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“No...” The word came out because it was the only one he could wrestle through his closing throat. He wasn’t like Dimitri Nikolaides, but he’d been tricked by him, his fears twisted, his weakness exposed. Made to doubt. “We can go—”
Her short, broken laugh stopped his words dead and ripped at his insides.
“I hate you.” The words, almost a whisper, hit him in the chest like a cannon blast.
She hated him.
Dimitri reached his daughter and began hauling her back toward the plane and onto the flight to a country Ares couldn’t name because they hadn’t told him. Somewhere far enough away that no one here would know about the baby—that was all he knew.
No hands grabbed him this time, but his feet still stayed glued to the ground.
“I will never forgive you for this!”
He wanted to say he loved her, but how could he say that now? Why would she believe him?
“I’m sorry.” He said the words, the only words he could find, and repeated them again and again.
I will come for you.
The words swam up—the words he meant to utter but couldn’t say to her. Not now, when the eyes that had always looked upon him with sweetness boiled over with such rage he could barely breathe.
The men who had been dragging him away now joined their boss in wrestling a struggling Erianthe back up the stairs.
The last words she screamed at him would still ring in his ears long after the plane departed. Because she was right.
This was all his fault.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_3023a61e-e551-5d36-bc29-6ca88e4fc0cb)
THE LAST TIME Dr. Erianthe Nikolaides had set foot on the island of her birth she’d been barely sixteen, pregnant and betrayed by the boy she’d loved. Ten years on it had taken the earth actually moving and the request of her adoptive brother to pull her back.
Weeks before, Mythelios had been struck by a strong earthquake and Theo had sent up the beacon to call them home to staff the only medical facility on the island, which they were all tied to. But Theo had urged her to stay and finish her medical degree before she answered the call, so her arrival had been regrettably postponed.
The heat of the July sun baked her dark hair like coals on the back of her neck, sucking the strength from her so that every step toward the lovely three-story stucco building housing the Mythelios Free Clinic became a marathon. That was why her knees wobbled and she barely had her suitcases under control. Nothing else. Not the weight of her past and her secrets. Not the rock in her middle that came from knowing Theo Nikolaides wasn’t the only man she’d be seeing today.
Ares Xenakis had received the same call to come home that she had. Theo had summoned home the whole merry band of the pampered children of Mopaxeni Shipping, forgotten until they messed up—the men who funded and regularly staffed the clinic and Erianthe, who had nothing to offer but her skills. She’d cut all contact with her parents years ago, and that had included her trust fund.
Her training had been officially completed only last week, and she was late arriving to the disaster. She was that final piece of the family they’d forged when they’d still been counting their ages in single digits. The family that would be broken forever if the others ever found out how her seventeenth year had ended.
She clanged her way through the main entrance, her resolve to take her position at her brother’s side stronger than her ability to control the four-wheeled storage system erratically rolling behind her. One wheel caught at the door frame and her suitcase snagged just as the door swung closed on it. Perfection. It would be really great if one part of this journey could go smoothly.
She put some weight into a tug and the case snapped free, making her stagger backward into the clinic, an expletive bouncing off the teeth she’d clenched shut. By the time she turned around, every eye in the packed reception area had fixed on her with the kind of wariness that said they expected calamity to accompany such cacophony.
If the heat had left any extra air in her lungs, she would’ve laughed. The only harm she’d ever caused on Mythelios had been to herself, by trusting the wrong boy and not running away the first time her father had uttered the word convent.
The urge to laugh evaporated like water in the summer sun, but Erianthe tried to cover it with a smile, hoping to make a better impression on her future patients than that.
She’d had a week to prepare to see Ares again, to prepare for the first run-in with her treacherous parents, but she no longer had that wellspring of rage that had fueled her daydreams of vengeance in the first couple years. Now she had no idea what she should say to any of them, or even how she should feel. Ten years was a long time.
Focus on today.
The door swung shut, clamping off the blast furnace her years in England had made her weak to, and taking away the light her sun-blinded eyes needed to see.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed slowly out.
No, today was too big. She had to focus on this minute, this second. Not one of her three betrayers was presently there. She didn’t have to know how to deal with them right at this second.
It wasn’t so much that she saw someone in front of her—her eyes were still closed and obstructed by her hand—but she felt a presence in her personal bubble and opened her eyes.
“Dr. Nikolaides.”
The woman standing before her smiled, not waiting for any answer, just relieving her of her cases with one hand and using the other to steer the visibly travel-bedraggled doctor somewhere that wouldn’t affect the clinic’s image.
“Your brother is with a patient, so just have a seat in here and I’ll send him shortly.”
She clicked on a light, allowing Erianthe to see the small office she’d been ushered to—and the woman herself. Friendly, but firm, with a touch of something motherly about her—not that Erianthe had much experience with what that was like—and just enough silver hair threaded through her ebony curls to give her gravitas. To make her somehow emanate comfort as she carried on speaking in a calm tone.
