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CHAPTER ONE

‘MOZART would be good for all the babies in the NICU,’ Marty protested. ‘I’ve picked out melodies everyone knows so the parents would enjoy it too. Besides, Emmaline is used to it. It’s what I’ve played for her all along.’

Sophie Gibson touched her friend lightly on the shoulder.

‘She’s not your baby,’ she gently reminded Marty. ‘In fact, she’s not even called Emmaline.’

‘But you’ve got to admit she looks like an Emmaline, doesn’t she?’

Marty put her hand through the port of the humidicrib and touched the wild black hair poking up from beneath the stockingette cap on the head of the tiny baby. Emmaline’s cherub face was screwed up as if sleeping required the utmost concentration, her little fists tucked up against her chin, ready to take on anyone who bothered her.

Or who messed with her Mozart!

‘She looks like a baby,’ Sophie said, then turned, smiling, as she heard her husband’s voice.

‘Glad you’re both here,’ Alexander Gibson said quietly. ‘Sophie, Marty, I’d like you both to meet Dr Carlos Quintero. He’s the baby’s father.’

Gib’s eyes sought out Marty, and she hoped the sick despair that squeezed her stomach wasn’t written on her face.

Stupid to have grown attached to Emmaline—stupid, stupid, stupid!

‘Carlos, this is Sophie Gibson, second in charge of the neonatal intensive care unit, and Marty Cox, the obstetrician who took care of Natalie during the time she was in on life support in the intensive care unit.’

The dark-haired, deeply tanned stranger bowed his head towards the two women, but Marty sensed his eyes, hidden beneath hooded, jet-fringed lids, were on Emm—the baby.

Then he lifted his head and eyes as dark as his lashes—obsidian stones in his harsh-planed face—met Marty’s.

‘I will wish to speak further to you,’ he said, his deep, accented voice, though quiet, carrying easily around the room.

Presence, that’s what he has, Marty thought, although she doubted presence was the reason for a sudden fluttery feeling in her chest.

‘Of course,’ she agreed, as easily as possible given the fluttery stuff going on. ‘Any time. Well, not quite any time, but we can make a time.’

She was chattering, something she only did when she was nervous, and of course Emmaline’s father suddenly turning up would make her nervous.

Wouldn’t it?

‘Why not now?’ Sophie suggested. ‘You’ve just come off duty.’

Marty fired a ‘some friend you are’ glance towards the neonatologist, and wondered just how bad she, herself, looked. Flat hair from the cap she’d been wearing in the delivery room, a too-large scrub suit billowing around her slight frame.

And you’re worrying because? her inner voice demanded.

‘You’d probably prefer to spend time with the baby right now,’ she mumbled at the stranger, who cast a look towards the crib then turned back to Marty.

‘Not at all. Now would suit me if it is convenient for you.’

Marty looked helplessly towards Sophie, who had to hide the smile, while Gib made matters worse by suggesting they use his office, which had a super coffee-maker and comfortable armchairs in which they could sit.

‘You know how to work the coffee-machine,’ he reminded Marty as she dragged her reluctant body out of the NICU, far too aware of the tall dark stranger following behind her.

‘Talk about a cliché!’ she muttered to herself as this description of Carlos whoever flashed through her mind.

‘I am sorry?’

She turned and shrugged.

‘No, I’m sorry. Talking to myself. Bad habit.’

‘And one I also have,’ the polite doctor informed her. ‘Though, in my case, I am often the only person who understands me.’

‘You can say that again!’ Marty told him, turning to smile as she added, ‘Though there are times when even I don’t understand me.’

‘Ah!’ He returned her smile, brilliant white teeth flashing in his dark face, deep lines creasing the tanned cheeks and crinkling the skin at the corner of his eyes. ‘But that is more than a language problem, is it not?’

Still getting over the effect of the smile—which had stuck her feet to the floor and made her stomach swoop in a wild roller-coaster simulation—she had no idea what to say to this fairly acute observation.

She settled on a lame ‘Gib’s office is through here’ and led the way along the corridor and into the comfortable room. At least, while she busied herself at the coffee-machine she wouldn’t have to look at this Carlos—wouldn’t have to see the silver strands in his night-dark hair, or the smooth tanned skin stretched over hard muscle in his arms, or the way his fine-boned nose seemed to direct the eye towards sinfully shapely lips.

And how come she’d noticed that much? She who looked on men as necessary adjuncts to the continuation of the species and, at best, useful friends who could reach the highest shelves in the supermarket or lift things down from on top of cupboards?

