Like Doctor, Like Son Page 14

  ‘Faith?’ He tightened his arm around her shoulders in silent support. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s DJ. He’s had an accident,’ she said distractedly, and Quinn was suddenly furious that the young man had intruded on their time together. ‘They’ve had to rush him to hospital,’ she added, and he felt like slime for being angry at the interruption. He might be as jealous as any teenager of the good-looking youngster but he didn’t wish him any harm.

  He heard her pressing buttons on the handset and marvelled that she could see what she was doing.

  ‘I’ve got to get to the hospital,’ she said, sounding quite frantic, then, when her call was answered, hurried into choppy speech. ‘Nadia? It’s Faith. DJ’s hurt. I’m sorry to call you so late but I need to be there—’

  ‘I’ll take you,’ Quinn interrupted, unable to bear the thought of leaving her to anyone else’s care when she was so obviously distraught. He might not be able to see them in the limited light, but he could hear the tears in her voice. The fact that his heart was breaking all over again at this proof of her love for the young man was something he would deal with later. He also needed to know why she would even think about sleeping with him if she loved DJ so much.

  As he scrambled to find his clothes Quinn wished they’d taken the time earlier to hunt down some candles. Then he remembered how unexpectedly erotic it had been to discover each other in the pitch dark, their eyes all but unnecessary as hands and mouths had charted every pleasure point in the journey to ecstasy.

  With a wardrobe of clothes to choose from, Faith didn’t seem to be having the same problem and in a matter of minutes she was ready to go.

  ‘Hurry,’ she muttered as she led the way down the stairs at breakneck pace, almost dragging him in her wake. ‘I’ve got to get there. I’ve got to be there with him.’

  His car obligingly chirruped in response to the signal from the key fob and flashed the indicators to show him in which direction to go, and in moments he’d settled her in the passenger seat and they were on their way.

  Quinn brooded in silence all the way to Weston, remembering that Faith had been so upset and distracted that she hadn’t even been able to fasten her safety belt without his help.

  She was no better when they arrived at the accident and emergency department, clinging on to his arm with trembling fingers as he led the way.

  ‘Faith! Over here,’ a familiar voice called, and there was Nadia, beckoning them over. ‘He’s through here,’ she continued when they joined her at the other end of the department. ‘Go straight through…they’re waiting for you.’

  To Quinn’s surprise, Faith continued clinging to him so that he ended up going into the trauma room, too.

  Only his years of training stopped him from exclaiming aloud when he caught sight of the bloody mess in the room. It looked like the aftermath of a pitched battle. What on earth had DJ done to himself?

  Nadia was less guarded.

  ‘Oh, my God! What happened?’ she exclaimed, and he felt the shock hit Faith like a blow, almost sending her off her feet. It was a good job he’d been supporting her or he suspected she’d have ended up on the floor.

  ‘Mrs Adamson?’ a very young-looking gloved and green-gowned figure asked, barely waiting for her assent before he continued. ‘I’m Nick Hanbury, the A and E registrar. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but—’

  ‘Nothing,’ she interrupted frantically. ‘All I know is that DJ was hurt in an accident and brought here.’

  ‘Oh, well…’ Quinn could almost hear his brain changing gears. ‘Apparently, he was changing a tyre on his car when something collapsed. His thigh was gashed on some rusty metal, damaging his femoral artery.’

  Even this far across the room Quinn could see the extent of the injury. It actually looked far more serious than the registrar was telling her, the clamps sprouting from the injury making it look suspiciously as if DJ had completely severed his femoral artery. No wonder there was so much blood everywhere.

  The registrar was trying to pretend he was calm when Quinn was quite certain he was on the verge of panic. If it was the first time he’d been faced with a patient in imminent danger of either bleeding out or having to have a leg amputated because the tissues had died through lack of blood, he could understand the feeling. He could even remember going through something similar himself during his time in A and E, but his patient had presented with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

  ‘Mrs Adamson,’ he continued hurriedly, a clock inside his head clearly marking the countdown to disaster. ‘We need to take DJ up to Theatre urgently, but there’s a problem. His injuries mean that he’s losing a lot of blood. We need to give him a whole blood transfusion, but because he’s Rhesus negative we’re having difficulty matching his blood group. Are you a match, or is DJ’s father?’

  For a moment, Quinn was startled at the man’s assumption that Faith was DJ’s mother. Couldn’t he see that she was far too young? Anyway, if DJ had been alert enough to tell them to call her, surely he would have given them details to contact his next of kin for the admission forms?

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,’ he began. ‘She’s not DJ’s—’

  ‘His father’s a match,’ Faith announced, shocking him into silence. She bit her lip as though wishing she could take the words back, then turned to Quinn with a look of utter misery on her face.

  The room was full of frantic activity as the staff fought to stabilise DJ’s condition and prepared to transfer their patient up to Theatre, but for several surreal seconds it seemed as if he and Faith were the only two there.

  ‘I didn’t want you to find out this way,’ she whispered, her lips almost bloodless. ‘But DJ’s…he inherited your blood group. He’s AB Rhesus negative, the same as you.’

