Paddington Children's Hospital Complete Collection. Kate Hardy

underground when Dominic found himself running after her.

      ‘Wait!’ he called out.

      She didn’t.

      Victoria stepped onto one of the escalators but she didn’t stand and let it carry her down. Instead she walked quickly but knew Dominic was fast and so he caught up with her at the bottom.

      ‘Victoria, wait.’

      ‘No.’ It was just as busy here as it had been in the pub and so it was a hopeless place for conversation and, given his attitude, she would not be asking him again to come back to her flat. ‘I’m tired, Dominic. It’s been a helluva long day and right now I just want to get home and go to bed.’

      He could see that she was tired and he thought of the day she had had. And he recalled the anger he had felt when she’d raced forward to grab that child.

      No, not anger.

      It had been fear that he had felt.

      He moved her aside and she stood straight rather than lean against the wall; he put up an arm that buffeted them from the people that passed.

      ‘Have you told work?’ Dominic asked, already guessing the answer.

      ‘Not yet,’ Victoria said. ‘My crewmate knows.’

      ‘Work needs to know.’ He thought of her today and the hell of that fire, and not just that—it was a dangerous job indeed. ‘Victoria!’

      ‘I’ll make that choice,’ Victoria said.

      It wasn’t really a choice; as soon as she knew she was pregnant she should tell them, but Victoria was still unable to get her head around things and had been putting it off.

      ‘Look...’ Dominic started, but she shook her head and made to leave.

      ‘I’m not discussing this here. You were the one who chose to be told out on the street.’

      He had been.

      But to stop her from dashing off he told her some of his truth.

      ‘Do you know how I know about date parameters?’

      ‘Well, you’re a doctor...’

      ‘I know about them,’ Dominic interrupted, ‘because I’d been reading up on things in the baby books. A few months ago I sat in on an ultrasound with my ex and found out that the baby we were expecting couldn’t possibly be mine, because I was in India at the time it was conceived. That’s why I moved down to London.’

      She looked at him, right at him, but instead of a sympathetic response Victoria told Dominic a truth. ‘I’m not your ex.’

      And then she ducked under his arm and was gone.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      NO, SHE CERTAINLY wasn’t his ex.

      Two days later Dominic sat in the back of the lecture theatre and watched as a very efficient Victoria took to the stage.

      She was wearing a grey linen dress with flat pumps and her hair was tied in a loose ponytail. She was petite, but her presence was commanding and despite stragglers arriving in the lecture theatre she started the meeting on time.

      ‘Let’s get started,’ Victoria said. ‘It’s so good to see such an amazing turnout.’

      She paused as someone’s phone rang out and, Dominic noted, Victoria was far from shy—instead of putting the person at ease, she glared.

      ‘Can everyone please silence their phones?’

      ‘It might be kind of important, Victoria,’ someone called out, and Dominic smiled at the smart response, given the people who were in the room.

      ‘Then put it on vibrate,’ Victoria said. ‘We’ve got a lot to get through and if we have pagers and phones going off every two minutes we shan’t get very far.’

      There was a brief pause as a lot of people turned their phones onto silent.

      Dominic’s was already off.

      He had started carrying it at work, though he kept it on silent. He still did not want his personal life intruding. But now, if his parents called, which they quite often did, he would let it go to message, then speak to them during a lull in his day rather than at the end of his shift.

      There still wasn’t much to talk about. They opted to discuss the weather rather than face the unpalatable topic as to what their youngest son had done.

      And, Dominic knew, he had taken out his malaise and mistrust on Victoria.

      That was the real reason he was here tonight; he hoped to speak with her afterwards.

      For now though, he listened to what she had to say.

      Victoria kicked off the meeting. ‘The fire has really helped showcase to people how vital an institution the hospital is.’

      Robyn’s hunch had proven right, and now Victoria and Dominic were the face of the Save Paddington’s campaign.

      The image of them came up on the screen behind Victoria and she tried not to glance over at Dominic.

      He hadn’t been at the other meetings, though she now knew he had been on leave. But even if she was glad of the big show tonight and for any support that could be mustered, there was one exception—Victoria rather wished he would stay away, for Dominic was a distraction that she did not need.

      Then again, that’s what he had done since their night together—distracted her from her life.

      Even before that, she had always found herself looking out for him whenever she and Glen brought a patient into the Castle.

      ‘The travel time is a vital point we should make,’ said Matthew McGrory, a burns specialist. He had been working around the clock with the patients from the school fire and looked as if he had barely slept in days. ‘Due to the sheer volume of casualties there were some patients that were taken to Riverside, but the most severely injured children came here and were treated quickly. That first hour is vital and a lot of that time would have been lost had Paddington’s not been here.’

      ‘Indeed.’ Victoria was up-front and well versed. ‘And we do need to push travel time and the difference it will make to locals. However, patients come from far and wide for treatment at Paddington’s. We need to promote both aspects and we need to start working out how best to do that.’

      It was a call to arms meeting.

      ‘The press is onside at the moment,’ Robyn said, ‘but we need to keep up that momentum.’

      Rebecca, a cardiothoracic surgeon who headed the transplant team, spoke about the real issue with doctors leaving and the problems the cardiology department were facing. ‘We’re only able to recruit on very short-term contracts. Paddington’s has always attracted world-class doctors and we can’t let that change. The campaign needs to showcase the hospital in its best light.’

      Ideas were building and they were starting to run with them; it was decided that the first major event to be held would be a fundraising ball.

      The meeting ran for a couple of hours and Dominic watched and listened.

      He could only admire Victoria.

      From an initial very scattered effort, the drive to save PCH was now starting to come together.

      Certainly, with the fire and its aftermath still prominent in the news, the public were starting to understand the real implications of Paddington’s closing.

      ‘Right,’ Victoria said. ‘I think that gives us enough to be going on with for now. Anyone who wants to carry on the discussion can—I think most of us who are not working will be heading over to the Frog and Peach.’

      Phones went back