A Sheikh to Capture Her Heart

by Meredith Webber

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said, turning to walk back along the beach to the bure.

  Sarah opened her mouth to say she’d have to see it to believe it, then closed it again.

  Theirs was a brief affair, a fling—it began and ended right here on Wildfire.

  * * *

  Harry held Sarah tightly against his body, his mouth opening to say, You must come and see them, then closing again. Remembering their decision that it would be a fling, and also the complications of his life back home.

  He knew of the young woman his parents had arranged for him to marry. Had even mentioned her existence to Sarah. The chosen one was everything a man could want in a wife—beautiful, well educated, a far-removed cousin in the strange marital dance of alliances the royal family had practised for centuries.

  The perfect match for a ruler!

  Except he didn’t wanted to rule.

  His brother would be better, fairer, more involved with the people.

  But the woman had been chosen. She would be expecting to marry him. To let her and both their families down would be unthinkable.

  So this romance would end with this last night...

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘SARAH, ARE YOU down here somewhere?’

  Sarah broke away from him and hurried towards Caroline.

  ‘We tried to get you on your phone, then at Harry’s. I’m so sorry, Sarah, but we’ve brought in a baby from one of the outer islands. Will you look at him?’

  Sarah turned back towards him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I have to go.’

  And she hurried with Caroline along by the pool, through the quiet gardens of the resort and, presumably, up to the hospital.

  Although he’d wanted to go with them, Harry knew it wasn’t his place. Besides, hadn’t he set aside his medical career, refusing to consider practising general medicine, which would have been more or less possible with the tremor in his hand?

  So that was it!

  The end of an idyll!

  Maybe not!

  The recent collapse of the mine having damaged the extensions to the airstrip so his jet couldn’t land here, it meant they’d both be on the same plane back to Cairns in the morning...

  Then he laughed at the thought!

  As if anything could happen on the local, gossipy plane that was more like a holiday coach jaunt than an international flight.

  No, the flight would just be something to be endured, torture, really, if that was the last he’d see of Sarah.

  He wandered back to his bure, kicking at the rough coral sand, remembering other sand, his sand.

  Maybe it was time he went home...

  His phone was ringing as he entered the bure and for a moment he was tempted to ignore it. But something about the insistent tone made him pick up.

  ‘Harry, I’m at the hospital. I need you!’

  The urgency in Sarah’s voice rang in his ears as he drove the little cart as fast as it would go up towards the hospital. Thankfully no one was around, although the privacy he’d built into the place meant you rarely met with other guests and all the staff should be home in their beds by now.

  Lights were dim in the ward side but burning brightly in the small ER room and farther on in Theatre.

  Sarah was waiting for him, her usual black and white replaced by theatre scrubs.

  ‘There’s a baby boy, born thirteen days ago on one of the outer islands. His mother has reported no bowel movements since birth and although he appeared to be feeding normally, he’s had a lot of projectile vomiting.’

  ‘Pyloric stenosis?’ Harry asked.

  Sarah nodded, her green eyes meeting his.

  Pleading?

  ‘Harry, he’s badly dehydrated and Sam’s working on his electrolyte balance and correcting his fluid balance, but it’s there, the little olive you can feel on palpation. They called me in—they often do if I’m here and it’s a child, because I do have a fair bit of paediatric experience—but he needs an op. Now! Not after the eight hours that it would take for someone to fly over, pick him up and fly him back to Cairns.’

  She paused and he wondered if she could possibly be going to ask him to operate.

  On a newborn when his hand trembled?

  Impossible!

  ‘I’ve never operated on a child so young,’ she said, hurrying on as he thought, here goes, ‘so I wondered if you’d guide me through it? Stand beside me and be my brain telling my hands what to do?’

  ‘Be your brain telling your hands what to do?’

  She couldn’t be serious.

  ‘Yes, it will work, I know it will. You must have done the operation a hundred times—well, a dozen at least—so what difference will it be if it is your brain telling my hands what to do instead of your hands, if you know what I mean?’

  The words had come out in a rush, out of the lips he’d kissed only hours earlier, but the idea was ridiculous.

  Impossible!

  ‘Please, Harry!’

  Lips and green eyes pleading now.

  ‘Just take a look at him, see how urgently he needs this op.’

  Harry closed his eyes and wondered if prayer would help.

  He’d left this all behind, put it away from him, lived from day to day for a long time, with the loss of something he’d set his heart and soul on doing.

  Forever!

  But now he was healing, getting over that loss. Wouldn’t this drag him back into that time?

  He looked at the woman in front of him, the woman he’d held in his arms, had kissed, had made passionate love to, and—

  ‘We can’t guarantee it would work,’ he said, and knew it for a pitiful excuse.

  Sarah must have known it, too, for she just waited.

  ‘He’ll need a nasogastric tube for continuous gastric lavage,’ he said, and the woman in front of him positively glowed.

