The Single Dad's New-Year Bride

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Hailey had been on too many ward rounds that were rushed and left the parents with more questions than answers. Callum didn’t operate that way. He seemed genuinely interested, concerned and willing to listen. He also engaged his entire team, med students included, teaching as he went, and it was obvious they liked and respected him.

He was careful to include her as well, seeking her opinion, consulting her about decisions, making it nigh on impossible not to interact with him. She’d hoped the round would be quick and painless but she’d been wrong. She was more aware of him than ever now she’d seen the professional side of him.

The truth was, even after thirty minutes, she had to grudgingly admit she admired the hell out of him. An irresistible mix when the kiss-that-never-happened still loomed large in her consciousness. Damn it all. This was a man she could like.

The surgical bays were full of the morning’s ENT list. Several tonsillectomies, some with adenoids as well and others with grommets. The surgeons would be in to see them later but Callum took the time to check all was well with them.

The medical bays sported a mix of conditions. From their frequent flyer, Lucy, with cystic fibrosis, to Troy, an eight-year-old cerebral palsy patient with pneumonia, and an adventurous three-year-old, Jake, who had petted a possum and ended up with a bitten arm for his trouble. The wound had developed cellulitis, necessitating intravenous antibiotics.

‘Hello, Jake,’ Callum greeted as they stopped at the three-year-old’s bedside. ‘I heard you wrestled a lion the other day.’

Jake giggled and looked at his mother, who smiled at Callum. ‘No, it was a crocodile, wasn’t it, Jakey?’

Jake giggled again.

‘Is it OK if I have a look at where this croc got you?’ Callum grinned.

Jake nodded shyly and held out his bandaged arm. The other arm was wrapped up too, to secure the IV. Hailey reached out to remove the dressing but Callum had already started unwinding it. She was so used to doing things like this for doctors that it was a nice change to come across one who could do his own dirty work.

‘Ah, now, see here,’ Callum said to his students as he revealed the wound. ‘This is a classic case of cellulitis. A central wound and a reddened area of skin surrounding it where the subcutaneous tissues have been inflamed. And see,’ Callum said, pointing to the perfectly formed outer edge of the angry-looking area, ‘the definite demarcation line where the inflammation halts.’

The students peered closer and nodded.

‘How big was that croc, Jake?’ Callum asked. ‘That’s an impressive wound.’

‘He was this big,’ Jake said, his eyes almost as wide as his outstretched arm span, getting into the swing of the game.

The team laughed. Hailey was still smiling when Callum rewound the bandage. Their gazes met and Callum winked at her. Her smile slipped. The memory of how he had done exactly that on the balcony taunted her and the strange fluttery sensation it had caused in the pit of her stomach returned.

‘He’s going to need longer on the antibiotics,’ Callum said, addressing Jake’s mother. ‘We’ll review the wound every day but I wouldn’t count on being out of here for at least two more days.’

The team waited for Callum to wash his hands and then moved on to the four-bedded high-dependency bay, directly opposite the nurses’ station, which currently housed only three patients.

There was twelve-month-old Henry, an ex-prem baby with a trachy tube for his floppy airway. His mother usually managed him at home but Henry had developed a respiratory infection and had become quite sick very rapidly, ending up in ICU for a week. He was on the mend now and was due for discharge some time in the next few days.

In the next bed Tristan, a very healthy-looking four-year-old was sitting up, watching television with his father. He was being monitored after ingestion of four of his grandmother’s blood-pressure tablets. He was in hospital as a precaution only and, barring any unexpected adverse reaction, would be discharged tomorrow.

Tahlia, a very cute newborn diabetic, was kicking up a ruckus. She’d also been a transfer from ICU. She would be with them for some time while her parents learned how to manage the condition.

‘Can you hold her while I go and get her bottle?’ Rosemary, the junior nurse who’d been allocated the bay for the shift, asked Hailey.

Hailey nodded and took the swaddled infant. Tahlia, well used to being picked up after her four weeks in hospital, settled instantly. Hailey held her while the round continued.

‘You’re a natural,’ Callum murmured as he brushed past her to wash his hands.

Hailey looked down into Tahlia’s blue gaze and realised she’d been subconsciously swaying. Well, yes, she was a paeds nurse after all. And prior to that she’d been a midwife. So, yes, she was good with kids.

But she wasn’t the same nurse who had gone away to London. What had happened there had taught her to keep her emotional distance. Made her wary of getting too involved with her patients. Once she may have been a natural. Now she was just doing her job.

Rosemary came back and Hailey handed Tahlia over gratefully. The round ended and Hailey scurried away to let the other nurses know the relevant changes pertaining to their patients and then sat to document the decisions from the round in each patient’s chart.

She was aware of Callum as his team lingered in the nurses’ station. His voice was totally distracting, deep and well modulated—very easy on the ear. His laugh practically shimmied along her nerves, shattering her concentration.

