Forever Family for the Midwife
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Kate Hardy
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CHAPTER ONE
‘I’M NOT HAVING you touching my wife.’
The words were audible right across the ward.
The raised voices weren’t just going to upset the poor mum-to-be in that room, they were going to upset all the other mums-to-be within earshot. And none of them needed the extra stress during labour. Rebecca knew that the head of midwifery was in a meeting with the consultants, so she was probably the most senior person on the ward at that moment—meaning that she was the one who needed to deal with this. She walked swiftly over to the room, preparing to calm everything down.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked sweetly, knowing perfectly well that it wasn’t, but also knowing that going in and shouting just as loudly wasn’t going to help anyone.
‘No, it isn’t.’ A stocky man stood in front of the bed with his fists clenched. ‘I’m not having him touching my wife.’
‘Him’ being the midwife. Rebecca hadn’t met Nathaniel Jones yet, as she’d been on leave for the last two weeks since he’d joined the maternity team at Muswell Hill Memorial Hospital, but she knew he was one of the very few male midwives in the country. And this situation needed to be de-escalated as fast as possible.
‘Let me introduce myself,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’m Dr Hart, obstetric registrar. Why don’t you come over to my office, where it’s a bit more private, and we can discuss it?’
‘What, and leave him here with my wife?’ the man demanded.
‘Mr—’ This couple hadn’t been to any of her clinics, and one of her colleagues had done the ward round this morning, so she didn’t know their names. She glanced at the whiteboard above the bed, where the words ‘Ruth Brown’ had been written, and hoped that her assumption wouldn’t make things worse. ‘Mr Brown. Your wife’s on our ward right now, and our priority is to keep her comfortable and the baby safe,’ she said calmly.
‘I’m fully qualified,’ Nathaniel said gently, ‘and Dr Hart is right—your wife and baby are our priorities. Just to reassure you, I had to deliver forty babies before I could qualify, and I’ve delivered a few more since then. Your wife is very safe with me—my job is to listen to her and help.’
‘It’s not that. I’m not having a man looking at her...’ Mr Brown gave a jerk of his head. ‘Down there.’
Oh, for pity’s sake. This was a maternity unit! But she bit back her impatience; telling the man he was being an idiot would only put his back up even more and make things worse. ‘While you and I have a chat, are you OK for Mr Jones to take your wife’s temperature, blood pressure and pulse rate, and keep a check on the baby’s movements?’
‘I suppose so,’ Mr Brown admitted grudgingly.
‘Good. Let’s go to my office,’ she said, giving Nathaniel a reassuring smile. ‘We’ll be back in a minute, Mrs Brown.’ She led Mr Brown to her office and closed the door to give them privacy.
Clearly she’d meant well, but Nathaniel was a little bit irritated that Rebecca Hart had swept in to deal with a situation he was perfectly capable of handling himself. He really hoped she wasn’t the sort of doctor who felt the need to pull rank on a midwife; he’d worked with that sort before and in his view the mum’s needs should come before everything else. Or was she like one of his tutors, feeling that men had no place as a midwife?
He took a deep breath to stem his irritation and turned to Ruth Brown. ‘Mrs Brown, I’m sorry about that,’ he said.
She grimaced. ‘I should be the one apologising. Mike was so rude to you.’
‘Hey. That’s not important. You are,’ he said. ‘And I’m guessing your blood pressure isn’t going to be great, so either I can regale you with some terrible jokes or you can do some breathing exercises to help you relax a bit before I put the cuff on your arm.’
As he’d hoped, she laughed and looked less awkward. ‘I’ll do the breathing. Mike doesn’t mean to be rude. We had a scare a couple of weeks back, when I couldn’t feel the baby moving. And he’s a typical bloke—can’t say what he feels, so he gets cross instead. Oh, present company excepted,’ she added.
Nathaniel laughed. ‘Fair point, and I don’t think I’m an exception. I don’t know many men who are good at talking about their feelings. Right. Let’s try that blood pressure...’
‘I’ve never heard of a bloke being a midwife,’ Mr Brown said, his mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘What’s he doing it for—so he can look at women down there?’
‘No. There are several hundred male midwives across the country, and they do it for exactly the same reason our female midwives do their job—the same reason that I, as a senior doctor, do my job. To deliver babies safely,’ Rebecca said, keeping her voice cool and even.