  ‘Oh, Harry,’ she murmured, then she became the total professional he had already seen she was. ‘Come on, let’s get you gowned then see our patient. Ben’s okay with the anaesthetic—he did a big stint in paediatric surgery before he decided to become a writer and needed something less full time.’

  Ben was a writer?

  Harry shook his head. That was so insignificant, yet it had caught his attention in the maelstrom of emotions he was feeling as he followed Sarah down the corridor.

  * * *

  She could do this! Sarah told herself as she led Harry to the theatre.

  With one of the world’s best paediatric surgeons there to guide her, she could do this.

  It would be like her first surgery experience again, only this time the guiding voice would be Harry’s, not some older unknown surgeon, and her hands would be steady on the instruments.

  No way could she let Harry or the baby down by being hesitant or unsure.

  She turned around at the door into the changing room and smiled at the man she’d probably pressured into helping her.

  Rahman al-Taraq, his name at the top of innumerable papers on paediatric surgery, considered among the top ten in the world.

  Until...

  She left him to change and returned to the theatre, stopping at the door to tuck her hair into a cap, pull on a sterile apron, new booties, then went to the wash basin, scrubbing carefully—newborns were so fragile—gloving up and moving to the middle of the room, where Sam and Ben stood beside the tiny baby boy, Hettie standing behind Sam, Caroline near Ben.

  Waiting...

  ‘Will he do it?’ Sam asked.

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘He’s changing now.’

  She didn’t add I hope it works because these people, these friends who’d helped put her life back together, were already wor
ried enough, without her dumping any doubts on them.

  Harry came in and her heart skipped a beat.

  It shouldn’t be doing that when it was just a passing fling.

  Neither could she have it misbehaving during the operation. Little Teo was far too important for that.

  Harry moved towards the operating table, his focus on the patient lying there, his eyes taped shut, wires and tubes already attached to him, overwhelming the little body.

  A trolley beside the operating table held everything Sarah had felt they would need, but Harry checked it anyway.

  Already gloved, he touched the child with gentle fingers, palpating his stomach, feeling the little lump that was proof that his stomach was blocked where it should empty into the intestines, and the operation was a necessity.

  ‘So!’

  He looked around at the assembled crew.

  ‘Not my usual team but I couldn’t ask for better,’ he said, waving Sarah towards him.

  He looked at Ben.

  ‘You ready?’

  Ben nodded and injected the anaesthetic into a tube already in place.

  ‘You happy with the nasogastric tube, Sam?’

  ‘It’s secure and we’ve a gentle suction attached to it.’

  ‘So, let’s go!’

  He smiled at Sarah as he said it, and for all his voice fired every nerve in her body, she set everything else aside and focussed on the little boy they needed to save.

  * * *

  Praying this would work, Harry began.

  ‘Three-centimetre incision just below the right rib cage, careful of the liver, see...’

  Sam was cauterising the small blood vessels, and as Harry talked he could watch Sarah’s steady gloved hands following his instructions. The teacher in him kept coming out as he explained things to the others—how gentle traction with a damp sponge just here—Hettie followed that order—could bring a curve to the stomach to allow best access to the pylorus.

  Each step seemed to take forever, but with such a tiny baby there were so many things that could go wrong. Cutting too deep could be as disastrous as not cutting deeply enough.

  Sarah followed his instructions with neat, sure movements, finding the side of the pylorus that lacked blood supply, placing the longitudinal cut along the wall of the tiny bead, cutting into the outer skin but not going deep enough to do any damage to the inner walls.

  ‘Now, gently spread the lips of the cut apart until the mucosa puffs up—there, you’ve got it. Excellent. Now, who has the slow absorbable sutures? I use a running stitch but you can use interrupted ones.’

  He watched as, with more confidence now, Sarah sewed up the layers of tissue and muscle through which she’d cut, finally asking Sam to add butterfly closures across the wound to ensure its closure.

  * * *

  Harry was uncertain what he felt as he left the theatre, Sarah staying on as if unwilling to leave their fragile patient.

  Satisfaction, certainly, but...

  Was Sarah right?

  Did he have something to offer to paediatric surgery, even if he couldn’t operate?

  Probably, but surely it would never be enough.

  No, what he was feeling must be nostalgia. He had new interests, more than enough to keep him busy, and maybe, just maybe, he could fall in line with his family’s wishes and go home to learn at least something of his country’s politics.

  Yet the words Sarah had thrown at him that night still rankled.

  And the fact that their last night together—the one night he’d known she’d stay with him—had been cut so short rankled, as well.

  How selfish was that!

  Of course Sarah would want to stay with the baby.

  Hadn’t he needed to watch over babies he’d operated on?

  They’d always seemed too fragile for the indignities he’d made them suffer, too small for him to be invading their bodies.

  The dull ache of all he’d lost returned, and he realised it was the first time since he and Sarah had made love that he’d felt what had been an ever-present pain before.

  Because he’d known their time together would be so short?

  Surely not!

