“I don’t care where we go,” he said. “Or what we do.”

As long as we’re together.

He didn’t say it, but it seemed so clear.

“Neither do I…” Emma’s heart gave its usual giddy lurch in her chest, and she wanted his company so badly that she almost felt ill.

The hospital was so quiet this time of night. Visitors and most doctors had gone home. The two of them were alone.

“My place, then,” she added shakily.

They left the building together and walked in the direction of the car park. Pete put his arm around her, drawing her close to his side, and for a moment she let her head dip onto his shoulder.

It felt too good. She lifted her head again and slid out of the circle of his arm. He let her go without protest, as if he hadn’t wanted more. They both knew quite definitely, however, that he had.

Dear Reader,

This is the second book in my Glenfallon miniseries, about four women friends, with satisfying careers in an Australian country town, who aren’t necessarily looking for love, but find it anyhow.

When she goes away to Paris for three months, Emma rents out her house to one of Glenfallon’s doctors, Pete Croft, whom she’s known casually for years. The e-mails they exchange, and the intimacy of living in the same space, even though at different times, makes them look at each other in a new way.

I’ve read that actress Meryl Steep and her sculptor-husband went from being casual acquaintances to close friends and then lovers in just this way, and it’s always struck me as an unusual and romantic way to make a connection.

The connection is only the beginning for Pete and Emma; however, Pete has emotional ties and obligations elsewhere that he can’t ignore.

You’ll encounter Kit from The Midwife’s Courage in this book, as well as Caroline and Nell, who you’ll be able to read about later on.

Lilian Darcy

The Honourable Midwife

Lilian Darcy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

Cover

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THERE was bound to be something left behind, Pete Croft decided as he walked around Emma Burns’s house and garden one last time. A toy hidden under a flowerpot during a game and then forgotten, or some stray coins in a drawer.

No, there’d be more than that. Something much more personal. Something that would endure for longer.

He stood on the back veranda and looked at the garden. It was the start of spring, the first weekend of September, and there were daffodils and blossom trees and golden acacias in bloom.

The grass was a lush green, and he’d mowed it just this morning, so that the fresh, earthy scent of the clippings still hung in the air. He could hear a couple of other motor mowers going in the distance, too. It was a weekend sound, a hopeful sound, and somehow more soothing to the spirits than such a sound had any right to be.

Inside Emma’s house, cool polished floorboards gleamed, and spring sunshine made the living room bright. On any other Saturday, Pete might have stretched out on that squishy-cushioned regency-stripe couch with the weekend city newspaper and a cup of good coffee. Today, however, he had to move out.

I don’t want to leave, he realised.

He’d been happy here, during the three-month interlude of his tenancy. He’d found a tranquillity and peace he’d never known in quite the same way before, and an odd kind of friendship, via e-mail, with his temporary landlady on the other side of the world in France.

These were the things he didn’t want to leave behind. The sheer tranquillity. Emma’s e-mails. The sense of her personality lingering like a well-loved fragrance in every room. The sight of his four-year-old twin daughters playing in their ‘cubby house’ under the old hydrangea bushes, without an apparent care in the world, despite the upheaval unleashed on them by the collapsing of their parents’ marriage.

His marriage. His marriage to Claire.

This was the reason Pete made another tour through the house. He went down the brick steps at the front, around the slate paved path at the side of the house and into the back garden once more, rebelling against a reality he couldn’t change.

He didn’t want to leave at all.

But, of course, he had to. Emma Burns was coming home tomorrow, after her three-month trip, and he was moving into his own brand-new place in Glenfallon’s trendiest suburban housing development. The interlude had to end, and real life had to resume.

He’d had professional cleaners in, and he’d groomed Emma’s garden himself. The fact that it was spring and flowers were in bloom made it a little easier than it would otherwise have been for him to tell the real plants from the weeds.

The real estate agent was dropping in this afternoon to satisfy himself that everything was in order, but Pete knew this was just a formality. Everything was in order. There was really nothing more to do. He put the key in an envelope, along with a card he’d written to Emma, left them on the kitchen bench top, let himself out the front door and clicked it shut behind him.

Dr Croft had left a couple of things, Emma discovered on Sunday afternoon. The card, for one, which was nice. It was thick and expensive, with a lushly colourful painting of poppies on the front. Inside, he’d written, ‘Welcome home, and thanks for renting me your little slice of paradise at a time when I really needed it, Pete. P. S. I want the names of your paint colours.’

His e-mails had been like that, too. Simple and brief, most of them, they’d bounced from heartfelt to practical and back again in the space of three sentences. She had replied in the same vein, and several times over the past three months they’d had a conversation going back and forth for days—a conversation which had had nothing to do with the impersonal tenant-to-landlady issue that had begun it.

Standing in her empty, pristine kitchen, Emma smiled.

She’d enjoyed those electronic conversations. She’d enjoyed the fact that she’d been sitting in an internet café in Paris, with half a dozen languages chittering around her. She’d enjoyed feeling tired and hot, and she’d enjoyed smelling of sugar and cheese and chocolate after hours of lessons in haute cuisine.

Most of all, oddly enough, she’d enjoyed the companionship. On a professional level, she’d known Pete Croft on and off for…well, it had to be several years, at least, but it had taken flurries of e-mails flashing back and forth across half the world to make her feel as if she knew him as a person.

E-mails, and the fact that he’d been living in her house.

Emma was tired and jet-lagged after the long flight from Europe and the connecting hop, in a small propellor-driven aircraft, from Sydney to Glenfallon. The ground didn’t seem quite steady beneath her feet. There was a lot to do if she was going to get settled back in before she started work on Tuesday, but she found it impossible to put her flagging energy to anything useful just yet.

Instead, she wandered around the house and garden, finding evidence of her tenant’s recent occupation. He’d repaired the latch on the side gate, and the torn flyscreen on the kitchen door. His four-year-old twin daughters, Jessie and Zoe, had dropped a brown Lego horse in the daffodil bed.

He’d left a bottle of brand-new aftershave on the bathroom window-sill, hidden behind a set of cheap lace curtains which she intended to replace soon. For some reason, Emma was tempted to open the aftershave, to see if it smelled like him—What, could it smell like his e-mails?—but sensibly she didn’t. She would give it and the Lego horse back to him when she got a chance, but doubted the matter was urgent.

She knew Pete had bought a house in the new development at the edge of town, but didn’t have the address. He would be busy moving in, finalising the details of his divorce, his property settlement and his custody arrangements. Plastic horses and missing bottles of unused aftershave would be far, far down on his list of priorities.