‘It’s not right, a bloke being a midwife,’ Mr Brown continued, his face flushed with anger.
‘Nathaniel is qualified and he’s experienced,’ Rebecca said. ‘If I was in labour, I’d want someone like him to look after me. A trained midwife, who’d be able to spot the signs of any problem right in the early stages and could sort it out before it became an emergency.’
‘I suppose,’ Mr Brown acknowledged. ‘But I still don’t want him looking after my wife.’
‘Would you have a problem with your wife being seen by a male doctor?’ she asked.
He looked surprised. ‘Well, no.’
‘It’s the same thing,’ she pointed out gently. ‘Just a different title.’
He shook his head. ‘Midwives aren’t doctors.’
Midwives were just as important as doctors, but this wasn’t the right time to have that argument. She needed to deal with the immediate situation first. ‘I can talk to the midwifery team to see if anyone else is available to look after your wife,’ she said. ‘But I can’t guarantee there will be.’ She could see fear in Mr Brown’s face. Was it fear that was driving all this? ‘Is this your first baby?’ she asked gently.
He nodded.
‘It’s exciting, because you can’t wait to meet your baby, the one you’ve felt kick and seen on a scan; but it’s also really scary, because you see all these awful things on the internet. All the horror stories of things going wrong.’ She’d just bet Mr Brown was familiar with ‘Dr Search Engine’—and she really hoped that he hadn’t seen fit to share his findings with his wife.
‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘Ruth couldn’t feel the baby moving, a couple of weeks back. I drove her here so fast I got stopped by the police. But when I told them why, they escorted us in with their blue lights going.’
‘And everything was all right?’ Well, obviously, or she wouldn’t be in labour. But he was talking now and Rebecca wanted to keep that going.
‘We had a scan and the baby was kicking.’ A muscle tensed in his jaw. ‘But the doctors said the baby’s a bit small for dates. That’s why they wanted Ruth to come in today and be induced.’
‘So you came in first thing this morning?’
He nodded. ‘We had a different midwife when we came in. She said she was going to do this membrane sweep thing.’
‘That’s an internal exam, which separates the membranes of the fluid-filled sac around the baby from the cervix, releasing the hormones that kick-start labour,’ Rebecca said, sure that the midwife had already explained the process but wanting to make completely certain that Mr Brown understood what was happening. ‘I assume her labour hasn’t started yet?’
‘No. And he said he’d insert a pessary. In her...’ He paused, looking embarrassed and cross.
‘Your first midwife probably—’ definitely ‘—told you that might need to happen if Ruth’s contractions hadn’t started within six hours,’ she said gently.
‘I didn’t really take it all in,’ Mr Brown admitted. ‘I was just worried about Ruthie and the baby.’
‘OK. When we induce labour, if the membrane sweep doesn’t work then we’ll insert a tablet of the prostaglandin hormones into the vagina.’ Rebecca chose her words carefully, keeping everything as impersonal and cool as possible. ‘Sometimes it takes a second tablet before labour actually starts. Right now, I think you need someone experienced looking after your wife. Someone who understands about the scare you had during pregnancy, and how worrying it is to have your labour started for you instead of it all happening naturally. You need someone who’s going to keep a really good eye on your wife and the baby. Someone who sees her as a mum-to-be and understands her worries—and yours, too. If anything, I reckon Mr Jones is going to be able to help you a bit more than a female midwife could because he’ll have a better idea of what goes through a bloke’s head.’
Mr Brown shuffled in his chair.
Clearly he was still focusing on the idea of another man looking at and touching his wife’s vagina. So she was going to have to embarrass him slightly. ‘I can assure you, Mr Jones won’t be looking at your wife in the same way you do,’ she said, as kindly as she could. ‘Just as if, say, you had a lump in your testicles and I was your GP and needed to examine you.’
This time, his face went a very deep shade of crimson.
‘I’d examine you, because that’s my job,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t be looking at your body in the same way that your wife does. I’d see you as my patient—someone who’s worried, who has a symptom on a part of his body and who needs my help. There wouldn’t be anything at all sexual in the way I looked at you, just as there’s nothing sexual in the way Mr Jones looks at your wife. He’ll simply be following the procedures, just as a female midwife would.’
‘I guess,’ Mr Brown said.
