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'We're not going to waste any time, Lisa. Your anaesthetist will be Rudy Frazer—he's new since you worked here. He's a really great guy—super at his job, great to talk to.' The nurse replaced the cap on the pen that she kept on a cord hanging round her neck.

'He'll be here to talk to you any second now, then we'll be wheeling you straight into the OR and ask you to climb onto the operating table before he actually gives the anaesthetic. That way, you won't be under the anaesthetic any longer than you possibly have to. We'll do the skin
prep and put on the sterile drapes before you actually go under.'

'Yes.'

'I know you're familiar with the routine, honey,' Leonora said, 'but I always do the spiel anyway because I feel that if you break from routine, especially if it's a staff member, it's not good for the patient. So long as you know I'm not being patronizing, love.'

'Thanks, I appreciate that. You going to be the circulating nurse in there with me?'

'I sure am. Now.. .1 understand you've got an empty stomach but, to be on the safe side, Dr Frazer will probably want to put down a gastric tube. He may do that while you're under the anaesthetic. Here comes Dr Frazer now. . .and the other guys are getting scrubbed.'

As another powerful contraction swept over her, Lisa was not able to suppress a moan of pain.

Leonora gripped her hand. 'Hang in there, honey. You'll be getting something for pain real soon. Everything's going to be just fine.'

She closed her eyes and rode out the pain with difficulty, trying to blot it out. Lisa felt her mind floating back to the time when she had worked in this unit, in the gynaecology and obstetrics OR. So much for trying to keep him out of her mind—it was impossible here. Because it was here that she had met Richard.. .all of two and a half years ago... Dr Richard Decker. As though she were still living in that time, she could clearly recall the sound of his voice, what he had said...

'Hi, there! And who might you be, you gorgeous creature? I thought they didn't come like that any more!'

Those had been the first words that Richard had said to her. Although she had tried to pretend to herself that she'd not been flattered, she had been kidding herself.

From the moment she'd turned to look at him she'd been smitten. She had never set eyes on him before, and she had been blissfully unaware of the momentous part he was to play in her young life.

'You're a welcome sight on a wet Monday morning, with a bloody great operating list ahead of us,' he'd said, looking at her with undisguised admiration.. .a look that she'd learnt later he'd perfected very well.
It
had been a look of burning intensity, as though the object of that intent regard had been the only thing that had mattered to him in the entire world. It had also been blatantly sexual. And it had had the effect of winding her, psychologically speaking.

It turned out that he was doing a six-month rotation as a resident in obstetrics and gynaecology, before starting his training in accident and emergency medicine at University Hospital. As she turned to look at him enquiringly in that first moment, to meet his penetrating green eyes which were regarding her with intense interest above the surgical mask that he wore, she experienced a peculiar shock, like a sense of recognition. Yet she had never seen him before in her life.

I must be desperate for a man, she thought musingly then. After the long, enforced deprivation, being away from civilization...

'What's your name?' he repeated, standing close to her and watching her work. He was very tall. The short-sleeved scrubsuit top that he wore did nothing to disguise the rippling muscles of his tanned arms. Almost then and there, she realized in retrospect, she had become infatuated with him.

'I'm Lisa Stanton,' she said, with feigned calm. 'I've been out of the country for a few weeks. I'm really an old hand.'

'I can see that you are,' he murmured, his voice deep and caressing. After watching her for a few moments, during which his eyes seemed to bore into the small of her back, he said baldly, 'Are you spoken for?'

She stopped her activities. 'What? What do you mean?' she said.

'Have you got someone? Have you got a man?'

The atmosphere seemed charged with electricity as she stared at him in shocked silence while he stood tensely, watching her. Even then there was something proprietorial about him, as though he had a right to possess her. Only later had she seen it as predatory. With other men, so far, she had found that assumption annoying, sometimes laughable. Big egos were not always endearing. With this man it was suddenly overwhelmingly exciting, almost as though he had reached forward and touched her, taken possession of her.

'No...no, I haven't,' she found herself saying, as though the question were reasonable on a first meeting.

