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The Pull Of The Moon
Darlene Graham
9 MONTHS LATERMoonstruck?Dr. Danni Goodlove would like to blame everything on the moon. If it hadn't been full that night, maybe the emergency room would have been quieter. Maybe one of the E.R. doctors would've had time to patch up firefighter Matt Creed. Maybe Danni could have stayed in Labor and Delivery where she belonged instead of attending Matt's injuries–and struggling to control her own heart rate.She might be able to blame that night on the full moon. But how could she explain what happened next? Matt's showing up at her medical convention in the Caribbean. His crazy proposal, her equally crazy acceptance and an unusual marriage ceremony–followed by her new husband's tender lovemaking.And now, just a the doctor's regaining her senses, she's having a baby….
“Fathers are important.” (#uc92b3de9-1a0d-505a-b90a-6570ffbd7442)Letter to Reader (#ucde634d9-42c6-52e2-9081-e380f2331b6a)Title Page (#uc31cbd0e-8c99-50d2-b30f-6238fb82e403)Dedication (#ua25ab1ea-688e-5895-8954-0c19c80e0ef6)CHAPTER ONE (#u0a72094b-f87b-56ae-918e-efa24518735c)CHAPTER TWO (#udc28d898-3a37-5f91-b4ab-5a8bc6502d9c)CHAPTER THREE (#u2367b083-3e8b-5b7c-bac8-0fe016c48b20)CHAPTER FOUR (#u40787677-78b6-5040-ac77-c1c8bc601c22)CHAPTER FIVE (#u07a9843a-7b89-582a-a1b7-8d5bf9b82141)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Fathers are important.”
Matt spoke simply. “And I think my baby deserves a good one.”
Olivia’s smile softened. “I agree, Mr. Creed. But I’m afraid that with my daughter, there is little either of us can do to change her mind.”
Matt leaned forward on the couch. “Oh, there’s plenty I can do,” he said. “I can take her to court and sue for joint custody”
Olivia answered quickly. “Nasty legal proceedings will solve nothing. Besides, you have no claim to the baby. Danni would have to name you as the father for you to have any legal standing.”
There was silence for a few seconds, then Matt spoke. “Your daughter didn’t tell you?”
Olivia looked confused.
“Mrs. Goodlove, your daughter and I are married.”
“THE PULL OF THE MOON is a tender, memorable story of a remarkable man and a dedicated woman, who, through loving each other, heal the wounds upon their souls. It is a page-turning, feel-good book from beginning to end.”
—Sharon Sala, award-winning author of Reunion
Dear Reader,
I worked as a labor and delivery nurse for many years and allays wanted to write a story about a dedicated, funny, sawy, but lonely obstetrician who yearns for a love of her own. Dr. Danni Goodlove began forming in my mind all those years ago.
But it wasn’t until I met the firefighters/rescuers after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City (I was privileged to work as a volunteer at the site during the rescue effort) that I found the hero who would be Danni’s match.
I hope my portrayal of Matthew Creed does justice to the tireless and truly heroic men and women who gave their all during that terrible time. To my own son Damon, a television reporter who was one of the first to arrive at the scene, and to everyone who suffered in the wake of that heinous crime, I hope that the references in this book provide only consolation and validation.
Though deeply emotional issues are woven into this story, it is a joyous account Because it shows one woman’s journey as she chooses change and growth, finds true love and receives the family of her dreams.
I enjoy hearing from my readers. You can write to me at
P.O. Box 720224, Norman, Oklahoma 73070.
Darlene Graham
The Pull of the Moon
Darlene Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Ray and Tonie Lueb.
Thank you for answering God’s call
to become loving parents.
CHAPTER ONE
THE FULL MOON WAS THE trouble, and everybody knew it.
As Dr. Danielle Goodlove shoved her long, thick hair under a disposable cap and began the routine surgical scrub, she thought how ironic it was that all the simpering romantics out there in TV- and movie-land considered the moon a symbol of romance.
Romance. Ha!
In obstetrics everybody knew that all hell broke loose when Old Man Moon turned his fat face on the unsuspecting earth. Why did stuff like this—an emergency C-section with a life in the balance—always seem to happen when the moon was full?
Correction: two lives.
She nudged the knee handle to cut the water off, raised her dripping hands, and headed toward delivery room one.
A woman’s scream from within caused Danni to break into a trot. She knocked the heavy door open with her bottom and yelled: “Fetal heart rate?”
A nurse turned up the volume on a state-of-theart monitor and called back, “Sixties!” as the ominously slow beeps filled the otherwise-silent room.