She shook her head as the espresso machine delivered its final drops into the two small cups, took a deep breath and turned back to find the man studying the photos of some of Gib’s patients that adorned the walls of his office.

‘You call these before and after photos?’ he said, turning as she put the coffee cups on the low table. ‘I have never done much neonatology. It is amazing to think these small babies can grow into such sturdy children and healthy-looking teenagers.’

‘They get the best possible start in this NICU,’ Marty told him. ‘With Emmaline—I’m sorry, with your baby we weren’t sure how premature she was, but her birth weight was 1500 grams, which put her into low birth weight category. So she’d have gone there rather than the other nursery anyway. In the NICU she can be watched every minute of the day in case any of the things that beset premmie babies crops up.’

Had he noticed her slip?

He didn’t mention it, settling himself in a chair near the table and spooning sugar into his coffee.

‘Emmaline?’ Dark eyebrows rose as he said the word and Marty squirmed with embarrassment.

‘I know it’s silly, but I’ve kind of known her, you see, right from when Natalie was admitted. I was called to consult in A and E when she was brought in after the accident, and then when the decision was made to keep her on life support for the baby’s sake, I was the obstetrician in charge—but Gib’s already told you that part. The hospital couldn’t track down any relatives, which meant Natalie had no visitors so there was no one to talk to the baby. I used to visit, and talk to it, and play music—’

‘Mozart?’

So he had heard her conversation. She really should learn to argue more quietly. But playing Mozart had been little enough to do for the baby and the brain-dead woman who had been carrying her, so she tilted her chin and defended her actions.

‘Did you know a researcher once had a group of adolescents take a test, then played some Mozart for them, then had them take a parallel test and every one of them did better? I don’t know if it made any difference to the baby, or to Natalie, but it’s beautiful music. I love Bach—probably more than Mozart—but I thought he might be too complex for the baby, so stuck with a lot of the piano concertos—’

She stopped abruptly as embarrassment coiled and writhed like something alive inside her.

‘Of course, my musical tastes are nothing to do with what you want to know, which was—’

Marty had no idea where the conversation had begun, so she picked up her coffee and took a gulp. Quite dreadful—she’d forgotten to put sugar in, or was too muddled to have given it a thought.

‘Emmaline,’ he repeated, and she felt embarrassment heat her body as she remembered.

‘I didn’t name her right away. I called her “the baby” or just “baby” when I visited for the four weeks Natalie was in the ICU, but then, when I delivered her, she was a tiny scrap of humanity with this wealth of black hair.’ She smiled. ‘I’d had a doll with hair like that when I was young and she was Emmaline, so the name just sort of stuck.’

‘Emmaline Quintero!’ He spoke as if tasting the name on his tongue, and Marty, wondering if there was a word that would convey the ultimate in mortification—mortifiedest?—rushed into speech again.

‘You don’t have to call her Emmaline, of course you don’t. You’ll have your own name for her, a family name maybe—your mother’s name—a favourite, or you could call her after Natalie.’

Big mistake! The man’s face became a mask of nothingness, all expression wiped away—black eyes boring into Marty’s, lips thinned and tight as he said coldly, ‘I think not.’

Do not apologise, Marty’s inner voice ordered, but she was beyond help from within and had already rushed into a confused bout of ‘sorrys’.

‘The decision to keep Natalie on life support? That was yours?’

Thankfully, Carlos’s question cut across her stumbling apologies and Marty was able to grasp the lifeline of a purely medical question.

Although why was he questioning the decision?

Refusing to think about the implications of that one, Marty explained.

‘Actually, in the absence of any relative that we could contact, the hospital ethics committee made the decision. They went on the advice of the neonatologist—Sophie was the one consulted at the time—and my judgement of the stage of the pregnancy. It was deemed advisable, for the baby’s sake—’

‘What was that judgement?’

Marty was prepared to accept his interruption—after all, the man had stuff he wanted to know—but the cold, hard voice in which he interrupted—she didn’t like that one little bit.

‘My judgement of the stage of pregnancy?’ she queried, her voice as cold and hard as his—all compassion gone. Two could play this game. ‘I measured fundal height, and used ultrasound to estimate the length of the baby and head circumference. But although these measurements are fairly close in the first and second trimester, by the third, beginning at twenty-eight weeks—’

Too much information now—he’d know all this medical detail—but he didn’t interrupt so she kept going.

‘They can be out by as much as three weeks, and that’s plus or minus. The man who was in the car gave no help apart to say she was pregnant when she moved in with him so the closest we could get was twenty-eight to thirty-one weeks. Natalie was tall and slim so it was also possible the pregnancy could have been further along than that—a possibility that became a probability when Em—the baby—was delivered.’

