Greek Doctor, Cinderella Bride

by Amy Andrews

  She wasn’t quite sure why she’d put it on with a sarong this morning, instead of her usual baggy attire. Or why she’d even packed it. It was certainly perfect weather for it. But then it had been all along. Maybe she wanted to leave Alex with an impression of her as a woman, the woman he had taken to dizzying heights two nights ago? Not the other woman. The lab geek. But Izzy, his responsive lover.

  A flash of red in her peripheral vision distracted her, and she turned her head towards its location at the back of the boat, thankful for the reprieve. She was just in time to see Sam, sans life jacket, losing his balance as he leaned over the side of the boat, and falling silently into the water.

  ‘Sam!’ she yelled, panic rising in her chest, her pulse roaring through her head. She sprinted towards the back, stripping off her sarong, discarding her glasses, kicking off her flip-flops.

  ‘Isobella?’ Alex called after her.

  ‘It’s Sam,’ she yelled back as she reached the side searching the water quickly, looking for any sign of the little boy, praying that he would bob to the surface.

  They were in the middle of the ocean—it wasn’t the crystal-clear waters of the island—and just looking was futile. She hesitated for a moment, feeling the clutch of panic as her fear of the ocean and what had happened to her the last time she’d ventured in took hold.

  Part of her wanted to recoil. To find a nice safe corner of the boat and pretend nothing had happened. And for a moment she hesitated, summoning the nerve to do something she hadn’t done in sixteen years. Something she’d sworn she’d never do again. But Theresa’s anguished cry pierced her bubble of anxiety. She took a deep breath and jumped into the water. A child’s life was at stake. There was no time for hysterics.

  She could vaguely hear shouting from the boat as she ducked and dived repeatedly around the area at the back of the cruiser, her under-average vision probing the vastness of the murky depths for a small, small boy.

  She could hear Theresa crying as she came up for air, and felt more desperate, more helpless. There were splashes beside her as Alex and Mike joined in the search. She dived down again, holding her breath until her chest throbbed and her eyes stung from the salt water.

  She burst to the surface, taking huge gulps of air. Something brushed her leg and her pulse-rate leapt, a surge of adrenalin and panic flooding her system as she waited for the pain, for the searing heat. It took a split second for her to realise the touch was harmless, and another to duck her head under the water to check out the source, her heart hammering. Could it be?

  Sam’s little body hung eerily suspended in the water, just near her toe. ‘Here!’ she called to the others, before diving down, grabbing him around the waist and kicking hard at the water to deliver them to the surface pronto.

  Then Alex was there, congratulating her, taking the frighteningly limp child from her, kicking powerfully to the boat, passing him up to Theresa. ‘I need you,’ he called over his shoulder to her as he hauled himself onto the boat.

  Isobella responded instantly, as she suspected she always would to Alex, and swam to the side. He leant down and pulled her onto the boat in one sleek movement. Water sluiced off her, and their bodies brushed briefly before they turned their attention to a hysterical Theresa, who was hugging Sam tight and crying uncontrollably, shaking him and telling him to wake up.

  Mike was trying to pry his son out of his wife’s arms, and Isobella glanced at Alex as the high emotion of the life-and-death situation enveloped her in its dreadful grip. Theresa’s anguish, her raw grief, was terrible to watch.

  ‘Theresa!’

  Alex’s voice might have been rough and husky, but the command growled across the boat, cutting into her hysteria. Theresa stopped crying and looked at him.

  ‘Let Isobella and I take care of Sam.’

  He held out his arms, and Isobella breathed a sigh of relief when Theresa relinquished her frighteningly still son to Alex’s care.

  Alex laid him on the deck and they both knelt beside him, uncaring of their dripping state. Sam lips were blue, and already his little limbs were cold and mottled. He wasn’t breathing. ‘How long do you reckon he’s been apnoeic for?’ Alex murmured quietly.

  Isobella shrugged, her brain trying to rapidly calculate while at the same time assimilate how such an active little boy could look so…lifeless. ‘Two minutes tops.’

