Once Upon a Christmas

Bryony swallowed hard, trying to dispel the mental image of Jack naked in her spare room.

For a woman who was not supposed to be thinking about Jack Rothwell, she was failing dismally.

‘Jack …’

‘What I really need is a hug.’ Without waiting for a response, he hauled her against him and she went into his arms, feeling the softness of his jumper covering the hard muscle of his chest and the strength of his arms as he held her. He gave a groan and tightened his hold, burying his face in her hair.

Bryony could hardly breathe. She felt the steady thud of his heart against her flushed cheek, felt her whole body tingle in response to the feel of his body against hers. He felt strong and safe and deliciously male.

They stood like that for a moment and she closed her eyes, wishing that it could last for ever. Wishing that it could lead to something more.

And then gradually his grip on her loosened and his hands slid slowly up her arms. His strong fingers curled into her shoulders and he looked down at her, his blue eyes suddenly intent on her face.

A warmth spread slowly through her pelvis and her whole body melted with longing.

She felt his fingers tighten, saw something flicker in his eyes and then his head lowered towards hers.

He was going to kiss her.

Finally, after so many years of dreaming about exactly that, Jack was going to kiss her.

Dizzy with excitement, Bryony stared up at him, breathless with anticipation.

And then suddenly his hands fell away from her shoulders and he stepped back, his handsome face blank of expression.

‘We should probably get some sleep, Blondie.’ His tone was light and he glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s getting late.’

Bryony tried to smile but it was a poor effort. She felt swamped with a disappointment so powerful that it was almost a physical pain. She’d been so sure that he was going to kiss her.

But why would Jack kiss her?

She gritted her teeth, furious with herself. She was doing it again. Fantasising about Jack.

So much for her campaign to date other men. So far she’d been on one date that had been an utter disaster and she was still noticing Jack.

She had less than two months to find Lizzie a daddy, or at least someone who looked as though he had potential. It was time she made more effort.

She needed to kiss someone and see if that helped.

She needed to stop comparing everyone with Jack.

There must be another man who looked good in jeans. There must be another man who always knew exactly what to do when everyone around them was panicking. There must be another man who would make her knees wobble every time he walked into a room.

And she was going to find him.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE rest of November flew past and Annie’s condition gradually improved.

‘The burns are almost all round her skirt area,’ Jack told Bryony one day as they snatched a quick cup of coffee during a late shift. ‘I talked to the consultant last night. She’s going to need extensive skin grafts.’

‘Poor mite.’ Bryony pulled a face at the thought of the number of hospital stays Annie was going to have to endure. ‘It’s going to be so hard for her.’

Jack nodded. ‘But at least she’s alive. And Lizzie seems to have bounced back amazingly well.’

‘Yes.’ Bryony smiled. ‘I was worried about that but she’s doing fine. We’re visiting Annie a lot, which helps, and Lizzie has made it her mission to act as the link between Annie and the school. She’s been taking her all sorts of books and things to do and generally keeping her in touch with the gossip.’

‘She’s a great girl.’ Jack drained his coffee and sat back in his chair with a yawn, long legs stretched out in front of him. ‘So, Blondie. December the first tomorrow.’

Bryony stared gloomily into her coffee. ‘Don’t remind me. I now have less than a month to sort out Lizzie’s Christmas present, and I’m fast coming to the conclusion that it’s an impossible task.’

Jack looked at her quizzically, a strange light in his eyes. ‘So, is the romance with David Armstrong not working?’

Romance?

Bryony looked at him. ‘We’ve been on two dates. The first one we barely had time to talk because you kept calling—not that it was your fault that Lizzie was demanding that night,’ she added hastily, hoping that he didn’t think that she was complaining, ‘and the second date was disturbed because you called him back to the hospital to see a child. And that wasn’t your fault either.’

Jack looked at her, his expression inscrutable. ‘And he hasn’t asked you out since?’

