Shock Baby for the Doctor
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Charlotte Hawkes
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CHAPTER ONE
BASILIUS JANSEN WASN’T merely aware of his reputation as the incorrigible playboy surgeon of the Thorncroft Royal Infirmary, he actively revelled in his notoriety.
At least, he usually did.
Even now, as he strode purposefully through the corridors towards the resus department, he dipped his head and automatically flashed his trademark killer smile at the usual chorus of flirtatious greetings that rang around every turn.
‘Hello, Bas, your surgery last night was amazing.’ Hair-twirl.
‘Hey, Dr Jansen, have you just been working out?’ Sashay.
‘Hi, Bas, see you at the Jansen Ball tonight.’ Eyelash-flutter.
Smile. Grin. Wink.
But his heart wasn’t in it.
It hadn’t been for some months now—and these days his greetings were more of a baring of teeth than his usual infamous, wolfish charm. Actually taking any of them up on their overt hints held even less appeal.
He growled under his breath. It made no sense.
Boundary-pushing surgeries, stunning women, and expensive liquor had long been his three favourite activities—in that order. And whilst the latter two had never, never, impacted on his medical focus, the phrase ‘work hard, party harder’ might as well have been coined exclusively for him. And he’d been more than happy with that.
He could blame the letter that lay, even now, crumpled and unread in the bottom of the wastepaper basket—to his mind, sullying the luxuriously appointed corner suite on the coveted twelfth storey of the hospital, which boasted a dual aspect over the verdant green landscape that was Thorncroft Park, and for which he’d worked insanely hard.
It had been the last of three letters that he’d received over the past five months, and though he’d hated himself for even opening it, Bas hadn’t been able to stop himself from traitorously skimming the contents.
Henrik—the brother who he hadn’t heard from in almost thirty years and would have been happy not to hear from for another thirty years. The brother whose one, all too easily dropped lie had caused their mother to eject Bas from the family home, and turn her back on him, never once responding to a single letter or phone call, from a desperate seven-year-old son.
Learning that Henrik was now a surgeon like him had been galling. Worse, that the man who remained his brother in name only was apparently, not only in Britain, but even now on his way to Thorncroft, already stirring up hateful memories that Bas had thought he’d long-since entombed.
Enkindled, incinerated, and entombed.
And now, apparently, resurrected.
Old, hateful memories rose up shamefully inside him. And Bas hated himself for such weakness. For the fact that a trio of unwanted letters could strip away the happy, shiny life he’d built for himself, and hurtle him straight back in time to his vicious past. Making him wish he were anyone else but himself.
Ludicrous.
Surely he was built to bask in who he was? And revel in his Scandinavian heritage?
From his six-foot-three broad-shouldered frame to his shock of light blond hair, and from the dash of stubble that enhanced his strong, square jawline to his eyes, which were the iciest-blue of the fjords themselves, Bas knew he was heart-stoppingly arresting. Or so women loved to tell him—and who was he to tell them any different?
Yet, as if basking in such heritage wasn’t enough, Bas also gloried in his reputation as one of the country’s rising plastic surgeons. His name—and indeed that of his even more of a playboy plastic surgeon father—was above the entrance to the Jansen wing and it was no coincidence that this ultra-modern, staggeringly hi-tech, private medical suite in Thorncroft Royal Infirmary was one of the most sought-after medical care facilities in the country.
Between his father’s high-profile reputation as cosmetic surgeon to the deliriously rich and achingly famous, and his own growing name for plastic surgical trauma, surgeons around the world were fighting for a rotation within one of their three UK-based Jansen facilities.
And now, it seemed, Henrik was to be one of them.
Surely that was reason enough for his own uncharacteristically dour mood?
Yet still, deep down, Bas fought the odd notion that it wasn’t just the letter that had got under his skin.
Rather, he was finding it hard to explain the growing sense of disillusionment that had been building inside him for several months now.
Bas couldn’t explain it. Or perhaps it was more that he didn’t care to. Not for the first time, a memory of the last gala night drifted towards him before he thrust it aside, the way he’d been doing for months.