‘I’ll unpack, and put on a load of laundry, and get myself organised,’ Emma decided, and wondered if it was only because her wonderful three months in Paris was over that she felt so flat.

‘Dr Croft? It’s Patsy McNichol.’

‘Yes, Patsy? What is it?’

Pete blinked, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and tried to lift his voice above its early-morning creak. The red figures on the clock radio beside his bed showed six twenty-five, and it was not yet fully light. He was quickly alert, however. He knew this patient wouldn’t be phoning him at such an hour on a whim.

‘I’m bleeding again,’ she said. ‘But it’s much worse, this time, and…and there’s some cramping, too.’

‘What kind of cramping?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Could it be contractions?’ She was trying to keep her voice steady, but it wasn’t working. Pete could hear the wobble and the pitch of panic. She didn’t want this to be happening yet.

‘How does the pain feel, Patsy? Is it steady? Describe it for me.’

‘It sort of drags, like really bad menstrual cramps, but it’s tight, too. It builds, and then it ebbs, and then a little while later—I should have been timing it, shouldn’t I?—it builds again. It woke me up about half an hour ago, and I just lay there, but then I felt the blood.’

‘How much?’

‘The bed is soaked.’

‘Is it still flowing?’

‘It’s eased off. Seems to have.’

‘Are you lying down?’

‘Yes, with my feet up.’

‘Can Brian drive you to the hospital?’

‘We’re already dressed. I didn’t want to disturb you any earlier than I had to.’

Pete dammed back a sigh of frustration. Why were people like this? He had patients who would phone his home number at midnight, complaining of a paper cut, without so much as a ‘Sorry to bother you’, and patients who would hang back on a lifesaving call in order to give him ten minutes more sleep.

‘I’ll see you there as soon as I can,’ he told Patsy.

He dressed quickly, opting for a set of green surgical gear—drawstring pants and a short-sleeved, V-necked top. Realistically, given the position and size of Patsy’s uterine fibroids, he was probably going to be assisting with an emergency Caesarean first thing this morning.

He could feel the aridity of his new bedroom as he moved around it in the early-morning light. The whole house was still far too bare and echoing and new after the cottage cosiness and warmth of Emma Burns’s place, which he’d been forced to abandon three days ago.

How did you achieve that sort of atmosphere? he wondered. He wasn’t convinced he had the skills, or the time. Well, certainly not the latter. So much on his plate right now.

Claire’s behaviour was like a nightmare. Her ultimatums to him didn’t make sense. He suspected she was sleeping around, but perhaps that wasn’t fair. Perhaps he was simply displacing the real sources of his anger onto a safer issue. How well was she looking after the girls? He wasn’t happy with their informal custody arrangement as it stood. He wanted more involvement in his daughters’ lives.

And now Patsy McNichol had apparently gone into premature labour, with bleeding that didn’t surprise him but definitely wasn’t good. She’d done well so far with the pregnancy, and they’d all been crossing their fingers that this wouldn’t happen.

There was no time to eat, or to gulp the coffee he craved. He left a message on the answering-machine at his practice, asking his staff to reschedule the first hour of his morning appointments, and he reversed out of the garage and pressed his finger to the button on his remote control garage door opener at six thirty-three.

He couldn’t help reviewing Patsy McNichol’s history as he drove. She was thirty-five years old, by no means too old for a first baby but old enough to have developed the uterine fibroid tumours in the muscle layer of the uterine wall which had clouded the safety of this pregnancy from the beginning.

Unfortunately, the fibroids had been small enough to have sent out no warning signals before she’d conceived. If he’d known about them before the McNichols had started trying for a baby, Pete would have recommended surgery—the procedure was called a myomectomy—which would in all likelihood have cleared the way for a normal, healthy pregnancy.

As soon as Patsy had conceived, however, it had been too late. Pregnancy produced hormones—high levels of oestrogen and progesterone which stimulated rapid growth of the fibroids. With the relative positions of the fibroids and the placenta that he’d seen on more than one ultrasound scan over the past three months, Mrs McNichol had been lucky to have had so few problems thus far.

There’d been signs on the most recent ultrasound, however, that the baby was no longer getting its optimum amount of nourishment. Although, thanks to the growth of the fibroids, the uterus itself was now very large, the baby wasn’t.

Patsy was desperate to keep the pregnancy going in safety. She’d given up work around the family farm months earlier than she and her husband had originally planned, and had gone on bed rest as soon as Pete had mentioned the idea. She’d had two or three episodes of moderate bleeding which they’d managed to control through medication, but now there was cramping as well.

A few months from now, when the uterus had returned to its pre-pregnancy size and her hormone levels had dropped, Patsy would go under the knife again, so that the fibroids could be safely removed. A future pregnancy would almost certainly be a much safer proposition for her.

First things first, however. Pete was concerned about the extent of the bleeding, and about the ongoing health of an undernourished baby at thirty-three and a half weeks gestation.

If labour could be stopped or slowed, should he send Patsy to Sydney or Canberra? At thirty-three and a half weeks, the baby’s required level of care fell just days short of the scope of Glenfallon Hospital’s small level two special care facilities. On paper, a few days wasn’t much, but how significant was the compromised environment of the uterus?

The clock on the dashboard of his car read six forty-one when he pulled into a reserved space outside the two-storey building which housed Glenfallon Hospital’s maternity unit, including its special care facilities and an obstetric operating theatre opened just this year.

The hospital buildings in current use were all relatively new. They were pleasant but rather bland concrete and glass constructions dating from various times over the past twenty-five years when the town had been endowed with capital funds for expansion.

The original building, of gracious old stone with wide verandas, a slate roof and thick walls, was now used for outpatient clinics and support services. The change had been necessary. Apart from its inadequate size, you just couldn’t make the old building’s layout and facilities accommodate modern medical equipment and practice. Still, stubbornly, Pete liked the old building best. It was the same way he felt about Emma Burns’s cottage versus his own newly purchased dwelling.

The new place had a locked double garage with remote-controlled doors. It had two bathrooms, and a family room adjoining the state-of-the-art kitchen. It had a back yard that was currently a depressing expanse of arid soil and builders’ rubble but would eventually be a great place for the girls to play whenever they were in residence. He had a landscaping firm scheduled to start work on paths and retaining walls soon.

As with the new hospital buildings, however, he wasn’t convinced the house would ever have the right character.

Arriving in the unit, he discovered that, despite their head start, Patsy and Brian McNichol had got there just a few minutes earlier. The departing staff, Kit McConnell and Julie Wong, were both helping the new and nervous patient into a gown and checking her history. She was the delivery ward’s only patient at the moment, but the phone was ringing, heralding the possible arrival of someone else.

