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The Surgeon's Love-Child
Lilian Darcy
The sexual attraction was instantaneous.American surgeon Candace Fletcher felt it as soon as Dr. Steve Colton met her off the plane as she arrived down under.He was gorgeous – tanned, lean, muscular Australian male – several years younger than herself. It wasn't long before they were embarking on a passionate affair…Then, just a few months before she was due to return home to America, the bombshell came: she was pregnant …
“I just have to say it, don’t I? Steve, I’m pregnant.”
Whump!
That was the sound of his backside hitting the couch with force. He suddenly knew what the expression “legs turning to jelly” meant, in a way he never had before. Beyond the beating of blood in his head, he had wit enough to understand at once that his first reaction to this news was critical. Still, the only thing he could come up with at first was “That’s a surprise.”
“I know.” She nodded. She flushed, then smiled, and that gave him his first clue.
She’s thrilled.
Dear Reader (#ue090796b-5f9f-54ac-b604-1689df963064),
It’s possible one day I’ll regret that I wrote this book. I love my American heroine, Candace, with her combination of strength and vulnerability. I don’t regret her. She really deserves Steve Colton, the sexy Australian doctor who comes into her life. I love the way their story develops—sex comes early and real life hits them hard soon afterward. I love the atmosphere of surgery and the cast of minor characters, particularly Candace’s mother. No regrets there, either.
What I’ll regret is the fact that I’ve given away one of Australia’s great, undiscovered secrets—the beautiful coastline south of Sydney, stretching for miles and miles. As you’ll find out when you read The Surgeon’s Love-Child, some of those gorgeous beaches are deserted enough that you can walk for an hour and scarcely see another human being…or make love in the dunes after dark without fear of discovery.
I hope you love Candace and Steve’s story, and that the setting inspires some of you to come for a visit. But please don’t tell anyone. We want to keep the place to ourselves, don’t you think?
Lilian Darcy
The Surgeon’s Love-Child
Lilian Darcy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
COVER (#u89e908cb-b032-559e-90f8-9e0223a850be)
LETTER TO READER (#ubc79a12d-ece3-53b6-85df-d7222cd928e4)
TITLE PAGE (#ud8314d60-75db-539d-b61e-1aa4641e1676)
CHAPTER ONE (#u17fb8c89-7578-5f14-a547-aec224d013e1)
CHAPTER TWO (#u7d600483-70fa-5339-a0d2-e8609010c47a)
CHAPTER THREE (#u220d39e2-a719-5b67-b33c-a429bd69e315)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ue090796b-5f9f-54ac-b604-1689df963064)
HE WAS holding up a sign with her name on it, but he wasn’t Terry Davis.
Definitely not.
Terry wouldn’t have needed a sign. He and Candace had known each other, on and off, for years. She would have recognised his weatherbeaten face at once, and he would have seen her coming towards him through the milling crowd of arrivals at Sydney’s international airport. He would have smiled.
This man wasn’t smiling. He hadn’t seen her yet. He hadn’t realised that Candace had spotted her name, scrawled quickly by hand in black felt-tip pen on a makeshift rectangle of cardboard, and that she was zeroing in on it.
This man looked much younger than Terry. Early thirties, tall and fit and medium dark, with a body that somehow managed to be both solid and lean at the same time. He was wearing jeans and a navy T-shirt that hugged his form closely. In contrast, Terry was well past fifty, and had always looked his age. He never wore jeans.
Candace herself—DR CANDACE FLETCHER, as the sign correctly stated—was thirty-eight years old and intensely conscious of the fact. She had been for months and was, suddenly, particularly conscious of it now. It had been twenty-four hours since she had left Boston. She must look like a dog’s breakfast, despite a recent freshening in the unappealing cubicle of the aircraft toilet.
She reached the stranger and his sign, and was tempted to wave a hand in front of his face. Hell-o-o-o! I’m here! He was still scanning the crowd with a frown etched across his high, squarish forehead. Apparently, she didn’t look like her name.
‘Are you waiting for me?’
The frown cleared at once. ‘With insufficient vigilance, obviously, Dr Fletcher. You sneaked up on me.’
‘I did think about waving.’
‘Probably not what you expected. I should have been Terry.’
‘Mmm.’
She almost blurted out that not much in her life had gone according to expectations over the past year and more, but managed to keep the words back. Dear God, it would be so easy to get emotional!
‘I’ll explain as we head to the car,’ he said.
‘Sounds good.’
Unobtrusively, he took control of the luggage cart and began to wheel it towards the exit. She walked beside him, matching his pace.
‘I’m Steve, by the way. Steve Colton. You’ll be seeing me in Theatre fairly regularly. I’m often rostered to handle the anaesthesia. Terry’s wife is…not well. That’s why he couldn’t make it.’
‘Oh, no!’ Candace said. ‘That’s too bad! It isn’t serious, I hope.’
‘So do I,’ he answered soberly. ‘But I’m actually her GP, so I can’t really talk about it. Is this all of your luggage?’
‘This is it,’ she confirmed. Three suitcases and a box, for a one-year stay. ‘My mother helped me pack, and she’s very strict.’
‘Travels light?’
‘Arrives light. Leaves heavy. She’s convinced that Australia will have glorious shopping possibilities, thanks to the state of your dollar.’
‘She’s right, if you can find anything you want to buy. Terry told you Narralee’s not a big place, I hope. Not exactly a shopper’s heaven.’
