LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER THREE

      THIS was crazy. Worse than crazy, it was dangerous. No, she wouldn’t leave Gran and the unknown Angus, but maybe his responsibility was to pick both women up and take them to hospital regardless.

      But he’d have to chain Gran into the car, he thought ruefully. Plus he didn’t know what facilities Gosland hospital had, and the long drive to Sydney was the last thing either of them needed.

      But caring for an injured, pregnant woman at home…

      And for him personally to have to check her baby…

      Max was out on the back veranda, supposedly on his way to fetch Maggie’s gear from the back of her wagon. He’d taken a moment to phone Anton, his anaesthetist, to tell him that their more-than-competent registrar would be needed for the woman coming in with the hysterectomy complications. Now he was staring down at the river winding down to the sea, taking a second to catch his breath. And his thoughts.

      Maggie would agree to hospital if there was a real threat to her baby. He knew it. The moment he’d laid it on the line—that they were risking the baby’s death—he could tell that both women would finally agree to go. Only there was such despair in the old lady’s eyes, and such a sense of defeat and fear on Maggie’s face, that he’d agreed to help them stay.

      So all he had to do now was to find Maggie’s ultrasound equipment and turn into an obstetrician again.

      No. Checking one baby didn’t make an obstetrician.

      He wasn’t even delivering a baby. He was simply checking it was healthy, before heading back to the city to his very successful gynaecological practice—the surgery he was good at and that he could do without the emotional investment every pregnant woman seemed to demand of him.

      The need to care.

      Not that he didn’t care about his patients. He did. He gave excellent service, making the lives of the women who came to him much more comfortable. He was even saving lives.

      He just didn’t do babies anymore.

      Except this one.

      This was insane. He should refuse to have anything to do with it.

      Yet…the way she looked at him…

      It was the craziest of reasons and yet he couldn’t let it go. She looked as trapped as he felt. More.

      He didn’t know what was at stake here. He shouldn’t want to know, he reminded himself. Do not get personally involved.

      Stay professional, he told himself harshly. Find the ultrasound equipment, make sure things are okay and then leave. An ultrasound was no big deal. It wasn’t like she was expecting him to deliver the baby.

      That was really when he’d run a mile.

      ‘Is he really a doctor?’

      ‘He says he is and he knows all the right words.’

      The open fire was wonderful, the room was warm, but Maggie was still shivering. Reaction, she thought. Nothing more. It couldn’t be anything like internal shock—caused by a bleed, say, from a torn placenta.

      She had to fight the fear. But what was keeping him?

      She had a sudden vision of Max in his beautiful car, heading back to Sydney, and she felt ill. But she wasn’t running after him this time. She trusted him.

      She had no choice.

      ‘Where are my calves?’ Gran said fretfully.

      ‘The crate slid off the back of the truck. The calves ended up on the beach. Bonnie’s watching over them.’

      ‘Are you sure they’re okay?’

      ‘They’re fine.’ Hopefully they were.

      ‘How do you know? Of all the irresponsible…You only had to bring four calves less than ten miles.’ The old lady’s voice was querulous and Maggie looked at her sharply.

      ‘How bad’s the pain? Scale of one to ten?’

      ‘Three.’

      ‘Betty…’

      ‘Eight, then,’ she said, goaded.

      ‘You have to let me put up a syringe driver.’ With a permanent syringe, morphine could be delivered continuously so there wasn’t this four-hourly cycle of pain, relief, sleep, pain that Betty was suffering. But so far Betty had resisted. She’d insisted on control at every stage of this illness and she wasn’t letting go now.

      ‘I’ll take a pill in a few minutes.’

      ‘Take one now. No, take two.’

      ‘When I see our baby’s okay,’ Betty said roughly. ‘Oh, my dear…’

      ‘It’ll be fine.’ Maggie hauled herself around and stretched her hand out to her. Betty’s hand was thin and cold and it trembled.

      Probably hers did, too, Maggie thought. Things were going from bad to worse.

      Hurry up the man with the ultrasound. Max. A doctor for her baby.

      And more.

      Max.

      He’d carried her and he’d made her feel cared for. The remembered sensation was insidious—almost treacherous. It undermined her independence. Stupidly it made her want to cry.

      Max.

      He opened the back of the wagon, expecting to see a basic medical kit—or even no kit at all, because he still hardly believed she was a doctor—but what he saw was amazing. The equipment, carefully stored, sorted and readily accessible, was state of the art.

      What had she said back at the crash site? She was the ambulance?

      Maybe she was, for in the centre of the shelves of equipment lay a stretcher. It had been fitted to custom-built rails, with wheeled legs folded underneath. It was narrow, but otherwise there was little difference to the stretcher trolleys used at his city teaching hospital.

      The ultrasound equipment was impossible to miss for it was in a red case labelled ‘Ultrasound’. Useful for a doctor in a crisis, he thought, to be able to say to an onlooker, ‘Fetch me the red case with this label.’ And the cases were stacked and fastened against the sides in such a way that in a crisis they could be pulled out fast.

      He had a sudden vision of an emergency—maybe a child with breathing problems. With this set-up Maggie could haul out the side cases fast, then have someone else drive while she worked

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