Doctor O: A Friends to Lovers Romance

by Ash Harlow

  We circled back through a network of paths in the native gardens and came to an area marked by two enormous boulders. “This is an old mineshaft that we shored up. It’s now the entrance to the Lodge’s private club. Would you like to take a look?”

  I had an idea about private clubs. They were either filled with stuffy old men pretending they were living in another land and a different century, or they were about tying people up and whipping them. Either way, not my thing. I shook my head.

  “Maybe another time,” I mumbled, feeling foolish. God knows I’m not a prude but I was a virgin when it came to sex clubs, or whatever this was.

  Oliver didn’t seem the least bit bothered by my refusal and with a light touch to my shoulder he steered me toward a new path that led us around to an enormous lawn.

  “Marquee tents go here. The kitchen is in that direction,” he waved his hand toward the rear of the Lodge’s main building. “Chef will handle the extra catering staff he’ll need but you’re welcome to sit in on menu planning.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll leave that to the experts. I keep a firm hand on things but I’m not a control freak.”

  “Good, because Chef is, and two control freaks would be overkill.”

  He shot a smile my way that would have been overkill if it wasn’t completely genuine. It made me want to inch closer to him and bathe in its warmth.

  He led me toward a large pool complex surrounded by native trees. Unusually the pool was dark, the bottom done in smooth river stones so that the water looked clear like a river instead of the usual artificial blue. Parts of it meandered in from the bush like a stream, then disappeared at the other end of the pool in the same manner. It was reminiscent of a swimming hole you’d come across in the bush.

  A man sat at a table, belting at the keys of his laptop with two fingers, like he was squashing ants. Waitapu Bay was either a magnet for hot guys, or they had a factory up the river churning them out. And for the sake of women everywhere I hoped they kept the molds because the ones I’d seen so far arrived fully fledged, oozing charisma.

  Oliver introduced me to Cole Danzig, who stood as we approached. He sounded American with a southern lilt to his accent, and ruggedness that suggested a lot of time spent outdoors lined his face.

  Like Oliver, he seemed immensely grateful I was here to run the show for them. It gave me confidence and I knew I’d have his support when needed. We had coffee and pastries and shared ideas before Cole was called away.

  Oliver stood. “Come on, I’ll take you back to town. I have my main offices at Tradewind Super Yachts. We can go over the contract and get you settled in.”

  5 ~ DARCY

  The interior of Oliver’s Range Rover might have been expansive but it somehow didn’t feel large enough as we drove to Tradewind.

  Heat and energy, impossible to absorb, radiated between us. The way it was captured in the vehicle made me jittery and I wanted to lower the window to set it free. I thought I’d feel better if I could hang my head outside the car like a dog and experience something to distract my high-alert senses—the scent of leaf mold from the bush, decomposing roadkill—anything to take my mind off the man beside me. I opted for closing my eyes.

  “Open your eyes, Darcy.”

  His voice ran through me like warmed molasses, coating my nerve endings, and except for raising my lids I remained completely still in my seat.

  “The view as we round this corner is stunning.”

  Just kill me. I wished he could do something about that voice because even in tour guide mode, it sent a sexual tremor through me that settled as an ache between my legs. I squeezed my thighs together to curtail the arousal. It had been so long since I’d had an orgasm at the hands of a second party, I was ill-equipped to be this close to him.

  Oliver slowed the car as we rounded another hairpin bend, stopping in a safe spot, the vehicle’s engine idling quietly. He was right, the view was astonishing in its beauty. The day was clear, Waitapu township stretched before us in sparkling blue, rolling hills of rich green and the long stretches of the bay’s white sand. There were possibly better places to be poor, but I’d yet to hear of them.

  I told him I agreed, it was beautiful, and that he was lucky to have grown up here. His gaze lingered on my face and while still watching me, he slipped the vehicle into drive and started the long wind out of the hills.

