Their First Family Christmas
That was where it had happened, wasn’t it?
Where Ben and Sarah had had the accident that had claimed their lives exactly a year ago today?
Almost to the minute...
There was a new burning sensation now, behind his eyes this time, and he recognised that feeling.
It had been only a couple of weeks ago. In the burning heat of an African summer, when one of his colleagues had started reminiscing about English winters. About Christmas...
He could have sworn that Ben was right beside him, giving him one of those none-too-gentle elbow nudges in his ribs. Saying the words that had been the last thing his brother had ever said to him.
‘See you tomorrow, bro. For once, you’re going to enjoy Christmas. Me and Sarah and Lily...we’re going to show you what Christmas is all about. Family...’
It hadn’t been the first time he’d found a private spot with the view of nothing but desert but it had been the first time in forever that he’d cried. Gut-wrenching sobs that had been torn from his soul. And that was why he recognised this painful stinging sensation at the back of his eyes.
It couldn’t happen now. Not in heavy traffic and with what looked like sleet getting thicker by the second. There was an exit lane ahead and he needed to change lanes and make sure he was well clear of any idiot who might decide to take the exit unexpectedly.
Like that dodgy-looking small truck that was crossing the line directly in front of him.
Tilting his body weight, after checking there was a gap in the lane beside him, Jack flipped on his indicator and glanced over his shoulder again to check the lane was still clear.
Where the hell had that car come from? And what did it think it was doing?
No-o-o...
* * *
Text messages had been frequent over the last hour, including one that accompanied an adorable photo of Lily, bundled up like a little Eskimo in her puffy, pink jacket, with tinsel in her dark curls, crouching down to put an enormous carrot beside a bucket of water. Emma could see the ropes of the swing hanging from the branch of the old oak tree in the garden in the background so she knew exactly where the bucket had been placed.
Exactly where she should have been, too.
Just as well she was too busy to dwell on the unexpected turn her evening had taken.
The waiting room was crowded but the curtained cubicles were all full right now. Every doctor had several patients to cover and Emma was trying to keep herself mobile so she could help wherever she was needed. She just had to decide on the priority as she looked at the list on the glass board.
It wouldn’t be the drunk in Curtain Eight who’d been punched in the nose and had a septal haematoma that needed draining. Or the teenager that had downed enough alcohol at a work Christmas party to collapse. Someone else could supervise the administration of activated charcoal there. Was it the young woman with epigastric pain in Curtain Four? The dislocated shoulder in Curtain Two that needed sedation and relocation? That was a task that needed quite a lot of physical strength sometimes so she might need to wait until Alistair had a free moment, and he was busy sorting pain relief for that nasty foot fracture that had come in a little while ago when an elderly man had fallen from the ladder he was using to hang twinkly lights in a garden tree.
The X-rays were up on the screen beside her and Emma couldn’t help leaning in for a closer look. A Lisfranc fracture and a fracture/dislocation of at least two other joints. This patient was going to need some urgent orthopaedic management as soon as pain relief was on board and a plaster back-slab applied. He’d need to be kept nil by mouth, too, in case a theatre slot became available.
The baby, Emma decided. The one with the rash that looked like a bad reaction to antibiotics. She’d just pop her head into the side room and check that something had been given to settle the miserable infant and calm its mother.
And she wouldn’t look at the clock on the way.
It was getting too close to that time.
The moment her world had started to fall apart this time last year. When those sliding doors had opened for two stretchers to be rolled in amongst a team of paramedics that all had the grim faces that advertised how bad this accident had been. With the policeman behind them carrying a baby in its car seat.
Not that she had had any idea of how bad this really was. Neither had Jack, who was standing in one of the resus rooms, having been summoned as the orthopaedic component of the major trauma team that had gathered to receive the victims of the MVA out on the M74.
The injuries had been so bad, he hadn’t even recognised his twin brother in those first minutes. It had been Emma who recognised Sarah on the second stretcher. Still conscious. Asking over and over whether Lily was all right and where was Ben?
She’d had to go into Resus One. Just as Stuart was shaking his head before he glanced up at the clock.