‘If a female midwife isn’t available and you’re really concerned about the propriety of having a male midwife, we can arrange for a chaperone,’ she said. He’d said earlier that he wouldn’t object to a male doctor, so maybe this was the best way to make the point. ‘And if any of our male doctors need to see her, we can also arrange for a chaperone for them if that would make you feel more comfortable.’
She waited for him to think about it.
Eventually he looked at her. ‘I’m making a fuss over nothing, aren’t I?’ he asked.
‘You’re worried about your wife and the baby,’ she said. ‘But you’re also worrying about something that isn’t an issue, so that’s one burden you can choose to take off your shoulders and make your life a bit easier.’
He took a deep breath. ‘All right. He can do it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And we don’t need a chaperone.’
Relief flooded through her. She smiled. ‘Rest assured, all the staff here will treat your wife—and you—with the utmost dignity and respect. But I’d also like to remind you, Mr Brown, that the hospital has a zero-tolerance policy. Our staff have the right to care for our mums-to-be without being attacked or abused, physically or verbally.’
He shuffled in the chair again. ‘I owe that bloke an apology, don’t I?’
Yes, he did. ‘That’s your call,’ she said, still keeping things calm.
‘I’m sorry. I just—I panic, sometimes. I’m used to...’ His voice tailed off.
Used to blustering and shouting at his juniors at work if things didn’t go quite according to plan? She knew the type. But this wasn’t a battle worth fighting. She’d dealt with the important bit so Mrs Brown would get the care she needed. ‘OK. Shall we go back and see how your wife’s doing?’
He looked shamefaced. ‘Ruth’s going to kill me.’
‘As she’s being induced, I think she might have something else distracting her,’ Rebecca said with a smile. Mr Brown needed distracting, too, given an important job to stop him overthinking things and getting upset and shouty again. ‘And I’m pretty sure she’d like you to do some hand-holding. To chat to her and keep her mind off the wait, because this bit of an induced birth can really get boring. She’ll need you to rub her back when she’s having a contraction, or get her some really cold water, or fetch her a sandwich when she’s getting hungry—that sort of thing.’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Shall we go back?’
He nodded.
She escorted him back to the ward where Mrs Brown was waiting on the bed with Nathaniel sitting on the chair next to her, the curtains drawn round them. She was chatting to Nathaniel, clearly completely at ease with him.
Mr Brown walked over to the bed. ‘Sorry, mate. I was in the wrong,’ he muttered, holding his hand out to shake Nathaniel’s.
‘You’re all right,’ Nathaniel said, shaking his hand. ‘First babies can do that to you, especially when you’ve already had a scare and your wife’s being induced, and you feel a bit helpless because she’s the one going through it and you’re not really sure what you can do to make things better.’
Clearly Mrs Brown had filled him in on the situation, Rebecca thought. And Nathaniel was handling this brilliantly, empathising with a scared dad-to-be.
‘Yeah,’ Mr Brown said.
‘You’re such an idiot, Mike. Nathaniel’s been really good,’ Mrs Brown said. ‘So are you going to stop making a fuss now and let us get on with having this baby?’
Mr Brown nodded, looking hangdog.
‘You could go and get your wife a cup of tea while I sort out the prostaglandin,’ Nathaniel suggested, clearly sensitive to what one of the big problems had been.
‘I will,’ Mr Brown said. ‘Can I get anything for you?’
Nathaniel smiled. ‘I’m fine, but thanks for asking.’
‘I’d like a chicken salad sandwich on wholemeal with that cup of tea, please, love. I’m starving,’ Mrs Brown added.
When Mr Brown had left, Mrs Brown said, ‘Mike doesn’t mean to be an idiot. He’s just...’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘A bit old-school, I suppose.’
‘I’ve reassured him,’ Rebecca said. ‘I think he realises now that medics don’t see their patients in a sexual way, so he won’t worry any more.’
Mrs Brown rolled her eyes. ‘Open up, ground, and swallow me now,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘There’s no need to apologise. A lot of dads-to-be feel like that, at first. It’s all fine. Let’s concentrate on you and the baby,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Now, let’s get you comfortable and see if we can get this labour up and running.’
‘I’m going to back to my paperwork before my clinic. Call me if you need anything,’ Rebecca said.
‘Thank you,’ he said, though there was something in his eyes that said he had no intention of calling her. She suppressed a sigh; the last thing she needed was a team member with a chip on his shoulder. There wasn’t room for egos in this job. Their mums-to-be and babies always came first.
