by Becky Wicks
* * *
Freya was just about to leave for the elevator when she realised she’d left her book in the staffroom. At the end of another busy shift she was making a mental note of all the things she now had to do back at the house. The boxes certainly weren’t unpacking themselves, and she still had to pack the ‘vintage treasures’ she’d promised to sell to some bargain hunter on an online marketplace.
But when she stepped through the door, she was surprised to find Joy, Pieter and Ruud huddled around the desk with the computer on it, all looking at something in a box.
‘What are you lot doing?’
Pieter put a hand to his heart and drew a short, sharp breath. ‘It’s you,’ he stated in relief.
‘Still me.’ She swiped her book from the table and dropped it into her bag. ‘Who were you afraid I was?’
Joy handed her a medical journal from the box on the desk. ‘We don’t know if Lucas has seen it yet,’ Ruud said cryptically, perching one butt cheek on the arm of the sofa and adjusting his tie and his shirt collar. Both he and Pieter were wearing matching purple ties with characters from Sesame Street on them.
‘Maybe she had some separate copies sent straight to him at the houseboat,’ Pieter wondered out loud.
‘Houseboat?’ Freya asked, intrigued.
‘The gorgeous, state-of-the-art, totally humongous houseboat Lucas lives on,’ Joy explained, as if she should already know. ‘It’s more like a luxury apartment with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of the water from floor-to-ceiling windows. Did you know he even has a grand piano in it? And he had Banksy design his bathroom wallpaper.’
‘Lucas knows Banksy?’ she heard herself saying in awe.
‘That was just a joke,’ Ruud said, tutting loudly. ‘Lucas wasn’t being serious when he said that about the wallpaper, Joy.’
‘How would you know?’ Joy shot back, but Ruud didn’t respond. He was frowning to himself, pulling at an imaginary beard on his chin. ‘Why would she make two different deliveries all the way from India? No, this must be the only box of journals she sent. I bet Lucas hasn’t seen it yet.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter, he’s still booked to give a speech about it at the presentation on Friday. It’s in his calendar, I checked,’ Joy said.
‘What is it?’ Freya remembered the email in her inbox about the event on Friday night. It was a black-tie dinner for cardiology professionals. Part of a three-day medical conference at a hotel in Dam Square, Amsterdam’s historic central point. They’d been promised great food, as well as speeches by various medical contributors, blah blah.
She’d been to several such events before and usually sat there wishing she’d declined the invitation. They were often excruciatingly dull. She’d been contemplating not going, given that she had so much to do at the house. Now she realised that was probably the wrong attitude.
Still, she failed to see why the Rhythm Medical Journal in her hands was causing such excitement amongst her colleagues. She turned it around in her hands and read the blurb. It was all in English.
The Netherlands is putting the heart into cardiology. Exploring new experimental aspects of paediatrics with genetics, devices, drugs and surgery by Dr Lucas Van de Burg. Illustrations by award-winning Rajasthan-based medical illustrator Roshinda Acharya.
Freya flicked through the pages, taking in the immaculate, detailed drawings, which seemed to document the surgical techniques involved in Dr Lucas’s breakthrough heart replacements. Something clicked from their conversation in Vondelpark.
India... Hadn’t Lucas said his ex-girlfriend had gone back to India? The one he’d thought he would marry?
‘She did a great job,’ Ruud said from the couch. He was flicking through the pages, admiring each image up close. ‘No matter what she did to Lucas’s heart in reality.’
Freya looked up. ‘Roshinda?’ she probed without thinking, though she already felt a little ruffled by the revelation, much to her annoyance.
‘We don’t talk about her.’ Pieter’s fingers caught around Elmo’s face on his tie. He sounded almost sad, and her heart upped its thudding, remembering the look on Lucas’s face in the park just at the mention of his ex being back in India. Maybe he wasn’t over her yet. Seeing these journals certainly wouldn’t speed up the healing process for him either—not that she should be tracking the extent of Lucas’s recovery after a failed relationship at all, she reminded herself.
Still...they must have worked pretty closely together to do all this. She looked through the journal again. It must have taken months to do all these illustrations. How long had they worked together before getting physically close? she wondered, noticing the way her stomach seemed to tie itself into jealous knots most unexpectedly.
Had he been with Roshinda out of hours in Amsterdam’s most beautiful places? Had they once sat in the park together with the sun on their faces during their lunch breaks? She turned to the photo on the inside cover, feeling another pang of envy. Roshinda was beautiful, with hair just as long as Freya’s was, piercing dark brown intelligent eyes, and eyebrows to die for.
Ruud made a disapproving growling sound over her shoulder. Then he shut the journal with a snap. ‘Roshinda was—’
‘An asset to our team.’
Lucas was standing in the doorway. Blood rushed to Freya’s cheeks as he strode towards their little huddle and stopped at the desk. It felt like time stopped as he hovered there a moment, jaw ticking. Pieter put a hand on his arm in apparent consolation, but Lucas ignored him.
