The Vet's Escape to Paradise
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Becky Wicks
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19
CHAPTER ONE
‘HAVE YOU SEEN any boobies yet?’
Mike snorted a laugh at the end of the phone, all the way from Galway, and Ivy put her feet up on the gilded headboard. Flat on her back on the soft satin sheets of her honeymoon bed, she sighed at the ceiling.
‘You just couldn’t wait to ask me about the boobies, could you? And yes, they’re everywhere if you must know. You can’t walk down the street in Santa Cruz without being accosted by a man displaying his rail of I heart boobies T-shirts. Even this hotel lobby has a rack of them.’
Boobies were the blue-footed birds she’d been excited to see here in their native home, the Galapagos Islands. Her business partner, Mike, had probably been storing up the question for weeks, waiting till she was actually here on Santa Cruz—the island known as the beating heart of the archipelago—to blurt it out.
‘Pick me up a shirt, will you? That would make some of our clients’ day!’ he said. Then Mike’s tone changed. She pictured him pouting the way he did, elbows resting on the reception desk at their veterinary clinic, thin lips pursed in the thick of his grey-flecked beard. ‘And how are you, Ivy? You’re a brave woman, going on your honeymoon to a couples’ resort, all by yourself.’
‘It just means more chocolates and champagne for me,’ she said, doing her best to stay chipper, even as the song from Bridget Jones popped into her head: ‘All by Myself’.
‘You forced me to come anyway,’ she reminded him, crossing to the balcony. The heat hit her like a hairdryer. She’d given up on taming her mass of red curls in the humidity on day one. Three long days ago. ‘You said I needed a holiday.’
‘And you do. I don’t think you’ve taken a break since I’ve known you—you’re a thirty-eight-year-old workaholic and you know it. Are you meditating, like I told you to?’
She let Mike impart his limited spiritual knowledge, most of which he usually spouted verbatim from Oprah Winfrey’s podcasts, while she let her eyes trail down to the heart-shaped swimming pool. One couple were enjoying the facilities in the fading sunlight, floating their cares away on matchy-matchy inflatable love hearts. Ugh.
It should be her down there with Simon, living the couple’s dream. Only Simon was probably three pints deep into another session at The Smuggler’s Nook back home, planning new dreams without her.
She’d always hated that pub.
‘You’ll be glad you both called off the wedding one day,’ Mike said, probably reading her thoughts. He had an uncanny knack for it after launching and working at Animal Remedy Referrals at her side for so many years. They knew everything about each other.
‘You both agreed you didn’t want kids when you met, and he took this long to tell you he’s changed his mind. You were only dating, what...four and a half years? What else wasn’t he telling you?’
‘Nothing, Mike,’ she said wearily, watching the sickeningly happy couple lean across the gap between their inflatables for a kiss. ‘I know you’re trying to be a good friend but Simon’s a good man, you know it. I know it. We just want different things. Talk to me about the animals. How’s Ollie’s little pup doing after the parvo scare?’
Mike dutifully changed the subject to their animal patients, while a familiar twinge of anxiety made her clasp her phone tighter. She shouldn’t have left them, really. What right did she have to take a honeymoon when she wasn’t even married? In South America of all places. She should be home discussing the potential acquisition with Mike. It wasn’t every day some huge private equity firm offered you millions to take your business to the next level—or to a whole new set of standards that would match their national portfolio.
Then again, she would have to think about that wherever she was. Mike hadn’t said it directly yet, but she knew he was leaning towards selling...even if she was still unsure.
Anyway, this month-long trip had been booked for over a year. It would have been stupid to waste it. October was the best time to be here, coming up to summer in the Southern hemisphere. Besides, her mother had already paid for it...probably out of guilt, she thought. Then she admonished herself for being snarky. Not working right now meant far too much time wrapped up in her own head.
Sure, Simon could have informed her of his burning urge to spawn mini-mes before they’d planned the wedding and honeymoon of the century.
But then, maybe he had tried to discuss it. Maybe she just hadn’t been listening. Hadn’t wanted to listen.
Sheesh. Being her other half couldn’t have been easy. She did like to work. A lot.
Asking Mike to check in with her again tomorrow, just so she could be sure that things were ticking along OK in her absence, and getting a firm ‘no way’ in response, Ivy wandered down to the pool.
