Marion Lennox - The Doctors’ Baby

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ he told her and handed over Robby with a promptness that made her chuckle. ‘Here’s your baby.’

Your baby.

That got to her.

She looked down at Robby, and then she looked up at Jonas. This was dangerous territory they were getting into, she thought-and she wondered if Jonas knew exactly how dangerous it really was.

He had it all worked out.

Back at the house, Em’s sometime receptionist, Amy, was waiting for them. The teenager had lunch on the table, and she smiled her welcome as Jonas ushered his brood indoors.

It was some brood. One partner and four children.

And one dog. Bernard made straight for his place under the sink and lay down. Immediately, he had two children tugging him up again.

And Amy was smiling at them all, making Em even more confused. ‘Hi.’

‘Hi, Amy. What are you doing here?’

‘Lou’s flu is better.’ Amy beamed as if that fact alone was little short of miraculous. The teenager really hadn’t enjoyed her short stint as medical rececptionist. ‘So Lou’s back at Reception and Dr Lunn knew I was out of work. To be honest, I’m happier childminding than I am waiting for someone to vomit all over the waiting-room floor. So when Dr Lunn suggested I be your short-term nanny I thought it’d be cool.’

Cool…

‘It fitted perfectly.’ Jonas beamed with the satisfaction of a man who’d just put in the final piece of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. ‘Isn’t it perfect, Dr Mainwaring?’

‘Perfect,’ she said faintly, and his smile faded.

‘It is. It will work, Em. It must.’

‘I can see that.’ That it must.

‘Amy will be here during the day, and at night only one of us needs to be on call. So the kids can be settled.’

But Em was still holding Robby close. Robby, who had such a hold on her heart…

‘Why are you looking afraid?’ Jonas asked gently, and she knew that he saw way too much for her liking. He knew her too well. Instinctively he knew what she was thinking, and she found the sensation almost frightening.

‘I’m just trying to figure how I can let go of Robby-again,’ she murmured, and he looked at her for a long time.

‘Maybe you don’t want to,’ he said at last.

‘But-’

‘And maybe there’s no need.’ He reached forward and touched her very lightly on the nose-a feather touch that sent electric currents straight through her. ‘Have a think about that. With Amy’s help, you don’t need to. Meanwhile, if I can leave you with Amy and the kids, I really need to go to Blairglen and see Anna.’

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘This is going to work,’ he told her strongly. ‘If we make it.’ He looked at her for a long, long moment, in his eyes a question, but what he saw seemed to satisfy him. He gave a decisive nod.

‘OK, kids,’ he told his niece and nephews. ‘You know what’s happening. I’m leaving you to get settled with Dr Em and Amy, but I’ll be back tonight to tell you how Mummy is. OK?’

‘OK,’ they quavered, and Em knew they were as scared as she was.

But, like them, she had no choice.

‘Jonas,’ she said as he turned away, and he turned straight back to face her.

‘Yes?’ Their eyes met, and once again that intangible thing passed between them. That thing that scared Em so much…

‘Stay as long as you need to tonight,’ she told him. ‘Amy and I will be fine. Give our love to Anna. And…’

‘And?’

‘And I have all my fingers and toes crossed for her,’ she said simply. ‘And anything else I can think of.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. Their eyes locked above the heads of the four children and once again that silent message was passed.

They may as well have kissed…

IT WAS midnight before Jonas returned.

Em was wide awake when his car pulled in-not because she needed to be, but because she simply couldn’t sleep.

Everyone else was sleeping. There was no reason not to be asleep herself, and no reason why she should be nervous about having the children on her own. Jonas, she discovered, had even provided for night-shift child care.

Amy went home at six but if both doctors were called out, the arrangement was to open the connecting door to the hospital, alert the night staff, and the house could be treated as an extra kids’ ward, to be checked by the nurses at need.

It was so simple, Em thought. She just wished her feelings about Jonas were as straight forward.

Not so simple either were her feelings for the little boy in the crib beside her bed. Her bedroom was the logical place for him to be, she’d decided, a decision made even easier by the boys’ insistence that Bernard sleep in their bedroom, but the reason why her heart turned over at every movement Robby made wasn’t logical in the least.

She didn’t intend to have babies, she told herself for maybe the thousandth time in her life. So…she couldn’t attach herself to Robby. She couldn’t!

Just like she was never going to marry. There simply wasn’t room in her life for a family.