‘I need to look at this before Friday,’ he said gruffly, and his eyes met hers. She tried to convey her apologies with just one look. It wasn’t like her to involve herself in gossip or even a staffroom huddle. She hoped he didn’t think badly of her. She felt like saying she wouldn’t even be here if she hadn’t forgotten her book. But Lucas picked up the entire box of journals in his arms and without a word left the room with it. She swore the room grew colder as he shut the door behind him.
CHAPTER FIVE
LUCAS WATCHED THE breeze send ripples through the reflections on the swimming pool’s surface from his place on the swish poolside tiles. The waiter stopped at his side and offered him a glass of wine. He refused.
It was hard to find a swimming pool in central Amsterdam, but the one on the rooftop of the Royal Palace Hotel was special for many reasons. It was a mirror for the setting sun, the spires of the Nieuwe Kerk, and the mint-green globes and gargoyles on the facade of the seventeenth-century palace. It was certainly impressing the two hundred medical experts who’d flown in for the three-day conference.
He checked his watch. He should probably stay another thirty minutes or so. So many people were still vying for his attention with questions about his work after his speech so it wouldn’t do to run off yet, even though he’d promised Martijn he’d stop by the shelter with a book they’d been discussing. He didn’t want to let the older man down.
‘Lucas?’
Freya was heading towards him from where she’d been talking to Joy over by the bar. He’d caught her eye and found himself appreciating her lovely figure in the tight blue satin dress at several points throughout the evening, and now he registered a slight twinge of discomfort at the way his body still insisted on reacting to her.
In spite of telling himself over and over since her arrival that he didn’t find her overwhelmingly dazzling, both to look at and listen to, he’d been lying to himself. Beauty and brains were a fatal combination for his heart, damn it.
Still, he nodded curtly as she stopped in front of him. ‘Freya.’
‘Lucas.’ She almost smirked, like she knew as well as he did that they’d both been waiting for an opportunity to talk out here.
‘Listen, Lucas, I wanted to apologise for the other day in the staffroom. I’d hate to seem like I was encouraging or participating in any gossip.’
He said
nothing, though it was his turn to smirk now, letting his eyes travel along the slit in the skirt of her satin gown from her ankle right up to her slender hip. Why did women always insist they hated gossip when they revelled in it—all of them? It hadn’t annoyed him, seeing her participating in that little staffroom huddle, but he’d noticed Freya first, like he always did, and at that moment the last thing he’d wanted her to think was that he wasn’t over Roshinda, which concerned him. Why get attached to someone else who had no intention of sticking around?
Her hair was shinier than ever tonight. It annoyed him no end that he’d even noticed that. His efforts to keep her at a professional distance and think of her only as a colleague were probably futile. He let his eyes linger on her lips next as she took a sip of wine from the glass she was holding.
‘I mean, it’s none of my business if you dated the medical illustrator you were working with on the journal.’ She gestured to the issues of Rhythm that were propped on a silver podium by the pool, next to a giant poster of him in scrubs, advertising the Happy Hearts Clinic.
‘You’re right, it’s no one’s business,’ he agreed.
Saying Roshinda’s name tonight in his speech in front of all these people without letting on with his face how close they’d been once hadn’t exactly been the highlight of the night. It had taken so long for the journal to be published. They’d had to finalise the plans, the illustrations, the bilingual blurbs and corresponding DVDs, the legalities around publishing in multiple countries...and it had felt like everyone and everything involved had dragged out their broken relationship along with it. Still, now it was over and the journal was finally out, perhaps he could put it behind him once and for all.
He motioned for Freya to walk with him away from the crowd. Her high-heeled shoes tapped behind him on the tiles around the pool before she joined him in leaning against the balcony railings. The sun was a fading glow that was quickly disappearing behind a building.
‘I told you my ex was back in India,’ he said, watching the traffic snaking through the narrow street below. ‘You would have figured out we’d worked together on that journal even if Joy and Pieter weren’t the biggest over-sharers in Amsterdam.’
‘Probably. I am pretty smart,’ she agreed, and he felt the smile break out fully on his face for a second, just as he took a dizzying hit of her perfume.
‘I did like your speech, though, Lucas. You managed not to let on that you dated her. From the crowd’s reactions I’m assuming most people didn’t know you were together while she was documenting your work with all those drawings. Was it a secret?’
‘I like it that that is what you were thinking about while most people were lost in the details of my surgical procedures,’ he said lightly, tightening his hands on the ornate railings. She had basically just offered proof that she’d been wondering things about him and his past relationships, which caused a sudden desire to snake an arm around her shoulders and escape with her down the stairs, maybe invite her to find out more about him, so to speak.
That would be entirely inappropriate, he told himself ruefully.
‘So, was dating your colleague a secret to everyone except the team?’
He blew air through his lips, shaking his head. ‘You don’t like gossip, eh? Could have fooled me.’
‘I’d rather hear it from you.’
‘Damn, you’re persistent.’
‘When I want something, yes, I am.’
She offered him a secretive smile and he groaned inwardly at her not-so-subtle flirtation, watching the shape of her lips, noticing how the alluring fragrance she wore sent his mind first to the clouds and then to the bedroom. ‘To tell you the truth, the fact that I dated a colleague is irrelevant,’ he said, reining his mind back to the moment. ‘What bothers me is that I dated her at all, when I always knew she’d have to go back to India. Deep down, I guess I always knew she’d leave. ‘
He looked at her pointedly. Freya wasn’t biting.
