Prognosis Irreconcilable Differences Read online

  God knew, he’d been unable to think of anything else since she’d run from his bed and refused to talk to him. And when he had come home the next afternoon to an empty house he’d been devastated. ‘I have missed you, Jacqui. I was just too busy in my rush to the top to admit it.’

  He stopped and looked at her, knowing she’d been one of the casualties of his single-minded drive to succeed. His beautiful Jacqueline, with the crazy hair and the bangles and the big toffee eyes.

  ‘Oh, poor Nathan. Poor little rich boy,’ she said frostily. ‘Do you think giving me a baby is going to appease your empty existence?’

  Nathan shut his eyes — boy, was she steamed. He opened them again. ‘I’m sorry. It was clumsy of me. But...’ He stopped again, hoping to broach the subject more delicately this time. ‘Why not, Jacq? I know you want a baby. Always have. I’m a fertility doctor with a chain of clinics worldwide. I can do this for you. There was so much I couldn’t give you when we were together. But I can give you this. Let me.’

  Jacqui snorted. He was acting as if it was a diamond ring or an expensive dress. He just didn’t get it. He hadn’t back then, and it seemed a decade and several billion dollars hadn’t wised him up. ‘I never wanted anything but you, Nate.’

  Nathan shook his head. ‘Yes, you did. You wanted a baby.’

  She rubbed her brow, her bangles jangling. ‘Your baby, Nathan. Not just a baby. Yours.’

  Nathan swallowed as his male pride swelled and rose in his chest, his throat. The thought of her belly pregnant with his child pierced his heart with a savage arrow of possession.

  ‘It’s not that I didn’t want to have a child with you, Jacqui. I just wanted to wait.’

  ‘Wait? Till what? Your first million? Billion? Till you floated your company? What? What the hell were you waiting for?’ Despite herself she felt a huge well of emotion rise in her chest and tears stung her eyes. ‘I was right there, Nate. For years.’

  Available. Eager. Some would even have said desperate. And now, when they were estranged, nearly divorced, now he wanted a baby?

  Nathan shrugged. Truthfully, he didn’t know where he’d thought the end point would be. All he knew was that now he was where he’d always wanted to be — on the verge of his ultimate goal — his life had never felt emptier. Less complete. Making a career out of helping make other people’s baby dreams a reality had suddenly seemed to magnify the barrenness of his own life.

  ‘I’m ready now.’

  Jacqui shook her head at his supreme arrogance. This from the man whose company was just about to go public? When would he even have the time? Was he ready, or did he just hate to lose? To have his plans thwarted?

  ‘You want this with all your heart, do you?’ she demanded. ‘You want it so bad that you’d give up every penny just to hold your child in your arms?’

  Jacqui could see Nathan recoil from the suggestion, the tentacles of his past holding him firmly in their grip.

  ‘Because that’s what I demand. At least if you’re going to have a baby with me, that is,’ she continued. ‘I’m not going to take some kind of arrogant offer from a man who’s going to be too busy building an empire to spend time with his kid. Or do you not want anything to do with this child at all other than providing the sperm? You’re okay with being a stranger to your kid like your father was to you?’

  Nathan felt her barb pierce the centre of his chest, and sucked in a breath at how deep it tore. ‘Damn it, Jacqui!’ he growled. He would never wish the torment of knowing it wasn’t loved on an innocent child. ‘Of course I want to be there for my child. And you. I want a reconciliation for real. To live together for real. I want to be a family.’

  It was Jacqui’s turn to feel the tear of the barb. How many years had she yearned to hear those words coming from his mouth? And he offered them up now in some half-baked, ill-thought-out plan. Because his life was empty.

  Because billions of dollars weren’t enough.

  He hadn’t even mentioned love. Had he become that arrogant, that cynical, that detached he could contemplate being a family without love?

  It hurt. It hurt a lot.

  ‘You’re not going to use me to paper over the cracks, Nathan. And I won’t let you use a child, either.’

  Nathan studied her intently, his heart crashing in his chest as his grand plans slipped slowly out of his grasp. She returned his gaze unflinchingly. Her chin had a proud tilt; her toffee eyes were deceptively hard. How could she stand there, vulnerable in so many ways, and yet seem so resolute in the hard beam of his glare?