  I had to keep telling myself that Oliver wasn’t the man for me. At this point, all he knew was what he saw of me in the passenger seat of his vehicle. He couldn’t see inside me, he couldn’t view my past. You don’t share everything when you’re trying to make an impression so when I’d talked about the work I’d done in Australia, I left out the part where I’d lost the best job I’d ever had. A dream job, at a global agency with clients who adored me.

  I left out the hours of police interviews, the court case, the constant fear, and the muck I was dragged through.

  That situation had sucked up my savings and the only work I could get was at a creepy sandwich bar on the fringe of an industrial estate where they thought curriculum vitae was a flash name for a deep-fried squid ring. The owner couldn’t have cared less what my CV said, nor whether my name was real. He paid me cash, and I kept my head down and tried not to think of my career change from one of Sydney’s top advertising agencies to Chief Roach Beater and Sandwich Maker. So, I left out the roach killer part, and my burger skills.

  Still, I knew I was capable of doing a good job for Oliver, and I would. As long as he stayed out of my past and let me forget it, too.

  “You all good?” he asked the second time our glances collided.

  “I’m better than good,” I said.

  When we arrived at Tradewind he switched off the engine and we sat, playing with that energy between us. I fought the urge to lean toward him.

  “If we weren’t at the yard with several sets of eyes trained like snipers upon us...”

  He left his incomplete sentence for me to fill. I made a sound back at him. Not a word but a little noise that suggested I went along with his idea.

  “It would be foolish,” he said.

  “It would.” I agreed.

  “Good, glad we’re on the same page.”

  With that he opened his door and did that quick skirt around the car he had done at the Lodge, reaching my side and opening the door by the time I had my seatbelt released. I could get used to that move, and his manners.

  The automatic doors to the reception area opened in a whisper and his hand on my lower back steered me in the right direction, drawing a raised eyebrow from an older, smartly dressed woman who was talking to the receptionist.

  The older woman was Oliver’s PA, Gail. She greeted me warmly. “You have no idea how pleased I am to have you here.”

  “Gail was left to pick up the pieces when your predecessor left,” Oliver explained.

  “Unfortunately, I dumped them into a big box labeled ‘Ignore’, so I hope you enjoy a challenge.”

  “I certainly do,” I told her.

  “Great, I’ll come and see you shortly.”

  Oliver took me along the hall past various offices, pointing out a room with a kitchen and various tables, chairs and sofas. He threw open a door to an office with a million-dollar view of the river, down to the marina and out to the islands. The tide was high, the river the deepest emerald shade. A stately pōhutukawa tree reached out across the water, twisted and bowed as if someone had tried to extract its secrets. Soon its deep crimson flowers would signal the arrival of summer and the Christmas season.

  Today I was getting a fresh outlook on my home country and I’d forgotten how iconic the tree was to a Kiwi summer. The childhood memory of a swing under a tree just like the one I looked at settled the butterflies in my stomach.

  “Your office,” he said. “I hope it’s suitable.”

  I thanked him. It was stunning. “I hope the view won’t be too distracting.”

  Oliver cast me a look that said the view from
the window was the least distracting thing around here at the moment. He cleared his throat, the first time there’d been any indication he might not trust his gorgeous voice to perform, and explained Gail would be setting me up on the technical side of things.

  I spent the rest of the day sorting out my actual duties. Gail turned out to be an efficient no-bullshit type which I appreciated. Her sense of humor was dry, and she expertly handled the abundance of men who worked for Tradewind. She had a whole bunch of reports from the previous year’s event for me to go through, and she handed a stack of files over with something that could only be described as relief.

  It was so good to be back on a job that gave me some self-worth and a reasonable salary. I spent the afternoon listing ideas for promotion, ticket sales and companies to go to for products for the auction. As long as what happened in Australia stayed there, my summer was shaping up way better than I’d hoped.

  The only bug in the process would be my attraction to Oliver but I felt certain after a couple of weeks the ridiculous infatuation would pass.