‘Dios! Call the baby Emmaline if you wish. Anything is better than this stumbling every time she’s mentioned.’ He glared at Marty, as if defying her to disobey his order, then demanded, ‘So, if anything, Natalie was further into her pregnancy than your initial assessment—that is what you’re saying?’

Marty nodded, feeling sorry now for Emmaline who had this disagreeable man for a father.

‘And the man said she was pregnant when she returned to him?’

‘I don’t know about “returned”. He said she was already pregnant when she came and that’s all he’d say.’

‘Oh, she returned, for sure,’ Carlos told her, enough ice in his voice to make Marty shiver.

There was a long silence, then he added, ‘So this Emmaline, she is mine!’

He ground out the words with such evident regret—distaste almost—Marty let fly.

‘You make it sound as if she’s an albatross hung around your neck by some malign fate. She’s a baby—she’s not to blame for being born. You’re a doctor—you of all people know how conception happens. Actually, ten-year-old kids know how it happens these days. But it was up to you. If you didn’t want a child, you should have done something to prevent it.’

She was glaring directly at him so caught the flash of something that might be humour in his eyes, then he smiled as he said, ‘And do you always think of the possibility of conception when you make love with your partner? Or is the easing of the urgent need the priority of both mind and body?’

The smile, though as coolly cynical as the words, confused her to the extent she forgot to breathe, then, angry at her reaction, she snapped at him.

‘I don’t have a partner!’

Oh, hell! Mortification all over again because that wasn’t the issue—her personal life was none of Carlos Quintero’s business.

Fine, dark eyebrows rose again and the jet-black eyes seemed to penetrate her scrub suit to scan the body hidden beneath it.

Infuriated beyond reason, Marty stood up, grabbed the empty cups off the table and carried them across the room. This man wasn’t interested in his wife, or how she’d died. His only concern—hope?—had been that maybe the baby wasn’t his.

Callous, arrogant wretch, with his insinuating remarks and come-to-bed eyes scanning her body!

‘It is not for myself I regret Emmaline,’ he said, and Marty’s wrath, which had been building up nicely, dissipated instantly. He’d used her name! ‘It is she I am thinking of. The life I lead—it is no life for a baby, yet it is work to which I am committed. This is hard, you see, for me now to have a baby and to know what best to do with it.’

‘Her,’ Marty corrected automatically.

‘Her!’ he repeated obediently.

Carlos watched the woman’s shoulders slump and knew he’d won a reprieve. He, who hated above all things to be dependent on another person, needed help—help to understand what had happened, and where things stood—help to work out what to do next. And one thing was clear—this woman had the baby’s—Emmaline’s—interest at heart and for that reason, he guessed, she might be willing to help a stranger.

She returned to her chair, though he could read her reluctance in the way she moved and her distrust in the way she held her body. One of those women to whom their job is their life, he guessed, though her attachment to the baby was strange—professional detachment usually went hand in hand with such dedication.

‘Do you know any details of the accident?’ he asked, steering the conversation away from the baby in the hope she might relax a little.

‘Only that it was single vehicle—apparently the car careened off the road on a curve and struck a tree—and Natalie was breathing on her own when the ambulance arrived. She stopped breathing when she was moved and they revived her twice at the site then put her on life support to bring her to the hospital. Foetal heart rate was stable throughout the examinations, and tests at the hospital showed no damage to the amniotic sac or the placenta and, as far as we could tell, no damage to the foetus.’

‘And the man?’

He saw the woman’s quick glance—clear, almond-shaped, hazel eyes sweeping across his face—before she replied.

‘Multiple fractures to both legs, some contusions and concussion, I think a ruptured spleen but nothing life-threatening.’

A shame, Carlos thought, then dismissed the thought as petty and unworthy. It wasn’t Peter Richards’s fault Natalie had loved him. Although, if he’d not broken off their engagement, sending her scurrying to Europe to forget him, the beautiful blonde would never have crossed Carlos’s path and this entire, unsatisfactory mess could have been avoided.

Though he wouldn’t use the words ‘unsatisfactory mess’ to this fiery little obstetrician!

Marty—as strange a name as Emmaline!

‘So he was hospitalised here?’

Marty nodded, though the look on her face suggested she was no more fond of Peter Richards than he was.

‘You didn’t like him?’