  More importantly, how could he convince her that it wasn’t some whim? That he really wanted this?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Jacqui—’

  A loud banging on the door interrupted him. Nathan frowned as Shep roused himself half-heartedly from his slumber.

  ‘Is it common practice to have people knocking on your door on dark and stormy nights?’

  Jacqui rose, pleased with the respite from this heartbreaking conversation. ‘Lately, yes.’

  He preceded her down the stairs, opening the door to reveal one very soaked man holding what appeared to be another man in his arms. Beyond the stranger, a car idled, parked at a crazy angle, its lights on, its doors open.

  ‘Jimbo? Is that you?’ Jacqui asked, flying down the remaining stairs.

  The man nodded. ‘Think this young fella’s not well, Jacqui.’

  Jacqui didn’t ask questions. Country men weren’t prone to exaggeration. If Jim Owen thought the kid was crook then she’d bet her last cent he was right. ‘Bring him through, Jimbo,’ she said, leading him into the clinic with Nathan following close behind.

  Jacqui took them past her reception area and into a medium-sized room that looked like a theatre to Nathan, and helped Jimbo place his load on the central table. He looked like a kid — probably not even twenty. And not well was a very accurate description. He looked pale and listless. He groaned.

  ‘Isn’t that Ross Earnshaw’s boy?’ Jacqui frowned. She’d been to his eighteenth birthday party a few months ago.

  ‘Yup. Jeremy,’ Jimbo replied.

  ‘What happened?’ Nathan demanded, searching for the kid’s carotid pulse while Jacqui applied an oxygen mask to his still, ashen face.

  ‘He skidded off the road in front of me and rammed into a tree. Stupid kid, driving too fast for the conditions. Anyway, I helped him out, and he said he was fine. He’d been wearing a seatbelt and he hadn’t banged his head. We tried to get his car back up on the road for a bit, but it was pretty boggy, and then he kind of half collapsed against me and said he had a lot of pain. I was going to drive him to the hospital at Wongaree, but a few minutes into the journey he started to look real pasty and drifted off. No mobile reception to ring an ambulance, and you were only ten minutes away.’

  Jacqui absorbed the information as she switched on a monitor, ripped open the soaked shirt, and hooked Jeremy up to it. It was the first time she’d ever used it on a human.

  ‘Jeremy? Jeremy!’ she called, giving the boy a brisk sternal rub. ‘Can you hear me?’

  Jeremy moaned and opened his eyes, clutching at his side. ‘Cold,’ he murmured.

  Nathan followed the path of the subcutaneous petechial haemorrhaging across the boy’s belly, where the seatbelt had obviously left its mark. ‘Can you remember what happened, Jeremy?’ Nathan butted in.

  ‘Accident,’ he muttered. ‘It hurts.’

  Nathan palpated over the area Jeremy was guarding and the teenager cried out. Nathan looked at Jacqui. Was she also thinking possible splenic or other abdominal injury from the seatbelt? His gaze flicked to the monitor. Tachycardic at one hundred and twenty.

  ‘Spleen?’ Jacqui asked, their earlier argument forgotten amidst the seriousness of the drama being played out in her veterinary theatre.

  ‘Could be.’

  She pointed behind him. ‘Ultrasound help?’

  Nathan looked over his shoulder at the machine. It was like manna from he
aven. He looked back at her. She’d secured her curls in a hasty ponytail and was chewing anxiously on her bottom lip. He smiled at her. ‘You bet.’

  She smiled back at him, and the adrenaline surging through his system spiked.

  ‘Let’s get a couple of IVs into him first and get him warm. We’ll have a quick look with the ultrasound, and then arrange to get him the hell out of here to a primary care facility.’

  Jacqui agreed with his razor-sharp assessment. ‘Jimbo, can you go upstairs to my linen cupboard and grab some blankets? Nathan, I’ll stick a large bore in this arm; you can do that side.’

  ‘Don’t suppose you also have a blood pressure cuff amongst that lot?’ Nathan asked, indicating the monitor equipment.

  ‘Fraid not — don’t really use them on animals. But I do have a manual cuff that I bought after Timmy Marshall’s grandmother had an MI in my waiting room.’