  6 ~ OLIVER

  I’d been on the patio nursing a scotch for twenty minutes. Luther was due to arrive and I knew he would be pissed with me because giving the contract to Darcy was like taking a pointy stick and giving fate a hefty ass-reaming.

  Darcy had lived in Sydney these past two years. So had more than four-and-a-half-million other people. Luther would point out the long shot that the two people who seemed hell-bent on destroying my business also lived in Sydney. He would deduce that Darcy was a new arrow launched my way.

  There was that pointy stick again.

  I didn’t need Luther to bring any of that to my attention. The previous night I’d woken just after 2.00 a.m. That’s a shitty time to lie in bed, alone with my irrational thoughts, which meant I’d arrived at Darcy’s house yesterday with a dose of paranoia fully primed

  I felt Luther’s approach behind me because his energy was like that of a pack alpha about to dish out a paw-smack to a recalcitrant adolescent. I fucking loved him like this, containing his fury, letting small amounts out to sting you, before closing off his pressure valve, holding it all in because if he released all that pressure he might deflate. Lose his game. Not going to happen but it was a habit and the thing he used to drive himself.

  It’s what made us the perfect pairing on the rugby field at college, though neither of us had the balls or the inclination to carry on with the game once we’d graduated. We were tired of being hammered by the extraordinarily large and physically mature Polynesian guys. Luther would get riled by the opposition insulting him about his light stature, I’d back them up by saying he’d stepped up a grade for this game because we were a player short, and that would give him enough motivation to make elegant, angry try-scoring set-ups. What he lacked in bulk he made up for with sheer speed and cunning.

  He carried an envelope which he threw square into my lap with customary precision. “Annabelle was on your stepfather’s payroll in Sydney. The evidence is in there—”

  “You’ve told me this already, Luther.”

  “Read it.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Your selective naïvety makes you such an easy target, Oli. A beautiful stranger arrives in town—from Sydney no less—and ends up living a few houses along the road from you. Not only that, but by some incredible coincidence she has the exact qualifications we need to fill a contract vacancy because the person who’d initially taken the contract suddenly decides she doesn’t want to do it. And you’re all, step this way, sweetheart, the job’s yours.”

  I tossed the peanut I was toying with at him but he snatched it from the air before it made contact with his head and in a reflex move, flicked it skywards and captured it in his mouth.

  “Listen up, Oli. You’re a good businessman and you’re almost as good at building magnificent boats as your father. But one thing your father had that you don’t is the good sense to pay attention when his lawyer tells him he needs a bit of protection. Your father never questioned Dad when he suggested putting Tradewind into a trust before he married. That is the reason you had one of the most respected boatyards in the world to inherit. To me, Darcy looks and walks like a duck. I’m only suggesting you let me find out whether she quacks.”

  “Believe me, she’s no duck.” I grinned at him. “You’re more paranoid than I am.”

  “I’m the one who has to mop up the mess when this thing goes tits-up. Not to mention the damage to my liver from the nights I’ll have to spend consoling you with a bottle of scotch. Which brings me to my next question; is that whisky poisonous?”

  I pushed a glass and the bottle in his direction and Luther added a couple of generous fingers of Laphroaig.

  “If she’s clean, you have my blessing.”

  Luther and I have been friends since kindergarten. He’s also one of the partners in the Lodge, and acts as my lawyer, the same way his father acted as my father’s lawyer. We enjoy tradition. There’s not much he doesn’t know about me, my business dealings, finances or the way I like to fuck. When he’s pissed with me, he doesn’t hold back so I braced myself for an expletive-filled tirade that would finish with diminishing insults until one of us offered to get the next drink.

  “Do you think the Alberinis are still after the boatyard?” I asked.

  My mother was a selfish bitch who followed the money. When she left Dad for Ant Alberini, his main business rival with a boatyard based out of Australia, it broke Dad’s heart. But Dad wasn’t as naïve as my mother and her new boyfriend hoped. Once my parents divorced Mother received half of sweet-fuck-all which meant Alberini was no closer to the superyacht contracts he had bid for, and lost.

