Twins for a Christmas Bride

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘No,’ Sara said sharply, and her mother turned on her with a look of utter disbelief on her face.

  ‘What do you mean, no? Sara, you can’t refuse to help your sister if she needs one of yours.’

  ‘Mother, I’ve only got one liver, so I can’t give it to her. The operation would mean chopping a chunk of mine away and that’s major surgery. Anyway, I doubt if you’d find a surgeon willing to do it because I’m pregnant and it wouldn’t be good for the babies.’

  ‘Well, then, you’ll have to get rid of the babies,’ her mother announced with a breathtaking lack of feeling for the unborn lives nestling inside her. ‘You can’t refuse to help save your sister’s life. She could die.’

  ‘But you would be quite happy for me to murder my babies to save your baby?’ Sara couldn’t believe the pain that thought caused, her heart clenching inside her chest as though every drop of blood had been wrung out of it.

  Ever since she’d seen those two hearts on the ultrasound screen, beating so valiantly in spite of the recent trauma, it had brought the reality of her pregnancy home to her the way no amount of reading pregnancy books had done. She felt so connected to those tiny beings, so protective, that the thought of deliberately scouring them out of her womb and flushing them away was anathema.

  ‘So.’ She lifted her chin and stared her mother right in the eye. ‘What if I refuse to do it?’

  ‘You can’t refuse because they’re not your babies, they’re Zara’s, and if she needs them to die so that she can live—’

  It was Sara’s turn to interrupt and she did so without a qualm.

  ‘They might be babies I’m carrying for Zara, but they’re growing in my body and from my eggs … and what’s more, it’s my liver you’re talking about and no one can have it if I don’t want to give it.’

  Her mother broke into noisy sobs and no matter what her father said she wouldn’t be consoled.

  Sara felt dreadful.

  She now knew firsthand just how fiercely a mother would defend her child and couldn’t really blame her own mother for wanting to do everything she could to give her daughter a chance of being well again.

  But she was a mother, too—at least while those two helpless innocents were still inside her—and she was going to fight every bit as hard for their survival.

  Poor Mr Shah didn’t seem to know what to do for the best. Her parents were clearly beyond listening to anything he said, even though he repeatedly tried to reassure them that Zara’s condition hadn’t yet reached the point of no return.

  While Dan …

  Suddenly, Sara realised that the one person with the most to lose in this whole disastrous situation was the only one who hadn’t said a single word.

  A single glance in his direction was enough to tell her that he’d retreated behind what she’d privately dubbed his ‘stone’ face. There wasn’t a single emotion visible, until she happened to see the way his hands were clenched into tight fists inside his trouser pockets.

  As if her mother had sensed that her attention had wandered she turned a tear-ravaged face to her son-in-law. ‘Danny, do something,’ she pleaded. ‘You have to tell Sara to save my precious girl … You must make her give Zara a new liver!’

  ‘No,’ he said quietly with a reinforcing shake of his head. ‘It’s not time for that discussion, Audrey. Listen to what Mr Shah’s been trying to tell you. Eighty per cent of patients with even severe liver damage eventually recover on their own, so it’s just a case of waiting to see if Zara’s liver is going to do the same.’

  ‘But the transplant,’ she persisted. ‘Because they’re identical twins it would be a perfect match and—’

  ‘And it might only give her another year of life,’ Dan finished brutally, and literally robbed her of the breath to argue any further, her mouth and eyes open like a gasping fish. ‘That’s the average survival rate for liver transplants at the moment,’ he told her with an air of finality.

  Sara knew from reading medical journals that some patients had survived considerably longer. It was probably the poor survival rate of liver cancer transplant patients that brought the overall rate down, but it wasn’t accurate statistics that she cared about, it was the fact that he had managed to take her completely out of the firing line … for the moment at least.

  ‘Now,’ said Mr Shah, looking unusually flustered by the open warfare he’d just had to witness, ‘I think it would be best if you were all to go home and have some rest.’

  ‘Oh, but we haven’t seen—’ Audrey began, but was totally ignored as he continued inexorably, drawing a line in the sand.

  ‘You may come back at visiting time this evening, but no more than two of you may visit at a time. That will ensure that my patient will have what remains of the day to rest and hopefully give her body a chance to start to recover.’

  It was beautifully done, Sara acknowledged wryly as they filed silently out of the consultant’s office, but it had left all of them in no doubt who was wielding the power in his unit.

  ‘Would you like a lift?’ Dan offered quietly, when they’d watched her parents scurry out of the unit before he began to push her in the same direction.

  ‘Don’t you have to go to work today?’ she asked, desperate to spend what time she could with him but knowing it wasn’t a sensible idea. ‘You don’t have time to keep ferrying me about.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got all the time in the world, having just been banned from visiting until evening visiting hours,’ he contradicted her as he pushed the button for the lift that was just taking the Walkers down to the main reception area.

  All Sara hoped was that it would deliver the two of them to the ground floor before it returned for Dan and her. She didn’t think she could bear to be shut up in such a small space with her parents, even for the short time it would take to travel a couple of floors. Mr Shah’s office had been bad enough with all that animosity flying around.