‘Time of death, twenty-two thirty-five...’
‘Jack?’ It had been so hard to get the words out. ‘Jack...? I think...I think this might be Ben...I’m so, so sorry...’
Later, she’d wondered if he’d already guessed but had been too shocked to process the information. You’d think that the kind of connection between twins would make it plausible but Jack and Ben had been opposite sides of the same coin, hadn’t they? Ben was the quiet one. The responsible one. The perfect husband and father material that Sarah couldn’t believe how lucky she’d been to find.
Jack might have mirrored his brother’s career in medicine and achieved even greater popularity and success but he was the wild one of the pair.
She’d been warned by Sarah to stay away from him.
Jack had been warned by Ben to stay away from her.
Not that their disobedience had mattered in the end, because any connection as far as Jack was concerned had evaporated in the instant she’d passed on that devastating news.
It was another thing she’d lost that night...
* * *
Emma sucked in a deep breath. The noises around her seem to be amplified for a moment as she dragged herself back to the present. People shouting. Babies crying. A shriek of pain. Phones ringing. An ambulance call coming through on the radio. Caroline should have gone home ages ago but she was still there, fielding the calls.
‘Go ahead, Rescue Seven. Reading you loud and clear. Over...’
‘We’re coming to you with a thirty-six-year-old male, result of a motorbike accident on the M74. Query chest injury. Multiple contusions. Query fracture left tib/fib. Vital signs as follows: GCS fifteen, heart rate one-twenty...’
Breathe, Emma told herself. Without thinking, she reached up to touch her hair, finding the inevitable tight curl that had sprung free from its clip and making sure it was trapped again. It was an action that always made her feel that little bit more in control.
This was just another accident. Not even a particularly serious one, by the sound of things, but she wasn’t going to take anything for granted.
‘I’ll be in Resus One,’ she told Caroline.
‘Want me to activate the trauma team?’
A GCS of fifteen meant that the victim was conscious and alert. Okay, he might have a chest injury but he was breathing well enough for the moment. Part of her job in charge of this department was to make sure she used potentially limited extra resources as wisely as possible.
‘Not yet. I’ll take a look at him first. How far away are they?’
‘About five minutes.’
Emma couldn’t help glancing up at the clock as she walked into Resus One and pulled on a disposable gown and some gloves.
Twenty-two thirty. It would probably be twenty-two thirty-five as they rolled the stretcher in.
Breathe, she reminded herself again, as she heard the whoosh of the ambulance bay doors.
Alistair came in and grabbed a gown, closely followed by a nurse. And then the stretcher arrived. Nothing could have prompted Emma to take a breath when she saw who was on the stretcher. The opposite happened as her body and brain both froze. There was just enough breath left to utter a single, horrified word.
‘Jack...?’
CHAPTER TWO
THE JOY CAME from nowhere.
It caught her in that moment when Jack opened his eyes and his startled gaze met her own. When she saw the flare of recognition and something more... Relief that he was in a place he knew he’d be cared for? Or was it because he wanted to see her? Was it the reason he’d finally come back?
It only lasted a heartbeat, that joy, but in that instant, every cell in Emma’s body was singing.
He’s come back...
Jack’s here...
But following so closely on the heels of joy that it morphed with it and then took over was fear.
He’s hurt...
Maybe badly hurt...
She could see the lines of pain etched on his face and in the way he was pressing his lips together as he closed his eyes again.
This might be the biggest challenge of her career so far in not allowing emotional involvement to interfere with delivering clinical excellence but, to her surprise, Emma found she was up for it.
It was a relief, even, to turn away from such overpowering feelings to something she knew she could handle. The paramedic who was giving a rapid but thorough handover had her full attention.
‘High-speed collision. Mr Reynolds got cut off by someone coming into his lane. He swerved, apparently, but lost control of the bike. GCS is fifteen but he may have been KO’d briefly. I suspect the bike landed on his left leg. We’ve splinted the possible tib/fib fracture there. The chest injury may have come from contact with the handlebars. One sleeve of his jacket got ripped so there’s road rash and a potential fracture on his left forearm.’
