Neurosurgeon, Single Dad...Husband?
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Charlotte Hawkes
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CHAPTER ONE
‘THE DAMN THING is a beast. It’s wrapped completely around these major vessels.’
‘Perhaps,’ Seth Mulder mused, peering through the co-observation surgical microscope at his patient’s brain tumour to where his fellow surgeon, and friend, was indicating. ‘Although, given how well-developed both the post-central and inter-parietal sulci are, they should make particularly good landmarks.’
The clearer those grooves were, the easier it would be for his team to identify the separate functional centres of their patient’s brain and avoid cutting into the most essential areas of it.
‘I reckon we might be able to take advantage of this in order to achieve a particularly anatomical resection—at least of the most superficial parts of the tumour.’
‘And attempt preservation using microsurgical techniques,’ his colleague agreed. ‘Nice, yes, I like it.’
‘Once arterial release is achieved, we should be able to remove the bulk of the tumour in order to create a little more working space in there.’
Seth lifted his head from the microscope and felt some of the tension of the last few weeks began to eek from his body. It felt good to be back in the operating room after the past few, hellish weeks away.
As complex as this surgery was—and as much as he would never wish such a beast of a tumour on anyone—he found he’d missed being in the OR more than he could have imagined.
Brain surgery was his world. It was what drove him on. It was what he was good at—brilliant at, in fact. Complex neurological procedures on patients who had not just paid handsomely to be treated at the state-of-the-art private wing of Baystone Medical Practice but to be treated by him personally.
Up until a month ago, these surgeries had been the sole focus of his highly driven life. They’d been all he lived for. All he wanted to live for. Which was just as well, since he clearly made a lousy excuse for a father. Or surrogate father. Or whatever the hell he was supposed to call himself now.
A wave of something cold and hard seeped into his chest—with an underlying current of something he couldn’t quite identify.
The kid deserved better.
He wasn’t designed to be a good parent, he thought guiltily. He wasn’t designed to be a parent at all. His sister had always had the maternal instincts—generous and patient, just like their beloved grandmother had been. Meanwhile, he was the one who had inherited all the traits from their parents, who had all the parental instincts of cuckoos dumping their young on someone else to look after.
No, he was designed to be a bachelor: free to play the field and love his life as a neurosurgeon. So how was he supposed to help a six-year-old kid who couldn’t even stand to look at him, let alone speak a single word to him?
Not for the first time, Seth wondered if he really was the best choice for young, grieving Noah—no matter what his sister’s will had instructed. If he was such a good uncle and brother, then he would never have left her to raise her son—his nephew—without any familial help at all.
Another wave of guilt seeped into him, and this time Seth recognised that underlying current for the self-loathing that it was. He was her brother, but he’d been too consumed with his own career, his own life, that he hadn’t really acted like a good brother these past years. He’d never meant to let her down. He’d let work, life and Stacey’s aggravating insistence that he needed to find a decent woman get in the way. Perhaps, deep down, he’d always thought he’d have time to make it up to her. But now she was gone, and he had Noah to consider.
The irony of it was that he’d begun to tire of that part of himself that played the field a while ago. The parties had started to make his skull pound, the city’s most exclusive hotspots looked like tedious carbon copies of each other and the women he dated were certainly beautiful but left him feeling unstimulated. Outside the bedroom, at any rate.
He was only too aware of how shallow that made him sound. A couple of months ago his usually quiet scrub-nurse Andrea Perkins had asked directly, curiously but clearly with no agenda, if he ever wearied of being the ‘Smoulder’ half of the ‘Smoulder and Heartstop’ duo of fellow surgeon Jack Hart and him. But surely that was better than becoming the kind of deficient father that he’d had the misfortune to call his own?
Lifting his head, Seth steeled himself for that now-familiar punch as Andrea’s striking eyes caught his, and in that instant everything stilled unexpectedly around him and he forgot where he was just for a moment.
What was it about this gentle, reserved woman that seemed to get under his skin? That made him feel as though, if he let his guard down even an inch, she would be able to see right through to his very soul? It was not merely because her eyes were the most stunning shade that they reminded him of the pale blue plumbago that his grandmother used to cultivate in her garden.
The memory jolted through Seth’s head before coming to a juddering halt.
Where had that sprung from?
He shut the memory down barely a fraction of a second later. But even a fraction of a second was more than he had allowed himself in the past—with anyone, for that matter.
Which wasn’t to say that he hadn’t noticed Andrea Perkins the moment she’d walked into his very first surgery at Baystone over seven months ago, but he’d quashed the inconvenient attraction instantly.
