Pregnant. It didn’t tell her how pregnant, and her mind tried to sort it out. It was the beginning of April, and she’d met Sam at the end of January. So...nearly nine weeks ago, which made her eleven weeks pregnant, maybe? Her other test must have been too soon...
‘Kate? Kate, are you OK?’
She opened the door, her hands shaking as she held out the wand to Annie. ‘You were right,’ she said, her voice sounding hollow and far away. ‘Oh, God, Annie, what on earth am I going to do?’
She felt arms come round her, the firm jut of Annie’s pregnant abdomen pressing against her. She could feel the babies kicking, and with a shock she realised that if she did nothing, then in a few more weeks this would be her, her body swollen by the child growing inside it.
And then what? How could she be a mother? She had no idea what a mother even was. Not a real mother.
Her teeth started to chatter, and Annie tutted and sat her down on the bed, putting her arm around her and rocking her. She could remember her foster mother doing that when she was sixteen, trying to soothe her when her world had been turned upside down and all feeling had drained away.
It felt the same now, the same numbness, the same emptiness and what now?-ness that she’d felt then.
‘I can’t do it, Annie. I can’t do it on my own—’
‘Do you know who the father is?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, of course I know. Hell, Annie, I’m not that reckless, but I can’t contact him. I don’t have his number any more, but he won’t want to know, it was just one night. Oh, God, I’ve been so stupid! Why...?’
‘Hush, hush,’ Annie crooned, rocking her gently. ‘It’ll be all right. You can do it. I did it on my own.’
‘No, you didn’t, you had your mum, and I don’t have a mum—’
‘But you have me. I’ll help you. You won’t be alone, Kate. And you can do this, if you decide you want to. You’ll be all right.’
And if she didn’t want to?
If Sam really was the locum, she’d have to tell him, and then he’d have an opinion, want a say. He might want her to go through with the pregnancy even if she decided that she couldn’t. And if the locum wasn’t Sam, she’d deleted all trace of him from her phone, so she wouldn’t be able to tell him, however much she might decide she wanted to.
Which meant if she kept it she would be all on her own to deal with it, bar a little help from Annie.
But that was fine. She’d been on her own most of her life, and she liked it like that. She’d had enough of being bullied and manipulated and lied to.
Not that Sam would necessarily do any of those things, but she wasn’t inclined to give him the chance.
Even assuming Sam was the locum.
* * *
He was.
She knew that the moment she walked into the department two days later, at seven on Monday morning. She heard his laugh over the background noise, heard James saying something and then another laugh, and it drew closer as she turned the corner.
She ground to a halt, too late to turn and walk away, too shocked to keep on moving past because she hadn’t really believed it would be him. And then he saw her and his eyes widened in surprise.
She searched his face, fell in love with it all over again and then remembered all the reasons she had to regret that she’d ever met him. One in particular...
‘Ah, Kate. Let me introduce you to Sam Ryder, our locum consultant. Sam, this is Kate Ashton, one of our best senior nurses.’
‘Hello, Kate,’ Sam said softly, but speech had deserted her and the ground refused to swallow her up. ‘Do you two know each other?’ James asked after an uncomfortable silence.
‘Yes—’
‘No!’
They spoke in unison, and James did a mild double-take and looked from her to Sam and back again. ‘Well, which is it?’
Sam just stood there, and after a second she found her voice. ‘We’ve met,’ she qualified. ‘Just once.’
Just long enough to make a baby...
A muscled clenched in his jaw, but otherwise Sam’s face didn’t move. No smile, no frown—nothing. Just those accusing eyes.
She felt sick. Nothing unusual. She was getting so used to it, it was the new normal.
The silence hung in the air between them, broken only by the sound of a pager bleeping. James pulled it out of his pocket and scanned the message.
‘Sorry, I need to go. Sam, why don’t I put you in Kate’s hands for now and let her show you round? She’s worked a lot with Annie so she’s the expert on her role, really. I’ll see you later. Come and find me when you’re done with HR.’
James clapped him on the shoulder and walked off, and Sam’s eyes tracked him down the corridor and then switched back to Kate. She’d forgotten how piercing they could be.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a nurse.’
‘You didn’t tell me you were a doctor.’
‘At least I didn’t lie.’
She felt colour tease her cheeks. ‘Only by omission. That’s no better.’
‘There are degrees. And I didn’t deny that I know you.’
‘I didn’t think our...’
‘Fling? Liaison? One-night stand? Random—’
‘Our private life was any of his business. And anyway, you don’t know me. Only in the biblical sense.’
Something flickered in those flat, ice-blue eyes, something wild and untamed and a little scary. And then he looked away.
‘Apparently so.’
She sucked in a breath and straightened her shoulders. At some point she’d have to tell him she was pregnant, but not here, not now, not like this, and if they were going to have this baby, at some point they would need to get to know each other. But, again, not now. Now she had a job to do, and she was going to have to put her feelings on the back burner and resist the urge to run away.
She pulled herself together with effort and straightened her shoulders. ‘So, shall we get on with your guided tour? What have you seen?’
‘His office. Nothing else, really.’
‘Right. Let’s start at Reception and work through the route the patients take, and then you can go up to HR. I’ll give you a map of the hospital.’
And with any luck her legs wouldn’t give way and dump her on the floor before they were done...
* * *
‘We need to talk.’
There was a lull in the chaos that had been the day so far, and they were alone at the desk, filling in paperwork on the last case. He paused, his pen hovering over the notes.
‘We do?’
He was still stinging a little from her rejection back in January, not to mention her denial to James that she knew him, and he’d spent the whole morning so far trying to quell his traitorous body, which seemed to be delighted at her sudden reappearance in his life. In fact she’d been at least half of the reason he’d taken this locum job, on the off-chance that he might run into her again, but now he had it seemed like a profoundly lousy idea, especially since they were going to be working together.
He made himself look at her, forced