  ‘He has a faint brachial pulse,’ Alex said, louder this time, trying to give Theresa hope.

  Mike was holding her tight, telling her Sam was going to be all right. That he and Isobella were going to save him. Alex prayed it wasn’t too late. Signs of a pulse were encouraging.

  ‘Keep monitoring it,’ Alex instructed as he dipped his head towards Sam’s colourless face, grasped his chin, pinched his little nostrils and puffed air past his cold lips.

  Isobella’s heart drummed madly in her chest as she watched the bob of Alex’s head. Reaction to her unplanned dip in the ocean warred with the desperate battle for life happening before her eyes. Now was not the time to freak out.

  Sam’s pulse fluttered slow and weak against her fingers as she focused her attention on the task at hand. She pushed harder against the crook of his elbow, willing it to be stronger.

  ‘Get some blankets,’ Alex ordered in between puffs. ‘Something—anything—to get him warm.’

  Isobella vaguely heard Theresa leave, no doubt grateful to have something to do that was going to help. Then a few seconds later Sam’s body spasmed, his shoulders jerked, and he coughed.

  Alex sprang back as a fountain of sea water spewed from the little boy’s mouth and ran out of his nose. They quickly rolled him on his side and he started to cry. A great big beautiful wail that Isobella would never forget as long as she lived. His lips were already pinking up.

  Theresa heard it, and she flew across the deck, sobbing his name.

  ‘Mummy,’ Sam wailed, between coughing and spluttering.

  ‘It’s okay, darling. Mummy’s here,’ Theresa choked, cocooning her son in the large beach towels she’d been carrying, lifting him in her arms, clutching him to her body. Mike dropped down beside his wife, hugging them both.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mike said, looking at both Alex and Isobella. ‘Thank you so much.’

  ‘Oh, God, yes,’ Theresa added rocking an inconsolable Sam in her arms. ‘I don’t know how it happened, but just—thank you…thank you for your seeing him, for finding him. I don’t want to think about what could have happened—’ She broke into a flurry of tears again.

  ‘It’s okay, love,’ Mike said gruffly, hugging her tighter. ‘Let’s not drive ourselves crazy with what-ifs.’

  Alex nodded. ‘I’m just pleased we could be of assistance.’

  They all sat in a dripping huddle for the next few minutes, watching anxiously as Sam’s cries slowly subsided. Alex suggested they get him fully medically checked out when they landed on Temora, and Mike and Theresa were more than glad to follow his advice.

  Sam sniffled and pointed to a seagull wheeling in the sky overhead. ‘Birdie,’ he said. The adults looked at him, stunned, and then roared with laughter at his intact innocence. Sam said ‘birdie’ again for good measure, obviously pleased by their cheery response.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any lasting damage with him.’ Alex smiled, ruffling Sam’s wet locks as the little boy yawned.

  ‘He’s no doubt exhausted,’ Isobella murmured. Nothing like an interrupted nap and a hypoxic incident to induce fatigue.

  Theresa stood, aided by Mike, and Isobella and Alex followed suit. ‘I think I’ll put him down for a nap and stay with him,’ she said, rubbing her nose against his.

  Mike watched them go. ‘Do you mind if I join them for a while? I promise I’ll have you on Temora in plenty of time for your flight.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Alex said. ‘Go, man. Go be with your little Houdini.’

  Mike grinned at them and they watched him go. Alex turned back to Isobella, remembering the moment he’d seen her di
ve over the side, not knowing why, his heart in his mouth. ‘That was an incredibly brave thing to do. It can’t have been easy for someone with a water phobia.’

  Isobella shrugged, her heart beating madly, her hands trembling as full realisation hit her. ‘I guess I didn’t have time to stop and think about it too much.’

  She looked dazed and his brow creased. ‘Are you okay?’

  She nodded briskly. ‘Well, maybe a little wet, but…’

  Alex laughed, his gaze drawn to her dripping hair and then down further to her now very see-through shirt. He could see she was wearing the cream bra with the butterfly at her cleavage he’d spied that first day on Piccolo. He knew he shouldn’t, but his gaze moved further south, anticipating a peek at the matching knickers.