  * * *

  Sarah wasn’t sure why she’d stayed. There were plenty of more than competent people watching over little Teo, yet somehow she couldn’t leave the quiet room where machines still helped him breathe, and wires taped to his chest showed all his vital signs on the monitor above his bed.

  Yet still she had to stay, as if in apology to the little one whose body she’d invaded.

  She thought of Harry, wondered if he’d be expecting her, yet somehow knew he’d understand her needing to be here.

  So, tomorrow on the flight back to Cairns would be their last time together. She had a few days off then a flight to Emerald in Central Queensland, a week of surgery there, patients brought in from hundreds of miles around the large country town.

  While Harry, well, she’d seen the blue-and-gold-painted executive jet on the tarmac at Cairns airport from time to time. It matched the colours of the little helicopter that sat on the tarmac here at Wildfire, always ready to take visitors on a trip to one of the outer islands, or simply a flight over the marvels of the reef that surrounded M’Langi.

  Harry would be whisked away in his pretty plane to places she could only imagine. Not back to the desert with its silken sands but probably to Africa to check up on his projects there, or to South-East Asia to see for himself how his mosquito eradication programme was progressing.

  Harry!

  Weird how they’d started out hurting each other, then—

  Well, all holiday romances must come to an end.

  * * *

  ‘How’s our patient?’ Harry asked when Sarah appeared at the airstrip while the place was still being unloaded.

  She flashed a radiant smile that hit him in the gut.

  ‘Brilliant!’ she said. ‘The staff know how to treat him, and they’re the best, so he’ll be fine.’

  Now beneath the happiness he saw her exhaustion.

  ‘You haven’t slept,’ he said, and heard an edge of what couldn’t possibly be anger in his voice. As if her sleep—or lack of it—was any of his business.

  ‘I usually sleep on the plane,’ she said. ‘And I’ve a few days off to catch up anyway.’

  It shouldn’t be like this. Harry’s mind, or maybe some other part of him, was protesting. This shouldn’t be how it ended, polite nothings on an airstrip.

  But what else was there?

  The two of them in a bubble of—what, emotion?—amongst the bustle of people coming and going. All words said, their time together was already becoming nothing more than a memory.

  ‘Hi!’

  The bubble burst as Ben arrived, a wodge of papers stuck untidily under one arm, a duffle bag in the other.

  ‘Maybe I won’t be sleeping on the plane,’ Sarah said, smiling at the new arrival and taking the papers from under his arm.

  ‘Did you finish this last night?’ she asked Ben, who nodded happily, although he looked even more tired than Sarah.

  ‘I’m his first reader,’ Sarah explained, turning back to Harry, explaining politely, as if this was all perfectly normal.

  Wasn’t her body shouting that it hadn’t had enough?

  Weren’t her fingers longing to touch his shoulder, his cheek, perhaps run a thumb across his lips?

  How could she just stand there chatting about Ben’s latest book, which she apparently was going to read on the plane? Now even sitting next to her was probably out of the question.

  He had obviously been mad to start something he couldn’t finish properly. To begin an affair that couldn’t possibly come to its natural conclusion.

 
Holiday romance, indeed!

  Yet Sarah seemed unfazed. Tired, yes, but remarkably at ease, as if their few nights together were already forgotten. As if the passion with which she’d kissed him could be turned off so easily.

  Like flicking a switch!

  Whereas he just wanted to rip off all her clothes—or maybe undress her slowly—and finish what they’d started in a way more suited to a holiday romance...

  * * *

  Sarah hugged the mess of papers that was Ben’s latest masterpiece to her chest, thankful it would excuse her from sitting next to Harry on the flight back. Ben would claim the seat next to her—previous experience told her that. He’d want to know, every ten minutes, what she thought of it so far...

  But sitting next to Harry would have been agony. Already she was having trouble controlling fingers that wanted to stroke his cheek, hands that wanted to rest lightly on the back of his waist, or on his neck, or head, or, really, anywhere at all on Harry.

  She wanted the licence her fingers and hands had had to roam his body, learning him by touch, while other senses devoured him, inhaling the scent of him, thrilling to the roughness in his deep voice when he made love, seeing the light in his grey eyes when she made him laugh.

  Oh, Harry...

  She looked his way, caught his eyes on her, and knew he, too, felt the urge to touch.

  It was because their last night together had been cut short that their little romance felt unfinished. It had to be that, for her body to be wanting him so badly.

  Thank heaven for Ben.

  Sitting next to Harry for four hours and not ripping off his clothes would have been unbearable.

  ‘Okay, folks, remember we go through customs when we land, so leave anything illegal here on the island.’

  The pilot and co-pilot were ones Sarah had flown with before, and the co-pilot, in charge of loading, always began the flight the same way. At the top of the steps leading into the plane one of the two cabin staff waited, a list in his hand.

  Sarah smiled to herself. The flight crew would all know who was going to be on the plane and also which of the various islanders could cause problems, often trying to smuggle a live chicken or even a piglet on board, to be part of a celebration feast with their family in Australia.