she is in labour, let’s see if we can do something about slowing things down … at least long enough so we can do something to give the babies’ lungs a chance,’ he said, putting such thoughts to the back of his head with all the other things about Jenny that he had to ignore, like her surprisingly long legs that almost enabled her to keep pace with him. Instead, it was time to concentrate, setting his brain working to produce a list of possible complications that could have sparked this situation with Aliyah.
‘Hi, Aliyah,’ Jenny called as soon as she caught sight of their white-faced patient being wheeled swiftly into the unit by a uniformed paramedic. ‘You love us so much that you couldn’t stay away?’
‘S-something like that,’ the young woman muttered through trembling lips, then burst into noisy sobs. ‘P-please help me,’ she begged, clutching at Jenny’s hand as tears coursed down her elegant cheeks. ‘I can’t lose my babies. I can’t … not after everything we’ve gone through. You must save my little boys, even if you can’t save …’
‘Aliyah, no!’ her darkly handsome husband interrupted fiercely before dropping to his knees in front of the wheelchair. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you,’ he said before breaking into an impassioned speech in his own language.
‘Jenny …’ said Daniel’s familiar deep voice behind her, and instantly she snapped out of her unexpected fascination with the scene in front of her.
She quickly slipped into her proper role, escorting Aliyah through to Daniel’s examination room and taking her vital signs in preparation for his evaluation of the situation, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t feel a residual ache of envy for the depth of love between Aliyah and her husband.
‘So, let’s see what’s going on, then, shall we?’ Daniel said as she finished adding the latest findings to Aliyah’s file. ‘Your blood pressure’s up and so is your pulse—which is perfectly logical in a stressful situation—but they shouldn’t be raising your temperature.’
Jenny had thought the same thing and had the necessary vials ready when the decision was made to do a range of blood tests.
‘In the meantime, you say you haven’t been spotting but you have been experiencing pains.’ His dark brows drew together thoughtfully. ‘Shall we do an ultrasound to check up on your little passengers before we do anything else?’
‘Please!’
‘Yes, please!’ The Farouks answered almost simultaneously, making everyone smile in spite of the tension in the room.
‘Well, let me get you a nice big glass of water before we set everything up,’ Jenny said. ‘For some reason, that’s the preferred method of torture used by ultrasound technicians … to make pregnant women waddle around with a baby pressing on a full bladder.’ It was a joke that she often told to pregnant women in an attempt at sidetracking their thoughts, but it rarely worked very well with women as stressed-out as Aliyah Farouk, finally pregnant after a string of unexplained spontaneous abortions.
This whole side of the unit was relatively new to Jenny, who’d spent several years working with the most fragile of their premature babies under the unit’s director, Josh Weatherby. Then Daniel had joined the team, the focus of his attention being the at-risk mothers and babies—those who needed his special skills if they were to have a hope of a successful pregnancy—and she’d found herself fascinated by the new field.
Of course, as soon as word had gone round that he was good-looking, heterosexual and single, there had been much laughter among the existing staff about the sudden influx of nurses wanting to join his specialist side of the unit even if it meant undergoing further training, but for Jenny, that had just been a particularly delicious bonus.
She had decided to take advantage of the opportunity when it was offered, as a way to step back from the constant minute-by-minute stress of caring for babies who could stop breathing at any moment, or suffer from a catastrophic intracranial bleed with very little warning, or develop necrotising enterocolitis, or any one of dozens of other complications.
She hadn’t realised until it was too late that it could be every bit as stressful caring for the pregnant women referred to the unit and the children they were fighting to carry, especially as she grew to know them over the weeks of their pregnancy. Anyway, by the time she’d realised it, she was hooked on the job and the delight of working with someone as focused and professional as Daniel. The fact that he also had a wicked sense of humour and was one of the best-looking and sexiest members of staff, causing a spike in her pulse rate whenever he entered a room, had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Aliyah Farouk had been one of the first patients she had met in the at-risk category, and she’d immediately warmed to the woman, feeling an empathy for her desire to continue with her legal work as long as possible. It had been during a wait for an earlier ultrasound that Aliyah had confided the details of her battle with her ultra-traditional parents to be allowed to study the law that had struck a chord with Jenny’s own battles after her decision to become a nurse rather than follow her parents’ preferred route as a third-generation doctor.
‘Let’s see if we can get a clear picture, yet,’ the ultrasound technician said a while later as she squirted a small mound of clear pale blue gel on the neat swell of Aliyah’s belly. ‘And there’s absolutely no truth to the rumour that we keep that gel in the fridge so we can shock the baby into running around.’
A shoulder pressed firmly against hers as Jenny craned her neck to see the shadowy image appearing on the screen and she didn’t need to glance at the lean muscled body or draw in the mixture of soap, hospital laundry starch and warm man to know that it was Daniel standing beside her. Her galloping pulse had already told her that.
‘Well, baby one is still definitely there,’ the technician said as she gestured towards the patterns of dark and light that differentiated between foetus and the surrounding water and maternal tissues. ‘And there’s a second very healthy heart there, too. Listen.’
The rapid patter of two foetal heartbeats, one after the other, filled the room and one of the little creatures suddenly seemed to react to the fact that they were all intruding on what should have been a private place, almost seeming to wave a fist at them.
‘All right, little ones,’ the technician chuckled as she tapped the necessary buttons to record the scan and silence the Doppler. ‘We’ve seen that you’re both safe and sound in there, so we’ll go away and leave you in peace, now.’
Aliyah burst into noisy sobs of relief and Jenny was certain that there was a suspicious gleam in her stoic husband’s eye, too, as he cradled her dark head against his shoulder.
‘So, if there is nothing wrong with the babies, why is Aliyah having pains?’ he demanded, apparently only allowing his fear to show now that his wife couldn’t see his face. ‘Is there something wrong with her?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out with the tests we’ve taken,’ Daniel explained calmly. ‘It shouldn’t be long before we have the first of the results back.’
‘Now that the ultrasound’s been done, it would be a good time to do some urine tests, too,’ Jenny suggested. ‘Aliyah’s probably desperate for the bathroom by now.’
‘Good idea,’ Daniel agreed. ‘And then, could we find her a comfortable place to rest until we know what’s going on?’
‘You think I need to stay in hospital?’ The idea clearly horrified her. ‘You think it’s something so serious that I can’t go home?’
‘I’ve no idea at the moment,’ he said and Jenny registered that, although she hadn’t known Daniel for very long, in that time he’d never been anything less than absolutely honest with a patient. ‘But it would be a good idea if you tried to stay as calm as possible until we get all the results, if only for the sake of your blood pressure. It would be better for the babies, too.’
‘And for me,’ her harried husband added.
Jenny stayed until Aliyah