Their Twin Christmas Surprise

‘Come on! Come on!’ he urged as he transferred her swiftly to the floor and began carefully controlled cardiac compressions to boost the volume of blood going to her brain, desperate to hear the sound of a siren drawing closer.

The weight of his guilt was almost crushing as he kept automatic count inside his head. If he’d come home when he’d said he would, rather than hovering over Sara and waiting till she was settled in her room, would he have arrived in time for Zara to tell him that she was feeling ill?

Would he have been able to prevent her collapsing in the first place?

A sudden hammering on the front door made him realise that he’d completely forgotten to release the catch for the ambulancemen to get into the flat.

‘She’s in here,’ he directed as he quickly led the way back to the bedroom and dropped to his knees beside her again. ‘Her systolic must have been close to 70 when I found her because her femoral pulse was barely palpable and her pupils were fixed and dilated.’ He glanced across at the man who dropped to his knees on the other side of the body to begin his primary survey, and they came face to face for the first time.

‘Dr Lomax!’ the paramedic exclaimed, clearly shocked to see him, but he immediately became the consummate professional. ‘Do you know what happened to her, sir?’ the paramedic asked as he bent over the ominously still figure between them to check her pulse and respiration rates for himself.

As he did so, Dan heard the man’s foot strike something to send it skittering under the bed but no one even bothered to glance at it. At the moment nothing mattered more than giving Zara a chance to continue her vibrant life.

Out of the corner of his eye Dan saw the man’s colleague depositing an oxygen cylinder on the carpet and he reached out for it, leaving him free to set up the defibrillator with the swift ease of much practice.

He was ashamed to see how badly his own hands were trembling as he fumbled to tighten the mask against her face, blocking out the heart-stopping thought that Zara might already be in need of the defibrillator’s violent charge to reset her heart rhythm. It was several horrified seconds before he remembered that it could also be used as a valuable monitoring and diagnostic tool.

‘I’ve no idea what happened to her,’ he said, dragging his thoughts back to the question he’d been asked, frustrated when he saw that the man was having trouble finding a vein. But, then, with her blood pressure so low, it was hardly surprising. Still, he had to fight the urge to take over and do the job himself. They needed to get the IV started and the lactated Ringer’s running into her veins as soon as possible to get her blood pressure up. If she’d had some sort of spontaneous bleed that had caused a catastrophic drop in her blood pressure …

‘I came home from work to find her lying on the bed,’ he continued, forcing himself not to waste any time second-guessing, even as the need to do something urged him to continue CPR. ‘At first, I thought she was sleeping, but when I tried to wake her …’ he shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s when I realised how ill she was.’

‘Do you know if she’d had any alcohol to drink before you found her?’ he asked, and Dan almost smiled.

‘It’s unlikely. She never drinks anything stronger than a white wine spritzer … too many calories,’ he added.

‘Do you know if she’s taken any drugs, sir?’ the young man asked as he peeled the gel pads from their protective backing and positioned them swiftly on Zara’s chest, and even though Dan knew that the questions were necessary for him to do his job, the suggestion shocked him.

‘No!’ he exclaimed immediately, horrified at even the thought that this bright beautiful woman might have wanted to kill herself. Then he remembered a conversation he’d overheard at one of the parties she’d dragged him to earlier on in their marriage. He’d been shocked to learn just how many of her fellow models resorted to chemical assistance to maintain their almost skeletal slenderness.

‘Oh, God,’ he muttered, praying that Zara hadn’t been tempted down that route. In a profession that valued the freshness of youth above almost everything else, her age was already counting against her. Had she been that desperate to extend her modelling career that she would use drugs to help her compete with all those younger wannabes?

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted finally. ‘I’ve never seen her taking anything, but …’

‘Could you go and have a look in the bathroom, please, sir,’ the paramedic asked firmly, as he gestured to his colleague to take his hands off their patient while he activated the machine to monitor the state of her heart. ‘We’ll take over here now.’

