Grace looked at the pizza growing colder on her plate and understood why he hadn’t ordered it. But he’d been right, she had to eat some of it because not eating it would look suspicious. She picked up a slice and bit into it, recognising that the mix of flavours was indeed delicious, although the food seemed to be turning to sawdust in her mouth.
A car accident—losing a daughter. The poor man! And for all he was so perfect, she’d have to cross him off the list.
Although…
She thought it through, looking at the idea from all angles, finally coming to the conclusion that maybe what she was offering was just what Theo needed.
In the back of her head she heard her father warning her that her solutions might not always be what was best for other people, but that had been when she’d been dealing with some of the poor families at home, ruthlessly reorganising their lives into some semblance of order.
This was different.
A child that was yet wasn’t his.
No responsibility.
No need to get emotionally involved.
With either her or the child…
Yes, it could work.
‘Does he live somewhere nearby?’ she heard herself ask Jasmine, then, in case the question was too obvious, she added, ‘Perhaps someone should call in and see if he’s OK.’
Jasmine looked at her, then smiled.
‘He’s OK and even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t want anyone fussing over him,’ she said. ‘He’s a very private man, our Theo. I’d better tell you that he never gets involved with colleagues. Believe me, many have tried but none have succeeded. It’s kind of like a golden rule with him.’ Well, really! Grace thought, annoyed with Jasmine for assuming—quite correctly—that she was intersted in Theo, and horrified with herself for being so 0bvious about it.
‘It’s a good rule,’ she managed, realising some response was necessary. ‘Relationships at work can get very messy.’
‘Or can work brilliantly,’ Jasmine said, nodding towards Maggie and Phil, who were laughing together at the far end of the table. ‘We had three couples fall in love within the unit only last year, so don’t think you’ll be immune to love while you’re here in Oz.’
She paused and studied Grace for a moment.
‘Unless, of course, there’s a very special man back home in South Africa?’ she teased.
Grace thought of the very special man back home and smiled.
‘Oh, yes, there is,’ she said, but she didn’t add that it was because of him—well, partly because of him—that she was interested in Theo. Someone like Jasmine, recently engaged to the man she loved, would never understand Grace’s plan or the means by which she hoped to implement it…
CHAPTER TWO
THEO watched as Grace attached the PVC tube from the bypass machine to the cannula inserted into the right side of little Adelaide Matthews’s heart. She worked quickly but carefully, her movements so precise and economical he had to admire them.
With the ingoing tube attached to the cannula already inserted into the aorta, she stepped back to let Phil get closer.
‘On pump,’ Phil said, the order crisp and quiet, and Theo started the machine, watching closely to see that the heparin given to thin the blood had been sufficient to prevent clotting, watching the pressure—Adelaide was three and needed more pressure than a baby but less than a five-year-old—watching for anything to go wrong.
‘Plege on.’ Now Phil fed the cardioplegia—a potassium poison—into the heart to stop it beating. When it worked, in a matter of minutes, he could begin.
The operation, to correct a problem with the coronary arteries which had been repositioned during an earlier operation for transposition of the great arteries, shouldn’t have been difficult, but scans had shown that one of the coronary arteries had grown through the wall of the heart, like a hose going in through the side of a bucket then back out again, and needed total repositioning.
Aware it could take some time, Theo was overly conscious of his patient’s status, checking the monitors constantly, noting the various pressures, the ECG, coagulation values, blood gases and electrolytes. But mainly it was controlling the pump that absorbed him. Too little blood flow and the patient could suffer oxygen deprivation to her brain, too much and it could blow her delicate little blood vessels apart.
Why did a surgeon turn to this job? Grace had asked, but the satisfaction he found in getting a patient through an often long and complex operation in as good a condition as possible, was a source of enormous satisfaction, and already some of his refinements to the bypass machine were being used worldwide.
Why not?
He looked across at Grace—well, at the hooded, gowned, bespectacled figure he knew was Grace—and was sorry he hadn’t answered that particular question.
Wouldn’t have an opportunity now, having spoken so abruptly to her the previous evening…
‘Theo?’
Knowing what Phil was asking, he recited all the information he had to hand, adding that Adelaide was doing very well.
‘So why change from surgery?’
Three operations later, he’d just emerged from the shower in the theatre changing rooms, a towel wrapped around his waist, when Grace, in bra and panties—her figure was superb—asked the question he’d decided she would never ask again.
He stared at her, debating whether to answer, but as everyone else was gone—he always stayed back to ensure personally that the machine was properly sterilised and sealed—there was really no reason why he shouldn’t tell her.
Particularly as she was pulling on a crisp white shirt, buttoning it up, drawing his attention to her breasts in a way that was totally out of order—he changed with women all the time and never looked at their breasts!
‘I injured my hands—for a while I couldn’t operate—but the world of paediatric cardiac surgery had been my focus as I trained, through basic surgery, then cardiac surgery. I’d finally made it as a registrar on the paeds cardiac team and I didn’t want to leave it. Probably out of pity, my old boss, the chief surgeon at the hospital, suggested I have a go at perfusion while my hands healed. I did a course, learned even more from the woman who had run the machine for our team, then began to see possibilities of improving the system, which was when I became hooked. To me, keeping a child as stable as possible while on pump—and even more importantly while on ECMO—has become my obsession.’
‘So much so you never considered going back to operating?’
He paused, looking at his hands.
‘My hands were burnt, the tendons damaged, and although they healed, it worried me that they had probably lost some sensitivity.’
He paused, remembering the pain of those years—so much pain, the least of it physical.
‘I wondered if I would still have the feel you need to put a stitch the size of a pinhead into a vein with the diameter of a hair. I decided I couldn’t take the risk.’
‘That’s an incredibly honest answer,’ she said, looking puzzled again.
‘Did you think I’d lie?’ he demanded angrily, his emotions already stirred up with memories. And on top of that, it was the puzzled look he caught on her face that gave the impression of vulnerability despite suspecting she was about as vulnerable as a slab of concrete.
Although more shapely…
She grinned at him, totally disarming him.
‘No, I suppose not, but it’s the kind of thing I might have said and I’m forever being told I should pretty