But sometimes, on nights where sleep eluded him, he caught the distant sound of a big band playing. And he saw a shimmer of emerald, heard the ghost of a sweet laugh, and took in the hint of a delicate scent.
Logic told him the memory wasn’t sticking so much because of the woman herself, but more because she’d been a welcome distraction—along with the fact that he’d uncharacteristically tried to drown himself in a bottle of the most expensive brandy he could get his hands on—after receiving Henrik’s first letter. But still, his skull pounded with the effort of keeping the memory at bay.
Bas emitted another low growl and flung the thoughts from his head as he stabbed the buttons to access the main hospital’s resus department.
‘Someone paged me for a consult?’ he announced, striding over to the ward sister, who was standing at the central computer station. ‘An eight-year-old who landed face first off a swing?’
‘Hey, Bas.’ The sister nodded, making a point of flicking her long ponytail as she changed her pose. ‘I didn’t know you were on call. Lucky us.’
‘I could say the same.’ He flashed his killer smile again, and she didn’t seem to notice how robotic he sounded. Or maybe it was only in his head. ‘Which bay did you say?’
She flicked her tongue out over her lower lip—deliberately probably—and lifted her hand to point across the room.
‘Bay five.’
Dipping his head in acknowledgement, Bas swivelled on the spot and began to make his way across the floor, relieved to be away though he couldn’t explain that, either. Stepping around the curtain to the bay, he took in the sight of an older doctor, Val, who he knew well, smiling at her charge as she carried out her examination.
‘I just want a quick feel of your neck, Bradley, can you turn your head for me?’
‘Which way?’ the kid asked, his voice clearly thick with tears.
‘Whichever way you like. That’s perfect. Good man.’
Bas watched as Val gently felt the head and neck.
‘What have we got?’ he murmured to no one in particular, his eyes still on the patient.
‘Eight-year-old kid. Bradley,’ someone answered. ‘He was brought in by paramedics a few hours ago.’
He watched as Val continued to check the kid’s head and neck, telling him he was doing great, and asking him to turn his head to the other side.
‘Any more details?’ Bas pressed, his eyes still not leaving the boy.
‘He was playing a game of dare with his friends, trying to see who could swing the highest and then jump off. Bradley fell. We think he landed face first.’
‘You only think he landed face first?’ Bas checked, when they didn’t continue.
He turned his head to look, only to find the nurse in question staring at him and blushing bright red.
Great—not what his patient needed.
‘Anybody?’ he gritted out, barely casting a cursory look at who else was in the bay, waiting to get called on to help Val.
There was another beat of hesitation and then a reluctant voice piped up.
‘It seems there were no actual witnesses to the fall. Apparently the other kids had all been distracted when a police car had driven by on the road below the woods, with its blues and twos.’
That voice.
Something walloped into Bas—like being struck by a bullet from a forty-four. Only the impact of this strike was mental as well as physical. He was aware of his head swivelling around though he couldn’t have said how he managed to move it.
The flash of green, the laughter, the music, all swirled around his head as he stared at the woman. This time, there was no batting her away from his brain.
Naomi Fox.
The woman who’d been haunting his dreams ever since that night of the gala. Longer, in fact. Because the truth was that he’d noticed her the first day she’d worked on the resus floor—what red-blooded male wouldn’t?—but he’d warned himself to stay away.
There had been something about her, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on, that had warned him that Naomi Fox was not a woman with whom he could ever share just a simple, single night of harmless fun.
Striking and tall—almost Amazonian—with a halo of shiny black curls that was almost angelic, and a body that was nothing short of sinfully wicked, she was any man’s X-rated dream. And even from that one, single case he’d worked on with her, he’d known she prided herself on being serious and professional. Any man chasing her would have to be equally serious.
Which had made her totally off-limits to someone like him. So why was he still staring like some lost puppy?
And still he stared as Naomi blinked, swallowed, and then, inconceivably, carried on. As if she didn’t want to acknowledge anything had ever happened between the two of them.
