Twins for the Neurosurgeon
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Louisa Heaton
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10
PROLOGUE
THE SECOND SHE got through the door to her hotel room, Samantha Gordon kicked off her heels with a heavy sigh and let her bag drop to the floor. In the darkness of her room, she padded over to the big window that revealed the Paris skyline at night in all its wonderful glory.
There was the Eiffel Tower, gleaming in gold, the beating heart of this city. And all around it yellow and red veins of light, as drivers drove their cars to various destinations. The tourists, the city’s lifeblood, and the residents were all going about their lives as if nothing incredibly significant had just happened in hers.
How did life just carry on?
Sam envied them their ignorance. Wished that she could be out there with them, taking in the delights of the city one last time. Dining on crêpes, or macarons, or crème brûlée. Walking by the river or the palace, or hoping for one last glimpse of beauty at the Louvre. Sucking up the energy, the culture, the passion and hope within this city and somehow bottling it to take it back home with her to Richmond.
She wished that she could pretend that this day hadn’t ever happened at all.
Instead she was here. Standing in the dark. In this hotel room, alone. Knowing that her actions today had resulted in a beautiful girl no longer being in this world. A wonderful young girl. Emmeline. An eleven-year-old who had already been through so much, who had been tired, who had begged them not to do another surgery.
But it hadn’t been Emmeline’s call.
That decision had lain with her parents, and Sam knew that they were somewhere out there in this vibrant city of light, broken, in pieces, also questioning their decision today. Mourning. Grieving. Maybe even blaming each other. Who knew? Would today’s decision rip them apart? Emmeline’s mother had been sure surgery was the right thing. Her father not so much. It was certainly a decision that would be with them for ever.
Sam knew that. Bad memories had a way of clinging on. Of digging into your psyche, clawing into you with painful ripping talons, changing it, changing you. Bad memories were studied, provoked. Feasted on. They popped up when you least expected them to ruin your day. A phantom of the past. Haunting you for ever.
‘I’m so sorry, Emmeline,’ she whispered, pressing her forehead against the ceiling-to-floor windows. And she told herself, there and then, that she would never forget this girl.
Ever.
She deserved to remember her. She deserved to be reminded of her. The ghost of this girl would remind Sam every day that she needed to be sure about every single decision she made.
A gentle knock at her hotel room door brought her back to the present. She almost didn’t answer it. The idea of facing people...seeing anyone...
Sam wanted to ignore it. Wanted to just lie on her bed and stare into space for a while, and maybe later order some food to her room. She’d not eaten very well the last couple of days, having caught a tummy bug. But now she could feel her hunger.
Tomorrow she had to be up early for her flight home at eight-twenty. That meant getting to the airport an hour or so earlier, which meant getting up at... She groaned at the thought of such an early wake-up call. Hiding beneath the quilt seemed like such a wonderful idea right now. Maybe she could phone the airline? Change her flight to a later one? There had to be more than one flight to London tomorrow, right?
‘One second!’
She padded across the floor in her bare feet and picked up her bag, hung it off the back of a chair. Then she picked up her heels and placed them off to one side, before peering through the spyhole in the door. She wasn’t just going to open her door this late at night when she wasn’t expecting anyone.
Yanis?
Yanis Baptiste was one of the neurosurgeons she’d been working with on this exchange between her hospital in Richmond—St Barnabas’s, affectionately known as Barney’s—and his hospital, Hôpital St Albert.
It was a month-long exchange. Sam and a few other doctors from various hospital departments had come over to Paris, whilst some of the Parisian doctors had gone over to London to work. It was something they’d been doing for a few years, and this year Sam had volunteered to go, having heard so many wonderful stories from other doctors who had taken part. They had informed her of just how much knowledge they had gained from the exchange. Plus, it would be a chance to soak up the local culture. See the sights, too.
Sam was always looking to expand her knowledge. Always trying to find new ways of doing things and learning...
But what was he doing here? This late at night?
She opened the door. ‘Hey... I wasn’t expecting a visit.’
She smiled at him. It was hard not to. Yanis Baptiste was a very handsome man. Dark hair, piercing blue eyes. Cheekbones you could cut yourself on and lips that... Well, the first time she’d met him she could remember thinking that she’d happily suck on his bottom lip. Or bite it.
It had been kind of distracting, working with him, but Sam had behaved herself, despite the constant flirting and the knowledge that they were both single consenting adults.
‘There is a tradition here at St Albert that when we lose a patient we raise a glass to celebrate their life.’ He held up a bottle of red wine.
Well, if it was tradition... Plus, Sam was ready for a drink of something stronger than the tea she’d been about to make herself. And there was no way she was going to raid the mini bar and be faced with an extortionate bill when she left.
She stepped back, opening the door wider. ‘Come on in.’
Yanis smiled and stepped past, and she was met by his usual scent—something exotic and masculine. Briefly she closed her eyes to enjoy it, breathing him in, letting it soothe her ragged soul, before opening her eyes again and closing the door.
Yanis was looking for glasses, which he found above the mini bar. ‘You like Merlot?’
‘Sure.’
