by Annie O'Neil
* * *
‘Hello, Talia. I can’t say I ever expected—or hoped—to see you again.’
A shiver started on the back of Talia’s neck and shot over her skin, permeating every inch of her goose-bumped flesh, through to her veins, turning her blood to ice. She couldn’t turn around. She could barely even lay the last of the instruments in the metal preparation tray.
Her mind spun.
The voice was Liam’s, and yet it wasn’t. She recognised the clipped, unerringly professional tone yet there was also an uncharacteristic hint of ice about it that almost made her want to pull her scrubs tighter around herself. Though whether more for warmth or for protection, she couldn’t quite be sure.
So he had actually come to St Victoria. Even though she’d known it was happening—even though she was the one who had put Liam’s name forward to her chief of staff—she hadn’t quite believed it. She’d been almost convinced he would turn down the case just because it was on St Victoria.
The fact that he hadn’t only proved one thing...that she was so insignificant to him that she hadn’t even factored into his decision-making process. A fact she already knew, of course. She’d discovered that three years ago. To her detriment.
Which was all the more reason why it should make no difference to her whatsoever that he was here, Talia reminded herself desperately.
She hadn’t recommended Liam to Nate because she’d wanted to see him again—because she absolutely had not—she had simply recommended him because she’d known that Duke Hospital’s famous Heart Whisperer would be the best chance for her young, desperate patient.
Her own emotions hadn’t factored into the equation at all.
Not at all.
So why was her body trembling as though it didn’t believe her?
You’re immune to him, she reminded herself desperately, preparing to turn around as she pretended that she didn’t feel half as shaky as she did.
Her one consolation was that at least Liam would never know it had been her who had put his name forward. She had asked Nate to keep that part to himself.
‘Is this what you intend to do for the next month, then?’ His low voice reverberated softly around the room, but she wasn’t fool enough to believe that made it no less dangerous to her. ‘Pretend you can’t even hear me? Only I can’t imagine it’s going to be the most successful play you could make.’
‘Of course not,’ she murmured, taking one final, steadying breath before she spun around—a bright, if uncharacteristically tight, smile plastered to her lips. It promptly froze in place the moment she met his expression of cool appraisal.
Pain slammed into her, hard and unyielding.
This was the man who had taught her what it was to ache, need, sear, just with a look. With a word. Yet right now he was looking at her as though he didn’t know her at all.
Like she was no one more special than a stranger he was meeting for the first time. It hurt more than she could have ever imagined possible.
‘Liam,’ she choked out, the name seeming to stick in her mouth, as though she was trying to savour it just a fraction longer.
It was enough to make her despair of herself, especially when her eyes locked with his and she was unable to drag them away again. Dark and foreboding.
Yet it wasn’t just that expression that was proving her undoing. As Talia found herself struggling for breath, fearing her legs would actually buckle beneath her, she reached behind her and gripped the medical trolley for support.
She’d spent the past three years telling herself that her girlish memories had built Liam up into something far more potent than he could ever truly have been in reality. Yet right now she realised that even her memories hadn’t gone far enough.
The man was as glorious as he’d ever been. From the six-two frame outlined with those broad shoulders, down the unmistakably honed chest beneath that immaculate suit shirt—in spite of the eighty-five-degree St Victoria heat, Talia could see that nothing had changed. His square jaw was a study in masculinity, and so sharp that she thought it would cut her even from that distance. His thighs still so impossibly muscled that she practically wanted to lick them.
She swallowed. Hard.
Yep, forget the dulled memory. If anything, he seemed even more chiselled than ever and his face looked as though it had been hewn from pure granite as he glowered at her. She pretended it didn’t feel like a tight fist closing around her already fragile heart.
‘Is that all you have to say?’ His tone was too neutral, his expression giving nothing away. ‘My name? You’re not even going to explain what I’m doing out here?’
Panic shot through her in an instant, and it was all Talia could do not to show it.
He doesn’t know, she reminded herself feverishly. He can’t possibly know.
She tried to dredge up another smile but it was impossible, she’d have to content herself with a controlled tone. One that didn’t betray just how crazily she was shaking inside.
‘You’re here to take over one of Isak’s clinical trial surgeries, I believe,’ she managed. ‘I’m sure that’s what the rumour mill said, anyway.’