‘Yes, but my mother has a bloodhound’s nose for good places to spend money. And Terry also told me Sydney makes a great weekend getaway, only a three-and-a-half-hour drive. Oh! Which means you’re making a seven-hour round trip to pick me up,’ she realised aloud, ‘and I haven’t thanked you yet.’
‘Plenty of time for that.’
‘Three and a half hours, in fact.’
They both laughed.
He seemed nice, Candace decided. The kind of well-mannered yet easygoing Australian male she’d heard good things about and seen—in somewhat exaggerated form—in various movies over the years. Three and a half hours, plus a stop for a snack, maybe. This shouldn’t be any kind of a penance…
And it wasn’t. Far from it.
They talked for a while, about the obvious things. Her journey. The city of Sydney. She commented on its red-tiled roofs, bright in the March morning sunlight, and all the aqua blue ovals and rectangles of the swimming pools she’d seen from above in the sprawl of suburban back yards as the plane had come in to land.
Then they left human habitation behind and crossed the wild, wind-scoured terrain of a national park. Steve Colton stopped asking questions and giving out helpful tourist information. Candace pretended to sleep.
She had been doing a lot of that lately—lying in bed with her brain buzzing and the shrill whistle of tinnitus in her ears, totally exhausted, miles from sleep and not fooling herself for a second.
Todd was sleeping with Brittany for six months and I never knew.
He said our marriage was empty long before that. Was he right? If there hadn’t been that electrical problem at the hospital that day, and they hadn’t cancelled elective surgery…If I hadn’t actually walked in on them, naked together in our marital bed…How long before I’d have found out? How long before he would have drummed up the courage to leave? Coming home to find them in bed was bad enough, but having them announce Brittany’s pregnancy before our divorce was even finalised was even worse.
I guess in a way I’m glad Maddy decided not to come to Australia with me—although that hurts, too, to think she’s so positive that she’ll be fine without her mother—because at least, out there, I’ll be able to be alone. I won’t have to pretend.
And here she was, pretending already.
Much easier to pretend to a newly met male colleague than to an emotional fifteen-year-old daughter, however. By hook or by crook, Candace wasn’t going to ruin Maddy’s relationship with her father. She had no right to do that—to deprive her daughter of something very precious and necessary in Maddy’s life purely in order to enact revenge on Todd, when maybe…probably…the blame wasn’t all on his side. She had to behave rationally, not let Maddy see quite how deeply ran her sense of betrayal.
But, oh, that huge, glowing and healthily advanced pregnancy of Brittany’s hurt! She was due in just a few weeks…
The car slowed. It stopped. Then there was silence. She opened her eyes. Dr Colton was watching her. No, Steve. She couldn’t possibly call him Dr Colton! He had to be a good five or six years younger than she was, and she had been told that Australians were informal people.
‘Are we here?’ she asked vaguely. She had no idea how long her mind had been churning while her eyes had flickered behind their closed lids.
‘No,’ he said, ‘But I thought it was probably hours since they gave you breakfast on the plane. It was a toss-up between letting you sleep and getting you fed. Did I pick the right one?’
‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she admitted, finding it easier to be honest with him than she had expected. ‘Just thinking.’
‘That can give you an appetite.’
She smiled. ‘It has. Or something has.’
‘Rightio, then.’
Rightio? Weird word! Cute, actually. The difference, the newness of it in his easy accent, blew across the raw-burned surface of her soul like a gentle puff of wind, and she was still smiling as she got out of the car.
He hadn’t gone so far as to open the door for her. She might have mistrusted that degree of chivalry. But he was standing there waiting, and he reached out a hand to steady her as she stood up.
The kerb was unexpectedly high. She held onto him, closing her fingers around a forearm that was bare and warm and ropy with muscle, while his hand remained cupped beneath her elbow.
‘Oh-h! The sidewalk is going up and down,’ she said.
‘Having your own personal earthquake?’
‘No, it’s more gentle than that. A kind of quavery undulation.’
He laughed. ‘It’s that long flight, and the beginnings of jet-lag. What time is it now in Boston?’
‘Um…’
‘Let’s see…’
They both began a mental calculation.
‘Sydney is sixteen hours ahead,’ she supplied. ‘Which means…’
He got there first. ‘Yesterday evening, then. Around sevenish. You probably are hungry in that case, and an empty stomach wouldn’t be helping.’
‘No,’ she agreed, although this wobbly sidewalk was probably more the result of months of stress and inadequate sleep than a mere sixteen-hour time difference and a few hours without food.
‘Shall I let go?’ he asked cheerfully.
‘Not yet.’
It seemed like a long time since she’d had a man’s physical support, and it felt better than she could have imagined. He wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t have an agenda. He was polite and steady, and she felt very safe.
‘OK,’ he said, tightening his grip a little.
Their eyes met and held for a moment before they both looked away. He was very good-looking. She hadn’t taken in this fact until now. It was in the shape of his face—the square forehead, the strong cheekbones and chin. It was in his easy, even smile, too, and in what that smile did to his blue eyes. They twinkled and softened, and looked a little wicked.
But this wasn’t just about looks, she realised. This was about—
Dear heaven, we’re going to have an affair!
The thought sliced into her mind without a shadow of warning, leaving her breathless. She could almost see it—the alluring progression of it—laid out before her like the squares on a life-sized Monopoly board, improbably perfect. A sizzlingly hot, totally heedless, carefree, life-affirming, fabulous affair, which would come to a painless, mutually-agreed-upon end some time before she was due to head home to that much chillier place called Real Life.
She dropped his delicious, masculine forearm like a live snake, her heart pounding.