‘How are you feeling, Patsy?’ Pete asked at once.

‘The contractions are getting stronger. There’s one coming now…’

From Patsy’s reaction, the pain was quite intense. She couldn’t move or speak during its peak, and had to press a thick pad between her legs to deal with the blood. Pete wasn’t happy about how much was still flowing. He abandoned any thought of getting her moved to Canberra or Sydney.

This didn’t mean he was relaxed about the idea of delivering her here. They could be in for some problems after the birth, and dealing with a post-partum haemorrhage could be a nightmare. Thank goodness there were a couple of good doctors he could call on.

‘Let’s get you on your left side with your feet up on a pillow,’ he told his patient, masking the extent of his concern.

She looked pale and drawn. Tired, as if she hadn’t been sleeping well in weeks, which was probably the case. Bed rest wasn’t fun. No physical activity to promote a healthy fatigue at the end of the day, too much time to think and worry. And she was huge, the size due to her fibroids, not the baby.

Pete palpated the uterus, gave her an internal examination and found that the cervix was ripe, already fully effaced and dilated to six centimetres. The baby’s position wasn’t good. Feet and bottom down low, and head lying next to her mother’s heart. The heartbeat was fine, no sign of distress, and that was a plus. But he really didn’t like the bleeding, or his rough impression of the baby’s size. He’d been monitoring this for several weeks, and there’d been steady growth, but the baby was still smaller than it should be for this stage of pregnancy.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he promised Patsy, when he’d finished.

Heading for the phone at the nurses’ station, he almost cannoned into Emma Burns, who had just arrived, and whom he hadn’t seen in the three months he’d been renting her house. She was like a breath of cool, fresh air, scented with spring. She was like her home—bright and pretty and calming.

They smiled at each other.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

‘Thanks.’

A beat of uncomfortable silence hung in the air, and neither of them knew what to say. Pete felt there ought to be something better than what he’d come out with thus far. Something witty or meaningful. Something a little private and personal that encompassed all the complex flavours of the e-mails they’d exchanged.

As if he had time to think about it now!

She’d done something to herself while she’d been away, he noted vaguely. Something good. Hair was different. Eyes. Lips. How she’d done it, he didn’t know. He didn’t even know quite what she’d done, he only knew that it was good.

Straight, dark, glossy tresses, arched brows, glowing brown eyes, soft, happy mouth. And yet he didn’t even have time to say, Wow! You look great, Emma! Although he definitely wanted to.

‘Can you make sure the ob. theatre is fired up and ready to go?’ he said. ‘No one else in there, is there?’

‘No, we’re quiet.’

‘I’m phoning Gian Di Luzio and Nell Cassidy. I’ve a got a patient in there…’ he gestured at Room One with a backward jab of his thumb over his shoulder ‘…who’s making me nervous.’

‘Fill me in,’ she said. She had a lovely voice, clear and steady. ‘I’m not officially on yet, but I’m obviously going to be in on the surgery, right? I think we’ve got another labouring mum coming in, but Bronwyn’s going to handle her.’

‘Yes, I want you in Theatre,’ he answered. ‘And I expect you’ll be moving over to Special Care to look after this baby, if we keep her.’

Emma had spent two years in Sydney, a few years ago, acquiring specialised neonatal nursing qualifications, and staffing was usually juggled to enable her to care for any babies who needed extra attention and skills after birth. There were a couple of other well-qualified nurses to share the load as well.

‘Might we not keep her?’ she asked.

‘I hope we can.’ He hadn’t quite answered her question with the words, but went on to do so in his description of the patient’s history.

Emma’s appearance might have changed in three months—what was it? Her eyes glowed! But he doubted whether her capabilities had. She’d always been good. A team player and able to handle all the different types of people she had to deal with, from nervous new fathers to overworked GPs. She was level-headed, thorough and adept at anticipating problems. He sketched out what she needed to know, using a barrage of medical shorthand which had her nodding and frowning at once.

‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘I can see why you’d want Dr Di Luzio and Dr Cassidy.’

Gian Di Luzio was Glenfallon’s one obstetrician and gynaecologist, and a woman would have to go quite a distance to find another one. Like most parts of rural Australia, Glenfallon was chronically in need of specialists. As a result, there were several GPs in the area who’d obtained extra credentials in various fields to meet demand.

Pete was one of them. He’d returned to Glenfallon at the beginning of the year after two years spent in Sydney, and he was now better qualified than anyone but Gian in delivering babies and dealing with associated areas, but he was by no means too proud to reach out and grab a fully fledged specialist’s extra experience when he needed it. With the twin risks of post-partum haemorrhage and a delicate baby, this was one of those times.

Nell Cassidy was no slouch when it came to extra experience either. She ran the hospital’s accident and emergency department with an iron hand, and no velvet gloves involved. She also oversaw the hospital’s acute-care patients—adults, children and infants. She was extremely bright, unflappable in a crisis and always the very last person to accept that a patient couldn’t be saved.

She’d revived one of Pete’s patients last year—a four-year-old girl, the same age as his daughters now were—after a near-drowning, and she’d kept vigilant when everyone else had been ready to celebrate and relax.

Two days after the incident in the back-yard pool, when Amber Szabo had already started smiling and talking and her parents and hospital staff were talking about her discharge, Dr Cassidy had headed off a major organ shutdown, battled death once again and saved the child.

Now, as far as Pete was concerned, the A and E staff could saddle the woman with any unflattering nickname they liked, but he would defend her with spirit all the way.

They had a full team assembled by seven-twenty. They had type A-positive blood waiting for Patsy, and a neonatal resus trolley equipped and waiting for her baby. They had oxygen and intubation equipment, monitors for heart rate, respiratory rate and blood oxygen saturation, and a barrage of drugs on hand.

They had overhead lights switched on, trays of shiny, sterile equipment lined up, and their patient ready to be wheeled in. The pace had picked up in Labour and Delivery, too. The recently delivered mum had been moved across to the post-partum ward, but they had a new admission to take her place—a young woman of nineteen, who’d had only sporadic prenatal care and no second-trimester sonogram, and was uncertain of her dates. Around eight, eight and a half months gone, she thought.

Thirty-six or thirty-seven weeks? Apparently Bronwyn Jackson wasn’t convinced of this after a manual examination.

‘She feels too small,’ the midwife reported to Pete. ‘By the height of the fundus, I’d say thirty-five weeks, maybe even thirty-four.’

‘Can we try to stop the labour?’ Pete asked.

‘No chance. Fully effaced, half-dilated, contractions every few minutes. This baby’s coming today, and we’ve got the resus trolley on hand.’