‘Stand clear. Analysing now,’ said the disembodied voice programmed into the machine as he strode into the en suite bathroom, almost grateful for an excuse not to watch if they were going to have to make her beautiful body convulse with the brutality of a shock.

It took precious seconds to search through a mirror-fronted cabinet crammed full of beauty products of every shape and size, but the only tablets he could find were those in a half-full plastic bottle of over-the-counter painkillers.

‘No shock required,’ the voice was advising as he came back into the room, and his heart lifted briefly at the thought that at least Zara hadn’t gone into ventricular fibrillation or cardiac arrest.

‘Did you find anything, sir?’ prompted the paramedic as he rejoined them and he saw that in his absence they’d intubated Zara to secure her airway, rather than relying on the face mask, and had connected her to their portable oxygen cylinder. The monitor clipped to her finger was already starting to record an improvement in the saturation level in her blood.

‘No drugs, other than some generic analgesics,’ he said, disorientated by the fact that he was little more than a bystander in a situation where he was usually the one in charge. But this was completely different to working in A and E. There, he could work fast and effectively, treating any number of cardiac arrest patients in a single day with his brain working swiftly and clearly and every possible piece of equipment readily to hand.

Here, it felt as if his thoughts were travelling through treacle as he saw the paramedic’s gloved fingers sort through the pre-loaded syringes in his kit. Somehow, he just couldn’t get his brain to tell him what the man should be looking for, or why.

‘They were paracetamol and the bottle was half-full,’ he added, before the man could ask.

‘What about the bedside cabinet?’ prompted the other man, and Dan dragged his gaze away from what the two of them were doing to stride across and pull the drawer completely out. He upended it over the bed and several items fell off the edge of the mattress and hit his foot to land out of sight under the bed.

‘Some herbal sleeping tablets and … a bubble pack of contraceptive pills,’ he added in disbelief, suddenly wondering just how many kinds of a fool he’d been. So much for Zara’s grief that she couldn’t give him a child! If she’d been taking contraceptives to prevent herself getting pregnant, had anything about his marriage been real?

He reached under the bed to retrieve the items that had fallen, his first sweep revealing nothing more than a couple of pens and the locked diary that Zara had written in each night.

His second sweep shocked him to the core.

‘Barbiturates!’ he exclaimed when the empty bottle rolled into view and he caught sight of the name of the contents printed on the label. ‘Where did she get barbiturates from?’

There was an awful silence in the room, with only the soft sibilance of the oxygen to break it, all three of them gazing at the slender beauty with varying degrees of disbelief, incomprehension and pity. They all knew that the incidence of barbiturate overdose had dropped considerably with the introduction of newer, safer sleeping tablets, but if the label on the bottle was genuine, the dangerously addictive drugs were clearly still readily available in other parts of the world to globe-trotters such as models.

Although why Zara would feel the need to take …

‘We need to get her to hospital quickly, sir,’ the paramedic said briskly, as he selected several syringes. ‘Do you know your wife’s approximate weight so I can give her the first dose of sodium bicarbonate?’

Thank goodness he’d found the prescription bottle, he thought, realising wryly that he was probably one of very few husbands who would know almost to the ounce what his wife weighed, the result of Zara’s obsessive morning ritual had been a cause for alternating delight or despair for every single day of their marriage.

At least they now knew precisely which barbiturate she’d taken and that it was one that bicarbonate would promote more rapid urinary excretion—anything to get the drug out of her system before it could do any more damage. Zara was already deeply comatose and if he’d arrived home any later …

He shook his head, deliberately shutting that thought away as he followed every move that the two-man crew made with critical eyes. Not that he doubted their competence. From the moment they’d entered the flat they hadn’t made a false move.

His colleague had already piled everything else back into their packs and as soon as it was closed he straightened up. ‘I’ll get the stretcher,’ he announced and took off out of the flat.