  But his gaze didn’t get quite that far. The shirt was plastered to her abdomen, and he blinked at what he saw there. A mass of purple whip-like marks blemishing her flat stomach. Very like a Fleckeri scar. Very, very like.

  He stared as his heart pounded in his chest. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

  Alex’s gravelly voice sounded almost steely, and his cerulean eyes were flecked with chips of ice. Isobella shivered. She looked down, shocked to discover her thin white cotton shirt was completely transparent—she might as well have been wearing nothing. She crossed her arms across her abdomen. ‘Alex—’

  He batted her arms away, his hands holding them locked by her sides. Blood roared in his head. ‘Show me.’

  The husky demand brooked no argument. Their gazes clashed as her arms railed against the restraints of his. ‘Alex.’

  ‘Show me.’

  He was looking at her intently, and her breath suddenly became ragged. Quite unexpectedly the moment had turned into something else entirely. She was very aware of him as a man, with all that brooding intensity focused solely on her. His hands grazing her waist were sending hot needles of desire up to her breasts and down to her thighs. She felt small and vulnerable, defenceless in his grasp. He was angry, and it shouldn’t be turning her on, but she found herself strangely aroused.

  The sea lapped the sides of the anchored boat, loud in a tense silence as vast as the ocean around them. It bobbed gently, their bodies rising and falling with the sway.

  ‘Please, Alex.’ Her voice stuttered into the electric space between them.

  Alex couldn’t bear the raw appeal in her voice. Nausea surged through his system at the mere thought that her body might have fallen victim to the searing brand of a box jellyfish. He’d listened to too many victim horror stories. The thought that she had been through such an ordeal was too awful to contemplate.

  Isobella saw the flexing movement at the angle of his jaw. Felt the barely leashed power in the tightening of the bands around her wrists. Without any warning he grabbed the two edges of her shirt and ripped them apart, buttons scattering to the edges of the deck.

  Isobella gasped. ‘Alex!’

  He ignored her, his gaze rapidly seeking the marks he was all too familiar with. His breath hissed out as he took in the magnitude of her scars, horrified by the extent of them. Rivulets of water beaded her skin, pearling on the flat planes of her abdomen, pooling in the shallow recess of her belly button. He didn’t notice.

  Nor did he notice the transparency of her underwear, the visibility of her erect nipples or the dark patch at the front of her satin knickers. He had eyes only for the damage, for the ugly purple brands left by the tentacles as they had fired their deadly poison into her beautiful body. His gaze raked her stomach with clinical intensity. Her long, lean torso was completely covered, from the ribs down to beyond the band of her pants.

  Things suddenly became clearer. Her dislike of the ocean. The way she hid herself away. The startling empathy she’d shown him. And Danielle. The Isobella Nolan phenomena was suddenly making sense.

  ‘Isobella,’ he whispered, his gaze flicking momentarily to her face.

  He noticed the trachey scar for the first time, and another piece of the puzzle fell in place. All those high-necked shirts. That god-awful bow. His eyes returned to her abdomen, unable to look away.

  Isobella’s breath heaved in and out. She was speared to the spot by his brutal inspection. She stood before him, more vulnerable, more exposed than she’d been in her life. More than she’d ever been modelling lingerie on a Paris catwalk. More than three weeks in Intensive Care. More than the other night, when she’d been practically naked and he’d been deep inside her.

  But she couldn’t move. It was like that moment again—the moment when the Fleckeri had attacked and the pain had been so intense that for a few seconds she’d been completely paralysed. Unable to scream, to move, to get away, to seek help.

  His gaze rooted her to the spot. Warmth suffused her face. A breeze blew, chilling her wet skin despite the heat of the day and his incendiary stare. She was laid bare, and absolutely incapable of doing anything about it.

  Alex groped behind him for the moulded bench that lined the sides of the cruiser and sat down heavily. ‘Oh, my God.’ He raked his hands through his hair and then reached out to trace the whip-like blemishes.