  To say Quinn was shocked would be the understatement of the century.

  There were so many questions whirling around inside his head that he felt quite numb, but that didn’t stop him volunteering an immediate blood donation to help keep DJ alive while they waited for further supplies to arrive.

  DJ.

  David James. He’d actually had to ask someone what his son was called.

  The pain around his heart was excruciating when he realised that the young man had been given a version of his own name, Quinn David Jamison, when he hadn’t even known he’d had a son.

  Impatiently, he watched as the young nurse expertly taped the needle in position and his blood began to fill the waiting bag.

  ‘Can you find out how DJ is doing?’ he demanded, feeling isolated in the curtained cubicle and desperate to find out whether the teenager was holding his own. ‘Is he in Theatre yet?’

  Caught up in the drama of the situation, she promised to find out what she could and hurried away.

  He felt totally impotent as he tried to stare holes through the curtains, unable to do anything other than lie there and wait for the life-sustaining fluid to drain out of his vein.

  Was DJ already under anaesthetic? The last view he’d had of the teenager as he’d left the room had been his pale face half-hidden under an oxygen mask while he’d reached for Faith’s hand.

  There had been so much noise in the room that he hadn’t been able to hear what they’d been talking about. Was Faith telling him that Quinn was his father or had DJ known all along? Would he ever have the chance to ask him?

  Agony clenched around his heart. He couldn’t bear it if anything irreparable should happen before he’d had a chance to speak to him…to start getting to know him.

  Suddenly, the enormity of what Faith had deprived him of hit him with the force of an express train.

  At least he now had the answer to the question that had plagued him for so long. Seventeen years ago, when she’d disappeared out of his life without a word, it must have been because she’d known that she’d been carrying his baby.

  But why had she done it?

  Had it been because, when she’d really thought about it, she hadn’t
trusted him to turn out any better than his own father? Knowing the childhood he’d endured, had she been afraid that he’d become abusive, too?

  Hell, it didn’t really matter what reasons she might conjure up, there were no excuses for taking his son away without letting him know he even existed.

  He was close to tears when he realised that he’d missed a whole lifetime of firsts in his son’s life…DJ’s first smile, first tooth, first word, first step, first day at school. So many things were gone for ever and he hadn’t even guessed they’d been happening.

  ‘He’s in Theatre,’ the young nurse told him as she prepared to remove the unit of blood. ‘They’ve given him the last of the O negative to try to stabilise him and now he’s on plasma extender. They’re waiting for this before they start operating.’ She clamped off the clear tubing and laid the full bag to one side.

  ‘Take a second unit,’ he demanded, knowing with a sudden burst of emotion that he would be willing to give every drop of blood in his body if it might be needed to save DJ’s life.

  ‘I can’t do that!’ she exclaimed, open-mouthed at his unexpected demand.

  ‘Then get someone here who can,’ he ordered harshly. He guessed from her expression that she was feeling threatened by his attitude and drew a deep breath while he fought to find appropriate words. ‘Look, Kelly—’ her name badge had a yellow smiley face in one corner but he’d never felt less like smiling ‘—that’s my son on that operating table up there, and I won’t let him die for want of a second unit of blood if the transport bringing it from another hospital gets stuck in traffic.’

  ‘I’ll have to get authority,’ she said as she grabbed the curtain. ‘I promise I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she added, throwing him a slightly shaky smile before she disappeared.

  ‘Don’t forget to take the first one with you,’ he called after her, and threw her a conciliatory grin when she stepped back into view to grab it and rushed out of sight again.

  Two full units later he was propping the wall up in the lift and nursing his second bottle of water as he began the process of replenishing his body fluids. He’d taken analgesics to combat the leaden headache that had come with the induced blood loss and hoped DJ wasn’t suffering the same symptoms.

  The doors slid open and he stepped out, conscious that it wasn’t only the donor session that had his heart pumping so hard and his stomach feeling so queasy—it was a large dose of terror, too.

  Had there been any developments since he’d set off from the A and E department? The last thing he’d heard had been that the combination of his blood and the efforts of the vascular surgeon had stabilised DJ’s condition, but he’d been part of the medical fraternity too long not to know that it was a situation that could change in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked a young nurse who could have been Kelly’s clone.

  ‘Could you direct me to the relatives’ room? My son’s in surgery.’

  She smiled and pointed and she would never know that being able to say those simple words—‘my son’—was both heart-warming and utterly devastating.

  As he paused in the doorway, Faith’s and Nadia’s faces turned towards him with almost identical expressions of apprehension.

  ‘Quinn!’ Nadia exclaimed eagerly.

  ‘Is there any news?’ Faith demanded, clearly distraught. ‘It feels as if we’ve been waiting for hours.’

  ‘I was going to ask you that,’ he said wryly, unsurprised that she was wearing her tinted glasses again. She seemed to have spent so much of her time disguising tear-swollen eyes since she’d been back at the Barton. First she’d been mourning her mother, then Fliss and now she was terrified that she was going to lose DJ. She looked so pale and strained that, in spite of her duplicity, all he could think about was taking her in his arms and comforting her.

