Meredith Webber - The Heart Surgeon's Baby Surprise

She stared at the line on the stick, checked the packet’s instructions to make sure she was reading it properly, checked the line again, then gave a whoop of joy.

She was pregnant! It had happened!

She couldn’t stop smiling. To have a baby—to have a child on whom she could lavish a mother’s love—the love she’d missed out on as a child. Yes, her father had been wonderful, but she knew instinctively a mother’s love was different.

Theo!

How could she be so excited when she felt, deep in her heart, Theo really didn’t want another child?

Although now they knew each other better, might things not work out?

Might she not be able to have Theo and a child?

But the excitement she’d felt when she first saw the confirmation failed to return. She might have fallen in love with Theo, but in no way had he indicated he had similar feelings for her…

At least she’d have his child…

Meredith Webbersays of herself, ‘Some ten years ago, I read an article which suggested that Mills and Boon were looking for new medical authors. I had one of those “I can do that” moments, and gave it a try. What began as a challenge has become an obsession—though I do temper the “butt on seat” career of writing with dirty but healthy outdoor pursuits, fossicking through the Australian Outback in search of gold or opals. Having had some success in all of these endeavours, I now consider I’ve found the perfect lifestyle.’

Recent titles by the same author:

THE HEART SURGEON’S SECRET CHILD **CHILDREN’S DOCTOR, MEANT-TO-BE WIFE †THE SHEIKH SURGEON’S BABY *DESERT DOCTOR, SECRET SHEIKH *A PREGNANT NURSE’S CHRISTMAS WISH THE NURSE HE’S BEEN WAITING FOR †

** Jimmie’s Children’s Unit

* Desert Doctors

† Crocodile Creek

JIMMIE’S CHILDREN’S UNIT

The Children’s Cardiac Unit, St James’s Hospital, Sydney. A specialist unit where the dedicated staff mend children’s hearts…and their own!

BY

MEREDITH WEBBER

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

SHE was tall, she was blonde and she was beautiful. Theo Corones watched from the back of the team meeting as all the men in the room, most of whom were married, registered this fact.

‘Grace Sutherland, paediatric cardiac surgeon, trained in Cape Town, South Africa, then further studies in the UK. My main area of expertise is paediatric heart transplants.’

‘Of course, you’re a South African and following in famous footsteps,’ Alex Attwood, the head of the paediatric cardiac surgery team at St James’s Children’s Hospital, teased gently.

Was it because he was still thinking how beautiful she was that Theo saw the puzzled look on her face? She was intelligent enough to know from his voice that Alex was teasing her, so it seemed she wasn’t used to being teased.

Theo thought back to the briefing notes he’d had on the two new surgeons. Jean-Luc Fournier was from France, thirty-four years old and already considered good enough to head up a new unit at a hospital in Marseilles, and Grace Sutherland, thirty-five…

Surely by thirty-five you’d got used to being teased.

The meeting proceeded and Theo turned his attention to it, but that expression on Grace Sutherland’s face was like a missed note in a piece of music, so it stuck in a corner of his mind.

‘Grace, you’ll be working on Phil’s team, while Jean-Luc will work on mine. This is only for the first three months, then you’ll swap over so you both have a chance to see the two of us at work. Not that you’ll be observers—no, you’ll be operating with us and, when we’re not available, for us. And for that reason it’s important you know the whole team. Maggie Park, Phil’s wife, usually works as my anaesthetist—take a bow, Mags—while Aaron Gilchrist is the anaesthetist on Phil’s team.’

Aaron waved his hand at the two newcomers, while Alex went on to introduce the other theatre staff, nurses, registrars and residents who worked with the team.

‘And so we come to Theo, who works on both teams. At the moment we only have the one bypass machine—well, we have three but two are being modified to different specifications. Theo is working with the engineers in what spare time he gets—so he works with whoever is doing a procedure that requires bypass.’

Theo nodded his acknowledgement of the introduction but as both newcomers turned towards him he saw Grace Sutherland’s eyes for the first time. A pale clear blue, like the aquamarine stone in a ring his mother wore—like morning sky after a night of rain had cleared the dust and smog from the city…

‘Theo!’

Alex’s voice wasn’t exactly sharp but it made it clear Theo had missed some part of the conversation.

‘Sorry, Alex, you were saying?’

‘I was telling Grace and Jean-Luc you also ran the ECMO machines and would walk them through the way we use both machines later today.’

‘I’d be glad to,’ Theo replied, annoyed with himself for missing this conversation the first time. He was always focussed on work. And to be distracted by a blonde with aquamarine eyes—impossible!

Grace studied the man who worked the bypass machines. She’d been intrigued by his background when she’d read the notes she’d been given—brief bios of all members of the team.

What was different about Theo was that while most perfusionists—people specially trained to run bypass and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machines—were from a nursing background, Theo had been—and still was, she assumed—a doctor. A surgeon, in fact, who, for reasons unmentioned in the bio had turned from operating on small children to running the machines that kept them alive, before, after and during delicate operations.

It was a puzzle and she didn’t like puzzles. She’d have to ask him about it.

And now she’d sorted that out, she should stop looking at him—looking at him wasn’t going to provide an answer. But looking at him had made her register that he was a particularly good-looking man, big without being bulky, black hair shot through with silver here and there, dark eyes below well-shaped eyebrows. Her father always kept his eyebrows tidy, bemoaning the fact that many men, as they aged, didn’t bother.

It was, she realised, even as she considered Theo Corones’s eyebrows, a totally absurd thing for her to be thinking about in a team meeting and, sadly, a reflection of just how unlike other women she was! Other women, she was sure, would be checking out the straight nose and the full, well-defined lips and the way his profile resembled that of old Greek statues, but not her—she’d picked on eyebrows as a feature in his favour.

She sighed, aware she was so unlike other women she needed a planet of her own. Men were from Mars, women from Venus, and Grace from a galaxy far, far away…

The meeting broke up, and Jean-Luc, who would be living in the flat beneath hers for the six months she would be working in Sydney, was chatting to Maggie Park. That was another thing about people from galaxies far, far away—they couldn’t chat.

‘Would you like to see the machines now?’

She was pondering her inability to chat and assuring herself, for perhaps the millionth time, that it didn’t matter, when Theo asked the question. He’d come from somewhere behind her so she’d had no warning of his approach, and, being unprepared, his deep, velvety voice had sparked a peculiar reaction in her skin—prickly, like mild sunburn making its presence felt at the end of a day at the beach.