‘From what the ambulance crew were able to piece together at the scene, we believe Bradley suffered initial loss of consciousness for a few minutes,’ she hurried on. ‘He complained of pain to his neck and right side as well as blurred vision when he was admitted. Significant lacerations near the right eye, on the forehead, and to the right side of his upper lip.’
It should feel like a relief that she was pretending to ignore the electricity that positively crackled and arced between them. But it didn’t. Not when a myriad questions were tumbling through his traitorous brain, and not when his body was reacting as though he were some kind of excitable adolescent.
Get your head back in the game.
‘Do we know what the ground material was?’ mused Bas, irritated by how much effort it took him to revert his gaze to the young patient. To concentrate on peering at the boy’s facial injuries, and the blood-soaked clothing.
‘Possibly a bonded resin rubber mulch.’
‘You’ve taken bloods? Carried out a CT scan?’
Naomi reached to her side and picked up a tablet, walking towards him calmly. Majestically. And he wondered if she knew he’d spotted that faint tremor in her hands.
‘Bloodwork was clear, and we did a full body CT.’ She handed him the tablet with a set of results. ‘It cleared him on any neck or spinal damage, so Val’s just taking off the collar to do a final check for where the pain is located. However, scan did show a fracture to the eye socket.’
Hence why he had been called. He watched Val with the boy.
‘Great, Bradley, last thing now, can you lift your head off the bed for me, sweetheart?’ the doctor was saying. ‘Nice. Great work.’
‘No internal injuries?’ Bas mused.
‘We thought possible damaged spleen at first, but that’s also come back clear. It’s coming down to lacerations to his face, the orbital fracture and the blurred vision.’
‘Okay.’ He nodded, his eyes still on the scan, before swiping through the rest of the notes. ‘I just need a closer look.’
Handing back the tablet, he moved across the space to where Val was finishing up. It should feel like such a relief to step away from Naomi. But it didn’t. Not even when it calmed his body down—if only a fraction.
She shouldn’t matter to him at all.
‘Mind if I take a look, Val?’
‘No, of course not.’ She blinked at him in surprise. ‘Good grief, if it isn’t young Basilius.’
They’d known each other so long that it was as if the older woman had released a much-needed pressure valve from the spectre of Naomi, and he cast the older woman a genuine grin.
‘Are you ever going to simply call me Bas?’
Val shot him a pointed glance, which had the effect of further helping to ground him. She’d been at Thorncroft for over three decades—a former army nurse who had become a doctor later in life, and whose skills were legendary. But more than that, she was the one new doctors turned to.
She was also the one who had first looked after him when he’d wandered the hospital corridors as a heartbroken child. A desperately confused, lost kid who’d just been foisted onto a father who had never wanted him and who had been—and still was—even more of a Lothario surgeon than Bas.
After twelve months of his being shoved from proverbial pillar to post, his eight-year-old spirit hadn’t just been crushed by what had happened with Henrik and their mother, and then his deeply resentful father, it had been utterly decimated.
But then Val had come along, plucking him from whatever unused consultation room or quiet sluice room he’d been hiding in—so that no one could see quite how unwanted he was—and marching him determinedly towards the canteen to feed him up. And it was Val who had told—instructed—the unapproachable Magnus Jansen that he was going to pay for the refurbishment and redecoration of the small storeroom next to her department, so that Bas would always have a safe space of his own when he was hauled along to the hospital.
Having her there had been better than any babysitter his father could have paid handsomely to employ.
Val had almost been the mother he’d never had.
‘I prefer Basilius,’ she replied archly, the way she always did. Though the corners of her mouth tugged upwards. ‘It is your name, after all, correct? Or perhaps you would prefer the nickname I gave you when you were a boy?’
‘No, ma’am.’ He laughed. But still, he was entirely too aware of Naomi watching them.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that she saw too much. Worse, that he didn’t mind it.
With a jolt, he turned his attention back to the patient and for the next few minutes Bas busied himself with checking the boy’s lacerations, paying particular attention to the right eye socket.
‘Good lad, you did well,’ he praised the boy at last as he stepped back to where Val was still standing.