‘Do you want to travel with her, sir, or—?’

‘I’ll follow you,’ Dan interrupted, and understood the look of relief that briefly crossed the man’s face. He didn’t know many paramedics who would be entirely comfortable about doing their job under the eagle eyes of an A and E doctor, especially when the patient was a member of that doctor’s family.

Apart from anything else, he and his colleague were probably wondering at the situation between Zara and himself that could have led her to make such a desperate gesture.

He sighed heavily with the realisation that there was no way this would remain a secret, no matter how strict the rules were over patient confidentiality.

‘The last thing any of us needs is speculation and gossip,’ he groaned under his breath as he followed the stretcher out of the flat and paused just long enough to make sure the front door had locked behind him. It was going to be hard enough to tell Zara’s family that she had made an attempt at taking her own life without the whole hospital speculating what went on behind closed doors.

If that was what it had been, he continued agonising as he followed the flashing lights through the busy traffic, the urgent scream of the siren an audible reminder that the outcome of the situation was far from certain.

Suicide? Zara? It still seemed impossible. Had she just intended to give him a scare? Had it only been the fact that he had been late that had made this such a serious situation, the extra hours giving the drugs so much more time to do their damage.

And if she … when she survived? He hastily altered the words inside his head, feeling a renewed stab of guilt that he could even contemplate the alternative.

Anyway, he thought heavily, as far as her health was concerned, no one could predict how well or how badly she would recover. Only time would tell how much permanent damage the drugs had done to her system.

The fact that she was his wife was another matter entirely. Zara wasn’t anywhere near as important a model as she pretended to be, but any speculation that it might somehow be his fault that she’d come so close to death could start a media feeding frenzy that would ruin all their lives, to say nothing of his career. The lower end of the tabloid market would have the whole situation blown out of all proportion the minute they heard that she’d taken an overdose, especially if they unearthed the fact that the two of them had resorted to a surrogate pregnancy.

He followed the flashing lights all the way to the emergency entrance, his brain rerunning everything that had been done to try to stabilise Zara’s condition. He was so preoccupied that he only just remembered in time to pull into the designated staff parking area rather than cluttering up the area around the emergency entrance.

As his feet pounded across the tarmac towards the emergency doors, the lights cast long shadows that made it seem as if the doors never got any closer, but finally they slid silently open in front of him.

‘Dan? What on earth are you doing back here?’ demanded his opposite number on the night shift, but he didn’t even slow his pace, his long strides taking him unerringly through to the resuscitation rooms at the other end of the department.

‘Dan! Come in,’ called the consultant already standing the other side of Zara’s ominously still body, his face creased in concern as he beckoned him into the room.

For a moment, as he shouldered his way through the doors, Dan was filled with dread. Had things got worse during the ambulance journey from his flat to the hospital? Zara’s condition had been so serious that he was hardly likely to look across the clinically stark room and find her sitting up and preening herself in front of any males in her audience, but if the bottle of barbiturates she’d taken had been in her body too long, it was all too likely that she might never come out of the coma.

As he stared across at her, she looked even more like a porcelain doll under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, with an almost waxy sheen to her skin.

He slumped back against the wall and watched in awful fascination as his superior did everything he would have done if she were one of his patients, from aspirating her stomach contents to remove any tablets still undigested, to trying to neutralise any drug-laden fluids with activated charcoal before they could be absorbed by her body.

This just couldn’t be happening, he thought, his helplessness making him feel sick to his stomach.

Zara had so much to live for, and before this he would have sworn that she was far too self-centred and conceited to ever think of suicide. Why on earth would she do something so … so …?

‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ the consultant apologised, and Dan knew that he was going to confirm his worst fears … life extinct.

Just the thought of those solemn words was enough to change the way he saw the woman who was his wife. Somehow her slenderness became mere gauntness without the aura of her vivacity, her expert make-up smudged into a caricature of its usual perfection and her shimmering blonde hair artificial and brassy.