‘Why did she have to go back?’
He fixed his eyes on a cyclist in a neon-green vest below them, weaving through a line of cars backed up in traffic. He was dying to get out of his suit jacket. Instead he loosened his tie while Freya’s velvet eyes lasered his profile.
‘We were from two different worlds. Her family manages a chain of restaurants in Jaipur. They got rich and started an outreach centre, feeding the poor. She got into medicine because of that, and then she travelled all over the world...like you. But ultimately I think she loved her home too much to stay away for too long.’
‘It’s nice that she knows where home is. Some of us don’t.’
He shrugged. ‘I think home can be anywhere you decide you want it to be.’
‘Well, no offence, but sometimes it’s not that easy,’ Freya demurred. ‘Anyway, you can’t have been that different if you thought she was the one you would marry.’
‘You remember that.’
‘I do.’
They stood in silence a moment, watching the cyclists and cars. He could tell she was mildly disappointed that he wasn’t opening up to her to the same extent that she had done in the park with him, but that wasn’t his style. He was starting to feel like Freya was inching her way into his thoughts faster than Roshinda had, without her even realising it, and he felt his heart might be heading for the danger zone. Maybe he should start trying harder to protect himself, he thought.
‘So your family...’ he started, in an attempt to change the subject. ‘You said before how you haven’t seen your mother in a long time, even though she lives close to here?’
She bit her lip, looked away. ‘That’s right, in Weesp,’ she said. It sounded like Veysp in Dutch, and he liked the sound of her voice when she switched from English to Dutch. He had a thing for accents. Roshinda’s Indian lilt had been bewitching at first, like she’d carried the exotic thrill of somewhere new into every room and filled it with promise. Freya’s accent was different yet again. She sounded American, but there were often bits of British in there too. She didn’t drag every word out like some Americans he’d met, but she was neither one thing nor the other. A puzzle.
‘I bet you can’t wait to have them both at the house after all this time, your mum and your half-sister.’
Freya sipped her wine again, looking across at a formidable-looking gargoyle. He almost mentioned her phone, what he’d seen on the screen back when they’d been with the Vasques.
Mother. Don’t answer.
It was obviously a difficult topic for her to talk about, but he was intrigued to know more of her story.
‘Honestly, Lucas, sometimes I think I’m avoiding my family on purpose. To tell you the truth, my mum wasn’t exactly there for me as a kid, shuttling me between boarding school and Anouk while she did whatever she wanted. Anouk was my unofficial parent, really, even though she spent a lot of time at work. She was only thirty-eight when Mum had me. Cancer took her last year.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He was. It sounded like Freya had had it tough growing up, in comparison to him at least. He’d had what most people might consider an idyllic childhood, encouraged by his parents, surrounded by love, and no great losses...yet.
‘I do miss her, she was kind of what made Amsterdam my second home. I’m still planning to sell the house, like I told you at my interview, but it needs a lot of work. Maybe more than I anticipated. You should see the windmills on the kitchen tiles.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a classic Dutch look, you know.’
‘I know.’ She pulled a face, put her half-full glass back on the waiter’s tray as he passed. ‘But between you and me, Lucas, I have no clue where to start.’
‘I know some people who can help, if you want,’ he offered. ‘I sold a house before I bought my houseboat.’
She chewed her lip and he could tell she was considering whether that would be a good idea o
r not, committing to spending more time together after hours, and for a second he thought she was going to shut him down.
‘That would be great. I’m a little out of the loop,’ she said after a pause, and he felt her acceptance like a little victory, even though he knew it might well land him in trouble.
He was trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed Joy watching them from the bar with Pieter and Ruud. He folded his arms across the railings. Freya mirrored him at his side, at least a foot below him. Her lily scent lingered in the warm air. If he escaped now, they would all see him running away. He cleared his throat, his fingers still itching to touch her.
‘So what about your family?’ she said.
‘My own family is spread all around,’ he offered.
‘Are you close?’
‘I’m very close to my parents, but I don’t see as much of my brother Simon as I did when we were growing up. Life gets in the way, I guess. He’s the CEO of an ad agency in Rotterdam. We have a lot of love and respect for each other, but we’re pretty different.’
He paused. This wasn’t the time or place to get into the other reasons he and Simon hadn’t seen eye to eye lately. In fact, the thought rather ruined his mood. Simon had suggested putting their father in a home, even though neither of their parents wanted it. There were too many ears listening here to bring it up, not that he needed to involve a colleague in his private life anyway. He’d already decided that.
Looking at Freya now, though, he wanted to tell her suddenly. He was starting to see her as more than a colleague, more of a confidante. A very sexy, dangerous one...
She pushed her long brown hair over her right shoulder, causing a curl to bounce back around her face. ‘Still, you’re lucky to be so close to your parents,’ she said.
‘There’s still time for you to reconcile with your mother now that you’re here.’