Another nurse rushed forward to dry Danni’s hands with a sterile towel while a third nurse came at her with a surgical gown mittened over fists. The circulating nurse filled Danni in on the case, her words fast and low. “It’s a bad deal. The whole family was in the fire. Couple of toddlers. Mom’s water ruptured at the scene—”
“When?” Danni interrupted.
The nurse glanced at the large clock on the tiled wall.
“Just before midnight—about thirty minutes ago. We’ve got a prolapsed cord and fetal distress.”
“I hear it,” Danni said. The beeps got slower.
The nurse with the towel finished the drying and dodged aside so the other could thrust the gown onto Danni’s outstretched arms. The circulator continued to talk rapidly as she reached up and pushed Danni’s glasses firmly onto the bridge of her nose.
“Mom ran into the trailer when they realized the toddlers were missing. A fireman pulled her back out, then went in for the kids himself. The dad’s drunk, started the fire with a cigarette. The cops have him. She’s about thirty-four weeks. No prenatal care. You’re flying blind.”
Danni nodded while she jammed her hands into the sterile gloves held open before her. Then she stepped up to the surgery table.
The patient was no longer screaming. She now lay gravely silent with eyes closed, her skin pale and smudged beneath pathetically singed eyebrows and hair. She cracked her eyes open as Danni adjusted the paper drapes. When she saw Danni she tried to talk through the anesthesia mask, then reached sooty fingers from under the drape and grabbed for Danni’s arm. The circulator caught the woman’s hand before she could contaminate Danni’s sterile gown.
“Don’t worry,” Danni said and leaned over to look directly in the patient’s eyes as they grew heavy with the anesthetic. “We’ll get your baby out in time.”
She opened her gloved palm for the scalpel and peered over her mask at the anesthetist. He adjusted the nitrous oxide and nodded.
“Let’s go.” Danni flipped the knife into position and cut.
Dr. Danni Goodlove prided herself on her head-spinning, machinelike speed in emergencies. The C-section team at Tulsa’s Holy Cross Hospital—one of the best in the city—had scrambled to meet her exacting standard: six minutes from decision, to incision, to squalling baby.
In this business, sometimes you had to hurt the patient in order to help them. Sometimes they cried out. Danni might have let that affect her work, but she didn’t. While still in her teens she had learned to ignore her emotions and focus on her goal. She’d acquired that skill the hard way—in a tragedy she didn’t like to think about—but on a night like this she was grateful for it.
Because on a night like this—when the moon was full—Danni couldn’t help thinking of Lisa.
On a night like this, Lisa and her baby had died.
But tonight’s baby was lifted out, free of the strangling cord, squirming under the Ohio warmer a mere ninety seconds after Danni’s first swift, sure cut.
Danni hadn’t even broken a sweat, but the rest of the team released a collectively held breath when they heard the first weak cries from the corner where a pediatric team labored over the tiny patient. Danni tried to ignore the palpable relief all around her. She never allowed herself to get emotional during a delivery, but tonight she was feeling the tiniest twinge of—something—as the infant’s crying picked up steam.
Then the bang of the operating-room door startled them all.
A perky young ward clerk, breathless from her sprint down the hall, held a paper mask to her face, her eyes huge above it. “Dr. Danni!” she huffed. “Dr. Stone’s having a fit down in the E.R. He said to close this case fast and get down there stat. A ton of OB’s have flooded in.”
“The moon,” a nurse behind Danni moaned.
The girl spread a palm over her chest as if to calm herself, then noticed the baby. “That baby made it?”
One of the pediatric nurses called out, “He’s perfect!” above the infant’s wailing.
“You know,” the transfixed young woman said, nodding at the unconscious mother, “that fireman that got injured saving her?”
The team, busy with their tasks, didn’t acknowledge the question.
“Well,” she announced with an air of importance, “Cooper said he looks just like Tom Selleck.”
Danni gave the girl a cutting glance over her mask, then said, “Go tell Stone to cool his jets. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
ONCE SHE GOT DOWN to the E.R., Danni took a second to look in the exam room where two toddler-size bodies lay side by side on two gurneys. The bustling E.R. teams obstructed her view, but she knew it was bad. The teams were too controlled, too quiet. It was the deafening silence of hopelessness. What would she tell the mother?
A commotion behind her caused her to turn.
Some nurses and an orderly had stopped the gurney they’d been pushing and struggled with the huge man on it. He was wearing a bloodstained T-shirt, and a fresh dressing and ice packs swaddled one arm. His turnout pants and fire boots told Danni he must be the fireman the ward clerk had been talking about upstairs. He was fighting to sit up and pushed the burly orderly back with one hand while he jerked the oxygen mask off his face with the other.
