They could stabilise his condition—in fact, the drip Robert had inserted was already improving the baby’s colour and breathing—but the special care baby unit was the best place for him, and that was where he would go after they’d extracted as much information out of the mother as they could.
‘Was it a normal birth?’ Hannah asked as she took the baby’s blood pressure.
‘I think so,’ the girl replied uncertainly. ‘I mean, I’ve never had a baby before, so I can’t really say whether it was any different to anyone else’s labour.’
‘What Dr Blake meant was did the midwife notice anything unusual when your son was born?’ Robert asked. ‘Jaundice perhaps, or breathing problems, anything like that?’
The girl frowned. ‘Not that I recall, though they did say they’d found amphetamines in his body when he was born.’
And how do you suppose the amphetamines got there, you stupid girl? Hannah fumed. You put them in him. You must have been pill-popping when you were pregnant, and now your son is suffering because of it.
But she didn’t say that. Never judge, she’d been taught at med school, never criticise. You’re a doctor whose primary function is to heal, but to her dismay it soon became apparent that Robert had already judged and he was going to announce his verdict whether the young girl wanted to hear it or not.
‘I presume you went to antenatal classes?’ he demanded.
‘I went once or twice,’ the girl said, ‘but it was such a hassle getting there—’
‘Then you presumably missed the talk about how everything you put in your mouth would go straight into your baby’s body!’ he said caustically. ‘Your son has breathing difficulties because he was born a drug addict. Your son has a fever because he’s suffering from withdrawal symptoms.’
‘Dr Cunningham, I really don’t think this is perhaps the best time—’
‘Your baby is going to have to do cold turkey because of your irresponsibility,’ Robert continued as though Hannah hadn’t spoken, his eyes fixed icily on the baby’s mother. ‘His little body is going to be racked with pain and agony because of you, and I hope when you sit by his incubator and hear his tiny screams that you remember that!’
And before Hannah could stop him he had swung out of the cubicle, leaving her staring after him in stunned horror. Never had she seen Robert come so close to completely losing his temper before. OK, so what he’d told the baby’s mother was true. And, OK, the girl was obviously clueless, but a cubicle in the middle of A and E was hardly the proper place or the right time to tell her so.
‘I’m…I’m so very sorry,’ she said awkwardly as the girl began to cry. ‘Dr Cunningham…he’s been under a lot of strain recently, and I can only apologise for his…his brusqueness.’
And get you and your baby up to SCBU as fast as I can, she added mentally, quickly poking her head round the cubicle curtains to find Elliot, Jane and Floella standing outside, their faces concerned and worried.
‘Oh, Hannah, this really can’t go on, you know,’ Jane said, lowering her voice as the members of the night shift began to arrive. ‘It’s one thing to be snippy with us, but—’
‘We’re here to treat, not to judge,’ Elliot finished for her. ‘Hannah, he was completely out of order.’
‘I know that, but—’
‘Won’t you at least try to talk to him?’ Jane continued as Hannah gazed at her unhappily. ‘You could do it tonight. You could go round to his flat, speak to him privately…’
‘But, Jane—’
‘What if he does something worse tomorrow?’ the sister declared. ‘Hannah, he’s the best special registrar I’ve ever worked with, and…well, I know he’s got his faults, but I’m worried sick about him.’
Hannah was too, which was why she found herself standing on the doorstep of Robert’s flat some time later, pale and nervous but utterly determined.
‘So little Miss Muffet is doing house calls now, is she?’ he commented coldly when he opened the door and saw her. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t believe I need your medical services tonight.’
And to her dismay he actually began to shut the door on her.
‘OK, we can have this conversation on the doorstep for all your neighbours to hear,’ she said grimly, quickly putting her foot in the doorway and keeping it there. ‘Or you can invite me in to listen to what I have to say like a civilised human being.’
For a second she thought he really was going to make her say it on the doorstep but then, without a word, he turned on his heel and strode down the hall, leaving her to follow him.