He closed his eyes to try to block out the images, unable to look at her any more.

How was he going to break this latest news to her family? It had been bad enough when he’d been contemplating the best way to tell them that Sara had been knocked down, but this …

‘We’re going to have to put her on IPPV,’ the consultant warned when a monitor suddenly shrilled a warning that her oxygen saturation was falling dangerously low in spite of the mask. Dan’s eyes flew open and he blinked in disbelief. How had he managed to convince himself that Zara was dead when the room was filled with the sound of all those monitors?

‘Her respiratory effort is so badly depressed by the drugs …’ his superior continued, almost apologetically.

‘It’s OK,’ Dan reassured the man, immeasurably relieved that all was not yet lost. ‘Just do what you have to do. You don’t have to talk me through every step. I trust you.’

More than he would trust himself at the moment, he admitted silently. The whole scene seemed totally unreal, especially coming so soon after Sara’s narrow escape. How many disasters could one family cope with in a single evening?

At least he’d given in to Sara’s request not to inform her parents what had happened to her. He’d been reluctant, knowing how excited they were about the pregnancy, but Sara had promised that she would go straight to them when she was released in the morning, confident that hearing about the accident would be far less traumatic if they could see with their own eyes that she was perfectly all right.

Well, more or less, he temporised, imagining just how badly bruised she must be after such an event. Her pale skin would soon be all the colours of the rainbow, and as for the pain … that must be considerable, especially as she’d refused any further analgesia.

His respect for his sister-in-law couldn’t have been any higher, as a colleague, as a person and as the temporary mother of his children. Sara might not always get along with her twin—an understandable case of sibling rivalry, perhaps?—but she’d certainly proved how much she loved her sister by putting herself through the traumas of a surrogate pregnancy.

Behind his closed lids he saw a flash of another image—that of two tiny hearts beating side by side. And he could picture equally clearly the fiercely protective emotions in Sara’s eyes. It had been obvious just how much it had meant to her to see the babies for the first time and to know that her accident had apparently left them untouched.

A secret regret hit him afresh, one that he’d been living with for several years now.

He knew that he’d behaved stupidly when Zara had set out to entice him, had already realised, even then, that Sara had been more than halfway in love with him. He’d probably been heading in the same direction until her sister had started her determined pursuit.

And he’d been stupid enough to be flattered and intrigued by the prospect of being desired by a woman so confident in the power of her beauty. Had it been the fact that she was the twin of someone to whom he was already attracted that had made him believe he had been in love with her?

Enough!

Enough rationalisation! Enough excuses! Whatever the truth had been then, now was a different matter entirely.

He straightened his shoulders and deliberately opened his eyes to gaze directly at the woman he’d married, confronting his blame head on.

It had been his responsibility to protect her, and he’d obviously failed if she hadn’t felt able to come to him with her problem—be it depression or a dependency on drugs. He had no idea when it had started or how long it had been going on … no idea whether her brush with death had been an accidental overdose or a deliberate one.

No doubt the police would have to be involved and would doubtless grill him at length about the state of his marriage.

How much worse would it have been if she’d died while he’d been hovering around Sara until she had been settled on the ward?

As it was, even if she did recover fully, it would be some time before Zara was in any fit state to answer questions. He certainly had no idea what had made her take this drastic action, so if the police needed to know why she’d done it, they would probably have to interview Zara’s friends and colleagues as well.

‘She’s stable now, so we’re transferring her up to ICU,’ the consultant said, and Dan suddenly realised just how much time had elapsed while he’d been lost in his thoughts.

His superior patted his shoulder reassuringly, but there was something else entirely in the expression in his eyes, something that didn’t need to be put into words. They both knew that there was no guarantee of a happy outcome.

‘I’ve sent samples up to the lab, just to confirm what she’d taken to make sure we’ve done all the right things,’ he said quietly, then added, ‘Give them half an hour or so to get her settled up there,’ exactly the way he would have done had she been one of his patients.