She wasn’t sure where to sit. There were only two places—the chair next to the small table in the corner, or on the bed—so she just stood, watching him, as he popped the cork effortlessly and poured them both a glass.
He handed one to her and raised his own. ‘To Emmeline.’
Hearing him say the young girl’s name caused a lump in her throat. Reminded her of that sweet girl’s smile.
‘To Emmeline.’ She clinked her glass against his and took a sip. The wine was beautiful and ran over her tongue with a gentle caress of flavour.
She looked at him over the rim of her glass, drinking in the sculpted beauty of his face. He had such expressive eyes. The kind she could lose herself in if she wasn’t careful.
‘You were upset when you left.’
He stared at her so intently... It wasn’t an accusation. More of an observation, inviting her to speak about how she felt.
‘Yes, well...losing a patient will do that to you.’
‘It is always a difficult thing.’
She needed to sit down, so she sank onto the edge of the foot of her bed. ‘It just hit me hard, you know? She didn’t want that surgery. She’d had so many already. She was tired. Done. She didn’t want it any more—the fight. How many times did you tell me you’d gone in before?’
Yanis sat down next to her. ‘Three.’ His voice was sad.
‘Three times... Three times in her short life that poor girl had gone through brain surgery to scrape out a recurring tumour. No wonder she’d had enough!’
It hadn’t been just the trauma of surgery she’d needed to get past each time, but the recovery from surgery, too. Each one taking longer than the last.
‘We could not leave it. You know that. Doing so would have resulted in her losing function and dying. It would have been a terrible way to go.’
‘But she would have had more time! Time with her family. Time with her poor parents and her little brother. Time we took away from her today.’
The guilt was hitting hard, and Sam took a larger slug of her drink.
‘It would not have been quality time—you know that.’
‘But she begged us, Yanis! She begged us! And yet her parents told us to do the surgery because they trusted the medicine, trusted what we were doing, and look what happened!’
Yanis dipped his head. ‘We gave her counselling and prepared her in every way we could, Sam. We could not have known that she would stroke out like that today. Her previous surgeries have all been relatively straightforward.’
‘But we knew it was a risk.’
He turned to look at her. ‘There is always a risk. We did the right thing, Samantha. You have to believe that. Her tumour was slowly eating its way through areas of her brain that would have caused her to lose all function. Speech. Swallowing. Movement. Imagine her life without those things. She loved to swim. To play on her trampoline. Today we tried to give a young girl another six months of normality.’
‘Well, today we failed.’
She got up and went over to the bottle of Merlot and poured herself another glass, before filling his as well.
‘I just wish that...’
She fell silent as tears threatened, swallowing hard to gain control of her emotions, thinking of her own experiences, her own childhood spent in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The fear she’d felt. It could have been her. At any time in her childhood, this could have been her.
Yanis stood before her and looked deeply into her eyes. ‘Wish that what?’ he whispered.
‘That it could have been different.’ A tear slipped from her eye and rolled down her cheek.
Yanis took their glasses and put them down, and then he pulled her forward into his embrace.
She went willingly, her body yearning for the comfort that only another person could provide. Yearning for the warmth and the security and the safety. Yearning for a connection that she had not had for a long time.
Being here in Paris had made her feel so alone—something she’d not expected when she’d first packed her bags for a month in the city of love. She’d imagined meeting some French waiter or barman. Someone who would catch her eye and maybe provide some fun and laughter in amongst the hard work she would do here. A lighter side to her life. A brightness. A connection. Fun.
But she’d been so busy at the hospital, so exhausted when she came back to the hotel each night, she’d not really had time to sightsee or enjoy the city for what it was. But Yanis she knew. They’d known each other only for a month, but they had worked together a lot in that time, and she trusted him as a professional.
So she sank against Yanis’s chest, sighing heavily into the warmth of him, the strength of his arms around her, and closed her eyes in bliss as he stroked away her concerns and her cares, one hand on her back, the other stroking her hair. Her tears dried up and she realised they were swaying gently. He was rocking her, soothing her, and it felt so good and so right that she almost didn’t want it to end.
Lifting her head to look at him, to smile and say thank you, she was suddenly caught in the tractor beam of his intense gaze and the words got stuck in her throat.
Yanis looked down at her with a question in his eyes, a want and need of his own, and suddenly she realised just how upset that he must be, too. Yanis had known Emmeline. Much better than Sam had. He had worked on her for every surgery, had watched her grow over the last few years, had no doubt hoped for a better outcome than the one they’d experienced today. And yet here he was, comforting her.
She could see, sense, feel just how much Yanis needed this, too.
‘Yanis...’
‘Oui?’
‘Will you kiss me?’
She’d never in her whole life asked a man to kiss her before, but she had to right now. She knew Yanis wouldn’t do so without her giving her consent first. He would never assume that she wanted him to kiss her just because they were comforting each other. But something had changed within her as he’d embraced her. It was as if her whole body had come alive.
She’d felt so weary and tired when she’d made it back to her hotel room—hours operating on someone’s brain would do that to a person—but now all that world-weariness had gone and she felt alive for the first time in ages. She just knew that she wanted something to happen between them. It felt right. This was her last night in Paris. That was all she knew and that was all she needed to know. If they were going to celebrate a life, then why not enjoy the one they were living right now? Take a chance...strike whilst the iron was hot.
