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‘And I need your address, Elizabeth.’
‘Beth,’ she loudly corrected, and realised she was shouting again but she hated being called Elizabeth—that was the name her parents used when they were cross.
Oh, and they’d been cross of late.
‘We need your address...’
Beth gave it.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ Valerie commented.
‘I’m in London tonight for work.’
‘We need a next of kin.’ The receptionist was still asking questions but Beth was finding it hard to focus let alone answer and she shook her head. She did not want them contacting her parents about the baby when they had been so angry and had said they wanted nothing to do with it but then Valerie spoke gently.
‘If something happens to you, Beth, we need to know who to call.’
And though she was currently upset with her parents she thought of them in the middle of the night being called with bad news and she didn’t want that for them.
‘Rory...’ Beth gasped.
He would know how to handle them.
‘Is that your partner?’ the receptionist checked.
‘No, he’s my ex but he’s a very good family friend, he knows all that’s happened, he’d know how best to tell my parents if something happened to me.’
‘What’s his phone number?’
‘It’s on my phone.’
She found the number and then watched in terror as a resuscitation cot was brought into the cubicle and plugged in.
‘It’s too soon,’ Beth pleaded. ‘Can’t you give me something to stop it?’
Surely they were going to stop the labour—she was only twenty-nine weeks.
‘It’s okay.’ Valerie put an arm around her.
‘I need to push.’
‘Don’t push,’ the nurse said. ‘Wait till the doctor’s here.’
Beth screwed her eyes closed and fought not to push. It was like trying to hold back the tide yet she did all she could to hold her baby in.
Everything was going wrong.
Every last thing.
Because she opened her eyes and suddenly there he was.
Elias.
Her one-night stand, the father of her child.
‘No.’
She actually tried to launch herself and get off the trolley and declared she was going home.
She simply wanted to run.
Yet there was nowhere to go, the logical part of her brain knew that, and so did he for he caught her hands and held her loosely by the wrists as she knelt up on the trolley with the hastily put-on gown falling over her shoulders, and she knew her breasts were exposed.
And she cared not a jot any more.
He was so calm that she actually thought he might not recognise her.
Beth knew she would never forget him.
She had never thought she would see Elias again and yet she was staring into those grey eyes that had so easily seduced her and it was all too much to take in.
He was wearing rumpled navy scrubs and his hair was longer than it had been when they’d met. Now it fell forward and she wanted to push it back from his eyes, and she saw that unlike when they had met he was unshaven.
He looked as if he had just woken up.
‘Beth,’ he said. ‘The obstetrics team is on the way. For now, though, it’s me.’
She just stared back.
‘I’m one of the doctors working in Emergency tonight and I need to examine you.’
There was no choice, Elias knew.
He was the only doctor available in a critical situation.
Not that Beth understood.
‘Oh, no!’ She shouted it out. ‘I want an obstetrician!’
Valerie squeezed her shoulder.
‘Dr Santini knows what he’s doing,’ she reassured Beth. ‘He’s an emergency registrar. Just last month he delivered a lovely baby boy. You’re in good hands, Beth.’
It wasn’t his bloody qualifications she was objecting to.
It was the man himself, the man who, as Valerie helped her lie back, was calmly putting on a paper gown and then had the nerve to put on gloves.
‘You stop to...?’ She didn’t finish but Elias got the inference.
He had intimately explored her with his fingers, why worry with gloves now? And, no, he hadn’t stopped to put on a condom.
Here, perhaps, was the consequence.
He couldn’t think like that now. He could not addle his mind with the thought that he might be about to deliver his own child.
‘We need to focus on the baby,’ he said, and Beth looked at him and saw that despite the very calm demeanour there was concern in his eyes.
Serious concern.
‘Can she have some oxygen on?’ he asked Valerie, who was trying to pick up the baby’s heart rate with a Doppler machine.
The gown had long since gone.
She was naked, scared and vulnerable.
‘Can I examine you, Beth?’ Elias checked.
She could hear the chimes going off again. They were calling for an anaesthetist now and she thought of the man being given CPR. She had heard the nurses discussing the very sick child and if more staff needed to be sent down.
It was down to Elias, she realised.
Maybe this was hard for him too, she thought, because now she knew that he recognised her, for his voice was a touch strained as he requested her consent.
She nodded and then she told him her fear and why she was so confused.
‘It’s happening so fast. Just so-o-o fast. I was fine.’
‘How long have you been having contractions for?’ Elias asked, as Mandy helped her to lie down and lift her legs.
‘I don’t know,’ Beth said, and then she remembered standing outside the restaurant and looking at her phone as she pondered what to do.
‘Midnight.’
Elias glanced up at the clock—it wasn’t even twenty past twelve.
Poor thing, Elias thought.
Not just because it was Beth.
It was called a precipitate labour, one where the uterus rapidly expelled the foetus, and, though premature babies often came faster than full term ones, this was very rapid indeed. The contractions were often violent and exhausting, and the mother presented as drained and shocked.
‘Can you give me something to stop the labour?’ Beth asked as he examined her, and then she saw Elias’s jaw grit.
‘Beth, your baby’s about to be born. There’s nothing I can give you to stop it. We want to slow this last part down as best we can. You’re not to push...’
He would try and control the delivery with his hand as a very rapid birth could damage the baby’s brain, and also he badly wanted assistance to be here when the baby was born.
He looked over to Mandy.
‘Should we move over to Resus?’ he asked quietly, because there were more drugs and equipment over there, but Mandy shook her head.
‘It’s full. We’ve got everything in here and the team are on their way.’
Elias nodded.
He had seen them at work several times. They came with everything that was required. They could turn this room into a neonatal intensive care ward and also a theatre, if such was needed for Beth.
He was very glad to know that they were on their way.
His fingers were on the baby’s head, trying to control the delivery, and, unlike the large baby he had recently delivered, this head was tiny to his hand. ‘It’s coming again,’ Beth said. ‘I have to push,’
‘No, no,’ he told her, but not dismissively, more he suggested that she could resist. ‘Breathe through it, Beth. Take some nice slow breaths.’
She was taking short, rapid ones.
‘Slow breaths,’ he reminded her. ‘Let’s try to give this little one a gentle entrance to the world.’
Another contraction was coming and she moaned through the pain and the agony of not pushing when every cell in her body demanded that she do just that.
‘It’s too soon,’ she sobbed. ‘The baby’s too early...’
‘It is what it is,’ Elias said as the pain passed.
Odd, but those words calmed her.
They were the words her father used when one of his parishioners came to him during a tumultuous time in their life. Always Donald was calm and wise. He would listen as they poured out their dramas and fears, and then those were the words he would recite—it is what it is—and then he would do what he could to help them move forward.
Her father, though, had not been able to do that with her. It had been too much for Donald to accept that his gorgeous, well-behaved daughter had run so wild, let alone offer guidance.
Now Elias did.
His voice was assertive as he told Beth what to do and she was ready to listen.
‘Keep taking some nice deep, slow breaths so that your baby gets plenty of oxygen.’
She could do that.
‘Focus,’ Elias said.
‘I’m trying to but—’
‘Nothing else matters now.’
It didn’t.
His words were for both of them, a secret conversation between them, and he glanced up as he said it. ‘Just focus on the baby, the rest can all wait.’
Their history was irrelevant right now.
