she’s taken any drugs, sir?’ the young man asked as he peeled the gel pads from their protective backing and positioned them swiftly on Zara’s chest, and even though Dan knew that the questions were necessary for him to do his job, the suggestion shocked him.

  ‘No!’ he exclaimed immediately, horrified at even the thought that this bright beautiful woman might have wanted to kill herself. Then he remembered a conversation he’d overheard at one of the parties she’d dragged him to earlier on in their marriage. He’d been shocked to learn just how many of her fellow models resorted to chemical assistance to maintain their almost skeletal slenderness.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he muttered, praying that Zara hadn’t been tempted down that route. In a profession that valued the freshness of youth above almost everything else, her age was already counting against her. Had she been that desperate to extend her modelling career that she would use drugs to help her compete with all those yo
unger wannabes?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted finally. ‘I’ve never seen her taking anything, but …’

  ‘Could you go and have a look in the bathroom, please, sir,’ the paramedic asked firmly, as he gestured to his colleague to take his hands off their patient while he activated the machine to monitor the state of her heart. ‘We’ll take over here now.’

  ‘Stand clear. Analysing now,’ said the disembodied voice programmed into the machine as he strode into the en suite bathroom, almost grateful for an excuse not to watch if they were going to have to make her beautiful body convulse with the brutality of a shock.

  It took precious seconds to search through a mirror-fronted cabinet crammed full of beauty products of every shape and size, but the only tablets he could find were those in a half-full plastic bottle of over-the-counter painkillers.

  ‘No shock required,’ the voice was advising as he came back into the room, and his heart lifted briefly at the thought that at least Zara hadn’t gone into ventricular fibrillation or cardiac arrest.

  ‘Did you find anything, sir?’ prompted the paramedic as he rejoined them and he saw that in his absence they’d intubated Zara to secure her airway, rather than relying on the face mask, and had connected her to their portable oxygen cylinder. The monitor clipped to her finger was already starting to record an improvement in the saturation level in her blood.

  ‘No drugs, other than some generic analgesics,’ he said, disorientated by the fact that he was little more than a bystander in a situation where he was usually the one in charge. But this was completely different to working in A and E. There, he could work fast and effectively, treating any number of cardiac arrest patients in a single day with his brain working swiftly and clearly and every possible piece of equipment readily to hand.

  Here, it felt as if his thoughts were travelling through treacle as he saw the paramedic’s gloved fingers sort through the pre-loaded syringes in his kit. Somehow, he just couldn’t get his brain to tell him what the man should be looking for, or why.

  ‘They were paracetamol and the bottle was half-full,’ he added, before the man could ask.

  ‘What about the bedside cabinet?’ prompted the other man, and Dan dragged his gaze away from what the two of them were doing to stride across and pull the drawer completely out. He upended it over the bed and several items fell off the edge of the mattress and hit his foot to land out of sight under the bed.

  ‘Some herbal sleeping tablets and … a bubble pack of contraceptive pills,’ he added in disbelief, suddenly wondering just how many kinds of a fool he’d been. So much for Zara’s grief that she couldn’t give him a child! If she’d been taking contraceptives to prevent herself getting pregnant, had anything about his marriage been real?

  He reached under the bed to retrieve the items that had fallen, his first sweep revealing nothing more than a couple of pens and the locked diary that Zara had written in each night.

  His second sweep shocked him to the core.

  ‘Barbiturates!’ he exclaimed when the empty bottle rolled into view and he caught sight of the name of the contents printed on the label. ‘Where did she get barbiturates from?’

  There was an awful silence in the room, with only the soft sibilance of the oxygen to break it, all three of them gazing at the slender beauty with varying degrees of disbelief, incomprehension and pity. They all knew that the incidence of barbiturate overdose had dropped considerably with the introduction of newer, safer sleeping tablets, but if the label on the bottle was genuine, the dangerously addictive drugs were clearly still readily available in other parts of the world to globe-trotters such as models.

  Although why Zara would feel the need to take …

  ‘We need to get her to hospital quickly, sir,’ the paramedic said briskly, as he selected several syringes. ‘Do you know your wife’s approximate weight so I can give her the first dose of sodium bicarbonate?’

  Thank goodness he’d found the prescription bottle, he thought, realising wryly that he was probably one of very few husbands who would know almost to the ounce what his wife weighed, the result of Zara’s obsessive morning ritual had been a cause for alternating delight or despair for every single day of their marriage.