Maybe meditating in the final streaks of sunset would help her relax? If she stayed in her room, she’d just check her work email again and she’d already done that twice today. They laughed about the workaholic thing sometimes, but it wasn’t really funny. It hadn’t been funny to Simon.
Sometimes the look in her ex’s eyes when she’d come home late again...even now it made her cringe. She’d done to him what her mother had done to her all those years ago—worked so hard and so late that she’d barely kept track of the time or noticed the emotional effects of her absence on the people around her.
The more she thought about it from a distance, things hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing before Simon’s grand announcement: ‘I think I do want a kid, actually, Ivy. Wouldn’t it be grand...a little legacy?’
She cringed to herself just remembering how quickly the fear had set in, how quick she’d been to dismiss it: ‘I would be a terrible mother, Simon. We both know that.’
The swimming pool couple were taking cheesy photos in the blue hues of the pool with an underwater camera now. It didn’t feel right to intrude; besides, they deserved the couples’ pool, being an actual couple.
Ivy veered off the path towards the hotel’s private beach, located a sunlounger in the soft white sand and sat cross-legged to meditate.
Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Free the mind, release the ego.
Yeah, right.
With each swoosh of the waves, in swept her ego to chide her.
Children were nice enough, but she didn’t exactly know how to relate to them. Most of her own childhood had been spent cooped up in the house with her nanny and her dog, while her mother worked tirelessly, relentlessly, in some office Ivy had only ever visited in her head. Every day after school had been the same after her dad died: she’d been wrapped up in a cocoon, not allowed out to play in case something bad happened to her, too. Pretty soon her friends had stopped calling round altogether.
Thank goodness for Zeus, she thought. That big daft German shepherd had been her whole world. The reason she’d thrown herself into her animal books, then her veterinary studies! Her own career was her baby now. The reason she’d chosen a child-free life and future.
She pinged her eyes open, glowering at the horizon over the water.
Why could she not even meditate properly?
Her mind always spun backwards when she didn’t keep busy. Oprah would probably give her a right talking-to. How dare she feel even the slightest bit guilty for making her own career her baby? She had a big clinic-sized child to nurture and grow as she saw fit. What was so wrong with that?
It wasn’t as if she’d brought an actual child into the world, only to let her other priorities render it invisible.
Ivy bit the insides of her cheeks. It tended to centre the pain somewhere other than her heart. Her dad’s death had hit her mother hard, but maybe workaholics ran in the family.
Either way. She wouldn’t ever do that; she’d told Simon as much. They’d called everything off seven months ago. All that was left was this non-refundable holiday. Rumour had it he was dating again already.
So now you’re alone. Again. Just you. Is that what you really want, Ivy?
Shut up, ego. Breathe in, breathe out...
A frightened squall from the rocks around the water caught her ears and sucker-punched her square in the solar plexus. What the...?
Squinting, she removed herself from her decidedly un-meditational pose and found herself investigating. It sounded like an animal in pain—she’d know that sound anywhere.
‘Where are you? What are you?’
Navigating around the rocks in her flip-flops, she sent an army of magnificent red Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttling in a scarlet drove away from her.
Sorry, guys, don’t mind me.
The Galapagos was no place not to look where you were going; there were more rare species here than anywhere on earth and most of them had a cheerful tolerance of humans, which was exactly why these islands were so special. Already, on her photo expeditions around the island she’d seen more honking sea lions than she could count, and tiptoed around sleepy groups of charcoal marine iguanas, their red underbellies glowing like the embers of a fire. She always thought they looked like little dinosaurs who’d forgotten to become extinct.
It took her less than a minute to locate the source of the noise. She almost reeled, being so close to it. No way.
A baby blue-footed booby! Maybe just a month or so old. For a second, she studied it, in awe of its tiny pale body, light brown wings and distinctively sky-hued webbed feet. Like no other creature on earth.
‘Wow,’ she gushed, frowning at the deep red gash on its white feathered belly. ‘What happened to you?’
The poor thing looked as if it must have got into a fight with one of those marine iguanas that were usually chomping at moss on lava rocks, further up the beach. Both were synonymous with the Galapagos. This was why she’d wanted to come here for as long as she could remember, to witness such native creatures with her own eyes. But seeing one hurt—especially one so young and so small—she wasn’t prepared.
‘Come here, little buddy, I won’t hurt you.’
Careful not to scare it further, she shook off her green T-shirt and scooped it up. Lucky she’d kept her bikini top on underneath. In minutes she was hurrying back up the beach with it.
