Christmas Secrets Collection. Laura Iding

that he might give Zara’s hands that same warm caress.

       The last glance she threw over her shoulder as she reached the door left her certain that neither of them had even noticed that she’d gone.

      Sara woke to a world of pain and noise and eye-searingly bright light. Slamming her lids shut against the unbearable glare, she groaned, unable to decide which part of her hurt the most.

      Her hip was agony, but so was her shoulder … and as for her head …

      What on earth had happened to her? Had she fallen out of bed in the night? With nothing more than polished floorboards around the new divan it would certainly account for the feeling that she was bruised from head to foot.

      ‘Sara?’ said an urgent female voice right beside her ear, but she tried hard to ignore it. It wasn’t until she felt the familiar sensation of disposable gloves against her skin as a gentle hand awkwardly stroked the side of her face that she realised that she had an oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose. She tried to turn her head towards the voice but discovered that she was unable to move because of the padded blocks positioned on either side.

      She had seen the situation far too many times not to recognise what those sensations meant. She was strapped to a backboard with her head and neck restrained because of the fear of exacerbating a spinal injury.

      ‘Sara, can you hear me?’ the voice said over the cacophony of bleeping monitors and voices snapping out orders. ‘Sara, love, you’ve had a bit of an accident and you’re in the hospital …’ And with those few words terror gripped her. Suddenly she remembered everything that had happened to her in excruciating detail.

      The car appearing in the narrow road just as she started to cross it on her way back to her flat … the brightness of the headlights as it came straight towards her … as it hit her and sent her tumbling to the ground … deliberately?

      Then she remembered something even more important.

      ‘My baby …!’ she keened, her voice muffled behind the oxygen mask, panicking when she was unable to move her hand to her belly, so desperate to know by the familiar feel of the gentle swell that it was still safely inside her.

      Then she heard the echo of what she’d said and guilt hit her hard. ‘The baby,’ she said, deliberately damping the forbidden emotions the way she’d been forced to right from the first day she’d had the pregnancy confirmed. ‘Is it all right? Has anything happened to the baby?’

      ‘Stay still, Sara,’ ordered the familiar voice of the senior orthopaedic consultant. ‘You know better than to move until we’ve taken spinal X-rays and checked them.’

      ‘No! No X-rays!’ she gasped, feeling almost as if she was trapped in a terrifying nightmare. ‘I’m pregnant! No X-rays!’

      ‘Hush, sweetheart,’ said a softly accented voice, just another of those voices that she’d only recognised in the guise of colleagues before. Everything was so very different now that she was the helpless patient; they were her doctors and nurses and they would decide what treatment was best for her. ‘You just lie there and trust Sean O’Malley to know how to take an X-ray without harming your child,’ he said, coming to stand in exactly the right place so that she could see his familiar freckled face and carroty curls and the sincerity in his bright blue eyes. ‘I promise you on my word as an Irishman that the wee angel won’t come out glowing in the dark.’

      Sara gave a hiccup that was part laughter, part sob and somehow found a smile. ‘I trust you, Sean O’Malley,’ she whispered, knowing absolutely that a man who delighted in every one of his four rambunctious red-headed sons would never do anything to risk anyone’s child, let alone a colleague’s.

      The one voice she didn’t hear, even though it seemed as if every last member of the A and E department was crammed into the resus room around her, was Daniel’s.

      What sort of irony was that? she mused silently, a tear tracking from the corner of her eye into her hair and stinging as it reached the place where her head had come into contact with the granite kerbstone. The one person she wanted beside her as she tried to cope with the terror, the one colleague who had the most to lose if anything happened to the child she was carrying—and he wasn’t there for her.

       ‘You’re late, Sara,’ her mother scolded, almost dragging her into the house as soon as she set foot on the doorstep. ‘You could at least have tried to get here on time for your sister’s big announcement.’

       ‘Sorry, Mum,’ she apologised automatically as she shrugged out of her voluminous jacket. ‘Where’s Zara going this time? Or is it a contract with one of the really big fashion shows?’

       ‘Oh, Sara! You’re not wearing that old thing again! You could at least have made an effort.’ This time there was a sharper edge to her mother’s voice as she saw what her daughter was wearing. ‘I really don’t understand why you always look such a dowdy mess. No one would ever believe that the two of you were identical twins.’ She flung up her hands in despair as Sara glanced down at her favourite black trousers teamed with the soft ivory blouse that she usually wore with it. It had always been enough for a family supper before, so what was different tonight?

       Then her mother opened the door into the lounge and she heard the buzz of conversation that could only be made by several dozen voices and froze.

       ‘Mum? Is there a party or something?’ she demanded, hanging back. She was suddenly horribly conscious that she hadn’t bothered putting any make-up on after her shower and had done nothing other than run a brush through her hair either.

       ‘Sara, you know very well that your sister and Danny are making their big announcement this evening,’ her mother snapped as she beckoned her with an insistent hand. ‘She rang you up and told you all about it more than a week ago and everyone else has been here for hours. We’ve only been waiting for you to arrive.’

       ‘Dan …?’ Sara felt her eyes widen as the implication hit her with the force of a wrecking ball.

       Zara and Dan?

       A big announcement that her sister had told her about?

       For just a moment she thought she was going to be sick, but with her mother’s hand now firmly clamped around her elbow she had no choice but to enter the room beside her as she pushed the door wide.

       The room seemed to be crammed with people, every one of them dressed to the nines in their most elegant finery, but the glittering butterfly in their midst, effortlessly outshining them all, was Zara.

       So why was it that the first pair of eyes she met were the luminous green ones that belonged to Dan … eyes that only had to glance in her direction to double her pulse rate and send her blood pressure into orbit no matter how serious the medical emergency they were working on.

       Hastily, she dragged her gaze away, knowing that she couldn’t afford for anyone to guess just how much it was costing her to keep herself together while her world fell apart around her.

       This was the first time that she’d seen her sister since the day that she’d turned up in A and E to be introduced to Dan, and when she’d heard nothing more, Sara had dared to breathe a sigh of relief. Even if they had gone out together, Zara’s attention span was notoriously short and she was certain her fickle sister would soon tire of an escort who would never be at her beck and call.

       She was so confident that the two of them hadn’t hit it off together after all that she’d actually been contemplating screwing up her courage to ask Dan out for a drink later in the week, hoping that the two of them could continue the relationship they’d embarked on when she’d joined the department, longing to see where it would lead them.

       The last thing she’d expected was that he and Zara had been carrying on