A Doctor, A Nurse: A Christmas Baby

She gripped the crayon harder as his sexy chuckle lingered in the studio well after he’d gone.

If she was ever granted the use of a magic wand for even just a few seconds, Maggie would use it to completely annihilate night duty from existence.

She hated it. With a passion.

Her first night in particular. So, she wasn’t in the best of moods the next night when she switched off her ignition and climbed out of the car beneath a star-studded sky. Ten hours stretched before her and she yawned. Not a good sign!

Oh, she knew once she actually walked through the doors and greeted her fellow sufferers she’d be fine— it was the thought that was the most depressing. And the older she got the harder they were to get over. Back in her student days she’d bounce straight back. Twenty years later it took her a good couple of days to get over a run of nights.

After communal handover in the tearoom Maggie was allocated bed three and took bedside handover from Ray, the nurse who’d been looking after Toby Ryan since his admission to the unit at lunchtime.

Toby was a three-year-old boy who’d been born with a rare hereditary haematological disease. He’d been in and out of hospital most of his brief life, undergoing a multitude of different therapies in a bid to cure him. When everything had failed a bone-marrow transplant had been his only option and he was now fifty days post-procedure.

But not out of the woods. Unfortunately nothing had gone smoothly for little Toby and his chest X-ray had deteriorated in the last few days and was looking very pneumonic. He’d been started on antibiotics and had had sputum collected for analysis, but it had become obvious that morning that he required closer monitoring and further respiratory support so he’d been shifted to PICU.

She watched her patient carefully, noting even in his sleep he was using the accessory muscles in his chest to help him breathe. The sound of high-flow oxygen whooshing through his face mask and filling the attached plastic reservoir bag was surprisingly loud in an already noisy environment.

He was as cute as a button with tight black curls crowning his head, clutching a raggedy-looking teddy bear that was missing an eye and half an ear. He was wearing only pyjama pants, leaving his upper half exposed. Maggie frowned. He was working really hard, which was concerning especially considering his state of slumber.

Maggie did her start-of-shift checks and nursing assessments. Linda, the nurse in charge of the shift and a close friend, was setting up bed four for a retrieval patient when Maggie asked her to check some drugs shortly after. Then Toby’s mother, Alice, returned and Maggie chatted with her for a while.

It was a good couple of hours before Maggie had the chance to sit down and read back over Toby’s notes. The PICU had electronic charting, with each bedside having its own computer terminal. Maggie sat at hers and read back through her patient’s history. She noted that Toby’s cousin had died from the same condition only last year.

She looked up from the screen and took in Alice dozing by her son’s bed, his hand in hers. Maggie couldn’t even begin to imagine how scary it must be for her and the rest of Toby’s family.

The night settled into a familiar rhythm. Toby slept and held his own. Around her the other patients were behaving themselves also. The everyday noises of the unit didn’t register as Maggie went about her work. The low hum of machines, the beeping and trilling of monitors, the slurp of suckers and the variety of alarms attached to the technology-saturated environment formed a continuous background drone.

Collectively they were as familiar to Maggie as the sound of her own breath, the beat of her pulse. And subconsciously she registered what each of them were. She knew which ones to worry about and which ones to ignore. And even deeply involved in other tasks, she knew instantly when something sounded different.

Linda relieved Maggie for her first break. She returned half an hour later, coinciding with the arrival of the retrieval patient. Two paramedics pushed the gurney accompanied by a wardsmen and Gwen, the retrieval nurse.

But none of them held her interest or her gaze. Maggie could focus only on the other member of the party making their way towards her.

Nash Reece.

What the hell? What was Nash doing here? Wasn’t it bad enough that visions of the man with a child on his hip had been in her head like a recurring nightmare since yesterday? His gaze locked with hers as the gurney rolled past and he winked at her.

‘Hello, Maggie Green.’

Maggie stared at him, not even registering that he now knew her last name as her brain grappled with how exactly he came to be doing a PICU retrieval. Or at least it was trying to underneath the surge of one hundred per cent octane lust that had flooded her system and threatened to overload her circuits.