They eventually took their leave. Callum said goodbye and she returned it, not looking up from the chart, feigning complete absorption in her task. But her hand shook betrayingly and she let out a breath as Callum, his voice and his laugh finally left the ward.

An hour later, Hailey was counting down the minutes to the end of her shift—ten, to be exact—and the start of her days off. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Callum’s comments and she was looking forward to having a few days’ respite from his presence.

She was checking all her patient’s fluid charts when Joyce, the ward cleaner, approached. Joyce had been cleaning 2B’s floors and keeping everything spick and span for over two decades. Hailey had no doubt that at any given time she could eat off the floors safe in the knowledge that no bacteria would dare challenge the cleaner’s authority. Joyce was almost part of the furniture around the ward and was regarded as one of the team.

There was an old adage in nursing. Patients told doctors a little, nurses a lot and the cleaning staff everything. And a good nurse knew it. Joyce was her first port of call when one of the parents was reticent with information.

‘There’s an alarm going off next door.’ Joyce jabbed her thumb towards the high-dependency bay. ‘There’s no one in there.’

An urgent beeping from a saturation monitor worked its way into her consciousness. She realised then that it had been going off for a while. Hailey frowned. There was no one there? She’d subconsciously blocked the noise out, knowing it was Rosemary’s bay and the other nurse was supposed to be there.

The alarm persisted and Hailey thanked Joyce, making her way next door. She didn’t hurry, knowing that it would probably be just a dislodged probe. The bay was empty of any parents and also empty of Rosemary, as Joyce had indicated. She wasn’t supposed to leave the high-dependency bay without getting someone to take her place. The alarm was coming from Henry’s bed and Hailey strolled over, still unconcerned.

But when she got there, it was immediately obvious the alarm was for real. The sats monitor was recording Henry’s oxygen saturations as seventy per cent and one look at Henry confirmed the dire figure. He was flailing his arms around, gasping for air, like a fish out of water, his lips and peripheries tinged with blue, sweat beading his forehead.

‘Oh, no,’ Hailey muttered. Was Henry’s trachy blocked or had he just worked himself into a state, exacerbating his malacia? She hit the emergency call button on the wall near the end of the cot with one hand as she manoeuvred the cot side down with the other.

Callum, who had returned to the ward to fill out the paperwork for a pending admission, was at the nurses’ station when the distinctive tone of the emergency call went off. He looked at the nurse call board that displayed all the bed numbers and quickly located the source of the emergency.

He strode into the high-dependency bay to find a very worried Hailey frantically suctioning Henry’s trachy. One look at the little boy’s panic-filled gaze and cyanosed lips was enough to confirm the urgency of the situation.

‘What happened?’ he demanded, yanking the resus bag off the wall and twisting on the oxygen meter it was connected to, satisfied to hear the hiss of gas inflating the bag.

‘Not sure. I think he must have plugged his trachy,’ Hailey said, withdrawing the suction catheter from the artificial airway. ‘It’s no use. I can’t pass it. It must be completely blocked.’

Callum nodded, trusting her assessment. ‘We’re going to have to replace it.’

The alarm continued to trill in the background, the tone getting lower as Henry’s saturations continued to plummet further. Fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight. The little boy’s colour was getting worse the more oxygen deprived he became.

Hailey glanced at Callum, her heartbeat thundering in her ears. A red flush was creeping up her neck. She hesitated a split second before she nodded.

‘What’s the matter?’ Yvonne demanded as two other nurses, including a very pale-looking Rosemary, joined them.

‘Get the resus trolley,’ Hailey ordered, her gaze not leaving her patient as she fumbled with the emergency box of supplies kept on Henry’s bedside cabinet.

‘I’ll dilate the stoma,’ Callum said as he snipped the tapes that secured the useless trachy in place. ‘You place the airway.’

Hailey nodded as she handed him the trachy dilators. The noise of the alarm and the controlled panic that surrounded her as Yvonne barked orders and nurses performed their much practised roles faded as adrenaline honed her instincts. She was aware only of Callum and Henry as they worked in tandem to secure the little boy a patent airway.

Callum whipped out the old trachy and inserted the dilators into the hole in Henry’s neck. Hailey, her fingers trembling, ripped open the packaging of a new trachy and deftly inserted the sturdy, plastic airway into the tract. She held it in place for Callum as he attached the resus bag and gently puffed some breaths into Henry’s lungs.

The little boy pinked up almost immediately, the tone on the sats monitor getting higher and higher as his oxygen saturations climbed rapidly back into the nineties. Henry started to cry as panic was replaced with relief. The whole episode had obviously terrified him.

‘Crisis averted,’ Callum said, letting out a pent-up breath.

Hailey nodded. It had seemed like an hour, though, in reality, only two minutes had passed since Joyce had alerted her to the emergency. But their job wasn’t over yet and she wasn’t going to break out the champagne until it was. ‘Let’s secure it,’ she said.