His already cold expression changed abruptly, becoming even more closed off than ever. The fist around her heart squeezed tighter. He’d gone from talking to her to shutting her out in an instant. A stark reminder of why she’d made that impossible decision, three years ago, to walk away from the only man she had ever loved.
Three years, two months, two weeks and four days, if she was going to be precise.
Shamefully, she knew it to pretty much the hour, too.
‘“That’s what the rumour mill said”?’ he echoed. ‘Is this some game you’re now playing?’
The question rasped over her skin, scraping against old wounds she’d told herself were long since healed. Yet now, with a few words from Liam, they felt as raw as they had three years ago.
Leaving Duke’s—leaving him—had been the most agonising decision of her life. Who, in their right mind, would ever leave a man like Liam Miller? He had earned his nickname around Duke’s hospital as the Heart Whisperer for his incredible skill as a cardiothoracic surgeon, but it was equally fitting for the fact that colleagues, patients and relatives alike all fell head over heels for him.
Practically the whole single, female contingent of the place had wanted to be the one woman to catch Liam’s eye. The one woman who could reach the distant and seemingly lonely surgeon. The one woman who could heal his apparently damaged soul.
The fact that he’d never dated any of them had only made Liam all the more coveted. It was one of the first things she’d learned from her fellow scrub nurses the moment she’d arrived at Duke’s. The last thing she’d expected, then, had been for Liam to apparently break all his own rules when he’d asked her out on a date.
And then another.
She’d felt special. And perhaps she’d let that fact go to her head because she’d fallen in love with him, hard and fast. Moreover, she’d been foolish enough—naïve enough—to let herself believe he actually loved her too. That she had, actually, healed him. That was how much of a fool she’d been.
Which was why, when her father had called her with the dreadful news, that last day at Duke’s, she’d known that moving away from North Carolina—away from Liam—was the healthiest move all round.
Yet even though, deep down, she’d understood the logic, it had nonetheless been the most torturous and agonising decision of her life. Especially for a girl who’d once believed in happily-ever-afters, and soulmates, and love conquering all.
But she was no longer that young, naïve kid. Liam had taught her that real life wasn’t like that, and the simple truth had been that her love—she herself—hadn’t been enough. Not for Liam, anyway.
Tilting her head back and jerking her chin out a fraction, Talia summoned a glare of her own
.
‘I don’t play games. I never did.’
But, Lord, it was hard when he looked more beautiful, more dangerous than ever. So arresting that she was sure her perfidious heart stuttered and stumbled in her chest.
‘I used to think that,’ he stated flatly. ‘Just as I used to think that I knew you.’
Never mind the icy rivers that his dispassionate tone sent coursing through her, it was the way he looked straight through her that sheared off an entire glacier inside her, sending it—and almost her—crashing down to stain the highly polished, ultra-hygienic, stunning marble floor of the painfully opulent, intimidatingly high-tech Island Clinic.
She wanted to rail and argue. But what would be the point?
‘It turns out that I never really knew you at all, did I?’ Liam added, his acerbic smile so biting she could almost taste the sharp, unpleasant tang of it for herself.
The same bitterness she’d tasted when she’d finally realised that the future she had begun to imagine—one that included Duke’s, and Liam—was definitely not the same future he’d envisaged in his own mind. And it never would be.
He might have cared for her, in his odd strange way, but she still hadn’t been enough.
There was a part of Liam that he had always kept locked away, not just from her but from the world. He’d never truly let her close to him—he’d never let her in. If anything, he’d once condemned everything she believed in—love, marriage, family—as whimsical fantasies that had no place in the real world and would never for him.
And, still, the warning signs hadn’t been enough to allow her to cut her losses and run. She’d been tied to him. Loving him. Hoping that would be enough to encourage him to open up to her.
Not, of course, that she had expected a man she’d only been dating for a few months to declare undying love and propose marriage and a family. But, equally, she hadn’t expected such a man to wreck her in more ways than she’d ever thought possible. Leaving the way she had done had been the only way she’d known to save them both.
And now he was here on her small Caribbean island, and Talia found herself desperately fighting the maybes, and the what-ifs. As if there was room for such thoughts. But Liam would only be here for a month while he tended to his patient—the kid of one of Hollywood’s current brightest stars—and then he would be gone.
She’d be damned if she opened her heart up only to let him wreck her again. She simply couldn’t afford to let him see how easily he got under her skin.
How easily he could unravel her.
