The Magic of Christmas Read online

  ‘No need.’ Chloe gave a quick smile and shook her head. ‘I’ll read for a bit and then put my light out. See you in the morning.’

  Go after her, Lara urged silently, but Christian stood still, staring at the closed door with a frown on his handsome face.

  He stirred. ‘I usually tuck her in. Is twelve too old to be kissed good-night? I honestly have no idea.’

  Lara tilted her head to one side thoughtfully. ‘Well, I’ve never had children but I wouldn’t think that you’re ever too old for a hug. I’m still happy to be kissed good-night by the right guy, and I’m twenty-five.’

  His jaw tightened. ‘Lara—’

  ‘OK, OK, I probably shouldn’t have said that.’ She lifted a hand and gave a helpless shrug. ‘I would have thought she’d appreciate a hug. Probably not at the school gates but in the privacy of your own home…I don’t know, Christian. Perhaps you should just not give her the choice and go on up.’

  ‘I sensed that she didn’t want me to.’

  Lara stood, not knowing what to say. She’d sensed the same thing, but what little girl wouldn’t want her dad? Why would Chloe push him away? ‘It’s almost as if she’s afraid she’s being a bother.’

  ‘A bother?’ Christian turned to look at her, a frown in his eyes as he considered what she’d said. ‘Why would she think that?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Is it to do with her mother? How does she feel about all that?’

  There was a long silence and a muscle flickered in his jaw. ‘I have no idea. She refuses to talk about it.’

  ‘She’s never talked about it?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve tried, of course, but she always changes the subject really quickly.’ Christian glanced towards the closed door. ‘She seems more interested in checking that I’m happy. I think I’m probably asking all the wrong questions. I’m just not good at talking to twelve-yearold girls.’

  ‘It can’t be an easy thing to talk about.’ Lara hesitated. ‘Could she be hoping that her mum might come back?’

  ‘No.’ His tone was hard. ‘I was honest with them on that score. Perhaps too honest, but I didn’t want to create hope where there was none.’

  Lara thought of her own family and how close they were and didn’t bother trying to hide her shock. ‘Well, the whole thing must have been pretty traumatic for someone of Chloe’s age. It’s very unusual for a woman to leave her children. Does she visit them?’

  ‘She’s in Hong Kong, so visiting isn’t easy. She dropped in once when she had a stopover at Heathrow but she hasn’t spent much time in the UK since she left last Christmas. She’s an accountant and she was transferred to the Hong Kong office. Very prestigious job.’

  Lara looked at him. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she murmured. ‘You must have been devastated.’

  He was silent for such a long time that she thought he wasn’t going to respond to her statement but then he lifted his head and looked at her. ‘I was devastated for the girls.’

  She frowned. What was that supposed to mean? That he hadn’t loved his wife?

  ‘Christian—’

  ‘Move on, Lara,’ he said softly. ‘My ex-wife isn’t my favourite topic of conversation.Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I will go and tuck Chloe in.’

  ‘Perhaps she might chat to me if we’re decorating at the weekend.’ Lara smiled. ‘There’s nothing quite so effective as the boredom of painting a room to induce an intimate conversation.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE rest of the week was a whirl of work and unpacking.

  When she was at home, Lara finished emptying boxes and found homes for all the children’s possessions, and, when she was at work, she tried to concentrate on patients and not think about being attracted to Christian.

  But it was hard.

  Especially once Jane discovered her new living arrangements. ‘Christian mentioned that you’ve moved in to help him with the kids.’

  Lara frowned. ‘He told you that?’

  ‘Yes. We were chatting.’

  ‘Christian doesn’t chat.’

  ‘He does if you force the issue. I don’t know which piece of information shocked me most. The fact that he’s divorced or the news that you’ve moved in with him. Why didn’t you tell me?!’

  ‘Because I was worried that you might ring my mother.’ Lara glanced towards the ambulance bay, waiting for the arrival of an overdose patient. ‘She’d jump to the wrong conclusions.’

  ‘You’re not involved, then?’