  ‘Do you want me to go and see if I can get someone to find out?’ he offered, realising that he was going to need a bit of space to get his head together.

  Part of him still wanted to rail at her for hiding the existence of his son from him and he still needed to know—to hear from her own lips—the reason why she’d made such a hurtful decision.

  This was neither the time nor the place for that discussion.

  ‘Go and throw your medical qualifications around and see if that does some good,’ Nadia suggested, clearly frustrated by the lack of information. As Faith’s assistant, he realised that Nadia would be accustomed to taking charge of the arrangements for most aspects of Faith’s professional life. This situation clearly wasn’t to her liking.

  He glanced across at Faith, hoping that he would be able to read something more than fear from her expression when their eyes met—apology, contrition, remorse?—but she looked at him completely blankly, almost as if she had switched off to anything but her inner thoughts.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he promised, and set off in search of someone to grill for information.

  Much to his surprise, he ended up being permitted to stand outside the Theatre for a few minutes with his nose pressed to the viewing window set in the door, almost like a child outside a toyshop.

  His heart nearly stopped when he caught sight of the gaping wound in DJ’s thigh. Even as he watched, he could see how hard the vascular surgeon was having to concentrate on the complicated repair, using the special microscopic lenses in his cumbersome headgear to position the dozens of tiny stitches.

  Had he been able to repair the damage to the artery by rejoining the severed ends or had an arterial graft been necessary? If either method failed, the circulation in DJ’s leg would be so seriously compromised that he could lose the leg to gangrene or even bleed to death.

  For the first time in a long time he found himself sending up a fervent prayer that a surgeon’s skill was equal to the task he was performing. Never had it mattered so much to him, personally, that an operation was a success.

  He was just trying to force himself to leave his vigil, knowing that Faith would be waiting for news, when he saw the surgeon straighten up from the table, apparently to crack a joke with the rest of the staff.

  Whether someone alerted the sugeon to the fact that Quinn was outside the door, he didn’t know. All he could focus on was the symbolic raised thumb that told him the man was happy with the way the operation was going.

  Now he could go back to the relatives’ room with a lighter heart and pass on the news to the two women.

  ‘How much longer can it take?’ Faith demanded, knowing she must sound like a cranky child to Nadia but unable to care. Her son had been badly injured—in danger of losing his leg or even his life—and she could do nothing but sit here and wait.

  If she’d become a doctor, she could have been the one to throw a bit of medical weight around to get the information. As it was, it seemed like for ever since Quinn had left to see what he could find out.

  Perhaps he’d decided not to return to them. Was he angry enough with her to treat her like that? She could only imagine what he was thinking after such a shocking revelation. She needed to speak to Quinn, to explain that keeping DJ’s existence a secret hadn’t been planned, but at the moment the only thing on her mind was her son.

  ‘I saw the surgeon,’ Quinn announced suddenly, as if he’d materialised out of thin air.

  ‘Has he finished?’ Faith demanded, leaping to her feet with her heart soaring like a hot-air balloon. ‘Is everything all right? Can I go and see DJ now?’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ Quinn warned. ‘I was allowed to go into the restricted area to have a look into the Theatre through a window. The surgeon’s still operating on DJ at the moment, but he seems happy with the way things are going so far.’

  Faith collapsed onto the uncomfortable seat again, all the strength draining out of her legs when she realised that it wasn’t over yet.

  ‘I thought it was bad when he was rushed into hospital with suspected meningitis, but this is worse,’ she muttered. ‘At least then I could be with him
to hold his hand, whereas now…’

  ‘Meningitis?’ Quinn pounced on the word even though she thought she’d spoken to herself. ‘When was that? Recently?’

  ‘It was a false alarm when he was five,’ she explained, remembering the nightmare of that time all too easily. ‘It seemed to take for ever before the tests came back negative. The only thing that kept me sane was being with him while I waited.’

  ‘At least you had that option,’ Quinn growled, and all the hairs went up on the back of Faith’s neck. Suddenly she could imagine what it would feel like to be trapped in a room with an injured animal that was ready to lash out at the first person to come close enough, and she was the obvious target.

  ‘Tell me, Faith,’ he continued through gritted teeth. ‘Would you have kept him a secret for ever if he hadn’t needed my blood?’

  She squeezed her eyes tight shut and shook her head, beset by so many regrets. ‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ she admitted. ‘Or when.’

  ‘That’s not good enough!’ he snapped. ‘You’ve kept my son’s existence a secret for all these years. The very least I deserve is an honest explanation.’

  ‘I know you do, but it was all so complicated back then…’ Almost as complicated as it was now, even though the circumstances had changed beyond recognition. Why did she always have to be surrounded by so many secrets?

  ‘What was so complicated about it?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘You discovered that you were pregnant and because you didn’t trust me to be a good father, you ran away and hid my child from me.’

  ‘No!’ she exclaimed, so horrified that he should have even imagined such a thing that tears spurted from her eyes. ‘That’s not true! I never thought that, not for a single minute!’

  ‘Then why, Faith?’ he insisted, and the pain in his voice sounded like shards of glass. ‘I need to understand why you never told me about my child…my son.’