Tina Beckett - Cinderella And The Surgeon / Miracle Baby For The Midwife

Her skin prickled. He wasn’t saying anything out loud. But it felt like he was accusing her of something.

‘Experience with these babies tells me that if something is going to go wrong, it generally happens in the first forty-eight hours after surgery.’

The time when she was part of the team watching Billy.

She tilted her chin, part of her felt defiant, and part of her felt distinctly annoyed by his unsaid implication.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. She knew when surgery had started yesterday. If it had taken eight hours, it couldn’t have finished until well after midnight. Harry had already been here when she’d come in for her shift. She knew she hadn’t slept last night, but had he?

‘Are you staying close by? You’ve had a quick turnaround.’

She wasn’t even sure where the observation came from, and the instant it came out her mouth she wasn’t entirely comfortable with how it sounded.

But Harry didn’t seem to notice. ‘I’m only a few miles away in Belgravia, but I stayed here last night to keep an eye on Billy.’

‘Oh.’ She nodded. Belgravia. Of course. He was supposed to be some kind of royalty, wasn’t he? Of course that’s where he’d stay. Not like herself, who had to travel nearly an hour each day to get to work.

He pulled something from his pocket, then cleared his throat. ‘I left a note for the NICU nurse last night about all the things I wanted monitored in Billy.’

She glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘I do know how to do postoperative care, Harry. This isn’t my first rodeo, you know.’ There was no way she was touching that list. Her eyes quickly ran down it. It was what they would do for every baby postsurgery, with the exception of one test that could easily be ordered with the rest of the blood work.

She pressed her lips together and tried not to snap. Everything about this guy just seemed to annoy her. Even the way his aftershave seemed to linger in the air between them. ‘I guess when you move around a lot you don’t know what’s normal in each NICU. But you don’t need to worry about the Queen Victoria. We have a reputation of excellence because we’ve earned it.’

Was that too pointed? She didn’t think so. It seemed more factual to her.

He wasn’t wearing a typical doctor white coat and her eyes were drawn to the muscles beneath the pale blue shirt he wore. The shirt was clearly tailored, defining all the parts of him it should. It had short sleeves—just like all doctors were supposed to wear in clinical areas, but the short sleeves drew her attention to his biceps. Some place she definitely didn’t need to look.

‘Point taken,’ said Harry frostily. ‘But I’d still like my post-op instructions followed. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.’

He was still holding the piece of paper towards her. It was like a standoff. She didn’t want to take it. She didn’t. But Jill came out of the kitchen and started walking towards them. The last thing she needed was for Billy’s mum to think there was any kind of issue between the staff looking after her child. Esther reached out and grabbed the paper, stuffing it in her pocket.

‘Fine.’

One of his eyebrows quirked upwards. ‘Fine,’ he agreed before turning and walking away.

She moved quickly, doing her routine checks on Billy, followed by routine checks on the little girl she was taking care of too.

She’d hoped that Harry would take the cue to leave the NICU. Surely he must be tired? Or at the very least have other work to do. But apparently not. He settled in and made himself comfortable in a corner of the NICU, opening up a laptop and sitting next to one of the phones.

The phone calls were brisk. He seemed to consult on a whole host of cases, some in the UK, and some in Europe.

Not that she was listening to what he was doing. Of course not. She just kept hoping that one of those calls would give him an incentive to actually leave the NICU.

Every time she turned around she felt as if she could feel his eyes on her. At first she told herself it was her imagination. But on the few occasions she looked up, they definitely locked gazes, making heat rush into her cheeks.

She chewed the inside of her cheek as she logged in to one of the patient monitoring systems to update her nursing notes on Billy.

There was a little pink flash in the bottom right-hand corner. Someone else was in these notes. That wasn’t too unusual. The lab could be uploading results. Or someone else could be viewing x-rays or ultrasounds. But then the little flash turned blue, and Esther’s temperature turned red.

Now, someone was looking at the nursing notes. Her nursing notes. The ones she hadn’t even written yet. And all of sudden she didn’t have a single doubt who it was.

This guy was checking up on her, and that made her mad. She couldn’t even remember being supervised this much as a student nurse. When she’d come to the Queen Victoria to do her additional midwifery training it had only taken a few shifts for the staff she worked with to realise she was already trained as a nurse and was clearly competent. Of course, labour and deliveries were supervised. But when she was giving out regular medicines and writing up notes, the staff didn’t need to double-check as she already had a professional registration. So this definitely felt like being under the microscope. And she didn’t like it—not one bit.

The temptation to write Get Lost in the electronic system was overwhelming. It would appear to him in live time. Unfortunately this system was designed to keep a permanent log of everything recorded. So, if she typed it once—even if she deleted it a few seconds later—it could always be pulled up on a previous search.

It was designed to stop users changing records at a later date, but had actually proved a fail-safe for one midwife who’d accidentally recorded notes in the wrong patient record, deleted them, then had to deal with an emergency. The timing had meant she’d totally forgotten to go back and add the notes into the correct patient record. When questions had been asked later, the system could prove the record had been made, just not in the right place.

The midwife still got into trouble, just not as much as she could have.

Esther ignored Harry. She had to. Instead, she quickly typed Billy’s latest observations and results, along with a few thoughts of her own. Then she flipped into the records for Jill and made a few notes too. Jill was also still under observation and Esther had a few concerns.

An hour later, Harry was back by her side. He didn’t speak, but his shoes came into her line of vision. Italian handmade leather shoes. Something she’d only ever seen on movie stars before. Even his shoes annoyed her.

Was she maybe being irrational?

She waited until he’d sounded Billy’s chest again. ‘Why were you checking my notes?’

His hands flinched. ‘I wasn’t specifically checking your notes, Esther.’

‘You were. I can tell when someone is looking at the page I’m on.’

He gave her a sideways glance. ‘I was reviewing all of Billy’s records. From his delivery, to his first films, his consecutive test results and all of his medical and nursing notes. I like to be cautious. I like to take a big-picture look at my patients.’ He turned to face her. He gave her a reluctant kind of look. ‘I often think that the observations of the midwives or nurses that care for the patients are the most important. They might notice things that other people miss.’ He paused and ran one hand through his thick rumpled hair. There was something about that motion. The look on his face as he did it that made her breath catch somewhere at the back of her throat. Sorrow. Pain. Regret.