For all his playboy reputation outside the hospital, Seth had rules—boundaries. He didn’t date, or even flirt with, colleagues. It was a line he didn’t cross. It was too messy, too complicated. Without his set of carefully constructed rules, he’d be no better than the man who had fathered him—but had never actually been any kind of father.
And perhaps, if that excuse of a man had exerted some similar measure of self-control, then his desperately unhappy wife might not have turned herself inside out trying to be someone she wasn’t—so focussed on trying to please her perfidious husband that she didn’t have the energy to be any kind of mother to Stacey or himself.
All of which, Seth believed, proved exactly why he wasn’t designed to be a husband or father himself. And why he should never cross his own self-imposed line in the sand. Yet if there was one colleague who consistently intrigued him it was the enigmatic Andrea.
He was almost grateful when her soft, professional voice dragged him back to the present.
‘So the brain mapping you conducted at the beginning of the craniotomy, when the patient was awake, will help you to avoid eloquent areas of the brain?’
Irked, Seth yanked his gaze away and put the unexpected moment of weakness down to just how upside down his usually ordered life now was. But he needed that line to be there—now more than ever, when everything else seemed to be spiralling so dangerously out of his control.
Besides, he hadn’t asked for Andrea to be on this surgery because she had pretty eyes or a way of making him feel oddly more anchored—even though he’d never thought he’d felt at sea before; he’d asked for her because she was a damned good scrub nurse. And not because she was the only scrub nurse who’d learned within one single procedure how to set out the instruments exactly the way he preferred, which gloves he favoured for different operations or which sutures he was likely to want in any given circumstance.
Rather, what made her such a good scrub nurse—and, to be fair, Baystone Medical Practice had many good scrub nurses both in the private wing and in the main hospital itself—was how, from the first time that Andrea had been on his team, she’d impressed him with her intuitive approach and her eagerness to learn. Not least as now, when it was the first time she’d been part of a brain tumour resection like this one.
Not for the first time, he thought about the HCP-med course he’d been invited to mentor: a five-year course that would allow a nurse like Andrea to transition to become a doctor. The longer he worked with her, the more she struck him as the ideal candidate—not that he relished the idea of losing such an intuitive scrub nurse.
Little wonder that he found himself specifically selecting her to be part his team whenever he knew she was on duty, and not just today. She’d make up part of the crew he considered to be his dream team whether as a scrub nurse, or if she went on to become a doctor—and wasn’t that precisely what each and every one of his patients deserved?
‘Yes, the brain mapping will help during the first part of the tumour resection,’ Seth confirmed, giving her his attention as he finally answered her question. ‘But, once we start to remove more of it and get to sub-cortical levels, there may well be brain shift, so we’ll have to stimulate the brain again and look out for abnormal responses.’
‘You won’t wake the patient up again?’
‘Not this time.’ Seth shook his head as he lowered his focus back to the patient. ‘We’ll need to monitor brainwave patterns. Can we irrigate the brain a little more...? Great.’
He’d barely finished the request when she efficiently moved in with the ice-cold saline solution that would help to keep his patient’s brain cool and avoid any stroke to the exposed tissue.
He definitely ought to ask her if she’d ever considered retraining as a doctor, with him as her sponsor. At least he could actually do something to help her, which was more than he felt he was capable of doing for his nephew. He might as well be a hated stranger to that six-year-old, and he didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
How was it possible for him to be a surgeon so renowned for pushing boundaries in operations, and to achieve results that were gaining him global recognition, yet at the same time be so utterly incapable when it came to being some kind of father to little Noah?
It had always been his darkest fear that he was every bit as heartless, as callous, as his own father had been—which was why he’d always sworn he’d never want marriage or kids. And, with every day that passed with his nephew, that fear was proving more and more astute.
What the hell had his sister been thinking, naming him as Noah’s legal guardian? Especially in light of the fact the boy’s paternal grandparents wanted to take custody of him.
Something punched Seth in the stomach, but he refused to succumb to it. This was neither the time nor the place to deal with the daunting prospect of becoming a surrogate father to his grief-stricken young nephew. He had a craniotomy to perform, which was something he had no doubt he was the capable of doing.
Setting his mind firmly back on the surgery, Seth began to feel the tension ease a little.
‘Okay.’ He peered down the microscope and carefully manoeuvred his way around the major vessel that was being swallowed up by the tumour. ‘Let’s start freeing this one, shall we?’
For the next few hours the team worked steadily, resecting the beast of a tumour using microsurgery where necessary and very anatomical resections where the brain’s landmarks allowed it.
