The Doctor's Rebel Knight Read Online Free PDF

as she pushed through the garden gate towards the house.
    Jane Pelleri was trying her best to do CPR on the baby in the family room just off the pool area, with the two little boys distressed and crying in the background.
    ‘Jane, I’ll take over now,’ Fran said in a calm, doctor-in-control tone, even though her stomach was roiling with doubts and fears that she wouldn’t be up to the task. This was no well-equipped A and E department. This was a family’s home with baby and toddler photographs on the walls, not lifesaving resuscitation gear. Fear gripped at Fran’s heart with cruel claws. What if she couldn’t do this? What if she failed? Her stomach churned with nausea, her skin broke out in a sheen of perspiration and her hands shook almost uncontrollably as she tried to assess the situation.
    The child was on the very springy sofa, which had made the mother’s efforts at cardiac compression largely ineffective. Fran placed the infant, who looked about eighteen months old, onto her back on the carpeted floor, and tilted her head slightly back to open the airway. There seemed to be theremains of a biscuit in the child’s mouth, which Fran swept out with her finger. The child was clearly not breathing and appeared cyanosed. Supporting Ella’s head, Fran covered the nose and mouth with her mouth and gave five puffs, then felt for a pulse over the inner arm, then the neck.
    Either there was none, or her lack of recent clinical experience was letting her down and she just wasn’t sensitive enough to feel it, she thought as another pang of doubt stung her. She had to assume the child’s heart had stopped. Using two fingers, Fran gently compressed the child’s chest over the lower sternum, twenty rapid compressions for each couple of breaths.
    Was that the right ratio? she thought in panic. It was higher in adults, lower in children and lower in infants. Oh, God, what was the ratio? Had her skills and training been punched out of her along with her confidence in A and E that day? Her brain became foggy with fear, dread and doubts. She couldn’t do this. She was failing. She was not going to be able to save this child. How would she face the parents? What about those two little boys? Oh, God, even the photos on the walls seemed to be staring down at her in accusation. You are a failure. You are no good at this. Look at what you have done.
    Fran vaguely registered a siren sounding and it seemed mere seconds before Jacob Hawke was kneeling beside her, talking to her, but it was as if it was in a vacuum. She couldn’t hear him; she saw his lips moving but it was as if the sound had been muffled by her fear.
    ‘For God’s sake, Dr Nin,’ Jacob bit out roughly, finally shaking her out of her stasis. ‘Help me here. Keep her steady while I do the mouth-to-mouth.’
    Fran blinked herself into action and held the child in position, watching in numb silence as Jacob determinedly worked at the breaths and compressions for what seemed likehours, made worse by the howling boys and now hysterical mother. Had the child’s colour improved, or was it Fran’s imagination?
    Unexpectedly, the infant coughed, then seemed to convulse. She vomited up some water, coughed again, and then started wailing, the colour of her face turning from lavender to cherry red.
    In the distance another wailing sound could be heard, this one the reassuring whine of the ambulance approaching at speed.
    ‘Mummy-y!’ the toddler croaked over another cough.
    ‘Keep her on her side,’ Jacob directed the child’s mother. ‘She’ll be fine but she needs to go to hospital for a proper check of her airways and lungs.’
    Fran sat back on her heels, her breathing hurting her chest as cautious relief flooded through her. Ella was alive. Ella was breathing. Ella was alive…
    Jacob met her eyes, something in his ice-cold gaze ripping through her like shards of ice. ‘Everything all right, Dr Nin?’ he asked in a tone as arctic as his