The afternoon ward rounds and clinic took up most of the rest of her day. She was just finishing some paperwork when there was a knock on her open door. She looked up to see Nathaniel standing there.
‘Dr Hart.’
Normally she would’ve suggested first-name terms and asked how he was settling in to the team, but his attitude earlier had irritated her. ‘Yes, Mr Jones?’
‘I thought you’d like to know that the Browns had a healthy little girl, two point six kilos.’
‘That’s great news,’ she said, pleased. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
He smiled. ‘They both want her middle name to be Natalie, after me.’
Only a few hours ago, Mr Brown had been yelling that he didn’t want Nathaniel anywhere near his wife, and now he wanted to call his daughter after their male midwife?
And then it hit her: she’d steamed in and assumed he needed help to defuse the situation. He could’ve done it perfectly well himself.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He frowned. ‘Why?’
‘When I came in earlier, during the shouty bit. Of course you could handle things.’
He smiled at her, then, and a tingle ran down her spine. A tingle she suppressed ruthlessly; even if he wasn’t involved elsewhere, as a single mum she wasn’t interested in dating.
‘Mike Brown was disturbing the ward. I can see where you were coming from,’ he said.
‘All the same, I think we might have got off on the wrong foot.’
He gave her an assessing look. ‘You must be due a break. Let me buy you a coffee.’
‘Thanks for offering,’ she said, ‘but there’s really no need. We’re a team on this ward and we support each other.’
‘All my midwife colleagues are either with a mum or they’ve finished their shift and gone home. I’ve just delivered a baby and right now I really want to babble about how amazing it is, to someone who actually gets it.’
‘And I’m the only one around?’
‘Pretty much.’ He gave her another of those smiles that made her stomach swoop, and it unsettled her. She wasn’t used to reacting like this to someone.
‘Coffee and cake. My shout. And you can let me babble about babies.’ He gave her another of those incredibly winning smiles.
Part of her resisted. This man was charming—and she knew from personal experience that charming was fun for a while and then slid into heartbreak. On the other hand, he was her new colleague, they’d started off on the wrong foot and she wanted to smooth things over between them. ‘OK, but only if I buy.’
‘Dr Hart, it’s coffee. No strings,’ he said gently.
Which made her face feel hot with embarrassment. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
‘By the way, what did you say to Mike Brown?’ he asked, sounding curious.
‘I pointed out that if I was a GP looking at a lump on his testicle, I’d see him as a worried patient, not a sex object, and you wouldn’t be leering at the business end of his wife because your job was to deliver the baby safely and make sure she was OK during labour. Or something along those lines.’
He grinned, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, and Rebecca noticed how long his eyelashes were. ‘I wish I’d seen his face when you said that.’
‘Patient confidentiality,’ Rebecca said, knowing how prim she sounded but unable to stop it.
‘He really squirmed, didn’t he?’ His grin broadened. ‘To be fair, I would’ve squirmed, too. Let’s go get that coffee.’
She saved the file, logged out of the computer system and walked with him to the canteen.
‘How do you like it?’ he asked.
Coffee. He was talking about coffee. For pity’s sake, why was she reacting to him like this? She never flirted. Not since Lucas. And she wasn’t going to start flirting now. ‘Skinny cappuccino, no chocolate on top, please.’
‘OK. Cake?’
‘I’m not really a cake person,’ she said. ‘Though thanks for the offer.’
‘Something savoury?’
‘Just coffee’s lovely, thanks.’
Once he’d ordered their coffee—and cake for himself—they found a quiet table.
‘I was away when you joined the team. How are you settling in?’ Rebecca asked.
‘Pretty good—the staff are all lovely, here,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I trained at the London Victoria, but I’ve always liked this part of the city, so when the job came up I applied for it.’ He paused. ‘How about you? Have you been here long?’
‘Two years. I trained at Hampstead,’ she said. And she’d loved it there. Until Lucas had crashed his motorbike three and a half years ago, leaving her a widow with a year-old baby. Riding too fast—but not to get home to her. He’d been going too fast because he’d loved the thrill of speed. Because he’d liked taking risks. And either he hadn’t seen the icy patch, or he’d thought himself invincible, or maybe both. The end result was the same.
