Fairytale on the Children's Ward by Meredith Webber

Author:Meredith Webber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Harlequin Medical Romances
ISBN: 9781460377529
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

NO OPERATIONS, just patients to see—regular check-ups, query patients referred from GPs, patients in for various tests. Oliver found the change refreshing, enjoying again the interaction between the children and their parents.

His final patient of the day was, by chance—there it was again—a nine-year-old girl, a little charmer who’d been born with a partial AVSD which had been repaired when she was twelve months old.

‘I really don’t need to be still seeing a specialist,’ she told him with the utmost confidence, ‘but it makes Mum feel better so I do it.’

She talked on, seeming to know a great deal about her operation, explaining, when he mentioned this, ‘Oh, I’m in a chat room with some other kids who’ve had heart surgery. We talk about all kinds of things, compare scars and stories of how nearly we were to dying, although I think most of us exaggerate that part.’

Did all nine-year-olds use the word exaggerate with such confidence? Oliver wondered, upgrading his image of his daughter from a just-past-starting-school stage to an almost teen.

I’ll never cope. The panic-stricken thought rendered him momentarily speechless, but fortunately his new young friend was now telling him about a boy on the chat list that she thought fancied her, though meeting him might be difficult as he lived in England.

‘Dr Rankin worked in England—he might know him.’ Was the nine-year-old’s mother trying to stem the flow of conversation?

And how likely was that in a country of more than forty million people? He was about to point out the impossibility when another panic struck him. This nine-year-old girl—a child—had a boy who fancied her.

Not his daughter! he decided savagely, but now the child was telling him the name of her boy friend—two separate words, Oliver told himself, not one—and the name was ringing a bell.

‘Is he from Leeds?’ he asked, getting back into the conversation with some difficulty.

‘Yes, he is,’ the delighted child replied. ‘Do you know him?’

Oliver shook his head. This was taking coincidence too far. He refused to believe in Fates that pushed human lives around on some kind of cosmic chessboard, but—

‘I actually operated on him a few years ago,’ he admitted. ‘Like you, he had an AVSD when he was an infant, but he had a full separation, not a partial like yours, and he needed another op a year or so ago to stop his mitral valve leaking.’

‘What’s he like?’ the excited girl demanded. ‘Is he as good-looking as his picture? Does he really have a tattoo?’

Oliver closed his eyes. Nine-year-old girls could not possibly be turned on by boys with tattoos. He refused to believe it.

‘I don’t remember a tattoo,’ he managed to reply, then he turned the conversation off the boy in Leeds by reminding his patient he had to examine her, and keeping the talk to purely professional matters.

‘I’ll tell him you’re my new doctor. He’ll be so excited,’ the girl told him as she left, while her mother, waiting until her daughter was out of earshot, smiled at Oliver in a harried kind of way.

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