‘Well, funnily enough, he rang me this morning,’ Bryony confided, ‘and he’s taking me to dinner at The Peacock on Saturday. Neither of us is on call and Lizzie is sleeping at my mother’s so this time there should be absolutely no interruptions.’

And this time she was going to kiss him.

She’d made up her mind that she was going to kiss him.

She was utterly convinced that kissing another man would cure her obsession with Jack.

David was a good-looking guy. She knew that lots of the nurses lusted after him secretly. He must know how to kiss.

And it was going to happen on Saturday. She was going to invite him in for coffee and she was going to kiss him.

The next day was incredibly busy.

‘It’s the roads,’ Sean said wearily as they snatched a five-minute coffee-break in the middle of a long and intensive shift. ‘They’re so icy and people drive too fast. I predict a nasty pile-up before the end of the evening.’

His prediction proved correct.

At seven o’clock the ambulance hotline rang. Bryony answered it and when she finally put the phone down both Sean and Jack were watching her expectantly.

‘Are you clairvoyant?’ She looked at Sean who shrugged.

‘Black ice. It was inevitable. What are the details?’

‘Twenty-two-year-old female, conscious but shocked and complaining of chest pains.’

She’d barely finished repeating what Ambulance Control had told her when the doors slammed open and the paramedics hurried in with the trolley.

‘Straight into Resus,’ Jack ordered and they transferred the woman onto the trolley as smoothly as possible. While the rest of the team moved quickly into action he questioned the paramedics about the accident.

‘It was a side impact,’ the paramedic told him. ‘She was driving and the other vehicle went straight into her side. Her passenger walked away virtually unharmed. He’s giving her details to Reception now.’

Jack nodded and turned his attention back to the young woman, a frown on his face. ‘She has a neck haematoma. I want a chest X-ray, fast,’ he murmured, and looked at Bryony. ‘Have you got a line in?’

She nodded. ‘One.’

‘Put in another one,’ he ordered, ‘but hold the fluid. And cross-match ten units of blood.’

Bryony’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’

‘Just a feeling. Nicky, I want a BP from both arms,’ he said, gesturing to the staff to stand back while the radiographer took the chest film.

‘Her blood pressure is different in each arm,’ Nicky said quickly, and Jack nodded.

‘I thought it might be. She’s only slightly hypotensive so I want minimal fluid replacement for now.’

Bryony looked at him, waiting for a blonde joke or one of his usual quips that would ease the tension, but this time his eyes were fixed on the patient.

‘Fast-bleep the surgeons,’ he ordered, ‘and let’s take a look at that chest X-ray.’

They walked across to look at the chest X-ray and Bryony looked at him, able to talk now that they were away from the patient. ‘Why did you cross-match so much blood?’

‘Because I think she’s ruptured her aorta.’

Bryony’s eyes widened. ‘But a ruptured aorta has a 90 per cent mortality rate. She’d be dead.’

He squinted at the X-ray. ‘Unless the bleed is contained by the aortic adventitia. Then she’d be alive. But at risk of haemorrhage.’

Bryony stared at the X-ray, too, and Jack lifted an eyebrow.

‘OK, Blondie—impress me. What do you see?’

‘The mediastinum is widened.’

‘And is that significant?’

Bryony chewed her lip and delved into her brain. ‘On its own, possibly not,’ she said, remembering something she’d read, ‘but taken with other factors …’

‘Such as?’

Bryony looked again, determined not to miss anything. ‘The trachea is deviated to the right. The aortic outline is blurred and the aortic knuckle is obliterated.’

‘What else?’

‘It’s cloudy.’ She peered closer at the X-ray. ‘I haven’t seen that before. Is it a haemothorax?’

‘Full marks.’ He gave her a lazy smile but his eyes glittered with admiration. ‘She has a right-sided haemothorax caused by a traumatic rupture of the thoracic aorta, which is currently contained. In this case we can see it clearly on the X-ray, but not always.’