‘I’ll get there for the delivery if I can.’

‘The joint is jumping all of a sudden.’

‘Better phone Alison Cairns and tell her she might be needed, too.’ Dr Cairns was good with fragile babies.

The new admission, Rebecca Childer, had been put down as Pete’s patient, although her family was fairly new to Glenfallon, and he’d only ever seen her mother, Susan, for a couple of routine things. He didn’t like having this new, questionable labour hanging over his head when Patsy and her baby were uppermost in his mind.

The baby obviously didn’t want to stay in Patsy’s tumour-filled uterus any longer. He only hoped the little girl would be safe out of there, and in their hands. Should he have sent Patsy to a bigger facility before this? She’d argued against the idea very strongly, but he could have presented it in starker terms.

If we lose this baby, came the insistent thought, how much will I question my own decisions? And where’s Rebecca Childer going to be up to in her labour when I get out of Theatre?

‘Dr Croft looks terrible,’ Emma said quietly to Nell Cassidy.

Although Emma was over a year younger than the A and E specialist, she and Nell had been friends since their school days. More specifically, since the Glenfallon Ladies’ College Senior A netball team’s memorable trip to Sydney about seventeen years ago, for a round of competitions.

Teenage giggles and confessions during the long bus ride had gradually evolved into the more considered honesty and support of adult friendship, and had survived divergent career paths and life experiences, long periods of living in different places and even some significant criticisms of each other’s choices.

Nell knew that Emma considered her too cool and too uncompromising in her approach to her work. Emma knew that Nell would have ‘thrown that parasitical stepmother of yours out months ago’, instead of putting up with the situation until Beryl had left in a huff to go and live with her own daughter earlier that year.

Somehow, however, these differences of opinion didn’t matter. This same honesty now made it possible for the two of them to have a serious, if snatched conversation on an unrelated subject while they waited for their own role in safeguarding the McNichol baby’s first minutes of life.

‘Terrible is a bit harsh,’ Nell said in response to Emma’s comment. ‘He looks tired, definitely. And stressed.’

‘That’s what I meant, Nell. It was sympathetic. I wasn’t accusing him of having a bad hair day and tacky clothes. Is he tired and stressed?’

‘Most people are when their marriage is in the process of doing a slow-motion shatter.’

‘I thought his marriage was over. In his e-mails, he always…Well, in his e-mails, he sounded better than he looks.’

‘These things take time, Emma. But I expect if he’s been talking about his divorce in his e-mails, you know a lot more about it than I do.’

‘I know hardly anything,’ Emma said quickly.

She was sorry she’d made the initial comment to Nell now. She hadn’t meant this to turn into an analysis or a catechism. Having thought of Pete Croft as a kind of penfriend for the past three months, she’d been concerned to see the evidence of stress and problems in his face—problems he’d mentioned to her only in the most oblique way.

Something changed in him when they began the surgery, however. She saw him blink and work the muscles in his face, as if trying to wake them up, and there was a new alertness in his expression, a determination and focus that stripped away the signs of weariness and emotional preoccupation she’d first seen.

Pete was a good-looking man. Somehow, she’d never seen it before. Maybe because he didn’t fit the tall-dark-and-handsome model that most women wanted. He was tall enough, yes, but he wasn’t a giant—just under six feet, nicely built in an athletic way. He wasn’t dark. He did have brown eyes, but they weren’t for drowning in. They were too focused, too intelligent, too ready to be amused and too casually kind.

His skin was typically Australian—fair, a little roughened by the power of the sun, and uneven in tone. On a woman, it would have been disastrous skin, but on a man it was…very male. Rugged and strong and casually attractive.

As Nell had pointed out, he hadn’t been near a razor that morning, and his beard was growing in fast, a red-gold sheen of stubble surrounding firm lips which looked thin when he was absorbed in his work and fuller when he smiled his generous smile.

His hair was cut so you could see that it started as a very dark, rusty gold and went blonder as it grew out, until it settled on sand mixed with straw as its definitive colour. He had little creases at the corners of his eyelids—creases he needed a woman to kiss away with soft, tender lips—and he had a tanned curve of neck at the back which could make that same woman want to stroke it with her fingers, then thread them upwards into the soft prickle of his hair as she sighed against him.

Only not me, Emma thought in sudden panic. Why on earth am I suddenly thinking this way?

‘We’re good to go here, Houston,’ said anaesthetist Harry Ang.

‘One day I am going to kill that man,’ Nell muttered.

It was one of Dr Ang’s harmless quirks that he liked to speak as if this was NASA Mission Control and he was an astronaut about to launch into space. Nell had a limited tolerance for harmless quirks.

Emma didn’t mind Dr Ang—he was a nice guy, and always pleasant to the nurses, which counted for a lot—but she had to suppress a laugh all the same when Pete said, ‘Apollo Thirteen, do you mind if we cut satellite communications for the rest of this mission?’

‘Just trying to raise team morale.’

‘Consider it already more than sufficiently raised, Dr Ang,’ Nell came in. Her tone could have lasered through glass.

Gian Di Luzio ignored the whole thing. He simply asked for a piece of equipment, and the surgery began. Emma and Nell were standing by, waiting for the baby, and Emma found that her focus stayed fixed on Pete. She’d never realised it would feel so intimate to know that he’d lived in her house, and she wondered if he felt in any way the same.

The intimacy had to be even greater, perhaps. He’d slept in her bed. He’d used her dishes. He’d sat on her couch. Her personal possessions had all been packed away, but rooms were personal, too. Air was personal. Grass was personal. He’d breathed her air and trodden her grass.

He had mowed it very neatly, too, just before he’d left. He’d dumped the fresh clippings from the mower in their usual spot beside the compost bin behind her shed, and she’d arrived home to find them still giving off their tangy, summery smell. It had seemed as if Pete must have left just minutes before.

Pete made the incision in Patsy’s abdomen and cut through the outer layers of fat and muscle to reach the uterus. He and Gian had decided on the more conservative midline incision, given the difficult placement of placenta, fibroids and baby.

Gian muttered a couple of suggestions, and Nell stepped close when it was time to lift the baby free. Dr Di Luzio was another very capable doctor, Emma knew, and he’d just become engaged to her fellow midwife and friend, Kit McConnell. The couple were still talking about dates for their wedding, and they’d just agreed to formally adopt his brother’s little girl, Bonnie.

‘Here we go,’ the obstetrician said.

He brought out a blue, slippery bundle of limbs and a tight, immobile little face, beyond the sea of green surgical fabric, and gave the baby girl at once to Nell. Above his mask, Pete looked tense, and the sound they were all waiting for—a baby’s cry—hadn’t happened yet. The lights were bright on Mrs McNichol’s exposed skin, with its rust-coloured splashes of antiseptic, and the seconds seemed to drag.

