Page 44 of Prognosis Baby Daddy

CHAPTER EIGHT

BEN and Katya spentthe weekend in bed. In fact, they spent a lot of their weekends in bed over the following months. Either in their villa or on The Mermaid. By some kind of unspoken agreement, they both knew denying themselves was stupid. They didn’t question it, they didn’t even speak about it, they just let it happen.

Katya was surprised at how easy it was. How easy Ben made it. Loving him and knowing that he wouldn’t love her back hurt. But walking away now wouldn’t help her love him any less. She still had a goal — the baby. And she had to finish what she had set out to do.

So, was there something wrong with having a few brief months where the eight-year-old Katya’s romantic fairytale played out? Was it wrong to make the most of her time with Ben and just enjoy it? Life without him, without her son would go on. It would be hard, her heart would be well and truly broken, but she knew she was strong enough to do it.

Was it wrong to want this for a little while?

Still, living in the lap of luxury was hard to get used to. Years of being poor and living frugally were harder than she’d imagined to overcome. She was enjoying the perks but the wealthy mindset that was inherent in Ben was still a foreign concept to her. She kept thinking she’d do or say something to embarrass him, show her lack of breeding. And despite his inclusion of her in every part of his life, she felt like an interloper, like Cinderella waiting for the clock to strike twelve.

Ben was great. He took her out and showed her all around the Amalfi coast. To Priano, Minori and Sorrento. He took her over to Capri on his boat, to the Blue Grotto and the Emerald Grotto. And one memorable afternoon he drove her to see the ruins at Pompeii. They dined with his mother and Katya loved going to Positano for their visits. Of all the places he’d taken her, she loved Positano best.

He took her to fabulous restaurants, way off the beaten track, where the tourists didn’t go. She ate amazing dishes, like Parmigiana Melanzane and mussels caught fresh from the Med cooked in wine, lemon juice and pepper. And bruschetta. Katya developed a real craving for bruschetta.

But it had to be Taddeo’s. Taddeo owned a restaurant not far from Ben’s villa and they often ended up there for Katya’s favourite food. Taddeo had told her the first time he’d served it up to her, ‘When you go home tonight, bella, you will dream of my bruschetta.’

She had laughed but he had been dead right. It was divine with just the right blend of basil and onion and the final touch — a drizzle of olive oil. And she had asked for seconds and had made Taddeo’s day.

The weeks flew by. Christmas and New Year passed. Her belly grew into a decent-sized bump. Ben loved watching her grow with his child — her stomach expand, her breasts flower. He rejoiced in every kick, every somersault. Every day that passed he fell further in love with his son. And Katya fell further in love with him.

Work was great as well. They worked well together, probably better now sexual frustration wasn’t making them edgy and tense. And Katya was surprised every day by how much she loved the work. It was so different to the madness of the frantic get-them-in, get-them-out world of MedSurg. At the Lucia Clinic there was time to follow a patient through, to get involved.

And that surprised her, too. The MedSurg environment had suited her emotional state for many years. The insanity of war and senseless violence became blunted in the frantic atmosphere, but as her pregnancy advanced and her hormones bloomed and she fell deeper in love with Ben, the emotional involvement the clinic afforded her gave her job satisfaction she’d never dreamed of.

The old Katya would have scoffed at such human sentiment, shied away from it even, but she was softer these days.

Was it love or the baby? She suspected a bit of both. One thing was for sure, she had a lot to thank Ben for. If she’d never fallen pregnant and never come to Italy, she would never have known this other side of herself existed. Never known she could be this...female.

Sure, she’d always looked like a woman, but perhaps now she was thinking and feeling more like one. She was even developing an understanding of her mother. Maybe they’d never be close but Katya was starting to appreciate that sometimes things weren’t so black and white.

She could see her mother’s choices through the eyes of a woman now, instead of those of a child. How love and duty for your child could war with the love you could feel for a man. Did that excuse her mother’s neglect? No.

Did it make it a little more comprehensible? Yes.

She was thirty weeks before she knew it. Her bump was soccer-ball-sized now. And she was tired. A lot. And her feet had started to swell at the end of each day from standing for hours and hours at an operating table. Ben would massage her feet each night and tried to persuade her to finish work early. But Katya refused.

Working with Ben was the one thing that helped keep their relationship in perspective. It gave it a professional aspect that she needed to keep from surrendering her heart completely. It gave her a different view of Ben for eight hours a day. Ben the surgeon. Not Ben the father of her baby. Or Ben her lover.

It was a daily dose of reality and she didn’t want to lose that sitting at home all day waiting for Ben, the man that she loved, to come home from work. That definitely smacked too much of happy families and she was determined to keep working until the day she went into labour.

But in her thirty-first week, the baby pulled rank. Followed closely by Ben. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked her quietly at the end of a particularly long day.

He’d noticed her rocking on her heels quite a lot throughout the long operation and moving from foot to foot. He was repairing a severe burns contracture of the face and neck. The ten-year-old boy had sustained his initial injury through a kerosene explosion several months before and inadequate treatment had led to the current grotesque disfigurement.

The contractures involved the eyelids, face, neck and chest, the resulting downward pull leading to the boy’s inability to shut his eyes or mouth. There was a fixed flexion deformity of the neck so that his chin was sitting against his chest, with the front of his neck not visible at all. Looking at the poor boy it was as if his skin had melted from his face and fused his head to his chest.

So it was a big repair job, involving skin grafting and complicated by difficulty gaining and maintaining anaesthesia. Four hours in, Katya’s back ached, her legs ached, she was starving and exceedingly light-headed.

‘I’m fine,’ she dismissed, knowing that they were on the downhill run and she could sit and eat something very soon.

They were stripping off their gowns fifteen minutes later, Ben chatting away excitedly about the op. He’d done a fantastic job and given a little boy back his face and neck. Katya could hear him vaguely, her rebelling stomach and a surge of nausea distracting her from his words.

Her ears started to ring and then she couldn’t hear him at all. She could see his mouth moving but the words were lost in the noise coming from inside her head. Her vision started to go next. Ben was shrinking before her eyes as a black fuzz slowly encroached on her field of sight. And then everything went black and she fell.

‘Katya? Katya!’ Ben caught her as she slumped against him. He gave her a shake and she flopped like a rag doll. He swore in Italian and swept her up into his arms. He strode down the corridor, past surprised staff, getting angrier with each footstep. He kicked the door to his office open and laid her down on the double sofa.

She murmured and he let out a pent-up breath, his heart hammering madly. ‘Katya?’ he said again.

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