Bryony looked at him and felt her heart thud harder. The patient was lucky to be alive. ‘So what happens now?’

‘She needs urgent surgical repair. In the meantime, we need to give fluid cautiously, otherwise the adventitia could rupture and she’ll have a fatal haemorrhage.’

‘So presumably we also need to give her good pain relief so that her blood pressure doesn’t go up?’

His eyes rested on her shiny blonde hair and he shook his head solemnly. ‘Amazing.’

She poked her tongue out discreetly and he gave her a sexy smile that made her knees wobble.

Fortunately, at that moment the surgeons walked into the room and provided a distraction. They all conferred, agreeing to take the woman to Theatre right away for surgical repair.

‘So what exactly do they do?’ Bryony asked Jack after the woman had been safely handed over to the surgeons and they were left to deal with the debris in Resus.

‘Depends.’ He ripped off his gloves and dropped them into the bin. ‘They’ll attempt a surgical repair.’

‘And if they can’t repair it?’

‘Then they’ll do a vascular graft.’

Bryony helped Nicky to clean the trolley. ‘But what made you suspect an aortic rupture? I always thought patients died at the scene of the accident.’

‘Well, if they’re alive it basically suggests a partial injury,’ he told her. ‘It’s often hard to diagnose on X-ray. A widened mediastinum doesn’t necessarily indicate an abnormality. But in her case there were other classic chest X-ray signs and she had clinical signs too. The neck haematoma, asymmetric BP and chest pain.’

‘And if the X-ray hadn’t been clear?’

‘I would have talked to the consultant radiologist and we would have done a multi-slice CT scan. It’s worth finding out as much as you can about the details of the accident. The paramedic told us her car had been hit on the driver’s side. A significant number of blunt traumatic aortic ruptures are caused by side impact.’

Bryony stared at him in fascination. ‘What’s the pathology?’

‘Basically a sudden deceleration such as a fall from a height or an RTA allows the mobile parts of the aorta to keep moving. It usually tears where the aorta is tethered to the pulmonary vein—’

‘The ligamentum arteriosum,’ Bryony intervened, and he rolled his eyes.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a brainy blonde,’ he drawled, and she clucked sympathetically.

‘If I’m threatening your ego then just let me know.’

‘My ego is shivering,’ he assured her, his blue eyes twinkling as looked down at her. ‘What do you get when you give a blonde a penny for her thoughts?’

‘Change,’ Bryony said immediately, tilting her head to one side. ‘Why is a man like a vintage wine?’

Jack’s eyes narrowed and his mouth twitched. ‘Go on …’

‘Because they all start out like grapes,’ Bryony said cheerfully, ‘and it’s a woman’s job to tread all over them and keep them in the dark until they mature into something you’d like to have dinner with.’

Nicky gave a snort of amusement from the corner of the room and Jack grinned.

‘That’s shockingly sexist, Blondie.’

‘Just giving as good as I get.’

Jack’s smile faded. ‘And talking about having dinner, haven’t you got a date tomorrow night?’

‘Yes.’ Bryony frowned as she remembered that she had all of three weeks to find a man who might make a good father for Lizzie. By anyone’s standards it was a tall order.

But at least she had another date with David so he must be fairly keen.

And he was a really nice man. Her eyes slid to Jack’s face and then away again. She wasn’t going to compare him to Jack. All right, so Jack was staggeringly handsome and he was clever and he had a great sense of humour—She cut herself off before the list grew too long. Jack didn’t do commitment. And Jack didn’t notice her. Which ruled him out as a potential partner.

At least David noticed her.

And she was going to start noticing him, she told herself firmly, leaving the room so that she wouldn’t be tempted to continually look at Jack.

‘I’m really looking forward to tonight.’ Bryony slid into David’s car and gave him a smile. ‘The food is meant to be great and Lizzie is at my mother’s so we are guaranteed no interruptions.’