That ward clerk was wrong, Danni thought as she rushed forward to help. This guy doesn’t look anything like Tom Selleck, And right now his face was so contorted with anger, his eyes were so wild with delirium, you couldn’t even call him handsome.
“Let me see them!” he yelled as he shoved the nurses’ hands away. “Dammit! I have to see if they’re okay!”
One of his fireman buddies, a black man in full regalia except for the helmet, ran up alongside the gurney and got into the act. “Matt, you need that oxygen,” he said as he forced the mask over the patient’s face and fought to get his mighty shoulders back down on the gurney.
“What’s he had?” Danni yelled across to a nurse, and as soon as she heard the answer added, “Get me some Ativan.” The other nurse had gone off, anticipating the order, and a full syringe was instantly in Danni’s hand.
“You hold him,” Danni ordered the black fireman.
The patient fought like a bull, still ranting about the toddlers, while Danni shot the sedative into a vein.
When the patient finally moaned into semiconsciousness, the black man released his hold and turned to Danni. “It’s not Matt’s fault. This is old stuff—” The big man suddenly seemed choked up. “He worked the bombing. Saving these babies tonight kind of brought it all back.”
The bombing. In Oklahoma they simply called it that—the bombing.
Danni nodded and felt her eyes mist when she turned to look at the man on the gurney as the nurses rolled him away, and saw the top of his dark head as he tossed it miserably from side to side.
The bombing—after all this time, so many still suffered from its aftershocks. Like that poor man.
“Matt’s usually a really nice guy,” the black man said from behind her. “Are you gonna take care of his arm?” he added anxiously.
Danni turned and looked up at him. This one was a handsome man, even though he looked thoroughly exhausted. “No. I’m an obstetrician, but one of the E.R. docs—”
Before she could finish, a harried-looking nurse rushed up and said, “Dr. Goodlove, please,” while she hauled Danni by the sleeve of her lab coat into an open area where the sight of five mounded tummies on five beds made Danni groan.
“All in active labor.” The nurse held out a stack of intake charts. “Stone says they’re all yours.”
“Gee. Could the Old Man be testing me again?” Danni took the charts.
“Again? When did he stop?” The nurse plunked a Doppler device and a bottle of blue gel on top of the charts. “Don’t worry, we finally located Dr. Bryant. Claimed his pager wasn’t working.”
Danni made a sarcastic face. “Oh, goody. Bryant.” Bryant, if anything, was a bigger pain than Stone. As the chief of staff, Kenneth Stone, at least, was supremely confident and above petty one-upsmanship. Bryant was not. Only a hair older than Danni, he was fiercely competitive.
Moments later, when Roger Bryant came blasting through the E.R. doors like a Viking god to the rescue, Danni studiously ignored him and let the triage nurse give him report.
Another hour flew by while Bryant and Danni got the OB patients examined and admitted.
“I’ll go up and cover Labor and Delivery now,” Bryant said and ran a hand through his fine, sandy-blond hair, then pointed at Danni as he backed toward the elevator, beating an obvious retreat from the E.R. chaos. “You’d better take a break, sister. You look terrible.”
“Oh, my gosh!” Danni framed her cheeks with her palms. “Imagine that! I look terrible!” She addressed this remark to Carol Hollis, her best friend and a top-notch scrub nurse, who’d appeared on her left.
“Gee,” Carol deadpanned, then raised her voice as the elevator doors slid closed over Bryant’s sour expression. “Could four deliveries and two C-sections have anything to do with it?”
Carol straightened, tossed her salt-and-pepper curls toward the elevator and muttered, “Prick.” She turned to Danni. “But unfortunately, the prick can’t handle what’s developing upstairs.”
“What’s that?”
“Another C-section.”
“When?”
“Maybe an hour. That’s why I came down to find you.”
Danni held up a palm. “Okay. But first I gotta eat something or I’ll pass out.”
But just as Danni and Carol plopped down in the break area, a nurse poked her head in the door and pleaded, “Dr. Goodlove, before you go back to OB could you possibly see the fireman?”
Danni gulped milk from a carton, then rubbed the back of her neck, not comprehending something this nurse obviously thought she should. “The fireman?”
“Yeah. The guy who pulled the twins out of the trailer. He’s been waiting for over an hour. Somebody needs to check his lungs again and he has a nasty wound that needs stitches.” The nurse shrugged apologetically while she held out a disposable suture tray. “We’re swamped. In fact, we’re so crowded we had to put the poor man in the supply room. Could you?”
“I’ll help,” Carol offered. “Bryant can survive a little while without you.”
Danni sighed. Would this night never end? “Okay.” She stood, tilted the milk carton up and drained it. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWO
