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Ryan was unreadable now, standing solid as a rock.
‘I see. How much experience do you have with malaria and spider bites, Miss Madeline?’
He didn’t sound as friendly as before.
Samantha squeezed her shoulder. ‘Madeline is a phenomenal writer, Ryan. You might have read her geopolitical romantic thriller—the one set in Madagascar?’
‘Can’t say I have,’ he said. ‘I don’t get a lot of time to read.’
He was reading her. Madeline knew it. Scrutinising her like a beetle under a microscope. She felt the urge to cover herself, but realised it was pointless.
‘She’s a keen traveller and explorer, like you, and she’s a medical professional,’ Samantha carried on as Madeline’s cheeks flamed. ‘I thought she’d be the perfect fit.’
‘What kind of medical professional?’
‘I used to be a nurse, but I’m not any more...’ Madeline let her words taper off. She didn’t particularly feel like explaining why she’d quit nursing. The thought of it still shamed her, but she doubted the time she’d spent on the wards of St David’s Hospital would help anyone who’d been mauled by a jaguar or hugged by an anaconda in the Amazon.
‘Is this necessary, Samantha?’ Ryan said, after a moment.
His tone was irritated. His arms were still crossed, tighter than ever.
Something in his icy tone made Madeline recall with a flash the other articles she’d uncovered on the internet. Ryan had lost one of his team members five years ago on a sponsored expedition. He’d been twenty-seven at the time. She remembered thinking that she and Ryan were the same age—both thirty-two now.
No one knew the finer details of how or why the young physician Josephine McCarthy had died suddenly out in the jungle. Ryan had clammed up—never shared it with the media. And the medical team with him at the time had also never divulged what had happened—if they even knew.
The rumour mill had been spinning ever since.
Most of what had been printed was hearsay, of course, but Ryan had spent a lot more time in the wild since then, setting up an HIV awareness programme in Africa, arranging vaccinations at schools in Nepal.
Apparently he hadn’t particularly wanted the camera crew to follow him when the concept of Medical Extremes had first been discussed, but the money they paid him helped thousands of villages get the medication they needed. And besides, the world needed to see the importance of doctors operating without borders.
That was what had been announced in the press release, at least.
‘I’m sorry, Ryan,’ Samantha said, interrupting Madeline’s thoughts. ‘A contract is a contract.’
‘I know... I know.’
His jaw twitched in annoyance as Madeline stood awkwardly between them.
‘If you don’t take Madeline with you we’ll only have to send someone else you haven’t even met, and we’re running out of time.’
‘Time has a habit of running out,’ he replied, somewhat mysteriously.
He’s incredibly moody—that was what she’d read. Those rumours must be true at least. Ryan Tobias spent his life touching the lives of many in the world’s most remote locations, but he himself was untouchable. And now Samantha was somehow asking her to accompany him on his next televised medical mission to the jungle?
She wondered whether her telling Samantha that she was now single had anything to do with this. She suddenly regretted telling her agent how Jason had decided to pursue his burgeoning relationship with a young zoologist called Adeline.
‘How can he want an Adeline when he has a perfectly good Madeline?’ she’d said at the time, enraged.
‘Ryan!’
Someone was calling him back towards a camera. He didn’t move. Instead he shot Madeline a narrow look that rattled every nerve-ending in her body. She fixed her eyes on his, determined not to let him know she had a lump in her throat the size of a cricket ball. He didn’t break his gaze—not that she was about to break hers either. She was damned if she’d let another moody man walk all over her, even if he was rich and famous.
‘Well, as you say, a contract is a contract,’ he muttered after a moment, sucking in a breath and letting it out so heavily that Madeline felt her damp hair ruffle.
‘It’ll be great for your profile,’ Samantha told him matter-of-factly, and Madeline caught him rolling his eyes.
‘We’ll see about that. Good to meet you, Madeline.’ He thrust his hand out at her suddenly. ‘We can always do with another nurse around, I suppose.’
‘Oh, like I said, I’m not a—’
‘Ryan! We need you over here, please.’ That voice again.
His face was expressionless as he engulfed Madeline’s hand with his own, and for some reason another episode of Medical Extremes was flashing in her mind. Cambodia. The one where he’d eaten a fried tarantula. It had been a gift from the family of a man he’d helped to save.
Ryan Tobias was fearless—that was what everyone said. Well. She was damned if she’d let him scare her.
‘I’m looking forward to working with you,’ she said calmly.
‘Ryan!’
‘I’m coming, damn it!’
He dropped her hand, turned and strolled across the studio, and Samantha took Madeline’s elbow, leading her to a sofa and coffee table in the corner of the chaos. Both were covered in sheets of paper.
‘You did good. I’m so sorry to spring this on you.’ She poured them both a cup of coffee. ‘But this opportunity wouldn’t have waited. I suggested you the moment I heard what happened to the last ghost-writer...’