And she did, into what had to be the most cheerless sitting room she’d ever seen. Oh, it was nicely furnished if your taste ran to the basic, and spotlessly neat, but it wasn’t a home. Homes had clutter. Homes had ornaments and photographs, and books and magazines lying where people had left them. This room had all the charm of one of those huge corporate hotels. Anonymous, functional and completely soulless.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, will you stop hovering over me like some student nurse checking out her first patient?’ he exclaimed irritably as he sat down. ‘Take a seat, say what you’ve got to say, then I’d be obliged if you’d leave and allow me to enjoy what remains of my evening in peace.’
Now was the moment to tell him that it was scathing comments like that which were putting everybody’s backs up, but the words wouldn’t come, and it wasn’t because she’d suddenly got a bad attack of cold feet. It was because he looked so lost somehow, sitting in this soulless, cheerless flat, with nothing but his memories for company.
‘Robert…I’m here because everyone’s so worried about you—’
‘What you mean is everyone’s had enough of my bad temper, and you were unlucky enough to draw the short straw to tell me so,’ he flared.
She coloured slightly. ‘In a way I guess that’s so, but we are worried about you. That girl and her baby…’
‘I went too far—I admit it,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll go up to SCBU tomorrow and apologise to her. Happy now?’
No, she wasn’t, not by a long shot. ‘Robert, we all know you’re unhappy, and we want to help you. We know how much you loved your wife—’
‘Do you remember me telling you once that we should trade secrets?’ he interrupted. ‘That I would tell you why I intended to get blind drunk on the anniversary of my wife’s death if you would tell me why you took a job in London instead of Edinburgh?’
She shifted uneasily in her seat. Now wasn’t the right time to tell him about her father. She didn’t know when that would be, but it certainly wasn’t now. ‘Robert—’
‘Well, I’ll tell you for free,’ he continued, his face bleak, empty. ‘I wanted to get drunk that night because I killed her. I killed Laura.’
Her eyes flew to his face in confusion. ‘But she was hit by a car outside the hospital—’
‘And she wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t left St Stephen’s so angry that the last thing she was thinking about was road safety,’ he said bitterly. ‘We’d had a row—a huge one—and I…I told her I wanted a divorce. If she hadn’t been angry with me that night, she would still be alive. I killed her, Hannah. I might not have been driving the car, but I still killed her.’
She didn’t know what to say, but she knew she had to say something. ‘You said you had a row…?’
‘The last of far too many,’ he murmured, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. ‘Laura…Laura was by far the most gifted doctor I’ve ever met, and it never occurred to me to look beyond that. To see that the only thing she really cared for wasn’t me, or her patients, but her work and the success it could bring.’
‘But surely she must have loved you if she married you?’ Hannah protested.
‘I think…I think she loved me as much as she was capable of loving anyone, but I wanted more, you see. I wanted to be the most important thing in her life, and she couldn’t give me that. Maybe I was selfish, unrealistic. Maybe I wanted too much, but…’ His lips twisted.
‘Oh, Hannah, you can have no idea what it’s like to live with someone—to love them deeply, desperately—and yet to know that you only ever occupy a tiny, unimportant part of their heart.’
But she did know, she thought as the memories came flooding back.
Memories of herself as a child, sitting up well past her bedtime waiting for her father to come home from the hospital. Longing to see him, to talk to him, to have him cuddle and hold her. And of her father coming home and absently patting her on the head before he disappeared into his study to plan his next big operation.
‘Robert—’
‘Would you tell the others I appreciate their concern for my career, and apologise to them for my recent behaviour?’ he interrupted quickly. ‘Tell them…’ He managed a smile. ‘Tell them I’ll try to do better in future.’
There was nothing left to say. She’d done what she’d been asked to do, and slowly she got to her feet, and even more slowly walked over to the sitting-room door, but when she reached it she turned to face him.
‘It wasn’t your career we were concerned about, you know. We care a great deal for you. Jane, and Flo, and Elliot, and…me.’
