by Becky Wicks
‘Call me Lucas,’ he said, his blue eyes still luring her in like deep oceans. ‘And I’m sure you can make time for all the things you have to do while you’re here. If you have any concerns about anything, we have a very supportive team in place—myself included. All you have to do is ask. Understood?’
‘Understood and appreciated, Lucas, dank je.’ She found she felt unaccountably hot despite the air-conditioning. She’d been entirely unprepared for this man’s undeniable sex appeal.
‘How’s your Dutch?’ His question came out of the blue. ‘Conversational, as I remember from the interview?’
‘Mijn Nederlands is oké, maar het kan beter,’ she replied. My Dutch is OK, but it could be better.
‘Well, you grew up here so I’m sure it will all start coming back to you. We already have you signed up for the refresher lessons we spoke about before.’
‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘If only for any new slang I might have missed, being away so long. I’d like to be as confident speaking with Dutch patients as possible.’
‘You’ll be fine. Did I hear you mention you speak Italian too?’
‘I do,’ she confessed, and she registered a rare flicker of pride in her linguistic abilities as he nodded in what seemed like admiration, and sat back in his seat. ‘We were all encouraged to be over-achievers at boarding school.’
‘Ah, boarding school in England, that’s right.’
‘Yes, my father sent me when I was very young,’ she said, recalling how he’d freed her from poor Anouk’s care at the same time. She’d loved term time at St Cuthbert’s, because at school she had almost been able to forget that in the outside world she was nothing but an inconvenience. It had only been in the holidays, when she had been swiftly shunted back to Amsterdam, that it had truly hit home.
Her father had been too busy for her, her mother hadn’t cared where she was, and Anouk, although she’d done her best to keep an eye on her, had been working full time, too. Not that she would say any of that to Lucas; she was far too busy getting lost in his eyes.
‘And your parents, are they in the UK, or here in the Netherlands?’ he asked.
‘They separated when I was a toddler. My mother lives here with her second husband Stijn...in a town called Weesp,’ she said.
Lucas let out a short laugh. ‘How funny, my parents live pretty close to there.’
‘I haven’t seen my mother in a long time,’ she told him, picturing his parents, who were obviously still together. Were they as tall as him, as good looking, as charismatic? ‘My father died almost seven years ago. He was bitten by a spider in his sleep on a trip to Thailand. He developed a fatal kidney infection as a result.’
Lucas’s face fell suddenly and gone was his air of professional authority. ‘I’m so sorry, Dr Grey...’
‘Freya, please.’
‘I didn’t mean to drag up the past like that. And to lose your father that way, I can’t even...’
‘I know,’ she said shortly, feeling the electric storm between them pass in a flash and settle into something verging on awkwardness. She might not have been so forthcoming with such details if he hadn’t been so damn handsome, staring at her like that with his vivid blue eyes. He was unnerving her, to say the least.
She sat up straighter in her seat, determined not to let things get any more personal. She was here to work after all, not to be thrown by a surgeon who for all intents and purposes looked more like a movie star than a medical professional. ‘Time heals everything, in my experience. Almost everything anyway. There’s no point in dwelling on the past. Should we get back to my introductory session, Lucas?’
CHAPTER TWO
A WEEK LATER, Lucas was observing Freya from across the room. She was crouched on the floor of the play space, laughing with little Violet and her mother over something in a book.
‘If only my hair would look that glossy at this hour,’ Pieter said, appearing at his side in the hallway. Lucas could always tell it was Pieter. It was as if he made his shoes squeak on purpose when he walked, just to be noticed.
‘She’s definitely the hottest cardiologist we’ve ever had here,’ Pieter’s boyfriend Ruud whispered, coming up between them. The two of them always arrived together. ‘Joy says she’s single. We should set her up with someone. What about Lucas here? Is his dating profile up to date again yet?’
Pieter rolled his eyes. ‘Ruud, he’s still mourning his Indian bride-not-to-be, you know that. Don’t be so insensitive.’
Rudd let out a pffft noise. ‘He has to move on from her eventually. It’s not like she’s ever coming back...’
‘Guys, I’m standing right here.’ Lucas shot them a look. They were speaking in Dutch, but he didn’t want any of his patients to hear them. Or Freya, who clearly didn’t need refresher lessons as much as he’d thought she might—he’d heard her talking quite fluently to their young patients all week. As much as he respected Pieter and Ruud’s work, the dietician and social worker duo liked to offer their observations a little too often, especially regarding his personal life, and especially at work.
Then again, if they were taking too much interest in his love life, that was his fault. He’d become pretty good friends with them more recently, and he’d never made a habit of becoming friends—or lovers—with colleagues. Not until Roshinda had shown up at the clinic to shadow him. The medical illustrator had been sent from India nearly two years ago to document his work for a journal. Things had been so good with her, at the start at least, that he’d been much happier in general. He’d got closer to his other colleagues at the clinic while she’d been around, Pieter and Ruud included.
The guys had been a huge support after she’d left six months later, but they still didn’t know the whole truth about why she’d gone. Roshinda had always had an arranged marriage to go back to. It had been set up long before her arrival in the Netherlands, and a fiancé she’d met just once had been waiting for her at home.