But before he could start to speak, she summoned Naomi over. Clearly she was taking the younger nurse under her wing, which meant she thought that Naomi was good. He knew the older woman too well, and it meant she was hoping her young charge would be able to take advantage of the new rules allowing capable nurses to train up as doctors within a matter of a few years.
He tried not to file that away as a point of interest.
‘Given the CT results, the location of the fracture, and from what I can see of young Bradley himself, it doesn’t look as though he has done damage to the eye itself, or the tear ducts,’ he told his old friend.
‘That’s as I thought.’ Val nodded before turning to Naomi. ‘But you understand why we paged Plastics rather than suturing ourselves?’
‘I do.’ To her credit, Naomi looked right at him, even though her voice was quieter than he thought it ought to be. Bas didn’t care to examine quite the effect that had on his body. ‘Given the complexity of the human face, and Bradley being so young, any doctor who sutures him would need to fully understand the structure beneath, since facial trauma could have such a deleterious effect on the development and growth of facial bones.’
‘Good,’ Val approved. ‘If there was any misalignment of the underlying tissue when they did the suturing, it could result in a malformation, which would likely on become more pronounced as the boy grows up.’
He was about to answer when Naomi started speaking again. More confidently again, this time.
‘The fact that the lacerations are in such complex places—around the eye, on the lip across the vermillion, and on the forehead—means that particular care will need to be taken to carry out careful debridement, ensuring no foreign bodies remained, as well as the suturing itself.’
Clearly, she wanted to learn and he couldn’t help but feel a little impressed. She was like he imagined a determined young Val to have been.
Only hotter, of course.
And incredibly dangerous to his libido.
‘I’m confident I can treat the kid whilst guaranteeing little to no scarring,’ he heard himself say.
As if he wanted to impress her, too.
He didn’t dare glance at Val, and was almost relieved when a doctor from another bay popped his head around the curtain and asked if he had a moment.
But then—with Bradley now occupied by his mother—it was just him and Naomi, and he wasn’t sure he cared for how much he liked that.
‘Okay,’ he bit out. ‘So, I’ll want to carry out a more detailed test in my own department once Val’s happy to release him but, as I said, at this point it looks like a minor eye-socket fracture. No suggestion of damage to the tear ducts or eye muscle itself. Most of the time, fractures like this go away on their own, with application of an icepack, rest, and pain relief.’
She nodded, then bit her lip and he wondered how he knew she wanted to ask him a question.
‘Go ahead,’ he prompted, just as the low buzz of Bradley’s mother grew quiet.
So when Naomi murmured quietly, he couldn’t quite hear.
He turned to his patient, but the woman was merely kissing her son’s forehead, engrossed in pushing the damp, bloodied hair away from his face, even though Val had already ensured it was done.
Still, when Bas turned back he instinctively took a step closer to Naomi, a waft of coconut-scented shampoo assailing his senses.
And this time, the wallop was a hard punch to his gut.
A split-second image of her curls tumbling down onto his chest as she bent her head to kiss a scorching trail along the ridges of the six-pack he was so famous for.
The punch sucked the air from his very lungs.
He’d slept with more than his fair share of women, over the years. But now, looking at Naomi, it was impossible for him to even recall any other name. Or face.
‘We considered getting someone from Ophthalmology,’ she muttered, and he actually had to fight the urge not to sway closer so that her lips might graze his cheek. ‘For the blurred vision.’
Bas hesitated. His throat was suddenly so parched that he could barely breathe. What the heck was happening to him? He enjoyed women, certainly, but they didn’t affect him. Certainly not like this.
He had no idea how he managed to respond.
‘I’ll take a closer look upstairs but, at this level, even that often goes away without the need for further treatment,’ he ground out. ‘I have a case to get back to, but have him sent through when you’re finished up.’
‘Okay.’ Naomi nodded, and something about it sent a whole lot more fragments of memory spiralling through his head.
‘Thank you, Basilius.’ Val came up behind him.
Bas grunted something akin to a reply as he turned to leave the department. The sooner he got out of here and back to the relative sanctuary of his private wing, the better. He was definitely not accustomed to this sensation of feeling turned inside out.