Despite not being able to make any noise due to the position of the trachy, Henry was still bawling, great silent sobs, taking full advantage of being able to fill his lungs with air.

‘It’s OK, baby,’ Hailey murmured as she tied the trachy tapes, anchoring them around the back of his neck. It was a finicky job at the best of times, made that much more difficult by an aggrieved Henry and her badly trembling fingers.

Henry’s crying was exacerbated by frequent coughing bouts and by the time the tapes were tied and Hailey had suctioned him, the little boy was in a state. Hailey didn’t give it a second thought. She scooped the little boy up into her arms and hugged him tightly to her.

‘Shh, baby, shh,’ she crooned, rocking him, her own heart rate galloping as she allowed herself to think about the potential consequences had she not responded to Joyce’s comment.

Callum put a hand on her shoulder and one on Henry’s back, rubbing it gently, also murmuring soothing words to the fractious child. Hailey didn’t object, too pleased to have had Callum with her during the incident to reject his company now.

She could hear Yvonne talking to Rosemary about the importance of vigilance somewhere behind her. Henry was settling and she pressed her forehead against his, shutting her eyes.

‘You OK?’

Hailey looked up into Callum’s concerned grey gaze. She gave a half laugh, half sigh. ‘I am now.’

Callum smiled. He was seeing a different side to Hailey. She was holding Henry tightly reminding him of a mother lion with one of her cubs. Like the way she’d drawn Tom close the other night. He’d been right earlier—she was a natural. She’d known instinctively that Henry had needed comfort. Just as she had known how to talk to Tom the other night. Not like a bratty, unwelcome kid, but like an equal.

‘Thank you. You were great.’

‘Really?’ She grimaced. ‘I felt all fingers and thumbs.’

He nodded, still stroking Henry’s back. ‘You were very cool under pressure.’

She did laugh this time. ‘Didn’t feel very cool inside.’

He shrugged. ‘That’s only normal. We wouldn’t be human if something like this didn’t freak us out a little.’

Hailey rubbed her cheek against Henry’s head as he snuggled into her neck. ‘You, too?’

‘Just because I wear a white coat, it doesn’t mean that an emergency situation won’t send my blood pressure up.’

Hailey nodded. She’d dealt with quite a few emergency situations over the course of her nursing career but they still managed to turn her into jelly on the inside. It was nice to hear an experienced paediatrician admitting to similar feelings.

‘He’s asleep.’

Hailey looked down into Henry’s sweet, sleeping face. ‘I’m sure he’s utterly exhausted, poor darling.’ She laid him gently back in his cot.

Callum watched as she covered him with a colourful bunny rug and lingered, caressing his cheek. She obviously cared about her young charges. She would make a great mother. The kind of mother Tom had been nagging him about to give him that baby brother.

‘I’d better get back to my paperwork,’ he said, dragging his thoughts away from the realm of fantasy.

Hailey watched him go, her hand still on the sleeping bundle in the cot. Working side by side with Callum to bring Henry back from the brink had been real nail-biting stuff but she couldn’t deny how alive it had made her feel or how long it had been since she’d felt this invigorated.

It would be wrong to read too much into it.

CHAPTER THREE

THE buzz that had infused Hailey immediately after the emergency with Henry dissipated quickly and she left the hospital feeling edgy. Coming down from an adrenaline rush always left her with a jittery, strung-out feeling. The best antidote for that? Shopping.

She drove to her apartment and had a quick shower, pleased to be rid of her uniform. She’d always worn it with pride but some days it was too much a reminder of work and her hand trembled slightly as she remembered the events of the day. She wished she could be sure it was the effects of the adrenaline but she suspected Callum’s touch, as she had held Henry, was also having an impact.

Damn the man. Things were finally getting back on track in her life. She didn’t need to derail her progress like this. She threw on some clothes, picked up her bag and strode out of her apartment, determined not to think about work or Henry’s blue lips and panicked face or Callum Craig.

The noise of the crowds and the hustle and bustle were instantly distracting. The announcements over the PA and the piped music gave her something else to think about. The concentration required to calculate discounts and specials and colour co-ordinate with her existing wardrobe was wonderfully absorbing. OK, her local shopping mall was hardly Oxford Street but it was good therapy nevertheless.

Yes, there were probably healthier ways of dealing with work stress. Fitness freaks probably would have jogged it out of their system. Or gone to the gym. Or to their favourite health-food bar and overdosed on carrot juice and wheatgrass smoothies.

Or some may even have rung a close work colleague or their best friend and debriefed. Gone out for a drink. Shot the breeze. Sought some female comfort. But Hailey had felt too disconnected from her friends since her return from overseas to have even considered that option.

Still, shopping was better than some pursuits. A nurse she’d befriended in London used to go out to a nightclub and pick up a man after a particularly harrowing shift. She’d maintained that there was nothing like sex to make you forget. And perhaps she’d been right. But Hailey was hard pressed at the moment not to think of sex and Callum Craig together so that definitely hadn’t been an option.