  She saw shock furrow his brow, a look of horror tauten his full lips, and Isobella’s brain finally switched on. She recoiled from his touch. ‘No!’ Hot tears stung her eyes as she turned her back to him, desperately pulling together the edges of her ruined shirt.

  ‘They’re…They’re…’ He groped for an apt description.

  ‘Hideous,’ she finished for him, as she whipped around, her fingers worrying the edges of the shirt together at her throat.

  Alex blinked at her vehemence, his brain still grappling with what he’d just seen. He noticed the familiar movement of her hand to her throat and realised it wasn’t a nervous gesture, as he’d originally assumed. ‘No!’ he denied vehemently.

  ‘And yet you look at me as if I have a disease you’re going to catch,’ she spat. Anthony had done exactly the same thing. Before he had run. At least she’d had one night of blind passion when her body had been revered by Alex. She looked around for the sarong she’d discarded before her leap into the ocean.

  Alex ran a hand through his hair. ‘No. I’m just…in shock.’ Her scars were by far the most extensive he’d ever seen. ‘I look at them and I can’t even begin to imagine the pain…the trauma you must have been through. But then I look at them and clinically…they’re fascinating.’

  Isobella bit down on her tongue to stop more tears welling in her eyes. First he looked at her as if she was contagious, and then like a specimen under a microscope in one of his labs.

  She gave a short, derisive laugh. ‘To think men used to look at me with yearning. Do you know how many magazines this body sold?’

  Alex stood, her words sinking in, her identity finally dawning on him. ‘Oh, my God—you’re her. You’re Izzy. Izzy Tucker. The model. The one who was stung on a beach off Cardwell during a photo shoot. The one we’ve been looking for.’

  Well, give the man a cigar. ‘The very same.’ She located her sarong and tied it tight around her waist, using it to keep her shirt together.

  He took a step towards her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She took a step back. ‘It was none of your business.’

  She was in total flight now. Her secret had been discovered. And, like the wounded animal she was, she knew the best form of defence was attack. She needed to push him back behind the line they’d crossed.

  Alex felt frustration surge through his system. ‘You knew I was keen to talk to you.’

  Attack. Attack. ‘I didn’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘Not even after the other night?’ Hadn’t they shared something special? Something meaningful? It hadn’t just been sex. They both knew it.

  Attack. Attack. ‘You think because I slept with you I owe you my life story?’

  Alex’s jaw clenched. She made it sound cheap. ‘I told you mine.’ He had laid himself bare in a way that he hadn’t in years. And to a woman too. He didn’t do
that. He wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t felt some connection with her. A level of trust that he’d never experienced with another woman. Not even Sonya.

  Isobella couldn’t refute his words. His candour had surprised her. Humbled her, even. She’d known it hadn’t been easy for him to open up to her that way. ‘This isn’t a competition.’

  He ignored her. ‘Was that what the nightmare was about? Do you have bad dreams about the day it happened to you?’ He remembered how frightened she’d been, how she had trembled against him as fragile as a newborn kitten.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she dismissed evasively.

  One thing he knew for sure—she wasn’t fine. And he knew that somewhere deep in her heart of hearts she must know it too. She was hiding herself away. Shying away from life. Why else was she pushing him away so hard? She’d let him catch a glimpse of the woman she really was. Passionate and sexy and unguarded. He couldn’t bear to think of her going back to being a lab recluse.

  ‘You’re not fine. You’re a mess. Hiding your body and your beauty in baggy clothes and ugly glasses, shutting yourself away in the secluded environment of a lab.’

  ‘Hey, I’ll deal with my issues my way.’

  ‘By avoiding them?’ he asked incredulously.

  No one had ever called her on the way she had coped. Not even her sister. Isobella wasn’t about to hear it from someone who up until a week ago had been a long-distance crush, a sexy voice down the telephone line. ‘I don’t think people who live in glass houses should throw stones,’ she said acidly. ‘At least I’m hurting no one but myself. You? You’re branding the entire female sex as untrustworthy because one woman screwed you over.’

  She made a fair point. ‘Maybe not any more. What happened between us the other night…and this…’ he gestured to her stomach ‘…it changes everything. Maybe I want more now.’