  Nathan stared at her nonplussed for a moment. He’d missed out on so much of her life. Her stories. But now really wasn’t the time to go there. He smiled. Despite the gravity of the situation, working with Jacqui was exhilarating. He felt alive.

  ‘God bless Timmy Marshall’s granny.’

  Nathan inserted his IV while Jacqui retrieved the sphygmomanometer and took a quick BP.

  ‘Ninety over forty,’ she said. Borderline. She wasted no time inserting another large-bore IV into the crook of Jeremy’s elbow.

  Nathan whistled. ‘And on a human too.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said, her voice bordering on affection as she handed him a bag of fluid Wongaree hospital regularly supplied her with.

  Within two minutes Jeremy had two IVs running wide open and was cocooned in blankets. They fired up the ultrasound and Jacqui watched as Nathan ran the transducer through the jelly he’d squeezed on Jeremy’s abdomen. She squinted at the fuzzy screen, looking for evidence of any free fluid.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ Nathan mused. ‘Nothing obvious. Don’t suppose you’ve got a CAT scanner hidden somewhere?’

  Jacqui rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry.’ Her gaze flicked to the monitor. ‘Heart-rate settling at one hundred. He’s responding well to the fluid bolus.’

  Nathan placed the transducer back in its place and strode to the wall phone as Jacqui pumped up the blood pressure cuff one more time.

  ‘One hundred systolic,’ she told him.

  Nathan repeated the figure to the emergency call taker and she watched surreptitiously as he gave a succinct summary of Jeremy’s condition.

  Nathan replaced the receiver. ‘Ambulance is on its way. ETA twenty minutes.’

  Jacqui hadn’t realised how on edge she’d been until help was at hand. All they had to do was keep him warm, monitor him and keep his vitals stable, and then Jeremy would be whisked away.

  Animals she could handle. Humans were a whole other proposition. Thank God Nathan was here.

  ‘So he’s going to be okay, then?’ asked Jimbo, who had been hovering in the background.

  ‘He’s stable at the moment.’ Nathan nodded.

  Jeremy groaned again, and Jimbo said, ‘He seems to be in a bit of pain. Surely you’ve got something here you can give him, Jacqui?’

  Jacqui shook her head. ‘We don’t want to give him anything in case it masks a deterioration in his condition, Jim. When the ambulance gets here, they’ll give him something.’

  Nathan smiled at Jacqui’s answer as Jeremy groaned one more time. He hoped the pain was coming from soft tissue damage, and not blood oozing into his abdomen from a hole somewhere.

  They watched Jeremy for the next fifteen minutes. He seemed settled, but with five minutes to go his heart-rate accelerated again and Nathan was concerned that his abdomen had become more tense.

  Jacqui, who’d changed into her usual green scrubs, watched with growing disquiet. His vitals were slipping. Her heart-rate climbed incrementally with Jeremy’s, and she prayed the ambulance was only a few minutes away. They should be able to hear the sirens any minute now.

  The phone rang. Nathan snatched it off the wall. Jacqui heard the one-sided conversation with dismay. The ambulance wasn’t coming.

  ‘The bridge is under, isn’t it?’ she asked as Nathan replaced the receiver.

  He nodded. ‘And they can’t send a helicopter out in this storm. I’m afraid we’re stuck here for a while.’

  Jacqui looked at him. She’d expected to see the same fear in his eyes that had a stranglehold on her gut, but it wasn’t there. He oozed confidence, authority.

  She swallowed. ‘He’s deteriorating.’

  Nathan looked at the monitor. Heart-rate one-thirty. He raised an eyebrow at Jacqui as she finished another BP.

  ‘Seventy systolic.’

  Yes, he was deteriorating. Yes, he’d bet every one of his billions that Jeremy was haemorrhaging internally. How much blood the boy had already lost, where it was coming from and how fast, he couldn’t know for sure.

  ‘Let’s run some more fluid,’ Nathan said.

  It restored Jeremy’s flagging circulation transiently, but his condition continued to deteriorate as the storm continued to rage.

  ‘What’s your operative set-up here?’

  Jacqui was actually trembling inside now. There was no doubt in her mind that Jeremy needed exploratory abdominal surgery — but here? In her veterinary theatre? ‘I do minor ops only. The most complex I do is spaying. I have a ventilator, suction, diathermy and some basic instrument sets.’

