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‘We’re to open them now?’ Rhiannon asked.
‘Now,’ Rhys said with a smile.
Dilys opened the envelope and scanned the invitation quickly. ‘You’re getting married at Easter?’ Dilys stared at them in surprise, and then beamed. ‘That’s fabulous. And you’re sure you want us to come?’
‘Absolutely,’ Katrina said. ‘It’s not going to be an enormous wedding, as my family’s quite small—just our family and closest friends—but there’ll be more of a party in the evening when our colleagues will be there too.’
‘We’d love to come,’ Dilys said immediately. ‘All of us.’
‘There was something else.’ Rhys coughed, and turned to Llewellyn. ‘I was wondering if you’d be my best man.’
‘Your best man?’ Llewellyn echoed, looking shocked. ‘I…I’d be proud. Really proud and really honoured.’ His eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘As long as it won’t upset your mam,’ he added, looking awkward.
Rhys gave a half-shrug. ‘She probably won’t be there.’
Llewellyn sighed. ‘She’s not softened at all over the years, then?’
‘You know the situation,’ Rhys said. ‘But at least you’re all going to be there, so my family’s going to be part of my wedding day.’
‘We wouldn’t miss it,’ Dilys said warmly, ‘not for anything.’
‘And one more thing,’ Katrina said. ‘We’d like to have an official engagement dinner. Just our families. On Valentine’s Day.’
The day of the engagement dinner arrived swiftly. The Gregorys and the Morgans took to each other straight away, and Katrina was delighted by the way Rhys seemed to bloom in their company.
But during the dinner Rhys took her hand, nodding at the family sitting a few tables down from them.
She looked, and saw the same thing that he did: a small boy coughing and apparently finding it hard to breathe.
‘I think one of us might be needed there, cariad,’ he said quietly. ‘Could be a foreign body, could be asthma. I’ll go.’
She watched him walk over to the family and talk to the parents—and then he beckoned her over.
‘Kat, it’s your engagement. Stay here. I’ll go and help Rhys,’ Theo offered.
Madison placed her hand over his. ‘Let her go,’ she said softly. ‘They’re used to working together.’
‘Like we are,’ Theo said. ‘Point taken.’
‘I won’t be long,’ Katrina said, and went to join Rhys.
Rhys introduced her swiftly, and continued taking the patient history. Katrina noticed that the little boy was wheezing heavily, though in a way that was a good sign. The last thing she wanted to see was a ‘silent chest’, where very little air was going in and out of the child’s lungs and breathing sounds were completely absent—a silent chest was life-threatening, and the child would need high-flow oxygen therapy and steroid injections as emergency treatment.
‘Ben’s been wheezing a bit today—we shouldn’t have taken him for such a long walk in the cold, but we were having such a nice time we didn’t think about the temperature,’ the woman said, biting her lip.
Definitely asthma, then, and this attack had been brought on by the cold. ‘Has he had asthma long?’ Katrina asked.
‘Since he was about three. The doctor diagnosed him three years ago.’
‘Do you have his reliever inhaler?’ Rhys asked.
Even as he spoke, the woman was rummaging through her bag. ‘Oh, no. It must still be in our room.’
‘Can you get it, please?’ Rhys asked. ‘And do you have a spacer?’
‘A spacer?’ she asked.
Clearly not. ‘Never mind—I can make something. But we need his medication right now, please.’
A waitress came over to them. ‘Can I help?’
Katrina nodded. ‘Please. Do you have a polystyrene cup and a knife? Or any cup where we can cut a hole in.’
‘If necessary, a brown paper bag,’ Rhys added. ‘And call an ambulance.’
‘Ambulance?’ The little boy’s father went white.
‘Precautionary,’ Rhys said gently. ‘The medications and a makeshift spacer might be enough to get him through this, but I don’t have a medical kit with me and we never, ever take risks with little ones.’
Meanwhile Katrina picked the little boy up, sat on his chair and settled him on her lap. Laying him down would make things a lot worse, she knew; right now he needed to be upright, to help him breathe. And being unable to breathe properly was making him panic, which in turn made it even harder for him to breathe—a vicious circle she needed to break by distracting him.