Lucas had tried hard not to, but he’d fallen for her anyway, and she him. He supposed he’d spent their whole relationship hoping she’d change her mind about going ahead with the marriage, although she never had. A year and a half after she’d left, he was starting to come out the other side, but moments like this brought it all back.
‘Touchy,’ Ruud quipped, no doubt seeing the look on his face. ‘You know we have your best interests at heart, Doctor. Get it? Heart doctor? Oh, she’s coming over. Tell her I like her shoes.’
The pair took their leave as Freya stood up and made her way towards him. ‘Good morning, Lucas.’ She stood at least a foot shorter than he was. ‘How are you today?’
‘Good,’ he said simply, frowning after Ruud and Pieter. ‘We’ll check in on Rolf first.’
‘You look tired. Was it a big night?’ Freya said, just as he was thinking how shiny her long, brown hair really was. Her observation took him by surprise, and he was a little irritated with himself at the way what she thought bothered him.
He’d been spending a lot of time admiring her over the past week, not least wishing he hadn’t put his foot in it before, asking about her father. How was he to know the man had died like that? He prayed to God it would be a long time before he’d have to know what that was like; losing his father. He’d sworn to be more careful with what he said to new recruits from now on, but Freya had got him flustered the second he’d walked into the staffroom and seen her face with its large pansy-like eyes in a shade of brown he’d never seen before, and her petite figure that would probably look great in anything.
She wasn’t what he’d been expecting. In fact, he’d had no time to wonder much about her beyond the fact that she’d seemed perfect for the position, but the moment she’d met his eyes, he’d seen something in her that he really hadn’t wanted to. Something interesting and magnetic.
‘I suppose it was a big night,’ he replied slowly, realising how ti
red he felt. The homeless shelter was usually busiest on Tuesday nights when he took the helm in the kitchen. He’d found a new sense of purpose at the chopping board, and putting creative recipes together from the leftover boxes of food the supermarkets dropped off; a different kind of science from his skills in surgery.
Freya was looking at him inquisitively but he didn’t elaborate. No one at work knew he was still volunteering at the shelter, it was a takeaway from his time with Roshinda that he’d kept to himself. Talking about the shelter meant talking about her, and he’d been trying not to.
They swung into Neonatal. Eleven-month-old baby Rolf was on ECMO for a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. The state-of-the-art technology known as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation supported the heart and lungs by replacing the heart’s pumping function and the lungs’ oxygen exchange. Rolf was doing well with it so far, but his face was still pale and he still wasn’t moving his fingers when they peered down at his tiny frame.
‘We had a child with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia at one of the hospitals I worked at once,’ Freya told him sadly. She started adjusting the blanket around the baby’s arms and he watched her long fingers fold the fabric softly around his tiny shoulders. ‘We couldn’t save him.’
‘We’re saving this one,’ he said firmly.
‘Little Rolf is going to be fine,’ Joy confirmed, coming over to them. ‘He’s a feisty one, he is. Was the other little baby back when you were in South Africa, Freya?’
Lucas flicked through the notes, listening to them talking with interest. He knew all about Freya’s penchant for travel—she’d spoken of these missions in her interview process and they’d hired her partly for her international experience—it wasn’t just the Dutch they served at this hospital. He’d never been farther than the south of France, himself, though not for lack of interest. He’d just never found much time for travelling.
‘It was, yes,’ Freya said, and he heard the slight despondency in her voice. ‘I did a three-month paediatric cardiac surgical mission with an NGO. That was pretty eye-opening. I was told we were lucky there was an operating room nurse and a consultant anaesthetist at the centre. Juanita, our consultant intensivist, said she’d been on missions in Asia where the surgeon had to do it all.’ She looked like the flashbacks of memory still upset her.
‘Sadly there were a lot of kids who suffered because of the lack of facilities. You can only do so much for people with limited tools and equipment, you know? I’m always so grateful when I’m working somewhere we can offer children the best chance of getting better.’
‘Like here,’ he interjected. ‘That’s our aim here.’
‘I know, that’s why I applied,’ she responded, and the look in her eyes suddenly told him she was a woman who could keep a team...and a man...in check. Freya was quite a force to be reckoned with, he thought with an inward smile.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘I’ve seen your certificates, Dr Van de Berg. Being the top children’s heart surgeon in the Netherlands must have kept you busy. Have you had the opportunity to work on a medical mission anywhere yet?’
‘No,’ he admitted, watching the sunlight catch her hair again through the stained-glass balloons above the windows. It was interesting, the way she’d said ‘yet’, as though going off to do things like that was for everyone. ‘I haven’t done too much travelling, for work or pleasure,’ he told her enquiring eyes. ‘I guess I always tell myself it’s something I’ll do later.’
Freya looked puzzled by his response, as though the notion was absurd. ‘How do you know how much “later” you have left?’
Lucas cleared his throat. She’d said it with a certain kind of intensity in her narrowed brown stare that he wasn’t used to and it both unnerved him and turned him on in equal measure. ‘Where in South Africa were you?’ he said, to distract them both.