‘I could say the same thing,’ she ground out instead. ‘But, really, what would be the point of such a conversation?’
‘What indeed?’
His dispassion sliced through her all over again. Leaving her with frost that seemed to spread from the inside out, and had nothing to do with the state-of-the-art air-con of The Island Clinic.
People had warned her that she would end up getting hurt. That Liam Miller was a brilliant surgeon but a lone wolf. A good man but a man with walls. She hadn’t believed any of them.
She’d been wrong. Terribly, desperately wrong. But hadn’t she already shown Liam enough weakness back then? She’d be damned if she gave him a new demonstration now.
‘Is that the reason you sought me out, then? To tell me that you never knew me at all? And to tell me that I was the last person you ever expected to see again? Because I can assure you that I didn’t expect to see you either.’
For a moment he didn’t answer, he merely smiled. An edgy little quirk of his lips that was so sharp it made Talia itch to check that he hadn’t actually cut her. And then he took a step towards her.
Just a single step, and Talia felt as though the entire clinic had lifted and tilted. It was a fight just to stay upright, such was the devastating impact Liam Miller had on her.
Had always had on her, from the moment they’d met on her first day at Duke’s.
‘I’ve just met your chief here, at this clinic of yours. He’s quite inspiring.’
‘Nate?’ She grasped the apparently safe topic with both hands. ‘Yes, he is. He set up The Island Clinic and the sister programme with St Vic’s Hospital after the hurricane here a few years ago.’
‘I’m well aware of the programme.’ His smile became all the more sardonic. ‘And I know many surgeons who would cut a limb off themselves with their own scalpel for a chance to work at the famous Island Clinic.’
‘Right. Of course.’
He’d taken another step towards her and Talia found she was twisting herself up in knots not to react. Not to show any sign of feeling intimidated.
Intimidation? a sly voice asked. Or attraction?
‘Which made it particularly interesting when the same Nate Edwards contacted me a week ago, asking me if I would like to take a look at a special case.’
Uncertainty coursed through her. His tone was so loaded that she almost thought he knew the truth. But how could he? Nate wouldn’t have betrayed her confidence. And now that she’d already pretended not to know what he was doing on the island, she had no choice but to keep feigning innocence.
Still, she flicked a nervous tongue out over suddenly parched lips as she adopted a look of vague interest.
‘Oh?’
‘Oh?’ he echoed, a little too breezily for Talia’s liking.
An almost dangerous nonchalance. Which was odd if she thought about it as Liam was renowned for his cool, even temperament. So laid-back that it almost dipped into emotional detachment.
Even with her. Which was the part she’d hated the most.
There had been a few moments over the long summer they’d enjoyed together—the briefest of flashes when she’d thought he was about to let his guard down and talk to her. But then the shutters had slammed down abruptly on her again, and she’d been left out in the cold. All his thoughts and feelings his, and his alone.
‘So, to be clear, you knew nothing about my arrival?’ he challenged, so close now that she had to tilt her neck up to look into his face.
And suddenly she couldn’t pretend any more. The electricity practically crackled in the space between them, leaving her feeling shaky and drained. Like she was coiled so tightly inside that she was at risk of jumping out of her own skin at any moment.
Whatever she’d told herself, it seemed her body was only too willing to undermine it. Even after all this time, it still wanted him. Ached for him.
‘I knew nothing,’ she confirmed, her voice sounding like that of a stranger. ‘Obviously, I knew a surgeon was coming in to fill in for Isak on the trial, but I didn’t know it was you.’
His eyes bored into her that little bit deeper, causing her entire body to begin to heat. She told herself it was because she hated fibbing. It was why she usually prided herself on never doing so.
‘Is that so?’ He lifted a hand and, if she hadn’t known better, she might have thought he was about to put a stray curl around her ear or caress her cheek.
Obviously, he did neither.
And still Talia didn’t answer. She was getting hotter now and somehow the ground had shifted beneath her feet, leaving her scrambling for some kind of purchase. She couldn’t explain it.
‘Imagine, then,’ Liam continued almost conversationally, ‘my thoughts when I asked Nate where he’d heard about my work, only for him to inform me that he’d looked into my reputation after one of his scrub nurses had recommended me.’
Copyright © 2021 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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ISBN-13: 9780369712011
The Princess and the Pediatrician
Copyright © 2021 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Annie O’Neil for her contribution to The Island Clinic miniseries.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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