Christmas Secrets Collection. Laura Iding

to tell Zara’s family that she had made an attempt at taking her own life without the whole hospital speculating what went on behind closed doors.

      If that was what it had been, he continued agonising as he followed the flashing lights through the busy traffic, the urgent scream of the siren an audible reminder that the outcome of the situation was far from certain.

      Suicide? Zara? It still seemed impossible. Had she just intended to give him a scare? Had it only been the fact that he had been late that had made this such a serious situation, the extra hours giving the drugs so much more time to do their damage.

      And if she … when she survived? He hastily altered the words inside his head, feeling a renewed stab of guilt that he could even contemplate the alternative.

      Anyway, he thought heavily, as far as her health was concerned, no one could predict how well or how badly she would recover. Only time would tell how much permanent damage the drugs had done to her system.

      The fact that she was his wife was another matter entirely. Zara wasn’t anywhere near as important a model as she pretended to be, but any speculation that it might somehow be his fault that she’d come so close to death could start a media feeding frenzy that would ruin all their lives, to say nothing of his career. The lower end of the tabloid market would have the whole situation blown out of all proportion the minute they heard that she’d taken an overdose, especially if they unearthed the fact that the two of them had resorted to a surrogate pregnancy.

      He followed the flashing lights all the way to the emergency entrance, his brain rerunning everything that had been done to try to stabilise Zara’s condition. He was so preoccupied that he only just remembered in time to pull into the designated staff parking area rather than cluttering up the area around the emergency entrance.

      As his feet pounded across the tarmac towards the emergency doors, the lights cast long shadows that made it seem as if the doors never got any closer, but finally they slid silently open in front of him.

      ‘Dan? What on earth are you doing back here?’ demanded his opposite number on the night shift, but he didn’t even slow his pace, his long strides taking him unerringly through to the resuscitation rooms at the other end of the department.

      ‘Dan! Come in,’ called the consultant already standing the other side of Zara’s ominously still body, his face creased in concern as he beckoned him into the room.

      For a moment, as he shouldered his way through the doors, Dan was filled with dread. Had things got worse during the ambulance journey from his flat to the hospital? Zara’s condition had been so serious that he was hardly likely to look across the clinically stark room and find her sitting up and preening herself in front of any males in her audience, but if the bottle of barbiturates she’d taken had been in her body too long, it was all too likely that she might never come out of the coma.

      As he stared across at her, she looked even more like a porcelain doll under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, with an almost waxy sheen to her skin.

      He slumped back against the wall and watched in awful fascination as his superior did everything he would have done if she were one of his patients, from aspirating her stomach contents to remove any tablets still undigested, to trying to neutralise any drug-laden fluids with activated charcoal before they could be absorbed by her body.

      This just couldn’t be happening, he thought, his helplessness making him feel sick to his stomach.

      Zara had so much to live for, and before this he would have sworn that she was far too self-centred and conceited to ever think of suicide. Why on earth would she do something so … so …?

      ‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ the consultant apologised, and Dan knew that he was going to confirm his worst fears … life extinct.

      Just the thought of those solemn words was enough to change the way he saw the woman who was his wife. Somehow her slenderness became mere gauntness without the aura of her vivacity, her expert make-up smudged into a caricature of its usual perfection and her shimmering blonde hair artificial and brassy.

      He closed his eyes to try to block out the images, unable to look at her any more.

      How was he going to break this latest news to her family? It had been bad enough when he’d been contemplating the best way to tell them that Sara had been knocked down, but this …

      ‘We’re going to have to put her on IPPV,’ the consultant warned when a monitor suddenly shrilled a warning that her oxygen saturation was falling dangerously low in spite of the mask. Dan’s eyes flew open and he blinked in disbelief. How had he managed to convince himself that Zara was dead when the room was filled with the sound of all those monitors?

      ‘Her respiratory effort is so badly depressed by the drugs …’ his superior continued, almost apologetically.

      ‘It’s OK,’ Dan reassured the man, immeasurably relieved that all was not yet lost. ‘Just do what you have to do. You don’t have to talk me through every step. I trust you.’

      More than he would trust himself at the moment, he admitted silently. The whole scene seemed totally unreal, especially coming so soon after Sara’s narrow escape. How many disasters could one family cope with in a single evening?

      At least he’d given in to Sara’s request not to inform her parents what had happened to her. He’d been reluctant, knowing how excited they were about the pregnancy, but Sara had promised that she would go straight to them when she was released in the morning, confident that hearing about the accident would be far less traumatic if they could see with their own eyes that she was perfectly all right.

      Well, more or less, he temporised, imagining just how badly bruised she must be after such an event. Her pale skin would soon be all the colours of the rainbow, and as for the pain … that must be considerable, especially as she’d refused any further analgesia.

      His respect for his sister-in-law couldn’t have been any higher, as a colleague, as a person and as the temporary mother of his children. Sara might not always get along with her twin—an understandable case of sibling rivalry, perhaps?—but she’d certainly proved how much she loved her sister by putting herself through the traumas of a surrogate pregnancy.

      Behind his closed lids he saw a flash of another image—that of two tiny hearts beating side by side. And he could picture equally clearly the fiercely protective emotions in Sara’s eyes. It had been obvious just how much it had meant to her to see the babies for the first time and to know that her accident had apparently left them untouched.

      A secret regret hit him afresh, one that he’d been living with for several years now.

      He knew that he’d behaved stupidly when Zara had set out to entice him, had already realised, even then, that Sara had been more than halfway in love with him. He’d probably been heading in the same direction until her sister had started her determined pursuit.

      And he’d been stupid enough to be flattered and intrigued by the prospect of being desired by a woman so confident in the power of her beauty. Had it been the fact that she was the twin of someone to whom he was already attracted that had made him believe he had been in love with her?

      Enough!

      Enough rationalisation! Enough excuses! Whatever the truth had been then, now was a different matter entirely.

      He straightened his shoulders and deliberately opened his eyes to gaze directly at the woman he’d married, confronting his blame head on.

      It had been his responsibility to protect her, and he’d obviously failed if she hadn’t felt able to come to him with her problem—be it depression or a dependency on drugs. He had no idea when it had started or how long it had been going on … no idea whether her brush with death had been an accidental overdose or a deliberate one.

      No doubt the police would have to be involved and would doubtless grill him at length about the state of his marriage.

      How much worse would it have been if she’d died