Kitabı oku: «Their Twin Christmas Surprise», sayfa 2

CHAPTER TWO

‘SARA! How could you be so clumsy? Your dress is ruined!’ her mother exclaimed in horror as she followed her into her hotel bedroom.

Sara hid a grim smile of satisfaction as she unceremoniously stripped the torn dress off and kicked the revolting garment towards the bin in the corner of the room. Even in a crumpled heap in the shadows the colour was offensive and from the first horrified moment she’d seen it she’d realised exactly why her sister had chosen it, and had been determined to thwart her plan. Even if today was her sister’s wedding, she had no intention of being made a laughing-stock in front of all their friends and family … and especially, she admitted guiltily, in front of Dan.

‘I’ll just have to step down from being a bridesmaid,’ she said logically, putting Plan A into action even as her mother hurried across to retrieve the expensive dress to examine the extent of the damage. It wouldn’t be nearly so hard to stand in the background while she tried to hide her emotions from everyone else; to hide the fact that she desperately longed to be the one standing beside Dan—the man she loved—exchanging their vows. Zara was the twin accustomed to standing in the limelight and putting on the face that the rest of the world expected to see. ‘It won’t take me long to put my smart suit on,’ she continued, refusing to think about anything beyond the immediate situation. ‘I’ll catch up with the rest of you downstairs before the ceremony starts.’

‘You can’t!’ her mother wailed, wringing her hands. ‘You’ve got to be Zara’s bridesmaid. You’re her only sister … her twin! What would everybody think?’

‘Does it really matter what they think? ‘Sara asked with her head in the wardrobe, already reaching for the black silk suit she’d chosen as an elegant alternative to the burnt-orange meringue her sister would have had her wear.

The thing that had amazed her was that her mother had apparently been oblivious to what had been going on right under her nose while the attendant’s clothes had been chosen for the wedding party. She’d commented approvingly about the clever idea of a colour theme graduating from the creamy ivory of the bride’s dress through various shades of gold and topaz for the dresses her wraith-thin modelling friends would wear, but how could she not have seen that both the colour and the style Zara had decreed for Sara’s dress were an abomination that did absolutely nothing for her second daughter’s colouring or more rounded shape?

And as for the hairstyle … Sara’s eyes flicked towards the mirror, her glance taking in the simple severity of the swept-back style that would have complemented the fine lines of her face if it hadn’t also revealed the imperfection of the scar her sister had inflicted on her so long ago.

The fact that her mother was oblivious to everything but that things should be exactly as her beautiful daughter wanted was an old hurt that was unlikely to go away any time soon.

There’s none so blind as them that will not see, she could hear her grandmother say darkly, and Sara smiled, remembering that the indomitable old woman she’d adored had been one of the few who had seen straight through Zara. Granny Walker had been the person who had always known when her younger granddaughter had been practising her wiles and had taken no nonsense, especially when Sara had been the butt of Zara’s machinations.

‘You’re not wearing black to your sister’s wedding,’ her mother pronounced as she whipped the hanger out of Sara’s hand and angrily flung the contents onto the bed. ‘There must be something we can do with your dress. It’s a designer original. The man did it specially … as a favour to Zara because she’s his favourite model.’

Sara knew without question that there was no way she was ever going to be able to wear that dreadful dress again. She’d made certain of that when she’d decided exactly what damage she was going to do to it. As far as she was concerned, everything about the dress was proof that the designer must have detested her sister … maybe even the whole female half of the world’s population.

‘How about this?’ she suggested as she switched to Plan B and took out the dress that had been hanging in the wardrobe just waiting for the right moment. ‘I was going to change into this after the photos. Do you remember it?

It was an evening dress of your mother’s, from before Nana married Granddad. I thought that if I wore it for part of the day, it would be almost as if she were here, too.’

The dress was simplicity itself and while the fluid silk looked nothing special draped over a hanger, once she was wearing it, the rich honey-coloured fabric was so supple that it looked as if it had been poured over her curves with a delicate hand.

‘Oh, darling …’ As she’d hoped, her mother caught her breath at the sentimental idea and when she reached out a tentative hand to stroke the fabric, Sara knew that she had won the first skirmish.

‘Shall we see if it fits me well enough?’ she suggested, already knowing what the answer was going to be—the dress fitted her as if it had been made for her. This battle plan had been worked out in every detail, knowing that it was the only way she was going to outwit her spiteful sister. ‘I remember you told me once that my hair is exactly the same colour as Nana’s was.’ Unlike Zara’s, which had been lightened season by season until it was now at least half a dozen shades paler than Sara’s dark blonde.

Her mother was quite misty-eyed as she helped Sara into the substitute dress, trying not to disturb either her hair or her make-up, and when she stood beside her in front of the mirror and had to resort to biting her lip so that she wouldn’t cry and ruin her own mascara, Sara knew that the battle was won. There was just the matter of teasing out a few ‘accidental’ tendrils of hair to camouflage the twisted line of scarring that pulled her eyebrow up at an angle …

‘Whatever you do, don’t catch this one on the doorhandle,’ her mother warned with a sniff into her lacy handkerchief as she bustled towards the door. ‘I’ll just go and make sure that everyone else is ready. Zara’s hairdresser was just putting the finishing touches once her veil went on when you had your accident. We don’t want to keep dear Danny waiting any longer.’

With those few words, the taste of victory over what she would wear was ashes in Sara’s mouth. What did it matter how much better she looked in her grandmother’s dress, or that her ugly scar was hidden? Dan probably wouldn’t even notice she was there; he wouldn’t have eyes for anyone other than his beautiful bride.

