Page 36 of Prognosis Baby Daddy

A knock on the door was a sharp intrusion into their passion and they broke off, shocked both at the interruption and at their recklessness. It was if someone had walked in and thrown a bucket of cold water all over them.

‘Benedetto? Carmella is asking for you,’ someone called in Italian.

Ben closed his eyes and rested his head against Katya’s shoulder, sucking in air, his hand still resting on her breast, the nipple still temptingly hard. He noted with some satisfaction the harsh rise and fall of her chest and was pleased to see she was similarly affected.

‘Momento,’he called out, and was grateful to hear the retreat of footsteps.

Katya lay very still, his hand hot against her aching flesh, struggling to come out the other side of the sexual fog and regain control of her breathing. God, what had she been thinking?

This was not going to make their cohabiting any easier.

‘I’d better go,’ Ben said pushing away from her. He grasped the lapels of her gown and pulled them gently together, covering the temptation of her aroused breasts. He stood up reluctantly, already dismayed to see her heady sexual stare from moments ago retreating. He wanted to throw caution to the wind, forget about Carmella and stay, kiss Katya until it came back again.

Katya nodded, too aroused and shocked at her behaviour to speak. She watched him walk out the door and then rolled on her side, pulling her knees up and her gown around her to try and ease the hot, deep ache between her legs. How on earth was she going to sleep next to him now?

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Ben rang an hour laterto tell her he was going to be caught up for a few hours with Carmella. They were working on trying to get a patient to Italy and had run into bureaucratic red tape. He was hitting the phones, calling in favours. He was very brisk and businesslike, for which she and her still raging hormones were grateful.

Any other day Katya would have gone and helped or at least watched, but she knew it was best to be apart from him at the moment. So she ate tea with some of the live-in staff and retired back to their quarters early, pleading a headache. She feigned interest in a book but by ten, and much to her surprise, she was falling asleep. Ben still hadn’t returned and she was relieved she’d be asleep when he did.

She was up early the next day and didn’t see him until the theatre list was due to start.

‘Avoiding me, Katya?’ he asked in a low voice as they scrubbed up together.

‘Yesterday was a mistake,’ she said, paying an inordinate amount of attention to scrubbing her fingernails. ‘Let’s just forget it, OK?’ She placed her soapy hands beneath the tap, the automatic spray clicking on and rinsing the suds away.

Forget it? How the hell was he supposed to forget it? He’d hardly slept a wink, thinking about it. The first thing he’d wanted to do when he’d arrived back at the room had been to pick up where they’d left off. Glide his hand around her stomach, pull her into him, see if he could feel the baby moving again and then take it from there.

Instead, he’d turned his back to her, clamped his hands between his thighs and balanced precariously on the edge of the bed, not trusting himself to get any closer. There was no way he was going to last the next few months.

No way.

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Katya was consciousof Ben’s weighty stare as he joined her at the table and was grateful for the routine as the first operation got under way. They had months to get through yet and Ben needed to know that one slip-up didn’t mean that she was losing focus.

The first case was four-year-old Ten-ti. The child was, without a doubt, one of the cutest little girls Katya had ever seen. She had gorgeous eyes, a gappy grin and soft black hair that fell in crazy layers around her face.

She was a happy little thing, chatting away merrily to everyone in her native tongue and had a giggle that was wickedly infectious. She had taken a particular liking to blonde-haired Katya and in the two days she’d been at the clinic Ten-ti had drawn at least a dozen pictures of her favourite nurse.

Katya had taken Ten-ti down to the garden with her that morning and the little girl had crawled into Katya’s lap and laid her head against Katya’s chest and waved and smiled at everyone who had come past as if to say, look at me, look how important I am.

The foundation had found Ten-ti at an orphanage. She had been abandoned at the age of one by her family when her condition had shown no signs of improving. It was hard to believe that the little girl was so happy. When Katya thought about how abandoned Ten-ti must have felt, it broke her heart.

At least she wasn’t going to give her baby a chance to get attached.

Katya looked down at the defect now as Ben made his first incision. The haemangioma was impressive. The vascular benign tumour protruded from Ten-ti’s skull over her temple. It was quite large, about the size of a grapefruit, and its typical bright red colour was marred in the centre by a large, ugly, grey-black patch where it was badly ulcerated.

It looked like something out of a science fiction magazine. Like a maniacal cartoonist had dreamt it up — a beautiful child with a mushroom-like growth protruding from her head. A soft spongy mushroom.

The nuns that ran the orphanage had been told that it would gradually get smaller and disappear, as the majority of hemangiomas did, but Ten-ti’s had shown no such propensity. At the age of four there were no signs of the tumour involuting and the ulceration, with its associated bleeding and pain, had made her a perfect candidate for surgery.

The actual excision of the haemangioma was relatively easy and Katya watched as Ben expertly sliced and slowly divided the tumour from the scalp. She handed him a metal kidney dish as he performed his last slice and he dropped the spongy mass into the metal receptacle.

Katya stared at it. On Ten-ti’s head it had looked huge. A nasty, poisonous-looking, disfiguring mass that had isolated her and flawed her features. And now, after four years of marring her life, causing her to be abandoned, it lay there, looking incongruous.

Impotent.

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