  ‘Anyway …’ Dan continued, breaking into her silent replay of the moment when her mother had glibly talked about aborting the precious pair already making their presence felt under her protective hand, the curve of her belly already noticeably bigger than it would have been for a single baby at the same number of weeks. ‘As I’m on compassionate leave until we know what the situation is with Zara, you can just name your destination.’

  ‘You’re going to regret that offer when you find out where I need to go,’ she warned, suddenly immeasurably grateful that the rest of the day didn’t stretch out in front of her like an arid desert.

  ‘Don’t tell me!’ Dan said with a groan as he pushed the chair into the waiting lift. ‘You need to go shopping!’

  ‘All right, I won’t tell you … but that doesn’t mean that I don’t need to go.’

  ‘All right,’ he said with an air of long-suffering that caused several smiles on the faces of the people sharing the lift. ‘I offered so I’ll take you. Just tell me where you need to go and let’s get it over with.’

  ‘What is it with men that they don’t like shopping? Is it a genetic thing?’ Sara mused aloud, drawing a few smiles of her own, then relented. ‘It shouldn’t take very long because I only need to do some grocery shopping while I’ve got someone to carry the bags for me,’ she added with a grin, then another thought struck her.

  She hesitated for a moment, wondering if there was some other way she could achieve what she wanted and feeling the increased warmth in her cheeks that told her she still hadn’t grown out of the habit of blushing. ‘I’m sorry but I’ll also need to do a bit of clothes shopping.’

  He groaned as he waited for their companions to exit first then pushed the wheelchair out into the spacious reception area, thronged as ever by a constantly changing stream of visitors going in and out of the hospital. ‘My absolute favourite occupation … not!’ he complained in tones of disgust. ‘If you’re anything like your sister, that will take the rest of the day.’

  His assumption stung her more than she had a right to feel an
d loosened the leash on her tongue. ‘Apart from the obvious physical resemblance, over which I have no control, I am absolutely nothing like my sister!’ she snapped. ‘And furthermore, far from taking the rest of the day, my shopping should take me no more than five minutes because I only need some comfortable underwear that I can pull on over my cast.’

  The words almost seemed to echo around the whole reception area—probably right around the whole of the hospital if the gossip grapevine was operating in its usual mysterious way.

  ‘Oh, good grief!’ she moaned, and covered her face when she saw just how many inquisitive faces were turned in their direction, and how many of them were sporting broad grins. ‘Just get me out of here,’ she ordered through clenched teeth, hoping that her long curtain of her hair was hiding the furious heat of her blush.

  Dan didn’t make the situation any better when he leaned forward and murmured in her ear, ‘Comfortable underwear, Sara? Is that what they call black lace thongs these days?’

  ‘Shut up!’ she hissed. ‘Just shut up and get me to the car.’

  ‘Ah … in just a second,’ he promised as he veered the chair towards the policeman who had just entered the reception area. Then he abandoned her in the middle of the floor to hail the man and the two of them stood talking earnestly for several minutes.

  Sara was puzzled when Dan reached into his pocket to pull out a disposable glove, especially when the two of them peered at something inside the glove.

  They both had serious expressions on their faces but she was far too far away to hear a single word either of them said, especially with the constant hubbub of passing humanity around her.

  ‘Right! To the car!’ Dan announced as he came back to her with the air of a man pleased with a mission accomplished. ‘Which would you rather do first—groceries or underwear?’ he demanded cheerfully, and the chance to ask what that little episode had been about was lost in the return of her embarrassment.

  The grocery shopping was done and they were standing in front of an embarrassing display of female underwear in her favourite high-street shop when Dan’s mobile burst into the opening bars of the 1812 Overture.

  Grateful for the fact that he wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder for a moment, Sara grabbed a packet containing some very definitely non-sexy underwear in a size several larger than her usual one, in the hope that the leg opening would be loose enough to accommodate her cast. But she couldn’t resist grabbing another containing a rainbow mix of coloured thongs, telling herself that at least she knew that they were relatively easy to get on. The fact that they were far sexier than the ‘old lady’ pants in her other hand had absolutely nothing to do with her choice.

  There was a frown on his face when he turned back to her.

  ‘That was the hospital,’ he began, and her heart leapt into her throat.

  ‘Zara?’ she said, immediately feeling guilty that she and Dan were out shopping for her underwear when he should have been waiting for news of his wife. ‘Is she worse?’

  ‘No, Sara, no,’ he soothed, looking contrite that he hadn’t realised that she’d immediately panic. ‘It was nothing to do with your sister. It was A and E, asking if I could possibly go in. With the two of us out and two others called in sick—that flu bug that’s going around has finally felled Derek when he was only boasting the other day that he never catches anything—they’re desperate for another doctor.’

  ‘Desperate? As in … they’re building up a logjam of patients and the waiting time’s becoming unacceptable?’ she asked as she handed over the two packages and had to submit to the indignity of having Dan pay for her underwear, too. He’d already paid for her groceries when she’d belatedly realised that sneaking out of the ward meant that she hadn’t collected the purse that had been given into Sister’s safekeeping.