  Nathan nodded, his brain leaping ahead. ‘I think we need to go in. Would you be happy to do anaesthetic and assist?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, hoping she sounded much more confident than she felt. ‘You’ll have to help me with doses.’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘I use Thio for induction and Isoflurane during.’

  Nathan examined Jeremy’s increasingly rigid abdomen. ‘Good. Let’s go.’

  For a second Jacqui just stared at him. But his confidence was inspiring, and she found herself responding automatically.

  ‘Jimbo, you’ve done a first aid course, haven’t you?’

  Jimbo swallowed, looking from one to the other. ‘Er, yeah...’

  ‘Good. We’re going to need your help.’

  Fifteen minutes later Jacqui had successfully intubated her first human since university practice sessions. She’d hooked him up to the ventilator, and was watching as Nathan made a mid-abdominal incision. Jimbo had been given a crash course in assisting a surgeon, helping Nathan prep the patient in sterile green drapes, and had been entrusted with monitoring Jeremy’s blood pressure.

  Nathan’s hand was rock-steady as he made the incision. There wasn’t a single moment of self-doubt. The only operations he’d performed in over a decade were fertility related or C-sections, but it was as if he’d never left his surgical residency.

  Jacqui angled the metallic sucker to slurp away the excess blood, and he headed straight for the spleen. The number one cause for ruptured spleens was motor vehicle accidents, usually seatbelt related, and his gut told him this was Jeremy’s Achilles’ heel.

  One look at the severely ruptured organ confirmed his suspicions, and his fingers moved rapidly to do what he needed to do. First priority was to fasten the splenic artery and achieve haemostasis, which Nathan managed in good time.

  He saw an almost instantaneous stabilising in Jeremy’s vitals. His heart rate dropped to one hundred, his blood pressure climbed to one hundred and ten systolic, and Nathan took his first deep breath. It took him a further thirty minutes to remove the mangled spleen altogether.

  ‘You going to see if anything else is damaged?’ Jacqui asked, peering inside the abdomen.

  Nathan looked down at her. ‘Let’s do a saline lavage, and we’ll see if any blood wells up from anywhere.’

  It had been a long time since Jacqui had seen Nathan in a mask, and she’d forgotten the impact of his eyes. She’d always adored them, but the green of the mask emphasised the green of his irises, and there was a glint to them that g
ave them an almost supernatural glow. The result was dazzling.

  She dragged her gaze away and concentrated on the open abdomen. After a minute, satisfied that no further bleeding appeared to be coming from anywhere, and with Jeremy’s systolic blood pressure improving all the time, Nathan closed the wound in layers. Forty-five minutes after they began, they were done.

  Nathan de-gloved, pulled his hat off and his mask down, and swept Jacqui into a tight embrace. ‘Oh, my God, Jacq!’ He picked her up and swung her around, letting out a mighty whoop. ‘That was amazing!’

  Jacqui laughed, feeling more relief than exhilaration.

  Nathan pulled back. ‘We make a good team.’

  Her heart contracted. She loved him more now than she ever had. ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll stick to animals.’

  If only Nathan didn’t look as happy as a pig in mud.

  The chopper was finally able to land on the beach an hour later, and Nathan accompanied Jeremy back to the Gold Coast, putting an end to any hope he had of continuing their conversation.

  Jacqui returned the next day too, as promised, for the lead-up to the float. Thanks to a very grateful Ross Earnshaw word had leaked out, and by the time Jacqui set foot back in Nathan’s apartment it was plastered all over the news. And the press went crazy!

  The story of Dr Nathan Trent, billionaire doctor, performing an emergency splenectomy on a dark and rainy night in his wife’s country veterinarian surgery had captured the imagination of the nation. Jimbo and Jeremy and the entire Serendipity community were bathed in the white-hot glare of publicity, and the story grew more grandiose every day.

  Suddenly Nathan wasn’t just fabulously wealthy and extraordinarily sexy, but he was an honest-to-God Aussie hero to boot. And Jacqueline was catapulted into the limelight with him.

  She’d been able to keep their ‘reconciliation’ reasonably contained within the business community until now, but suddenly it was impossible. In the days that followed they were photographed, stalked by media whenever they stepped out of Q1, and endlessly speculated over on radio talkback and current affairs shows.