‘She’s small for dates. Tiny!’ Dr Ang exclaimed.

‘We knew she would be,’ Pete said, his tone clipped. Nell suctioned the baby’s nose and throat out carefully and chafed her chest, but nothing happened. ‘Hoping for better than this, though,’ Pete added.

‘Come on, sweetheart!’ Nell muttered. ‘Don’t scare us like this!’

Working closely beside Nell, Emma clamped and cut the cord. The baby was still limp. Her one-minute Apgar score wouldn’t be all that great. Emma calculated automatically. One for tone, one for colour, zero for respiration…

‘OK, she’s still not breathing. I’m going to bag her, I’m not going to wait,’ Nell said, grabbing the equipment quickly.

She laid the baby in the open tray of the resus trolley beneath the warming lights. Emma managed to slip a stretchy little cap on the baby’s head to keep vital body heat in. The umbilical stump was the most favoured site for IV insertion in a premmie, but sometimes one needed intravenous lines put in through the veins in its scalp.

She hoped she wouldn’t be taking the little hat off again soon for that purpose. A baby at thirty-three weeks shouldn’t need that level of treatment. That fibroid-crowded uterus hadn’t been good for her at all.

‘Got some bleeding here,’ Dr Di Luzio said. ‘Pete, the placenta’s looking very tricky, right across a mass of intramurals. Surprised she got this far with the pregnancy. Not a bit surprised about the size of the baby. Nell?’

‘Going as fast as I can here,’ she answered. She held the manual oxygen bag to the baby’s face, trying to pump air into the tiny lungs and listen with a stethoscope at the same time. Nothing was happening.

‘One more try, then I’m going to intubate,’ she announced. ‘Heart rate’s a little slow and thready, and there’s a bit of a murmur. It may clear up on its own. They often do. Still, we have to get moving on this.’

Already, nearly two minutes had passed since the clamping of the cord, and every second without oxygen was critical. Thank goodness Patsy was unaware of all this!

‘Emma?’ Nell prompted.

‘Yes.’ She had the intubation equipment ready, and the oxygen.

The tube was pitifully small, and it would be an extremely delicate procedure, with the risk of tubing into the stomach instead, creating yet another delay. Nell had her naturally pale face set like a mask as she made her final attempt to squeeze oxygen into the baby’s lungs manually.

‘Come on, darling,’ she repeated, tapping the tiny feet, chafing the chest, looking for the right stimulation.

Normally, her skin complemented her dark blonde hair, but that was all tucked beneath her royal blue disposable cap. She looked as efficient and as cool as a machine, but Emma knew she had a strong, passionate heart beating away underneath.

‘OK, we’ve got her,’ Nell announced at last. ‘No tube, thank goodness. She’s breathing on her own. Yes.’ She watched and listened. ‘Yes! Heart rate is better already. Colour’s improving. She’s picking up quickly now.’

The five-minute Apgar score was the crucial one as a predictor of long-term health and development. Emma added the figures again. One for tone, one for colour, two for respiration…Seven. Eight would have been nice, but if she’d added that extra point, she would have been cheating.

‘Good. Go for it. Got our own problems over here,’ Gian said, in answer to Nell.

‘Houston, we have a—’ Dr Ang began.

‘Shut the hell up, Harry,’ Pete sang at him.

‘Sure. Sure.’

‘Can we tie off this vessel?’ the obstetrician asked.

‘Got it,’ Pete murmured. ‘How’s the placenta looking?’

Emma didn’t have time to look over at the table to see what was happening. She heard Pete’s voice, muttering something else, and Dr Ang confirming that everything looked fine at his end, although the patient’s blood pressure was beginning to drop.

‘OK, placenta’s coming away,’ Gian said. ‘Most of it. Getting a big bleed now.’ His voice was calm, almost lazy, but no one was fooled. ‘Cautery, Mary Ellen. Good. Thanks. Let’s get this closed off.’

There was a hiss, and the acrid smell of burning.

‘Good girl, what a lovely pink colour now! What great breathing!’ Nell said, as if it was the baby’s own success, not hers, and perhaps she was right. She leaned closer, listened once more just to check. ‘You good, darling girl! Now we’ve got it all happening,’ she crooned at the tiny baby, still working quickly as she spoke.

She taped a pulse oximeter to the baby’s hand, checked the fluctuating numbers that appeared on the screen. Climbing. Pink had now begun to radiate outwards from torso to extremities. Emma blinked back tears of relief. Blue was just the wrong colour for a baby, frightening and wrong. Pink was like the sun coming out on a cold, cloudy day, lifting spirits at once.

‘Thank God!’ she whispered.

She saw Pete’s glance cut across in her direction from the table. His face looked frozen for a moment, stark. He was thirty-six, she knew, but he looked forty today. A very masculine, competent, good-looking but stressed-out forty. Her fingers suddenly itched to smooth the lines on his face, to trace the shape of his mouth until it softened beneath her touch.

Then he blinked those tired brown eyes with their creased lids, grinned at her and nodded, wordlessly sharing her prayer of relief. She grinned back, and felt a rush of warmth and happiness. Gian’s running commentary suggested he had the bleeding in hand. Most importantly, the baby girl was breathing.

Emma wasn’t, as she smiled at Pete.

She seemed to be floating a good three inches above the ground, and she wasn’t breathing at all.

But at the moment breathing didn’t seem remotely important.

CHAPTER TWO

‘DR CROFT, we’ve got Rebecca in transition and almost ready to push,’ said Bronwyn. She was an efficient, thin and rather cool brunette, married with a school-aged son and daughter.

‘Right.’

Pete took a deep breath, switched his focus quickly. Little Lucy McNichol was looking good now, better than he’d dared to hope. She was small, just over three pounds on the old scale, but after that initial, frightening hitch with her breathing, she seemed reasonably strong, and she’d even taken the breast.

Nell had said she thought the gestational age might be closer to thirty-five or thirty-six weeks, not the thirty-three he’d been working on. Patsy might have mistaken bleeding at the beginning of the pregnancy for a period, and he’d dated the baby on that basis. With the spread and position of the fibroids retarding growth, the ultrasound scan at seventeen weeks hadn’t contradicted those dates.

But now here was Rebecca Childer about to give birth, and Bronwyn thought her dates might be wrong in the other direction. With no accurate date of LMP—last menstrual period—and no ultrasound measurements, they were working purely on the measurement from pelvic bone to top of uterus.

