CHAPTER ONE

      TAKING a steadying breath, Lydia would have loved to press her face against the cool bathroom tiles, to rinse out her mouth and splash her face with some icy cool water, but the shrill bleeps from her pager merited no such luxury.

      She was sure morning sickness should now be horrible distant memory, sure that by five months she should be able to walk into a hospital without diving for the nearest rest room.

      Why did the books always get it wrong?

      Catching sight of herself as she darted out of the cubicle, Lydia gave a grimace. She’d assumed by the time she hit registrar status that she’d sweep into the ward in chic, well-cut suits and impossibly beautiful shoes attached to thin silk stockinged legs. Not dashing in like some overgrown heifer with baggy theatre blues covering swollen ankles. But the tailored suits she’d envisaged for this stage of her career didn’t equate with the subtropical temperatures of the special care unit and high heels didn’t make for a speedy dash along the corridor. The chocolate curls she’d so neatly tied back this morning were escaping rather alarmingly and she’d have loved to have fiddled with a bit of lipstick, would have loved to have put some blusher on her way too pale cheeks, but there really wasn’t time. As a very new junior registrar on Special Care, the shrieks from her pager could only mean one thing…she was needed, and quickly.

      Consoling herself that the last thing a tiny baby would care about was whether the doctor had lipstick on, Lydia wrenched open the bathroom door and practically flew along the highly polished tiles, popping a mint into her mouth as she did so and praying her unfortunate delay would go unnoticed or, more pointedly, wouldn’t have done any damage to the fragile lives that were now in her charge.

      Racing through the black swing doors, even though she’d just washed her hands, even though time was of the essence, protocol still had to be adhered to and Lydia squeezed a hefty dose of alcohol rub into her palms as she scanned the special care nursery, watching the crowd huddled around a crib as she deftly made her way over.

      She’d so wanted to look cool for this, had wanted to breeze in on her first day supremely in control, to dispel in an instant the questionable merits of filling a three-month maternity leave position with a rather pregnant doctor. But instead of arriving cool and unflappable, it was a rather pale, shaky Lydia that made her way over to the gathered crowd. ‘What’s the problem?’

      ‘No problem,’ a deep voice clipped, and Lydia looked to the moving mouth on a very tall, very wide-set, very annoyed-looking ogre dressed in theatre blues. His green eyes worked the tiny infant, large hands retaping a probe connected to the baby’s rapidly moving stomach, each tiny fast breath requiring a supreme effort. ‘The drama’s over.’

      ‘What happened?’ Lydia had to wait a full minute before she got a reply. The crowd was drifting away now and a nurse fiddled with monitors as the avenging ogre suctioned the baby’s airway with surprising gentleness for someone with such large hands.

      ‘Prolonged apnoeic episode.’ Those green eyes finally met hers, and he flashed a very on-off smile. ‘Extremely prolonged, hence the emergency page.’

      ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Lydia mumbled, realising the direness of the situation she had just missed. Apnoeic incidents in Special Care were part and parcel of the day. These tiny babies often seemed to forget to breathe which would send most staff into a spin, but here under the controlled setting of Special Care it was routinely