The Consultant's Accidental Bride. Carol Marinelli

the crowd looked on.

      ‘I’m fine.’ Screwing her eyes closed, Leah struggled to catch her breath. ‘I’m fine,’ she said again. ‘I’m just embarrassed.’

      ‘Nobody’s looking,’ Cole said assuredly, his face concerned as he eyed her carefully. ‘They’re all too busy waving. That was quite a knock…’

      ‘It’s nothing,’ Leah gasped, wrapping her arms around her chest then shaking her head as tiny little silver spots danced in front of her eyes. Her chest hurt, it really hurt, and she waited for the pain to go. But it wasn’t like a stubbed toe, the agony followed by a dizzy relief. If anything, the pain was getting worse, her breath coming out in short painful bursts.

      ‘I can’t breathe,’ she whispered, only this time embarrassment had nothing to do with the lowering of her voice. A whisper was all she could manage.

      ‘Let me have a look at you.’

      ‘Not here,’ she begged, mortified at such an undignified end to such a wonderful evening. Cole swooped her up into his arms in one quick motion and headed up the stairs and across the foyer, nudging the lift button with his elbow and smiling reassuringly down at her as he did so, even managing a tiny joke as she sagged against him.

      ‘If you wanted to see my room…’ he smiled down at her ‘…you really only had to ask!’

       CHAPTER THREE

      HE WASN’T joking a few minutes later.

      As Cole gently lowered her onto his bed Leah shook her head frantically. Hanging her legs instead over the side, she leant forward, resting her elbows on her knees with her head in her hands in a desperate attempt to fill her lungs with air. The pain in her side was an agony in itself yet it barely registered against the awful feeling of suffocation.

      ‘I can’t breathe,’ Leah gasped, as Cole knelt on the floor beside her. ‘I really can’t…’

      ‘It’s OK, Leah, don’t try and talk.’ His voice was calm, his eyes holding hers for a second as he picked up the phone. ‘Get an ambulance up to room 204. Tell them there’s a doctor present and a female patient with a suspected pneumothorax.’ The poor person on the other end couldn’t have realised the might they were dealing with as they obviously asked a question. ‘Just do it!’ Cole roared, making even Leah jump, but, sensing her tension, he turned back to her. ‘She wanted to send for the hotel’s GP,’ he offered by way of explanation. ‘Just sit tight for a second, Leah, I’ll get my bag.’

      Thank heavens he was tidy.

      Strange, the things you thought when you were struggling to pull air into your lungs, strange how your mind focused on irrelevances rather than face the dire truth. For Leah it was easier to focus on the fact that had her life depended on finding her bag in the next couple of minutes, she might just as well have laid down and died there and then.

      Thankfully her dress was backless so there was nothing to remove, and as Cole listened to her air entry she felt the cool steel of his stethoscope as he pressed it against her back.

      ‘I need to listen to your chest.’

      Leah would have loved to have argued, loved to have told him she was fine. And as irrelevant as it was at this moment, the fact that her bust was jacked up with several metres of surgical tape wasn’t exactly the image she had been hoping to portray. Dying with shame or lack of oxygen, Leah couldn’t decide which, she moved forward. His hands located her zip almost instantly, which was no mean feat considering it was concealed in the seam at the side. Cole was obviously a man who knew his way around a woman’s dress, Leah thought, but it was her last stab at humour, her last attempt at self-preservation as the lights seemed to dim, the stars that were flickering in her eyes flashed brighter for a second then dimmed, the counterpane she was gripping so tightly seemed to slip out of her hands as she lurched forward. She struggled to fight it to stay awake, to beg Cole to do something, to tell him that she couldn’t die here—not in a stranger’s bedroom, not half a world away from home, with her breasts wrapped in tape, not when Kathy was just…

      ‘Leah, you have a pneumothorax.’ Cole’s voice seemed to be coming at her through a fog. ‘That’s why you’re having so much trouble breathing. A rib must have punctured your lung. Now, I can’t wait for the ambulance to get here so I’m going to put a needle in. It’s going to hurt,’ he warned. She could feel his fingers working their way down her rib cage and the coolness of the alcohol as he swabbed her skin. ‘It will only hurt for a second,’ he implored, ‘and after that you’ll feel much more comfortable.’

      She would have nodded, told him she understood what he was saying, she’d go through anything just to breathe again, but there was no strength left. A pain so vile, so intense Leah truly thought she would vomit, suddenly ricocheted through her as the needle pierced her chest, broke through into her lung, but just as she thought she would surely die, that surely it was all over, she felt the delicious feeling of air dragging into her lungs, the heady taste of oxygen as it seeped through her body and slowly, slowly her world came back into focus.

      ‘You’re all right now.’ Cole was strapping the needle into place as he spoke. ‘Just stay very still while I secure it. An ambulance is on its way.’

      ‘Thank you.’ It seemed such a paltry offering, but it was the only two words she could come up with. Even they were too many for Cole.

      ‘Don’t try and talk,’ he said crisply. ‘Once the ambulance gets here they’ll give you some oxygen. You must have fractured a rib when you fell.’

      ‘I feel better now,’ Leah said faintly, but Cole begged to differ.

      ‘Well, you don’t look it.’ Lifting her legs up onto the bed, he grabbed at pillows, making a massive arch around her, and the bliss as she lay back was indescribable. But the oxygen had obviously reached Leah’s brain now as the indignity of sitting naked from the waist up hit home.

      Cole must have read her mind. ‘I’ll just cover you up,’ he said, heading for the wardrobe and grabbing an ugly beige blanket.

      ‘Can you—?’

      ‘Get rid of the tape?’ Cole finished for her as a smile so small it was barely there inched over his lips. ‘So that’s why there’s never any when a doctor asks, the nurses are too busy swiping it!’

      It was the last of his smiles, the last glimpse of the man she was just starting to know, before the doctor took over as the paramedics roared into the room, smothering her in leads as they strapped an oxygen mask on.

      ‘Let’s just get her to Melbourne Central,’ Cole said impatiently as the inevitable questions started. ‘I’ve only got a Gelco in her, she needs a proper chest tube and an X-ray.’

      Something in his voice told Leah he wasn’t about to be argued with and she was right. In no time at all she was bumping along on the metal stretcher, screwing her eyes closed in embarrassment as they wheeled her out through Reception and into the flashing ambulance.

      ‘Thank you,’ Leah said again, pulling off the mask and attempting a brave smile.

      ‘You can thank me later,’ Cole replied, climbing into the ambulance behind her and sitting on the tiny seat. ‘Let’s just get you to the hospital.’

      He didn’t have to come, but Leah was so glad he did, so glad there was, if not a familiar face, at least someone who wasn’t a complete stranger sitting beside her as the ambulance sped through the dark streets and the wailing sirens told Leah she wasn’t quite out of the woods yet.

      Even though it was the other side of the world there was a strange comfort to be had in the familiarity of the emergency room, the efficient triage nurse listening intently to Cole’s brief handover as they whisked her straight into Resus. Her dress was removed in a second, along with her shoes, and bundled into a bright yellow bag, the monitors