Special Deliveries: Her Gift, His Baby: Secrets of a Career Girl / For the Baby's Sake / A Very Special Delivery. Carol Marinelli

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       CHAPTER THREE

      PENNY PARKED HER car and took a couple of moments to sort out her make-up and hair. She wondered, not for the first time, how she was going to get through this. It was eight a.m. and she had just come from having a blood test and vaginal ultrasound. If the results were as expected, she would be starting her injections this evening.

      She collected her handbag and the little cool bag holding the medication and told herself that lots of women worked while they went through this.

      And she told herself something else, something she had decided last night—at the very first opportunity she would apologise properly to Ethan. Penny had come up with a plan. She wouldn’t tell him everything, just explain to him that she was on some medication and that yesterday she hadn’t felt very well. If he probed, she might hint that it was a feminine issue.

      Her lips twitched into a smile as she pictured Ethan’s reaction—that would soon silence him.

      Walking towards Emergency, Penny saw a dark blue car pull up in the entrance bay, where the ambulances did, and she watched as a security guard walked towards it to warn the occupants that they couldn’t park there.

      Except the woman wasn’t parking her car.

      Instead, she was dropping Ethan Lewis off.

      Penny tried not to look as they shared a brief embrace and then a thoroughly seedy-looking Ethan climbed out. He was unshaven and unkempt, dressed in yesterday’s rumpled scrubs. She tried to turn her attention away from him, but her gaze went straight to the car he had just come from. And it was then that Penny felt it—the red-hot poker that jabbed into her stomach as she glanced at the woman, a red-hot poker that temporarily nudged aside her loudly ticking biological clock. And at six minutes past eight and a few months later than most women at Peninsula Hospital, Penny realised that Ethan Lewis really was an incredibly sexy man and it wasn’t a hot flash that was causing her to blush as they walked into the department together.

      ‘Ethan.’ She tried to keep to the script she had planned. ‘I was wondering if I could speak to you about yesterday. I realise that I—’

      ‘Just leave it.’ He completely dismissed her, so much so that he strode ahead of her and into the male changing rooms.

      Charming!

      Ethan ignored her all day and Penny decided that she wasn’t about to try apologising again.

      She took her lunch break in her office, waiting for the IVF nurse to ring, which she did right on time. Penny took a deep breath as she found out that, as expected, she was to start her injections that evening, which meant she needed to call Jasmine.

      ‘I’m on till six,’ Penny said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get away early.’

      ‘Penny, when do you ever get away early? It’s not a problem, I’ll come and give it to you at work, but Jed won’t be home so I’ll have to bring Simon in.’

      Penny grimaced. She did not want to make a fool of herself in front of her nephew as it would terrify him. Simon, like his mother, was very sensitive. Still, there was no choice.

      There really wasn’t time to worry about her upcoming jab. The department was busy enough to keep her mind off it and she smiled when she saw her next patient, an eight-week-old named Daniel.

      ‘He’s had a bit of a cold,’ Laura, the mother, explained. ‘I took him to my doctor yesterday and he said that he didn’t have a temperature and his chest sounded fine. I’ve been putting drops up his nose to help with feeding,’ Laura continued. ‘But this afternoon I came in from putting out the washing and went to check on him and he was pale, really pale, and he’d been sick. I know he’s fine now …’

      He seemed fine and Penny examined Daniel thoroughly, but apart from a cold and a low-grade temperature there was nothing remarkable to find.

      ‘Has he been coughing?’

      ‘A bit,’ Laura said, as Penny listened carefully to his chest, but apart from a couple of crackles it was clear.

      Still, Penny was concerned and it did sound as if he might have had an apnoeic episode so she decided to ring the paediatricians, who were very busy on the ward.

      ‘They’re going to be a while,’ Penny explained to the mum. ‘I’m going to take some bloods and do some swabs, so hopefully we’ll have some results back by the time they get down here. And I’ll order a chest X-ray.’

      To show that she wasn’t, in fact, too up herself to value Ethan’s opinion, late in the afternoon when she was concerned about the baby and the paediatricians weren’t anywhere around, instead of speaking with Mr Dean, Penny decided that she would ask Ethan.

      He barely looked up from the form he was filling out when Penny asked if she could have a word.

      ‘Sure.’