David waited while she fastened her seat belt and then pulled out of her drive. ‘Let’s hope not.’

They walked into the restaurant ten minutes later and Bryony gave a gasp of delight as she saw the Christmas tree sparkling by the log fire. ‘Oh—it’s lovely.’

And romantic.

How could she and David fail to further their relationship in this atmosphere? It was made for lovers.

She handed over her coat, feeling David’s eyes slide over her.

‘You look great,’ he said quietly, and she smiled shyly, pleased that she’d bought the red dress she’d seen on a shopping expedition a week earlier.

‘So do you.’

And he did. He was wearing a dark, well-cut suit and she saw several female heads turn towards him as they were shown to their table.

All right, so he didn’t make her knees wobble but that was a good thing surely. With Jack she actually felt physically sick every time he walked into a room, which was utterly ridiculous. She couldn’t concentrate and she couldn’t breathe. All she was aware of was him. And that wasn’t what she wanted in a stable, long-term relationship.

At least being with David didn’t make her feel sick with excitement.

They ordered their food and then David picked up his glass and raised it. ‘To an uninterrupted evening.’

She smiled and lifted her glass in response but before she could speak she gave a gasp of surprise. ‘Oh—it’s Jack!’

David’s jaw tightened and he put his glass carefully down on the table. ‘Jack?’

‘Jack Rothwell. He’s just walked in with some blonde.’

Bryony felt a flash of jealousy as she studied Jack’s companion. She was his usual type. Endless legs, silvery blonde hair and a skirt that barely covered her bottom. She wore a very low-cut top and Bryony glanced at Jack to see signs of disapproval, but he seemed perfectly relaxed, his eyes twinkling flirtatiously as he laughed at something the girl had said.

By contrast, David was glowering, his earlier good humour seemingly gone as he reached for his wine.

‘Well …’ Bryony made a determined effort not to look at Jack and not to mind that he didn’t appear to have noticed her anyway. ‘That’s a coincidence.’

‘Is it?’ David’s eyes glittered ominously and he sat back in his chair as the waiter poured more wine into his glass. ‘Aren’t you beginning to wonder why it is that Jack Rothwell would want to sabotage every date we have?’

‘Sabotage?’ Bryony looked at him in astonishment and gave a puzzled laugh. ‘Jack has nothing to do with the fact that our last two dates haven’t worked out that well.’

‘No?’

‘Well, he’s certainly not sabotaging tonight,’ Bryony said reasonably. ‘I mean, he hasn’t even noticed we’re here. He’s with a woman himself.’

She glanced across the restaurant again and immediately wished she hadn’t. Jack was leaning forward, his attention totally focused on his beautiful companion.

Bryony looked away quickly, trying not to mind. Knowing that she had no right to mind.

And, anyway, she was with David.

But he was looking at her with an odd expression on his face. ‘He knows you’re here,’ he said quietly, ‘and no man could fail to notice you, Bryony.’

She blushed at the compliment. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, but I can assure you that Jack certainly doesn’t notice me in the way you’re suggesting.’

In fact, he didn’t seem to notice her as a woman at all. Until she wore something that he disapproved of, she thought gloomily. Goodness knew how he would have reacted had she been the one dressed like his date. He probably would have had her locked up. But evidently the girl staring into his eyes at that precise moment was allowed to dress however she pleased.

Realising that she was staring again, Bryony turned her attention back to David but the atmosphere had changed. She made a valiant attempt to keep up lively conversation but it seemed like hard work.

In the end they ate their starter in virtual silence and Bryony’s gaze flickered surreptitiously to Jack yet again.

Immediately their eyes locked and she swallowed hard, aware that he must have been looking at her.

His eyes held hers and everything and everyone else in the room gradually faded into the background. For Bryony there was just Jack and he seemed as reluctant to break the contact as she was.

Her heart banged against her ribs with rhythmic force and the sick feeling started in her stomach.