Maybe it was just that Erianthe was no longer a spectacle, disrupting the waiting room, but she felt a little better. Less as if the sky was trying to press her into the rocky dirt.
The woman added something about coffee and departed, leaving Erianthe to fold into the closest chair—which happened to be one that spun.
Petra. She’d said her name was Petra.
Goodness, she had to get it together. What kind of doctor took half a minute to process something simple like a person’s name? A name she’d expected to hear, no less. The wonder woman Theo often raved about. Petra. Who had gone to fetch the magical elixir that would sharpen her buzzing senses and keep her from appearing like a bigger catastrophe than the quake had been.
The cool, supple leather of the chair reached through her light linen trousers, giving another tactile wink of comfort, soothing against the heat she’d absorbed, enough for her to notice that her head ached in a way that said it had probably been throbbing for a while.
The office door stood open and she swiveled the chair to watch through the aperture, silently counting breaths until the roar of memories she’d been trying to ignore since Theo’s call faded back a little.
The will that had carried her through those first months after her banishment forced it into something closer to a buzz. No, not a buzz—though it was just as discordant. Like her head was a radio receiver.
She stood as if at the edge of the signal for two overlapping stations—oldies and current hits. Annoying. Distorting. Confusing. Impossible to ignore. Because she knew the old song better, and it broke through the new one just enough that she wasn’t quite sure which song she was actually listening to. She could walk around in the present—she’d learned the lyrics—but the old song she knew by heart.
During the first two years after she’d been gone, the balance had been different. Her days had been filled with the oldies station, but now and then something new had broken through. Eventually she’d forced herself to learn the new words, to sing the song of today, and the balance had gradually shifted. She’d studied harder, because a mind full of calculus and physics had less room to wallow in the terrible injustice and loss of what had happened to her.
A corridor of bright light opened across the floor of the reception area, broken by a lumbering, misshapen shadow as the door swung closed, followed by the sounds of exertion. A call for help came from a rusty voice, and those she could see sitting in Reception turned worried eyes to her through the office door.
No one was out there to help. And they did see her as a doctor, no matter her clumsy, inept, socially awkward arrival.
Strength she’d been faking the whole day appeared, and Erianthe launched herself from the chair and out of the office. A man crouched on the floor beside a pregnant woman who leaned heavily on her left hip as she pressed at the right side of her swollen belly with her other hand. Six months? Seven? Less if it was multiples.
She’d made her occupation treating and helping pregnant women in distress, but when childbirth came unnaturally there was another feeling—something that twisted her insides and made her second-guess her career choice. Just for a second.
Erianthe knelt beside her, introducing herself and asking the man, “Did she fall onto the floor?”
“No. I put her down. You’re the baby doctor?” the man asked, reaching for her arm as if touching her made her more real to him, more of a comfort, and that conveyed all the trust and hope he was putting into her by giving this woman into her care.
The baby doctor. Theo must have told them she was coming.
“Yes. I’m an obstetrician. Tell me what happened.”
Just then Petra came out of somewhere with a mug of something steamy and a plate in her hand—but, seeing Erianthe kneeling beside a patient, she put them down on her reception desk and ran to get a wheelchair.
God bless her, the woman really was the dynamo Theo had promised. How had she forgotten about Petra?
The three of them got the patient transferred to the chair and Petra took control, steering them all toward the office Erianthe had just vacated and leaving them there to get files and supplies.
“You’re having pain?” Erianthe asked the woman, who nodded and pressed on her right side.
“Tell me about the pain. How did it start? Can you describe how it hurts?”
Though it was difficult for the woman to talk, within a couple short sentences Erianthe was able to determine that she was likely not dealing with a normal—if premature—birth situation.
“You were shifted to your left hip on the floor, so does it hurt more when you lie on your right?”
She took the woman’s wrist to track her pulse rate, while listening to the patient describe symptoms she had already expected: increased nausea, but only after the onset of pain, which had coincided with the sudden onset of bowel issues...
Petra returned with a familiar face in tow.
“Cailey!”
Erianthe hadn’t seen her onetime good friend since leaving the island, back when they’d become close because her mother had worked in the Nikolaides household. Cailey was someone Erianthe had always missed but had lost because she hadn’t been able to think of a way to talk to anyone and maintain her secrets back then.
Still couldn’t—not really. The first thing she wanted to do upon seeing her was confess, clear the air, but that kind of confession would only throw more debris around. They’d all choke on it.
It was hardly the time for even a proper greeting, let alone a confession, so Erianthe grabbed Cailey by the shoulders for a quick hug—she’d offer to help with the wedding when they had a few minutes to catch up. Then she got on with it, because that was what the moment demanded.
“I need temperature and blood pressure. She’s presenting with symptoms of appendicitis. Do we have a proper examination room? What about imaging equipment? I’d like to do some tests. There’s a lab, right?”
“Appendicitis?” the man asked, the wobble in his words conveying the worry of a husband and father, not just a friend. Which she should have expected if she’d given it a moment of thought. Mythelios was still quite traditional, even beyond the standards of the rest of Greek culture. And he was a good husband, if the deep furrow of his brows and the amount of lip sweat meant anything.
