Oh, help.
He’d never imagined himself as a father before. Not with Zoe, even though he’d loved her. But maybe that was because he and Zoe hadn’t been quite the right fit.
Was he the right fit with Georgie?
The idea sent him into a flat spin. He was worried sick about the one constant in his life, the dog he regarded as his entire family. Right now, he didn’t have the headspace to face the ghosts of his past and work out whether he could deal with them.
Knowing that he was being a coward, but doing it anyway, he said, ‘I’ll just go and get some more bread from the farm shop before you leave for work, if that’s OK?’
‘Sure. Truffle and I are going to watch a rerun of Friends,’ she said.
She was actually sitting on the floor with the dog now, taking as much care of her as Ryan would himself, and it made him feel as if something had cracked around his heart. Something that started to let the light in.
The feeling intensified over the next couple of days. Georgie was really, really good with Truffle. She was patient, she kept the dog amused and helped tire her out so she wasn’t fractious. He could trust her with his dog; so maybe, even though the idea of letting anyone that close to him terrified him, he could trust her with himself. Trust that even when her six-month job swap was up, she’d work with him to find a way for them to stay together.
But she was behaving more like a best friend than anything else. How could he explain to her that his feelings towards her were changing—that he was starting to want things he’d always believed he didn’t? And that he wanted them with her?
Sharing a house with Ryan was driving Georgie crackers. He’d made it very clear that he wanted nothing more than friendship from her—that he didn’t want to get involved with anyone again, and he wasn’t going to act on the attraction between them, despite that kiss.
Maybe a mad fling would get him out of her system.
But Georgie didn’t want a mad fling. If anything was going to happen between them, she wanted more than one night; she wanted to see where it would take them.
Which left them at stalemate, because Ryan McGregor was one of the most stubborn men she’d ever met.
She was working in the PAU at lunchtime on the Saturday when a four-year-old girl came in. Jennie had had a cold, which had then turned into a cough that wouldn’t go away. Her mum said it was worse at night but thought all colds were like that; and now Jennie was struggling to breathe, her chest was wheezy and she’d complained of chest pain. There was obvious sucking in at the base of her throat.
All the signs told Georgie that this was probably asthma, but she wanted to run an ECG to check the little girl’s heart. She went in search of someone to help her do the ECG while she did a full examination, and Ryan just happened to be in the corridor.
‘Everything OK?’ he asked.
‘No, I have a patient with suspected asthma and I want to run an ECG, so I need someone in with me to do that while I help her with her breathing.’
‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
He was too senior for this, really, but she wasn’t going to argue; she wanted to help her patient now.
She took him back to the treatment room and introduced him to Jennie and her mum.
‘Is there any asthma or hay fever or allergies in your family?’ Ryan asked.
Jennie’s mum shook her head. ‘Not in her dad’s, either. Is that what you think it is?’
‘It’s possible,’ Georgie said. ‘But we’ll concentrate on getting Jennie breathing easily before we run some tests.’
‘Can you sit up straight for us, Jennie?’ Ryan asked. ‘That’ll make it easier for you to breathe.’
The little girl nodded, a tear running down her face, and sat up straight.
‘That’s really good,’ Georgie said. ‘Now I’d like you to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Take it slowly. All the way in, all the way out.’
She guided Jennie through the breathing; once the little girl seemed calmer, she fitted a blue inhaler into a spacer. ‘This is special medication to help you breathe,’ she said. ‘I want you to hold the tube for me, and put the mouthpiece in your mouth. I’m going to press this bit on the end to put the medicine in the tube and I want you to breathe in to make the tube whistle for me. Can you do that?’
Jennie nodded again, and did what Georgie asked.
‘That’s brilliant,’ Ryan said. ‘You’re being so brave.’ He glanced at his watch and counted off a minute. ‘Another big breath in of the medicine?’
They repeated a puff of the inhaler per minute for ten puffs, then checked Jennie’s oxygen saturation levels. Ryan distracted Jennie with a series of terrible jokes while Georgie took bloods, and then Georgie put sticky pads on Jennie’s chest so they could run an ECG.
‘The pattern on this paper is a picture of how your heart is beating,’ Ryan said. ‘And that’s beautifully normal.’
Jennie’s mum looked relieved. ‘So is it asthma?’ she asked.
‘Coughing and wheezing can be caused by things other than asthma,’ Georgie said, ‘and Jennie’s too young to do some of the tests to show how her lungs are working, so I know this is going to be frustrating but we’ll need to do a trial of treatment for the next few weeks.’
‘We can give you a blue inhaler and a spacer like this one for her to use when she has bad symptoms,’ Ryan said.