Who could truly know how much time they had left on this earth?
Yanis was here with her in this hotel room and she deserved to enjoy him as much as he would enjoy her. Why not comfort each other?
He placed a finger beneath her chin, lifting it ever so slightly as he stared deeply into her eyes. She saw his pupils, large and dark with arousal, and in that moment she knew she had never looked into a man’s eyes that were so intense. So beautiful. So exotic.
The feel of his lips lightly brushing over her own sent fireworks exploding throughout her body, and a heat began to build within her as her hands began to clutch at his clothes.
Don’t let me go.
His lips trailed down one side of her neck, feather-light, gentle, and the occasional quick touch of his hot tongue against her skin made her nerve endings dance in delight.
Her heart began to pound within her chest. She needed this. This oblivion. Being with Yanis like this would take away all the pain of losing Emmeline and would, for a brief while at least, take away her own past, her own regrets, her own grief.
His lips found hers again and he deepened the kiss. She began to loosen the knot of his dark tie, her fingers hungry for the buttons of his shirt, so she could get past those, feel the wonder of his skin. Feel the heat of him. The strength. The flexing of muscles moving beneath flesh.
She shrugged out of her blouse, felt Yanis’s hand at the zip of her skirt before it fell to the floor. He lowered her gently onto the bed and she pulled him close, not willing to be apart from him for a second, arching towards him, meeting him, relishing the weight of him above her, his skin against hers.
His body was a delight, and exactly as she’d imagined. From the very first day at St Albert she had noticed Yanis—before they’d even been introduced.
He was tall, at least six feet, and his straight, dark hair was exquisitely styled to look as if he’d just been dragged out of bed. But he was still groomed enough to look professional. Just watching him move, she knew that he looked after himself. Broad shoulders, a trim, neat waist in his slim-fit shirts, trousers that accentuated his backside and thighs.
He was a man who knew how to dress for his shape. Or was that just a French thing? That innate sense of style that all French people seemed to have so effortlessly? It would not have surprised her to see him strolling down a catwalk, or even to find out he modelled in his spare time. She’d seen the way people looked at him. Nurses, patients, other doctors, even one or two men had cast an appreciative eye over the delectable Yanis Baptiste. A double take, a second look just to make sure that their eyes hadn’t been deceived.
And he was single. How that was possible she didn’t know, but right now she was very glad that he was—especially as his mouth was doing such wonderful things as it trailed over her stomach.
Did he notice her scars? Did he wonder? Did he have questions? She felt shame begin its deep burn and suddenly wanted to hide, to cover herself, but that feeling went away when he simply carried on, without stopping or pausing. Without speaking.
He said nothing as his lips trailed lower, his tongue lapping at her belly button, his teeth nibbling ever so gently over her hip bone, his fingers hooking into her underwear and sliding them down, so she ignored her feelings and pushed them away.
She lifted her hips to make it easier for him and closed her eyes in ecstasy as his mouth trailed up her left inner thigh.
Her fingers caught in his hair...
And then... Oh, yes!
She simply lost herself. It was as if all thoughts vanished, all cares were washed away, and all upset and shame disappeared, to be replaced by wonder and heat and delicious excitement as she thrust her body against his mouth, never wanting it to stop, never wanting these sensations to end. He drove her onwards, upwards, higher and higher as his tongue slicked over her flesh, and just as she thought she might explode, his lips came back to her own and she tasted herself upon him.
‘Sam...we should protect ourselves.’
She nodded. ‘I’m on the pill. Do you have a condom?’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t come here expecting to...’ He looked down at her body, smiled. ‘I haven’t been with a woman for a long time.’
‘I’ve not been with a man for a long time.’
She grinned and pulled him towards her. Urging him on, wrapping her legs around his waist, she gasped with pleasure as he slowly filled her with the long length of him and began to move slowly, watching her every expression.
Sam gazed into his eyes, holding on tight, riding the wave that was coming. She was unable to look away, not wanting to look away, needing to have that connection, to see into his soul, for him to see into hers.
Briefly, she worried about what he might see...worried that he might sense she was broken and could never be fixed and because of that he might stop. So she closed her eyes to him, denying him that kind of access, and buried her face in his neck as her body began its ascent.
She felt the build of it, the surge, the sparks of electricity, the fizzing of nerve endings as the current suddenly exploded and she cried out, clutching him tight, her nails scraping his back as he came, too. She felt him thrust even deeper, stronger, and then, after a few breaths, he slowly stilled and began to kiss and caress her collarbone.
The delicate kisses were a balm for the frenzy of before.
He pulled back to look into her eyes. ‘Are you all right, ma chérie?’
She nodded, smiling, but unable to open her eyes and look at him. She suddenly felt ashamed. Ashamed and fearful over what they had done.
Had he seen the real her? The Sam Gordon she liked to keep hidden? Had he glimpsed her secret?
Now that it was over—now that she’d had what she needed in that moment so she could forget—she wanted him gone.
Before he could ask too many questions.