‘Hannah—’
‘In fact…’ She took a deep breath and threw all caution to the wind. ‘I more than care, Robert. I—’
‘Don’t!’ he interrupted, springing to his feet. ‘Don’t—please, don’t say it.’
‘Why not?’ she asked, her heart beginning to beat very fast. ‘Why don’t you want me to say it?’
‘Because you and I…Hannah, I’ve thought and thought about this, and I do want you—I won’t deny it—but it would never work.’
‘Wouldn’t it?’ she whispered.
He shook his head. ‘I was no good for Laura—I’m no use for any woman—and I couldn’t…I just couldn’t bear it if I made you unhappy.’
‘I don’t think you’d make me unhappy, Robert,’ she said huskily. ‘In fact, I know you wouldn’t, and I’m going to say the words whether you want me to or not. I love you, Robert Cunningham.’
He didn’t answer, and it was she who took a step towards him, hesitantly, uncertainly, and for a second she thought he was going to back away, then suddenly his face cracked.
‘Oh, hell! Oh, hell, Hannah!’
And suddenly she was in his arms, and he was covering her face with tiny, searing kisses and brokenly saying her name over and over again. Tears slid from the corner of her eyes as his lips claimed hers, his mouth hungry, desperate, and she kissed him back just as fervently, giving him all that she was, knowing only that this was right. This was meant to be.
‘You’re beautiful…so beautiful,’ he murmured into her throat, his breathing shallow and unsteady as he carried her into the bedroom, then gently removed her clothes, leaving her dressed only in her bra and briefs.
‘I’m not,’ she mumbled, suddenly awkward and embarrassed as his gaze travelled over her. ‘I’m too skinny.’
Gently he reached out and cupped her lace-covered breasts in his hands. Even more gently he caressed each one through the fabric with his thumb until her already tingling nipples hardened with a pleasure that was almost pain. ‘Hannah, you’re so beautiful I want to throw you on that bed and make love to you until dawn, but…’
‘But?’ she gasped, her eyes large and luminous, her breathing now as unsteady as his.
‘Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ His hands slid down her sides and came to rest on the waistband of her briefs. ‘Please…please, be sure, because this time…this time even if St Stephen’s itself burst into flames, I wouldn’t be able to stop.’
‘I don’t want you to stop,’ she said, putting her hands over his and gently pushing downwards so her briefs slipped to the floor. ‘And believe me,’ she added, unclipping her bra so her breasts sprang free. ‘Believe me, I have never been more sure of anything in my life.’
And she was sure as he gathered her to him. Was never more certain as he paid tender homage to every inch of her throbbing body with his mouth and hands and tongue. And when he finally joined with her, and took her to heights she’d never even dreamt of, far less imagined, she knew that this was the man she’d been born for.
CHAPTER NINE
‘YOU’RE not actually going to eat all of that, are you?’ Elliot exclaimed, cradling a cup of black coffee in his hands and gazing with a barely concealed shudder at Hannah’s canteen dinner of chicken pie, chips and beans.
‘You bet I am,’ she said with a grin, forking a piece of pie into her mouth to prove it. ‘In fact, I have it on the very highest authority that nobody should start a shift in A and E without a decent meal inside them.’
‘Uh-huh. And this highest authority…’ Elliot took a sip of coffee and cocked his head at her thoughtfully. ‘He wouldn’t happen to be a tall, dark-haired individual who goes by the name of Robert Edward Cunningham, would he?’
Hannah’s lips quirked. ‘Maybe.’
‘Uh-huh. And as I appear to be on a winning roll here, would I also be right in surmising that this particular Robert Edward Cunningham and a certain Dr Hannah Blake have finally got it together?’
‘Elliot—’
‘Because if they haven’t,’ he continued doggedly as a rosy glow crept across her cheeks, ‘I want to know why Robert’s been going around A and E for the last three weeks with a silly grin on his face, and you have the look of a girl who has been very soundly loved.’
Hannah blushed scarlet, but with over sixty members of staff eating and talking in the canteen this evening she reckoned she could probably have shrieked ‘Stop, thief!’ and no one would have heard her. ‘OK, all right. We’re sort of together—’
‘About damn time.’