‘I didn’t know him, but I do know, once he was mobile, he never visited her, to sit with her and talk to her. I know she’d been ruled brain-dead but no one knows if on some deep level such people might feel comfort or support. He should have done it for his own sake if nothing else—having survived the accident that killed her—but he didn’t even come to say his goodbyes. She lay there, all alone, and so beautiful it hurt to look at her.’

Carlos saw his companion’s lips tighten to a thin line as she described what she saw as Peter Richards’s shortcomings. But she was right, Natalie had been beautiful. So beautiful she’d bewitched him, and he’d pursued her with an ardour and determination he’d never felt before, though beautiful women hadn’t been lacking in his life.

Anger stirred briefly—directed not at Peter Richards for his behaviour, or at Natalie for not loving him, but at himself for his folly in wanting her anyway, then he dismissed it, for the matter at hand was the baby.

A tap on the door, then a nurse popped her head around the jamb.

‘Dr Quintero, I’m about to change the baby and feed her. Would you like to see her? Hold her?’

He could feel Marty’s eyes on him but refused to look her way.

‘Not this time,’ he said, then felt obliged to make an excuse. ‘I have flown halfway around the world through too many time zones and am tired enough to maybe drop her.’

The nurse disappeared and he was unable to avoid turning back to Marty, who watched him, one mobile eyebrow raised in his direction.

‘What can I do with a baby?’ he demanded, so irritated by her attitude he was practically growling.

‘Bring it up?’ she suggested, and now he did growl.

‘You know nothing of my life. You sit there, so prim and righteous, passing judgement on Peter Richards, passing judgement on me. I work in Sudan, among people who lose their babies every day, so wretched is their existence. Children die because I cannot save them, because they have had nothing but stones to eat, and their mothers are so malnourished they cannot feed them. They might walk as long as six days to seek treatment for themselves or their children, then leave our small, makeshift hospital and walk back home again. That is my life!’

Marty was sorry she’d prodded. Like most people, she was overwhelmed with helplessness when she considered the death and destruction in famine- or war-ravaged countries. But that didn’t alter the fact that Emmaline was this man’s child. His responsibility.

‘So this baby doesn’t count?’ she persisted, and he stood up and paced around the room, a tall, angry stranger with a face that might be carved from teak, so strongly were his bones delineated beneath his skin, so remote the expression on those graven features.

‘I will deal with the baby!’ he said, after several minutes of pacing. ‘I come because a message reaches me—my wife is injured, dying perhaps. Do you think she told me she was pregnant before she left me? Do you think I would have let her go, carrying my baby? The baby is news when I reach the hospital. What am I supposed to do—summon up a carer for a baby out of thin air? Make plans for what school she will attend?’

‘I’m sorry!’ This time Marty’s apology was heart-felt. ‘I didn’t realise you hadn’t known. It must have been terrible for you—to arrive and learn you had a child. Most people have nine months to get used to the idea—to make plans. But you don’t have to decide anything immediately. Sophie wants to keep Emmaline in for at least another fortnight. At best, she was a month premature and her birth weight was very low, so she’s vulnerable to all the complications of both premmie and low birth weight infants.’

‘But so far, has had none of them?’

‘She was jaundiced after two days but that’s common enough and phototherapy cleared it up. Gib told you she’s five days old?’

Carlos nodded.

‘I assume Natalie’s deteriorating condition made a Caesar necessary earlier, possibly, than you would have liked?’

‘Her organs were shutting down,’ Marty agreed. ‘Life-support machines can only do so much. For Emmaline’s sake, it was advisable to operate.’

‘So now we have a baby.’

Marty would have liked to correct him—to say he had a baby—but he’d spoken quietly, as if moving towards acceptance, and she didn’t want to antagonise him again. In the meantime, she was missing Emmaline’s feeding time and a subtle ache in her arms reminded her of how much she’d been enjoying her contact with the little girl—and how unprofessional her behaviour was to have allowed herself to grow so attached.

She’d chosen to specialise in O and G rather than paediatrics so this didn’t happen—so she wouldn’t be forever getting clucky over other people’s children. In O and G you took care of the woman, delivered the baby, and after one postnatal check the family was gone from your life, or at least until the next pregnancy.

But with Emmaline it hadn’t worked that way, and all the up-till-then successfully repressed maternal urges had come bursting forth and Marty, doomed to childlessness, had fallen in love with a tiny scrap of humanity with a scrunched-up face, a putty nose, let-me-at-them fists and jet-black hair.

Misery swamped her, providing a partial antidote to the flutters she still felt when she looked at Emmaline’s father.

Get with it, woman, the inner voice ordered, and Marty tried.

