A Miracle for the Baby Doctor

by Meredith Webber

  Conceived in paradise...

  When beautiful embryologist Fran Hawthorne is offered the opportunity to work on a Pacific island for a month, she seizes the chance to escape the humiliation of her ex-husband’s betrayal.

  But Fran isn’t prepared for Steve Ransome, the handsome doctor heading the clinic. After years of struggling to conceive with her ex, Fran is tempted to give in to the pure passion that burns between them. Only their “temporary” fling results in her carrying the child she thought she’d never have...

  “Which ear?” Steve asked when he returned, brandishing the bright red hibiscus in front of Francesca.

  “What do you mean, which ear?”

  “Availability,” he explained, coming closer to her, breathing in the scent of woman beneath a light, flowery fragrance that might be nothing more than hair shampoo. “It’s an age-old custom—right ear for available women, left ear if you’re taken. Left because it’s closer to the heart. In truth it’s probably a tourist legend, not a local custom at all.”

  He was too close. Fran’s nerves were skirmishing with her brain, urging her to move closer, while her brain yelled restraint.

  Restraint!

  It was practically a byword in her life, preached by her mother, confirmed by her ex-husband—restraint in everything.

  Not that her ex-husband had shown any restraint...

  Did that explain this sudden urge to fling it all away? To move out of the confining bounds of the life she’d always led? To forget the stupid guilt she’d felt when her father had left her and her mother, and the restraint she’d imposed on herself since that day?

  “Definitely not taken,” she muttered, disturbed as much by the memories and the fight within her as the closeness of the attractive man.

  “Good,” he said quietly as he slid the flower’s delicate stem behind her right ear, letting his fingers brush against her jaw as he withdrew his hand, his eyes holding hers, sending messages she didn’t want to understand.

  Dear Reader,

  Those of you who have been following the stories of the children brought up in foster care by the wonderful Hallie and Pop will have heard of Stephen—or Sir Stephen, as the boys called him when they teased. Well, he was tired of being teased and wanted a story of his own. I have touched on IVF in other stories, but as Stephen is a specialist in IVF this had to be a book about it.

  Embryologists, who take care of the eggs and sperm, are as important as the doctors. More, according to some of them, like Francesca, especially now there is increasing use of IVM—in-vitro maturation. IVM saves women having to undergo a long series of injections in order to produce ripe eggs at the right time. With IVM, immature eggs are taken from the woman and are matured in an incubator, and as Fran was proficient at this procedure she ended up working with Steve on the lovely island of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific. The pure white sand beaches, the swaying palms and the heady scent of tropical flowers did the rest...

  Meredith Webber

  PS: Marty, the playboy, gets his turn to tell his story in the next book!

  A MIRACLE FOR THE BABY DOCTOR

  Meredith Webber

  Books by Meredith Webber

  Harlequin Medical Romance

  The Halliday Family

  A Forever Family for the Army Doc

  Engaged to the Doctor Sheikh

  Wildfire Island Docs

  The Man She Could Never Forget

  A Sheikh to Capture Her Heart

  The Accidental Daddy

  The Sheikh Doctor’s Bride

  The One Man to Heal Her

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

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  Praise for Meredith Webber

  “The romance is emotional, passionate, and does not appear to be forced as everything happens gradually and naturally. The author’s fans and everyone who loves a sheikh romance are gonna love this one.”

  —Harlequin Junkie on The Sheikh Doctor’s Bride

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM STOLEN KISSES WITH HER BOSS BY SUSAN CARLISLE

  PROLOGUE

  FRANCESCA LOUISE HAWTHORNE put down the phone with a sigh.

  A deep sigh!

  Why had she stayed in Sydney?

  Why hadn’t she fled to the far ends of the earth after the divorce?

  Sheer stubborn pride, probably!

  She shrugged her shoulders and sighed again.

  ‘Trouble?’

  She turned at the sound of her boss’s voice and smiled at the man who was part of the reason she hadn’t fled. Dr Andrew Flint was one of the foremost IVF specialists in Australia—the best in Sydney as far as Fran was concerned—and his, admittedly early, work into IVM could revolutionise the way couples who had difficulty conceiving could have babies.

  Could bring hope...

  And she knew a lot about hope...

  Andy had been the first specialist in Australia to work on in vitro maturation, where immature eggs were taken from women and grown to maturity in an incubator, and this work had excited Fran so much she hadn’t considered leaving.

  ‘Andy?’ she said, when he’d been standing just inside the door of her office for a few moments.

  This prompt was obviously not enough so she added, ‘You wanted something?’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘I did, but now I’m realising just how much I’ll miss you if you say yes to what I’ve come to ask.’

  Fran shook her head. Used as she was to deciphering her rather absent-minded boss’s pronouncements, this one had her stumped.

  ‘Which was?’ she tried.