‘Do me a favour, Basilius.’ Val stopped him. ‘When I send one of my nurses up, don’t...shall we say...keep her like you did last week.’
Bas turned back, raked his hand through his hair with uncharacteristic irritation. Only Val could get away with addressing him that way, and normally he might have made a joke of it. He was never embarrassed, ever, but right now he couldn’t even bring himself to look at Naomi.
‘Then don’t send that nurse again. She seemed to have practically glued her hands to the wheelchair and ended up cluttering up my department for an hour, claiming she needed to wait with the patient. I ended up having to order her out of the wing.’
She had also flirted with him incessantly. Or tried to. He was accustomed to the odd flirtation—or ten—behind the scenes, but this woman had been particularly unprofessional in front of the patient. Something Bas had never tolerated, for all his playboy reputation.
The older woman sniffed tellingly.
‘Well, if you didn’t play up to that reputation of yours...’
‘Val...’
‘Fine, I’ll have Naomi take him to you.’
‘Naomi?’ The name rolled around his tongue as if he couldn’t help but sample it. Taste it. Again.
‘Naomi,’ Val repeated impatiently, gesturing to his emerald goddess and clearly misinterpreting his hesitation.
Which was preferable to her realising the truth.
‘Does she suit your taste better?’ she asked, oblivious to the salacious thoughts that promptly raced around his brain. ‘She’s quiet and professional, keeps herself to herself most of the time, so I can’t imagine she’d be the type to be inclined to...clutter anywhere up.’
‘I’m standing right here,’ Naomi spoke up unexpectedly, eliciting a chuckle from Val.
‘She also isn’t afraid to speak her mind,’ Val noted appreciatively. ‘Which is why I told your father that he’d better grant her one of your darned prestigious Jansen Bursaries, or I’d want to know why.’
Without knowing he meant to, Bas swung his head back around to peer at Naomi.
‘You’re a JB recipient?’
‘You didn’t know?’ She narrowed her eyes at him and, too late, he realised he’d almost revealed too much.
Like the fact that, for all that the public reputation of the Jansen brand was that he and Magnus shared a close father-son surgeon connection, the reality was that his father was a prideful, jealous egotist who only acknowledged his own son’s achievements because it enhanced the Jansen name and reputation. And, by extension, meant more money flowing in.
The only reason his father offered a handful of bursaries around the country each year, to retrain some of the most promising nurses as doctors, wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart, but because the man hoped something so charitable would result in some kind of official honours. Maybe an MBE, or an OBE, but most likely, knowing the ruthless Magnus Jansen as Bas did, he was probably after a knighthood.
Still, less than altruistic motives aside, the Jansen Bursaries were worth their proverbial weight. Usually awarded to kids who had never had the same opportunities to go to university to train as doctors, but who showed particular medical aptitude in whichever medical profession they had chosen instead.
And Naomi Fox was apparently one of them.
‘I didn’t pay that close attention to who the recipients were,’ Bas lied easily, grateful that Val was called away by another doctor just at that moment, and couldn’t put her tuppence worth in.
‘Of course you didn’t,’ Naomi clipped out. And there was no reason at all for her disapproval to cut through him the way it did. ‘Well, for the record, it was awarded to me a couple of years ago.’
All he could think was that if she’d been awarded the JB a couple of years ago, then she was already part way through her training. So where had she been training up until her move to Thorncroft?
Bas frowned, thinking back to the sparse memos he’d read.
‘I thought the new trainee doctor coming to Thorncroft had been an army nurse?’
‘That’s right,’ she confirmed, her tone carefully neutral.
He should have paid more heed to it.
‘You?’
Naomi’s jaw locked tightly, almost imperceptibly. But Bas didn’t miss it. Just as he didn’t miss the vaguely defiant tilt of her head. A hint that his magnificent Amazon queen still stalked beneath that calm outer skin.
That image of her, dressed spectacularly in a shimmering emerald sort of metallic dress, hurtled through his mind. And then—more mouth-wateringly—that same dress pooling on the floor of a hotel room, and long, deep brown legs, her feet clad in the sexiest of green heels, stepping seductively out.
