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Her father chuckled and they parted for the night, Emma going quietly into the boys’ room and watching her sons sleep for a few minutes before dropping a kiss on each of their heads and taking herself off to bed.
Where, exhausted as she was, sleep was a long time coming.
Mainly because every time she closed her eyes she saw an image of a pair of laughing blue eyes.
She’d no sooner banished this image—with difficulty—when the barn dance hove into her mind. Though with Dad going too, the gossip mill could hardly slot her into the ranks of one of ‘Marty’s women’.
Could it?
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS SOMEWHERE during this mental argument that she fell asleep, to be woken by two very excited boys telling her God had brought them a puppy.
‘We’ve been praying and praying,’ Xavier was saying, while Hamish, usually the leader, echoed the words.
‘Praying and praying?’ Emma muttered weakly, then remembered the playgroup her father and the boys had attended at a local church in Sydney.
But praying for a puppy?
It was the first she’d heard of it!
The boys were now bouncing on her bed so any thought of going back to sleep was forgotten, while their combined pleas to come and see it dragged her reluctantly out of bed.
The ‘puppy’, sitting quietly in the kitchen listening to a lecture from her father on a dog’s place being in the yard, was the size of a small pony. It leapt up in delight when it saw the boys and lolloped towards them.
And her, where it slobbered enthusiastically all over her pyjamas.
However, that gave her more time to check it out. For all it had, at some time, been well cared for, it was painfully thin and none too clean.
‘Sit,’ she said, and was surprised when he obeyed immediately. He’d definitely been cared for by someone who’d taken the time to train him.
But a dog?
A strange dog?
‘I think we should leave him outside until he’s had a bath,’ she said, which brought wails from both boys.
‘Well, go and play with him on the veranda,’ she compromised, following them as far as the door so she could keep an eye on all three of them, mainly the dog.
‘We can’t keep him,’ she said to her father over her shoulder. ‘He’ll just be something else for you to look after. Besides, he’s sure to belong to someone. We can take a photo, put up posters, maybe ring the local radio.’
Her father nodded.
‘I’ll do all that, and I’ll take him to the vet, get him checked out. He might be micro-chipped. But if no one claims him, well, the boys do love him already and he’d be great for them. I’ve been watching him closely and he’s certainly not dangerous. The yard’s all fenced and he’s big enough to handle two rough little boys.’
Emma shook her head, then realised the dog had taken up far too much time already and if she didn’t hurry she’d be late for work.
But a dog?
Were they settling in to country life so quickly?
The ED was quiet when she arrived, not quite late but close, and the chat about the triage desk was of the forthcoming barn dance—apparently one of the big events in the Braxton social calendar.
Maybe the animal shelter would take the dog.
She was about to ask when the radio came on—an ambulance ten minutes out. Sylvie lifted the receiver to her ear so the whole room didn’t have to hear, relaying information to Emma as it came through.
‘Atrial fibrillation, blood pressure not too bad but pulse of one hundred and forty.’
Emma’s mind clicked into gear. Amiodarone drip. The cardiologist she’d always worked with recommended an initial IV treatment of one hundred and fifty mg over ten minutes, followed by sixty mg an hour over six hours and thirty mg an hour over eighteen hours.
But…
‘Is there a local cardiologist?’ she asked Sylvie, although she was reasonably sure the town would be too small to support one.
‘No, but we have a fly-in-fly-out cardio man. He does two days a week in his office in Retford, then flies around about six country towns each fortnight. We usually phone him with any problems, and, without checking to be sure, I think he’s due here tomorrow.’
Emma nodded. Presumably she could phone him, as she’d have done in the city, although down there the specialist she’d phoned had usually been in the same hospital or in rooms close by. It was strange the shift from a huge city hospital to a small country one, but the work remained the same.
‘Could you get him on the phone for me?’ she asked Sylvie as she walked away to meet the ambulance and its passenger.
‘It happens every so often,’ the patient told her cheerfully, obviously unfazed by the sudden onset of fibrillation. He was a man in his late thirties or early forties, she guessed, and sensible enough to know when he needed medical help.
