‘Are you all right? You look tired.’
She was exhausted. Thanks to the bedroom skills of his brother.
‘I’m fine.’
Josh cast her a speculative glance. ‘You’re far from fine. What’s happened?’
Louisa felt the colour seep into her cheeks and Josh gave a sigh.
‘OK, I know that look. You’d better tell me everything.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’ She gave a tiny shrug. ‘Your brother is so in love with his wife that he can’t see another woman and perhaps he never will.’
‘Is that what he told you?’ Josh stared at her in shock and then gave a little shake of his head. ‘No, Louisa, that isn’t—’
The shriek of a siren interrupted them and Louisa glanced towards the doorway, pleased for the excuse to change the subject. She didn’t really want to talk about it. The discovery that she’d finally fallen in love with a man who couldn’t love her back left her hollow inside. She’d waited so long to meet a man she knew she could be happy with, could make a family with. ‘We can’t talk about this now. That’s our patient. I’ll get the side room ready.’ She gathered together all the things she anticipated that they’d need just as the ambulance arrived.
She recognised the paramedic from the accident the night before. ‘Hi.’
His face brightened as he recognised her. ‘Well, if it isn’t our little heroine. Those kids are doing really well, thanks to you and Mac.’ He pushed the stretcher alongside the trolley. ‘This is Tom Parker. He was at his firm’s Christmas party when he started getting central chest pains radiating down the arm.’
‘It’s just indigestion,’ the man groaned, screwing up his face as the pain hit again. ‘Too many sausage rolls. And I should never have dan
ced with the girl from Accounts.’
‘Sounds like a good party,’ Josh drawled. ‘We just need to transfer you onto our trolley and then we can take a look at you.’
Louisa and the paramedics helped the man across onto the A and E trolley. ‘Have you ever had these pains before?’
Her eyes scanned the patient, noticing that he was very pale and sweaty. Alarm bells rang in her head. This had nothing to do with sausage rolls.
She glanced at Josh. ‘Right with you,’ he said softly, as he reached for a cannula. ‘We’ve called the coronary care team. They’re on their way. Give him a puff of GTN spray, Louisa,’ he ordered as he slid the cannula into the vein. Then his blue eyes lifted to hers. ‘And when we’re done here, you and I need to have a talk.’
What was there to talk about?
She was in love with his brother and talking about it wasn’t going to change the facts. That he didn’t love her.
Louisa checked the patient’s observations while Josh carried out his examination and checked the ECG trace.
‘He has ST elevation and pathological Q waves,’ he muttered, his eyes fixed on the trace. He turned to the SHO who was working with him. ‘Let’s get a line in, take bloods for urgent U and E, glucose, CK, FBC and baseline cholesterol. And let’s give him something for the pain. Louisa?’
Louisa handed him a syringe of morphine and cyclizine for sickness. ‘Is there anyone you’d like me to phone, Tom?’ She checked his blood-pressure reading again. ‘Is your family expecting you home?’
He nodded, his face contorted with the pain. ‘My wife. But not until later. I was expecting to stay at the party until mid-afternoon. I left the car at home. She was going to pick me up.’
‘Sensible man,’ Louisa said, thinking of the two teenagers. ‘I’ll call her,’ she promised. ‘Do you have a number?’
At that moment the coronary care team arrived and Louisa wrote down the number that Tom gave her and made the call, choosing her words carefully so that she didn’t worry his wife.
Tom was transferred quickly to Coronary Care and Louisa found herself helping out in the treatment room, dressing the arm of a child who had cut herself.
‘Her brother threw a snowball and it must have had a stone in it,’ the mother told her helplessly, looking completely fraught. ‘Can you imagine? For the first time in years it snows and we all think we’re going to have a fairy-tale Christmas and here we are in A and E! We were supposed to be sitting by the fire, watching the repeats on the television and arguing.’
Louisa laughed. ‘Isn’t that life, though? It never quite works out the way you expect.’
Hers certainly didn’t.
She finished bandaging the child’s arm and wished her concentration was better. All she could think about was Mac.