  ‘No.’ Lara checked her watch. Ambulance Control had said five minutes but there was no sign of the patient. ‘My love life is as depressingly stagnant as ever.’

  ‘Well, that might change now you’re actually living in the same house. You might bump into him naked in the bathroom.’ Jane gave her a wicked smile. ‘Do me a favour and carry a camera with you, just in case.’

  ‘You’re perverted.’Lara stared out of the window. ‘And it’s a big house. I could walk around naked for a week and not bump into him and, anyway, neither of us is interested in a relationship.’

  Jane looked at her. ‘I wasn’t really talking about a relationship. I was thinking more of passionate sex with a guy who looks like a Greek god. It seems like too perfect an opportunity to waste.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to waste it. He has two children and I’m going to Australia next month.’

  ‘Which gives you plenty of time to have a steamy, no-strings affair. Sounds just about perfect to me. You need some light relief. You work much too hard.’ Jane stared thoughtfully through the window. ‘Where are they? Do you think the ambulance has crashed?’

  ‘I hope not because we’ve only just restocked Resus after the last black ice disaster. It’s freezing out there.’

  ‘Snow is forecast at the weekend. Can you imagine that?’

  ‘Brilliant. It will make everything really Christmassy.’ Lara’s mood lifted and Jane gave an irritated frown.

  ‘Do you have to be so relentlessly positive? It’s really exhausting for the rest of us. Could you occasionally try and look on the black side, like normal people?’

  ‘I don’t see a black side to snow.’

  ‘Of course there’s a black side,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘A mere sprinkling of white dust and the whole city grinds to a halt. Cars slither, people slither, bones are broken…’

  ‘Well, we’re stuck here, anyway, so we may as well have some customers.’Lara heard the siren and gave a nod. ‘Here we go. Lights, camera, action.’

  The paramedics took the unconscious man straight through to Resus and seconds later Christian joined them.

  Jack, the paramedic, helped transfer the patient from their stretcher to the resus trolley. ‘His name is Gordon Baxter. He’s fifty-five, lives with his wife. She went out shopping this morning and found him when she returned. Apparently there was a note telling her not to call the ambulance.’

  The team listened to the handover as they worked.

  Without delay, Christian intubated the patient and Lara helped Penny insert a line into the patient’s vein.

  Jack moved the stretcher away and retrieved his blanket. ‘He’s been treated by the doctor for depression but there were no empty bottles lying around. We looked.’

  ‘Is his wife here?’

  ‘Just giving his details to Fran in Reception.’ Jack looked at the man on the trolley. ‘Apparently he lost his job six months ago and he’s been depressed ever since.’

  ‘Poor man,’ Lara murmured, monitoring his pulse rate. ‘It’s a hundred and forty, Christian.’

  His mouth tightened. ‘He’s taken something. We just need to work out what. Can someone go and question his wife in more detail? Were any of his tablets missing?’

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ Jane said immediately, and Lara reached for the ECG machine.

  ‘Let’s do a trace.’

  ‘Yes.’ Christian was examining the patient, checking his eyes. ‘He has a divergent squint and his pupils are unreactive. Penny
—we need to check his blood gases.’

  Lara attached the ECG leads to the patient and Penny stared at the machine. ‘He’s in VT.’

  ‘No.’ Christian studied the trace. ‘It’s sinus tachycardia with prolonged conduction. Look…’ He drew a finger along the trace. ‘The P wave is superimposed on the T wave. That’s why it looks like VT.’

  Lara stared at the ECG and wondered if she would have spotted the same thing. Maybe. ‘Tricyclic antidepressants?’

  ‘Possibly.’ Christian nodded. ‘Very possibly. Can someone ring his GP’s surgery and find out what he was taking, just to be sure?’

  Penny looked at them both. ‘How do you know it’s tricyclics? It could be anything.’

  ‘Not anything,’ Christian said calmly as he tested the man’s reflexes. ‘The signs are there if you know what you’re looking for. Lara, you should train as a doctor.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with the salary,’ Lara said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been living on nothing for so long.’