They’d had to airlift him to his own emergency department.
Losing a patient was always tough. But when that patient was a colleague as well, one who was charming and popular with everyone no matter what their qualifications or status... The accident had broken his team as much as it had broken Rebecca. And she hadn’t even had a chance to organise the funeral before Fate added another nasty twist. She’d assumed her missed period was because of the stress of the situation; she hadn’t even considered she might be pregnant. Being rushed into the same emergency department where Lucas had died and learning that she’d had an ectopic pregnancy—losing one of her fallopian tubes as well as the baby—had been almost too much to bear.
She shook herself. Not now. She’d had three and a half years to get used to being a widow. Three and a half years of learning not to wrap Jasmine completely in cotton wool, not to worry every second they were apart, and not to overcompensate and try to be both parents. Moving to Muswell Hill had really helped her, and Jasmine loved her nursery school. ‘Being a male midwife is a fairly unusual career choice,’ she said. ‘What made you pick midwifery?’
‘I used to be a building site manager,’ he said.
Site manager to a midwife? That was quite a career change. ‘Just as well Mr Brown didn’t know you worked on a building site, leaning down from the scaffolding and whistling at every passing woman,’ she said. ‘He’d have worried even more about letting you near the business end.’
Nathaniel laughed, a rich, deep sound that set those tingles off again. ‘That’s horrible stereotyping.’
‘A bit,’ she agreed. ‘But whenever I’ve walked past scaffolding that’s what the builders always do.’
‘You’re blonde and you’re pretty. Of course they’ll whistle at you.’
She felt her face go pink. ‘I wasn’t fishing for a compliment. I meant they whistle at every passing woman.’
‘Not all of them do. Some builders prefer men,’ Nathaniel said.
Was that an oblique way of telling her that he was gay? ‘OK,’ she said carefully. ‘So what persuaded you to change careers?’
It was a story Nathaniel was used to telling. ‘Fell off a roof,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Broke my back. I spent four months in hospital.’
‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘And I imagine you must’ve needed a ton of physio when you left hospital.’
He nodded. ‘It gave me a long time to think about what I really wanted to do with my life. Whether I had the nerve to work on a site again, whether I could make myself go up a ladder to check something.’
‘Did you?’
‘Let’s see. Work in an air-conditioned hospital; or be on a site in all weathers, from frost and snow to rain or blazing sun, knowing I’d maybe make it to forty before arthritis started making my job a lot more difficult every day?’ He spread his hands. ‘It was an easy choice.’
Though not all of the choices had been his. It had been Angela’s choice to end their engagement. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with the fact that the love of his life hadn’t stuck around when he’d needed her most. Eventually he’d worked out why: she’d agreed to marry Nathaniel the site manager, the man whose career was doing nicely. She hadn’t signed up to nurse him through a broken back, not knowing if he’d ever be able to walk again and they’d spend their entire marriage with her as his carer. Even though he understood it, he still found it hard to forgive. And even now he resented the fact that she’d ended their engagement so fast, not even waiting a couple of weeks to see if there were any signs of recovery.
To dump him so swiftly: had she ever really loved him in the first place? Was he that hopeless a judge of character when it came to relationships? The whole situation had really knocked his confidence in himself, and he hadn’t had a serious relationship since, not wanting to get close to someone else and risk discovering that he wasn’t enough for her, either. He kept his heart under wraps and his relationships short.
Not that he was going to tell Rebecca Hart anything about that. It wasn’t relevant to his job. Or to what she’d asked him.
‘I wanted a job where I’d make a difference,’ he said. ‘Where I’d make people’s lives better. The nurses on my ward got me through those first rough weeks, and it made me realise how amazing they were. I wanted to be able to do that for someone, too.’
‘Nurses are amazing,’ she agreed. ‘So did you start training as soon as you were back on your feet?’
He nodded. ‘I left school at sixteen, so despite having my site manager’s qualifications I had to do a year’s access course at the university before they’d accept me to do a BSc in nursing.’ He smiled. ‘I loved the course. I was going to work in the Emergency Department, because that was my favourite placement. But then, in my final year, my best friend’s wife was pregnant. Jason was away on business and Denise’s family was in Paris, celebrating her aunt’s sixtieth birthday—they thought it would be fine to go because all first babies are late and take ages.’