‘What happened?’ Madeline realised just how dry her throat was.
‘Fell down some stairs—cracked three ribs, broke one arm. Ironic isn’t the word. Would you like a biscuit?’
She shook her head, glancing to her right. Ryan was walking towards a guy packing a camera into a very large black box on wheels, talking about some supplies he needed but hadn’t seen yet. His voice still sent chills...or was it thrills?...straight through her.
Was she really going to the Amazon?
‘He seems...nice,’ she ventured, sipping her coffee.
‘He’s very nice, when everything goes to plan. So, Madeline, the long and short of it is that Ryan’s contract states that he needs to deliver a memoir and his publishers want it released for Christmas. Only as yet he’s been too busy to write it.’
‘OK...’
Madeline gripped more tightly onto her cup and bit into her cheek. Ghost-writing wasn’t exactly something she was thrilled about doing. Her last book—written under her own name—hadn’t gone too well, though, due to her publisher having no marketing budget, mostly. Her sales had suffered horribly while she’d been out writing the next one in the middle of nowhere in Zimbabwe.
Apparently bad things happened to books if you couldn’t spend twenty-four hours a day on Twitter, telling everyone about them.
Bad things happened to relationships, too, if you stupidly left your boyfriend alone for two months...
Madeline pushed thoughts of Adeline from her head.
Samantha sipped her coffee, then put the cup down on the messy table.
‘Ryan is about to go and shoot the third season of Medical Extremes, as you know, and what with all his appointments he hasn’t got time for the memoir, too. We need someone to help him write the book at the same time as he’s filming—gather quotes, insights, interviews, you know? Am I right in thinking you’re still free to take a week or two, probably three, out of London at the moment?’
Madeline nodded blankly. Ryan was so tall and so commanding without even trying. Everyone seemed to be in awe of him. And although she was a little loath to admit it, after the way he’d just acted towards her, it wasn’t hard to see why.
As well as being the sexiest doctor since George Clooney, Ryan was a millionaire who gave selflessly to charities all over the world. He didn’t have a lot else to spend his riches on, apparently. His father was a heart surgeon, famed for working with those less fortunate in the US. Ryan had taken things one step further by setting up his own non-profit organisation and flying all over the world with his team, crossing borders to reach people who’d never get help otherwise.
Samantha lowered her voice. ‘Ryan doesn’t write. Obviously his skills lie in other areas. But with you on board, plus his celebrity status, this book could be a bestseller. Easy. The publishers have a very impressive budget.’
‘And Twitter?’ Madeline said. ‘How many followers?’
‘Over four hundred thousand. He never tweets a damn thing, of course, but we have Amy from Middlesex University who’s his biggest fan. She won the competition to be his Twitter manager. He just got done with a news team covering the story... BBC, I think. How are you at being on camera? You’ve got great cheekbones—I bet it loves you. And you speak several languages, I recall? Always useful.’
Madeline’s stomach lurched. This was turning out to be a lot more than she’d bargained for. But it wasn’t as if she had anything else on the cards.
She mused over the offer as Samantha kept on talking. She vaguely registered her agent mentioning Rio, a remote tribe—‘none of those weird neck rings or anything’—parasites, anaemia... But after a minute she was only half listening, because she could feel Ryan looking at her again from across the room.
She straightened her back again, so that he could see he wasn’t intimidating her in any way, and tried to look enthusiastic and excited. She had to play her cards right. This chance was too good to pass up and maybe Samantha was right. It could be a bestseller by Christmas.
We can both get something out of this, she thought, sending the thought across the void and straight into Ryan’s cool, iceberg eyes.
CHAPTER TWO (#uf50b1f41-d8e8-59d0-8c87-85462b43624f)
‘DID YOU KNOW that CAN’s first pilots were called the flag-bearers of the skies? That was in the early nineteen-forties.’
‘I don’t know much about CAN at the moment,’ Madeline said. ‘This was all a bit short notice, as you know. Maybe you could explain?’
She was trying her hardest not to let turbulence affect the way she was talking to Ryan. This plane was far too shaky for her peace of mind, but of course this man flew everywhere for a living and didn’t even look as if he’d noticed they were bumping up and down in what felt like God’s hugest tantrum since the last giant tornado.
‘Correio Aéreo Nacional,’ he said, picking up a packet of peanuts and running a tanned thumb over the seal without opening it. ‘Their mission was to help integrate the most remote Amazon outposts with the rest of the country.’
‘How did they do that?’
Madeline pulled out her notebook, wishing she’d put her laptop under her seat instead of up in the overhead locker. She could type much faster than she could write these days, but there was no way on earth she was climbing past Ryan. She’d rather not risk feeling his eyes on her again as she tripped, or did something else stupid as a result of her nerves.