And still Jack’s eyes held hers.

They might have stared at each other for ever if the waiter hadn’t chosen that moment to deliver their next course, walking across their line of vision.

Staring down at her plate, Bryony realised that suddenly she wasn’t hungry any more. Her insides felt totally jumbled up.

Why had Jack been staring at her like that?

Did he disapprove of her seeing David? Did he think that she was dating the wrong man?

She pushed her food around her plate, miserably aware that David had finished his main course and was now watching her in silence.

Finally he spoke. ‘You don’t seem hungry.’

‘Not very.’ She put her fork down and smiled at him apologetically. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She bit her lip, embarrassed that the evening was going so badly. ‘I’m just a bit tired—it’s been a pretty busy week.’

‘Do you want to go home?’

She hesitated and then nodded. ‘Yes. If that’s all right with you.’

‘Shall we have coffee first?’

She remembered her resolution to kiss him. ‘No,’ she croaked. ‘Let’s have coffee at my house.’

He looked at her thoughtfully and seemed to relax slightly. Then he nodded and rose to his feet. ‘Good idea. Come on. I’ll settle the bill while they get our coats.’

‘If you’ve finished, I’ll take her home.’ Jack’s deep voice came from right beside her, his eyes fixed on her face. ‘It’s on my way.’

The two men stared at each other with ill-disguised hostility.

‘She’s my date,’ David said tightly, and Jack smiled.

‘You’ve had your date,’ he drawled softly, ‘and now I’m taking her home.’

Realising that everyone in the restaurant was staring at them, Bryony flushed scarlet and tugged Jack’s arm.

‘For goodness’ sake, Jack! Everyone’s looking at us.’

Jack gave a dismissive shrug that indicated just how little he was bothered by other people’s opinions and then he smiled as his date for the evening joined them. ‘Nina, this is David. He’s offered to take you home.’

Nina gave Jack a longing look that left no one in any doubt as to how she felt about him. And then she sighed and shot David a dazzling smile. ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble …’

Wondering why Nina was giving up so easily, Bryony watched as David’s eyes dropped to the neckline of Nina’s dress which revealed a hypnotic amount of female flesh.

He stared in blatant fascination and then finally cleared his throat and dragged his gaze up to Nina’s. ‘It’s no trouble at all,’ he said hoarsely and Bryony resisted the temptation to scream with frustration.

Men were just so pathetic!

Boiling with anger, she said goodnight to David and Nina and followed Jack across the car park.

He unlocked the car and opened the door for her and she slid inside and yanked at the seat belt.

As Jack settled himself in the driver’s seat, she let rip.

‘David was my date! You had no right to interfere.’

Jack reversed out of his parking space. ‘I merely offered to take you home.’

‘You didn’t offer, Jack,’ she said caustically, ‘you insisted. David was taking me home and he was ready to argue until your Nina thrust her chest in his face.’

Jack grinned, maddeningly unperturbed by her outburst. ‘impressive, isn’t she? I thought as I was taking you away from him, I ought to offer him something in compensation.’

‘So I suppose she was the booby prize?’ Bryony’s voice dripped sarcasm and Jack’s grin widened.

‘Booby prize.’ He repeated her words and chuckled with appreciation. ‘I admit I hadn’t thought of it in exactly those terms, but now you mention it …’

Bryony ground her teeth in frustration. ‘You are so hypocritical, do you know that? You have the nerve to criticise my black dress and then you go out with a girl who has a cleavage the size of the Grand Canyon and shows it off to the entire population. I didn’t notice you covering her up with a coat.’

Jack glanced across at her and in the semi-darkness she could see his eyes twinkling wickedly. ‘It would have had to be a big coat and it seemed a shame to deprive everyone of the view,’ he drawled, and she felt fury mix with a very different emotion.

Hurt.

When Nina wore a low-cut dress, Jack obviously thought she looked incredibly attractive. But when she

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