  He was still smiling as he came closer to her.

  ‘I’ve been asked to lend you to someone. Have you ever run across Steve Ransome? He runs an IVF clinic in the Alexandria area. He offers couples on limited incomes from some of the inner-city areas a reduced rate but his clinic has a high success rate so he has plenty of regular fee-paying clients.’

  Fran shook her head.

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ she said, refusing to think about high success rates and concentrating instead on where on earth this conversation might be going.

  And why had he mentioned missing her?

  At least trying to make sense out of Andy’s rambling was distracting her from the mother’s phone call—from the image of a smugly pregnant Clarissa that had lodged in her head...

  ‘Well, no matter, he’s a good bloke, and he’s asked me to lend you to him.’

  ‘Lend me to him?’

  This was bizarre, even for Andy!

  ‘For his clinic in Vanuatu.’

  Andy made this pronouncement as if it cleared up the whole conversation, and beamed at her as if he’d managed something wonderful.

  Fran rose to her feet and walked around her desk, pulling up a chair and turning to her boss.

  ‘Please
sit, Andy, then tell me this story from the beginning. I gather this doctor contacted you. Let’s start there.’

  Looking mildly put out, Andy sat.

  ‘But I told you,’ he protested. ‘Vanuatu! Only for a few weeks—four, I think Steve said. I thought it would be great for you—tropical island, balmy breezes, getting out of Sydney when the weather’s so lousy. It’s work, of course, and he particularly asked if I had someone on staff who’d done some IVM work. I thought of you straight off. You’ve been looking a little peaky lately. The change will do you good. Hard to manage here without you, of course, but you’ve got all the staff trained so well, I’m sure they’ll cope.’

  Sufficiently intrigued to swallow yet another sigh, Fran pieced the random bits of information together.

  ‘This man has a clinic in Vanuatu?’

  Andy smiled again, practically applauding her grip on the situation.

  ‘It’s a giving-back thing, you see, or maybe paying forward—that’s what he might have said,’ he said, and although Fran didn’t see or follow the paying forward part, she pressed on.

  ‘And he needs an embryologist for four weeks?’

  ‘I think it was four, or maybe six,’ Andy said, his forehead crumpling as he tried to remember. Then he obviously gave up on that bit of irrelevant information and added, ‘I said I was pretty sure you’d go. Friend in need—doing good work—that kind of thing. Right up your alley, I thought, and a lovely holiday thrown in.’

  Realising she wasn’t going to get much more from her boss, Fran changed tack.

  ‘Perhaps I should speak to him, find out exactly what the job entails.’

  Andy shook his head.

  ‘Afraid not,’ he said. ‘He left yesterday. Asked me last week but I forgot and he phoned from the airport. Gave me the name of his practice manager and said she’d sort you out with flights and stuff. I’ve got the number here.’

  Andy fished in his pocket, producing several screwed-up scraps of paper, uncrumpling them and glancing at each for a moment before stuffing them back into their hiding place.

  ‘Ah, here we go! Name’s Helen and the phone number’s there.’

  He handed the scrap of paper to Fran, who surveyed it dubiously. It certainly said Helen and there was a phone number but...

  ‘I think he wants you soon—like yesterday,’ Andy added, standing up and heading for the door. ‘You’ll still get your pay from here, of course, and he said something about having accommodation for you. Do keep in touch.’

  On which note he disappeared out the door.

  Having worked with Andy since graduating ten years earlier, Fran knew that was all she’d get out of him. In fact, if she asked him anything about it later in the day, he would probably stare blankly at her, the entire conversation lost in whatever was currently holding his attention.

  So Fran leaned back in her chair and wondered about serendipity.

  Ten minutes earlier she’d been pondering her stupidity in letting pride keep her in Sydney after her divorce from Nigel and his subsequent marriage to Clarissa.

  Well, pride, and her attachment to Andy and his work!

  Now here was an invitation to escape—if only for four weeks—plumped right into her lap in the most unlikely manner.

  Piecing together what little she’d gleaned from Andy, she assumed this man he’d spoken of—Steve Ransome—was running some kind of IVF programme on the island of Vanuatu and needed a embryologist—in particular one with experience in the very new field of IVM.

  She knew of Vanuatu, of course. An island nation in the South Pacific, originally under French rule, if she remembered rightly.

  Sun, sand, crystal-clear water, palm-tree fronds waving languidly over brilliantly coloured flowers...

  She looked at the rain lashing against her window and shivered because September, which should be bringing a little warmth, and a promise of spring, had so far provided nothing but rain and more rain, with temperatures more like winter.

  And Clarissa was pregnant...

  Her ex-husband’s wife, Clarissa.

  Her ex-husband, who’d hated every visit to the IVF clinic when Fran had been trying to get pregnant, who’d found the whole idea of IVF somehow humiliating—a slight on his manhood—and who now had a naturally pregnant wife...