  At that moment Jane hurried back into the room. ‘He’s been taking amitryptoline. His wife couldn’t find the bottle when she looked in the cupboard so it could be that.’

  ‘We can safely assume that it’s amitryptoline. Lara, did you send those bloods off?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you want to give him activated charcoal?’

  Christian shook his head. ‘Only if it’s within an hour of overdose and we’re way past that. Jane, do you know if the formulation he was taking was sustained release?’

  ‘It wasn’t. I asked.’

  ‘Good.’ Christian gave a nod of approval. ‘So let’s give him 8.4 per cent of sodium bicarbonate. Hopefully, by correcting the hypoxia and acidosis, we’ll treat the arrhythmias.’

  Lara reached for the ampoule. ‘One hundred mils?’

  ‘We’ll start with that. Sometimes it produces a dramatic improvement.’

  Penny stepped closer. ‘Why?’

  ‘It alters protein binding and lowers the amount of active free tricyclic drug.’ Christian injected the sodium bicarbonate and looked up. ‘How’s his blood pressure?’

  ‘Dropping,’ Lara murmured, her eyes on the screen.

  ‘Can we elevate the foot of the trolley? And let’s give 1 milligram of glucagon. Jane, can you ring the physicians? He’s going to need to be admitted.’

  They worked to stabilise the patient and then the physicians arrived.

  Christian went with Jane to talk to the man’s wife and Lara helped transfer the patient to the ward.

  When she returned to Resus, Christian was in the room, finishing the notes.

  ‘Will he live, do you think?’ Lara felt a rush of sadness as she thought about the man lying still and unresponsive on the trolley. ‘I hate to think of anyone feeling that desperate. It must be awful for his wife.’

  ‘She’s blaming herself. It’s the usual question of “what if?” What if she’d come home earlier from shopping? What if she’d decided to go on another day? It’s hard for her.’ Christian finished writing and walked across the room to the sink. ‘Let’s hope he’ll be OK.’

  ‘Christmas can be a difficult time of year.’

  ‘Yes.’ His answer was surprisingly terse and she studied his profile, remembering what he’d said about his wife leaving at Christmas.

  ‘Did she leave before or after?’

  He took a long time washing his hands and, for a moment, she wondered if he’d even heard her question. Then he turned off the water, dried his hands and turned to look at her. ‘After. Just.’ He gave a short laugh that was markedly lacking in humour. ‘I think she imagined that the children might be so pleased with their presents that they wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t around.’

  Lara couldn’t bear to think about how awful it must have been. ‘They must have been very shocked.’

  ‘To begin with, Aggie didn’t really see a difference because her mother was always jetting off to different parts of the world so her absence wasn’t a rarity. It took a while for it to sink in. But Chloe…’ He broke off and his mouth tightened. ‘Chloe was devastated. For weeks she seemed to shrink into herself and then she just quietly got on with her life.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I applied for this job and we moved house.’

  ‘Based on the principle that three major life changes are better than one?’ She pulled a face. ‘You certainly believe in piling on the stress, Dr Blake.’

  ‘I thought moving house might be good for all of us. And the house is nearer to the girls’ school.’

  ‘And was moving a good thing?’

  He dried his hands. ‘I think so.Apart from the fact that Chloe is far too quiet, they seem more stable.’

  ‘And what about you? How are you?’

  ‘It isn’t about me.’ He frowned, as though he considered the question strange. ‘It’s about the children. They didn’t choose to be in this situation.’

  ‘And you did?’

  Something bleak flickered in his eyes. ‘No. But I should have foreseen it. We were a disaster waiting to happen. My wife wasn’t good at relationships. And apparently I’m not an easy man to be married to. That’s got to be a flaw. You might want to remember that one, Lara.’

  She sighed. ‘Sorry, but that would only count as a flaw if I was planning to marry you. Given that my longest relationship is three dates, I think that’s an unlikely scenario. I need a flaw that will kill the chemistry stone dead. I thought your chocolate restraint was bad, but apparently it isn’t bad enough.’