  The same contracts Tradewind had bid for and won.

  Unbeknown to any of us, Dad had tied Tradewind up in a trust that took it out of the marital property portfolio in a legal sense. Luther’s father had successfully convinced my father that when it came to marriage, loyalty seldom figured in the equation.

  I had no time for my greedy mother, or any other woman with designs to access my assets. Ironically, I’m a generous person, but I prefer to choose where my money gets distributed.

  “A cocktail of Aussie pride and Latin machismo means Alberini will never give up. Accept it.”

  “Fine.” I tipped some more scotch into my mouth and let it heat and tease my tongue, all the while wondering what Darcy was up to.

  “Stop thinking about her,” Luther snapped.

  That was a lucky guess. “I’m not.”

  “Bullshit. Come to Auckland with me on Friday. We’ll hook up with a couple of women and go to a club.”

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “You need to.”

  “I need to eat. Come inside, Angus dropped in a couple of lobsters.” Angus ran the boats at the Lodge. He spent most of his time underwater, and everyone joked he’d developed gills. His hunting abilities were legendary and he could rustle up lobster with a mere whisper.

  After dinner we were back on the patio. I’d lit the outside fire because although it was spring, the sun had gone down taking the temperature with it. Over dinner dismantling lobster I steered Luther off the subject of Darcy, but she sat there as a topic ready to be revived at any moment.

  “Did you check her CV?” Luther asked.

  “Let me guess, Darcy’s CV, right?”

  He threw me a look that worked better with soon-to-be ex-wives than old mates. I’d planned to give her details to my HR person at the boatyard to check her references and qualifications. “Sure, she’s fine. Probably overqualified.”

  “Give me her details. I’ll run a background check on her.”

  He was a terrier when he needed to be. “That’s probably overdoing it,” I suggested

  “There are four of us partners in this, Oli.” He stabbed a finger at his chest. “This partner wants her checked out.”

  I raised my hands in surrender. He had every right to demand a more thorough background ch
eck and I had no idea why I didn’t want that done. Perhaps because the thought that my stepfather might be coming after me again was fucking annoying. And if he was using a beautiful woman to do it, like he had with Annabelle, that simply added another level of stupidity to his war.

  I pulled up Darcy’s CV on my tablet and passed the device to Luther. It felt like a betrayal even though I scarcely knew her. I certainly didn’t want to analyze the feeling driving that emotion.

  Luther did whatever it was he did and minutes later placed the tablet on the table and reached for his wine. “So, Auckland, Friday?”

  I shook my head. “I’m staying here this weekend. Going to show Darcy around the area, make sure she’s kept busy so that she doesn’t get bored and bolt.”

  “You’re so full of shit, Sackville.”

  I waited for him to say I was a Sackville of shit the way he usually did, but I could tell he was concerned. That should have troubled me more than it did.

  “How long is it since you last came to Auckland with me?” he asked.

  “I went up when you visited Rachel last month.”

  “That’s right. I visited Rachel, and you did what, exactly?”

  “I visited Rachel, too.”

  “Precisely. You’re a long time out of the game. You’re denying who you are. Come to Auckland, it’ll do you good.”

  “I have better arrangements.”

  “You fancy the fuck out of her, don’t you?”

  “If she’s my enemy, Luther, I plan to keep her very close. I’ll spend so much time in her company there won’t be a thing about her I don’t know. There’s chemistry between us, and the fact that I ‘fancy the fuck’ out of her, as you so eloquently put it, means this will be anything but a hardship.”

  Luther drained his glass and spent a moment peering at the sediment that remained. “You should have decanted the wine, Oli.”

  “You were in a hurry to fill your glass.”

  He shrugged. “Let me put a goon onto the case and we’ll know all about Darcy in a week.”