‘Don’t be surprised if you get called back up here,’ he told Nell, as she stripped off gloves and mask and prepared to head back down to A and E. ‘We have another iffy pregnancy on hand.’

‘I’ll be back up here anyway as soon as I can, just to make sure Lucy’s doing as well as we think,’ she said. ‘I did hear a faint murmur over her heart, did I tell you? But, of course, that’s very common. I’ll let it go as long as her stats are good.’

‘It’s your call. She looked good to me, too.’

‘See you in a while.’ Nell went towards the lift.

‘Rebecca, how are you doing here?’ Pete asked his new patient, as he entered Delivery Room Two.

She didn’t answer, just gave him a hostile look which he shrugged off. If he hadn’t asked about her state, the look would have been just as grim. In the grip of a powerful contraction, she wasn’t enjoying herself at the moment.

As soon as the contraction was over, he gave her a manual exam. It wasn’t routine policy to do so in this department, but Rebecca wanted a progress report. He listened to the baby. Heartbeat was fine. Dilatation was almost complete. The head was nice and low, but small. He agreed with Bronwyn. This wasn’t a thirty-seven-weeker.

‘Have we got extra staff?’ he muttered to her.

‘Vanessa Gunn is coming in,’ Bronwyn answered. ‘Emma will go into Special Care, with back-up from Sue North in post-partum. We’ll juggle it.’

Rebecca moaned. ‘I’m not ready for this. Nobody said it would be this bad.’

‘You’re doing really well, Rebecca,’ Bronwyn told her.

‘Don’t give me that garbage…’

Pete listened to the heart again, and found that the rate was perceptibly slower. ‘Get Dr Cassidy up here again,’ he told Bronwyn. ‘We might not need her, but if we do, I don’t want to wait.’

‘What about Emma?’

‘Her, too, as long as the post-partum staff have got Lucy’s care covered.’

Rebecca groaned, half sat up and opened her legs. The head was already crowning, propelled forward by the action of the uterus. Contractions were coming without a pause in between. Rebecca strained again. They’d have a baby very soon…

‘OK,’ Nell said. ‘She’s stable. She’s good.’

Like Patsy, Rebecca had delivered a tiny girl, whom she’d named Alethea. It was an old-fashioned name, but it was pretty, Emma thought. She clung to this thought—that the baby’s name was pretty, that the baby was pretty—because the little creature had problems at the moment.

She’d needed intubation and she was on a respirator. It had taken Nell, Emma and Pete an hour to get her stabilised enough to move her to Special Care, and Nell, who’d actually thought that was ‘nice and fast’ under the circumstances, was still working over her with a severe frown on her face.

Pete had left to check on Patsy McNichol.

‘Oxygen saturation’s gone up,’ Nell said. ‘I like her heart rate. I like how quickly we got this done. I like most things.’

‘That’s good.’

‘For the moment. And I’m hoping we’ll get her off the respirator within the next couple of days.’

‘What’s worrying you, Nell?’ Emma said. She knew her friend well enough to realise there was something.

‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head, as if to clear swimming-pool water from her ears. ‘I think I’m hearing a murmur again.’

‘Lucy had one, too.’

‘I know. They’re so common in babies, especially early babies, and mostly they mean nothing. With Lucy, I wasn’t so concerned. Her dates were better, even though she was almost as small. A small baby delivered within a few weeks of term is almost always better off than a larger one delivered earlier.’

‘And this one wasn’t large, in any case.’

‘I know. Which worries me, too, because I don’t know why.’ Nell listened to the heartbeat again. ‘I don’t know whether to be concerned about this baby’s murmur either,’ she said. ‘Certainly want to get the rest of her stronger before we start worrying about her heart. Hey, Alethea? Do you support that plan, darling? You don’t want a whole lot more mucking around, do you?’

Her voice was soft and cooing as she addressed the motionless baby. Then she straightened and spoke to Emma again.

‘All indications are that the heart is working fine at the moment,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t, her numbers wouldn’t look so good. If I keep hearing this, though, or if it changes, I’m going to do a couple of tests. Let me know if there are any indications that her heart isn’t doing its job.’

‘She’s premature…’ Emma said.

‘I’m guessing thirty-three or thirty-four weeks.’

‘So…Patent ductus arteriosus is a fairly common condition in premmies, isn’t it? Treatable, too.’

Emma knew that in a normal foetal heart, the ductus arteriosus was open. In a full-term baby, this vessel closed automatically at birth, as part of the heart’s almost miraculous shift from foetal circulation to the circulation pattern it sustains throughout its life. A premmie baby’s heart can’t always manage this shift on its own, however, and if the ductus remains open beyond early infancy, permanent heart damage could result. Fortunately, the condition could be monitored and treated if necessary.

‘If it’s that, and if the PDA doesn’t close on its own, there’s a drug we can use to encourage it,’ Nell agreed. ‘It doesn’t always work, and that’ll mean surgery.’

‘In Sydney.’

‘A few years ago, we’d have had no hope of handling a baby like this in Glenfallon at all, with or without the need for surgery. Even now, I wonder if we should be starting to look at arranging medivac transport.’

‘We’re a level two unit.’ Emma was a little defensive. ‘I’ve handled several thirty-four-weekers, and even a couple of younger ones whose mothers had their dates wrong, like this one did.’

‘Yes, I’m not kicking her out of here yet, am I, Alethea? There are no real danger signs, and it would be great if we could get her strong and well ourselves…but I still think Sydney’s on the cards.’

‘There’s no point in having the facilities to handle premmies here if we don’t use them to maximum potential,’ Emma said. ‘Thirty-four weeks is the cut-off, I know, but personally I’m trained to a higher level than that.’

‘True. And people get better at it if they practise. There are going to be a few of us practising on this baby.’

‘Don’t put it like that, Nell, as if she’s an anatomical model.’

‘Oh, I’m not. I’m not. You know I’m not. I’m just nervous. That thumb-pricking feeling that something’s not right, despite all the things that clearly are.’

‘The way you were worried about that little girl who was revived after she fell in her pool?’

‘She was Pete’s patient, too.’

‘This one was dropped into his lap,’ Emma pointed out, although why she felt this instinct to leap to Pete’s defence, she didn’t know. ‘He’d never seen her before.’

‘The man has trouble with the women in his life, doesn’t he?’ Nell commented lightly. ‘Whether they’re patients or family.’

Emma bit back a comment which she might regret. Was Nell implying Pete’s troubles were his fault? Again, she felt a need to protect him and to leap to his defence, which she didn’t understand. He was extremely competent and very intelligent. He worked hard, he cared and he had the right priorities. Just because he’d been living in her house, that didn’t mean he needed her nurturing. What was wrong with her today?