‘Got his helmet?’
‘Yes. Superficial damage but it’s not broken.’
Emma nodded. She listened to the quick summary of the most recent vital signs and glanced at the monitor, which was showing a rapid but normal heart rhythm. His oxygen saturation level was also good.
‘Let’s get him on the bed.’
As lead physician, it was Emma’s job to be at the head end of their patient. The ambulance crew had put a neck collar on Jack, quite correctly assuming that the mechanism of injury could mean he had a spinal injury, so she had to ensure that the transfer from stretcher to bed did not do anything to risk making it worse. Having the paramedics here was helpful in having enough people to do the job well.
‘Three on each side, please. On my count...’ Emma put her hands on either side of Jack’s head. Mostly, all she could feel was the plastic collar but at the base of her hands she could feel the warmth of his scalp. The softness of that shaggy black hair...
‘One...two...three...’
A smooth transfer. Emma had a moment to scan her patient and assess his airway as her colleagues went into a well-rehearsed routine.
Alistair was unhooking the leads of the ambulance monitor to replace them with their own. A nurse had a pair of shears in her hands.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to cut the rest of your leathers...’
Jack nodded, but didn’t say anything. His eyes were still shut.
‘Keep your head still,’ Emma reminded him. ‘We haven’t cleared your neck, yet. Your sats are good but are you having any trouble breathing?’
‘No.’
She hadn’t expected the effect that hearing his voice again would have. She had to swallow past the lump that appeared suddenly in her throat and felt like a rock.
‘Sinus tachycardia,’ Alistair said. ‘Blood pressure’s one-thirty on eighty.’
Probably higher than normal for Jack.
‘What’s your pain score?’ she queried. The paramedics had already given him some morphine but maybe it hadn’t been enough. She didn’t need to give Jack the usual range of zero to ten to pick from, with zero being no pain and ten the worst ever. He knew.
‘About five, I guess. Maybe six.’
‘Let’s top up the morphine,’ she directed Alistair, as she hooked her stethoscope into her ears. ‘I’m going to have a listen to your chest,’ she told Jack.
His chest was bare. The leather jacket had been unzipped and the black T-shirt beneath had been cut. His skin was far more tanned than Emma had ever seen but that whorl of dark hair was exactly the same. And she knew exactly what it would feel like against the silk of his skin, if it had been her fingers rather than the disc of her stethoscope she was pressing against it.
Oh, help... Maybe she should stand back and let Alistair take over here? Or call in part of the trauma team? They were probably going to need at least an orthopaedic consult but that should probably wait until the necessary X-rays and other tests had been done.
Alistair was drawing up the morphine. He held the ampoule so that Emma could do the drug check. Her nod was brisk. Happy with Jack’s breath sounds, she wanted to start a neurological check. The potential head injury was high on her list of concerns.
‘You know where you are, Jack?’
One side of his mouth curled into that ironic smile she remembered so well.
‘Oh, yeah... Unless the Eastern got shifted recently?’
‘And can you tell me what date it is today?’
The smile vanished and Emma knew, with what felt like a kick in her gut, that the pain in his eyes had nothing to do with his injuries. It was a standard question but how insensitive was it, given these particular circumstances?
‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ Jack said softly. ‘I’m...I’m sorry, Red.’
The old nickname, bestowed in honour of her wild, auburn hair, was almost her undoing.
Nobody else called her ‘Red’. Never had, never would...
Not even Sarah. She used to make Emma laugh when they were kids by calling her the ‘Ginger Ninja’ and there was nobody else in her life that would dream of doing that.
This time, the lump had jagged edges and there was no way of stopping the sting that got to the back of her eyes.
‘I’m sure you didn’t do this on purpose.’ Her voice sounded odd, coming from around the edges of that lump. ‘I’m sorry, too.’ She gathered some strength she didn’t know she had. ‘But don’t worry—we’re going to look after you.’
The nurse had finished cutting the leather of his bike pants and was working on the sleeves of his jacket. She had to pause while Alistair flushed the IV line, after injecting the painkiller.
‘I’ll draw some bloods,’ Alistair said. ‘Including an ETOH level?’