  At least they now knew precisely which barbiturate she’d taken and that it was one that bicarbonate would promote more rapid urinary excretion—anything to get the drug out of her system before it could do any more damage. Zara was already deeply comatose and if he’d arrived home any later …

  He shook his head, deliberately shutting that thought away as he followed every move that the two-man crew made with critical eyes. Not that he doubted their competence. From the moment they’d entered the flat they hadn’t made a false move.

  His colleague had already piled everything else back into their packs and as soon as it was closed he straightened up. ‘I’ll get the stretcher,’ he announced and took off out of the flat.

  ‘Do you want to travel with her, sir, or—?’

  ‘I’ll follow you,’ Dan interrupted, and understood the look of relief that briefly crossed the man’s face. He didn’t know many paramedics who would be entirely comfortable about doing their job under the eagle eyes of an A and E doctor, especially when the patient was a member of that doctor’s family.

  Apart from anything else, he and his colleague were probably wondering at the situation between Zara and himself that could have led her to make such a desperate gesture.

  He sighed heavily with the realisation that there was no way this would remain a secret, no matter how strict the rules were over patient confidentiality.

  ‘The last thing any of us needs is speculation and gossip,’ he groaned under his breath as he followed the stretcher out of the flat and paused just long enough to make sure the front door had locked behind him. It was going to be hard enough to tell Zara’s family that she had made an attempt at taking her own life without the whole hospital speculating what went on behind closed doors.

  If that was what it had been, he continued agonising as he followed the flashing lights through the busy traffic, the urgent scream of the siren an audible reminder that the outcome of the situation was far from certain.

  Suicide? Zara? It still seemed impossible. Had she just intended to give him a scare? Had it only been the fact that he had been late that had made this such a serious situation, the extra hours giving the drugs so much more time to do their damage.

  And if she … when she survived? He hastily altered the words inside his head, feeling a renewed stab of guilt that he could even contemplate the alternative.

  Anyway, he thought heavily, as far as her health was concerned, no one could predict how well or how badly she would recover. Only time would tell how much permanent damage the drugs had done to her system.

  The fact that she was his wife was another matter entirely. Zara wasn’t anywhere near as important a model as she pretended to be, but any speculation that it might somehow be his fault that she’d come so close to death could start a media feeding frenzy that would ruin all their lives, to say nothing of his career. The lower end of the tabloid market would have the whole situation blown out of all proportion the minute they heard that she’d taken an overdose, especially if they unearthed the fact that the two of them had resorted to a surrogate pregnancy.

  He followed the flashing lights all the way to the emergency entrance, his brain rerunning everything that had been done to try to stabilise Zara’s condition. He was so preoccupied that he only just remembered in time to pull into the designated staff parking area rather than cluttering up the area around the emergency entrance.

  As his feet pounded across the tarmac towards the emergency doors, the lights cast long shadows that made it seem as if the doors never got any closer, but finally they slid silently open in front of him.

  ‘Dan? What on earth are you doing back here?’ demanded his opposite number on the night shift, but he didn’t even slow his pace, his long strides taking h
im unerringly through to the resuscitation rooms at the other end of the department.

  ‘Dan! Come in,’ called the consultant already standing the other side of Zara’s ominously still body, his face creased in concern as he beckoned him into the room.

  For a moment, as he shouldered his way through the doors, Dan was filled with dread. Had things got worse during the ambulance journey from his flat to the hospital? Zara’s condition had been so serious that he was hardly likely to look across the clinically stark room and find her sitting up and preening herself in front of any males in her audience, but if the bottle of barbiturates she’d taken had been in her body too long, it was all too likely that she might never come out of the coma.

  As he stared across at her, she looked even more like a porcelain doll under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, with an almost waxy sheen to her skin.

  He slumped back against the wall and watched in awful fascination as his superior did everything he would have done if she were one of his patients, from aspirating her stomach contents to remove any tablets still undigested, to trying to neutralise any drug-laden fluids with activated charcoal before they could be absorbed by her body.

  This just couldn’t be happening, he thought, his helplessness making him feel sick to his stomach.

  Zara had so much to live for, and before this he would have sworn that she was far too self-centred and conceited to ever think of suicide. Why on earth would she do something so … so …?

  ‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ the consultant apologised, and Dan knew that he was going to confirm his worst fears … life extinct.

  Just the thought of those solemn words was enough to change the way he saw the woman who was his wife. Somehow her slenderness became mere gauntness without the aura of her vivacity, her expert make-up smudged into a caricature of its usual perfection and her shimmering blonde hair artificial and brassy.

  He closed his eyes to try to block out the images, unable to look at her any more.