‘Let’s take this one across to the unit,’ Nell added.

It took them another hour to get the baby settled in Glenfallon’s tiny special care unit, which was simply a small, closed-off room with thick, almost soundproof windows opening onto the rest of the maternity unit. It was most often staffed by the midwives rostered for post-partum care.

Lucy was already there, in the care of Sue North now, but she’d probably go home with her mother in a few days’ time, if her condition continued to be this good and she began to feed properly. Alethea’s arrival would necessitate the juggling of staff so that Emma and a roster of two or three other experienced nurses could provide her with the acute care she’d need at first, round the clock.

In the meantime, Nell was staying.

‘I hope my department’s quiet,’ she said. ‘No doubt I’ll hear the yelling soon enough if it isn’t! We can let the dad come in and see Lucy now.’

Brian McNichol had been shepherded aside as soon as Patsy had been taken into the operating theatre. He’d probably been fed several gallons of tea by now. Emma had lost track of time. Where was Patsy? Still in Recovery? After her general anaesthesia and the extent of her bleeding, she’d probably be kept there for longer than usual. Had her husband been able to see her yet?

‘I’ll track him down,’ she said.

‘Rebecca Childer, too. She might need some encouragement. She seemed a little frightened about what to expect, and inclined to suggest it was all up to the nurses. Or her mother!’

‘We’ll work on that. I’ll hunt up some pamphlets on premmies, and talk to her and her mother as well, try and get her involved right from the beginning.’

Emma went back to the nurses’ station on the labour and delivery side of the unit, and found an unnatural level of quiet. No patients.

‘Just had a phone call from a first-timer in query early labour, but it sounded to me like a false alarm,’ Bronwyn summarised, lifting her head from the paperwork she was catching up on. ‘She’s not due for a couple of weeks. She wants to come in, but I expect we’ll be sending her home again. Pete Croft is chugging coffee in the kitchen if you want a progress report on Mrs McNichol.’

‘Oh, I do!’ Emma said. ‘And I’m hunting for the dad.’

‘I sent him off for breakfast. He was wandering around like a ghost.’

‘Dr Cassidy says Rebecca can see her baby now. Have you moved her to her room?’

‘Yes, half an hour ago,’ Bronwyn answered. ‘And her mother’s with her. I’ll take Brian McNichol round to Special Care as soon as he gets back from breakfast.’

As Bronwyn had said, Emma found Pete in the kitchen.

He’d evidently ‘chugged’ his coffee to good effect, and was holding his mug beneath the wall-mounted urn to fill it for a second time—or possibly a third—when Emma entered the room. He took a gulp of it black, then shuddered, grabbed the milk carton and splashed in a generous amount, before bringing the mug to his lips again.

Only then did he turn and see her standing there, and she had to quickly hide the awareness she suspected had been showing in her face. ‘Emma…’ he said, coming back to the present from what looked like a million miles away.

‘I was wondering…Mrs McNichol?’ she asked, before the beat of awkwardness could lengthen.

‘She lost a lot of blood,’ Pete answered. ‘Not enough to need a transfusion, but she’s on a fast drip and I’ll be watching her iron levels over the next few months. Thank goodness the baby started breathing when she did!’

‘What’s your sense about Alethea Childer?’ Emma asked.

‘I wanted to ask you that, actually, since you’ve been with her all the way through. How much did she weigh?’

‘Twelve-fifty grams.’

‘And we estimated thirty-three weeks gestation!’ He pressed his lips together, and she couldn’t help watching as they softened again when he continued to speak. ‘That’s small, even for the dates.’

‘I know.’ An average baby should have weighed several hundred grams more. ‘And Dr Cassidy doesn’t know why.’

‘Bothering her?’

‘Yes. She picked up a heart murmur as well, which she’s not sure about yet.’

‘Lucy McNichol has one, too.’

‘This time she thinks it may be more significant, but so far the heart is doing the job with no problems, so we’re hanging fire.’

‘Right.’ Pete shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. A tiny muscle twitched just above one cheekbone. ‘I guess I’m not all that surprised. Has the staffing been sorted?’

Emma nodded. ‘Yes, looks like it. Sue North knows what she’s doing. I’m in there, too, and they’ll juggled the roster. We’re all used to stretching when we have to.’

‘It may not be for long, if we end up sending Alethea Childer somewhere else.’

‘You don’t want to?’

‘Funny, but, no, I don’t.’ He gave an upside-down smile. His eyes had those creases around them again. ‘You’d think I might be keen to get this one off my hands. But she dropped on us out of the blue, and for some reason I don’t want to lose her again to another hospital just as quickly. Rebecca’s young. She has no confidence, and she’s not ready for this.’

‘She seems a little detached at this stage, like she might leave everything to us and just stay away.’

‘Maybe that explains why I’m feeling possessive.’

He leaned back against the kitchen countertop, with one elbow resting on it. The movement made his shirt tighten across his strong chest. The fluorescent light overhead sculpted shadows on the side of his face.

‘I feel like the baby belongs here,’ he went on. ‘And that we can do what we need to for her, with Nell on board. Unless that heart murmur turns out to be significant and she needs surgery. That, we couldn’t handle. That would mean Sydney or Melbourne.’

He took another gulp of his coffee, punctuating the heaviness of the statement. The movement firmed his mouth and stretched the planes of his cheeks a little.

‘If it’s an open ductus, the operation itself isn’t that complex any more, is it?’ Emma asked.

‘In relative terms, I guess. It’s a closed-heart procedure.’

‘They don’t have to open the heart itself.’ Emma understood this.

‘And no heart-lung machine required,’ Pete confirmed. ‘Start to finish, less than an hour. They make an opening in the left side of her chest, tie off the PDA and divide it. It’s about the width of a piece of string.’

‘Oh, huge!’ she drawled.

‘As I said, simple is relative. It would still need to be done in a major children’s hospital, by a paediatric surgeon. And what parent wants to think of a baby as small as Alethea in surgery when she’s just a few days old, no matter how skilled those guys are?’

‘I know.’ Emma leaned against the fridge and rubbed an aching calf with the side of her shoe. ‘Nell has hopes the murmur doesn’t mean anything. The baby’s oxygen saturation is up in the high nineties.’

‘That’s great! Are you heading back to Special Care now?’ He tipped out the rest of his coffee, rinsed the mug and rested it upside down on the sink.

‘Yes, I just wanted to catch up with you and make sure everything was still in hand on this side of the unit.’

‘Come on, then,’ he said.