“That means there is an inflammation in her appendix. We’re going to check it out very well. Then we’ll know more about what we need to do to treat her. How long has the pain been going on?”
Over the next few minutes Cailey confirmed the low-grade fever that spoke of infection, and the husband spoke of having worn his wife down and made her come to the clinic after a night of increasingly unbearable pain.
“Who is our surgeon?” Erianthe would be happy when she got up to speed well enough to keep from alarming her patients by questioning the treatment options available here.
“Dr. Xenakis has the most experience,” Cailey answered.
As hard as Erianthe had worked to know as little as possible about Ares, she did at least know his specialty was emergency medicine, not surgery.
She leaned in to speak quietly to Cailey. “No general surgeon on the staff right now?”
“Ares has a great deal of experience. He got it in the field, with that unit he’s with. The one that travels to isolated areas to help people.”
Something she hadn’t been aware of. Ares was with an outreach charity? That didn’t strike her as fitting his always larger-than-life personality.
“Is he here?”
As if she didn’t know...
“He is. Let’s get Jacinda into a room,” Petra interjected, once again taking charge. “I’ll send him in. Dr. Nikolaides, do you want to change your clothes? We have extra scrubs in the corner cabinet there. Just close the door after us and change. We’ll be in the rear examination room.”
Not exactly the way she’d pictured her first day back. She had planned to say hello and tell her brother that because she felt weird about interrupting his new love nest with Cailey she was going to stay elsewhere, all the while carefully avoiding seeing Ares with the ninja-like sneaking skills she possessed only in her delusional imagination.
Now she was going into surgery with him. Another perfect point to her first day.
“You’re going to get her into CT?” she asked, snapping back into motion before Cailey could escape.
Cailey paused, the expression on her face reticent, regretful. “We don’t have a working CT scanner at the moment. Ours is on the fritz after the earthquake. I figured you’d want a CBC to check for infection?”
She waited for Erianthe to answer, but Petra kept going with Jacinda.
The CT scan wasn’t absolutely necessary—doctors had been correctly diagnosing appendicitis decades before imaging became available—but it was like a safety net. And today they would be working without a net.
“Yes to the blood panel,” she answered, weighing her options.
Flying in and out of the island was still difficult, and time was of the essence with appendicitis. She’d consult with Ares, then make the call.
Ares.
She didn’t need the warning flares her body was sending up to remind her how emotionally loaded his name was. She couldn’t even think it without those feelings of outrage and heartbreak rushing into her mouth, metallic and bitter.
Dr. Xenakis was safer. Easier on her fraying nerves.
Having something to do would help her, as it had always helped her. And helping her first patient on Mythelios would be even better. Filling up the hole that had opened in her chest with honorable duty.
The cabinet’s supply of extra scrubs needed restocking, and she made a mental note to see if an order had been made. They’d probably been hit hard in the days after the quake, when patient clothing had been ruined either in accidents or during emergency treatment and scrubs had been given out to wear instead.
She found a set of bottoms she could wear, due to the horrors of a drawstring waist, paired it with a tentlike top, then hit her suitcase for better shoes, a hairband and a stethoscope. Scrubs weren’t meant to flatter a person, and she hadn’t come home to win some kind of fashion award.
Later she’d let herself feel guilty for being glad someone needed her help. Having any kind of focus would let her meet Ares on a professional front, put all that personal stuff away—or at least make it clear to her brain what was important to the Erianthe of today: work. Personal emotional wounds, no matter how grievous, couldn’t bleed out or cause sepsis.
She’d worked cordially and professionally with both lukewarm ex-boyfriends and jerks she’d rather kick in the face than speak to, and she had never lost her cool with them. Even when there had been good reason to lose her cool. This would be no different. He was no different from any other colleague.
Closing the office door, she headed the way she’d been directed, grabbing her coffee and snack in transit, and practically inhaling half before she arrived at the patient’s room.
She reached for the knob of the exam room door, but before her hand closed on it Theo appeared at her side and immediately grabbed her in a quick hug that required she hold her arms out in a wide V to avoid dousing him in coffee.
Ever affectionate, even after the years of absence and neglect she’d forced on them both by staying so far away that his only choice in seeing her had been to come to her, this small display of affection when she was already worked up caused her throat to constrict. There was nothing she’d have liked better than to take shelter in the arms of someone she knew would always have her back. If she ever let herself ask.
It galled her how close to the surface those old feelings had risen since she’d gotten off the boat.
Turning her head, she kissed his cheek—something she could do—then stepped abruptly back. “Careful—you’ll end up with coffee down your back.”
“Glad you’re here,” he said, in that laughing way of his. “We’ll catch up after, shall we? Are you up to seeing her? Do you need anything from me?”
He was worried about her—and probably the patient too. Theo always worried about her, and one thing she hoped to accomplish by coming home was relieving that worry without burdening him with the secrets she’d hidden from everyone. Seeing this first patient to the best possible outcome would be a good start.
