One Tiny Miracle... by Carol Marinelli Read Free Book Online

more, just the unsettling scent of Celeste. The room was too hot, so of course she kept lifting up her arms and coiling her hair onto the top ofher head as she chatted away, and then it would tumble down again, and she’d lift her arms once more.
    ‘I’d better go…’
    ‘Already?’ Celeste said, but then they got talking, oh, just about this and that, and suddenly it was after ten. As he stood at the door to really go this time, Celeste found herself thinking that she’d had the nicest night in a long time.
    Too nice, even.
    Because of all the stupid things to be thinking, she was wondering what it would be like to be kissed goodnight by him.
    Wondering what she’d do if that lovely mouth came a little bit closer.
    ‘Thanks for the flowers, by the way.’ Ben broke into her thoughts. ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
    ‘It’s no problem.’
    ‘No, you really shouldn’t have done that.’ Ben grinned. ‘They’ll be dead in two days—I’ll forget to water them.’
    ‘I won’t.’ Celeste smiled. ‘Just enjoy.’
    It was a relief to close the door on him!

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HEY ignored each other at work, of course.
    Well, they didn’t mention their evenings by the television or walks on the beach and sometimes as she sat in the staffroom and listened as Deb rattled on about how sure she was that Ben was going to ask her out (when Ben had already told her that he was embarrassed by Deb’s constant flirting), or when the gorgeous Belinda started talking rather too warmly about him, though Celeste sat like a contended Buddha, inside she was fuming and could have cheerfully strangled them quiet.
    She liked him.
    Which was okay and everything. After all, half the department liked him in that way too, she was hardly in a minority—no, there was a slightly bigger problem than that.
    Sometimes, sometimes she got that nervous fluttering feeling, which could only be generated by two.
    Sometimes, sometimes she got this fleeting glimpse that Ben liked her too.
    She told herself she was imagining it—as surely asDeb was. Because there was no way Ben could possibly be interested in her.
    So why was he acting so strangely?
    Coffee break over, she headed back to Cots—and tried to tell her stupid heart to stop beating so quickly at the sight of him, except it didn’t listen. It picked up speed half an hour later, only for different reasons as a rather frantic mother handed Celeste a very floppy baby.
    She pushed on the call bell even before she unwrapped him.
    He was big and chubby and barely opened his eyes as Celeste swiftly undressed him and ran some obs.
    ‘He keeps vomiting…’ The mum was trying not to cry. ‘He saw the GP yesterday, she said it was gastro and to push fluids into him…’
    No help was coming, so Celeste pushed the call bell again. The baby’s pulse was racing and his temperature was high, so she put him on some oxygen and pushed the call bell again as she pulled over the IV trolley, resorting in the end to sticking her head out of the cubicle.
    ‘Could I have a hand?’ she snapped, and shot a frantic look at Ben, who was showing a patient his ankle X-ray. ‘Now!’
    ‘Press it three times for an emergency!” Ben snapped back, when he saw the baby.
    She was still learning which way was up—only yesterday she had been warned for overreacting and pressing three times for everything remotely urgent and now she was being scolded for doing too little.
    Some days this job was just so hard!
    ‘Depressed fontanel.’ Ben swiftly examined the listless baby, as Celeste quickly lifted him off the scales and set up for an IV. She was terrified of putting an IV line in such a sick baby, but it was part of her course and something she had to learn to do. She’d started on big, strapping, muscle-bound men with veins like tram lines, and then on sick adults. She had even put IVs in a few children now and a couple of babies as well, only not one as unwell as this and not with Mum anxiously