Then she remembered something even more important.
‘My baby …!’ she keened, her voice muffled behind the oxygen mask, panicking when she was unable to move her hand to her belly, so desperate to know by the familiar feel of the gentle swell that it was still safely inside her.
Then she heard the echo of what she’d said and guilt hit her hard. ‘The baby,’ she said, deliberately damping the forbidden emotions the way she’d been forced to right from the first day she’d had the pregnancy confirmed. ‘Is it all right? Has anything happened to the baby?’
‘Stay still, Sara,’ ordered the familiar voice of the senior orthopaedic consultant. ‘You know better than to move until we’ve taken spinal X-rays and checked them.’
‘No! No X-rays!’ she gasped, feeling almost as if she was trapped in a terrifying nightmare. ‘I’m pregnant! No X-rays!’
‘Hush, sweetheart,’ said a softly accented voice, just another of those voices that she’d only recognised in the guise of colleagues before. Everything was so very different now that she was the helpless patient; they were her doctors and nurses and they would decide what treatment was best for her. ‘You just lie there and trust Sean O’Malley to know how to take an X-ray without harming your child,’ he said, coming to stand in exactly the right place so that she could see his familiar freckled face and carroty curls and the sincerity in his bright blue eyes. ‘I promise you on my word as an Irishman that the wee angel won’t come out glowing in the dark.’
Sara gave a hiccup that was part laughter, part sob and somehow found a smile. ‘I trust you, Sean O’Malley,’ she whispered, knowing absolutely that a man who delighted in every one of his four rambunctious red-headed sons would never do anything to risk anyone’s child, let alone a colleague’s.
The one voice she didn’t hear, even though it seemed as if every last member of the A and E department was crammed into the resus room around her, was Daniel’s.
What sort of irony was that? she mused silently, a tear tracking from the corner of her eye into her hair and stinging as it reached the place where her head had come into contact with the granite kerbstone. The one person she wanted beside her as she tried to cope with the terror, the one colleague who had the most to lose if anything happened to the child she was carrying—and he wasn’t there for her.
‘You’re late, Sara,’ her mother scolded, almost dragging her into the house as soon as she set foot on the doorstep. ‘You could at least have tried to get here on time for your sister’s big announcement.’
‘Sorry, Mum,’ she apologised automatically as she shrugged out of her voluminous jacket. ‘Where’s Zara going this time? Or is it a contract with one of the really big fashion shows?’
‘Oh, Sara! You’re not wearing that old thing again! You could at least have made an effort.’ This time there was a sharper edge to her mother’s voice as she saw what her daughter was wearing. ‘I really don’t understand why you always look such a dowdy mess. No one would ever believe that the two of you were identical twins.’ She flung up her hands in despair as Sara glanced down at her favourite black trousers teamed with the soft ivory blouse that she usually wore with it. It had always been enough for a family supper before, so what was different tonight?
Then her mother opened the door into the lounge and she heard the buzz of conversation that could only be made by several dozen voices and froze.
‘Mum? Is there a party or something?’ she demanded, hanging back. She was suddenly horribly conscious that she hadn’t bothered putting any make-up on after her shower and had done nothing other than run a brush through her hair either.
‘Sara, you know very well that your sister and Danny are making their big announcement this evening,’ her mother snapped as she beckoned her with an insistent hand. ‘She rang you up and told you all about it more than a week ago and everyone else has been here for hours. We’ve only been waiting for you to arrive.’
‘Dan …?’ Sara felt her eyes widen as the implication hit her with the force of a wrecking ball.
Zara and Dan?
A big announcement that her sister had told her about?
For just a moment she thought she was going to be sick, but with her mother’s hand now firmly clamped around her elbow she had no choice but to enter the room beside her as she pushed the door wide.
The room seemed to be crammed with people, every one of them dressed to the nines in their most elegant finery, but the glittering butterfly in their midst, effortlessly outshining them all, was Zara.
So why was it that the first pair of eyes she met were the luminous green ones that belonged to Dan … eyes that only had to glance in her direction to double her pulse rate and send her blood pressure into orbit no matter how serious the medical emergency they were working on.
Hastily, she dragged her gaze away, knowing that she couldn’t afford for anyone to guess just how much it was costing her to keep herself together while her world fell apart around her.
This was the first time that she’d seen her sister since the day that she’d turned up in A and E to be introduced to Dan, and when she’d heard nothing more, Sara had dared to breathe a sigh of relief. Even if they had gone out together, Zara’s attention span was notoriously short and she was certain her fickle sister would soon tire of an escort who would never be at her beck and call.
She was so confident that the two of them hadn’t hit it off together after all that she’d actually been contemplating screwing up her courage to ask Dan out for a drink later in the week, hoping that the two of them could continue the relationship they’d embarked on when she’d joined the department, longing to see where it would lead them.
The last thing she’d expected was that he and Zara had been carrying on a whirlwind courtship that would result in an engagement. Zara hadn’t dropped a single hint … and she certainly hadn’t phoned her a week ago to invite her to their engagement party.
It was a good job that she’d had years of practice at hiding her feelings from her manipulative sister. Even so, she needed a moment or two to compose herself, grateful for the time it took for her mother to walk across the room to join her father. Then he tapped the edge of his glass to attract everyone’s attention. He beckoned Zara and Daniel to join the two of them in front of the fireplace before he cleared his throat portentously.
‘Friends,’ he began.
‘Romans and countrymen,’ added one of Zara’s modelling friends with an inebriated giggle, only to be hushed by one of the older, more sober guests.
‘Friends, as you all know, this is a very special occasion,’ Frank Walker began again as Zara finally met Sara’s gaze and she saw that, oh, so familiar smug expression followed by a cuttingly dismissive glance from head to toe that told Sara as clearly as anything that her sister had deliberately neglected to tell her about the purpose of this evening’s gathering for exactly this reason.
If ever there had been a moment that demonstrated how different the two of them were it was this one, with Zara … flawless, beautiful Zara … the centre of everyone’s admiring gaze while she was purposely relegated into the background, not even afforded the courtesy call that would have allowed her to look her best. No one would be left in any doubt why Dan would choose Zara over her dowdy, less-than-perfect twin.
‘Audrey and I are delighted to welcome you all this evening to celebrate the engagement of our beautiful daughter Zara to this handsome chap