The man looked incredible. His hair was mussy in a too-sexy-to-be-true fashion, no doubt aided by the inflight helmet. The navy-blue shirt of the retrieval uniform fitted snugly across his broad shoulders and chest, the pocket announcing his position as Doctor in vibrant red stitching. The cuffs were rolled back to reveal those strong forearms dusted with blond hairs.

Flaunting propriety, he wore a pair of faded jeans instead of the matching navy trousers. They clung in all the right places and Maggie found herself wondering what he’d look like in nothing but the jeans.

‘I’ll shut this across, Maggie, so we don’t wake Toby,’ Linda said.

Maggie nodded mutely and watched as the concertinaed divider between beds three and four shut out not only the spill of light but also Nash Reece and those damn distracting Levi’s.

Trying to concentrate on her work now was utterly useless. The voices next door were muted but she seemed finely tuned in to every low rumble or murmur that was distinctly Nash. Luckily Toby continued to sleep and although his effort remained the same, he still appeared to be coping.

An hour later, as Maggie typed her username and password into the computer to sign for a drug, she felt Nash’s presence behind her like the heat from a nuclear power plant.

‘MMG,’ he mused, reading over her shoulder. It had taken him a few days to get a handle on the electronic charting and there was probably a heap of features he’d yet to work out, but he did know that all the staff user-names consisted of their initials. ‘What’s your middle name, Maggie Green?’

Maggie ignored him, refusing to turn and acknowledge his query. It was none of his business.

Nash moved so he was standing in front of her, one tanned elbow and one lean hip propped against her mobile computer table. ‘Is it May? Are you a “Maggie May”? Was your mother a Rod Stewart fan?’

Maggie thanked her lucky stars for the relative dimness of the room as he crooned the opening notes of the well-known song.

‘Yes. I know what you meant,’ she said cutting into his surprisingly good baritone not sure she could stand being serenaded with that particular song about an illicit love affair between a younger man and an older woman. ‘I was named May after my grandmother,’ she said frostily. ‘I’m older than the Rod Stewart song.’

Nash chuckled. ‘I’ve never met a woman so keen to talk up her age.’

Maggie shrugged with as much nonchalance as she could muster. She couldn’t help it if the twentysomethings he dated had issues with getting older.

‘I guess I’d better get used to it seeing as how I’m working here for the next three months.’

Maggie took a moment to reel in the leap of her pulse. Three months? Maggie frowned as a sudden realisation hit her. ‘You knew!’ she accused. ‘The other day…at lunch…yesterday…you knew you were coming here.’

Nash smiled. ‘Guilty.’

Maggie looked into his utterly guiltless face. ‘You might have told me.’

‘And have you prepared?’ Nash laughed. ‘I like seeing you flustered, Maggie Green.’ Nash suspected not much flustered her and the fact that he’d put her off balance three times now was the boost his ego needed in the face of her continued resistance.

Maggie took a breath, refusing to rise to his bait or let him see how the prospect of three months in his vicinity rattled her. ‘So how’d you swing that? The current registrars are only halfway through their term.’

‘A short-term position came up. Dr Perkins offered it to me.’

Maggie frowned. Dr Gemma Perkins, the PICU director, never offered reduced terms. He must be bloody good. ‘Why only three months?’

‘I’ve got a position at Great Ormond Street in January.’

Maggie blinked. London? It must be part of his great career plan. ‘Good hospital,’ she murmured.

Still…London? She found it hard to believe how he’d survive in the environs of British medicine where suits and ties were mandatory. He’d changed from his retrieval top into a T-shirt, that combined with the faded fashion of his low-rider jeans, was the epitome of laid-back.

Did he even own a tie?

Nash grinned at her understatement. G.O.S.H. was a world leader. ‘The best.’

She nodded. ‘I worked there years ago.’

Nash couldn’t resist. ‘Back when you were my age?’

Maggie looked into his open flirty gaze, humour skyrocketing his attraction tenfold. ‘No. Back when I was first married. Twenty years ago. I do believe you must have been about ten at the time?’