‘How long before we know …? How badly is she …?’ He couldn’t finish a single question, knowing there were no real answers.

‘I’d love to be able to tell you that she’s going to be all right,’ the consultant said, patting Dan’s shoulder again. ‘But you know as well as I do that only time will tell. Shall I leave it to you to contact the other members of her family, or would it be better coming from me?’

‘I’ll do that now,’ Dan said, his voice sounding almost rusty as it emerged from a throat tight with too much emotion.

How was he going to break the news to Zara’s doting parents?

CHAPTER THREE

SARA heard the all-too-familiar swoosh and creak of the door to her room as someone pushed it open, and barely managed to stifle a groan.

Not another member of staff preventing her from sleeping! There couldn’t possibly be an inch of her body that hadn’t been examined, poked and prodded … or had a needle stuck in it.

When nothing happened after several seconds of silence, she opened cautious eyes, wondering what was going on. Seeing Dan standing beside the bed, gazing down at her, immediately doubled her pulse rate, then she realised that the oversized gown she’d been given had slipped right off one shoulder. She had to stifle a groan of agony when she tried to hike it back into a more modest position with the wrong hand.

‘Dan?’ she croaked, trying for impatient but only managing to sound pathetic. ‘I thought you were going home. You don’t need to keep checking up on me, too. There’s an army of nurses doing that every two minutes and …’ She had to bite her tongue to stop herself delivering another tirade when she still owed him a massive apology for the first one. He’d come to see her just after she’d had her ultrasound scan to see if she and the babies were all right and she’d jumped right down his throat. It just wasn’t fair that she was taking all her fear for the babies out on him.

‘I didn’t come to check up on you,’ he said quietly, one hand going out to the chair beside her bed, then pausing.

It was almost as if he wasn’t sure whether to stand or sit, and if it was sit, whether it should be on the chair or on the side of her bed. The whole incident took no more than a few seconds but it was totally uncharacteristic of a man who was usually decisiveness personified.

Finally, he perched uneasily on the edge of the bed, his lean hip nudging against her bruised thigh … not that she would say a word. Secretly, she still revelled in every occasion that he was close to her … close enough to smell the clean soapy scent of his skin and see the tracks where his fingers had raked through his hair. Close enough to see the lines of strain that had grown deeper still since she’d seen him just an hour or two ago.

‘Dan? Is something wrong?’ Panic struck her and her hand flew to cover the precious duo nestling deep inside her. ‘Is it something to do with the babies? Has something shown up on one of the tests?’

‘No!’ he exclaimed, clearly startled. ‘I’m sorry, Sara, I didn’t mean to frighten you. As far as I know, everything’s still fine.’

‘So, what’s wrong?’ she demanded. ‘I can tell you’ve got something serious on your mind and … Is it Mum and Dad? I told you not to tell them about my accident. I was going to go and visit them as soon as I’m set free in the morning, so that they could see that I’m not—’

‘It’s not your parents,’ he interrupted, then sighed heavily and shook his head. ‘Sara, I’m sorry but there’s only one way to tell you this. When I got home this evening, I found Zara unconscious. She’d taken an overdose of barbiturates.’

‘Barbiturates?’ she gasped, reeling. ‘No! Not Zara. She wouldn’t.’ It was her turn to shake her head at the impossibility of what he was suggesting. Her sister might be selfish and egotistical but she wasn’t anyone’s fool. She’d seen far too many of her fellow models slide down the slippery slope of drug addiction, hooked when the desire for impossible slenderness came with an intoxicating high. With a few high-profile exceptions she’d seen it ultimately ruin their careers as model agencies and advertisers alike crossed them off their books.

Anyway, barbiturates were usually prescribed for people having difficulty sleeping, so they wouldn’t be any use to someone wanting to get high. Deliberate overdoses were usually confined to people who were depressed and that definitely didn’t sound like her vivacious sister.