The Surgeon's One-Night Baby

But it didn’t happen. If anything, Archie studiously avoided meeting his gaze again, and had clearly omitted to mention him to her friend, and her dignified discretion only seemed to add to her allure. Especially when she resumed dancing, only to be a little more self-conscious, a fraction stiffer than she had been before. It was the tell he needed, knowing now she was indeed equally attracted to him.

It should concern him more that it felt like such a victory.

Alarm bells were sounding but too faint, too distant to have the impact he suspected they should have had. To jolt him back to reality. To warn him that she didn’t look like the kind of woman who did one-night stands. She looked like the kind of woman who did walks along beaches, and romantic meals, and talking until dawn. Relationships. Love. It was such bull.

He’d seen first-hand the toxic depths to which such emotions could plunge. His parents’ explosive marriage had been equalled only by their acrimonious divorce. And him, in the middle of it all his life. Their pawn. The tool they’d used to goad and taunt each other. The burden they’d each tried to make the other one bear.

And not just his parents. What about his own explosiveness? That out-of-control side of him that had only had to emerge once to completely ruin someone’s life. He’d sworn it would never happen again, and it hadn’t. Some might call him emotionally detached, or unavailable. He wasn’t. Where his patients were concerned he felt as much empathy as he could, for patient and family, without it impairing his ability to do his job. It was only in his personal life where he exerted such emotional...discipline.

So he did sex. He did fun. He did mutual gratification.

He didn’t do intimacy and he didn’t do complications.

Something told him that this Archie woman was both, and the best thing he could do, for both of them, would be to stay away.

Turning back to the bar, Kaspar picked up his drink and tried not to be irritated by the group of preening, simpering women who had begun to cluster around his part of the bar. It was about as easy as pretending he wasn’t searching out blonde hair and a metallic shimmer in the reflection of the mirror behind the glasses.

Apparently, his skydiving butterfly was now edging her way off the opposite side of the dance floor. About as far away from him as she could get.

He didn’t give himself time for second-guessing. For the second time that evening, he set his untouched drink down and gave in to temptation.

CHAPTER THREE (#u815974e9-1c3d-5fe8-bd3e-6ecc3e768e3f)

‘ARCHIE, WAIT. SLOW DOWN. Where are you going this time?’

‘Relax,’ Archie cast over her shoulder, a bright smile plastered to her lips at her friend’s typically bossy tone. ‘I’m just going for a drink.’

Still, she didn’t slow down in her quest to get off the dance floor and around to the other side of an enormous pillar that would shield her from Kaspar’s view. No easy feat in the ridiculously high heels Katie had insisted on lending her to go with the seriously sexy metallic number her friend had also talked her into buying this afternoon.

It was years since she’d been out so called clubbing it—not that she’d ever had the time or inclination to go out all that often, neither was this charity wrap party exactly clubbing it—but, still, she hoped she hadn’t looked too awkward and robotic out there on the dance floor. She’d felt fine...right up until she’d seen him watching her.

The minute she’d spotted him, her body hadn’t quite felt her own. As though it wasn’t completely under her control. Even now the memory of his eyes scanning over her left her blood feeling as though it was effervescing through her veins, making her entire body hum.

It was an unfamiliar, but not altogether unpleasant sensation.

Ducking behind the pillar, Archie pressed her back against the cool, smooth concrete and rested her hand underneath her breastbone. She could feel the tattoo her heart was drumming out, leaving her unable to even catch her breath. And it had nothing to do with the dancing. Oh, she’d tried to ignore him, especially when his usual harem had draped themselves around him and he’d barely had the decency to offer any of them the time of day.

But who could ignore Kaspar Athari?

‘So, if you’re getting a drink why are we the other side of the room from the bar?’ Katie bobbed under her nose, her brow knitted.

‘Hmm? Oh. I just...needed to catch my breath.’

It wasn’t exactly a lie, but she might have known her old friend would see through it.

‘Archie, you’re about as jittery as a beachgoer trying to get across hot sand.’

‘No, I’m not.’

Katie’s eyes narrowed sharply.

‘Is this about “the Surgeon Prince of Persia”?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she managed loftily, only for Katie to snort in derision.

‘Yeah, sure you don’t. He’s been devouring you with his eyes all night and you’ve been lapping it up.’

‘I have not,’ Archie spluttered, her knotted stomach twisting and flipping. ‘And it hasn’t been all night. It has been half an hour at most.’

‘Aha!’ Katie declared triumphantly. ‘So it is about the perennially sexy Kaspar Athari.’

‘No...not at all...well, not really. That is... Why are you frowning? Aren’t you the one who said I needed to get back out there and have fun, like we used to in uni? Like I did before my dad...died? Before I married Joe?’

She tailed off awkwardly as Katie pulled a face.

‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I always hated the way you changed when you married Joe. You went right into yourself. Nothing like the fun, sassy Archie I’d come to know.’

‘It wasn’t Joe who did that.’ Archie wrinkled her nose. She’d tried a hundred times to explain it to Katie, but her friend had never quite understood. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she owed it to Joe to try again. ‘He was exactly what I needed at that time in my life.’

‘I disagree.’

‘I know you do. You remind me often enough.’

Still, there was no rancour in Archie’s tone. In many respects it was buoying that her friend cared enough to do so. And Katie’s wry smile of response revealed that she knew it, too.

‘I just feel that, while he may not have intended to, Joe took advantage of the fact that you were young and na?ve. You were grieving for your dad, and your brother and his new wife were half a world away.’

They were falling into a conversation they’d had a hundred times before, but it was impossible to stop.

‘He didn’t take advantage. It was mutually beneficial.’

Katie’s eyebrows were practically lost in her hairline, but at least she had the tact not to bring up any painful reminders of more than three years of failed pregnancy attempts. The miscarriage at eighteen weeks.

Agony seared through her. Black, almost debilitating.

Faith.

As though it didn’t lacerate her from the inside out just thinking her unborn daughter’s name.

She swayed dangerously.

Had it not been for the silent, supportive hand at her elbow, Archie was afraid she was about to tumble to the floor. She blinked at Katie gratefully. Unspoken, unequivocal support shone back at Archie. Bolstering her. Making her want to forget the fact that, barely a year after she’d lost her unborn daughter, Joe was expecting a baby with his new wife.

It hurt.

Though not, perhaps, in precisely the way Archie might have thought it would. She couldn’t pinpoint it, but neither could she help suspecting that it had less to do with Joe than it ought to, and more to do with the simple pain that another woman seemed to find it so easy to have a baby while her own traitorous body hadn’t been able to do the one thing she felt it had surely been designed to do.

‘Fine, let’s say it was mutually beneficial...’ Katie conceded at length, though Archie could hear by her friend’s tone that she didn’t remotely believe that.