But she loved-loved-the baby sleeping beside her. She could no longer ignore it. And part of her loved the fact that her too-big house was now full of kids and dogs and…

And Jonas.

This was all far, far too complicated!

And now here was Jonas, returning to make her heart do things that were completely foreign to her. Complicating her life still further.

She should stick her head under her pillow and force herself to sleep, she told herself crossly, but she could do no such thing.

Instead, as Jonas’s key turned in the lock, she padded through to the living room to meet him.

He was exhausted.

She’d left the wall lamp on in case one of the children wandered in the night. It threw enough light on Jonas’s face to show his facial features harshly etched, as if he was deeply exhausted. His eyes were dark and shadowed, and the expression on his face was grim.

‘Jonas?’ Her heart lurched in fear. Dear heaven, Anna… What had happened?

But he saw her in the shadows, and his face cleared like magic. ‘Em.’

‘How is it with Anna?’

He’d taken a step toward her-for a moment she thought he was going to reach for her-but the tone of her voice stopped him.

It was meant to. She was getting far too emotionally involved here. She had to stand back a bit.

She couldn’t take his proffered hands.

So she made her voice clinical-doctor enquiring of colleague about a mutual patient-and she waited until he pulled himself into order.

‘I… She’s fine.’

She relented, just a little. ‘But you’re not fine,’ she told him. ‘I can see that. Come and have a cup of tea and tell me about it.’

‘You couldn’t make that a brandy?’

‘It went as badly as that?’

‘No.’ His face twisted into a grimace of a smile. ‘Hell, no. It’s just that I’m exhausted.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

Of course he hadn’t-and at least she’d had the train journey for sleep. Once more, her heart twisted. Somehow she managed to keep her voice dispassionate, but there were still these darned undercurrents running through her. Undercurrents she didn’t know what on earth to do with.

She took refuge in practicalities, crossing to the dresser, finding the brandy and pouring him a drink.

Handing it to him was tricky. She had to cross her emotional barrier. Her closeness limit. But then she backed away and hitched herself up onto the dresser, to watch him from a safe distance.

‘I won’t bite, you know,’ he said conversationally, and she managed a smile at that.

‘Nope. But I like it here.’ She motioned to the armchair. ‘Sit down and tell me all.’

He sat, but his eyes didn’t leave hers. ‘You look like a pale blue, very odd sort of garden gnome,’ he complained. ‘A garden gnome after a spray-paint job. You don’t look doctor-like at all.’

She thought about that, looked down at her jogging suit and smiled. ‘Hmm. Don’t you approve of the night-time me? Would you like to come through to my surgery while I put on a white coat?’

He grinned. ‘That’s kinky, Dr Mainwaring. I think I’ll leave it like it is. In fact, I kind of like it. Gnome-like instead of doctor-like.’

She smiled again, but then there was silence. Things settled between them. Almost. Em was still achingly aware of the closeness of him. He was eight feet away. Or, if you looked at it another way, he was three short steps away…

‘Tell me about Anna,’ she managed, and waited some more.

He looked at her, with that strange, questioning look that told her he only half believed she wanted to know. He wasn’t accustomed to professional caring, she thought. He wasn’t used to country doctors who worried about their patients on a personal as well as a professional level.

‘It’s gone as well as it could have,’ he told her.

‘Which means?’ Once more, she waited.

‘Small tumour. As the X-rays showed, it’s less than a centimetre across. It was all contained in the soft tissue under the breast, and it doesn’t look like there’s any spread at all. They’ve taken a fair margin, but there’s no sign of dispersion. They haven’t had to touch the nipple, so she’ll be left with one breast just slightly smaller than the other. If the pathology shows the margins are clear, I doubt Anna will even need a prosthesis.’

‘That’s great. And the nodes?’

‘They’ve done a complete node clearance. It looks good.’ Jonas’s face cleared then, but he looked down into the brandy as if he was trying desperately to see into the future. ‘One node was slightly enlarged, but we have to wait until late tomorrow or the next day for the pathology results.’

‘Oh, Jonas…’

‘It’s a bloody long wait,’ he said.

‘Longer for Anna than for you.’ But still it was hard for him. Suddenly she could bear it no longer. Slipping off her perch, she took the steps to cross the barrier between them. She placed her hands on the back of his neck and started to massage, slowly, expertly easing the knots of tension across his shoulder blades.