‘I haven’t been drinking.’ Jack’s words sounded a little slurred but his face had relaxed a bit, suggesting that his pain level—which Emma suspected he had under-reported—was dropping, so it was quite likely the morphine was making him sleepy.
Alistair’s look said it all. The slurred words were no surprise. This was Jack Reynolds, wasn’t it?
A flash of anger caught Emma unawares. Okay, Jack had left here under a huge cloud but there’d been a reason for that, hadn’t there? A reason big enough to make it, if not forgivable, at least enough to offer the benefit of doubt now.
The nurse cutting away clothing had caught the look and her eyebrows rose.
‘This is Mr Reynolds,’ Alistair told her. ‘He used to work here. He was one of our orthopaedic surgeons.’
‘Oh...’ The young nurse looked impressed. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Reynolds...about having to cut your leathers. I know how expensive they are.’
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ Jack muttered. ‘And call me Jack. I’m not at work at the moment.’
Emma caught her breath. Was he planning to be at work in the near future? Was that why he’d come back? But why would he choose today, of all days, to come back to Glasgow?
But then again...why wouldn’t he?
One of the junior doctors who had joined the team had taken off the dressing that covered Jack’s arm injury.
‘Can you wiggle your fingers for me, Jack?’
Emma was still holding her breath. The scraped skin looked raw and painful but if he’d broken bones it could affect his future as a surgeon and that might destroy what had always been the most important thing in his life. Jack Reynolds might still be seen as a badly behaved maverick by some—Alistair, for instance—but nobody had ever had anything other than praise to offer about his work as the rising star of the orthopaedic surgical department. Ironically, he’d been heading towards specialist trauma work and had been the best available for injuries that had the potential to seriously affect someone’s quality of life. Like neck fractures or mangled hands.
She released the breath in a sigh of relief as she saw the way Jack was able to move his hand. And he could make a fist and resist pressure without it causing undue pain in his arm so it was unlikely that any bones had been broken.
He might not be so lucky with that lower leg injury that Alistair was assessing. The nasty haematoma on his calf could well be the result of an underlying fracture and it was causing some pain to try and move his foot.
Neither of those injuries was in any way life-threatening, however. Emma was more concerned about the bruising on Jack’s ribs and whether he had a head injury. Despite the protection of a helmet, if he’d hit his head hard enough to lose consciousness, even briefly, he was very likely to have a concussion and possibly something worse, like a bleed, going on.
‘Take a deep breath for me, Jack. Is it painful?’ Emma put her hand over skin that was mottled with early bruising.
‘A bit.’
‘We’ll get some X-rays done soon. You might have broken a few ribs. Let me know if you get short of breath at all.’
‘I’m fine.’ Jack had closed his eyes again. ‘The department looked busy out there. You must have patients who are worse off than me.’
Emma ignored the comment. And the look that Alistair flicked in her direction. He knew. Not about how close she’d been to Jack, of course—keeping that a secret had been part of the excitement—and he hadn’t actually been in the department this time last year but there would be very few people in this hospital who hadn’t heard every single detail about the heartbreaking tragedy she and Jack had been so much a part of. The aftermath had been the hot topic for gossip for weeks as well. And everybody knew how much Emma’s life had changed when she’d finally taken responsibility for Lily.
Maybe Alistair thought she should step out. That she would prefer not to be caring for Jack after those traumatic weeks that had ended in a battle that everyone believed Jack had deserved to lose.
She couldn’t let him—or anyone else—know just how far from the truth that was. Her next words came out a little more sternly than was probably warranted.
‘Don’t move your head. I’m undoing the collar so I can have a feel of your neck.’
* * *
Jack couldn’t see Emma because she was standing behind his head.
But he could feel her.
Not just the obvious touch of her fingers on his neck as she pressed her thumbs on each side of his spine, putting systematic, gentle pressure down the midline to check for the presence of tenderness before moving further from the midline to repeat the process.
No. He could feel her in a much more ethereal sense. He hadn’t known which hospital he was being transported to after the accident and he hadn’t been feeling that great when he’d arrived, but even with his eyes shut, he’d known that Emma was in the room.