‘I’ll...um... I’ll have to call Jero.’ A stocky, round-faced lady with a name badge reading Nayely had taken one look at the injured bird from behind the reception desk and got on the phone.
Ivy had laid the fledgling out on the pristine lobby floor on her shirt, much to the interest of the couple who’d come in from the pool. They were standing to her left with their inflatable hearts dripping on the marble tiles, watching her swabbing gently at the wound. Nayely’s assistant had located fresh towels and an emergency kit, but it looked as though the wound would need stitches. And probably some kind of special antiseptic. She’d warned them—if it was a bite from an angry iguana, the toxins could kill.
‘At least it’s still moving, fight or flight going strong,’ she said to the crowd as she placed her hand over the bird to keep it still. It wouldn’t do to have an injured baby booby flitting erratically about, dropping blood all over their rack of prized booby pun T-shirts.
She was just admiring how its cute little head fitted between her forefinger and her middle finger when a rush of warm air enveloped her. She turned to see a male figure in the revolving doors, and in less than two seconds flat all six-foot-something of the powerfully built man was striding towards her, carrying the scent of the evening and a doctor’s bag.
Blinking, she stood to greet him, shocked into silence for a second by his presence. Lean. Athletic. Obviously white Latino, judging by the sun-kissed olive skin stretched over high cheekbones, and charcoal-black hair shaved almost to the scalp, as though he could have walked straight off an army base. He was rocking the hell out of a tight white T-shirt. A wall of muscle flexed in his broad-shouldered back as he said a quick hi and crouched at her feet to inspect the bird.
‘Where did you find her?’ he asked after a moment, looking up and fixing deep mahogany eyes onto hers. Faint crinkles lined them like parentheses; what was he, thirty-eight like her? Maybe forty?
‘On...out there...on the beach.’ Ivy cleared her throat, forcing her neurons to fire correctly instead of all over the place. God, he was handsome, and, judging from his accent, American?
‘You...work here? On this island, with the animals?’ she asked as Nayely appeared again with a cardboard box.
‘There’s nothing more I can do here; I’ll have to take her to the clinic.’ He paused, as if remembering her question. ‘I’m the founder, head vet and operations manager at the Darwin Animal Clinic,’ he replied, diverting his attention back to the bird, which she scooped gently into the box while he held it. She caught the edge of a black tattoo—something jagged and tribal-looking—on his biceps under his shirt.
‘That’s one hell of a job description,’ she said.
‘I work with the domestic animals as a rule. Sometimes we help the Galápagos National Park with injured wildlife, like this. Thank you for getting there first and helping this little one. I’m Jero Morales.’
‘Ivy Malone,’ she replied, self-consciousness snatching her breath as his bright eyes scanned her up and down from under thick black drawn-together brows. She was shirtless, in just her bikini top. Doh. At least she had denim shorts on too and wasn’t just standing here directly before him in a two-piece. That would have been awkward because this man was gorgeous.
‘Where’s the clinic?’
‘Not too far from here. We’re the only one on Santa Cruz. The only permanent one in the Galapagos.’
‘There’s only one permanent veterinary clinic, across all the islands?’
‘It’s more like a shack, but he did start it all from scratch,’ Nayely cut in.
Jero’s eyebrows raised at the look that must have been on her face. He stood with the box.
‘I mean, I just find it hard to believe there’s only one,’ she continued. ‘I’m a vet myself. Back in Ireland.’
He nodded and said something quietly in Spanish to Nayely. The two clearly knew each other—the island was small after all. Ivy found herself wondering where he lived and what else he did on the island when he wasn’t caring for sick animals.
Stop swooning, woman!
Suddenly, he was motioning goodbye, and she was speaking without thinking.
‘Can I check up on this booby, tomorrow? I’ll come by the clinic. Maybe I can even volunteer? I have some time...’
‘Sure, Nayely will let you know where I am.’ He eyed her up and down again, holding the box against him. She knew instinctively that the bird would be safe in his care. A part of her wanted to be that bird.
‘I should go,’ he said, and she shook herself. What the hell was she doing, crushing out like a schoolgirl?
Must be the heat.
His mouth twitched with a secret smile, and something in her stomach did a backflip as his eyes raked over her torso again. ‘Nice to meet you, Ivy,’ he said, and she allowed herself the pleasure of watching his pert bottom from behind as he made his way back out into the twilight.
