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‘She can’t leave now. She’s had her pre-med.’ That was the nurse, standing between her and Oliver.
‘Fine,’ Oliver told her. ‘Then I’ll stay with her until she can leave, but there’s no way my kid is going to be aborted. Got that?’
His words shocked through Ella’s pre-med, kicking her slow heartbeat into thudding anxiety.
‘I’m going to go and find the doctor. He won’t put up with this,’ the nurse was threatening.
‘You go and find him, and tell him when you do that I’ll be suing him for trying to abort my kid.’
The nurse had gone but Oliver was still there, leaning over the bed, his hands on Ella’s arms, as he insisted, ‘Come on, we’re getting out of here.’
The pre-med seemed to have taken away her willpower to do anything other than simply go along with the almost dreamlike things that were happening to her.
One minute she was lying in bed and the next, or so it seemed, she was in Oliver’s arms and then in a taxi, then a lift and then finally in another bed, where finally she was allowed to sleep.
Oliver looked down at Ella’s sleeping body, torn between elation and disbelief. What the hell had he done? The last thing he wanted was a kid. Just as his dad couldn’t have wanted him. But he had allowed him life, he had watched over him as best he could, he had provided for him and for his mother. The mark of a man. And Oliver simply didn’t have it in him to be less of a man than his father had been.
Ella woke up slowly and reluctantly. Her hand was lying on top of the bedclothes, against her flat belly. Tears trickled from between her closed eyelids. She had to do what she had done, but there was still grief and guilt to be borne. Her child would never be born now, but better that than to have a mother who later tried to kill it in her madness.
Someone was standing beside the bed.
‘Christ knows what was in that ruddy pre-med. You’ve been out for nearly two hours.’
Oliver. What was he doing here?
Ella’s body jerked beneath the bedclothes as she struggled to sit up, realising as she did so that ‘here’ wasn’t a hospital bed, but instead the bedroom in the flat Oliver was renting.
Vague memories stirred, disembodied and out of focus.
‘The kid’s still there,’ Oliver told her abruptly.
Still there? She looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘I couldn’t let you do it.’
He couldn’t?
Finally Ella found her voice. ‘That decision wasn’t yours to make.’
Oliver shrugged her argument aside. ‘The kid’s mine. And another thing: no kid of mine is going to grow up not knowing who its dad is, or not having my name.’ Like he’d had to do. ‘That means that we’re going to have to get married.’
Married? Her and Oliver?
‘No,’ Ella refused immediately.
‘Yes,’ Oliver insisted, adding unkindly, ‘You haven’t got any choice now. I can’t see that posh family of yours putting an announcement in The Times to tell the world that you’ve had a little bastard.’
Ella flinched.
‘You can’t mean it. I told you what happened to my mother,’ she reminded him desperately.
Oliver wasn’t going to be swayed. ‘I do mean it. We’ve created the kid between us and there’s no way that he’s going to grow up like I did, not knowing who his proper dad is. Once he’s been born, you can do what the hell you like–walk out, divorce me, do whatever you like, but the kid’s going to be mine and he stays with me.’
Chapter Fifty-Three
Four days, four days, nearly five, nearly a week, and Robbie had grown weaker with each hour of every one of them. He looked frighteningly small and fragile beneath the hospital bedclothes, his eyes huge in their hollowed sockets above his sunken, waxen cheeks.
‘Uncle Drogo?’ His voice, so thin and frail, the effort of speech so obviously draining what little strength he had, tore at Emerald’s heart. She loved him so much Why had it taken her so long to realise what a truly precious gift he was?