Zara looked like a flawless life-sized porcelain doll, Dan thought as he pushed open the bedroom door and found her lying on their bed.

It was hardly surprising that she’d fallen asleep. He was hours later than usual tonight, but he just hadn’t been able to make himself leave any sooner. The thought that Sara might be stubborn enough to insist on going home, even after such a potentially fatal encounter, had found him hanging around until he’d made certain that she had agreed to spend the night in hospital and was settled into a side ward.

He smiled wryly when he saw how perfectly Zara was posed. It was as if she was expecting her favourite photographer to start clicking away, her hair spread artistically over the pillow and one hand draped elegantly over the edge of the bed. It would almost have been a relief to find her curled up in an untidy ball with creases on her face from the pillow. As it was, sometimes it felt as if he was married to a mannequin, with her face always perfectly made up and never a hair out of place, even on the increasingly rare occasions that they made love.

The heavy sigh took him by surprise and the weight of regret that accompanied it made him feel very guilty.

He’d realised almost as soon as he’d placed the ring on Zara’s finger that he’d made a dreadful mistake, but by then there had been no way out.

Even if he had divorced his new wife, he’d known that there was no way that Sara would have stepped straight into her sister’s shoes … what woman would, especially after the way he’d treated her?

He might only have met Sara a few months earlier, but they’d already admitted to a mutual attraction and had been exploring the possibility of a long-term relationship. For the first time in his life, he’d even found himself wondering about the possibility of marriage in the not-too-distant future.

Then he’d met Zara and discovered the meaning of the words ‘whirlwind courtship', his feet hardly seeming to touch the ground before he’d found himself engaged and caught up in the planning of an uncomfortably high-profile wedding.

Up to that point, their relationship had been conducted largely in secret—at Zara’s insistence that she didn’t want to chance the media intruding—so he hadn’t really noticed that she was such a favourite with her parents. It had only been after their marriage that he’d noticed just how little her family regarded Sara, in spite of the fact that she was now a qualified and highly proficient doctor in a busy A and E department. All their pride was definitely focused on their glamorous, vivacious, younger daughter.

In a strange way, he could even understand it, to a certain extent. He’d certainly been blinded by Zara’s lively attractions when she’d set out to captivate him. What man wouldn’t have been flattered to have such a stunning woman hanging on his every word in such an ego-stroking way?

How could he not have realised that she was all outward show with very little substance beneath it? Why had it taken him so long to recognise that Sara was worth a dozen of her self-centred twin?

Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He was married, and even though he knew it had been one of the worst decisions of his life, he was not a man who broke a promise, so he certainly wouldn’t go back on a solemn vow. He would just have to be content with the fact that Sara had agreed to carry a child for the two of them … two children, in fact, he recalled with a sudden surge of the same incredulous delight that had swamped him when he’d learned of it. Although how Zara would respond when he told her that she would shortly be learning to cope with being a mother to not one but two newborn babies …

‘Zara?’ he called softly, stifling a sigh of resignation. His wife was not going to be in a happy mood when she saw how late it was, even though it had been her sister’s welfare and that of the babies she carried that had caused the delay. She was almost fanatical about preserving her looks with adequate sleep and certainly didn’t like eating at this hour. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but it was unavoidable. Your sister had a rather …’ He broke off with a puzzled frown.

She hadn’t so much as stirred, even when he’d lowered himself wearily to the edge of the bed. Something rustled as it slid to the floor between the side of the bed and the cabinet—a letter she’d been reading before she’d fallen asleep? Perhaps it was a glamorous new contract she’d wanted to gloat over while she’d waited for him to come home?

He reached out and touched her hand … her curiously lifeless hand.

Suddenly, he switched into doctor mode as all the hairs went up on the back of his neck in a warning that something was seriously wrong.

‘Zara!’ he called sharply as he leant forward to take a closer look at the silent figure. He’d been standing in the doorway wool-gathering for several minutes and only now was he noticing that she was so completely still that she didn’t even seem to be breathing.

‘Zara, wake up!’ he ordered harshly, his fingers automatically searching her wrist to find a pulse. ‘Zara!’ He heard the panic bouncing back at him from the expensively decorated bedroom walls when there was no sign of any rhythm under his fingertips. Was that because his ordinarily rocksteady hands hadn’t stopped shaking from the moment he’d heard that Sara had been knocked down? Frantically, he probed her slender neck and breathed a sigh of relief when he felt the reassuring throb of the artery under his fingertips.

It was slower than it should be … much slower … and her skin felt cold and clammy. It was no wonder that he hadn’t been able to see her breathing because her respiration was so shallow as to be almost imperceptible.

But at least she was breathing and her heart was beating, so that gave him precious time to try to make a diagnosis so that he could help her survive whatever had happened to her.

But first …

‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’ said a crisp voice in his ear as he continued to make his examination, trapping the phone in position with one shoulder.

‘Ambulance,’ he said tersely. ‘My wife has had some sort of collapse. Her pulse and respiration are both depressed and her pupils are fixed and dilated.’ He managed to give the operator his address even as he reeled with horror at the possibility that Zara was imminently going into cardiac arrest.

Without some secure means of administering oxygen and the supplies to set up an IV line he had no way of improving her tidal volume or boosting her systolic pressure above 80. At the moment it must hovering around 70 because her femoral pulse was barely perceptible. If it dropped below 60 the carotid pulse would disappear, too, and she would be just minutes away from irreversible brain damage and death …

‘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.