St. Piran's: Rescuing Pregnant Cinderella by Carol Marinelli

Author:Carol Marinelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

‘THAT’S it, Izzy...’ She could hear a male voice she didn’t recognise. ‘Stay on your back.’

She was under blankets and wanted to roll onto her side, except she couldn’t seem to move.

‘You’re doing fine,’ came the unfamiliar voice. ‘Stay nice and still.’

‘Izzy, it’s all okay.’

There was a voice she knew. Strong and deep and accented, and she knew it was Diego, she just didn’t know why, and then she opened her eyes and saw his and she remembered.

‘You’ve got a daughter.’ His face was inches away. ‘She’s okay, she’s being looked after.’

And then it was fog, followed by pain, followed by drugs, so many drugs she struggled to focus when Diego came back in the afternoon with pictures of her baby.

‘She looks like you,’ Diego said, but all Izzy could see were tubes.

‘Are you working today?’

Diego shook his head. ‘No. I just came in to see you.’ And he sat down in the chair by her bed and Izzy went to sleep. He flicked through the photos and tried very hard to only see tubes, because this felt uncomfortably familiar, this felt a little like it had with Fernando and he just couldn’t go there again.

He certainly wasn’t ready to go there again.

There was a very good reason that a normal pregnancy lasted forty weeks, Diego reflected, putting the photos on her locker and heading for home—and it wasn’t just for the baby. The parents needed every week of that time to prepare themselves emotionally for the change to their lives.

He wasn’t even a parent.

* * *

It was Tuesday night and a vicious UTI later before anything resembling normal thought process occurred and a midwife helped her into a chair and along with her mother wheeled her down to the NICU, where, of course, any new mum would want to be if her baby was.

‘We take mums down at night all the time,’ the midwife explained, when Izzy said the next day would be fine. ‘It’s no problem.’

Except, privately, frankly, Izzy would have preferred to sleep.

Izzy knew she was a likely candidate for postnatal depression.

As a doctor she was well versed in the subject and the midwives had also gently warned her and given her leaflets to read. Gus too had talked to her—about her difficult labour, the fact she had been separated from her daughter and her difficult past. He’d told her he was there if she needed to talk and he had been open and upfront and told her not to hesitate to reach out sooner rather than later, as had Jess.

She sat in a wheelchair at the entrance to NICU, at the very spot where she had first flirted with Diego, where the first thawing of her heart had taken place, and it seemed a lifetime ago, not a few short weeks.

And, just as she had felt that day, Izzy was tempted to ask the midwife to turn the chair around, more nervous at meeting her baby than she could ever let on. Diego

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