  And as Fran’s mother’s best friend, Joan, was Nigel’s mother, there’d no doubt be regular progress reports on the pregnancy of the wonderfully fertile Clarissa.

  Doubt stabbed at her, making Fran wonder if the whole thing subtly underlined her mother’s disappointment in Fran’s failure to produce a child. Fran shook her head again.

  No, her mother had been upset over the divorce, but more because of the two families’ friendship.

  But the friendship had survived between her mother and Joan and although her mother was nearly always travelling these days, they were obviously still in close contact. Blame mobile phones and the internet!

  Which meant Fran would doubtless get updates on the pregnancy at regular intervals, each one probing all the still sore spots in Fran’s heart and mind.

  Getting away, if only for a month, was exactly what she needed.

  Although...

  She looked around the lab, seeing her workmates busy at their jobs.

  After all the treatment she’d had, plus three unsuccessful IVF cycles, people had been surprised that she’d come back to work.

  To work that was such an integral part of IVF programmes.

  But here, in the big lab that dealt with so many specimens and eggs and tiny embryos to care for, she didn’t ever know which couple had success, and who had failed. She was shut off from their success or their pain.

  And her own remembered pain...

  Fran smoothed out the piece of paper, checked the number and phoned a stranger called Helen.

  CHAPTER ONE

  STEVE PARKED THE battered four-wheel drive in the short-stay area of the car park and hurried towards the arrivals hall.

  When he realised he hadn’t a clue what the woman he was to meet looked like, he hurried back to the car, tore the top off a carton and hurriedly scrawled ‘Dr Hawthorne’ on it.

  Okay, so the name on a card made him look like a limo driver, except that in flip-flops, shorts and a vivid print shirt he didn’t even come close to their tailored elegance.

  And the limo drivers, he noticed, now he was back in the crowd outside the customs area, were holding professionally printed signs.

  He should have done better. After all, this woman was doing him a huge favour, coming out here on a moment’s notice to cover for his usual embryologist.

  He could at least have worn a quieter shirt.

  It was the pelican’s fault!

  He’d been heading for the shower when two young boys had appeared with an injured pelican—hauling it behind them in a homemade go-cart. The bird had appeared to have an injured wing but its docility had made Steve suspect it had other injuries as well.

  He’d explained to the boys that they needed a vet, then realised they could hardly drag it all the way to the north of the island where the vet had his practice. Packing all three of them—and the cart—into his car and driving them out there had seemed the only solution, which had left him too late to shower and change.

  So now he was late, and probably smelling of fish.

  It couldn’t be helped. He was sure the woman would understand...

  Passengers began to emerge, and he studied each one. The holidaymakers were obvious, already in party mode, smiling and laughing as they came through the doors, looking around eagerly for their first glimpse of the tropical paradise. Returning locals he could also pick out quite easily. Men in business suits or harassed mothers herding troops of children.

  Then came a tall woman, light brow
n hair slicked back into some kind of neat arrangement at the back of her head, loose slacks and a blue shirt, a hard-case silver suitcase wheeling along behind her.

  Elegant. Sophisticated.

  Not Dr Hawthorne, he decided, as the embryologists he knew were more the absent-minded professor type, usually clad in distressed jeans and band name T-shirts beneath their lab coats.

  The elegant woman paused, scanning the names held up in the crowd, passed by his and started towards someone else.

  It was stupid to feel disappointed, there were plenty more passengers to come. Apart from which, she’d be a work colleague—work being the operative word.

  ‘Dr Ransome?’

  He turned, and there was the woman, strange green eyes studying him quite intensely.

  Green?

  He checked—maybe blue, not green, or blue-green, hard to tell.

  ‘You are Dr Ransome?’ she said with an edge of impatience. ‘Helen told me you would meet me.’

  ‘Sorry, yes,’ Steve said, and held out his hand, realising too late that it was still holding his makeshift sign.

  ‘Oops,’ he said, tucking the sign under his arm.

  He reached out to take the handle of her suitcase.

  ‘The car’s out this way,’ he said, heading for the door. ‘It was so good of you to come—so good of Andy to spare you. My usual embryologist had a skiing accident in New Zealand last month and is still in traction.’

  Was he talking too much?

  He usually did when he was rattled, and the cool, sophisticated woman walking beside him had rattled every bone in his body.

  But why, for heaven’s sake? It wasn’t that there weren’t—or hadn’t been—other such women in his life.

  He slid a sidelong glance towards her.

  Composed, that’s what she was, which put him at a disadvantage as, right now, he was...well, badly dressed and almost certainly in need of a shower. The boys had been trying to feed the bird small fish.

  ‘Sorry about the rough sign, not to mention the clothes. There was this pelican, you see...’