He had felt something of that aura of determination and genuine caring that made Emma Matthews stand out in any crowd of equally intelligent and successful medics.
And then he’d opened his eyes and she looked exactly the same. Those bright hazel eyes. The matching freckles sprinkled over a button of a nose. Jack could even see the usual coils of that astonishing hair that had wormed their way out from beneath the prisons of their clips.
It hit him like a brick. All that time he’d been away, he’d been so convinced that he didn’t miss her. That she was just another one of the stream of women that had shared his life—and his bed—for a limited time.
But he had been missing her, hadn’t he? Every minute of every day. And all that accumulated emotion coalesced into one king punch that was far more painful than anything going on in his battered body at that moment. He’d had to press his lips together against the pain. Screw his eyes tightly shut so that he didn’t keep staring at her and making the pain worse.
And now she was touching him and it made him remember how clever those small hands were. How gentle Emma was.
How the touch on his skin made it feel like he was being caressed by a whisper of a delicious, cool breeze on the hottest day ever. That coolness had been an illusion, though, hadn’t it? It could flick in a heartbeat to a heat that no other woman had ever evoked.
Jack had to stifle a groan. The morphine was clearly scrambling his brain. He shouldn’t be thinking of something like that. It was over. Dead and buried. And he’d been the one to kill it.
Emma must have heard the small sound. ‘What’s hurting?’ she asked. ‘What’s bothering you?’
Oh...that was a question and a half. Would she actually want to know about the guilt over abandoning his brother’s child that had been hanging around his neck like an ever-increasing weight?
The shame of the way he’d behaved in those dark days? The way he’d treated her?
Even if she was prepared to listen to him, it would have to be a very private conversation and there were others around. He could feel the sting of the damaged skin on his arm being cleaned and redressed. Of his lower leg being unwrapped from its temporary splint. And he could hear the voices of new arrivals—the radiographers, probably—who would be preparing to operate the overhead X-ray machines.
‘Is it your neck? Was it here?’ Her fingers were pressing again on the last spot she’d touched at the bottom of his cervical spine.
‘No...my neck feels fine.’
‘Really?’ Emma’s face appeared as she moved to one side of the bed. So close to his own he could see those unusual golden flecks in the soft brown of her irises. ‘And you really haven’t been drinking?’
That hurt. He might have been a complete bastard in those last weeks but he’d never been less than honest with her. With anyone, for that matter.
He saw the flicker in her eyes. ‘Sorry...I just needed to be sure.’
‘Yeah...you always were very thorough, Dr Matthews. It’s a commendable attribute.’
That earned a tilt of her lips that was almost a smile. ‘There’s a checklist for determining whether a cervical spine is stable, as you well know. You don’t seem to have any midline tenderness and there’s no evidence of intoxication. You seem to be reasonably alert and oriented to time and place.’
Jack could feel his own lips curve. ‘Cheers. Under the circumstances, I’ll take reasonably alert as a good thing.’
Emma unclipped her small pen torch from the top pocket of her scrubs tunic and flicked the light on. Jack kept his eyes open and stared straight ahead as she moved the beam to check his pupil sizes and reactions.
‘Equal and reactive,’ she said. ‘There’s only one other thing on the checklist. Do you remember what it is?’
Clever. She was throwing in something completely different as another check on his neurological status.
‘Whether there are any painful, distracting injuries, like a long bone fracture.’
‘And is anything painful enough to qualify as a distraction?’
‘No.’
‘Mmm... Okay, then, I reckon you pass.’ She looked away from him to someone he couldn’t see. ‘I’m happy to leave the collar off but I’d still like a cervical X-ray series, please. Along with chest, pelvis, left tib/fib and the left forearm.’
‘Do you want a lead apron?’ someone queried.
Emma shook her head, looking down at Jack again. ‘I’m happy that your condition hasn’t deteriorated in any way. I’m going to duck out and get up to speed with what’s happening in the rest of the department until I get your X-rays up on the computer. I won’t be far away and someone will come and get me if I’m needed.’