He slipped past her and she followed in his wake at once. They walked along the U-shaped corridor together in a comfortable silence, and found Nell scribbling notes on Alethea’s chart, while Lucy slept peacefully. Both babies looked like tiny red frogs in the white expanse of their special, warmed humidicribs.

‘I’m heading off,’ Nell said, capping her pen. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Or sooner if you need me, Emma. If that oxygen sat rate drops, if the heart rate changes, you know what I’m looking for. Pete, she’s not as strong as you hoped. And there may—may—be a heart problem.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘Emma told me. You’re going to wait before doing any tests?’

‘Yes, as long as her levels are this good, but I want to talk to the mother about whether to send her to a higher level unit even if she doesn’t need surgery. There may be other problems. I just have that feeling, despite what the machines are saying. And this is a stretch for us.’

‘I know, Nell, but if there’s nothing specific, and if the mother is already too detached to get properly—’

‘Look, I’m not saying it’s an easy decision,’ she cut in. ‘There are pros and cons.’

‘There are always those.’

She ignored him. ‘We have to consider the downside of transporting a fragile baby, for a start. And you’re right. Taking a premmie away from a mother whose bonding is already tenuous could cause its own problems. But let’s think about it,’ she urged, her eyes bright. ‘Let’s get it right.’

She left without giving him time to reply, and Emma saw his jaw set.

Anger, or determination?

She wasn’t sure.

She didn’t think Pete was the kind of doctor who’d make up his mind and then stick to his guns out of ego and pride. She’d only ever seen him put the interests of his patients first. But she knew he was under pressure at the moment in his personal life, and there were pulls in both directions for Alethea.

Pete looked again at the baby and at the fluctuating red figures on the monitor, and Emma couldn’t help doing the same. The heart rate, respiration and oxygen saturation all showed up on screen at a glance. The baby’s nappy was as small and flat as an envelope. The little hat covered the whole of her tiny head, and her face looked as crumpled and ancient and inscrutable as that of an Eastern mystic.

‘Should we start trying for a bed in Sydney or Melbourne straight away?’ Pete muttered. He might have been talking to himself. ‘On paper, we’ve got the facilities and the staff. I’m glad I called in Nell.’

‘She’s good,’ Emma agreed.

So was he. Thorough and caring and imaginative in his approach. He wasn’t afraid to try something new, or to go out on a limb.

He was way out on a precarious one right at this moment, putting Rebecca’s chance to bond with her baby on a par with the baby’s potential need for a higher level of care. On the other hand, skin-to-skin human contact had been shown in repeated studies to be as physically important to a premmie’s development as oxygen, medication and specialist expertise.

He looked up.

‘Sorry. I’m still e-mailing you. Only verbally this time.’ He grinned, and there was a warm glint in his brown eyes that she responded to at once with a laugh.

‘Are you?’

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ he conceded. ‘But it was nice, Emma. Did I say that?’

‘You said it was a slice of paradise. My house. In your card, I mean.’ Emma cleared her throat. ‘You didn’t specifically mention the e-mails.’

She felt absurdly self-conscious beneath the warm wash of his words. In the confined space, they were standing closer than she felt comfortable with. It was ridiculous to be so aware of him, to feel this sense of closeness and this sense of knowing him, which was based on such a thin foundation.

‘Well, the e-mails were good,’ he said. ‘They helped.’

Emma blurted, ‘Is it Claire? Is that why you’re looking so stressed?’ Then could have cut out her tongue. He’d said nothing to encourage her to ask such a personal question. It was all coming from her.

He sighed, then muttered, ‘Yes, of course it’s Claire.’

‘I’m sorry, you don’t have to—’

‘I thought that we were in the home stretch.’ His mouth tightened and turned down. He spoke in a low, rapid way, and didn’t look at her. ‘We had decisions made and arrangements worked out. I thought. But Claire’s thrown that to the four winds, and I would have done so even if she hadn’t, because of the way she’s been behaving. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.’

He stopped, and looked up suddenly, with a ravaged expression that struck Emma to the heart. She felt the same need to touch him that had tingled in her fingers before. The same need to smooth out those creases around his eyes and softly stroke the brown skin at the back of his neck, to press his lips with her fingertips until they relaxed, and to tell him everything would be all right.

‘Oh, Pete!’ she said. It was heartfelt, but so inadequate.

‘I haven’t talked to anyone about this.’ His eyes were narrowed, and glittered with fatigue. ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Because you’re listening, I guess. Because you asked. You were here at the right moment, basically. The wrong moment, perhaps.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.’

‘No, it was fine. Only now I’m not offering you much choice about listening to a far more detailed reply than you wanted.’

‘I-it’s fine, Pete,’ she stammered, echoing the same word he’d used—safe and vague. ‘I’m happy—that is, I want to listen. If it’s a help.’

‘I’m petitioning for sole custody. Please, don’t talk to anyone about this!’

‘As if I would!’

He glanced around to check that the door was closed and that they were fully alone.

‘Couldn’t find a house I liked as much as yours,’ he said quietly. Emma had to step even closer in order to hear him, and came within range of his body heat and his clean male smell. ‘I’ve rushed into it. Had to, because I wanted a home for the girls. It’s part of that new development up on the hill overlooking the river.’

‘It’ll be beautiful when the gardens get going. I’ve driven through it. There are some lovely places.’

‘I know. But right now it’s arid. And I shouldn’t even begin to mind about that, because it’s the least of my problems. I don’t know what’s wrong with Claire,’ he repeated.

‘If you need anything, Pete…’ Emma offered, while wondering if even this token formula was overstepping the bounds. They weren’t friends. They were only colleagues, and he’d recently paid her three months of rent. The fact that they were standing this close didn’t mean anything personal.

‘Might,’ he answered. The single word told her nothing about how he’d received her offer. ‘I’ll let you know.’

‘Please, do.’

He nodded briefly, then looked at both babies’ monitors again, and she watched him literally turn his back on the brief moments of confession. With his back to her, he cleared his throat, massaged his temples with the thumb and middle finger of one hand, squared his shoulders, then turned to her again. ‘Patsy’s out of Recovery and in a private room. She wants to see the baby.’

‘Mary Ellen can organise that. She’s probably with Patsy now, starting to get her mobile.’

‘Keep me posted on any change in how Alethea’s doing. I want to be as involved as I can.’

‘Of course. You and Dr Cassidy are both down as her doctors.’

‘I’d better go. For some strange reason, a lot of other people in this town have the idea I’m their doctor as well!’ His smile was warm and kindled flame in his brown eyes, but Emma saw the effort in it and it soon faded.

Something vital seemed to leave the atmosphere of the room as soon as he’d gone.

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