‘But we don’t want anybody to know about it yet,’ she insisted. ‘It’s too soon, you see.’
He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Not a word will pass my lips, love. All I want to know is whether you’re happy.’
She was. Blissfully, unbelievably happy. And no more so than when she was bidding a decorous goodnight to Robert in the staffroom—a goodnight he always echoed just as solemnly—and knew that within half an hour she’d be in his flat, in his bed, and they would be making glorious, unending love until the sun rose.
‘You’re the best thing that’s ever come into my life,’ Robert had murmured into her hair one morning as he’d held her close. ‘But Laura and I…We didn’t really know one another before we got married, and this time I don’t want any secrets between us—no dark corners—so neither of us will ever have any regrets.’
Regrets—how could she possibly have any regrets? she wondered. She loved him, and knew he loved her. OK, so maybe he hadn’t actually said that he did, but Laura had hurt him badly and it would take time for him to trust her. Time for him to realise she truly did love him, and they had all the time in the world for him to learn that.
‘Have you told him who your father is yet?’ Elliot asked abruptly.
Well, perhaps not all the time, she realised, putting down her knife and fork, her appetite suddenly gone.
‘Almost.’
‘Hannah, you can’t “almost” tell someone something like that,’ Elliot protested. ‘Either you have, or you haven’t!’
She bit her lip. ‘Look, I’ll get round to it, OK? It’s been a bit difficult, finding the right moment—’
‘Good grief, woman, how can there possibly be a wrong moment? All you have to do is open your mouth and say, “Charles Blake is my father.”’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Sweetheart, you have to tell him. Believe me, the longer you wait, the harder it will get, and if Robert finds out himself…’ He rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘Hannah, I don’t have half the hang-ups that Robert Cunningham does, but if I was in love with you, and you kept something like this a secret from me, even I’d start to wonder what else you had to hide. Love, you’ve got to tell him—and tell him soon.’
‘I will—I promise I will,’ she insisted. ‘When�
��when the time is right.’
And as Elliot shook his head and swore under his breath, neither of them noticed that Jerry Clark was sitting two tables from them, a thoughtful, malicious smile spreading across his face.
‘Ten years ago A and E would have been packed to the rafters on November 5th with burns cases like this,’ Robert murmured as he and Hannah carefully began covering the burns on Harry Ryan’s hands and arms with sterile, non-stick, moist dressings. ‘This poor little chap’s our first casualty, and hopefully he’s going to be our last.’
‘That advertising campaign the government did a few years back certainly made a huge difference,’ Hannah observed, as the whooshes and bangs in the distance indicated that somewhere in the city yet another bonfire-night display was getting under way. ‘When the public saw the kinds of horrific injuries both adults and children could get from exploding fireworks, most people decided to take their kids to organised events instead of having parties in their back gardens.’
‘It’s a pity Harry’s parents didn’t do that.’ Robert sighed. ‘Imagine anyone being stupid enough to allow a six-year-old to hold a box of fireworks. You wonder where some people’s brains are.’ He glanced across at Jane. ‘How’s his BP and pulse rate now?’
‘Stabilising nicely now the IVs are up and running,’ she replied.
Robert nodded. The biggest danger in a case like this—apart from the severity of the burns—was that the victim would go into hypovolaemic shock when the body attempted to repair itself by withdrawing fluids from the uninjured areas of the body. Replacing those lost fluids as quickly as possible was imperative before liver and kidney damage could occur.
‘What should we do about the minor blisters on the side of his neck?’ Hannah asked, smiling encouragingly down at the little boy who was lying, white-faced and tearstained, on the trolley, a nasal cannula plugged into his nose to give him added oxygen. ‘Should we dress them as well, or—?’
‘Leave them alone,’ Robert said, staring at the blisters critically. ‘The burns unit won’t thank us for sending him up looking like a mummy, and they have their own procedures for dealing with minor injuries.’
A Wife for Dr. Cunningham Page 14