'Great!' he said, as though something were settled between them. 'I'm Richard Decker.'

'Hi,' she said.

By the end of that hectic day of gynaecological surgery Lisa felt that she knew a lot about Richard Decker— his prodigious ego, the immense driving force behind his capacity for work, his hard, clinical intelligence, his seductive charm. Because of her attraction to him she had overlooked the assumptions he had made which from someone else might have jarred.

'I've enjoyed working with you, Dr Decker.' She smiled at him sincerely. He had been more than competent.

'Call me Richard,' he said, when they were momentarily alone. 'Have dinner with me on the weekend. For once, I've got a whole weekend off. Who knows when it may happen again?'

'Well...' She hesitated, thinking of the essential chores she usually did on the weekend, actually nervous about accepting his offer.

'Give me your phone number,' he said, grabbing a handy message pad and pen. 'I'll call you.'

Someone had come into the room then so she quickly gave him her number. With a tremor of delightful anticipation she felt that she had gone beyond a point of no return with him.

That was how it had begun—from a simple giving of her telephone number. From then on she would gradually give more to Dr Richard Decker.. .much, much more. And she hadn't, as it turned out, discovered as much about him on that first working day as she had thought.

'Is the pain bad?' The gentle question, spoken at her side, together with a spasm of pain brought her back abruptly to the present. In a few moments her mind had encompassed two and a half years of her past life.

Now the present intruded again forcefully as her eyelids shot open and she heard her own moan of pain—as though it were coming from another person—as her uterus contracted powerfully and another gush of fluid escaped from her body.

'Oh. . .the contractions are very strong,' she gasped, turning her head sideways. 'Please help me... The pain... I can't...'

'It's OK, everything's OK.'

Lisa's eyes met those of the gowned and masked figure beside her. Not for me, it isn't, she wanted to say to him. And maybe not for my baby, either.

'Hi! I've given you a shot of something in the IV. You should be feeling the effects of that any second now, just to take the edge off the pain,' he said. 'I'm Rudy Frazer, from the department of anaesthesia, and I'm going to be giving you your anaesthetic. Take a deep breath... Ride with the pain, if you can. That's it... Let it out slowly. In a moment or two I'm going to be giving you the Pentothal. OK? First, we're taking you into the OR.'

As he spoke he began to push the stretcher through a door into the room where she would have her operation. Turning her head, Lisa could see the large operating lights, already switched on, over the operating table. The scrub nurse was ready, standing waiting for her, with the surgeon and his two assistants. It was all so familiar. This time she was on the other side of the fence.

'Please...' Lisa looked up at Dr Frazer '.. .Don't let anything happen to this baby.'

'We won't,' Dr Rudy Frazer said emphatically. 'Now, just slide over there onto the operating table. That's my girl... Take the sheet with you. Great! Now, I want to ask you a few brief questions.'

She watched him take up the 20cc syringe that held the anaesthetic drug, Pentothal, that would put her to sleep in a few brief seconds when injected into her IV line. At the same time, the surgeons began prepping her abdomen with an iodine solution. The fear had receded somewhat now. From somewhere she had found the necessary strength. Leonora positioned her arms out on padded boards, moved her IV drip bags from the stretcher pole to another metal pole.

'Have you had an anaesthetic before? And are you allergic to any drugs that you know of?' Dr Frazer asked.

'No.. .no allergies. I've had an anaesthetic before when I had my appendix out at sixteen.'

'Great! Any problems with your heart, lungs or kidneys? Any major illnesses or blood-clotting problems?'

'No.'

'Right. Here we go, then, Lisa. First of all, I want you to breathe in a little more of the oxygen.. .just breathe normally.' As he placed a rubber mask over her mouth Lisa decided that she liked Dr Frazer, that she trusted him implicitly. And he had a wonderful bedside manner. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his hands on the IV tubing, saw him position the needle of the syringe in one of the rubber ports.

For a second she felt a moment of panic, then Leonora was beside her, smiling calmly, reassuringly.