  ‘That, and the fact that the traffic lights are on the blink at one of the crossroads and there’s been a whole series of prangs as people take the law into their own hands. Pedestrians, cyclists and car-drivers, some more serious than others.’

  ‘Ouch!’ She pursed her lips as frustration swept through her. She was certain she would be able to work if she’d only injured her leg. Having a doctor working away in minors, doing the bread-and-butter jobs of stitching and retrieving foreign bodies from various apertures, wouldn’t be too taxing as she would probably be able to sit down for much of it, and it would definitely take some of the load off the rest of them. But with her shoulder strapped to prevent her using anywhere near the full range of motion and with the rest of her body complaining whenever she moved a bruised portion, she’d be more of a liability than a help.

  ‘Stop brooding,’ he chided as he pushed her back towards his car at a far faster rate than the companionable stroll with which they’d started their outing. ‘You’re in no fit state to work, so don’t even think about it.’

  ‘Hmm! I see you’ve added mind-reading to your diagnostic skills,’ she sniped, uncomfortable that he’d been able to tell what she was thinking. She hadn’t realised that she was so transparent and now worried just how many of her other thoughts he’d been privy to. ‘Was that the Masters course in Mind-reading or just the Diploma?’

  He laughed. ‘Nothing so low-brow. I found I was so good at it that I went all the way to PhD.’

  He quickly had her settled in the blissful comfort of the passenger seat and they were on their way—at least, they should have been on their way. The journey from the car park to her flat was only a matter of two streets but they weren’t even able to join the stream of traffic on the first one because nothing was moving.

  ‘This isn’t going to work,’ he said aloud as, with a careful look around, he put the car into a swift U-turn and went back the way they’d come. ‘I’m sorry, Sara, but if I’m going to arrive at the hospital in time to do any good I’m going to have to drop you off at our place instead.’

  She wanted to object because she really didn’t want to spend any time at all in the place that her sister shared with the man she loved, but logic told her that she didn’t have any other option. Even if she were to ring for a taxi, that would still leave her with the insurmountable obstacle of getting herself and her groceries up four flights of stairs with only one leg and one arm in any sort of usable state.

  ‘I’ll come back as soon as the panic’s over and deliver you and your goods and chattels as promised,’ he assured her as he deposited her shopping bags on the pristine work surface in his kitchen. The journey up in the lift had been a breeze in comparison to the struggle it would have been to install her in her own flat.

  ‘Sling your perishables in the fridge so they don’t succumb to the central heating,’ he ordered briskly, his mind obviously already racing ahead to what he was going to find when he reached A and E.

  ‘And make yourself at home,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, with one hand already reaching out to the front door. ‘It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to sort through the worst of it.’ And he was gone.

  ‘Make myself at home?’ Sara said into the sudden emptiness of Dan’s home and knew it would be impossible.

  And it wasn’t just because this was the home he shared with Zara. It would have been just as bad whoever he was sharing it with because she’d hoped that any home he lived in would have been her home, too.

  It was because she’d started to dream at one time that it would be her future for the two of them to choose the home they were to share together, to decorate it and choose the furniture and accessories together and … She looked around her, able to see into each of the rooms from her position in this compact central hallway. To the kitchen with the clean-lined Scandinavian cupboards trying desperately to soften the over-abundance of cold stainless-steel appliances and work surfaces; to the bathroom with what should have been a stylish art-deco-inspired combination of black and white that had been made overpowering with the excess of black on floors, walls and paintwork; to the bedroom with the oversized four-poster bed that
was totally out of place in such a modern setting and whose voluminous floral drapery looked more like something a pre-schooler would prescribe for a fairy-tale princess.

  In fact, the only room in which it looked as if Dan had finally put his foot down was the living room. That alone was an oasis of calm understatement with restful neutral colours a backdrop for the stunning views out of the wide uncluttered windows.

  The furniture, when she finally made her way to it, was deliciously comfortable, particularly the reclining chair that was in reach of everything she could need, from the remote control for the television and another one for the stereo system to a wall of bookshelves that had everything from Agatha Christie to massive tomes on emergency radiographic diagnosis.

  She quickly realised that this was the one place in the whole flat where she might be able to feel at home, but it wasn’t until she turned her head and caught a hint of the shampoo that Dan used that she understood why.

  ‘This is Dan’s chair,’ she said, and cringed as she heard the words coming back to her sounding like the sort of reverential tones of a besotted fan of her favourite idol.

  Disgusted with herself for mooning about like this, she forced herself up onto her feet—well, onto her one weight-bearing foot and her single crutch—and struggled her way into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s not your home, so don’t go criticising it,’ she told herself sternly as she sorted through her shopping to put the perishables away in the enormous American-style fridge. ‘And don’t go getting comfortable in it either … not even in Dan’s chair. You’re only going to be here for a short time—just until the panic’s over in A and E—and then you’ll be back in your own place.’

  Her own place with the little poky rooms that were too small to have anything bigger than doll’s-house furniture and the old draughty windows and iffy heating.

  ‘But it’s mine, everything in it is something I’ve chosen and it suits me,’ she said aloud, even as she silently wondered who she was trying to convince.