‘Right in the heart of the Zulu area,’ she said, and her voice softened more as she ran a thumb softly across Rolf’s cheek. ‘Communities there were made up of all sorts of people, from refugees, to tribes, to people in rural areas who had no access to healthcare at all. Some of them lived in so much poverty you couldn’t help letting it all out sometimes, even though you knew you needed to be their strength.’
Joy pressed a hand to her heart and let out an anguished sound. ‘You’re making me want to go there.’
‘You should, at some point,’ she urged, casting him a glance that told him she meant him, too. ‘They need every qualified medic that they can get. We all had to do our breaking down behind the scenes, we couldn’t let them know how hard we found it. Seeing their pain, and realising the consequences of our world’s indifference over matters of life and death, that’s life-changing. Those people, Joy, they have hardly any help. Some of the kids came in as heads of their households after their parents had died, some of their family members were too sick to get to us themselves. I really should go back on the next mission trip...’
The things Freya must have seen throughout her career so far had intrigued him from the start, since their phone interview, in fact, when she’d told him one of her best achievements to date was spending six weeks on another medical mission in Cambodia, mostly keeping the wild monkeys at bay. She’d said the monkeys had been trying to steal supplies from their camp.
He remembered he’d wanted to ask her more about all the places she had seen and been, but the panel had had three other people waiting to be interviewed for the same role on the same afternoon, so he’d had to cut their call short. He wasn’t sure he’d have been able to do that had the interview been in person. Freya was beautiful and beguiling on top of her impressive list of qualifications. He’d been struck by her presence the second he’d seen her.
Joy was looking at Freya like she’d just switched on a light-bulb inside her. Lucas hoped she wasn’t getting any ideas. As much as Freya’s work was impressive, inspirational even, he didn’t need his team to start disappearing off to South Africa, or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe it wasn’t the same as heading to Africa but he...all of them...had enough people to help here. More than enough.
His life was different now, and had been ever since his father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eighteen months ago. Now Fred Van de Berg couldn’t concentrate on a conversation for more than five minutes, which was driving his already crazy mother, Mira, even crazier. She was putting on a brave face but it was getting harder by the day.
There was Martijn, too, at the homeless shelter. Martijn was only fifty-five, a once proud family man who’d served his time in the military before losing an arm in an aircraft manufacturing accident at a factory up near Rotterdam. Then he’d lost his wife, both kids and his home thanks to the depression he’d suffered after the accident.
It was a self-appointed position, to be doing what he did for Inloophuis, meaning Walk-in House, one, sometimes two nights a week. Sometimes he wished he didn’t care so much about Martijn, especially when he showed up at the shelter and found the guy passed out drunk outside next to his dog, Shadow. But when Martijn was sober, he enjoyed talking to him and Lucas had seen a steady transformation in Martijn’s attitude towards life and recovery that countered his father’s slow but steady decline. One made him sad, the other lifted his spirits, so he’d come to rely on Martijn as much as Martijn relied on him.
His father Fred had the rest of their family around, who loved him dearly and protected him. Martijn had nothing. No one. Like many of the people Freya had met on her travels, probably.
‘You look like you’re miles away,’ Freya observed.
He shrugged and turned away from her piercing eyes, cursing himself. He hadn’t told anyone at the hospital about his father’s illness, not even Pieter and Ruud. If he did, they’d be urging him to spend less time working so hard at the hospital and more time with his father, and there was just so much to do here. His team didn’t know he worked at the shelter either, but
he was too involved now to stop and he juggled it all well—most of the time.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he told Freya, resisting the urge to get lost in her eyes again. There was something about her...
Sometimes it felt like everyone needed a piece of him. He couldn’t leave the Netherlands even if he wanted to.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I DON’T KNOW why you won’t just let me come and help you with the house. You can’t do all that on your own, Freya, it’s a huge task!’
Freya lowered herself to the grass and lay on her back and stared up at the solo wispy white cloud that seemed to be hovering over her head in Vondelpark. Her half-sister Liv had finally caught up with her. Or rather Freya had guiltily decided to answer one of her calls.
‘I told you Liv, I’m fine. Thank you for offering. I’ll be working all day at the hospital. It’s long hours, you know that, so you’d be by yourself most of the time, and it would be very boring...’
‘Freya, Anouk was my grandma too. I know she left the house to you, but I want to see the place we spent all that time in. I want to help you go through her stuff. Besides, me and Jed just broke up.’
Wincing Freya squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Oh, Liv. I’m sorry to hear that.’
She really was. Liv and Jed, both twenty-three, had been an item for four years. He was the reason Liv had left the Netherlands and moved back to the UK. ‘I thought you guys were rock solid?’
‘He did to me what Johnny and Beatrice did to you,’ Liv said through clenched teeth. Her thick Dutch accent permeated her English still, but she always made a habit of speaking in English to Freya. ‘Can you believe it? I don’t know how women can be so cruel to other women. Maybe I’ll just come home. It might be fun, now you’re there too.’