‘I should be going,’ she said, standing up, acting positive and in control, but still waiting until his pacing took him away from the door before heading in that direction herself.

Just in case the antidote wasn’t working…

He moved a different way, blocking her path.

‘I’ve kept you from your dinner. Do you have far to go to your home?’

Politeness?

Or did he want more from her?

Positive! In control!

‘Dinner can wait,’ she said lightly, waving her hand in the air in case he hadn’t picked up the nonchalance in her voice. ‘And, no, my home’s not far. Walking distance actually. I live in an apartment by the river in a parkland area called South Bank.’

Explaining too much again, but the antidote wasn’t working—not at all—and the man’s proximity—his body standing so close to hers—was affecting her again, making her feel shaky and uncertain and a lot of other things she hadn’t felt for so long it was hard to believe she was feeling them now.

‘South Bank? The hospital administrator to whom I spoke earlier was kind enough to book me into a hotel at South Bank. You know of this hotel?’

Only because it’s across the road from my apartment building! How’s that for fickle fate?

‘I know it,’ she said cautiously.

‘Then, perhaps you will be so kind as to wait while I collect my backpack then guide me on my way.’

He was a visitor to her country so she could hardly refuse, and to flee in desperate disorder down the corridor might look a tad strange.

‘Where’s your backpack?’

‘It is in the office on the ground floor, behind the desk where people enquire about patients or ask for directions. A kind woman on the desk offered to look after it for me.’

‘Of course she would,’ Marty muttered, then she remembered this man had super-sensitive hearing and was wise to mutterings. She’d better stop doing it forthwith.

‘I’ve got to change so I’ll meet you in the foyer,’ she suggested, leading the way out of Gib’s office and along the corridor to a bank of staff lifts. ‘If you turn left when you come out on the ground floor, you’ll find the information desk without any trouble.’

Positive! In control!

She was moving away, intending to sneak a few minutes in the NICU before changing—not one hundred per cent in control—when his hand touched her shoulder and she froze.

‘Thank you,’ he said, though whether his gratitude was for her directions, her explanations or her kindness to his daughter, Marty had no idea. He’d lifted his hand off her shoulder almost as soon as it had touched down, and then stepped into the lift and disappeared behind the silently closing doors.

They collected his backpack and she led him out of the hospital, into the soft, dark, late January night. Humidity wrapped around them as they walked beneath the vivid bougainvillea that twined above the path through the centre of the park, while the smell of the river wafted through the air.

Usually, this walk was special to Marty, separating as it did her work life from her social life—if going to the occasional concert, learning Mandarin and practising Tae Kwon Do could be called a social life.

But tonight the peace of the walk was disturbed by the company, her body, usually obedient to her demands, behaving badly. It skittered when Carlos brushed his arm against her hip, and nerves leapt beneath her skin when he held her elbow to guide her out of the path of a couple of in-line skaters. If this was attraction, it was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before, and if it wasn’t attraction, then what the hell was it?

She was too healthy for it to be the start of some contagion, but surely too old, not to mention too sensible, to be feeling the lustful urges of an adolescent towards a total stranger.

‘This is my apartment block and your hotel is there, across the road.’

Given how she was reacting to him, it was the sensible thing to do but as she stood there, banishing this tired, bereaved, confused man to the anonymity of a hotel room, she felt a sharp pang of guilt, as if her mother was standing behind her, prodding her with the tip of a carving knife.

‘You’ll be OK?’ she asked, then immediately regretted it. He couldn’t possibly be all right after all he’d been through. But he let her off the hook, nodding acquiescence.

‘I will see you again,’ he said, before shifting the weight of his backpack against his shoulders and crossing the road to the hotel, a tall dark shadow in the streetlights—a man who walked alone.

She turned towards her apartment building, free to mutter now, castigating herself for feeling sorry for him, but also warning him, in his absence, that the ‘seeing you again’ scenario was most unlikely.

Emmaline had a family now—there’d be no need for her to provide that special contact all babies needed. Emmaline’s father was best placed to do this for her and it was up to him to decide where the little one’s future lay.

Her heart might ache as she accepted these truths, but it was time to be sensible and make a clean break from the baby who had sneaked beneath her guard and professionalism, and had wormed her way into her heart.

She rode the lift up to her floor, then opened the apartment door, walking through the darkened rooms to stand on the balcony and look out at the river, reminding herself of all the positives in her life—a job she loved, a great apartment, interests and friends—but neither the river nor her thoughts filled the aching emptiness within her, and she hugged herself tightly as she went back inside to find something for her dinner.