CHAPTER ONE
HARPERLAYONthe hospital gurney in a sweat-soaked panic. Was she going to die? The niggling pain in her back that had started three days ago was getting worse. It was spreading to her abdomen—tight, rigid bands that made it hard for her to breathe. Was it endometriosis? Or...orcancer? She was only twenty-seven—how could she die of cancer? She had so much left to do. Her career was taking off. She had a book deal featuring her photographs—photographs she had yet to take in Paris in six weeks’ time. This was definitely the wrong time to contract a terminal illness.
The pain gradually subsided like a retreating tide and Harper flopped back on the pillow and let out a shuddering breath. But she knew it would be back. The time intervals between the spasms were shrinking.
Only a junior doctor had examined her so far and he had seemed a little baffled by Harper’s symptoms. The doctor took a blood sample for Pathology and told Harper the more senior emergency doctor would be back with the results, as soon as they came through.
Harper closed her eyes and tried to meditate while she waited for the results of the test. Not that meditation had ever been her forte. Her one and only visit to a health spa retreat had made her feel antsy and agitated the whole time, while everyone else was chanting and cleansing and rebalancing their chakras. Her chakras were obviously beyond repair. As for her mind? It was hardly ever still, which she put down to her turbulent childhood. All that time in foster care had made her hypervigilant. Every noise, every sound, every footfall and she was wide awake and alert.
A and E was busy with the usual dramas of a Saturday night. Harper could hear the noise of someone coughing a couple of cubicles away. Not a simple virus cough but one that hinted at some sort of hideous lung disease like emphysema or cancer.
Cancer.
Why could she not stop thinking about the C word?
A man was shouting in another cubicle about wanting more morphine. Harper wondered if he was suffering from the same disease. Maybe the Swan women weren’t destined to live beyond thirty. Her mother had died young, so too her grandmother.
Another band of pain tightened around her abdomen like an iron cable. Sweat poured like tears from her hairline, her teeth were gritted together so hard she was sure she was going to crack every one of her molars. But hey, if she was going to die, what would it matter if every tooth fell out?
I don’t want to die!
It was a scream inside her brain, as if a panic button had been pressed in her head, a piercing siren of distress only she could hear.
The curtain was swished aside and a more senior emergency doctor came in. She placed a hand on Harper’s wrist, her expression grave. ‘Is your partner waiting outside?’
‘I don’t have a partner.’
‘Oh, well, your next of kin? Your mother?’
‘My mother died when I was eight.’ Harper could say it without any trace of emotion but it had taken years of practice. Years of concealing her true feelings behind a mask of indifference. Years of blocking the vision of finding her mother lying lifeless on the floor of their cramped bedsit when she came home from school on that fateful day. Later than she should have come home. If she hadn’t stopped on the walk home to play with a stray kitten...
‘A sibling?’
‘I’m an only child.’ Which, strictly speaking wasn’t quite true. Harper had several half-siblings she had never met because her father hadn’t wanted his dirty little secret—her, his secret love child—to be revealed to his wife and family. ‘Love child’ was a bit of a stretch. Her father hadn’t loved Harper’s mother. He had used her to break his marital boredom and then left her when she got pregnant.
‘Harper...’ The female doctor’s voice was gentle, as if she was preparing to deliver shocking news.
‘It’s okay, Dr Praneesh,’ Harper said with a grim smile. ‘You can be straight with me. It’s cancer, isn’t it?’
Dr Praneesh frowned. ‘No, you don’t have cancer.’ She moistened her lips and continued, ‘It’s a different type of growth—you’re pregnant.’
Harper rapid-blinked. Her heart knocked against her ribcage with the force of a punch. ‘I—I can’t possibly be pregnant.’ Was she having some sort of hallucination? A bad dream? How could she be pregnant and not know? And more to the point—not show? Sure, she wasn’t the slimmest woman on the planet but she could distinguish a baby bump.
‘When was the last time you had intercourse?’
‘Erm...months ago.’
‘Nine months?’
Harper did the mental arithmetic, a worm of worry wriggling through her mind. Her stomach swooped and dipped and dived. Her one-night stand with Jack Livingstone. How could she be pregnant to a playboy? It was her worst nightmare. How could she tell him? How could she rock up to him carrying a full-term baby in her arms? How could she be having Jack’s baby? Anyone’s baby? She hadn’t planned on having kids. She wasn’t the maternal type. She was a career woman. She had no room in her life for a baby. She hadn’t even held a baby since she was a kid. ‘Yes, but that’s ridiculous. I—I’ve had a period every month since.’ She looked down at her slightly rounded abdomen just as the pain began again. ‘Oh, God, here it comes again.’ She gripped the doctor’s hand so hard Dr Praneesh winced.
‘You’re in labour, Harper. It seems you’ve had a cryptic pregnancy. It’s not as rare as you’d think. One in two thousand five hundred pregnancies in the UK, which is about three hundred a year. You can still have a light period each month and not have any other symptoms of pregnancy, or at least none that you notice, especially if the placenta is in the front of the abdomen, as it lessens the sensations of the foetus kicking and moving. I’ll have to examine you to see how close you are to delivering.’
‘Delivering...’ Harper swallowed a lump of dread. ‘You mean, I’m having a baby?Now?’ Her panicked shriek rivalled the volume of Morphine Man in cubicle six.
‘Your contractions are ten minutes apart, so it won’t be long now. From what you told the triage nurse, you’ve been in non-active labour a couple of days. I’ll do an ultrasound to check the baby’s development, and the sex if you’d like to know, and then do an internal examination. Would you like to call a friend or the baby’s father to be with you?’
Harper gulped. Her two best friends and business partners were out of town—Ruby had only days ago got engaged to Lucas Rothwell and was spending the weekend with him in the Lake District. And Aerin was visiting her parents in Buckinghamshire for their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. God only knew where Jack Livingstone would be—no doubt in bed with his latest hook-up in one of his plush hotels. But she had to tell him, right? He was the father and he had to be given the choice to be present at the baby’s birth, not to mention the choice to be a part of his child’s life.