They tested the edges of it and stimulated the brain whenever they needed to in order to ensure they wouldn’t cause a stroke in the surrounding heathy tissue. And, when they’d removed as much of the tumour as they could without risking damage to the eloquent sub-cortex deeper down, they finally closed up.
Finally he took the suture kit from Andrea, watching as she carefully kept track of the tail and lifted it clear of the sterile field as she passed it across. She had a good career as a specialist nurse and she’d never once mentioned wanting to change it. So why couldn’t he shake the impression that beneath her guarded exterior something in her hankered for more?
Was it just her hunger for learning that struck a chord inside him?
A short while later, the surgery finally completed, Seth and Jack finally moved out of the OR to de-gown and scrub out, Andrea following as she noted final instructions for the handover to the ICU team and post-op care.
Seth stepped through the doors and activated the taps with his elbow.
‘It’s been a nice job,’ he heard himself tell her. ‘Well done.’
Did he imagine that brief flicker of surprise in her eyes before she carefully schooled her features?
‘Thank you.’
Was it really that unusual for him to compliment his team? He really didn’t think so. But perhaps he did take it as read that his team would perform well.
‘I have another interesting surgery this afternoon, an ependymoma. Do you know anything about them?’
Andrea tilted her head.
‘Ependymoma? They’re relatively rare tumours. I think they account for less than two percent of all central-nervous-system tumours. I haven’t actually seen one performed before.’
‘I thought you might benefit from the learning experience.’ Seth nodded. ‘The scrub nurse who was dealing with this case has been pulled away to an emergency case and I need someone who can get up to speed quickly.’
He ignored the suspicion that he also preferred the idea of Andrea working alongside him.
‘Right.’
‘This surgery will be on a thirty-eight-year-old female who presented with a ten-week history of neck pain radiating down both arms and numbness in both hands. A neurological examination was relatively normal, but a cervical spinal MRI showed a well-demarcated inter-medullary lesion around the level of C6.’
‘I would love to be a part of that surgery,’ she admitted regretfully. ‘But I don’t think I’m scheduled to be on your team this afternoon.’
‘Leave it with me, I’ll sort it.’
‘Thank you...’ She hesitated, as though about to say more, but then stopped herself. ‘Meanwhile I’ll liaise with the ICU team in terms of the brain stimulation responses we had during the surgery.’
‘Good.’
He liked how Andrea pulled the conversation neatly back to the patient.
‘I’ll also advise them of the particular abnormalities you said to look out for as he regains consciousness.’
‘I have a few patients to see now, but I’ll check in after that,’ he confirmed, knocking off the taps as he finished scrubbing and drawing down a few sheets of paper towel to dry his hands.
It was only as Andrea left, the glass doors sliding smoothly closed behind her, that he noticed his friend’s curious gaze on him.
‘What?’
‘I knew you had a soft spot for her.’ Jack grinned, amused.
Something odd punched through Seth, but he managed a dismissive snort.
‘Because I asked if she was interested in a surgery? Where are we—back in the playground?’
‘You like her,’ his friend insisted, unperturbed.
‘You’re the one who dates colleagues.’ Seth shook his head. ‘Not me.’
Jack laughed.
‘Yeah, yeah, your infamous lines not to be crossed. But maybe, just once, you could break your own rules. You’re not your old man.’
‘I’m well aware,’ Seth bit out stiffly. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean, just because I think a colleague might learn from a particular procedure, that I want to sleep with her.’
‘It doesn’t necessarily mean it, no,’ his friend agreed. ‘But in this case I believe it does. Either way, I thought you might like to know that Andrea might be leaving Baystone.’
Andrea was leaving?
Seth froze. Only for a moment, but it was enough. And he hated that the revelation upended him in a way it certainly shouldn’t have had the power to do. Clearly, he wasn’t himself at the moment.
‘That’s...a shame,’ he managed at length when he could be sure his voice sounded vaguely casual. ‘She’s a good scrub nurse. Do you know why she’s leaving?’
And then he kicked himself for sounding so interested.
‘No idea. You know Andrea: she doesn’t talk to many people.’ Jack finished scrubbing his hands and began to dry them. ‘But she might tell you. If you decide to ask, that is.’
A hundred different thoughts raced through Seth’s head. He pushed them aside.
‘Why would I do that?’ he demanded crisply. ‘If she’s leaving, then that’s her business and no one else’s.’
And then, before he could analyse himself any further, Seth shot the spent paper towel into the bins and left the room.
