Christmas Secrets Collection. Laura Iding

smiled wryly when he saw how perfectly Zara was posed. It was as if she was expecting her favourite photographer to start clicking away, her hair spread artistically over the pillow and one hand draped elegantly over the edge of the bed. It would almost have been a relief to find her curled up in an untidy ball with creases on her face from the pillow. As it was, sometimes it felt as if he was married to a mannequin, with her face always perfectly made up and never a hair out of place, even on the increasingly rare occasions that they made love.

      The heavy sigh took him by surprise and the weight of regret that accompanied it made him feel very guilty.

      He’d realised almost as soon as he’d placed the ring on Zara’s finger that he’d made a dreadful mistake, but by then there had been no way out.

      Even if he had divorced his new wife, he’d known that there was no way that Sara would have stepped straight into her sister’s shoes … what woman would, especially after the way he’d treated her?

      He might only have met Sara a few months earlier, but they’d already admitted to a mutual attraction and had been exploring the possibility of a long-term relationship. For the first time in his life, he’d even found himself wondering about the possibility of marriage in the not-too-distant future.

      Then he’d met Zara and discovered the meaning of the words ‘whirlwind courtship', his feet hardly seeming to touch the ground before he’d found himself engaged and caught up in the planning of an uncomfortably high-profile wedding.

      Up to that point, their relationship had been conducted largely in secret—at Zara’s insistence that she didn’t want to chance the media intruding—so he hadn’t really noticed that she was such a favourite with her parents. It had only been after their marriage that he’d noticed just how little her family regarded Sara, in spite of the fact that she was now a qualified and highly proficient doctor in a busy A and E department. All their pride was definitely focused on their glamorous, vivacious, younger daughter.

      In a strange way, he could even understand it, to a certain extent. He’d certainly been blinded by Zara’s lively attractions when she’d set out to captivate him. What man wouldn’t have been flattered to have such a stunning woman hanging on his every word in such an ego-stroking way?

      How could he not have realised that she was all outward show with very little substance beneath it? Why had it taken him so long to recognise that Sara was worth a dozen of her self-centred twin?

      Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He was married, and even though he knew it had been one of the worst decisions of his life, he was not a man who broke a promise, so he certainly wouldn’t go back on a solemn vow. He would just have to be content with the fact that Sara had agreed to carry a child for the two of them … two children, in fact, he recalled with a sudden surge of the same incredulous delight that had swamped him when he’d learned of it. Although how Zara would respond when he told her that she would shortly be learning to cope with being a mother to not one but two newborn babies …

      ‘Zara?’ he called softly, stifling a sigh of resignation. His wife was not going to be in a happy mood when she saw how late it was, even though it had been her sister’s welfare and that of the babies she carried that had caused the delay. She was almost fanatical about preserving her looks with adequate sleep and certainly didn’t like eating at this hour. ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but it was unavoidable. Your sister had a rather …’ He broke off with a puzzled frown.

      She hadn’t so much as stirred, even when he’d lowered himself wearily to the edge of the bed. Something rustled as it slid to the floor between the side of the bed and the cabinet—a letter she’d been reading before she’d fallen asleep? Perhaps it was a glamorous new contract she’d wanted to gloat over while she’d waited for him to come home?

      He reached out and touched her hand … her curiously lifeless hand.

      Suddenly, he switched into doctor mode as all the hairs went up on the back of his neck in a warning that something was seriously wrong.

      ‘Zara!’ he called sharply as he leant forward to take a closer look at the silent figure. He’d been standing in the doorway wool-gathering for several minutes and only now was he noticing that she was so completely still that she didn’t even seem to be breathing.

      ‘Zara, wake up!’ he ordered harshly, his fingers automatically searching her wrist to find a pulse. ‘Zara!’ He heard the panic bouncing back at him from the expensively decorated bedroom walls when there was no sign of any rhythm under his fingertips. Was that because his ordinarily rocksteady hands hadn’t stopped shaking from the moment he’d heard that Sara had been knocked down? Frantically, he probed her slender neck and breathed a sigh of relief when he felt the reassuring throb of the artery under his fingertips.

      It was slower than it should be … much slower … and her skin felt cold and clammy. It was no wonder that he hadn’t been able to see her breathing because her respiration was so shallow as to be almost imperceptible.

      But at least she was breathing and her heart was beating, so that gave him precious time to try to make a diagnosis so that he could help her survive whatever had happened to her.

      But first …

      ‘Emergency. Which service do you require?’ said a crisp voice in his ear as he continued to make his examination, trapping the phone in position with one shoulder.

      ‘Ambulance,’ he said tersely. ‘My wife has had some sort of collapse. Her pulse and respiration are both depressed and her pupils are fixed and dilated.’ He managed to give the operator his address even as he reeled with horror at the possibility that Zara was imminently going into cardiac arrest.

      Without some secure means of administering oxygen and the supplies to set up an IV line he had no way of improving her tidal volume or boosting her systolic pressure above 80. At the moment it must hovering around 70 because her femoral pulse was barely perceptible. If it dropped below 60 the carotid pulse would disappear, too, and she would be just minutes away from irreversible brain damage and death …

      ‘Come on! Come on!’ he urged as he transferred her swiftly to the floor and began carefully controlled cardiac compressions to boost the volume of blood going to her brain, desperate to hear the sound of a siren drawing closer.

      The weight of his guilt was almost crushing as he kept automatic count inside his head. If he’d come home when he’d said he would, rather than hovering over Sara and waiting till she was settled in her room, would he have arrived in time for Zara to tell him that she was feeling ill?

      Would he have been able to prevent her collapsing in the first place?

      A sudden hammering on the front door made him realise that he’d completely forgotten to release the catch for the ambulancemen to get into the flat.

      ‘She’s in here,’ he directed as he quickly led the way back to the bedroom and dropped to his knees beside her again. ‘Her systolic must have been close to 70 when I found her because her femoral pulse was barely palpable and her pupils were fixed and dilated.’ He glanced across at the man who dropped to his knees on the other side of the body to begin his primary survey, and they came face to face for the first time.

      ‘Dr Lomax!’ the paramedic exclaimed, clearly shocked to see him, but he immediately became the consummate professional. ‘Do you know what happened to her, sir?’ the paramedic asked as he bent over the ominously still figure between them to check her pulse and respiration rates for himself.

      As he did so, Dan heard the man’s foot strike something to send it skittering under the bed but no one even bothered to glance at it. At the moment nothing mattered more than giving Zara a chance to continue her vibrant life.

      Out of the corner of his eye Dan saw the man’s colleague depositing an oxygen cylinder on the carpet and he reached out for it, leaving him free to set up the defibrillator with the swift ease of much practice.

      He was ashamed to see how badly his own hands were trembling as he fumbled to tighten the mask