The Doctor's Lost-and-Found Bride
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He swore under his breath. He’d promised himself that he was over it, that he could cope with working in England again. But seeing that little tableau made it feel as if someone had cracked his heart wide open and stomped on it.
Marina had a child. With someone else.
He’d thought that he’d reached the depths of pain. Now he knew there was more—and it felt as if he were drowning. Someone else had the life he’d planned, the life he’d wanted: Marina, their baby, a fulfilling job.
Why the hell hadn’t he tried harder to make it work?
Because he’d been an idiot.
Because he’d been hurting too much at the time to work out what he’d needed to do—what they had needed to do—as a couple.
And now it was too late. Way, way too late.
There was only one way of getting this out of his system. So, instead of making himself a sandwich when he got home, Max grabbed his gym gear and headed out again. What he needed was a workout that would leave him too damn tired to think. He’d sleep on it, let his subconscious come up with a way of dealing with the fact that Marina Petrelli was back in his life—and she was very firmly off-limits.
Chapter Two
THE roster fairy definitely wasn’t on his side, Max thought the next morning as he walked into Resus and saw his team.
To think he’d been so cool and calm yesterday, asking Marina if it would be a problem for her, working in the same department. He’d been so sure that he could handle the situation.
Though, that had been before he’d seen her with her daughter.
And he was shocked by how much that thought still hurt, like a bruise that went right through his soul.
‘Good morning, Dr Fenton,’ Marina said.
She sounded bright and breezy, as if nothing was wrong—although he’d noticed that her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and she was using his formal title rather than his first name. OK; he’d take the lead from her. Bright, breezy and surface-friendly it was—even though he felt like punching something. He forced himself to unclench the fists in his pockets. ‘Good morning, Dr Petrelli.’
‘We’ve just had a shout,’ she told him. ‘RTC, elderly female passenger, ETA six minutes.’
‘Any details?’
‘Query fracture and internal injuries. They’ve put a line in and she’s on a spinal board.’
Max met the ambulance crew at the door and quickly went through the handover, and the team swung into action to treat Mrs Jennings. Clearly they were used to working together and, whatever the problems between himself and Marina, she obviously took her job seriously, and she hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said that she could push the personal stuff into the background and put her patient first. Max quickly discovered that over the last four years Marina had become a fine doctor, confident and capable, and whenever he was about to give her some instructions he found she was already doing it, having second-guessed him.
As they assessed their patient for hypovolaemic shock—Max wasn’t happy with her blood pressure or the capillary refill—they both noted the pattern of bruising across her abdomen, the lap-belt imprint. On examination, Mrs Jennings’ abdomen was tender. Not good.
‘I’m not happy with this,’ Max said quietly to Marina.
‘I’d need to see the X-ray to confirm it, but my guess is that the impact fractured her pelvis,’ Marina said, equally quietly.
He nodded. ‘There may be some splenic involvement as well, or even damage to other organs. We need a CT scan and an X-ray to see what’s going on.’
‘Agreed. Let’s get her stabilised first,’ Marina said.
Quietly, Max asked Stella, their senior nurse, to bleep the orthopaedic-surgery team and put Theatre on standby, and then he turned back to the patient. ‘Mrs Jennings, I’m going to put a mask over your face,’ he said, ‘to give you some oxygen, which will help you to breathe more easily. And I’m going to give you something to help with the pain, so it makes things a bit more comfortable for you while we take a look at your injuries. If you’re worried about anything, just lift your hand and we’ll take the mask off for a few moments so you can talk to us, OK?’
Mrs Jennings whispered her consent. Max fitted the oxygen mask over her face and gave her analgesia through the IV line that the paramedics had put in, while Marina inserted a second IV line and set up a drip. Marina took blood samples for rapid cross-matching, all the while talking to Mrs Jennings, reassuring her and assessing her. Max was impressed by Marina’s calm, kind manner. Although they were faced with a potentially life-threatening emergency—compound pelvic fractures, especially if there were abdominal injuries as well, were associated with a mortality rate of more than fifty per cent—Marina made sure that Mrs Jennings didn’t realise how worried they all were. She behaved as if this was a completely everyday occurrence, and nothing more worrying than a dislocated elbow, which meant that their patient relaxed rather than panicking—and in turn that made their investigations just that touch easier.
If it wasn’t for the personal stuff between them, working with her would have been a dream.
As it was, it was a living nightmare. Her voice echoed through his head: Let’s go and meet Daddy.
Daddy. Daddy.
It should’ve been him.
He shook himself. This wasn’t the time or the place. And there was nothing he could do to change the situation, so it was pointless ripping himself apart over it. He forced himself to stay in professional mode, and reviewed the X-rays with Marina against the lightbox. ‘Classic open-book fracture,’ he said.
‘That’s fixable. What worries me more is that her BP is still dropping.’
‘Which means she has internal injuries.’ He grimaced. ‘We don’t have time to wait for a CT scan, and even a DPL’s going to be risky.’ A diagnostic peritoneal lavage or DPL was a quick way of checking for internal haemorrhage when a scan would take too long. ‘We need to get her up to Theatre now. Fast-bleep the orthopods, please, Stella,’ he said to the nurse. ‘I’m sending Mrs Jennings up.’
He turned to Mrs Jennings. ‘The X-rays show that the accident broke your pelvis,’ Max explained gently, holding her hand and looking into her eyes. ‘I’m going to send you up to Theatre so the surgeons can fix it for you. We want to keep you as still as possible on the way, so we’re going to put sandbags either side of you to make sure you don’t move on the trolley.’