'Everything's going to be OK, Lisa.' Dr Frazer's soothing voice cut through her momentary fear. 'When you wake up you'll be in the recovery room. You'll probably still have a stomach tube in place. Not to worry about it. OK? Breathe away. .. Just concentrate on breathing. . .in and out.. .that's it.'

Unaccountably she thought of Marcus Blair as she listened to the calm, professional voice instructing her— she thought of his kindness, of the warmth of his hand. Would he be waiting for her as he had promised?

Then she felt herself sliding away, her eyelids heavy, the overhead lights blurred. 'Oh, my baby.. .my baby.' The anguished cry of longing broke from her. It was a primitive, instinctive cry from a need to protect her baby, in spite of her total helplessness. Now it was all out of her control—the whole situation. There was nothing she could do but trust those around her.

With all the fervour of her being she longed to hold that unseen baby in her arms, that baby that had already begun the epic journey of its life—the fight for survival. Like her, it had no alternative and because of that there was an unbreakable bond between them which would last for ever. She also shared a bond with all the women who had gone before her who had given birth from the dawn of human history, and with all the women who would come after her as long as the human race survived. With them, she risked her life.

'Marcus.' She whispered his name, the name of the man whose image was in her brain now. He was the one who had been there for her when she so desperately needed someone. With an awful, sober clarity she knew now that that was what really mattered in the end.

'Sweet dreams,' someone said.

The words floated over her as she drifted into unconsciousness.

'You have a daughter, a beautiful daughter.'

The lights were very bright, throwing no shadows. As Lisa opened her eyes the people and things in the vast room seemed distanced from her, as though she were looking at it all through the wrong end of a telescope. People moved about here and there in front of her. Disorientated, she looked around her, not knowing where she was. She was propped up in a semi-sitting position on a stretcher.

A hand touched her cheek, gently moving her head round so that she found herself looking at a face that was very close—a man's face. 'Hi, I'm Marcus Blair. Remember me? It's all over. You're in the recovery room now,' the voice articulated slowly. 'Everything's fine. You've got a lovely girl. She's OK.'

Very slowly Lisa found herself coming back to a sense of time and place, of moving out of a momentary confusion. The remarkable thing about a general anaesthetic was that there was no awareness of the passage of time, not like a natural sleep. Now it seemed like a split second only had passed since she had seen Dr Rudy Frazer injecting the Pentothal into her IV tubing. Yet there was pain—of a different type—attesting to an unaccounted-for interval of time.

Over her nose and mouth a clear plastic mask delivered moistened oxygen. She could hear the bubbling of the vaporizer as her mind slowly identified the sights and sounds around her. There was a plastic airway in her mouth and Lisa found herself gagging on it. A hand reached forward to extricate it carefully from between her lips.

There was a peculiar taste in her mouth, coupled with the unmistakable odour of anaesthetic gases clinging to her.

Aware of tears running down her face, uncontrollable tears of abject relief, she focused on the man's face. He smiled, his teeth even and white. There was dark stubble on his chin and lower cheeks.

'Remember me?' he asked again, gently. 'Marcus?'

Lisa nodded, putting up a hand to lift the mask so that she could talk to him. 'Oh.. .yes, of course.' She smiled back tentatively. 'I'm so glad you're here. A. . .a girl?' Her throat felt dry, a little raw, and her speech was slurred.

'Yes. I've seen her. Not only is she beautiful, she's perfect—with ten toes and ten fingers, as well as everything else that she should have. And she's got a thatch of auburn hair, just like yours.'

'Oh...' she felt herself smiling that inane, relieved, delighted smile of the new mother—smiling at the miracle of creation, at the flood of maternal love and the surprise that it had all actually happened to her and the relief of finding herself still alive.

As her tear-filled eyes met his she really looked at him thoroughly for the first time now that there was all the time in the world, noticing how she could read the empathy and intelligence in his deep brown eyes. Intuitively she knew that he was a warm, loving man, one who would not stint in giving of himself yet, paradoxically, one who would not give himself thoughtlessly to a woman. A man who would only promise something after careful consideration of whether he could keep that promise. In other words, a man of integrity. There was an odd regret in her that she would not be that woman.