  They looked at each other for a long moment and Lara felt her mouth dry and her heart bump hard against her chest.

  It didn’t matter what they said or did, the chemistry was there, sizzling away like a high-voltage power cable.

  She wanted to kiss him. Just once. To satisfy her curiosity.

  And perhaps he read her thoughts because he drew breath sharply and a muscle flickered in his hard jaw. ‘Lara—there are some instincts and urges that should be ignored. This is one of them.’

  Her whole body burning with frustration, she ran her tongue over her lips to try and moisten them. ‘Right. I’m sure that’s absolutely the right decision.’

  His eyes dropped to her mouth, lingered there for a moment and then he turned sharply and strode out of Resus, shouldering the door open so violently that it crashed against the wall.

  Lara flinched and stared after him in helpless frustration.

  The chemistry between them was virtually setting fire to the building and he was walking away from it?

  She wanted to ask him for a few hints and tips because she wasn’t finding it anywhere near as easy to handle as he clearly was.

  Then she looked at the door, which was still swinging from the force of his exit.

  Maybe he wasn’t finding it that easy, either.

  Deciding that what she needed was to throw herself into her work and stop dreaming about kissing Christian, she walked back round to the main area of the emergency department to start working her way through the steady stream of patients that poured through the doors on a daily basis. All required concentration and focus. But none prevented her from thinking about kissing Christian.

  By the end of her shift, she was becoming impatient with herself.

  This was completely ridiculous.

  She’d never felt this way about a man and she didn’t understand why she was feeling this way now.

  It had to be because a relationship just wasn’t possible.

  Because she couldn’t have it, she wanted it.

  Determined to think about something other than Christian, she wandered through to Reception to talk to Fran, hoping for distraction.

  She found her standing on a chair, pinning metres of tinsel around the reception area.

  Lara handed her another rope of tinsel. ‘You look unreasonably cheerful for a woman fighting at the front line.’

  ‘I am cheerful. I met a man last night.’ Fran hugged a piece of
tinsel to her chest and beamed. ‘Oh, Lara, he was gorgeous.’

  Lara thought about the psychic’s prediction. ‘Did you use contraception?’

  ‘Lara!! I can’t believe you just asked me that!’ Fran covered her mouth and started to laugh, and Lara gave a sheepish smile.

  ‘Sorry.’ She stooped and picked up a pile of mistletoe that was lying on the floor. ‘So tell me all about him.’

  ‘He’s a fireman. I met him when he brought that little boy in a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘The one who had his leg stuck in the bicycle wheel? Oh, yes, I remember him. Are you seeing him again?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Good. Well, I hope you have—Make sure you don’t—’ Deciding that there was no best way to tell someone that a psychic had predicted she’d be pregnant by Christmas, Lara waved the mistletoe. It was all nonsense, anyway. ‘Where are you planning to put this? Not in Reception, surely? It’s asking for trouble. Somebody is bound to eat the berries and sue us.’

  ‘It’s going in the staffroom.’ Fran jumped down from the chair. ‘I thought it might liven up everyone’s working day.’

  Lara looked at the mistletoe in her hand.

  Why not?

  It might be the only cure for her problem. It had always worked before. ‘Good idea.’ She gave Fran a casual smile. ‘I’ll go and pin it somewhere obvious.’

  Lara strolled back down the corridor but instead of turning left to the staffroom, she turned right towards Christian’s office. His door was open and he was on the phone, but the moment he saw her his brows rose questioningly. He swiftly terminated the phone call and rose to his feet. ‘Problems?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ She closed the door behind her and gave an apologetic smile. ‘Bit of an emergency going on here. I need your help with something.’

  Restoring her sanity.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be going home?’

  ‘I’m going home right after this,’ she assured him, her heart pounding as she watched him walk around his desk towards her, concern in his eyes. ‘I just need you to do something for me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He was so close to her now that she could hardly breathe. Feeling reckless and daring, she rose on tiptoe and the mistletoe slipped from her fingers as she slid her arms round his neck and touched her mouth to his.