And now he found out that his glorious green goddess had been in the army? How deliciously apt.
‘You don’t think an army nurse could be female?’ she gritted out. ‘How disappointingly medieval of you.’
‘Is it?’ he asked, almost cheerfully.
She either didn’t know that Val also used to be an army nurse, or she didn’t know that he knew it. Or perhaps she didn’t think he cared enough about his old friend to remember. But instead of setting Naomi right, Bas found himself deliberately goading her and he couldn’t seem to help himself. It had to be some twisted reward that when her eyebrows shot up into high, disdainful arches, he found it so utterly fascinating.
‘You do know that women have been a part of the British army for centuries, whether it was legal or not?’ she demanded.
‘Have they really?’ He deliberately notched his eyebrows a fraction higher as she glowered at him.
He was getting under her skin and making that professional edge of hers slip—even if only a little. And what did it say about him that he relished the concept?
‘Yes. They have,’ she hissed. ‘In fact, during the British Civil Wars in the mid-seventeenth century, so many women disguised themselves as male soldiers that Charles I issued a proclamation banning women from wearing men’s military uniforms.’
And now he knew he was in even more trouble than he’d first feared. Because, as irrational as it was, he found her waspish attitude all the more thrilling.
It was certainly better than her pretending she didn’t know him, that they hadn’t spent nowhere near enough glorious hours exploring every single inch of each other’s bodies. Indulging in their most carnal needs.
The quiet, almost meek Naomi of before was not the version of her that he wanted to remember.
‘Thank you for the impromptu history lesson.’ He flashed his most wolfish grin at her. As if he were about to bite her—and probably in the most carnal way—and he revelled in the punch of triumph as she didn’t quite suppress a shiver. ‘But I’m not entirely ignorant.’
She made a noise that wasn’t a grunt precisely, but suggested that she was graciously biting her tongue from verbally expressing her scepticism. No doubt she wouldn’t have been so restrained had Val not still been there, though it was getting harder and harder not to forget about the older woman’s presence.
‘I am fully aware there are plenty of female military nurses, and female military doctors, and, indeed, female frontline combat soldiers,’ he told her, his tone deliberately leisurely. ‘Val here was also an army nurse, so my surprise was not about females in general—I’m not a philistine—but about you in particular.’
‘Right.’
She didn’t sound as if she remotely believed him, and an inexplicably crazy urge to get under her skin charged through him. He ratcheted his grin up to lethal.
‘Especially given that, the night of the gala, you didn’t mention being in the military at all. Then again, I don’t recall us doing much talking. Do you?’
She made something of a strangled sound, her rich eyes—already the colour of his favourite deep, hickory-infused brandy—darkening to almost black, and her breathing becoming suddenly shallower and more rapid. Clearly their not-even-one-night stand wasn’t far from Naomi’s mind either.
He didn’t know why he should find that so deeply satisfying. Bas grinned.
‘I do recall asking you to dance, only for you to tell me that my reputation as Thorncroft’s playboy of the decade preceded me, and that I should keep on walking.’
Though it hadn’t deterred him. Their mutual attraction had been undeniable, and she hadn’t tried much to resist him after that. She’d certainly been waiting for him around a quiet corner in the hotel lobby as he’d instructed, when he’d emerged from the gala after her.
‘Which is why she’s unlikely to be daft enough to fall for your particular brand of welcome party,’ Val cut in, reappearing without warning and catching the back end of their conversation as she turned to Naomi. ‘You’re due off duty in ten minutes anyway, so if you take Bradley up, you won’t get collared onto a new case and you might even get home on time, for once.’
If looks could have killed, Bas was fairly sure Val would have been flat out on the floor. Naomi didn’t even attempt to conceal her dismay, though he didn’t miss the telltale kick of her pulse in her neck.
Right where he was sure he had sampled with great satisfaction, more than once.
It certainly cost him far more than it should have done to bob his head in some semblance of normality as he turned back to the older doctor and forced his suddenly deadweight legs to move again.
‘Fine, send her,’ he managed, astonished that his voice actually sounded normal. ‘She seems perfect.’
Which was not at all what he’d meant to say.