‘Right,’ Rebecca said, rolling her eyes because she clearly knew how much of a myth that was. ‘So I’m guessing she went into labour early?’
‘Yes. Her best friend was meant to be her backup birth partner, but she was a junior doctor and was in Theatre when Denise went into labour. Obviously she couldn’t just walk out of the op, so Denise called me in a panic. I thought I’d just be there for the first stage of labour and Jason would be back in time for the birth, but it was a quick labour and he didn’t make it to the hospital until Sienna was a couple of hours old. It was the most amazing thing in the world, being there when my goddaughter took her first breath.’ He grinned. ‘The first thing Sienna did after being born was an enormous poo, and my first job as her godfather was to change that nappy.’
Rebecca’s blue eyes twinkled. ‘Ah, yes, the joys of the first nappy. So even the meconium didn’t put you off wanting to be a midwife?’
‘Nope. In a weird way, that decided me. Looking at her face, seeing those first few moments, I knew Maternity was where I wanted to be. Which meant I was just about to graduate in the wrong subject.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, ish. My degree gave me good foundations for midwifery. After I graduated, I did the eighteen-month short course to become a midwife. I was the only man in my year group, but most people accepted me.’
‘Most?’
‘One of my tutors didn’t really take to me,’ he admitted. ‘In her view, men shouldn’t be midwives because they can’t have babies.’
Rebecca winced. ‘That’s unfair. And also not true—are you going to say heart surgeons can’t do their job if they haven’t had heart surgery themselves? And what about women who can’t have children? That’s not a valid reason for them not being midwives.’ She looked cross. ‘I hate that kind of prejudice.’
And that really gratified him, at the same time as it made him realise that he’d misjudged her. She hadn’t stepped in earlier to pull rank; she really had intended to help and be supportive.
He shrugged. ‘I guess it helped prepare me for any parents-to-be who thought the same as my tutor did. I learned to come up with some solid answers. But here I am. I qualified, I love my job, and it’s such a privilege to help women through one of the most intense and emotional experiences of their lives.’
‘Do you get many dads reacting to you the way Mr Brown did today?’ she asked.
‘One or two. A couple of women have said they didn’t want a man delivering their baby—ironically, they ended up with sections and a male surgeon,’ he added, rolling his eyes, ‘but normally, once people get over the surprise of me not being a woman, they’re fine about it. Not many go from nought to shouty in two seconds, the way he did.’ He smiled at her. ‘What about you? Why did you choose Maternity?’
‘It was my favourite rotation,’ she said. ‘That first moment after the birth, when all’s still, and the baby opens their eyes and looks at you, and you see all the wonder of the universe in their face.’
‘Those tiny fingers and tiny toes,’ he said. ‘I love babies’ feet. And the way babies grip your finger.’
‘The softness of their skin,’ Rebecca said. ‘Even if they’re a late baby and a bit overcooked, or an early baby covered in vernix—they’re just beautiful.’
And that look of joy on her face took his breath away, transforming her from the slightly starchy doctor he’d first met to the most gorgeous woman he’d even seen. His spine pricked with awareness of her.
‘I think,’ Nathan said, ‘we’re on the same page.’
‘I agree.’ She smiled. ‘Thank you for the coffee, Mr Jones.’
‘Nathaniel.’ He waited a beat. Was she going to stay all starchy and formal? Or would she...?
‘Rebecca.’
Only then did he realise he’d been holding his breath. Which was crazy.
‘I’m afraid I need to get going—but welcome to the team.’
‘Cheers,’ he said, and deliberately stayed to finished his own coffee.
He was so aware of the brilliant sky blue of her eyes, and the way her hair—even caught back in a ponytail for work—looked like sunlight on ripened cornfields. The shape of her mouth.
Although he’d dated a few times since the end of his engagement, there hadn’t been anyone serious and it had been a long while since he’d felt that instant zing of attraction. He’d just been going through the motions, doing what everyone expected of him.
He hadn’t been able to help himself glancing at Rebecca’s left hand as they chatted. No ring, though that meant nothing nowadays. For all he knew, she could be in a committed relationship but hadn’t formalised it. Though he wasn’t going to ask any of his colleagues if she was single; the last thing he wanted was to put either of them under the focus of the hospital rumour mill.
She hadn’t flirted with him; but he hadn’t been able to stop himself flirting a bit with her.
He was really going to have to be careful.