There was something in his stare, she mused. It stayed with her even with her eyes closed. She’d seen it a thousand times in camera close-ups, of course, and it was part of what drew people in their thousands to watch him in action. It had the power to make you feel like you were the only person on earth. It also had the power to make you feel like an idiot.
Ryan smiled, apparently scrutinising her handwriting from his seat on the aisle. ‘CAN transported isolated residents from riverside communities to places where they could be helped—usually the city. They had dozens of planes flying over the Amazon—more than they do now anyway.’
Madeline scribbled as fast as she could to get his words down, feeling thankful that she’d brought a Dictaphone for later.
When she looked up his grey eyes were fixed on her, and she found herself annoyingly self-conscious. At least she wasn’t wet and covered in coffee this time—she’d put on a very respectable knee-length blue dress for the flight, one that accentuated her small waist, and she’d left her long hair down around her shoulders. Also, he seemed to be making a concerted effort to be friendly, for which she was more than grateful.
‘The flying doctors were known as the Angels of the Amazon, is that right?’ she asked him, reaching for her necklace.
‘Correct,’ he said, watching her fiddling with the silver chain as she slid the small crystal apple up and down on it. ‘They were angels, Madeline. Still are. They deliver medical aid by aircraft. If they didn’t these people would only get help after weeks of travelling on foot through the jungle, or by boat.’
‘So, would you consider yourself an angel now, too?’
Ryan frowned, drumming his fingers on his tray table. ‘I just do what’s necessary—like they do,’ he said. ‘These people live and breathe the Amazon—a place most of us know little about, except that it’s a living pharmacy essential to billions of lives on earth, right? They’re the caretakers of the jungle and everything in it. By helping them and looking after their health we’re helping the environment.’
The plane jostled them again and Madeline’s tray table jumped.
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ he asked, catching her notepad before it slid off.
‘Caramambatai,’ she replied quickly, hoping she was pronouncing it right. ‘Your producer says it’s an indigenous settlement...’
‘The Ingariko tribe, yes. They’re spread all over South America, but this camp is pretty much hidden on the border between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. It’s about as remote as you’re going to get. Legend has it people have been swallowed whole by thick morning mists in these parts. They’re more likely to have been finished off by surucucu snakes, if you ask me. Highly poisonous, by the way. If you see one it will probably be the last thing you see.’
She realised, now that he was so close, that he had lines around his eyes—proof of laughter, perhaps, more than age. He’d been happy once. Happier than the media made him out to be now anyway. He looked sexier in person, too, she decided.
Then she caught herself.
Sexier? There was no way she was letting herself think that again. She was here to do a job—and besides, as if anyone would go near her, let alone this guy. Her friend Emma had said she reeked of heartbreak, which wasn’t particularly nice but was definitely true. Hardly surprising after what Jason had done.
Madeline could still recite every line of that love-struck email to Adeline she’d read by mistake after he’d left his laptop open.
I’m just trying to find the right time to tell her, baby. You know it’s not her I’m in love with any more.
‘So, how do we reach these people once we get to Brazil?’ she asked, trying and failing to cross her legs properly under her tray table.
They’d been on the plane for four hours already, and she’d already counted at least nine things in her head that she’d forgotten to pack or research. She was hoping she’d have time to sort a few things out in Rio—where they were stopping for supplies before taking another flight to Saint Elena.
‘We’ll take a Cessna,’ Ryan said. ‘Either that or a Black Hawk—whatever the team have booked. Both are pretty good on the runways.’
‘There are runways in the rainforest?’
‘Well, they’re mud strips, really.’
Ryan opened the peanuts and offered her one. She shook her head, trying her hardest to write without scribbling on the tray table instead. They were still bouncing up and down, as if the plane itself was on some sort of trampoline.
‘The runways were carved out by the gold miners initially,’ he told her. ‘Illegally, of course, but they help us do our jobs so I suppose the real value of that gold just keeps on increasing—wherever it is. You can write that down.’
She realised her pen was hovering and that she was lost in thoughts of Jason again. But this time Jason was standing next to Ryan Tobias in the jungle, and being somewhat dwarfed by him.
She blinked to get rid of them both. ‘Right, yes. Good idea.’ She started to scribble, flustered.
‘Whatever you do, stay close to us,’ Ryan said suddenly, in a tone that pulled her eyes to his again like a magnet. ‘People go missing out there all the time.’
Her breath caught as she saw an emotion she didn’t recognise cross his face.
He continued without looking at her. ‘Last time we found a burnt-out helicopter which must have crashed twenty years ago. No skeletons inside...who knows what happened to them? The jungle has a way of luring people in and keeping them.’
Madeline tried not to shudder. For some reason she knew he was thinking of Josephine McCarthy. What had happened to her, exactly?
‘When were you here last?’ she asked.
‘Eight months ago. Five-day CAN mission. No cameras. We treated six hundred patients for minor infections, brought some ultrasound machines. We felt bad we couldn’t help the guy who got shot, though.’
